The Skeptics Guide #1063 - Nov 22 2025

Speaker 2 You're listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

Speaker 1 Hello and welcome to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, November 20th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.
Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

Speaker 3 Hey, everybody.

Speaker 1 Jay Novella. Hey, guys.
And Evan Bernstein.

Speaker 4 Good afternoon, everyone.

Speaker 1 Now, Kara is away this week, but I did record her segment previously, so that will, she'll be jumping in in the middle of the show with her news item, but she is not here to participate in the rest of the show.

Speaker 1 She actually, we did her science or fiction as well. So I'll be clipping that.
Ah, oh.

Speaker 3 Aha, she went first.

Speaker 1 If I had known,

Speaker 4 I would have texted her and asked her.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right.

Speaker 3 Does that mean, though, we get to hear her ramblings before and her decision?

Speaker 1 Before we go. Oh, so she's playing.

Speaker 1 Why wouldn't she go first?

Speaker 4 She's in a limbo.

Speaker 3 She went.

Speaker 1 She's done. But I'm going to

Speaker 1 play her for you.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Did you tell her if she got it right or not?

Speaker 1 Maybe. Oh, Steve, you are clever.
All right.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 Bob just picked me up at the airport a few hours ago. I just got in from Dubai.
I'm significantly jet-lagged.

Speaker 1 This will be fun. I'm mostly awake.
It was a good trip. It was a lot of fun.
I did a nine-hour seminar on Primiter on Scientific Skepticism, which is always fun.

Speaker 1 After that, there was a conference where I was on a panel on the future of consciousness in the mind. It was good.
It actually turned out to be a really good, really good panel.

Speaker 1 So yeah, things are happening in Dubai. We may be going back there next year.

Speaker 5 What's your number one takeaway?

Speaker 1 So, I mean, there's,

Speaker 1 you know, Dubai is trying to position itself as like the city of the future. You know, they're investing a lot of technology.
They're trying to attract a lot of talent, a lot of investment.

Speaker 1 And they're motivated to make this happen. So, you know, they have like the Museum of the Future there.
It's actually a pretty snazzy kind of construction. Yeah, so, you know, the

Speaker 1 Muhammad is the guy who's hosting me there, who's the listener of the show. He's a skeptic.
He's like, skepticism has to be part of this process. Otherwise, the pseudoscience will come in.

Speaker 1 Which, of course, I completely agree with. The learning curve is pretty steep when you're thinking about metacognition, critical thinking, science versus pseudoscience.

Speaker 1 Thinking about that versus not thinking about that is a huge difference. Right.

Speaker 1 So having some kind of process where we say, okay, is this something that's legitimate, that deserves our time and attention, our investment, or is this just some crank looking to exploit the situation?

Speaker 1 So that's what we're trying to at least introduce that basic nuts and bolts kind of process.

Speaker 5 I mean, even them pausing for a second and asking themselves, could this be a scam or could I possibly be taken advantage of, is a wonderful start.

Speaker 1 And there's research on that. Anything you do to make people think about, be aware of the truth status of a claim makes them more skeptical about it.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Just introduce, even if saying anything about is this true or not true, as soon as you introduce the idea that it may or may not be true, people think about it. You know?

Speaker 1 So, so, yeah, obviously, doing that in the context of this is how you tell real science from fake science.

Speaker 5 Steve, when you're there, like, this is part of a giant conference, right? That you said it lasts like a month?

Speaker 1 So, there's two things, right?

Speaker 1 So the first is the FIEAL program, which is like there are 30 fellows that are invited each year, and they spend a month-long seminar workshop with going through multiple seminars.

Speaker 1 I did one of the seminars, you know, for that course, but they have many other people doing that. And then the other one was a two-day conference.

Speaker 1 It was the future forum, just a two-day conference that anybody could go to. Just got to buy a ticket like any other con.

Speaker 4 Was it dominated by AI discussion?

Speaker 1 So AI all over the place, man. It was so much AI.
Absolutely. Of course.
Like almost every, it seemed to come up in almost every context, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And of course AI is going to change this. It's like, sure.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 See what they're saying after the

Speaker 1 bubble burst.

Speaker 1 No, listen, it's AI is, as we've said before on the show, it is, it's hype, but it's real technology as well, just like any new technology.

Speaker 1 It doesn't work for everything, but it's still figuring out, like the internet, you know, like when internet commerce and

Speaker 1 the web came out, obviously it's transformed our economy, but there was a lot of hype that led to a bubble, which then burst, you're right. And so the two things can be true at the same time.

Speaker 1 It is a powerful new tool that is being used in research in so many ways. But because of that, there's also a ton of hype around it.

Speaker 1 And there's a lot of talk in the last couple of weeks about the AI bubble and when's it going to burst and et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 5 I don't see it bursting. I mean, there we will see it.

Speaker 1 It will, and then it, you know, it'll things will sort itself out, you know, over time, like what really works. Now we're in the sh throw shit against the wall phase, you know, see what happens.

Speaker 5 But there is, there is so much money being put into that industry.

Speaker 1 It's crazy. That's the thing.
There's so much money being that's the bubble, right?

Speaker 1 It's attracting

Speaker 1 crazy investment money, which is inflating the whole thing, you know. But yeah, the way I had it explained to me, actually, it was

Speaker 1 one of our friends who was an investment guy. Remember, stocks are based on two things.

Speaker 1 There's the actual value of the company, its assets, its revenue, and then there's speculation about its potential in the future.

Speaker 1 When speculation gets too far ahead of reality, that's when you have a bubble, right? So we are absolutely in the massively speculative phase of AI.

Speaker 1 And it's no question that that's causing a bubble because of that. At some point, there's a quote-unquote correction, right? Now, that correction is when you get back to a proper balance of

Speaker 1 the actual value of the company, like its profits and its assets versus speculation. The question is, is the correction going to cause a recession or even a depression, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Hopefully it won't get that bad. Hopefully not.
But that's what happened in 1929, right? There were other problems, too. There were regulatory problems that we've hopefully fixed this time around.
But

Speaker 1 a lot of economists are worried that there's

Speaker 1 some similar things going on now that we have to be careful about.

Speaker 4 Yep.

Speaker 4 And there have been some big sells by some prominent investors who have sold, for example, all their NVIDIA stock, like dumped it all now, like just this week, because they see the downturn coming already.

Speaker 1 But that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Speaker 4 It could be. It definitely could be.
But there's more than one of these people and hedge funds and other things that have been

Speaker 1 unloading. That's why bubbles burst, right?

Speaker 1 There's everyone's getting in to make money, and then as soon as people think that it's going the other way, there's a rush for the door, and then it collapses.

Speaker 4 Right. And then there will be a buyback once it's left down.
But you're right. There could be a lot of collateral damage on the way.
I just hope it doesn't get to that point.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And can you trust those bastards?

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 trust. It's a big word.

Speaker 5 Hey, and you know, I guess we're not going to talk about the Epstein files, right?

Speaker 1 Has that been in the news recently? I don't know. A little bit, yeah.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah, yeah, you've been in Dubai.

Speaker 1 No, even in Dubai, it's in the news. Actually, my lifeline while I was over there was BBC International, which was like the one English-speaking news station I could get in the hotel room.
So

Speaker 1 that was my lifeline to U.S. News, which is the BBC, which is actually pretty good.

Speaker 1 It's actually

Speaker 1 fairly objective reporting, in my opinion.

Speaker 1 Anyway, let's move on. Evan, you're going to start us off with the dumbest thing of the week.
Thank you, Steve.

Speaker 4 Yes, dumbest thing of the week.

Speaker 1 Now, Steve, as

Speaker 4 you know, you were in Dubai recently.

Speaker 1 That's what I understand.

Speaker 4 This particular dumbest thing of the week took place relatively close to where you were.

Speaker 1 Not exactly, not,

Speaker 1 you know, but in the same same region. Same part of the world.
Same region.

Speaker 4 Same part of the world. Yep, yep, yep.
And this comes to us courtesy of the Today Show. Oh, boy.
I know a lot of people in the United States know about this show.

Speaker 4 It is a big, big morning television show here in the USA on a major network. And this network even has a deeper online reach to its various related media products.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, NBC, the national broadcasting company, this is their product. This is not some fringe TikToker or MySpacer or Six Degrees.

Speaker 4 Six Degree? Do you guys remember that at all? That That was like

Speaker 4 the precursor to MySpace. Look it up.

Speaker 1 Oh, geez.

Speaker 4 I had to look it up because I didn't even remember what six degree was. But that was the pre-MySpace.

Speaker 4 So due to its enormous reach and potential damage to the collective IQ of the planet, they have earned definitely the dumbest thing of the week.

Speaker 4 So they thought it was a good idea to head out to Mount Ararat in Turkey and recook a long-dead burger known as Noah's Ark.

Speaker 3 Ararat, isn't that where Noah's Ark is?

Speaker 1 Thank you, Bob. Yes.

Speaker 3 Do you remember that?

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 4 Well, NBC did because that's where they went and that's what this particular story was about.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 4 a new team of investigators went out there to once again

Speaker 4 study this particular area to see and try to get confirmation that they have located the biblical, the fictional, the mythical Noah's Ark.

Speaker 3 Steve, I got to say real quick, Steve and Jay, do you remember going to the movie theater to see the movie popularization of that whole thing? Yeah, Yeah, it was just like a

Speaker 3 bad pseudoscientific documentary.

Speaker 1 It was horrible. Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 It was, yeah, it was in search of level of horribleness. Yes.
Oh, yes. It's all speculation and coincidence.
And, you know, you know what I mean? It's like never ever.

Speaker 1 That was one of the shows that in my formative years, you know, like when I'm in the, when I was a proto-skeptic, not really a full skeptic, but we were all interested in all of this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 Where I always had this nagging feeling, it's like, how come we never get to actual evidence?

Speaker 1 There's always the promise of evidence, the implication of evidence, the suggestion that there might be evidence, and it's all really full of hype and everything, but never anything solid.

Speaker 1 And that was definitely in that bucket. You know, that movie was that way.
It's like, it's all just wild ass speculation.

Speaker 4 And yet, teams of researchers continue to visit the site in an attempt to try to make fact out of fiction, basically, is what happens.

Speaker 4 Now, for those who don't know, in the book of Genesis, Noah's Ark came to rest, according to the book, on the mountains of Ararat, which has led to a long tradition of searching for Noah's Ark near Mount Ararat in what is modern-day Turkey, the highest peak in Turkey.

Speaker 4 In fact, Mount Ararat. It's a dormant volcano near the borders of Armenia and Iran.

Speaker 4 So, despite many alleged sightings over the centuries, as you said, Steve, there has been none zero credible scientific or archaeological evidence that the ark has been found.

Speaker 4 Geological studies of a presumed arc formation have concluded that they are what?

Speaker 4 Not an ark, but a natural rock formation.

Speaker 1 Yep. Yep.

Speaker 4 So the new claim. In 2025, an American Turkish research team using GPR and other geophysical scans claimed to have found evidence of man-made structures within this particular formation.

Speaker 4 Finally, you know, using the latest, greatest technology to go back to an archaeological site to try to find more information, which is not unusual in archaeology. That does happen.
However,

Speaker 4 what did they find?

Speaker 4 Well, let's see.

Speaker 4 According to Lawrence Collins, who is a retired professor of geology from California State University and co-author of a paper that thoroughly debunked this formation near Mount Ararat as a natural geological structure, which was formed by volcanic sediment, by the way, and erosion,

Speaker 4 rather than being a man-made vessel. His analysis determined that the supposed artifacts look like an iron bracket and drogue stones, or is it Druge stones, D-R-O-G-U-E.

Speaker 4 And that's what these new researchers said that their readings came back with. But actually, nope.
natural mineral concentrations, local rocks. It's still just geology that we're looking at.

Speaker 4 But hey, it looks like an arc, right? It has the shape. It has roughly, I guess, the size that would match it.
So what do you do if you're a true believer or creationist or what have you?

Speaker 4 You go back and you try to continue to find evidence to support your conclusions.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's not even good pareidolia. Right.
It's just vaguely boatish-shaped. It's clearly a natural rock formation.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 It's the kind of thing like you wouldn't even necessarily think anything about it until somebody points it out. It's like a face in the cloud.
Like you kind of see how this could be a boat.

Speaker 1 Yeah, okay. You know, sure, if you squint really just right.
But it's not even convincing. Even just as just as being in a boat shape, it's terrible.

Speaker 5 But, Steve, for a lot of people, that's enough.

Speaker 1 Apparently.

Speaker 4 Well, right. And, you know, and what they're and again, they just continue to go back to try to get.

Speaker 4 more information, you know, something, anything that they can cling on to to help support their particular biblical-based theory of what this is. But it fails.
It fails time and time again.

Speaker 4 Why NBC and the Today Show decided to do a segment of this?

Speaker 1 We know the answer to that question.

Speaker 1 I suppose so.

Speaker 1 Why does Time magazine have Jesus on the cover once a year, no matter what's going on?

Speaker 1 That's true.

Speaker 4 Troudatorin pops up all the time, you know, regularly. These things are cyclical in this way.

Speaker 4 So that's NBC. They get the dumbest thing of the week for helping to keep

Speaker 4 creationism alive.

Speaker 1 Well, I do want to point out one other thing, and that is I'm noticing that the use of this

Speaker 1 penetrating sonar is the latest pseudoscientific tool because it's a blob squatch tool because you get back these vague low-res

Speaker 1 images that you can hallucinate whatever the freak you want to hallucinate in those images. And so, look, this could be a corridor.
And then they superimpose on top of these blobs a ship.

Speaker 1 You know what you're like, come on.

