The Skeptics Guide #1067 - Dec 20 2025

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

Hello, and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Monday, December 15th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.
Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody.

Kara Santa Maria. Howdy.
And Evan Bernstein. Good evening, folks.
Jay is sick this week. He thinks he has the flu.
Could just be a bad cold, but his daughter was sick.

And, you know, kids are basically Petri dishes. They're just vectors for communicable disease.

I hope Jay got his flu shot already. He didn't.

Which I dressed him down about. But, you know, he said he went to get his flu shot

and it was not available. They were out.

So then he went to CBS and they were out of stock. Well, he did.
Then he basically forgot.

Then he dropped the ball. But he wasn't persistent enough, and now he's paying the price.
I had the weirdest experience. Tell me if this has ever happened to you.

This year, I got my flu shot at work because I started my job back again, and they require a flu shot if you work in a hospital. But my hospital has stopped requiring that you get annual COVIDs.

You have to have had a certain number of shots. I see.
But you don't, you're not required to keep getting the booster every time.

But I wanted to get the booster, and so I went to CVS like that same day and I got my COVID booster. And I had them do it in the same arm because, you know, I don't want two sore shoulders.

And my arm lumped up in a way it had never done it before. Oh, they gave you steroids.
I was like, what happened? And I don't know. I remember her getting confused at CVS.
She was like,

and I was like, do you want me to take the band-aid off? And she was like, yeah, it's right where I need to give you the shot. So I took the band-aid off from the old shot.

And I'm like, did she stick it in the same hole?

Wow.

What happened? Because my arm was not happy.

I would have got them in different arms. It's not a big deal.
Yeah, maybe I should. I've gotten them together before, but it's usually the same person that does them.

And I guess they stuck them in far enough apart. You think it's just like I had a local reaction? Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, you had a double local reaction since you had the two shots in the same way.

Not a big deal, but yeah. No, no, no.
I mean, I had, I think, eight vaccines in one sitting before when I went to a travel clinic before I traveled to

Africa. Boom.

And that woman was incredible. I was like, like, how did you do that? She was like, I do this all day, every day.
It was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I didn't even feel it.

Amazing. Some people say you shouldn't get like the flu and COVID shot at the same day.
You can. I did, absolutely.
You can. You absolutely can.

I did once, and it was definitely a much bigger wallop than I'm used to with either getting just one on its own. So that's just one data point.

But when you say wallop, you mean like your arm hurt or like you got sick? Well, it hurt. And I felt, yeah, I felt sick the next day.
Because I haven't felt sick with COVID boosters in a while.

Yeah, the first couple were bad, and then after that, it hasn't been bad. Yeah.
Yeah, it's never been bad for me, but that one time I I did the double, it was the worst that I had experienced.

It's never been bad for you. You're so lucky.
I feel like I had the flu for days the first time I got a COVID vaccine. No, the second one.
The first one. Second one was the worst.
Yeah.

Yeah, second one. It was basically one bad night.
You know, like you just lose one

sleep. But even

this year, I don't think I really just had a sore arm per a day. That was it.
Yeah, same. I got my shingles shot today.
First of two.

Good for you. Because I was reading up on shingles and horror stories that people go through.
Definitely get your shingles shot. When is it recommended again? After age 50.
50, yeah.

We should lower that. My kid's sister got shingles and COVID at the same time, and she's like 30 years old.

Yeah, you could get it. Finally, I got COVID, got the shingles in his 30s.
I was in my 40s, and

I think I got super lucky because it wasn't bad at all. And I keep hearing horror stories.
Like, wait, shingles is that bad? Like, holy crap, I must have lost it. To roll the dice.

So it's, you know, know, it's a reactivation of the chickenpox virus that is dormant in the sensory nuclei in your spinal cord, basically.

And then, if it reactivates, it goes out to the skin and back to the spinal cord, right?

So, you get the rash, the vesicles, but then also it could cause the nerves to be painful. And the worst is when you get post-herpetic neuralgia.

So, it's not just the pain of the rash and of the acute flare. You can have years of burning pain in the distribution of where you had the shingles.

And that's the roll of the dice, right? That's what you don't want to get, but that could be terrible. And that it's treatable.
I've treated many patients with it, you know, but it's not fun.

I had patients who got shingles in the middle of their cancer treatment. And these were patients with severe disease and intense chemotherapy and radiation.

And they were like, the shingles is by far the worst part of what I'm dealing with right now. Oh boy.

Yeah, this is what's so weird

and saying, yeah, I've put it off too long. I've just got to get this done.
Yeah. No, your risk, yeah, your risk of getting shingles is greater if you are in any way under stress.
Yeah.

You know, so getting chemos, huge risk of doing that. So you can get it when you're not under stress, but it's just your risk of getting it goes up.

For me, I remember, the only thing I really remember is this weird tickle itch in my back. Like, whoa, what's that? I never felt that before.

But it was not bad at all. It's just weird.

I feel like at this point, they should just let us all get the vaccine because anybody my age kids start getting vaccinated against

chickenpox. I never had a vaccination for chickenpox.
No, none of us did. I contracted.
I had chickenpox. I had it in 1981.
That was when I was 11 years old. Right, but you guys are older than me.

I'm saying younger people than me, not that much younger, all got the chickenpox vaccine.

1970s. Well, that's when it was developed.
1995 is when it was approved. That's it.
Okay.

So kids, people who were kids in 95 or later, they're all vaccinated already. So I feel like I'm kind of in that last lost generation.
And I'm only 42. Just let me get the shingles vaccine now.

Just let anybody who is not vaccinated.

Yeah. I just don't know if it, I mean, I'll probably have to pay for it out of pocket.
Damn, you managed care. Right.

How bad could that be, though? Yeah. It's just weird.

Like, it's the same thing with the, I mean, we've talked about this before, but when Gardasil first came on the scene, people in my generation just kept getting skipped over because it wasn't approved for us right away.

It was only approved for younger adults. And then they would like extend the coverage to be older and older and older.
And finally, we were in the cohort. We were able to get it and it'd be paid for.

But it was so silly that a lot of people just got skipped when the vaccine came out. You can still get it, though, everyone.
I think up to age 45. Yeah.

So there are reasons not to get the vaccine early, Kara. One of the reasons is that they don't know how long it lasts, and so you want it to last when you're vulnerable, you know, when you're older.

So if you get it when you're younger, when you don't really, when the risk of shingles is much lower, it's kind of a waste.

It's not really a waste, though, if you can just revaccinate every, however, you know, like tetanus, right? You just get it again every 10 years.

And they say the side effects are stronger the younger you are.

That's so the case with a lot of things. It's really a shame.
Because your immune system is more robust. So you

chemo, too. Yeah.
Well, you know, us here, we're sticklers for vaccines.

Good job, Evans.

Yeah.

Well played.

All right. Well, let's go straight into some news items.
Say no.

Okay.

Okay.

I'm going to talk to you guys about domesticating animals. Not like kids.
Not necessarily domestication, but the whole, you know, it's a continuum.

And this is based on, I want to to talk about it because of a recent study. So, this is a study looking at brown bears in a specific region of Italy.

Now, these brown bears, this population has been isolated, genetically isolated from other populations of brown bears for a couple of thousand years. And they're pretty distinct.

You could tell from looking at them, right, they look a little different. Their faces look different than a typical brown bear.
But there's something else about these bears.

So, this population has been living in close proximity to humans, right, to like urbanized areas and suburban areas. So the researchers wanted to know

if they had adapted at all to being in such close proximity. And

they did a genetic analysis for genes that are known to be associated with aggressiveness. And these are all genes that affect brain development, you know.

And they had many genes that are associated with reduced aggressiveness. These are some of the same genes that you would see in domesticated animals.
Oh, this is like the fox experiment.

It's like the foxes, yeah.

So I remember the Russian fox experiment where they, again, they selected foxes for, these are the silver foxes, they selected them for being less aggressive, less nasty, more calm, more friendly.

Only to humans, too, which was really interesting. Yeah, to humans.

And we forget, too, they also bred the most aggressive things together.

They bred the most aggressive and the least aggressive. They created two populations.

Then they compared their genes and they identified the genes, again, for brain development, that were associated with sort of domestication versus being very aggressive. Such a great experiment.

And it really was just a few generations, and you could start to see some significant differences. Oh, yeah.
And now they're pets all over the world.

Yeah, and then because they selected for the behavior, but a lot of the physical characteristics, which they were not specifically selecting for, came along for the ride.

Right, Floppy ears, spotted coats. Spots, yeah.
Yeah, so they looked cuter, you know.

The problem is they also have that thing like excited urination or whatever it's called, where they just pee when they see people. Happy pee.
Yeah, happy pee. Crank Dachshund had happy pee.

Yeah,

whenever I would see that dog, he'd run over to me and be just, yep, happy pee's come. I just expected it.
He just loved me too much.

I miss Murray.

So

he was an adorable dog.

All right, so it's interesting to think about, though, there's lots of instances where, just because the human population is so big and we've taken over so much of the earth, that animals are basically forced to adapt to living side by side with humans.

And one of the ways that they adapt is to become less aggressive. So, and we've seen that historically, obviously, probably most famously with wolves evolving into dogs.

Most of that domestication, experts now believe, was probably

self-domestication by the wolves. Like, it wasn't due to human selective pressures.
We weren't breeding them. They were self-selecting.
There was a selective pressure there to become more docile.

And that was primarily the availability of food at the edges of human

civilization habitation. And so the less aggressive also means less high-strung and a little bit more willing to get closer to people.

And so that would be, that would provide a huge calorie source that gave a selective advantage.

And so the wolves that were better able to be around people, you know, were able to get more access to food. But it also meant that they were less dependent on hunting.