Speaker 3 We're seeing it under the pyramids, right? In Egypt, we're seeing similar blobs.

Speaker 1 That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so this, now my radar is up for any pseudo-archaeologist, whatever, using this ground-penetrating radar. It's just pareidolia generating machine at this point in time.

Speaker 5 Which, you know, suits their purposes perfectly.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 It's like the ghost hunters who use the squelch machine to listen to ghost voices.

Speaker 1 The pseudoscientists will use noise-generating machines that they could then overinterpret to be whatever they want it to be, or whatever they need it to be, to support their nonsense.

Speaker 1 But real scientists know how to use it properly, and you know how its strengths and weaknesses, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 4 Limitations of the instruments, correct.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. I mean, the thing is, and this is, again, this is standard archaeology, is when you see something that looks like it might be something, right, just because it has a shape or whatever.

Speaker 1 That's meaningless until you find the physical stuff itself, right? So like, show me, where's the actual ship? There's got to be some, we have ships that are 4,000 years ago. Yeah,

Speaker 1 2,700 BCE. So, yeah, so we could find shipwrecks from thousands of years ago.
There should be something, some wood, some, as you say, nails, some of the pizza metal that you use to make it.

Speaker 1 Something, not just it's dirt in a vague ship shape that i impose my beliefs on to all right jay what i understand that scientists have used ai to make a virus to kill a bacteria that is correct steve i was really really looking forward to hearing what you guys think about this i think it's really cool i think it's another great example of um you know, of using artificial intelligence.

Speaker 5 But of course, there's details and there's things that we have to consider.

Speaker 5 So what we have is two scientific teams, both in California, and they claim they've used artificial intelligence to create functioning viruses that can infect and kill bacteria.

Speaker 5 You know, on the surface, this sounds incredible, right? Both groups designed complete viral genomes using the AI systems.

Speaker 5 The AI systems were trained on massive DNA data sets.

Speaker 5 filled it with as much information as they could. And then they assembled those genomes in the the lab and watched them come to life inside bacteria cells.

Speaker 5 They had 16 successful AI-generated designs from the Stanford and ARC Institute teams.

Speaker 5 They produced fully working bacteriophages. And this marks

Speaker 5 a significant shift in how biology can be engineered. Now, of course, I mean, who hasn't thought about this? I've been thinking about...

Speaker 5 you know, them using AI to do genetic engineering for a long time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's code, right? It's perfect tool for it.

Speaker 5 Exactly, yeah. And it's this is probably not the first time it's been used this way, but

Speaker 5 this particular thing that was accomplished is pretty significant. So, in case you don't know, a bacteriophage is a virus that infects bacteria.

Speaker 5 It can't reproduce or grow on its own.

Speaker 5 And what it does is it attaches itself to a living bacterial cell, then it injects its genetic material, which then hijacks the cell's internal machinery, which forces the cell to make new viral components.

Speaker 5 This is

Speaker 5 exactly what happened with COVID. And then eventually it causes the cell to burst open.
And this is very much like a Thanksgiving meal at my house, by the way.

Speaker 5 Each phage usually targets only one type of bacteria, sometimes even a single strain, and that's pretty cool. That means you can match a specific phage to a specific infection.

Speaker 5 So the targeting potential here is at maximum.

Speaker 5 This is why researchers are right now exploring these phages and the precise treatments that they could eventually bring to us for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Speaker 5 And if you don't know about what is going on in the world of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, well, there is a growing problem. caused by several things.

Speaker 5 One of them is people taking their medication and not finishing their antibiotics.

Speaker 5 You know, you can get some nasty bacteria that comes out of that happening over and over and over and over again.

Speaker 5 And it's always good to future-proof ourselves from future potential heavy-duty bacterial threats, which happen from time to time.

Speaker 5 The California team at Stratford and ARC Institute, they were focusing on PHIX174. This is a tiny phage with a genome of about 5,000 bases and 11 genes.

Speaker 5 In a virus, this genome is a single continuous piece of DNA or RNA, and that tells the host cell which proteins they produce and how to assemble new virus particles, right?

Speaker 5 This is all basic virus information.

Speaker 5 PHI X174, this is a well-known and very much heavily studied phase, which makes it perfect, a perfect test case for these synthetic genome designs that they're coming up with.

Speaker 5 The researchers also used the LLM that is specifically trained on DNA sequences, right? So it wasn't just a standard, like out-of-the-box LLM.

Speaker 5 They were training it to only, essentially, only understand DNA, and there wasn't even really like

Speaker 5 talking component to it. Like you couldn't just type into it.

Speaker 5 The way that they were communicating with it was largely just based on them pumping in DNA information and it spitting out DNA information.

Speaker 5 And that LLM was part of the Evo and Evo2 family of artificial intelligence systems. You could read a little bit more about them.
They're being used for different things.

Speaker 5 So they used it to write complete virus genomes from scratch, and the AI was able to do this very well because the models were trained like I said on just a huge amount of data about bacteria and virus and everything so they they built they loaded the gun perfectly for them to get these results the AI learned many of the rules that real biological genomes follow and this part is important because it wasn't just it shooting into the dark they concluded that the the success of this program proves that it had, you know, a quote-unquote a real understanding of what the, you know, you can call them rules or whatever, but just how these systems work.

Speaker 5 And it needed that in order to have this many successes.

Speaker 5 So once that they had these DNA sequences, they used other laboratories to actually build these structures, and they were assembled, and they were able to inject them into bacteria.

Speaker 5 And it worked.

Speaker 5 It was actually very successful.

Speaker 5 And the interesting thing here, so now that we have the DNA and now that they were able to build these phages, the implications are significant because we see what was able to be done with the LLM.

Speaker 5 We know that it can function and we know that it can spit out usable data. So now, what are we looking at?

Speaker 5 You know, phage therapy could become a much more targeted thing in the future. Synthetic biology could explore

Speaker 5 designs that are way beyond what evolution has produced. But of course, there's like the Frankenstein risks here that we have to be very careful about.

Speaker 5 And there needs to be responsible oversight.

Speaker 5 And of course, whenever we say that we need oversight, that's the one thing that we seem not to get because, you know, we have this incredible, powerful technology that, again, we could do incredible things with.

Speaker 5 Here's a few things people need to keep in mind. This could be used in the future.
It's not ready today.

Speaker 1 We also should say that this is a pre-print, so it hasn't been peer-reviewed yet.

Speaker 1 And it hasn't been replicated.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that's why I'm saying that they claimed it.

Speaker 1 This isn't. But yeah, just to point that out specifically, this is preliminary.

Speaker 1 But this is the next iterative step in this research that's been done.

Speaker 1 This is not a huge leap.

Speaker 5 And again, this is how science works. Right now, it's in super early phase.
We don't know exactly where it's going to go, what's going to happen with this research.

Speaker 5 If you look back on mRNA and the mRNA platform, for example, that took 40 years from the very beginnings of it to get it to where we could create a vaccine, or at least come up with the vaccine code in a few days, right?

Speaker 5 It's incredibly powerful.

Speaker 5 They can only test this thing in the controlled lab environment. They have to work on

Speaker 5 safe model organisms. This is not a medical application that involves people.
It probably won't be that. If it even gets there, it would be a very long time from now.

Speaker 5 But that said, this is not insignificant, and it's one of those things where it could potentially have a massive downstream effect.

Speaker 1 Both good and bad. So I think the idea that we could make designer bacteriophages to fight bacterial infections, that could be a massive new medical application, right? That could be wonderful.

Speaker 4 We need it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we definitely are. Bacterial.
Gotta have it.

Speaker 1 Antibiotic resistance

Speaker 1 is an issue.

Speaker 1 So, yeah,

Speaker 1 again, it could be, if it works, if this all pans out, and I've seen no reason why it wouldn't, you know, again, genetics is code, and LLMs are sort of a perfect tool for this,

Speaker 1 then the applications could be amazing. But the risks are equally powerful, right? Double-edged sword is.

Speaker 1 It's a double-edged sword.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the ability to create custom viruses

Speaker 1 as a potential bioweapon. That's obviously the first thing to be concerned about.

Speaker 1 Somebody could use the same platform to

Speaker 1 engineer a bioweapon, just tell an LLM to do it. So once again, we're the point where in a perfect world, the regulators would be all over this, and they would be getting

Speaker 1 the testimony from the right experts and trying to craft thoughtful regulation to minimize the worst risks of this kind of technology without slowing down genuine innovation or the potential upside of it.

Speaker 3 And they should do it now. They should be doing it now.

Speaker 1 You've got to stay ahead of the path.

Speaker 3 But this is going to happen, right? Is there any doubt that this is going to happen on some level in the not-too-distant future? I mean, it's happening now.

Speaker 1 So let me tell you something.

Speaker 1 I was

Speaker 1 at Dubai. One thing that's interesting is that

Speaker 1 the whole thing,

Speaker 1 especially like the future form, is very corporate, which is fine. But so it was a little bit different than the academic conferences that I'm used to.
It had more of a corporate vibe to it.

Speaker 1 But it's good for me. I think it was good to get a perspective, to get that perspective.

Speaker 1 And one of the panels, one of the guys running a company doing this kind of cutting-edge research is like, yeah, we prefer operating in that phase before the regulators know we exist.

Speaker 1 Because then we get to do whatever we want.

Speaker 1 And they're always behind. They always are playing catch-up late.
So that means you have this phase where you could just do whatever you want

Speaker 1 without having to worry about regulation. So that's kind of,

Speaker 1 I agree with that, the idea that regulators tend to be decades behind sometimes, you know, regulating these new technologies when they really need to, like, we need a system.

Speaker 1 We need, like, there should be an office or whatever.

Speaker 1 There's got to be people whose job it is to keep an eye on emerging technologies that may need to be regulated before the genie's out of the bottle, right?

Speaker 3 Right. And it would also be nice if we had politicians that barely, you know, that do more or know more than just barely understanding what email is.
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 3 I mean, so having these old guys, you know, try to these complicated advances. It's just not working out.

Speaker 1 I mean, again, not to be ageist. It is just from a generation who didn't grow up with digital technology.
That doesn't mean they can overcome it if

Speaker 1 they make a point to understand the technology and to learn and keep up. But they're saying things like the internet is a series of tubes.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 They're making comments that indicate that they don't understand the technology.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they don't inspire confidence at this point.

Speaker 1 They don't inspire confidence. That's a good way to put it.
So we're going to cut to Kara's item, which we pre-recorded, and then we'll come back to the stuff we're recording now.

Speaker 1 All right, Kara, you're going to tell us about Earth's digital twin.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so there's a really interesting study that was just published.

Speaker 2 Oh, no, actually, it's still this month in the archive Physics.

Speaker 2 It's called Computing the Full Earth System at one kilometer resolution, which is actually really funny because it's 1.25 kilometers resolution, but they're like close enough.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we'll round it off.

Speaker 1 Yeah, round it off.

Speaker 2 They're like, yeah, for all intents and purposes, it's the same thing.

Speaker 2 So this was published by a group of scientists who basically, I mean, there are two main things that happened here to make this possible. And from everything I'm reading, and

Speaker 2 this area of press, it was originally

Speaker 2 published in Universe Today, and then it was picked up by Science Alert and by other outlets.

Speaker 2 And the physics archive it was published in, I guess the sub-heading is Atmospheric and Ocean Physics.

Speaker 1 And is this preprint?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it's in the archive. So

Speaker 2 that's almost always preprint. But from what and the main reason it's a big deal is, well, it's two things.

Speaker 2 Number one, they used the latest technology to be able to do this, technology that just wasn't available before. And we'll get into what that is.
And number two, they simulated the Earth.

Speaker 2 And And we're talking about weather and climate patterns or systems of the full Earth down to a resolution that's never been achieved before.

Speaker 1 So you say weather and climate, weather meaning it's very on a short time scale, not just

Speaker 1 on a long time scale.

Speaker 2 And they actually, for the purposes of communicating the research and the modeling, they basically talk about two categories and they call them fast and slow systems.

Speaker 2 So they use these different models, and we'll talk about what the models are, or at least how they got to the models, to reflect these two systems. These are obviously very dynamic systems.

Speaker 2 The fast system is basically what they're calling weather, like energy and water cycles.

Speaker 2 And then the slow system are the things that have been somewhat successfully modeled in the past, like the carbon cycle and changes to ocean geochemistry, the biosphere.

Speaker 2 So these are things where the changes occur over years, sometimes decades. Whereas the fast system, we're talking minutes.

Speaker 2 Like imagine a thunderstorm and it's moving from one area of the map to another.

Speaker 2 They're able to get that resolution down to 1.25 kilometers, which is high enough to be able to say, here is a storm moving from one area to another. Previously, systems were only computationally

Speaker 2 mappable down to about 40 kilometers or more. So this is a big

Speaker 1 change. Yeah, a big change.
Are they feeding it real-time data or this is just to look and see at simulated weather?

Speaker 2 I'm actually not sure because all of the reporting has to do with how they did the model computationally. And it has less to do with what they fed into it.

Speaker 2 But basically, what they decided to do, and well, yeah, I think what ends up happening happening with a model is that you do get real-time data, but I'm not sure if it's historical or if it's, you know, to the minute.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, for climate, you know, if it takes them a year to input the data, it doesn't matter. For weather, it's got to be pretty in reality.
It's got to be pretty

Speaker 1 real-time.

Speaker 1 But that's maybe a different thing.

Speaker 2 And I guess modeling, too, is complicated because I watched a few videos on how to model climate and all of the different levels of complexity that go into it.

Speaker 2 And some of it does seem to do with just basic Earth parameters. Like, especially when we're talking about climate, it's like albedo, it's where, you know, it's like the rotation of the earth.