And so over time, the selective pressures for being mean and muscular and aggressive reduced, and the selective pressures for being cute and cuddly and and friendly increased.

And that's how you get a chihuahua. It was working both ways.
Exactly. Yeah.
And so

you get basically dogs from wolves. And then once people really took them in, then we, of course, started breeding them ourselves as well.

But they basically were domesticated by the time that happened.

And now this is happening in other species as well. There's like different species all along this continuum.
So there's the golden jackals of Israel. Have you guys heard of them?

So they're like halfway there. They've been, again, living in close proximity to human civilization for a very long time, and they are becoming less and less aggressive.

And they are because they're getting access to food. You know, even if people aren't directly feeding them, they're finding food.

But there's another layer to this as well, and that is humans do provide a selective pressure, even if they're not breeding them. We kill aggressive animals, right?

Oh, so wow.

Yeah,

if you're a wolf or a jackal or a bear or whatever and you're very aggressive and mean, yeah, we might just kill you, you know, just to protect our people, our pets, our livestock.

But that also helps these more friendly versions of the people. Yeah, it's a double selective pressure.
Right.

So not only are they self-selective, but then we are killing the aggressive ones if they get too close. So there's a double selective pressure there as well.
You definitely see that here in L.A.

with our coyote population. Oh, yeah.

Most of coyotes get killed. The ones that don't bother anybody live among us now.
Like they're fully just walking down the street near us. They're probably also breeding with dogs.

And they could be breeding with dogs as well. Yeah.
I know the eastern coyote is part wolf, part coyote, and part dog.

And they are.

So I don't know if the wolf and the dog parts are fighting with each other, I guess, but

they're not friendly. I mean,

they're wild animals. Yeah, ours are wild too, but they are definitely garbage dump hypotheses.

They're doing it now. They're like right there along with people.

Most people just don't bother them and they don't bother us. And

I have coyote sightings weekly in my neighborhood. Yeah.
Well, that's part, just like just staying away from humans is one of the selective

pathways that you could take. You don't have to be friendly with them.
You could just know how to stay out of their way. Yeah, just don't bother them and eat their garbage.

Right. Yeah.

And I wonder how mountain lions will adapt because they're very popular in the western part of the country. They are.

But the problem with mountain lions is they will hunt livestock and they will get killed. Yeah.
And it happens over and over and over.

Actually, sadly, this is neither here nor there, but the biggest selection pressure, the second biggest cause of death among mountain lions, other than other mountain lions, is cars. Yeah.

So that's another thing I was going to bring up: that a lot of animals, like in the eastern half of the U.S., car strikes are a huge problem with deer.

So will deer evolve behavior that makes them less likely to be struck by a vehicle? God, I wish they would. Or would squirrels evolve? Will their behavior change?

Aren't deer also the most deadly animal to humans because of that? Yes. Yeah.

Absolutely. In the U.S., yeah, yeah.
I don't know if it's the most. It's not an insect animal.
No, no, no. I think in the U.S.,

they are more deadly than mosquitoes. They are very deadly in the U.S.

And in fact, I know that because I read

that article that said, hey, if mountain lions were introduced in the East, or if they migrate naturally to the East, even if they kill a couple people a year, they're going to save lives from controlling the deer population, which is now totally out of control over here.

It's different to be think about eaten by a lion versus hitting a deer in your car.

Exactly. And mountain lions are so rare.
It just doesn't happen. They don't want to.
It's very rare. It's like 12 in the last hundred years, like literally.

And they still aren't like eating the people.

I think that's pretty. I don't think they're like, I'm hungry.
I'm going to eat a whole human. They might be attacking them,

but that's different.

I hit a deer at highway speeds. Yeah, that's.
Yeah, that's scary. You could have died.
Oh, gosh. I've seen horrible.
That was like, I guess I got lucky. I mean, it was, you know, it was nasty.

I mean, there was like fur and blood on my car.

$3,000 worth of damage. But, you know, killing something like that is just like, it's horrible.
It's just a big, beautiful creature. It's so sad.

But damn, man, it's just like, like, oh, all of a sudden, yep, there's a deer. And that's happened to me on back roads at three other times.

Like, there's no braking or, I mean, you could, you should be looking out in certain areas, but all of a sudden, yep, there's a deer right in front of my car. I have, oh, I have no time to react.

You'll see the signs here, the road signs, the warning signs, deer crossing.

That's common in Connecticut.

That's common all over the country. In Australia, it's kangaroos.
You basically have to have like a kangaroo rack on the front of your vehicle if you're driving.

But the best ones, maybe New Zealand, where they encourage you. They have signs encouraging you to hit the possum.
He's killed the possum and the rats.

Right. If you see them, strike them.

That blew my mind. That was like, wow.
Well, they're invasive.

I get it.

I just didn't expect to see road signs encouraging you to drive your car into them. Hey, man, all hands on deck there, okay.
That's right. Almost hit the car.
Population is low.

It was close, but the buck stopped here.

I was waiting for that.

I looked it up. It's 150 to 440 deaths a year.
And that actually makes it the deadliest animal in the U.S., but like tens of thousands of injuries. Yeah, lots of injuries.

Lots of vehicle damage as well. You could total your car easily.
Oh, absolutely. Easy.
I've seen it.

So the other thing is that humans have to adapt to animals as well, but our adaptation is more cultural than evolutionary, right? We just basically have to learn the rules.

I remember that time I had a bear in my backyard, and I called the animal control people, and they were basically like, stay out of his way.

This is what you should do. Yeah, just bad luck for you, pal.
So

you're in his territory, so you have to stay out of his way. So, you know, you learn like we have to bring the bird seed in.
You can't leave that outside.

You shouldn't leave your garbage out overnight. You know, you gotta, if you have anything in the garage that's edible, you gotta keep your garage doors closed.

We actually have a neighbor warning system where we text each other when we sight bears in in the neighborhood. It's a neighborhood watch.
Yeah, it is. You can bring your pets in, et cetera.

Because our population is growing so much and because we're restricting their territory so much, we are getting more and more crossover between animal and human living spaces.

And they're adapting to us, we're adapting to them. You all got to get along.
You know what I mean? Yeah, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. No.

But it does raise interesting questions about domestication, kind of classic domestication, like pets, right?

I definitely see arguments online or people kind of arguing for why don't we keep raccoons as pets? Raccoons are, you know, really interesting animals that have basically domesticated themselves.

They make a terrible pets. They're smart, man.

They make terrible pets. I mean, I would love if raccoons could be a pet, I would be interested in it because they are fascinating.
I think they're very, they're smart, they're cute.

Their own authenticity man. There's a couple of problems with raccoons.
One is

biting is their go-to move. They bite.

Have you ever met a cat? No, no, they way more than cats. Way more than cats are cats.
Because cats can be very bady.

No, raccoons are, that's what they do. They bite.

They are off the hook bitey. And they also will wreck your furniture and pee everywhere.
Yeah.

Have you ever met cats? They have behavioral.

You cannot housebreak a raccoons. I think a lot of this is cultural.

We decided that that is an acceptable risk for that animal. In India, they bring the cows inside the house.

Exactly. Yeah.

Cats often bite. My cat has never bitten anything.
A lot of cats are very bitey, and a lot of cats will destroy your furniture, too. Sure

and some dogs you know don't ever get house broken in sweden a startup built these devices they almost look like atms and what they do is they trade little pellets of food for cigarette butt litter and all of the crows have learned no clean up the cigarette butts deposit them in this little machine and then they get food in exchange for it that is awesome

i know what the hell man because that's just something cigarette butts are impossible to clean up.

And they said it's, it's, yeah, it's reducing like billions of cigarettes, butts, cigarette butts that are thrown out each year. But the cancer rate among crows has grown.

Fascinating. It's so cool.
One reason among many white smoking is a disgusting habit. It is disgusting.
I'm into that. All right.
Let's move on. Karen, there's another animal-related item.

You're going to tell us about pig organ transplants.

Yeah, so help me remember, but you know, earlier this year, there was a trending story about a patient, basically part of a new clinical trial, where a genetically modified pig kidney was transplanted into this patient.

That's correct.

Yeah, we talked about this in October, I think.

And we've talked about xenotransplantation in the past.

We've talked about this idea of sort of a human-animal transplantation, whether we're talking about specific valves in a heart maybe or skin grafts or different organs.

And, you know, there are some transplants that we can do directly from an animal, like utilizing their tissue and using enough drugs and different mechanisms to reduce rejection.

And then there's the big difficult ones, whole organ transplantation. So this pig to human kidney transplant, do you guys remember the kidney? Was it pig or human? It was pig.

It was a genetically modified pig. Yes, it was a genetically modified pig kidney that was modified to sort of mimic human tissue, mostly around rejection, right?

It was modified to have a lesser chance of rejection.

Why was it not a human kidney that was grown in a pig? Does anybody but Steve know?

Would it even work? Would it have some rejection issues? Of course.

Even a human kidney has rejection issues that goes into another human. Right.
So then that's not the answer, though? That's not the answer.

Well, something advantageous about a pig kidney that a human kidney doesn't have, maybe. Nope.

It probably is too big.

Yeah, it probably would be better to grow a human kidney inside of a pig, but we're not allowed to. Oh, ethics.
I see. Oh,

yeah. Yeah.
So that's what this article that was recently written in The Conversation is all about.

It was written by Monica Piotrowska, who's an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Albany, State University, New York.

And I love just the headline of this: Putting pig organs in people is okay in the U.S., but growing human organs in pigs is not. Why is that? And really, that's the question she's posing.
Why is that?

It seems that the answer comes down to

abuse. Yeah, it seems that the answer comes down to the NIH guidelines for human stem cell research.
In 2015, they, well, I should say, I shouldn't say they outlawed it.

They paused funding for work on growing human organs inside of animals, specifically inside of pigs.

They paused that funding in 2015, and the argument here came back to the NIH guidelines for human stem cell research.

So when you look at some of the FAQ, you know, they talk about potential benefits of the research, funding that could happen in the future, what is their policy on this research?

And basically, they said, we can't move forward with this

because

it is falling underneath. There's a moratorium that falls underneath the purview of the stem cell guidelines due to public outcry and due to some concerns from

scientists, from individual experts working in this field. But this is one of those really interesting topics that we sometimes get to discuss on the SGU where 99.9% of scientists don't agree, right?

Like there's actually quite a bit of debate within these fields themselves about whether or not this ethical consideration is appropriate and the kind of the extreme step of putting a moratorium.

And can you really call it a moratorium if it was put into effect 10 years ago? Is that still a moratorium? Or is that it for all intents and purposes, a ban? It's a de facto ban. Right.
And so

here's something that's interesting, right? So we've got this new clinical trial

where basically researchers are trying to sidestep the regulation, not

sidestep isn't really the appropriate term because they're not breaking with regulation. They're trying to do everything they can and still

follow the rules.

And in doing that, they're having to go through quite a few hoops, you know, okay, instead of growing a human kidney inside of a pig, which nobody's done before, by the way, but when the moratorium was put into place,

they had shown proof of concept by growing, I think, a mouse pancreas inside of a rat, which I know sounds like, oh, it's mouse to rat. It's basically the same.
It's not the same.

Those are two different species. And so they were showing proof of concept there.

And they were able to do that successfully. And that's sort of when all the research stopped.

So we know that it could potentially work, but we don't know if it can work because we haven't been able to figure out if it works.

So instead of growing these kidneys, these human kidneys, and when we say human kidneys, we don't mean like generic of the human ilk.

We mean kidneys grown from the genetic information of the actual recipient.

That's the

goal here.

From human cells. From human cells, but not just human cells, the recipient's cells.

The individual. Yeah, the individual.
The idea here would be that they would be a match to not just their blood type, but all of the different factors that they're coding for that would

promote, or I should say, decrease the chance of rejection because the recipient would recognize this cell or this organ as its own. That's the hope.

What they're having to do right now is they're having to use different genetic modification techniques to sort of trick the recipient's immune system into thinking that the organ is not a threat, into thinking that the organ is human, or maybe even into thinking that the organ is the recipients.

And it kind of works. And that's what we talked about.
a few months ago when we described this. If you guys remember, ultimately, these recipients are having to have these organs removed.

There was one example, 271 days was the

length of time that the New Hampshire man who was on the transplant list was able to keep the pig kidney. I shouldn't say was able to survive with it because he didn't die.

He just had it removed and then went back into dialysis. And then

that was after, you know, an Alabama woman's pig kidney lasted 130 days. And we've had some other examples in the past.
But we have to remember that the transplant list is long and it's growing.

There are over 100,000 people on the transplant list in the U.S.

And most of those are for kidney transplants, actually. You would think it's mostly heart, but it's not.
It's still mostly kidney transplant that's needed. Oh, interesting.
I didn't know that.

I know, right? Because heart is by far the most difficult, and you can't donate a heart, obviously. And the rules are much, much stricter.
But yeah, most people who need an organ need a kidney.

And there just aren't enough. There aren't enough donors.

And so

we are, or should say were, on track.

I'm not saying it was there yet and I'm not saying it was perfect, but on track to be able to, and you can read some really, you know, fascinating articles from 5, 10, 15 years ago about growing human organs in animal animal hosts, and specifically pig is usually the one that's used.

But where are the ethical concerns? Like, I do think it's important to highlight both sides of this debate. What do you think that the largest ethical concerns are?

Why would people not be okay with growing a human kidney inside of a pig?

So, what are they inserting?

They're not inserting stem cells. I mean, right?

It's just

the general stem cell argument. Human stem cells into animal embryos.

But even beyond the general kind of like

the fear, the fear of

chimeras. That's a

fear with some people. What's the main fear of chimeras? That chimeras are going to vote democratic? I mean, no.

Well, but it's funny you say that. I mean, that's actually obviously really funny, but it's that the pig would be more human.

Right. And how human is too human.

And that is

making a new

human type of species here. Are we we playing God? That kind of thing.
Like the NIH literally used this quote. They were concerned of possible, quote, alterations of the animal's cognitive state.

Yeah, which is ridiculous. They were concerned that putting kidney, human stem cells that, you know, will ultimately code for a human kidney into an embryonic pig could somehow those cells could

migrate to neural tissue.

Was that the real fear? Or was it the fear that this is the slippery slope and this is the first step that will lead to like neural transformation?

Or is it a panel of doctors and things, and they have to placate a couple of them who are fringe on the panel by saying something like this?

What's the ultimate reason? I don't know if anybody really knows.

And Bob, I think that's an interesting question. We can only go off of what's published.
And what they published is a warning of possible alterations of the animal's cognitive state.

Now, you do see animal rights activist groups or animal advocacy organizations arguing against sentience or awareness or, you know, whatever kind of terminology they want to use.

Not sentience, sapience, sorry. Animals are already sentient.

They can feel pain and pleasure, but arguing against a fear of sapience. And you're right.

I think a distinction needs to be made between a slippery slope of what happens if we try or we get to a point where we have the technology and the know-how to insert human stem cells into a pig's brain, for example, intentionally to try and grow a human-like brain in a pig.

That's very different than a concern that a few cells might migrate into the brain of a pig when the intention with a lot of safeguards. Safeguards, yes, is

to prevent that from happening. And I think also it shows just like a general lack of understanding of how this kind of scientific research happens.

You don't just throw some cells in an animal and see what sticks.

It's really hard to make this work.

Really hard.

It's hard enough. Does the examples of something like that actually happening? I don't think so.
No, no, no. I'm saying it's hard enough just to make growing a kidney work.

Right, right, let alone worrying about

the developing of

As some sort of random oopsies. And, you know,

this bioethicist or philosopher, I should say, who obviously specializes in bioethics, their argument in their article about the flawed logic of the ban, as they call it, is that in practice, they're saying it's not about the concept of self-consciousness at all.

It's about species membership. membership and sort of human exceptionalism.
They're saying that if,

and this is a direct quote, if certain cognitive capacities such as self-consciousness conferred higher moral status, then it follows that regulators would be equally concerned about inserting dolphin or primate cells into pigs as they are about inserting human cells.

But they are not.

They are not equally concerned about that. It's specific to humans.

This idea of human to non-human chimera. We're responsible for it all, I suppose, you know, whereas a dolphin's not.
True, true. And I think

that an important argument. But I think there's also this concern of like, where is the cutoff? And this is something that we've talked about a lot on the show.

And I know I'll probably get feedback from people,

you know, arguing against certain stances on eating meat or arguing for veganism. And I think that these are all valid arguments.

But there's always a line in the sand at which a decision has to be made, whether it's personally or collectively, you know, from a policy standpoint, that says, what is,

you know, at what level is this ethical and is it not?

Because I think we often forget that fruit flies are animals.

Yeah.

We often forget that, you know, fish can feel pain.

It's a continuum, yeah. I think they're all written about the island of Dr.
Moreau.

That's what came to my head. It's a slippery slope, I think, at the end of the day.
It was like, well, we have

a pig with human parts. You know, they're thinking about human parts.

How many parts? Eventually, the end of that is basically a human being with a pig brain, or you have a pig with a human brain. And I think either of those are abominations that people would recoil at.

And so they don't want to go in that direction. Whereas if you're genetically modifying a pig, it's still a pig.
It's just genes. I guess that's a little bit more easy to take.

I don't think there's a rational, science-based, or even really ethically-based distinction there.

You know, growing a human kidney and a pig versus a genetically modified pig kidney to look more human, to be functional. Right.

Either way, the pig is

a host. Yeah.
Well, and not just is it still a pig, it's still a host. We're still harvesting the organ and sacrificing that pig so that the human may live.

If that's the argument, if that's the concern that we don't want these pig farms, which is a valid concern, right?

That like we don't want to like use animals just for our health purposes, just to slaughter them at the end of the day.

It's a valid concern, but it doesn't hold water here because we're already doing that.

It's not the distinction that they're making.

The distinction they're making is this idea of a human chimera. And at what point is that animal, should that animal have similar rights to human beings due to its makeup being some percent human?

But I would make a huge distinction between neural tissue and everything else.

Of course, and everything else. It's like, come on.

Yeah.

But we're seeing this with a lot of technologies. We just talked last week about the fact that

the European Union is making a distinction between genetically modified and genetically altered, genetically engineered. That's really splitting hairs.

And

if you remember back in 2001, with President Bush's ban on stem cell research on harvesting any new lines, eventually they worked around it. They found a way to

make cell lines that did not have to be harvested.

And it basically

made the law obsolete.

I see they're kind of doing that in this case, but it is holding back the research, which is

absolutely

holding back the research. Yeah, it's, I mean, hopefully it works as well as

the false start that we had. But I just, I see there being sort of a line where we go, we just can't go any further without this organ being of human origin.
Like, we just can't.

And I guess I'll close with another quote from the article because, I mean, she says it better than we could.

If a pig embryo infused with human cells truly became something close enough to count as a member of the human species, then current research regulations would dictate its owed human-level regard.

But the mere presence of human cells doesn't make pigs human. And Steve, you made this point.

Then she goes on to say, the pigs engineered for kidney transplants already carry human genes, but they aren't called half-human beings.

When a person donates a kidney, the recipient doesn't become part of the donor's family. Yet current research policies treat a pig with a human kidney as if it might.

Yeah, I think it's scientifically incoherent. Yeah, yeah.
And it's holding back research in a major way.