Speaker 2 It's all these different things

Speaker 2 that are relatively

Speaker 2 standard. And then when it comes to weather, of course, there are pressure changes and shifts and all the things that kind of feed into pockets of weather forming.

Speaker 2 So, so two things that were kind of big here. So, they used

Speaker 2 something called the IC, IC, okay, the icosahedral non-hydrostatic model.

Speaker 1 What? Icosahedral?

Speaker 2 Yeah, icosahedral, but ICO is like in capitals for something. IC.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I'm not sure why, but the icosahedral non-hydrostatic model was developed as the German weather service, or sorry, by the German Weather Service and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology.

Speaker 2 That is, I guess, the data that they used or the kind of basic modeling that they built upon. The big difference here is scale.

Speaker 2 So in order to get that 1.25 kilometer scale, they're estimating that basically, if you imagine like a grid covering the surface of the Earth, that that grid is composed now of 336 million cells.

Speaker 2 They doubled it because then they kind of modeled atmospheric cells and they're mapped directly above the ground-based ones.

Speaker 2 So we're looking at a model of around 672 million calculated cells, which they estimate translates to like one trillion what they're calling degrees of freedom, which I know is different depending on the statistics that you're talking about.

Speaker 2 But here, what they're referring to when they talk about a trillion degrees of freedom is the total number of values it's calculating.

Speaker 2 So it obviously needs a supercomputer to run this, and that's where this big new bit comes in.

Speaker 2 They used 20,480 of the new Nvidia GH200 super chips to be able to model 145.7 Earth days in a single day.

Speaker 1 And that's why my gaming rig costs so much. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Using up them and everybody else, every cryptocurrency price of the world.

Speaker 2 So I had to look up what a GH200 super chip is because I was like, what does GH stand for? Is that like gigahertz? What does that actually mean? It's not. That was really confusing to me.

Speaker 2 The number and the

Speaker 2 letters have nothing to do with computing power. So the Nvidia

Speaker 2 GH200 is also called the Grace Hopper.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 GH stands for Grace Hopper. It's, you know, to honor her.
And 200 is just their naming convention. So this is the 200th product in their series.

Speaker 2 But the GH200, by every measure that I've read, is a huge leap in performance, a huge leap in memory. We're talking mostly because it's integrating two different types of processing.

Speaker 2 So there's the NVIDIA GRACE CPU integrated with the Nvidia H100 TensorCore GPU, and then they work in tandem. So you've got CPU processing along with the graphic processing.

Speaker 2 And so it's got this high bandwidth interconnect between the two. It's got unified memory.
It's got a massive memory capacity.

Speaker 2 And so the platforms, like the applications for things like this, is generative AI, it's high-performance computing, it's data analytics, you know, it's things like modeling the climate and the weather of the entire Earth.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And since we're talking about computer chips, though, as a little bit of an aside, IBM just announced their latest quantum computer chip, which does seem to be a real game changer.

Speaker 1 We'll probably have to do a deeper dive on it at some point, but they combined error correction on the same chip with the quantum computing. It kind of reminds me of the same thing.

Speaker 1 It's like it's the two functions in one. And as Bob and I have said previously, the error correction is like the ballgame at this point with quantum computer chips.

Speaker 1 Like what's the error rate, you know? And so anyway, if this pans out the way they say it would,

Speaker 1 it should, then they should have like commercial quantum computer chips by 2030 is what they're saying.

Speaker 1 So I wonder if that would apply to this kind of model. Because that's always the first thing you hear when they say, what's it going to do? It's going to be able to do climate models.

Speaker 1 It's always on the top of the list of what these chips could do.

Speaker 1 I wonder if that would, you know, for some applications, they could be thousands of times more powerful than conventional chips or more.

Speaker 2 And this is what's really interesting.

Speaker 2 As you were talking about that, I did a little, so I'm trusting AI here a little bit, but I did a little search about the NVIDIA chip because it's not a quantum chip, right?

Speaker 1 There's no quantum chip that you could buy.

Speaker 2 But they are calling it a super chip. And the interesting thing is that even though it's a classical processor, it is playing a really important role in advancing quantum computing because

Speaker 2 it can run large-scale simulations of quantum algorithms. And because it's got that low-latency classical computing power, it can be used for quantum error correction.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 designing these things is big.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And apparently, this one was like a leaps and bounds.

Speaker 2 Like, they made a big leap when they went from their pre when NVIDIA went from their previous super chip to the Grace Hopper 200. Right.
So, now you combine that with what's going on over at IBM.

Speaker 2 And wow.

Speaker 1 But so, not surprising, though, with this model, it's basically a hardware upgrade and a software upgrade.

Speaker 1 They're using these super chips, and they're getting better at the software

Speaker 1 using generative AI.

Speaker 1 And boom, we got a one, quote-unquote one kilometer

Speaker 2 weather. And also other hardware, right? They're using these massive supercomputers in order to run it because it just takes, it takes so much of everything.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 It takes so much energy.

Speaker 1 It's going to warm the climate itself just by running the model.

Speaker 2 But that's what they, the authors at least really put a lot of

Speaker 2 the kind of onus, I guess that's not quite the right word, but they say that this is really only possible because of that GPU-CPU bifurcation. It allows them to run the FAST models.

Speaker 2 Previous to that, they could have only done the carbon cycle models. So they're doing the carbon cycle models on the CPU portion in parallel with the FAST models on the GPU portion.

Speaker 2 So the weather and climate is being modeled sort of at the same time due to

Speaker 2 this big innovation

Speaker 1 in the chip.

Speaker 1 And from what I'm reading,

Speaker 1 tell me if this is your understanding too, they're using an existing model, right? An existing model. I think that's what the idea is.
They just made it higher resolution.

Speaker 1 So it's not like this model has to be validated. It's already been validated.
They're just making it, they're just putting it on steroids.

Speaker 2 Yeah, basically they're taking a model that has been used in Germany and that is, I think, yeah, like valid, completely validated because it's in use today

Speaker 2 through Icon. And then they are,

Speaker 2 because of this computational power, it made a huge leap from like 40 plus kilometers down to like 1.25 in resolution, which is enough to talk about weather.

Speaker 2 But 40 kilometers, yeah, you can kind of talk about huge weather systems,

Speaker 2 but we're not talking, you know, looking at your app on your phone and seeing what's happening right where you live. That wouldn't be possible with 40 kilometer resolution.
So, you know,

Speaker 2 the write-up does caution, and the authors do as well, that, you know, models of this complexity are not going to be carried by local weather stations.

Speaker 2 It's just just too, you know, it requires too much computational power. And they worry, of course, that big tech is going to use that type of computational power.

Speaker 2 Like these GH200s are going to be used for generative AI 100%. And then all of the supercomputing time is being taken for that.
But maybe, you know,

Speaker 2 you've got to show that something's possible before it becomes faster, cheaper, better. And this is showing that it is possible.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I wonder if this will impact the

Speaker 1 global warming modeling that

Speaker 1 this model does.

Speaker 2 Oh, right. Because even if it's not.

Speaker 1 Will it get more precise or will it be different?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Like even if your local weather station can't afford to do this, obviously the researchers doing this are going to give this data to the UN and to

Speaker 2 all of these groups that are sort of responsible for modeling what's happening.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 local weather services, by the way, like your local weather, they're all pulling their data off the weather service. They're not doing anything themselves.

Speaker 1 So this would be used like by the government, and then everybody would get the information. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But yeah, this idea of a digital twin, it's, I don't know, when I first read about it, I couldn't help but see the parallel between our fields, right?

Speaker 2 Where there's constant modeling of brains or of other biological processes, and we're trying to get better and better at that.

Speaker 2 That in some ways the climate is, I don't know, there is a parallel there because it's stochastic and it's complicated and there's so many variables that have to be fed into it.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, Jr.: And we are just trying to get more and more resolution.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know.
But what we don't have, like, with the, we could do a mouse brain, you know, because it's smaller than a human brain. We don't have any small planetary systems to model.

Speaker 2 Well, actually, we have been able to model things like Mars pretty well because like the atmosphere is a whole level of complexity that we just, you know, makes the Earth way more difficult to model.

Speaker 1 Do we have really complicated climate models of Mars?

Speaker 2 Well, really complicated is tough, but I did do a deep dive into this really great video where I learned an awful lot. So I want to give a shout out to Dr.
Trevor Bazett's YouTube channel.

Speaker 2 But he talks about how climate modeling works, and he goes into like four different levels of complexity.

Speaker 2 And he says over and over, he uses like Mars and the Moon as an example over and over, where he's like, yeah, this would be easy to do on Mars or the Moon, but like now that we have the atmosphere of Earth, things get a lot more complicated.

Speaker 2 But yeah, probably not down to 40 or even, definitely not down to one kilometer.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. All right.
Thank you, Kara. Yep.
All right, guys.

Speaker 1 Have you ever heard of this idea of using creatine supplements for brain function to improve your brain health or improve your brain function? So I was asked about it. I've heard of it.

Speaker 1 I was asked about it.

Speaker 1 And I hadn't heard of it specifically. I've heard it for like bodybuilding, you know.
Yeah, me too. But that's like 20 years ago.
You know, it was when it was, I think,

Speaker 1 having its heyday.

Speaker 4 I wonder what creatine exactly is, though.

Speaker 1 Well, it's protein, basically.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 3 You could say that about anything about biology, and you will probably be right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a good first guess.

Speaker 1 Protein.

Speaker 4 It's organic.

Speaker 1 If you want to get crazy, you could say it's an enzyme. This isn't an enzyme, though.
All right, but

Speaker 1 that would be crazy. Here's the basic science.
So this is specifically creatine monohydrate, but you know, creatine. It gets converted to phosphocreatine and stored in neurons.

Speaker 1 Phosphocreatine can be broken down into ATP, which is energy currency. Adenosine triphosphate.

Speaker 1 Adenosine triphosphate. So it basically could be turned into energy that can be used by cells to function.

Speaker 1 Kind of important.

Speaker 1 So the idea is if you take supplements, you'll increase your store of phosphocreatine and therefore you'll increase the availability of this energy currency to the brain when it needs it, so it'll function better.

Speaker 1 So I consider this to be a semi-plausible mechanism.

Speaker 1 At least it's something physical happening, like the biology adds up.

Speaker 1 It's not saying quantum vibrations or anything like that, right? It's saying

Speaker 4 homeopathic memory.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 the idea that because

Speaker 1 it's based upon the premise that the availability of the raw material is a rate-limiting step here, and that's rarely the the case, right?

Speaker 1 Just eating more of something usually doesn't make your body function better.

Speaker 1 It would only be helpful, it would only be helpful in a situation where the body's being stressed beyond its normal parameters.

Speaker 1 And we'll get to that in a second, or where you are deficient for some reason. Right.
Right. Or you have a disease that makes it deficient, or whatever.

Speaker 4 Vitamin C if you have scurvy.

Speaker 1 But if you're, yeah, exactly. Vitamin C is helpful for scurvy because you're deficient in vitamin C.

Speaker 1 But if you're a healthy person with a good diet, taking more vitamin C probably isn't going to help, right? That's the idea. So I have sort of the same overall view of this.

Speaker 1 It's like, okay, that sort of makes sense and it's helpful, but doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to help if we're a healthy person to take it.

Speaker 1 Your brain's going to function better because it has more ATP being made from this sort of side pathway.

Speaker 3 Right. Is it even noticeable?

Speaker 1 Right. And also, it all may be true.
That is true of so many things, Bob, where it's like, yeah, that's true. That is happening, but is that a clinically significant effect in and of itself?

Speaker 1 Maybe not, you know. So, how do we know? You have to do clinical studies, right?

Speaker 4 Can it lead to toxicity as well?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 the big thing with creatine is that it's got to be processed by the kidney, and if you take too much of it, like a lot of proteins,

Speaker 1 it could stress out the kidneys. But generally speaking, the doses that people are using for this specific indication are below the general safe levels.

Speaker 1 Again, if you have kidney disease, then don't take it, right? Talk to your doctor. All bets are off.
But if you're healthy kidneys, you could take this. The supplement levels are probably safe.

Speaker 1 Okay, so there was 2024 systematic reviews, so that's pretty recently.

Speaker 1 16 clinical trials. That's not a lot for a systematic review, but it's not nothing.
492 participants in total. Again, that's not a lot, especially for 16 studies.

Speaker 1 That means they're mostly small studies. So that's an overall modest amount of data.
This is telling me this is preliminary research.

Speaker 1 So they found that creatine supplementation showed significant positive effects on memory, attention time, and processing speed.

Speaker 1 But no significant improvements were found on overall cognitive function. That seems like a big thing.
Or executive function.

Speaker 1 So it kind of sounds like it's like, all right, there's some improvement on components of thinking, but it didn't didn't improve your overall cognitive function and didn't improve your executive function

Speaker 1 so they also did a subgroup analysis to show that the effect was more significant in people with diseases those aged 18 to 60 not sure about what that means and females again not sure what that means so what is how do we make sense of all this data first these results are a bit mixed right there It's not a clear, consistent signal.

Speaker 1 It shows improvement in some things, but not others. Also, those are kind of quirky subsets of people to be affected by it.
Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 So that tells me that this could just be an artifact of small studies looking at a lot of variables, and some things are going to come up positive, right?

Speaker 1 So this is overall not very confidence-building, right? Not a good sign. So the authors themselves conclude that the evidence is low to moderate confidence.

Speaker 1 That would be like more of an evidence-based evaluation.

Speaker 1 I would say putting, adding the other things that I just said, the mixed results and the patterns that we're seeing, I would put, to me, that's low confidence.