Which we need, because, again, you said there's a massive shortage in organ transplantation, especially kidneys. Yeah.

All right. Thanks, Kara.
Bob, you're going to talk about another cutting-edge high-tech issue here. Japan's plan to beam energy from space.
Yeah.

Japan is about to test for the first time solar power beamed from space, guys.

This is its Ohisama project, and it will soon launch a satellite to collect solar energy, beam it down to Earth as microwaves to be turned into electricity, enough to run a toaster, I hear.

So we've touched on this before here and there, right, Steve? Our reaction has always been something like, oh, this is such a cool idea, but give me a break.

It's way too expensive compared to simple ground-based solar power collection. I mean, how is this even a discussion? So that's basically

how we've been. dealing with this, I think.
I mean, at least in talks, Steve, you and I have had. It's like, oh, it's cool, but come on, it's just way too, it's ridiculously expensive.

Why is that even on the table? So let's revisit this a little bit. Space-based solar power, SBSP.
First proposed by aerospace engineer Peter Glazer. And when do you think?

What year do you think this was proposed, this idea, guys? 1868. Yeah, you bastard.

Whatever. You should have just been able to get it.
1868.

Yeah. So, I mean, there's so, but there's so many benefits to collecting solar energy in space.
It's easy to get a little entranced by it.

The benefits are just like, oh, man, it's just so wonderful. So traditional solar farms on the ground, they've got the classic disadvantage, right? At night, the Earth gets in the way of the Sun.

It's like the damn Earth, there it is, it's blocking the Sun. So yeah, nighttime really sucks for solar.

It's, you know, it's like half the time, it's not, you can't, you can't, by definition, use it.

And then, of course, even when the sun's shining, there's cloud cover, then you got to deal with, you know,

limited area. And even just respect for the environment.
It's like, oh, my God, you know, because some of these

installations can be so big, and there's always concern there. But now the orbital solar collectors in, say, geosynchronous orbit, now that's, you know, geostationary, right, Bob? Yeah, right.

There's that whole thing.

It would be in a geosynchronous orbit, but it would be in a specific type of geosynchronous orbit, which is geostationary, so that it's in one spot.

Right? So if you've got a... You're getting me off on a table.
Save your emails first.

It's geostationary. So it's basically hovering in one spot, whereas a generic geosynchronous doesn't have to be in one spot.
It could move a little bit.

All right, so

when you're in this orbit, sunny 24-7, Earth is no longer in your way at night. There's no weather, right? Especially the clouds don't get in the way.

Also, here's an interesting angle. You avoid most common forms of wear because you're not like on the planet dealing with weather.

So many types of wear won't be happening that you would see on the ground.

And the environmental impact is basically non-existent except for some of the collectors, but nothing compared to the big solar arrays.

So it's just like so many interesting advantages to orbital solar collectors. And we all know how much energy is hitting the Earth.
I mean, if you look at

a stat I found interesting. Our deserts absorb in one day all the energy humans use in a year.
And as great as that is, space is even better. It's even better.

Sunlight in orbit is approximately, it's like 144 or 150% stronger than the ground. And if you factor in no nighttime or weather, orbital systems can yield 40 times the total output over time.

So, yeah, it's just an amazing place for this to happen. So, now to transmit the power home efficiently, my first thought would be: let's use lasers, right? Why don't we use lasers? But

they can cause issues due to the interference with the atmosphere. The atmosphere can be problematic for lasers in this scenario to a certain extent.

So, for decades, many decades, and most recently in 2008, it's been shown that power beaming with microwaves would be much better. It just slides through the atmosphere almost

effortlessly. It's really, microwaves are great for this application.
So, there we go, microwaves. So, this is what Japan is going to test.

And microwave beams, you know, it sounds like, oh boy, this is what's happening in my microwave that's heating food. It's safe.
It's very safe for us and for wildlife.

The energy densities are not anything that we would really need to worry about here.

But this is the process.

If this worked, the process would happen this way, just a generic solar installation in space. So

the solar panels intercept the solar radiation and they convert that to DC, direct current. That DC powers the microwave generator that sends the signal to Earth, right?

Converting the microwaves into electricity on the ground, for me, that was the real slick part of this tech because I didn't really understand how that worked.

How were you taking microwaves and producing

usable electricity from that? So to deal with this, they have special antennas. These are called rectifying antennas or rectennas.
Have you guys heard about rectennas or rectifying circuits?

Yeah, they're fascinating. I didn't really have a full grasp of how they actually did their work.
So it's basically two devices in one, this rectenna, hence the portmanteau, right?

Rectifying antenna, you know, rectifying circuit and antenna, rectenna.

So the antenna part of this device is just a regular antenna, but it's designed to harvest microwaves instead of, say you know remember steve our old school tv signals were which were our radio waves on our on the roof of our house now microwaves by the way are really just energetic radio waves so they're just basically i think technically they are radio waves but they're just just you know at the far end there so now you got the antenna the antenna is grabbing on to these microwaves the microwaves drive the electrons back and forth in the in the antenna, right?

Imagine the antenna, the microwaves are hitting it, it's driving electrons back and forth. This is basically alternating current.
This is AC right here that we're dealing with.

The rectifier takes this back and forth of

the electrons and blocks the backward part, right? So the current mostly goes in one direction. Instead of both directions, it's just going in

this one direction. And then you're basically done.

The only thing that you need to do additionally here is that a filter will take that kind of bumpy direct current and make it into a smooth direct current that

we normally use in our everyday lives. So that's what's happening.
This rectifier takes some of that back and forth of the electrons and makes the current go in one direction.

And that's what it's doing to turn microwaves into direct current.

But OHIS Samuth project is going to launch a 400-pound washing machine-sized satellite into low-Earth orbit about 400 kilometers above Earth. It's a two-square-meter solar panel.

That's going to collect the solar power and it's going to beam it down in the microwaves to an array, a ground, a 13-antena ground away. That array, that's the plan.

And the test is designed to validate two things.

They want to make sure that the accuracy of the microwave to ground targeting is spot on and that the efficiency of the wireless energy reception on Earth is also good.

I mean, if it's not efficient and not accurate,

this is not going to work. I think this is going to work for them.

I think when they finally get this up here, probably, I would guess, they keep saying the end of 2025, and we're getting damn close to that. I assume

it's going to be like the first quarter of 2026, that they're going to launch this and they'll do a test.

I don't think this is, I think this will work fine, this very narrow specific test, because mainly because this isn't the hard part. Scaling this up cheaply, that's the hard part.

You know, it's the steps that come after this that really get kind of rough. And it boils down to what? What does it boil down to?

Is this worth the extra expense of launching this entire system into space, right? Why would Japan even consider this? And it's kind of obvious if you think about Japan.

Japan imports something like, I've heard numbers from 90 to 97% of their energy. Any country should consider that untenable long term.
Like this is ridiculous.

I mean, we can't be, how do we survive long term if we're if we're importing almost all of our energy like that?

So yeah, so they're looking at this hard and they've been they've been working on this specific technology for decades. This has been a priority for them.
Well, look more at Japan.

A ground-based solar array that's very limited in Japan. There's limited space, right, in Japan.
The terrain is difficult. There's a lot of people in a tiny area.

So, yeah, so ground-based solar arrays are not going to really do that much. Let's see, nuclear energy, that's a tough sell, right, Fukushima.
I mean, I think that's something that

they're trying not to focus on too much.

I just think

the gut reaction to people over there is just like obviously pretty tainted. Geothermal isn't much of an option in Japan.

There is some geothermal activity there, but either they can't use it where it is, or it's being used for hot baths and stuff, and they don't want to start a huge construction thing there where tourists go and whatever.

Offshore wind farms, I think that's pretty viable. They've got a lot of coastline.

But I think that this is going to need to be kind of a scenario where they do different things, including a wind farm and maybe

some space-based solar. I don't know.
But let's see how much more expensive this could be. So I found a NASA study that's only, I think it's only a couple years old, so it's pretty new.

They looked at two designs. Each design would add two gigawatts to the grid.
So that's pretty intense right there. Japan is only imagining a one gigawatt solar array up in space.

So NASA was thinking about two gigawatts and what would this cost?

They calculated the cost of electricity comes to about 61 cents USD, 61 cents per kilowatt hour for one design, and their other design was $1.59 per kilowatt hour.

And Steve, do you know the latest ground solar is like $0.04 per kilowatt hour, something like that? So it's, yeah, so clearly this is going to be more expensive. Duh, that's kind of a good idea.

But Bob, because I was looking at that too, I was very interested in the relative cost. That NASA study, which I also came upon, is at the very high end of estimates.

I've read other estimates that put it as low as like 10 to 20 billion for a one gigawatt system, where NASA is like $250 billion for the two-gigawatt system.

So NASA's estimates is 10 times more than some other estimates. There are even super optimistic estimates that put it at $1 to $2 billion.

I think that's pie in the sky. But if they could get the cost down to $10 billion for a 1 gigawatt system,

that's in the cost range for a nuclear reactor. That's now as expensive as nuclear.
And that is totally doable. Best case scenario is interesting.

I mean, they did conclude that space-based solar power would cost either 12 to 31 times higher

for one design or 32 to 80 times as much as the other. So I didn't really focus on the dollars here.
I focused on how much more expensive would it be because of the launch.

And of course, it's mostly launch costs.

Remember, we're talking thousands of launches, right? To get this into space, thousands of launches they're predicting. So NASA says 70 to 80% of the life cycle cost is just launching.

But then, if you keep reading, it says that best case scenario, if there's multiple major improvements made, like say that the launch is even cheaper,

it's more efficient, and this and that.

So, if you have multiple stacking major improvements, they say the cost could drop dramatically, even even down to get this single-digit cents per kilowatt hour.