Speaker 1 And they say that we need larger, robust clinical trials to validate it. So, again, that's code for this is not ready for prime time.
This results have not been established.

Speaker 1 So, we can also look at this from the lens of if we take a hundred things, right, medical claims, that where there's this level of evidence, how many of them pan out to actually work?

Speaker 1 And you're probably down in the 1 to 2% range.

Speaker 1 And there has been some research to back that up.

Speaker 1 It's hard to say it's exactly analogous, but when we generally ask that question, the answer is quite low, usually single digits in terms of percentages.

Speaker 1 Part of the reason is because there's a huge false positive bias in the literature.

Speaker 1 So if you have preliminary data, mostly small studies with mixed results, and you account for a positive, a significant positive research bias, then, you know, statistically speaking, and again, historically, this is true, most of these things don't pan out.

Speaker 1 And of course, the supplement industry has the flavor of the weak approach, right? It takes 10, 20, 30 years to do the research to really tell if something is effective or not.

Speaker 1 That gives them 20 to 30 years to market it. And then by the time it gets shot down, they're on to the next thing.

Speaker 1 So to me, this is just the next, you know, sort of an endless sequence of

Speaker 1 brain supplements that are supposed to help your brain function better, make you smart, or whatever, the smart pill thing. And none of them really pan out.

Speaker 3 Where sometimes the bologna sticks around, it does go away.

Speaker 1 Sometimes it doesn't. Like, yeah, the antioxidant thing is this, it's just so embedded now.
I think some things become permanent.

Speaker 1 Like, they just become a permanent addition to the culture and the health halo thing that never goes away.

Speaker 1 And I think, yeah, I think antioxidants are here to stay, even though I think there's no evidence that there's any benefit to supplementing them. So be cautious with the creatine thing again.

Speaker 1 Don't spend a lot of money on it, would be my advice.

Speaker 1 I'm not saying there's no benefit.

Speaker 1 There may be some benefit, but the evidence is preliminary. low confidence.
These things don't have a good history.

Speaker 1 I will say one other signal, there's another study I looked at that wasn't in the systematic review that showed that it may have a benefit for people who are sleep deprived. So

Speaker 1 that's a little bit more plausible because if you are, like, if you're sleep-deprived, you're under a lot of stress, then things like this could make a difference at the edges. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 I don't think it's going to affect normal, healthy functioning of your brain, but it may help with these kinds of situations. But again,

Speaker 1 we need more research to tell, but that is at least somewhat more plausible. And it wouldn't surprise me, right?

Speaker 1 It wouldn't surprise me if it's, oh, yeah, there's a little bit of a benefit if you take a high dose right when you're sleep deprived. Okay, maybe.
It's kind of like the probiotic thing, too.

Speaker 1 Like, probiotics don't do anything for most people most of the time.

Speaker 1 But if you take a super high dose only when you have post-antibiotic used problems because you wiped out your gut flora, it may help. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Like there's this little sliver of there may be some effect here in these, with all of these caveats.

Speaker 1 So it wouldn't surprise me if, like, again, in some subset of a subset, it may have some limited benefit. But it's not a panacea.

Speaker 1 It's not like, oh, take these smart pills and all your cognitive function is better. I think already we could

Speaker 1 say that that's probably not true because if it were, we would be seeing it.

Speaker 1 There isn't a false negative bias. Usually

Speaker 1 the false positive bias means

Speaker 1 the preliminary research is usually calibrated to make sure that they're seeing an effect and not missing it,

Speaker 1 at the expense of overcalling it.

Speaker 1 So if you're not seeing

Speaker 1 a home run positive effect in this level of data, it's probably not there.

Speaker 1 So that's kind of the longish answer to: hey, is there anything to the whole creatine thing for brain health? That's

Speaker 1 meh. Yeah,

Speaker 3 even less than meh minus. Yeah, I'd say.

Speaker 1 So this is how I would characterize this research as this is the plausibility and the preliminary research is sufficient to justify doing large clinical trials. But that's it.

Speaker 1 It's not sufficient to market it or make clinical claims or I think even take it. But I do think it's enough to justify further research, and that's it.

Speaker 1 I think that's the best way to look at it.

Speaker 5 But people won't change their buying habits.

Speaker 1 Well, some people will. Maybe some people listening to the show who are critical thinkers and skeptics will say, oh, that's good information.
I will change my buying habits.

Speaker 1 Who knows?

Speaker 4 That's because we have awesome listeners.

Speaker 1 Yeah, absolutely. All right, Bob.
I'm very excited about this.

Speaker 1 Here we go. Tell us about this quiet supersonic jet.
Yeah,

Speaker 3 Guys, commercial supersonic flight took a significant lurch out of its grave recently

Speaker 3 when a test plane, the X-59, flew for the first time at relative slow speeds to check its systems. The plane's been designed to fly faster than sound, but not create the jarring.

Speaker 1 Wait, it didn't fly faster than sound for the test?

Speaker 3 No, this was a shakedown cruise.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 3 All right. Yeah, I wanted to mention that out of the gate because then it's just like, you you know, you'd be the disappointments hopefully over.

Speaker 1 Yeah, get that over with. Now tell us the whole stuff.

Speaker 3 Right. The plane has been designed, Steve, to fly faster than sound, but not create the jarring ground-level sonic booms, only tiny sonic thumps.
Sonic thumps.

Speaker 3 So this X-59, it's the baby of NASA and Lockheed Martin. The first full-scale experimental plane designed for tolerable booms.
We all remember the iconic Concorde, right? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, yes.

Speaker 3 It flew its last flight early in this millennium. I think it was 2003.

Speaker 1 Who were on Concorde? Oh yeah man. I remember it.

Speaker 3 I remember being so excited. But such commercial planes are not allowed to fly over the land in the U.S.
Even if the Concorde couldn't do that.

Speaker 3 And that's because the sonic booms are so loud and disruptive that it could actually potentially break windows and cause minor building damage even. worst case scenario.

Speaker 3 But despite that, the real sonic boom problem was the chronic annoyance and the public backlash that it caused. It was people were, you know, were just not happy.
Can you imagine hearing that

Speaker 1 time? Can I point out at this point? Yeah. Because I had a misconception about this when I was younger, and I wonder how many people still have it too.

Speaker 1 I thought

Speaker 1 the sonic boom, yeah, it was when it crossed the barrier to supersonic, but it's the entire time it's flying supersonically,

Speaker 1 there's a continuous boom as it travels.

Speaker 3 It's constantly.

Speaker 4 It's a putter, or is it a solid kind of.

Speaker 1 I've heard it before. I've heard it before.

Speaker 3 It's a constant booming. It's a constant booming.
But

Speaker 1 you hear it once, each person, but as it travels over the land, the boom travels with it.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 3 And I had that misconception as well, and that's the biggest misconception. But I'll go into a little bit more detail about that.

Speaker 3 Commercial supersonic flight,

Speaker 3 that's one of the sci-fi staples, right? I mean, not one of the big boys, but it's a sci-fi staple.

Speaker 3 Yes, this one is extra frustrating because we already had the damn thing and now we don't. Bye-bye.
See you later. Just a big tease.
So, but have you considered this other angle as well?

Speaker 3 This is also frustrating. The Boeing 707 in 1958, 67 years ago, flew at 965 kilometers per hour, 600 miles per hour.
And that's just about what commercial jets do today.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 You know, that's when you think about that, how is that even a thing in this age of rapid scientific advancement?

Speaker 1 Same speed we were exploring.

Speaker 3 Across so many fronts. It just sounds wrong, right? But, you know, there are.

Speaker 3 Engineers aren't lazy and it's just like, ah, this is good enough. There's good engineering reasons why we don't see commercial flights getting faster and faster.

Speaker 5 Tom, isn't it largely fuel efficiency?

Speaker 3 That's part of it. But it's also, yeah, but it just becomes more and more difficult to go much faster than commercial airlines today.
Not just for the reason of surpassing supersonic speed.

Speaker 3 The drag just gets worse and worse and worse. So there's lots of reasons.

Speaker 3 But NASA and Lockheed Martin, they're trying to solve a lot of these problems on test planes like the X-59 and in just general research.

Speaker 3 But they specifically, from what I could gather, they specifically want to make this technology available so that U.S. manufacturers could then build their own supersonic commercial jets.

Speaker 3 That's one of their goals. So ideally, these technologies will need to solve so many problems, all of which plague the Concorde and are why it no longer flies.

Speaker 3 And these reasons include inefficiencies and expense.

Speaker 3 If you look at the tickets back then, they were priced at, in today's dollars, many thousands of dollars,

Speaker 3 you know, and even tens of thousands of dollars,

Speaker 3 about twice the first-class subsonic ticket at the time.

Speaker 3 And even then, the Concorde struggled to be consistently profitable. It was very, very difficult, even with those exorbitant prices that people were paying.

Speaker 3 And then there's safety.

Speaker 3 There were safety problems. Remember, there was a crash in 2000.
It killed over 113 passengers. That greatly, that was a real turning point.

Speaker 3 That greatly diminished ticket sales and confidence that people had.

Speaker 4 It had a good safety record up until that.

Speaker 3 And yeah, there was just a crazy thing.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 the tire taking off hit some debris that flew into the wing, which punctured the tank. And like, oh man, you can imagine, just extrapolate from there, how bad that got.

Speaker 3 So those are just a couple of the problems

Speaker 3 that these planes would experience. There's also also the environmental impact, takeoff and landing noise.
There's high-altitude emissions, and

Speaker 3 there's weight. But finally, one of the greatest barriers for a commercial supersonic flight is this iconic sonic boom.
And

Speaker 3 it's that

Speaker 3 specifically which the X-59 test plane is addressing.

Speaker 3 major problem right there. That's basically the purpose of the X-59.
So it's not specifically addressing these other issues which are important, but it's a sonic boom problem.

Speaker 3 This relates to another critical goal of this research, and that's essentially to change aviation laws, right? Now there's a specific aviation law that says no civil aircraft over Mach 1 in U.S.

Speaker 3 airspace without special authorization. So

Speaker 3 that's a law. So these researchers want to change that.

Speaker 3 Ideally, I think if we could change that law or if they could change that law to say something like, you can go supersonic over land as long as what people on the ground hear stays below a certain decibel range, a loudness limit, if you will.

Speaker 3 That's also one of their major goals here, is to make that happen, to actually change these laws. But then I'm thinking, well, what made sonic booms so bad? What is it about them? Why are they so bad?

Speaker 3 So I definitely... took a dive and just learned as much as I could about what is actually happening here in these scenarios.
So to do that, let's start with subsonic flight first, right?

Speaker 3 And then we'll just kind of work our way up. So below the speed of light, wait, sorry, that's force of habit, guys.
Below the speed of sound, we're dealing with sound, not light.

Speaker 3 So below the speed of sound, planes push air out of the way as they move, and that creates these pressure waves, which is sound. It's essentially sound, right?

Speaker 3 So they travel at the speed of sound, obviously. And since the plane is moving slower than sound, the sound waves can move smoothly away from the plane as it's coming.

Speaker 3 And in all directions, it just can move away. There's plenty of time to do that, in a lot of ways, similar to the boat waves that you may look at boat waves as a boat is going through the water.

Speaker 3 So then, guys, what comes after subsonic?

Speaker 5 Supersonic. Sonic.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you would think, but technically, no, technically, technically,

Speaker 3 actually, it's transonic.

Speaker 3 The term is transonic, but that occurs between Mach 0.8 and 1.2, right? Between 0.8 and 1.2. And things start getting messy in this regime.
It's basically around the cutoff of Mach 1.

Speaker 3 It's a little bit messy messy for a little while.

Speaker 3 So that's because, I didn't realize this, that's because parts of the plane, like the wings, can experience supersonic airflow, even though the plane itself is subsonic, right?

Speaker 3 So it's kind of like a

Speaker 1 mixed airflow.

Speaker 3 These isolated... shockwaves, you know, supersonic airflows can cause these mini kind of proto-shockwaves.

Speaker 3 So we're already starting to see this transition to supersonic flight before you even hit supersonic flight. And then finally, we have, we enter the regime of supersonic flight, Mach 1, right?

Speaker 3 At sea level that's 1,234 kilometers per hour or 767 miles per hour. At altitude it gets a little bit lower because of temperature changes.

Speaker 3 Okay, now this transition is characterized by the smooth pressure waves of subsonic flight changing abruptly into shock waves. That's what the key thing that happens when you become supersonic,

Speaker 3 the formation of shock waves. So basically the air pressure waves can no longer get out of the way of each other, right? Because the plane is traveling as fast or faster than sound itself.

Speaker 3 So these pressure waves pile up, merging together into essentially this thin, sharp wall of compressed air. That's a shockwave.
That's the cause of these sonic booms.

Speaker 3 Now, Steve, I was going to say here what you had mentioned. This is the misconception is that the plane creates a sonic boom as it exceeds the speed of sound.
And then it's over.

Speaker 3 Like, ah, we're done here with the sonic booms. No, the shockwave is continuous.
It booms as long as the plane is exceeding Mach 1. And also important, you have multiple shock waves.

Speaker 3 This isn't just one big shockwave. This is multiple shock waves are generated from the cone, right? The leading cone of the plane.

Speaker 3 The wing, the tail, any surface like that are creating their own shock waves. What happens is that all of these shock waves kind of merge into a cone expanding behind the plane.

Speaker 3 So the plane is at the point the end of the cone, and behind it, you have the cone shape expanding.

Speaker 3 And it's all the sonic waves, all these shock waves that the plane fuchsialized, the body is, and the wings, and everything about it, all of those shock waves are being formed and pushed into this expanding cone behind the plane.

Speaker 3 And when that cone intersects the ground, we hear a sonic boom. So that's why it's such a deal killer for commercial planes over populated areas.
Anyone near that plane

Speaker 3 is going to hear it.

Speaker 3 You could hear the classic, you know, the double sonic boom,

Speaker 3 which is often the, you know, the front of the plane and the tail of the plane. But sometimes it's just a rumble, a nasty rumble that's kind of like hard to tease out specific booms.

Speaker 3 So it depends on lots of different variables. So that's why it's such a deal killer over populated areas.

Speaker 3 Anyone that's under that boom carpet, they call it the boom carpet, as the plane passes nearby, they're going to hear that boom.

Speaker 3 Not just the people right under the flight path, but even extended outwards as well. So that's a sonic boom, and that's supersonic flight, and what happens.

Speaker 3 So, to turn the sonic boom into a sonic thump, the engineers are in essence sculpting and shaping the downward part of that cone of shock waves, right?

Speaker 3 So, you got the, they don't really care about the upward part of the cone. It's all about the downward part.

Speaker 3 That's what people are going to hear. And so, they're kind of sculpting it into smaller, gentler shockwaves, more spread out in time and space.

Speaker 3 They say that when you eventually hear it on the ground, it should have the volume of a car door slamming a little bit of distance away from you, or sometimes they liken it to the rumbling of distant thunder,

Speaker 3 a lot more tolerable than the classic sonic boom that we hear today. So, to do this, the nose of the plane has to be really long.
It looks kind of weird, it's so long.

Speaker 3 They call it, they refer to the plane as a swordfish. It really does look like a swordfish.
But the end isn't pointy, though.

Speaker 3 It needs to be this chisel shape to effectively change the shape of the shockwave. And the entire body of the plane also is kind of designed to do this.
So this test happened this past October 2025.

Speaker 3 They went very well. It passed all the tests.
It only flew, as I said before, at a boring 230 miles per hour at 12,000 feet, but it was still a historic test for this experimental X-plane.

Speaker 1 This is just to make sure it flies.

Speaker 3 Yeah, this is basically a 12,000-foot shakedown cruise, right? This is the shakedown cruise because this plane was built from scratch.

Speaker 3 It's not like they just added, you know, they screwed on a few things over a conventional plane. This is an experimental plane designed from the ground up.

Speaker 3 So they wanted to make sure that this thing actually flies. And it's a huge milestone for any X-plane to have that first cruise.

Speaker 3 And it's not doing what it was specifically designed to do, but it can fly. And all the components are working together.
So

Speaker 3 that was the goal of this flight.

Speaker 3 But now what happens, you have the real test campaign is going to going to begin.

Speaker 3 So in the near future, we should hopefully be reading about this test plane, this X-59, hitting Mach 1.4, which is about 925 miles per hour and at 55,000 feet.

Speaker 3 So soon after that, what's going to happen is that they're going to fly it over various communities in the United States, not only to record and assess these new sonic thumps, but also and primarily to interview.

Speaker 3 interview people to see what their impressions are of these sonic thumps. Is this something, could you live near an airport where you hear this multiple times a day?

Speaker 3 Is that something that would be, you know, would cause problems or would you be annoyed? You know, what are your impressions?

Speaker 3 That's what they're going to do, which is something that doesn't really happen. Typically, when you have

Speaker 3 an X plane that's flying, it flies over a specific area, a military area. It's not going to go over communities, but this one, we need to do this.

Speaker 3 We need this real-world data and see what people's impressions are. Because when they did this test in the 60s with supersonic commercial flights,

Speaker 3 the feedback that people gave was not very good. And I don't think

Speaker 3 it never got good. And that's when I think maybe it was at that point, but that they said that, yeah, you can't fly over land.
And that was one of the major problems with the Concorde.

Speaker 3 It could be supersonic over the ocean,

Speaker 3 but not over the land. And that was a major problem for any, right? Any supersonic plane, you want to be able to fly supersonically over land.
And they couldn't even do that.

Speaker 3 So if regulators are convinced that the thump is tolerable, this may be the first domino to fall for the true return of commercial supersonic flight.

Speaker 3 And, of course, as I mentioned, other hurdles remain, like the environmental and climate impacts need to be addressed. And you actually have to make this into a viable business.

Speaker 3 You have to make money. You know, one of the many problems with the Concorde was

Speaker 3 not making enough money, or sometimes

Speaker 3 no money at all. It just wasn't a consistent money maker, and that was one of the things that will kill any business very quickly.

Speaker 3 But for the first first time since the Concorde retired, we now seem to have a plausible path for a future with airliners traveling twice as fast as they do now, with no one cringing over the inevitable boom that just never will come this time, hopefully.

Speaker 3 So, fingers crossed, definitely going to track this.

Speaker 5 I hope to

Speaker 3 fly on one of these at some point before I lurch into the ground as well. So, we'll see what happens.

Speaker 1 All right. Thanks, Mel.
Yeah, we'll

Speaker 1 report back on this. I especially want to see what happens when they fly at actually supersonic speeds and see what kind of a sonic thump it makes.
Yes.

Speaker 1 But I love the fact that they're doing this and then saying so that commercial airliners can incorporate this into.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I was very happy to hear that. Yes.

Speaker 3 I was like, that's the goal. They want to make the technology.
All right, guys, here's the technology. Just now you can

Speaker 3 make it happen. Build your own supersonic airliners and let's have at it.

Speaker 1 But having just spent 14 and a half hours on a plane, I heartily endorse this plan.

Speaker 3 Steve, imagine that trip would have been cut in half.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 practically. All right, Evan, tell us about this new test for chronic fatigue syndrome.

Speaker 4 A new test, right? Chronic fatigue syndrome. It's been a little while maybe since we've talked about it on the show.

Speaker 1 Steve, you blog a lot about this. I have in the past.
I don't know about it a lot, but yeah.

Speaker 4 Am I getting this term right? It's myalgic encephalomyelitis. Am I pronouncing that right?

Speaker 1 Myalgic encephalomyelitis.

Speaker 4 There we go. But I am going to call it chronic fatigue syndrome because that's what most people know it as.
Let's see, according to the, well, looked up the definition of this.

Speaker 4 A debilitating condition characterized by persistent fatigue that's not improved by rest.

Speaker 4 It can lead to cognitive issues, sleep problems,

Speaker 4 orthostatic intolerance, and other issues. Here's a little history on this.

Speaker 4 From what I could tell, in the, well, what, the 1980s, basically through 2010s, some researchers proposed psychosomatic or behavioral explanations as to what this actually was.

Speaker 4 But in recent years, there has been some other, well,

Speaker 4 maybe more scientific support for it actually being

Speaker 4 a real physical medical issue. Let's see.
The current, and I'm by say current, as of late 2025, the current scientific and medical consensus based on CDC, NIH,

Speaker 4 the UK's NICE, NICE, the WHO,

Speaker 4 and some other recent peer-reviewed research say that it represents a distinct physiological disorder, which involves immunology, neurology, autonomic, and metabolic dysfunctions.

Speaker 4 No single biomarker has historically defined it. Multiple converging lines of evidence seem to point to a biological disease process.

Speaker 4 This is controversial.

Speaker 1 I I mean, I think that that's definitely where the science has been heading in that direction for the last 30 years. You know, that there is something biological going on here.
And in any case,

Speaker 1 at least in neurology, we've significantly moved away from the notion that anything is purely psychosomatic. You know, we don't even use that term anymore.

Speaker 1 It's functional neurological disorder, meaning it's just a complex

Speaker 1 disorder that involves

Speaker 1 brain function, but it's not

Speaker 1 simplistically understood. Now, with chronic fatigue syndrome, the big caveat to chronic fatigue syndrome is that it's probably not one thing.

Speaker 1 It's not one discrete pathophysiological disease. That doesn't mean it's not real.
That means it's complicated. It's probably multiple things.

Speaker 1 So, different people, right? So, it's a syndrome. You should think about it.

Speaker 1 It is chronic fatigue syndrome.

Speaker 1 That word is appropriate. It's a syndrome because it's a clinical entity.

Speaker 1 If you have this, again, persistent fatigue above and beyond

Speaker 1 your activity, you get this with modest physical activity, you get extreme prolonged fatigue that doesn't get better, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of components to it.
That's the syndrome.

Speaker 1 But different people could have different causes. There could be different ways that people get to that.

Speaker 1 So that makes any research on it difficult because any marker you look for may only be relevant in a subset of the people you're looking at, or you may be looking at things that contribute to chronic fatigue syndrome, but aren't the essence of what it is, which all will be brought to bear on this news item that you're talking about.

Speaker 1 But go ahead and tell us what the new bit is, and then we'll talk about how to make sense of it all.

Speaker 4 Science Daily had a headline recently that reads, breakthrough blood test finally confirms chronic fatigue syndrome.

Speaker 1 That's all hype.

Speaker 4 Okay. Now, because, yeah, based on what you just said, Steve, my follow-up sort of question immediately on this: syndromes,

Speaker 4 can you have something as simple as a blood test that could define or identify a syndrome? It doesn't sound like that that would be the case.

Speaker 1 No, I mean, that would be very unlikely at this point in time with all the research that's been done and everything we've done to try to understand this syndrome.

Speaker 1 That, oh, it turns out this one thing, like this one thing explains it it pretty much completely. I doubt that that's going to be the result.
It's not impossible, we may be missing something.

Speaker 1 You know, it may be like there's this one, that even if it has multiple things that

Speaker 1 contribute to it, there may be one thing about people who get it that is different. And maybe there may be one biochemical or biological pathway.

Speaker 1 Again, unlikely, but I can't say that that's impossible. But

Speaker 1 this test is not it, though, right? If that is possible,

Speaker 1 or at least they have not established that it is. So the hype isn't getting way ahead of where the research is.

Speaker 1 This is one component to a long and complicated research program to try to understand this very complicated syndrome. It is not the breakthrough that that headline hyped it as.

Speaker 4 Right, right.

Speaker 4 But a research team has conducted these studies via the University of East Anglia in collaboration with Oxford Biodynamics company.

Speaker 4 They've developed a blood test using 3D genomic folding or epigenetic profiling that reportedly achieves roughly 96% accuracy in differentiating chronic fatigue syndrome from healthy controls.

Speaker 4 The assay examines, I brought my assay,

Speaker 4 the assay examines DNA folding signatures in immune cells, which suggests an underlying measurable biological signature for the disease.

Speaker 4 Lead researcher is Professor Dimitri, oh boy, this one, P-S-H-E-Z-H.

Speaker 4 Dimitri Pozinski, I'm sorry if I got that wrong, of UEA's Norwich Medical School, was quoted as saying, CFS is a serious and often debilitating disease characterized by extreme fatigue that is not relieved by rest.

Speaker 4 We wanted to see if we could develop a blood test to diagnose the condition, and we did. Exclamation point.

Speaker 4 Our discovery offers the potential for a simple, accurate blood test to help confirm a diagnosis, the diagnosis, which could lead to earlier support and more effective management.

Speaker 4 Post-COVID syndrome, commonly referred to as long COVID, is one example of ME/CFS, where a similar cluster of symptoms is triggered by the COVID-19 virus rather than by other known causes such as glandular fever.

Speaker 4 We therefore hope that our research will also help pave the way for a similar test to accurately diagnose diagnose long COVID.

Speaker 1 What do you think of that?

Speaker 1 So, all right, so what do you think?

Speaker 4 That sounds like something different, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, right. He's basically admitting that this is multiple potential different clinical entities that might have this commonality, right? Like saying this is also going to diagnose long COVID.

Speaker 1 Well, then, is that the same or different than chronic fatigue syndrome?

Speaker 1 Definitely, you know, I have seen plenty of patients with post-infectious chronic fatigue syndrome. That's definitely a thing.

Speaker 1 Again, we don't really understand the mechanism that causes that.

Speaker 1 But again, that's probably a different thing than people who have it who have not had a brain infection or some other chronic serious illness.

Speaker 1 All right, so if there is one glaring problem with this research, though, with this specific study.

Speaker 1 I don't know if any of you have a guess as to what that might be. So they compared.

Speaker 4 Small. It's a small.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, there's the usual caveats. It needs to be validated, it needs to be independently researched, needs

Speaker 1 larger studies. But just

Speaker 1 they compared people who have the clinical diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome. Again, there's no real gold standard, it's just you meet the, you have the clinical diagnosis, and

Speaker 1 certain changes, epigenetic changes that they were looking for, you know, in their study. So, what did they not do? I guess this might be hard for you to, you know, as non-physicians to suss out, but

Speaker 1 just wondering if any of you have a guess. So, they compared people with the disease clinically to healthy controls.

Speaker 1 What's another comparison that might be helpful?

Speaker 4 People with comorbidities.

Speaker 1 That's close. I mean,

Speaker 1 that would be good too, but you're sort of heading in the right direction. People with other diseases.
So again, this is the kind of thing like a physician

Speaker 1 who's familiar with this kind of research would instantly see that, oh, yeah, but they didn't compare it to other diseases, right?

Speaker 1 So if you're saying it's specific, to chronic fatigue syndrome, then you have to show that it doesn't exist in everybody with any disease. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Just saying it doesn't exist, these markers aren't present in healthy controls, that's one important component.

Speaker 1 But you also need to show it's not present in people who have, let's say, rheumatoid arthritis or who have Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease or MS or a hundred other diseases.

Speaker 1 You give us some idea that it's actually specific to chronic fatigue syndrome. What if it's present in all of these things? Well, that doesn't help.

Speaker 1 Well, then maybe it's just a marker for inflammation, right?