So, that would mean instead of four pennies per kilowatt hour now on the ground, they're saying space-based could eventually be something like nine, nine cents per kilowatt hour.

That would be like, oh my god, that'd be a no-brainer. Who knows? There's so many complex variables interplaying here.
Who knows what it's going to be? So, what's the takeaway?

I'm not sure. Generally, I think the takeaway is this: it's too expensive now, but it will get better and perhaps it could get way better potentially.
I don't know.

But I think if we just wait, it's going to get better. We just wait a little while.
It's going to get better.

I'm not sure when we might see a gigawatt-class instrument deployed, very complex instrument deployed into space. I don't know

if we're going to see that. That still could be 20, 30, 40 years away.
I don't know. I think if Japan figures that their cost is at the lower end of the estimate, they may go ahead and

try to do this and launch their planned gigawatt system into space. But one problem with that is that some people are saying that

this is going to require an international effort like the Large Hadron Collider. You know, it's just like, it's just too big for one country to do it.

But the problem is, what other countries are going to put all the millions of millions of dollars,

millions of whatever, whatever currency they use into this project and

their time and their smartest people. And if it only benefits Japan.
I mean, the Large Hadron Collider, I mean, this data is available for everyone. But for this, it's like,

why would Germany then spend millions on something that is directly just for Japan? I mean, the technology that you come away with,

maybe that kind of joint intellectual property would make it worth it. I don't know.

I think the idea is that the advances reduce the cost until it gets down into the range where it's viable for the EU or for the United States, for other countries to do this.

So what's interesting, though, you have have to think about how expensive something is.

That depends on the country, right? It depends on the use case. Japan is kind of unique in that

they have their landlocked. They have a severe land restriction, you know.
So

this only needs to come down to the relative cost of nuclear. It doesn't need to come down to the cost of ground-based solar because they don't have a land for ground-based solar.

So it's not really an option for them. They are absolutely a special case, and I think we'll see it with them before any other country, essentially.

They are more motivated than

they should be. They could push this forward, but they could be, you know, if that RD brings it down.
Because there's other things you didn't talk about that really could affect the price.

Yeah, it's so complicated. Like one aspect of what else.

How are they going to be constructed in space, right? Are you going to send up individual units that are built on Earth and then unfold in orbit?

Or are you going to have robots assembling a massive multi-kilometer array in orbit? We don't have the technology to do that right now.

So a lot depends on how we develop that technology and if that we can get that so that's reliable and it's cheap, you know, then it changes the equation further.

Yeah, NASA's study went through a lot of the different

types of technologies and

the ways and different methods and ideas, just that super high level,

what are they going to construct up there, like you mentioned. So maybe we'll put the link to that PDF on the site.
I wish I had had time to read every word of it. It was kind of big,

but it had a lot to digest there. But so, yeah, interesting topic.
We'll probably be talking about this again

maybe once it launches, but we'll see how it goes. I think

it's going to go well. It's what happens afterwards that really matters.
So, we'll see. Now, old Musk would have just invested $100 billion in this and made it happen and made it be cool.

Right.

Tesla Space or whatever, you know what I mean? Yep. Workforce.

All right. Thanks, Bob.
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All right, guys, let's get back to the show. All right, Evan, tell us about this yogurt.
Sounds yummy.

Yeah, it does sound yummy.

Maybe.

I had an ant yogurt. She was wonderful.
And

I have a question. All right.
Bob, I know you've

expressed your concern about aging, but I think we all have, you know, maybe to some degree, right? Sure. We slow down, we lose our vitality, so forth.

Would you consider sucking down a straw that had ants

crawled all over it to get benefits of helping with that aging issue. Would you do that?

Depends on the extent of help.

I suppose it would.

This is an actual folk practice that existed in parts of Europe as something I had never heard about before. Are any of you familiar with this or have you heard this in any machination?

Ants, straws, sucking on straws. Nothing like that.
Straws then. Ants used to be.

I don't understand what you're saying. Is it a straw full of ants?

It's a straw that ants were at,

it's a little unclear, but that ants had crawled onto.

Oh, well, that wouldn't bother me. I mean, it sounds like it wouldn't do anything either, but it wouldn't bother me.

But what it, but how it's described is that if you then, you know, drink something through it, you'll get this taste, this almost like a little bitter, maybe sour taste, and that

relates to some kind of health benefit.

Right? Sounds kind of crazy, but a lot of these stories from antiquity

are, you know, we've heard crazier stories than that. And this turns out to be an actual practice that existed in parts of Europe.

Joe Schwarz over at McGill, at the McGill Office for Science and Society, wrote an article about this recently.

But according to the story, children would place a straw into an anthill, wait for the ants to climb up it, and then they would suck on the straw to get that sour taste, supposedly absorbing the ants' vitality and improving their own health.

And someone wrote to Joe

talking about this and claimed that it may have contributed to someone in their family living to the age of 93.

Right.

Okay, so first of all, that's wrong. One thing has nothing to do with the other.

So that the fact that somebody lived to age 93 and sucked on a straw that an ants once crawled on, that's not anything, right? So we already know that part.

But underneath that folklore, there appears to be maybe something real,

which is cool stuff when it comes to science. So it's a general, when you talk about these things generally, the category that anthropologists term,

the term they use is sympathetic magic. So the idea that you can absorb the qualities of something by contact or consumption.
You know, ants are energetic, resilient.

So if you ingest something associated with ants, maybe you get some of those benefits as well. Right?

Eating animal organs for strength, wearing animal skins for power, bloodletting, you know, the humors, so many different things in our history have pointed in that direction.

And they're all wrong, of course, now that we know that. But this was a time before, really, science and medicine came together.
So, wait, why would the straw taste sour in the first place?

That's a good question. There is a scientific explanation for that.

Ants produce formic acid, which is responsible for the sharp acidic sensation, like when you're bitten or stung. So, that sour taste that children would have is real.
It's a real phenomenon.

But there's no evidence that ingesting those tiny amounts of formic acid would do anything beneficial for your health. So, you know,

strike one there. But in some regions of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, people didn't just suck on the ant straws.

What they did is they would add ants to warm milk, allow it to ferment, and that produced a yogurt-like food. So

it's a form of fermentation. The ants carried lactic acid bacteria on their bodies.

Those bacteria can lower the pH of the milk, cause it to curdle, producing something, you know, yogurt or yogurt-like. And so the ants become the delivery system for this particular bacteria.

And there could be some narrow, but some health benefits that could be derived from a product like that.

If you isolated that bacteria and cultured it directly, you would really get the same results and you wouldn't even need the ants at that point.

So does that mean we should all go out and start sticking ants into our foods and getting those benefits?

No, it's not that at all, but you can kind of get the sense of where this came from, the ancient folklore behind it, and how it sort of

translated through time up to the point where we now are able to sort of isolate it and figure out, okay, this is really what they were talking about in a real scientific sense.

Fermented foods, including yogurt, can have modest health benefits, can we say?

Maybe certain strains of bacteria might help with lactose digestion,

help prevent antibiotic-associated diarrhea. This is according to

what? The American Gastroenterological Association, the AGA, and the World Gastroenterology Organization, the WGO. It's all pretty thin.

So if you've had a number of articles on science-based medicine about it.

The evidence only supports the highest count, you know, colony count probiotics, and only if you take them before you initiate antibiotics.

So like in the most favorable situation, maybe there's a little bit of a benefit. That's about all you could say.
But like using it routinely, no.

Using anything other than the highest colony count, no.

For any other conditions or general gut health, no.

And they do say it has extremely narrow and specific potential

in those particular cases, Steve. That's right.

They are not saying this is

a general practice for overall health. Very, very.

And it's strain-specific, condition-specific, with small effects. So, yes, there's...

Something there. But it's kind of interesting how we look into these stories.
And frankly, this is one I had never heard of before.

Maybe our listeners in Europe are a little more familiar with it, something their grandparents or great-grandparents handed down to them. It's in their culture, it's in

their history.

But this was something, you know, I mean, we've come across so many things over our 20, 30 years of being exposed to this, and I had never heard of this before. So anytime I find something new

like this, I become really interested. in

how it went from its original, its origins to where we are today understanding it. I mean, I'd do it to grow an exoskeleton.
That'd be cool. Well, yeah,

if it would do something like that. You know, Vladimir Putin

is said to bathe in reindeer blood. Reindeer antler blood.
We've talked about that on the show before. Same idea.
You know,

pretty much the exact same idea. That's Siberian culture

with roots and their folklore, essentially, but no basis whatsoever. There's no evidence that it does anything.
Yet, there is. There's one of the most

infamous people right now on the planet who's doing it. And

who knows who else is doing it on TikTok, let's say.

And Evan, in this case, think of the poor ants. They didn't ask to be sucked up.

That's true.

That is absolutely true. We don't think of them not nearly enough.
All right, guys. Well, I want to finish up with just a quick news item here.

How far back in time do you think evidence for fire use by hominids goes? Oh, I don't know. 400,000 years? 450,000 would have been my guess.

So you're incorrect, Bob. Goes back about 1.5 million years.
I see. I'm way longer.
I'm way long. Oh, yeah.
That's what I meant to say.

The 400,000 that you're citing, I know you were trying to do to me what I did to you, but you

and I failed.

So you have to make a distinction between evidence for fire use, which is what I said, versus evidence for fire making, which is what I said. Meaning starting, like starting your own fire.

Actually, starting your own fire. So, there's 400,000?

So, the evidence for fire use goes back to probably

Homo erectus, and essentially you could see evidence of fire pits with animals that they were eating, like the bones were charred, right? So, we were

they cooked the food that they were eating multiple times at that site. So, that's clear evidence of fire use.
But that doesn't mean they made the fire. Do you guys remember the movie Quest for Fire?