Speaker 1 How do we know that

Speaker 1 they didn't just discover some other marker for inflammation that's going to occur in any chronic illness or in many chronic illnesses?

Speaker 1 Or what if this is a marker for the depression that people often feel from chronic fatigue? That, you know, that's secondary to the chronic fatigue and then becomes comorbid with it.

Speaker 1 So who knows, right? We can't answer any of these questions because all they did was compare it to healthy controls. So that's why this is just getting the ball started.

Speaker 1 This is the kind of thing where, again, this is saying, oh, there's something potentially here. Now, here's a dozen other studies we need to do to really suss this out.
We need to confirm it.

Speaker 1 We need larger data. We need a more generalizable population.

Speaker 1 We need to validate that it's unique to or telling us something specific about chronic fatigue syndrome as opposed to just all chronic illness or maybe some of the symptoms of chronic fatigue, but not the cause of chronic fatigue.

Speaker 1 So many questions.

Speaker 1 But then at the end of the day, then at the end of the day, and this is something that I learned just over the course of my career, like one of the pearls of wisdom that you get with experience that I teach to, you know, to students and fellows, is that when we first start to

Speaker 1 understand a disease, we're looking for ways to say, like, who has the diagnosis, right? Who has, who qualifies for having the diagnosis of chronic fatigue fatigue syndrome? But then

Speaker 1 once our knowledge of that disease and especially how to treat it matures,

Speaker 1 then the question shifts to who should get treated and with what. And that's the only thing that really matters.

Speaker 1 Or that's the thing that matters the most. It's not the only thing that matters.
But that

Speaker 1 overshadows the question of who gets the label. Like who gets the labels only a marker for these other questions? What's the prognosis? What's the treatment?

Speaker 1 What are any other comorbidities or other concerns that we have to worry about, et cetera, et cetera?

Speaker 1 But the thing, of course, most people are interested in is who gets what treatment and does it work.

Speaker 1 So if this test, and that will be the ultimate test, if this is a marker of anything, is does it predict anything useful clinically?

Speaker 1 If all it predicts is who we label as having chronic fatigue syndrome, who cares? That doesn't help. It It doesn't bring us any closer.
It has to predict, but of course, we can't treat really

Speaker 1 until we, they're saying maybe this will lead to treatment. Sure, that's a pretty big maybe.
Let's hope that it does, but that's like you're now you're jumping ahead multiple steps.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, this is one preliminary step in a complicated picture that may or may not pan out. Don't believe the early hype that finally we've proven it's real and blah, blah, blah.
That's all nonsense.

Speaker 1 It's just one interesting little nugget in a complicated story. But those are the pieces pieces that you have to think about when you hear things like this.
You know, what other

Speaker 1 comparisons did they make, and how has it been externally validated? Does it actually predict or mean anything, or is it just some correlation that they found? Right?

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 1 All right. Complicated item, but it was

Speaker 1 interesting. It's good to talk through those issues.

Speaker 4 And anytime CFS hits my headlines, obviously I stop and take a second look

Speaker 4 because it's something we have talked about before on the show. So we keep up on this.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time? Oh, boy.

Speaker 5 How come all these freaking studies, it's like, it's always like there's a million things ahead of what you're reading before like anything legit could happen.

Speaker 1 You know, it's that's science is frustrating. Science is complicated, and the news cycle wants breakthroughs and sexy headlines.
Yep.

Speaker 5 Yeah. I mean, I totally, look, I agree and I know all that.
It's just, it's, it's every single thing we talk about, though, it's never like, this is functioning right now.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because we're functioning on the edge, Jay. We're on the edge.
You're right.

Speaker 1 We're riding the wave, crest of the wave.

Speaker 5 All right, guys. Last week I played This Noisy.

Speaker 4 Oh, that's a sonic boom.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the lamest sonic boom ever created.

Speaker 1 The lamest. This is a sonic fart.
It sounds like a sonic fart.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it sounded like a sonic fart. It's funny.

Speaker 1 Sonic Raspberry. I got to preamble this Who's That Noisy segment with

Speaker 5 thank you to the 370 people who responded this week.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 5 Yes, because this is a noise that a lot of people recognize in one manner or another.

Speaker 5 And as we get into it, I'll reveal some of the most common responses that I got. So So let's get into this.

Speaker 5 We got a listener named Birkhaup Medahan and Birkhaup says, hey y'all, Burkhalp from D-But of Turkish Descent.

Speaker 5 D-E Space B-U-T of Turkish descent. I'm just reading what he's saying here.

Speaker 4 The team might be silent.

Speaker 5 It could be, but you know, you know what my problem is. Well, he says it's the second time guessing, but I don't count.
the first time.

Speaker 5 My guess for this week's Noisy is a recording of a rocket launch at a public viewing. The weird farting noise is, I think, due to the decibels of the ignition of the rocket.

Speaker 5 The mic just couldn't handle the amplitude.

Speaker 3 Is this correct?

Speaker 5 You are not correct, but it is a good guess. Definitely is a good guess because it has some rockety noises in there.
So I totally can see why you picked that one. Thanks a lot for setting that in.

Speaker 5 I have another listener here named Stephen Gluff who says, hi all, long time listener, first time guesser to me.

Speaker 5 It sounds like a wasp being sucked into some sort of vacuum.

Speaker 5 Many pest control workers will eradicate a wasp nest by using something like a shop vac half-filled with liquid to suck up and drown the wasps. I have never heard about this.

Speaker 5 I've never heard a noisy about this,

Speaker 5 but I thought that this one was very provocative. I think I need to know now what this thing sounds like.
It's like a slop vac or whatever. But anyway, thank you, Stephen.

Speaker 5 You are incorrect, but that was a fun guess. This next one was sent in by a listener named Edward Andrik.
He is a friend of ours,

Speaker 5 but he did have a good guess. I'm not

Speaker 1 favorites. He is a a punk.

Speaker 5 But we love him. He says, Hey, Jay, don't normally have guesses on the noisy, but this sounds like a model jet aircraft powering up and taking off.

Speaker 5 The sound at the beginning could be some sort of electric pulse ignition device which starts the engine prior to takeoff. I have no idea if any of what I just said is even a thing, but it's my guess.

Speaker 5 It's not that crazy. There are a lot of model jet aircraft.

Speaker 5 They have jets. So there is definitely some jet-sounding noise in there.
It's not a bad guess.

Speaker 5 But Ed, you're incorrect. But don't be sad because this game's just for fun.

Speaker 5 Another listener named Nicholas Jasmine says, first time guessing, long-time listener, this sounds exactly like an A-10 Warthog firing its rotary cannon as it flies. Guys, I like that.

Speaker 5 This was by far the most popular guess, and it's incorrect.

Speaker 1 It's a hell of a plane, man.

Speaker 5 But all the people that guess this or similar,

Speaker 5 you're there. You're there.

Speaker 5 Now we're just talking of what kind of Adams.

Speaker 1 The Details.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's always about the details. I did have a winner from this week.
The winner's name is Mike, not to be confused with Mike, who sent in the noisy.

Speaker 5 And Mike says, Damage, I've heard this. I think my guess is that this is a demonstration of an F-16 doing a strafing run, firing its M61 Vulcan auto-cannon.
And Mike, you're perfectly correct.

Speaker 5 I don't know how people can tell the difference between the Warthog and the F-16. I listened to both of them, and for my ears, it's the same exact thing.

Speaker 5 You know, some of them might have a little bit more bass or whatever, but

Speaker 5 it just depends on the recording equipment and everything. But some people, they can tell.

Speaker 1 That would be an interesting skill to have to recognize all different kinds of fighter jets and planes just from hearing the engine.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I just guarantee you that there are people out there that can do that.

Speaker 1 Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 5 So, this was sent in by a listener named Mike, and Mike actually is the person that flew this plane. That was him flying the plane and firing those guns.

Speaker 5 He said, this is me.

Speaker 5 You're seeing and hearing me strafing in an F-16, shooting the 20-millimeter gun at a target on the ground.

Speaker 1 So that's pretty cool.

Speaker 3 Wait, is it a simulator?

Speaker 5 No, it's a video. I saw a video of him do it.

Speaker 3 Oh, it's not just an audio file. Oh.

Speaker 5 He waved to me, and he was holding up an SGU banner, too. I mean, the guy is a fan.
No, but I saw the video.

Speaker 1 It's legit. Awesome.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and the

Speaker 5 sheer power of those guns, I mean, they're unbelievably powerful, apparently very useful when the time comes. But anyway, thank you, Mike, for winning, and thanks, Mike, for sending that in.

Speaker 5 That was a lot of fun. I have a new noisy for you guys this week.
This noisy was sent in by a listener named Jim Grove, and here it is.

Speaker 1 Where's George Rob when you translate things like this?

Speaker 5 I had to pick this one. This is a tough one, guys.

Speaker 5 We had an internal discussion here. I usually don't reveal what the thing is, but I wanted to because I asked everyone, hey, should I give anybody a clue here?

Speaker 5 And Steve came out swinging from left field and said, hell no, like I'm guessing.

Speaker 1 That's it.

Speaker 1 You're on your own, folks.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so just do your best.

Speaker 5 You know, send me the wacky guesses if you have them. If you want to send me a guess or you heard something cool this week, you got to email me at wtn at the skepticsguide.org.

Speaker 5 Steve, I'm going to shotgun this list real quick. If you support the work that we do or would like to support us, please think about becoming a patron of the SGU.

Speaker 5 We have a ton of work ahead of us for obvious reasons. You know what I'm talking about.
And we want to make the world a more logical and skeptical place. And we do that through our weekly activism.

Speaker 5 So if you're interested in helping us, go to patreon.com forward slash skepticsguide. Every week we send out a mailing list that tells you everything that the SGU did the previous week.

Speaker 5 Go to our homepage at the skepticsguide.org if you'd like to join that list. You can give our show a rating if you don't mind.
It always helps other people find the podcast.

Speaker 5 And then, then, of course, guys, we have tickets going on sale or are on sale. We have a show in Seattle and a show in Wisconsin.
There's going to be a SGU private recording.

Speaker 5 There's going to be extravaganza shows at both of those. At the Seattle show, we will be having a special event on Friday night.
This is going to be a very low-attendance event to hang out and talk.

Speaker 5 And, Steve, you called that the what, the special premium talk about bananas event?

Speaker 1 Yeah, the talk about bananas event. That's exactly what it is.
Okay.

Speaker 5 All this information, though, people, it's on the website. Go to the skepticsguide.org.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 All right. Thanks, Jay.
All right, guys, let's do one email. This one comes from Tom Buckley.
And Tom writes, a recent paper in Science claims wolves use tools.

Speaker 1 A wolf apparently learned to pull up a submerged net with crabs at the bottom.

Speaker 1 An ethologist on Blue Sky wrote, this meets the most standard definition of tool use used used in primatology, and it surprises me how many don't think it qualifies as tool use.

Speaker 1 The definition is apparently that they are using an unattached object, the net, to manipulate something else, the fish, and manipulate it and properly orients the tool, correctly angles it to pull the net out and get the fish.

Speaker 1 To me, this seems like a weak definition of tool because it relies on humans' awareness of whether the object is unattached to the reward.

Speaker 1 For example, suppose crabs had a very long, floaty tail that looked like just like a net, and a wolf pulled that up and ate the crab's main body.

Speaker 1 Humans wouldn't call that a tool, but the wolf might not see any difference between that and the reported situation. What do you all reckon? Love the show best.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, I love these kind of questions because it has to do with definition or...

Speaker 1 categorization and these are always subjective right so what counts as tool use and is there's not going to be any right or wrong answer. It's going to be a continuum.

Speaker 1 And this is arguably in the gray zone. Personally, I don't buy it.
I don't think this is tool use. So you've got to watch the video.

Speaker 1 Essentially, it's a wild wolf pulling up a net from a river, and it's attached to a trap, you know, a fish trap. The fish swim in, but they can't, you know, swim out.

Speaker 1 And then there's a fish in there, and he eats it.

Speaker 1 So I don't think that's tool use. He just knows that there's fish there.
He's just getting at the fish.

Speaker 4 I would liken it to maybe a bird getting caught in a bird feeder and a bear or something coming over, knocking down the bird feeder and eating the bird.

Speaker 1 Yeah, something like that. Something like that.
Yeah, squirrels get into my bird feeder and eat my suet. Are they using a tool? No.

Speaker 5 Steve, if he deployed the thing,

Speaker 1 he's not reeled it back in. It would be impressive.
He's an object. So that's the thing.
They say they are using an unattached object, the net, but he's not really using it.

Speaker 1 He's just pulling it out of the water because

Speaker 1 it's attached to food. Yeah, if this thing was on land, he wouldn't have pulled it out.

Speaker 1 If it were a branch, if there was a fish caught in a branch and he grabbed it and pulled the branch out of the river to get at the fish, would that be using a tool? Well, he didn't go get it.

Speaker 1 Now, if he went and got the net and put it in there, and that pulled, that's different.

Speaker 3 That would be impressive. But he had to connect

Speaker 3 this buoy that, right? He grabbed the buoy, and so he connected the buoy to fish.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, that's smart. I'm not saying it's not clever.

Speaker 3 But how because the analogy with the bird and the bear is, of course, is not a perfect analogy because the bear could see the bird, but you can't see the cage, you know, the net or

Speaker 3 the fish. You just see the buoy floating.
So, he did he see somebody pull it out himself or herself and get the fish? Maybe that was where he made the connection. He or she made the connection.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 4 I'm not a sample of one video here of one wolf.

Speaker 1 How could you say that wolves have learned to do this?

Speaker 4 Seems substandard to me.