I do. Lightning Baby.
1981. Yeah, so that movie wasn't really accurate.
I'm not citing this for anyone. No.

But Steve, I remember we were in Italy in 1981

or 3.

We were in Italy and

I see the sign and I had read about it. And I'm like, wait, I know there's no language in this movie and we're in Italy.
We could still watch it because it's not going to

lunch. Just grunts.

That was awesome.

But they were two basically different humanoid species there, and one had fire but didn't make it. They had to protect the fire, right? The keeper of the fire.

And the other more advanced species could make fire.

And so that's the distinction we're talking about here.

Of course, because we don't have evidence that Homo erectus or early Homo neanotilensis or whatever, that they could make fire, that doesn't mean they couldn't, right?

It just means we haven't been able to to prove that they could. We knew they were using it, but it could have been opportunistic, like lightning strikes, etc.

And maybe they were able to keep the flame going for a while.

But the earliest evidence for making fires goes back about 50,000 years to humans until, of course, this new study, which was just published,

comes from a site in eastern England. And this is a site that was occupied by Neanderthals

and is 400,000 years old.

There's the number.

Yes, that's what we got the number. Pretty convincing evidence of fire making, not just fire use.
What do you think that might be?

What would be the evidence that they were making fire, not just using flint? They were scraping the rocks together or something. What rocks?

Flint, right? Flint, yeah, exactly. A lot of flint, baby.

So flint.

And what else? Flint and charcoal.

Nope. And

lasers. No,

quartz, no.

Pyrite. Iron pyrite.
So flint and pyrite will spark together.

What are pirates doing here now?

Wait, sorry, I misheard.

So they found both pyrite and flint.

And there's two. Okay, so there's flint and pyrite at the site, and they were cooking it.
They were using fire at the site. Again, burned bones.

The clay was subjected to high temperatures over a long period of time. Well, is it a little circumstantial at this point?

Pretty crazy.

You tell me.

What are the other options? So one is there were flints there that were heat shattered, right? So there was flint, which is used to make fire, and it was in the fire, right? So

that is circumstantial, but that's

that a technique to make it a better tool? No, it just means they were using it and some of it ended up in a fire at some point. Yeah, they were doing it for decades or

hundreds of years, maybe.

But the pyrite, here's the thing: the pyrite is not local.

The most local source of pyrite was 40 miles away. So they brought the pyrite to their campsite.

How did they know?

They learned from somebody else?

Oh, how did they figure it out? Yeah. That was 40 miles away.

If you have a rock-making culture, figuring out that these two particular rocks spark is probably not that unusual.

But to the point where they traveled with the pyrite 40 miles. In other words, why weren't they building fires at the pyrite site? Or were they built?

Well, because this was a watering hole where they were hunting game.

We also don't have every site fossil.

We don't have to. Undiscovered sites, of course.
Exactly.

Yeah, so

this site was good for them to camp at. They needed pyrite.
It was 40 miles away, so they brought it from there. So clearly, it was important to them.

It's probably not a a coincidence they had both flint and pyrite where they were using fire, and it was definitely exposed to the fire.

So, it's again, it's not direct, direct evidence, but that's pretty darn good. I think that's

the simplest explanation for all those pieces of information. I think they make a very strong case that those Neanderthals 400,000 years ago were making fire.

And again, it may go back long before then. It's just things are always older than our earliest evidence for them, right? Because

chances are pretty low that we found the very first fire use starter, you know what I mean, ever in the history of the world, that we have caught it in the act.

So

we're always only going to see evidence later than when it really started. So does that also push anything else on the timeline into a different

era? I mean, 50,000 compared to 400,000 is a long time, like other tool making and things. Do they have to move anything else as a result of discovering this? No, no.

Again, we knew that fire use goes back one and a half million years or so, or two million years, something like that. And so

it's not

a stretch. And we also suspected this was going to be the case.
Really, the only trick was how do we prove it, right? How do we find evidence for fire starting?

Extensive fire use does imply that at some point in time they figured out how to make fire, although not again, not necessarily because they could have just been very good at

finding it when it occurred naturally.

Holding on to it. But also you think of, you could estimate how common it was by how easy it is to find, right? So, but unfortunately, now we just have it, we have an N of one, right?

One instance of over a long period of time, but one location where there's evidence of fire use 400,000 years ago. But still,

it was pretty hard to put these pieces together. It doesn't mean that it wasn't common.
It could have been common knowledge among human ancestors at that time.

It's amazing just to think that something that people were doing hundreds of thousands or over a million years ago is discernible now. So I mean, talk about a cold, a cold case.

I mean, it's ridiculous that this stuff would be something that we could figure out kind of these details. It just blows my mind sometimes.
It's like,

you imagine, you know, in a million years, there's not going to be a trace of us at all. There will be.
Sure, there will be. There will be.

The robots will be able to do that. I mean, something like

that, they say, will last a very long time. You can't say a trace.
There'll be, you know, people with fillings in their teeth and stuff like that.

There'll be some technical stuff.

There'll be the plastic layer

in the surface to be discovered.

But nothing we do is going to be there around.

Mount Rishmore, they think they say, is going to be one of the last things to do. By we, I mean many hundreds of thousands of years.
By me, I'm talking about us four. Oh, the four of us.
Oh,

well, okay. We'll work on that, Bob.
Let's put a time capsule of something together.

We have to record all of our podcasts in the most endurable medium possible, and then we have to put it someplace where it's going to be preserved.

Well, I've read a news item that engraved information onto these glass discs for billions of years. So that's what I'm working on.
Oh, that's what I'm working to do.

Billions of years. That's good.
Yeah, billions.

Work on that, Bob.

All right, so it's supposed to exist. No, who's that noisy this week?

Well, who's the winner, though?

He'll get us updated next week, which will be the year in review show, but he'll do the re

I guess a

noisy review.

Either that will reveal for the first show in January. But we are going to do a couple of emails, a couple of quick emails.

The first one is, I sent this article a couple months back as a suggestion for a segment. I am resending it because of the science or fiction last week.
It is about mercury in lakes in Minnesota.

They are bioengineering fish to get rid of it. So, yeah, so mercury in fish is a problem.

That's one of the avenues that mercury, especially the methylmercury that's very, very toxic, gets to people, right, is through fish. That's because the

bacteria alter the mercury into the methylmercury toxic form,

and then it bioaccumulates up the chain.

up the food chain, right? And so then when you have the fish that eat the fish, that eat the fish, that eat the whatever, that eat the plankton, that eat the bacteria,

then

they have bioaccumulated a lot of this mercury. So, this is a problem in

many of the lakes, like it's pretty rampant in the lakes of Minnesota. They have to

have an alert as to warn people, don't eat fish from these lakes. It's basically most of them.

Isn't it a problem in the ocean, too? Yeah, oh, yeah, absolutely.

But it just happens to be an area of high concentration. You know where most of the mercury in civilized areas comes from? And it's naturally occurring in the soil.

There's going to be a certain amount of it, but vaccines? No.

Coal-fired plants, right? Any fossil fuel, but especially coal, and especially certain types of coal,

is very dirty coal. It has a lot of mercury in it as well.
It's radioactivity and other stuff.

So that mercury from coal gets into the ecosystem, gets into the water, the bacteria convert it, then it concentrates up the food chain.

Then you have fish that are kind of at the top of the food chain, ones that are popular to fish and to eat, and they can have mercury levels that are higher than the cutoffs of recommended cutoffs, sometimes 10 to 15 times as much as the upper limit of what is considered generally safe.

So they're obviously interested in ways of reducing the amount of mercury that makes its way into the food chain in these lakes. And so one would obviously be releasing

less mercury into the air. And you could do that by burning less coal, but also by having better standards of capturing the pollution at

the the coal power factories, power plants. But there's another way and that they're that they're investigating.

And remember we talked about this as a science or fiction, about some plants and plankton have a pathway that allows them to convert the methylmercury to the non-toxic form and then into the gaseous mercury and release it back into the atmosphere.

Well, they're taking those same genes and they're putting them in the fish, into some specific fish, to see if that can reduce the burden of mercury in the fish in the lakes. So they're targeting

minnows. Minnows.
Minnows. Good job.

The SS minnow? SS minnow. Yep.

So

what they want to do is make genetically modified minnows, which are small fish that

the game fish eat, right?

Wait, are there any human components in that gene? No, no human components, just plant genes that will allow them to get rid of their mercury so it's not bioaccumulating.

And then their hope is that that would reduce the mercury burden all the way up the food chain.

Because now the fish that eat them will be also getting less mercury because they're the ones, that's where they get their mercury from, right?

Right. So we'll see how it all works out, but that's, but they're doing that.

And hopefully that will work. Basically, cut off the chain of accumulation of mercury in the system.

Genetic engineering

has tremendous potential, you know, putting a plant gene into fish. This would be a transgene, right? Ethical considerations? Not in my opinion.
Yeah, right.

Okay, one more. This one comes from Guy Henry, and he writes, long time listener, one-time helper of Steve for his son runs solar panels.
You guys remember that saga? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

You had to call in the saga.

Oh, God. Anyway,

yeah, he helped me.

I had to get my solar panels taken off the roof to repair the chimney, then put back on the roof, and I couldn't get them put back. But he made it happen.

The company was in transition, blah, blah, blah. It was a big, yeah.
So, thanks for that guy. So, he writes: a strip mall right near my house has a quote-unquote compounding pharmacy.

I've never heard of such a thing and haven't heard it mentioned on the show. I knew it had to be BS, and apparently, it's an alternative medicine that is not regulated.

I'm wondering if you've talked about this on the show, and if not, it might be worth a segment. Thanks for all you do.
So, what do you guys know about compounding pharmacies?