Speaker 1 They're generalizing. It could be a hasty generalization, but even that aside.

Speaker 3 It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 Does this qualify? Does this qualify? I just, I don't know. I think

Speaker 1 the term

Speaker 1 using is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. They're using an unattached object.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're just pulling at something to get to food. You know what I mean? It's not really tool use.

Speaker 1 They're not using it. They did not deploy the net.

Speaker 1 They're not doing anything with it. They're just pulling at it to get at food.

Speaker 3 It's not like a chimpanzee crafting

Speaker 1 into a treatment. It's off the stick, right?

Speaker 4 Forming it for a tool, sticking it into the termite mound. Getting it.

Speaker 4 It's pulling it back out. There you go.

Speaker 5 An interesting thing to look at here, though, is that wolf knows that there are fish in there.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's easy.
That was the biggest leap.

Speaker 1 How was that connection made? It wasn't a pop, pop. They eat fish.
I mean, what are you talking about?

Speaker 1 Those wolves, some wolves live by water. They eat fish.

Speaker 3 Well, of course, but my point is connecting the buoy, a man-made yellow

Speaker 1 buoy with fish.

Speaker 5 But he probably saw the guy throw it in the water.

Speaker 1 That's what...

Speaker 3 had to have happened, I assume. That's how he made the connection.
I don't think he could have made that connection otherwise, right?

Speaker 1 But how do you know that he's making that connection? Meaning that, and again, you're saying, how does he know that

Speaker 1 it's artificial? It's just something in the water. Fish get trapped in stuff in the water.
You pull this stuff out, and sometimes there's fish attached to it.

Speaker 1 And maybe this specifically he's learned through experience or through observation that there's often fish attached to it.

Speaker 1 Again, is it different than pulling a branch out of the water, hoping there's a fish in it? I don't know. Right.

Speaker 3 I mean, fish can get caught in submerged branches, I guess. But

Speaker 1 I'm explaining.

Speaker 3 I see your point.

Speaker 1 Maybe he just

Speaker 3 brings stuff in that's floating, just, you know, he just something that it's a behavior that they do.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 3 it could potentially, you know, get lucky and get some sort of food trapped in there, whatever it may be.

Speaker 4 I would have been more impressed if the wolf took, see how these loose rocks are over here on the shore? It's a very rocky shore. Because there's a technique by which you put rocks in the water

Speaker 4 near the edge of the shore, and the fish will swim into that rock formation and kind of get trapped.

Speaker 1 And then if the wolf did that,

Speaker 1 I would be more impressed with that. That's tool use.
So, again, I love this because it's this murky question of definition. Right.

Speaker 1 And it shows you how careful you have to be with definitions because you could break that, right?

Speaker 1 I think this is an example which is breaking a poorly written definition of what Karin says. Tool use.
Again, I don't think the wolf there is making any of these associations.

Speaker 1 I don't think he's using that net or in any way. He's not manipulating anything.
He's just getting at food. That's it.
Yeah. And that's not tool use in my book.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's definitely a stretch. For tool use, it's a cool behavior, but it's not, yeah, I could say that.

Speaker 1 And look,

Speaker 1 this is the real stretch. He manipulated and properly orients the tool, right? So he correctly angles it to pull it.
You know, he's just pulling the net out of the freaking water.

Speaker 4 However, it came out, it came out.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like he just fucks with it until it comes out.

Speaker 4 He's not, yeah, he's not exactly measuring the 45-degree angle to optimization. No way.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's not like he's doing that to catch the fish. He's just pulling the thing out of the water.

Speaker 4 Yeah, let's see this thing recast that out into the water. And that would impress me.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 reset the trap. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right. So that's what I'm saying.
Where did you guys fall? I'm not buying it. I don't know.

Speaker 1 Do you guys agree? Or any of you think this constitutes tool use? It's not tool use.

Speaker 3 No,

Speaker 3 it's not tool use. It's cool, but it's not technically tool use as I envision it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, again, it's no different than the bear getting my suet out of my cage. You know, Wolfie.

Speaker 1 Wolfie. Or Wolfie.
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 genuine and one fictitious. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

Speaker 1 And of course, you all can play at home. Feel free to play along with us.
All right.

Speaker 1 Three regular news items. Are you guys ready? Yeah.
Yeah. Here we go.

Speaker 1 Item number one: South Korean researchers have developed a process for increasing bacterial cellulose production for textiles by over tenfold, approaching cost parity with natural fibers.

Speaker 1 Iron number two, MIT researchers have developed a thin polymer film that is 10,000 times less permeable to gas than all other polymers.

Speaker 1 And iron number three, for the first time, scientists were able to create immortal cow cells without the need for any genetic modification. Bob, go first.

Speaker 3 All right, so they've increased bacterial cellulose production for textiles an order of magnitude. Parody with natural fibers.

Speaker 1 I mean, okay. I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 3 It doesn't sound very dramatic at all, which kind of makes me want to pick this because it's just like, oh, it seems a little ho-hum.

Speaker 3 I don't know the details about this, but not as dramatic as the other ones, it seems. Okay, now we've got a polymer film for the second one.
10,000 times less permeable to gas than other polymers.

Speaker 3 I mean, I just don't know enough about polymers, I guess, to know how dramatic this is. I mean, yeah, 10,000 times is dramatic, but

Speaker 3 I don't know what to make of these. Let's see, let's try the third one.
Maybe I'll have some insight into that one. Immortal cow cells without the need for any genetic modifications.

Speaker 1 That's the new bit, obviously.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So what could you tell me, Steve, about this that might not, that you would allow?

Speaker 3 What kind of question can I ask that you would answer? I don't know.

Speaker 1 You'll have to ask it. You'll have to ask it.

Speaker 3 Not an unreasonable stance. Crap.
I mean, I guess that's interesting because my first thought is, like, can't they just grab some cancer cells from a cow and get immortal cells that way? But

Speaker 1 well, I'll tell you one thing. They're obviously doing this for the point of like artificial meat, right? Lab grain meat.
Right. Not going to make it a cancer cells.

Speaker 1 Cancer burger.

Speaker 1 Cancer burger.

Speaker 3 Maybe they should just call that the seaburger instead.

Speaker 1 The sea burger.

Speaker 3 I don't know. This is a total crapshoot for me on these.
I'm just really don't have a lot of a huge amount of insight into any of these.

Speaker 3 Couldn't you just throw in like an astronomy or physics one in here, Steve?

Speaker 1 I mean, Jesus.

Speaker 3 No. Throw me a throw me a bone here.

Speaker 3 All right, I'm just gonna,

Speaker 3 I'll take the one that is just seems like meh. I'm gonna say that the bacterial cellulose one seemed to

Speaker 3 seem

Speaker 3 more mundane than the other ones. And maybe it's not, and hopefully it's not.
So I'll say that one's fiction.

Speaker 1 Okay, Evan.

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 yeah, I don't, I don't, this first one is confusing me a little bit.

Speaker 4 Cellulose production for textiles.

Speaker 4 Cellulose production for textiles.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So, all right.
But basically, you know, you could engineer bacteria to make stuff, right?

Speaker 1 And you grow it in a vat and it cracks out stuff. So it's making cellulose.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 1 Which is a structural protein.

Speaker 3 Protein, baby.

Speaker 1 And then you could weave that cellulose into fibers, right? That you can then make clothes out of.

Speaker 4 I didn't know this happened.

Speaker 1 This is possible.

Speaker 1 So this has been going on.

Speaker 1 That's not new. What's new is that they got the production increased tenfold, driving the cost down to close to, say, things like cotton, like natural fiber.

Speaker 4 So higher efficiency, better efficiency. By the order of magnitude.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It seems reasonable.

Speaker 4 You said this one's the fiction?

Speaker 3 No,

Speaker 3 I said, yes, I did.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yes, I did. No, yes, I did.

Speaker 4 You must have been more impressed with the other two then.

Speaker 3 More so. Yeah, but this one is interesting now that I'm really.

Speaker 1 What's going on? Whatever.

Speaker 1 Kara, Kara, what do you think?

Speaker 1 Well, moving on. I'll tell you what she thought after you go.

Speaker 4 She would have told you that.

Speaker 4 Okay, second one:

Speaker 4 a thin polymer film 10,000 times less permeable.

Speaker 1 That's a lot.

Speaker 4 But it's gas, okay.

Speaker 4 compared to other polymers. Hmm.
A thin polymer film. MIT researchers, okay.
10,000. Eh, I don't know.
10,000 is a lot. Maybe it's 1,000.

Speaker 4 Maybe it's like order of magnitude kind of thing, but I don't know.

Speaker 4 You don't usually play those games. You have, but

Speaker 4 not always, and not that often. The last item

Speaker 1 is:

Speaker 4 scientists were able to create

Speaker 4 immortal cow cells without the need for any genetic modification. So

Speaker 1 create,

Speaker 4 hmm, without the need for any genetic modification. So,

Speaker 4 what would be the option? What would be, if it wasn't genetically modified, then they did it through what?

Speaker 1 Some other way.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 1 How?

Speaker 1 That's the essence of that one. So, I'm not going to.

Speaker 1 Oh, boy.

Speaker 4 So, some other process that is not as well known as genetic modification. I don't know.

Speaker 4 This is tough. This is a very difficult one for me.
I'm not really having a good sense for any of these. Therefore, Bob, I'm going to to latch myself to you for no other reason.

Speaker 1 And you and I are going to rise together or we're going to fall to the deepest depths. I will proactively apologize.
All right, Jay.

Speaker 5 Okay, I'll just take them in reverse order here.

Speaker 5 So we got the cow cell one.

Speaker 5 So there wasn't genetic modification, and

Speaker 5 they were able to create immortal cow cells in some other way. I mean, I don't know.
I would just imagine if it wasn't from genetic modification, that it would be through their environment somehow.

Speaker 5 You know, and if they made a genetic modification that made the cow cells immortal, I would imagine that would have been all over the news big time.

Speaker 5 And this one is like the biggest claim as far as I read of these three. Like, it has the most implications, and it seems the most dramatic.

Speaker 5 And my science or fiction Kung Fu is telling me that this one is science. But, you know, it's one of those things.
It could easily go either way. Like, what am I going to say? No, they didn't.

Speaker 5 And then what would my premise be? Because I don't even know how they got there in the first place. So, it's too vague to actually even divine.

Speaker 3 Got that?

Speaker 1 No? Okay.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Anyway, I'll say that one is tentatively science. MIT researchers have developed this thin polymer film that's 10,000 times less permeable than other polymers.
Okay.

Speaker 5 I mean, you know, on first blush, you know, I could see an advancement like this. I mean, companies are constantly working on making improvements like this.
It is a massive jump forward.

Speaker 5 You know, 10,000 times is a profound change from the current polymers that are being used. We don't know if this means anything other than it happened in the lab.

Speaker 5 It's not like you can buy this stuff for whatever uses that they have for it.

Speaker 5 I don't know. That one seems like a big deal, like a big number jump there.
Let me just go on to the first one.

Speaker 5 So, this one here, where the South Korean researchers have developed a process for increasing bacterial cellulose production by over tenfold. That's not a tenfold leap, it is not that big.

Speaker 5 It drives a cost way down, like Steve said.

Speaker 5 I don't see this being a, it's not a massive claim like the other two. But I find it interesting that Bob picked this one.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I could tell you that the other two seem like crazy and,

Speaker 5 you know, a lot of big, big claims and everything. And this one is like the stinker.
This one's like, oh, yeah, they'll believe it. It's so, you know, it's not that big of a deal.

Speaker 1 So I'm going to go with the boys, Steve.

Speaker 5 I'm going to go with the boys.

Speaker 1 You guys all agree on number one?

Speaker 1 I'll tell you why. It's important.

Speaker 5 Because

Speaker 5 if I'm wrong and the work that we do here happens and people will forget if we lose, no big deal. You know, we lost.
But if we sweep you,

Speaker 5 then it's a thing.

Speaker 1 And I'd rather go for the sweep. You're going for the sweep.
You're swinging for the fence in the middle. It depends what Kara said.
It depends what Kara said.

Speaker 5 That's true.

Speaker 3 No, she's irrelevant. She's not here.
This is the boy's.

Speaker 1 No, she's not irrelevant. No, she put her guess in.
So Kara's guess.

Speaker 3 There's no interaction and no feedback.

Speaker 5 Kara's guess.

Speaker 2 Okay, so the first one here is

Speaker 2 they've just developed a process, so that's important. They're increasing bacterial cellulose production for textiles by over tenfold.
Approaching cost parity with natural fibers.

Speaker 2 Oh, bacterial cellulose. I was like, well, synthetic fibers are way cheaper, but yeah, they're bacterial cellulose fiber.
Okay, so basically they're artificially producing natural fibers.

Speaker 1 Oh, cellulose-based fibers, yeah, which is,

Speaker 1 yeah, it's difficult.

Speaker 2 We're not talking like

Speaker 2 polyester.

Speaker 1 Right, right, right.

Speaker 2 Because that is way cheaper, which is why microplastics is like a massive thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but we're talking like with cost parity with something like cotton.

Speaker 2 Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's big.

Speaker 2 And then the thin polymer film, 10,000 times less, I mean, I don't know, less permeable to gas than all other polymers. So why would you need this?

Speaker 2 You would want something that is, yeah, that no gas can pass through for all sorts of applications. Medical, industrial.
I could see that being important, but I don't know how.

Speaker 2 I always thought polymers weren't very permeable anyway.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 2 That seems like it's probably maybe, oh, this is so hard. And then lastly, immortal cow cells without the need for any genetic modification.
We don't already have immortal cow cells.