Don't they take medicines, put them into candies and stuff? Isn't that that kind of pharmacy? I mean, guys, compounding pharmacies are real.

Yes, I know they're real.

So basically, there are drugs that are developed by drug companies, and those drugs are produced.

But there are certain instances when drugs need to be combined or they need to be offered in a different formula.

And that's what compounding pharmacies do. They're run by pharmacists.
They also do retail stuff.

Like they might add multiple derma drugs to like a skin cream and then sell that as like a combination dermatological topical treatment or something. But these are all RPH, like they're pharmacists.

They're legit. They're legit.
They are regulated. The idea that they're not regulated by the FDA or by state boards is not correct.

No, it's just that the compounds that they offer are not FDA approved.

A specific compound has not itself been FDA approved. But the components are FDA approved, and they either are, they have to be approved in one way or another.

Either they are an approved drug, or they are part of the FDA's approved bulk pharmacy list, which is the, you know, the bulk drugs are the one

that they would use as their compounding, right?

And they are also regulated by the state boards of pharmacy, which oversee their daily operations and enforce guidelines, you know, of purity and cleanliness and all that kind of stuff.

They can't just put whatever they want in there, right? The ingredients all have to be approved on some level, right?

They have to have proper labeling,

you know, et cetera, et cetera. They're accredited.
So

they're legitimate. They are regulated.
They're just differently regulated than just like a specific drug. That's like you have one drug, so many milligrams.
I would order them all the time.

Most of the time I would order them, it was for the creams, as you say, Karen. Like I want to use it.
Yeah, there's a lot of derma you use. With 1% this, 2% that, blah, blah, blah.

I would use it for patients who have like post-iropedic neuralgia, you know, ironically, which came up previously.

You know, where you it's a topical treatment for neuropathic pain thing, you know, for is one one

use that I would frequently order it for. And yeah, so they're they're legit.

Now, whether there are pharmacies playing hinky alternative medicine stuff, I can't tell you that regular pharmacies do that too. They sell homeopathies or whatever.

Yeah, homeopathies homeopathies on the shelves at CVS and Walgreens. Yeah, so I'm sure there are compounding pharmacies also selling bullshit too.

You know what?

What a common one that, I shouldn't say common, it's very, very rare, but what I know them best for now in my work is that medical aid and dying drugs have to come from a compounding pharmacy because it's all these different powders that are mixed together.

It's like grams and grams of material. And so, of course, you're not going to buy all the pills individually and mix them together.
They compound it for you. Yeah, they compound it for you.
Yeah.

How do you know if a pharmacy is a compounding pharmacy? They say it. It says it in the title.
Yeah.

I mean, so like the storefront compounding pharmacy. And you have to order.
Yeah, it does.

Each compounding pharmacy had their own order form that I had to fill out in order to order the specific thing that I wanted. Like you're saying as a provider.
Yeah. Like as a physician.
Yeah.

So when you don't write a script, you fill out a compounding form. Right.
And like

as a consumer, your provider will tell you, oh, this specific thing that I, you know, that I'm recommending can only come from the compounding pharmacy. Here's their number.
Or

lots of times they're like mail order now, and you can do it all online. Yeah, I told some patients, just find a compounding pharmacy near you, send me their form, and I'll fill it out for you.
Yeah.

Yep, compounding is interesting.

Yep. All right, that was better.

That was better than your other one.

I've had like five. Which one?

Keep going. Just You just keep throwing a bunch of crap at you.
The one that had more growth.

The buck stops here. That was a bad one.
That one was not good.

The most emails on that one.

All right. One from TikTok.
TikTok is an endless source of scotch. Oh, my God.

What do you guys know about the inventor of the diesel engine? He died of Moida. Died a Moida.
No, that's the controversy, Evan. That is the actual issue at stake here.

So that was Rudolf Diesel, right? It was the guy's name. Rudolph Diesel was a German engineer.
He developed the concept in the 1890s. Do you guys know?

I mean, this is like an wonky engineering thing, but do any of you know what a diesel engine is? What makes a diesel engine a diesel engine?

It's a compression scenario.

Yes. So

instead of igniting the fuel with a spark plug, it compresses it so that it heats up and ignites spontaneously. Oh, I know you need something called like add blue, right? Isn't that a common?

You need like additives when you run a diesel engine.

What's the advantage/slash disadvantage? The advantages of the diesel engine primarily are that it's more efficient, it's more energy efficient.

The disadvantages, when they were first invented, they were huge. They actually were too big

for a car, you know, so they were used in trains and ships

or as generators, right? So that's like their initial use, generators, ships, and trains, you know, things like that. Yeah, not good for airplanes.

And then in the 1920s, other people came up with smaller

versions of them. Then they sort of were usable in trucks.
And it wasn't until the 1930s that the first car, like diesel engine car, was on the market.

All right, but so the diesel engines were initially used basically in ships and as power generators. And so they this is now in the lead up to World War I.

Germany was using the diesel engine for in its navy. And

Rudolf Diesel was visiting England, and he vanished from the ship that he was on and was later found, drowned, floating in the water. So there are three hypotheses as to what happened.

And this, so the TikTok video that I was responding to about this is a Joe Rogan interview, where he's interviewing some guy who's basically touting one of these three hypotheses, right?

So the one that historians think is most most likely is that he died by suicide, right? That he

jumped overboard. What was going on in his life? That's what his two biographers conclude.
So, you know, I'm kind of leaning towards the two biographers. Was he dealing with like

money problems? Yes, he had gone bankrupt. Okay.
What money he had, he left in a bag for his wife. That's kind of like you're giving stuff away.
Yeah, that's a badass.

That's a fact.

And there's no evidence that anything else happened, right?

But there's two other hypotheses both involve Moida, right event so one what about the an accident well i guess he's accidentally fallen overboard i guess so

in the 30s that happened got drunk nobody thinks that that that that's not usually proposed as one of them but i guess that's interesting okay all right sorry you also kind of left a note i mean so

anyway uh

so one hypothesis is that germany had him killed because they were afraid he was going to give the diesel technology to to england and that would beef up their navy and

so that it would compete with Germany's. Again, this is in rising tensions prior to the First World War.
So that one, at least it's, I think, plausible that that could happen.

Again, there's no evidence that it did happen, but the idea that

Germany would assassinate this engineer who was about to sell his patents to an enemy, you know, that they might be going to war with soon that could actually affect the balance of power. Again,

I don't think it's that plausible, but at least it's semi-plausible, right? I think it's plausible. Yeah, right? I mean, it's not crazy.
No. If the evidence supported that, sure.

But the Rogan interview was touting the third hypothesis. Anybody want to guess what that was? Oh, gosh.

Aliens? No.

God's pretty crazy.

That he's still alive? No.

Or that

he faked his death? No. That he was killed, that he was murdered.

Someone

who was

by Rockefeller. What? Oh, because

in order to protect his oil interests. Oh, I see.
Now, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Because, so, first of all,

is this TikTok? All right. So, the only sort of kernel here where you could at least there's a threat to pull on is that the diesel engine is a flex-fuel engine.
You could burn anything anyhow.

It doesn't have to be gasoline.

So the thinking is Rockefeller was trying to protect his gasoline interests against this flex-fuel engine. So we tried to have, you know, we had diesel killed, you know, in

1913. But it's ridiculous because, first of all, you'll notice that we still have diesel engines.

Right? I mean, killing the inventor of an invention that's already out there doesn't do anything. Rockefeller

was not a dumb guy. He probably would not have, oh, I want to kill the diesel engine by killing Rudolph diesel.
That'll do it.

You know, if he did, obviously it completely failed. But it's dumb.
Like, that's not how you silence an invention. First of all, you can't.

Like, the idea of we're going to use compression to whatever. Somebody was going to come up with that at some point.
He was just the the first guy to come up with it.

It's not like you can kill an idea. You know what I mean?

So it's just stupid, that whole idea that all these peep, these brilliant inventors get killed by people trying to suppress their inventions. It's dumb.
It's not how it works, right?

It's not how technology works or how advancement works. You can't just kill one guy.
And then you think forever we're going to silence this idea.

And again, if anything, the diesel is a counterexample because the diesel engine is still around today, 100 years later.

Also, as I said, there was no diesel car engine at the time. It was still 20 years away, which means they didn't have any idea if it would ever be developed.
So it wasn't competing with car engines.

And it may never have. And it may never have.
And the third thing is there was no infrastructure of any alternative oil that could compete with gasoline.

It's not like there was a peanut oil magnet out there who was going to take over

the oil industry by running diesel engines on peanut oil.

There was nothing like that. Rockefeller had nothing to worry about in terms of, and of course he didn't, right? Because the diesel engine had its

niche in technology. It didn't do anything to decrease the

fossil fuels. And diesel engines run on fossil fuel.
You know what I mean? It's not like we're

running them on peanut oil. We had electric engines that were in practice prior to oil being used, prior to gasoline.
So it's not like

no, way prior. Gasoline came after

the electric car. Yeah, yeah.
Gasoline, like you're right, not oil, but like refined oil. Like gasoline, as we know it came after steam and electric were like well on the scene.

And so they clearly they had incentive to use these fossil fuels because they had alternative options available and people were choosing to use use gasoline-powered cars.

Yeah, it was two things that really - this is a separate conversation, but very quickly, we wrote about this in our book. I've done extensive research on this very question, and no one knows for sure.

But the two primary facts that come up, one is infrastructure.

It was just, you know, the infrastructure, this is something that Rockefeller did, right? You know, just

had plenty of mechanisms to massively refine gasoline and distribute it everywhere, right?

We were about 20 years behind the time on electrification. If we were 20 years ahead of where we were, the electric car might have won out or at least succeeded side by side with gasoline.