Speaker 2 We have immortal people cells.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but they we get to them through genetic modification. So this is the first time they're able to do it without genetic modification.

Speaker 2 Gotcha. Well, I thought we had immortal cells through like cancer lines too.
Do we genetically modify those?

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 Gosh, these all seem like they could be science or fiction.

Speaker 2 I think the one that's bothering me the most is maybe the cellulose,

Speaker 2 because I don't think, I think that there's a reason that we have

Speaker 2 such a big cost difference right now.

Speaker 2 And I know that this is an area of a lot of research and like you know when we talk about sort of plastics or even biochemical um innovation we just see so much happening so quickly like when we talk about material science um and when we talk about uh biochemistry in the lab but I don't know, textile science, I feel like it's really bifurcated.

Speaker 2 It's like the old school natural methods, and then it's like the new stuff, which is all material science, and it's all plastic. It's all like synthetics.

Speaker 2 And so either, I don't know, the will hasn't been there, or maybe there is something that prevents it from happening. Of course, then that means that there's a vacuum.

Speaker 2 So there's, you know, space for a lot of innovation. But this one just seems like an area that we're not reading about very often, and we're not seeing like these huge improvements and changes.

Speaker 2 But I mean, this is such a shot in the dark because all of these seem like they could be either completely realistic or not realistic at all. But I just got to put my nickel down.

Speaker 2 So I'll say the bacterial cellulose production is

Speaker 2 either not increased by tenfold or it's not approaching cost parity with natural fibers. One of those two things may be false.
I doubt it's that it was not in South Korea, but

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 2 Also, that one is really complex. It has enough variables that maybe one or two of those things are wrong.

Speaker 1 Kara's guess was

Speaker 1 number one as well. So it was

Speaker 1 so love it. It's going to be a sweep one way or the other.

Speaker 1 Let's take these in reverse order. Follow Jay's lead.

Speaker 3 I'm sure her reasoning, though, was much more, you know.

Speaker 1 Not really. Air your diet in hours.
Oh, good. We were all lost.

Speaker 3 I love it. Excellent.

Speaker 1 No, she was pretty lost, but

Speaker 1 she reasons her way pretty smartly through these actions. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Anyway,

Speaker 3 we know that by now.

Speaker 1 All right, we'll start at number three. For the first time, scientists were able to create immortal cow cells without the need for any genetic modification.

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

Speaker 1 science. This is science.
So,

Speaker 1 previously, it was believed that in large mammals this was not possible.

Speaker 1 All cells will only divide so many times. In order to bypass this limit, you have to disable genes that

Speaker 1 can limit the number of times that cells can reproduce. So, they wanted to see if they could find naturally occurring, like spontaneous immortality in

Speaker 1 the cells

Speaker 1 of a large mammal, because

Speaker 1 this has been previously shown to exist in chickens, but they're not mammals, and they're not large. So they said, all right, but they thought, but this can't happen in cows.

Speaker 1 So the researchers wanted to see if it was possible. So

Speaker 1 they basically plated the cow cells for 240 cell generations over 18 months, just looking for any cells that looked self-renewing, right?

Speaker 1 self-renewing colonies emerged. And finally, finally, one did.

Speaker 1 Basically, they proved that there's spontaneous

Speaker 1 emergence of immortal cell lines in cow cells.

Speaker 1 They then found out the mechanism was the natural activation of telomerase and PGC1-alpha. So basically, extending the telomeres, right?

Speaker 1 So setting back the repairing the telomeres to set back the biological clocks. All right, so that's cool.
Obviously, the purpose of this is

Speaker 1 for

Speaker 1 lab-grown meat, right?

Speaker 1 The big advantage here is one is regulatory because if there, if there's no genetic modification, it bypasses all of the GMI

Speaker 1 regulation. Yeah, so that's a big question.

Speaker 1 And also, this could make the whole process cheaper, right? So they think now they want to do this with like muscle cells and

Speaker 1 basically create immortal lines that then you could use to crank out those lab-grown hamburgers. All right, so we'll see if this leads to anything, but that's that was the purpose for that.

Speaker 1 All right, let's get back to number two. MIT researchers have developed a thin polymer film that is 10,000 times less permeable to gas than all other polymers.

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

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 also science. Hello, everyone.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Kara.

Speaker 1 So, polymers generally are made from fibers which are woven together, and those are very permeable because there's gaps in between the weaving.

Speaker 1 So, this polymer, however, was made as a two-dimensional material.

Speaker 1 So, it's a single film, and therefore there's a solid crystalline structure with no gaps, and so that's why it doesn't let the gas through.

Speaker 1 No gases, no gases. So, they tested it, tested it with helium, nitrogen, oxygen, argon, helium, methane, and sulfur hexafluoride.
Do you guys remember huffing sulfur reflex? Yeah, it's the opposite of

Speaker 1 helium.

Speaker 1 Makes your voice really loud. Yeah, it was so cool.

Speaker 1 All right, so what do you think this would be useful for?

Speaker 4 Well, gas-proof. Space.

Speaker 1 They didn't mention that as a potential one.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 5 Big thing would be scientific experiments.

Speaker 1 Food preservation, right? Because it basically prevents anything from oxidizing if you can keep oxygen from getting access to it. So this would be very useful.

Speaker 1 Because it also could be a very, very thin coating, you know. So you could put it on, wrap food in it, for example.

Speaker 1 Also, it would be useful for...

Speaker 1 So the reason why I was interested in hydrogen, because hydrogen is notoriously hard to contain.

Speaker 3 Well, yeah, it's so small.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so

Speaker 3 if you read Hail Mary,

Speaker 3 you kind of would get there too.

Speaker 1 You could line the tank with this film, and that would keep the hydrogen from leaking out.

Speaker 1 So any time when

Speaker 1 you need a sealant, it would be useful as a sealant.

Speaker 1 Okay, that means that South Korean researchers have developed a process for increasing bacterial cellulose production for textiles by over tenfold, approaching cost parity with natural fibers, is the fiction.

Speaker 1 because the innovation has nothing to do with production, and this is still hella expensive and nowhere near the the cost of natural fibers. But what they did was they figured out how to

Speaker 1 combine two different bacteria in the same vat.

Speaker 1 One makes the cellulose and the other makes the dye. So

Speaker 1 they had to get the timing right and everything. So essentially you could do both things at the same time and then you get these vibrant colored cellulose fibers

Speaker 1 to make the textiles out of and they tested them to show that they would hold on to their color even with the usual test, with bleaching or washing or whatever.

Speaker 1 So it seems like a good method for making textiles of these different colors, dyed in the wool, as they say, but in this case, dyed in the cellulose.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 it's still super expensive.

Speaker 4 Where do we see cellulose-based textiles in everyday life? Or don't we, because of the cost?

Speaker 1 Well, you can, but cellulose is in. Cellulose, I think, is the most.
Yeah, cellulose is in cotton. So it's just artificial.

Speaker 1 Cellulose is it is the most

Speaker 1 common structural protein that exists in the world.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I just didn't realize it was used for textiles.

Speaker 1 Well, it's in it's part of any natural plant fiber is going to have cellulose in it. And a lot of natural fiber textiles are made out of plant fibers, right? Like cotton and jeep.
She and

Speaker 1 other things.

Speaker 1 Flax, you know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so that, so this is, you know, it's an interesting technology that they developed. Again,

Speaker 1 I'm concerned about the scalability of using back-grown textiles when you could use plants and

Speaker 1 cotton to do it cheaper. But

Speaker 1 part of the idea is that, well, if you're manufacturing the textiles, you have more control over them.

Speaker 1 So you could make fibers with, or the, the, the, the cloth itself with better properties, you know, than you would get out of the natural fibers. Yeah, like bulletproof cotton.

Speaker 1 Or it shrinks less would be nice. You know.
So I don't know if this is commercializable. It's a, you know, kind of a proof of concept kind of thing.
We'll see if it goes anywhere.

Speaker 1 But it's a fiction, so it doesn't matter. Well, good job, everyone.
You got me. Well, you swept us a few weeks back.

Speaker 1 Less than I can't make the fictions too simple.

Speaker 3 This was kind of unique in that you had two people go for it.

Speaker 1 And you both kind of had a similar thinking.

Speaker 4 Interesting.

Speaker 1 It's like Carol's in a tooth mundane.

Speaker 3 You compliment me, dear sir.

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

Speaker 4 What you learn from a life in science is the vastness of our ignorance.

Speaker 4 Very well put by David Eagleman. Nice.
An American neuroscientist, best-selling author, and science communicator who teaches at Stanford University.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a critical concept. You don't know what you don't know.
And the more you learn, the more you know about what you don't know.

Speaker 1 So actually, the frontier of the unknown increases as you learn more.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the stupider you feel, the more you learn.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Right? Or the more you learn, in a way, the more humble you are.
Like, you know, the humility.

Speaker 1 Because you realize how much more more there is that you still don't know.

Speaker 3 Which makes it even more exciting, right?

Speaker 1 It should, anyway. And you guys have probably had this experience, too.

Speaker 1 When I go from knowing basically nothing about a field to knowing something about it, one of the first things I realize is, wow, there's a lot of information here.

Speaker 1 This is way more complicated and way more deep than I thought.

Speaker 3 Right. And you appreciate the experts even more.

Speaker 1 Heck yes.

Speaker 4 The people who devote their lives to their particular field.

Speaker 1 my gosh. And this is beyond science.
This is in any field of intellectual endeavor.

Speaker 1 Even just hobbies, anything. It's amazing how complicated things everything gets when people are involved.

Speaker 5 You know, in the rare cases when the average person has some level of expertise in something, right?

Speaker 5 And they hear somebody talk about that topic. Yeah.
And you say to yourself, oh, they don't know what the hell they're talking about.

Speaker 5 You know, like, I have a couple of things in my life that I've been able to, I've had this happen with.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Right.

Speaker 5 Now, imagine whatever that thing is that you're good at, that you did it for 30 years.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And you know it so well that

Speaker 5 there might be a hundred or less people in the world that know it on the level that you do. Like that, that's when you would be

Speaker 5 blown away by all the BS that people, you know, or how little understanding that people have on it and everything.

Speaker 5 And that is one of the things that causes me to have an enormous amount of respect for people who have developed these massive skill sets and expertise.

Speaker 5 When they say, hey, man,

Speaker 5 global warming is happening and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's good enough for me.
I don't have to pretend that I'm going online

Speaker 1 to do research. You're not checking their math, right? You're not.
Yeah. Let me take a look at those ice cores and see if I agree with you on that.
Come on.

Speaker 1 But I also flip that around because I use that example a lot, like your own expertise.

Speaker 1 That thing that you're an expert in, when you read an article about it in the lay media or somebody

Speaker 1 in the general population is talking about it, they know nothing, right? Like you,

Speaker 1 it's cringy, you know, they profoundly know nothing about this topic that you're an expert in. But that's you for every other freaking topic in the world.
So, that's the thing that you remember.

Speaker 1 You are just as ignorant about all the other things you're not an expert in. So, that should be a humbling experience.

Speaker 1 You know, but you have to, you have to extrapolate to that, you know, to that bigger point. So, I often use that example in lectures because I think it drives it home pretty well.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You're that person,

Speaker 1 that cringy person who doesn't know what they're talking about on every other topic. Yeah, but what about all those TikTok videos? I see.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Again, don't get me started.
Don't get me started. The thing, all right, since you had to mention TikTok, so I have to rant you out for two seconds.

Speaker 1 The thing that kills me about TikTok is now one of the themes that I'm picking up with the videos that get sent to us, et cetera, is the denial of history, right? Just denying that something happened.

Speaker 1 The most recent one we talked about was now there's assholes denying that Helen Keller existed, or, you know, that

Speaker 1 she was blind and deaf. She couldn't have been blind and deaf.
Nobody could do what she did if they were blind and deaf. That's the point, you idiot.

Speaker 1 That's why you know her name 100 years later, because she was amazing and she did amazing things. And now you're going to try to take that all away from her because you don't believe it? Get a life.

Speaker 1 I mean, I know.

Speaker 5 It's really, it really is sad to hear things like that because

Speaker 5 why would anybody even need to go?

Speaker 1 Well, I know, that's the other thing. Like,

Speaker 1 yeah, right. So, what's the deepest? Big Helen Keller made it up for some purpose.
I mean, it's just silly. Right.
Or you're seeing through the veil that nobody else could see through.

Speaker 1 You know, come on. Get everything.
You've been lied to all these years, you see.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I know the truth. That's the narrative.

Speaker 1 Everything you know is wrong. I know what's really going on.
It's all coming out now, right? It's all coming out now.

Speaker 1 We're all according to TikTok.

Speaker 1 It's good to have you home, Steve. Yeah, it's good to be home.
I enjoyed the trip, but it's always good to walk in your front door and to be home again.

Speaker 4 Now you're going to sleep, I'm sure.

Speaker 1 Dinner, then sleep. I haven't eaten in a long time.

Speaker 5 And this time you didn't crash into your house at the very last time.

Speaker 1 I know, I know.

Speaker 1 That when the second time, I think we were coming back from Australia. So, literally traveling for over 24 hours towards

Speaker 1 and I crash into my house at the very end of the whole driving.

Speaker 1 It wasn't as bad as it sounds. I hit the top of my driveway.

Speaker 1 My driveway was frozen over solid with glass of ice. Yes.
And it's also like invisible. It's just this glass of ice.

Speaker 1 And then my car coasted all the way down and hit into the house.

Speaker 1 I had zero control. It just slid all the way down.

Speaker 1 Coefficient of friction.

Speaker 1 No coefficient or friction. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.
Sure, man. You're welcome, brother.
And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

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