Can you imagine?

The steam engine, it was water. Like you had to replace the water frequently and there wasn't an infrastructure for refilling your tank with water to get from one city to the next.

So it was mainly an infrastructure thing, but the other one is just quirky history. Ford planned on making a gasoline car and an electric car, and he just chose to do the gasoline one first.

He was fully...

Yeah, so it was mass-produced early. Yeah, so

he had designs for a mass-produced electric car, and Edison was going to build the batteries for him, and it was going to be a nickel-metal battery. Nickel-ion battery.
That was the issue there.

But his...

R ⁇ D was a little behind schedule, so he sent Ford some lead acid batteries. Ford got pissed and canceled the whole project.
That was it. Wow.
That was it.

It was a quirky thing that it did not have to go down that way.

We could have had electric cars.

The thing is,

the range was always going to be an issue,

but it could have existed side by side for intra-city driving or small commutes or whatever. Yeah, because that's how most people drove.
Yeah, it's how drove. Yeah, exactly.

It's still how most people drove.

These were horse trails and stuff that people were driving on. They didn't want to go drive 40 miles.
It was a bumpy as hell ride. Exactly.
Their electric car looked exactly like a horse carriage.

Yes. It just had a wheel instead of

like reins.

It was a horse's carriage. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Fascinating.
All right. Let's go on with science or fiction.

It's time for science or fiction.

Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine, one preclinical. Then I challenge my panel and skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.
There's a theme this week.

Bob, this theme is for you. Oh.

The theme is astronomy news from 2025. Oh, geez.
Let's see if you caught these news items.

All right. Who's going last?

Item number one. Bob's going last.
I know who's going first. Item number one.

Astronomers discovered a nearly perfect spherical bubble of gas and dust within the Milky Way, which they named Teleos, but do not yet have an explanation for its formation.

Item number two, scientists confirmed the existence of four Mars-sized planets orbiting Barnard star, the closest single-star system to Earth at just six light-years.

And item number three, NASA's Curiosity rover discovered evidence of complex organic chemistry on Mars, including 12 carbon atoms and simple nucleic acids. Kara, go first.

Nearly perfect spherical bubble of gas and dust within the Milky Way named Teleos.

But they don't know why it formed. You know what Teleos, by the way? What did that word means?

It's Greek.

It's Greek for

telestral, like tele. Perfect.

Perfect. Perfect.
That makes sense. Right? Because you've got the terrestrial, the telestrial, and the celestial kingdoms in Mormon

mythology.

You have an advantage here. Probably comes from that.
No, I don't have an advantage at all.

Let's see. So we've got that.
I would think that a lot of things started spherically and then got weird, but it's within the Milky Way, so that's interesting.

Then we've got the existence of four Mars-sized planets orbiting Barnard's star.

So that's the closest star system.

So, I mean, that wouldn't really surprise me because I know that we've found so many exoplanets at this point. Most of them are probably gas giants, but I think that we're just getting better.

So, I wouldn't be surprised if we started to see like rocky looking things.

Curiosity discovered complex organic chemistry,

including simple nucleic acids.

Hmm. I feel like I remember there being some stuff found, but nucleic acids is getting me.

Complex organic chemistry. So 12 carbon atoms and simple nucleic acids.

Okay, so the two that I think that the four Mars-sized planets orbiting Barnard star is science. So I'll throw that one out.
So I think the two that are getting me are if Teleos is this close.

Like, is it here?

Or is it really, really far away? I don't know. Is it super, super old? Not that the Milky Way is not old, and they don't know why it looks the way it looks.
Is that what you mean by that?

Like, I don't have that.

Yeah, like for why it's spherical.

And then the other one is the

curiosity.

I don't think they found nucleic acids. Wouldn't we have been talking about that?

I think that that's the fiction. Maybe they found some stuff, but not nucleic acids.
Okay, Evan.

I'm going to start with the fourth one.

Moving on.

Okay, the first one about Teleos.

Do not yet have an explanation for its formation. I don't know.
Could that be the

kink in that one, if that one is the fiction?

Maybe they do have an explanation for its formation. I don't know if you'd go that way with a science or fiction like that, though.

But a nearly perfect spherical bubble. If you made this up, Steve, you did a good job naming it.
I mean, I'll give you that. But I don't recall this news item at all.

The second one about Barnard star. Certainly know about that one.
The closest single star system to Earth at just six light years. So, I guess what?

Centauri, Alpha Centauri must be a multi-star system. I thought that one was closest.
But in any case,

the existence of form.

Yeah, that one's a system? Okay, then that's what I'm saying. Yeah, it's a ticket.
Three stars. So, six light-years away is the single-star system.
That's our closest.

The existence of four Mars-sized planets orbiting. I agree with Kara.
I think that one turns out to be science. And then this last one about NASA's Curiosity rover.

We've talked a lot this year about chemical analysis of, you know, the OSIRIS-REx analysis, among other things. Certainly what's going on on Mars, we've talked about a lot.

We didn't talk about this, though. 12 carbon atoms and a simple nucleic acid

simple nucleic acids.

I'll bet it $5

we did not cover this. So if any one of these three is going to be the fiction, this one probably has the highest probability of being the fiction.
I'll join Kara and say it is the fiction.

Okay, and Bob. Yeah, good choice, Steve.

These are kind of obscure.

But yeah, I'm going to go with the crew. Nucleic acids on Mars,

we would be talking about it.

Bottom line for these. So, yeah, I'll stop now.
All right. All right, so let's take these in order.
Astronomers discovered a nearly perfect spherical bubble of gas and dust within the Milky Way, which

they named Telios, but do not yet have an explanation for its formation. You all think this one is science, and this one is

science.

So good, he sounded really happy for it.

Yeah, right. I have to throw you off.

So, yeah, so

they don't know why it formed.

It probably is a supernova remnant, right? Your supernova explodes, sends out a bubble of energy. Wonderfully uniform.

But they very quickly get oddly shaped as they push up against different, in different directions, they're going to have different pressures that they're pushing up against, more or less concentration of hydrogen gas, you know.

So what would keep this one perfectly spherical for so long that it could get so huge, right? It's got to be a

weirdly uniform chunk of space. Yes.

And what would make it uniform? A vacuum.

That it's relatively empty. Super low density? Super low.
Yeah,

it must be just happening in a relatively empty part of the galaxy so that there's nothing disrupting the perfect sphere of the galaxy.

Other supernovas in the past could have cleared it out. Oh, yeah.
I was like, why would something be empty?

Well, remember, the galaxy does have arms, and in between the arms, it's relatively empty. Right? The galaxy is not a uniform.
We don't live in a globular cluster galaxy.

Or a spiral. Yeah, we lived in a spiral galaxy where there are arms and then between the arms.
But I don't know if that's where it is either.

So they're still trying to sort it exactly why, but that's the current theory.

All right, let's go on number two. Scientists confirmed the existence of four Mars-sized planets orbiting Barnard star, the closest single-star system to Earth at just six light years.

You guys also all

think this one is science. And this one is

science. Good job, guys.

No way. Yeah, man.

I got to read more about this one. This is cool.
This did feel the most like science. I know they're excellent, but it's a lot of fun.
You know, far north star, man. Far north star.

Six light years away.

They have the image of it. Like

one of our telescopes captured an image of it. I thought that was

AI.

This is the wobble method. This is all wobble method.
But the thing is, I feel like

if we're going to detect something small, it's going to be to the closest star.

Right. Yes.
Right.

It's the second closest system.

The Alpha Centauri system is a lot of a lot of time. It's four light years away, but that's a multi-star system.
This is a single star system.

Yeah, I mean, this is like in your back pocket, not even in your backyard. Yeah, six light years away from nothing.

So, yeah, this was the wobble method is that you could see the wobble in the orbit, the movement of the star because it's being tugged a little bit by the planets orbiting it. And And

that works best for systems where we're looking at them face-on, not edge-on-right. More face-on than edge-on.
And also when they're close. So this is

a perfect candidate for that. As opposed to the transit method where you need to be looking at them edge-on, but that's only going to be a certain number, you know, percentage of systems.

All right, that means that NASA's Curiosity rover discovered evidence of complex organic chemistry on Mars, including 12 carbon atoms and simple nucleic acids, is the fiction.

So this this is an item that we just missed. I didn't miss it.
I read the item at the time, but it just never got, it fell between our weekly cycles, you know. Oh, yeah, it happens sometimes.

Yeah, we just never reported on it.

What NASA's Curiosity River found, Bob, do you remember? Well, it was

organic chemistry. It was organic chemistry, right? Just not nucleic chemistry.
Not nucleic acids. You're right, Carol.

They did find carbon atoms that are 12 carbon atoms big.

So that's complex carbon-based chemistry, but they did not find nucleic acids. We've never found nucleic acids on Mars.
We recently found nucleic acids on asteroid Bennu. Yeah, right? Yeah.

So hoping you would get that confused, or at least think, well, we've found nucleic acids out there, so why not Mars? But we just haven't. They may be on Mars.
We just haven't discovered them yet.

Carbon-based life, baby. It's a way to go.
So it's not a proof that there was ever life on Mars. It is the simplest explanation, though.
And there's other evidence emerged this year.

Yeah, so it's not proof that there was life on Mars, but it is proof that there's ingredients for life on Mars. Yes, and

that there was ancient life on Mars is the simplest explanation for the evidence that we have so far.

But it's not proof that there was life on Mars. So we haven't discovered life on Mars, but it's looking good that there was ancient life on Mars.
Evidence that there was. Right, that's cool.

There could still be extant life on Mars. We haven't ruled that out.

Please.

But we haven't found evidence. We have a lot of soil back to your family.
Yeah, deep in the soil yeah exactly yeah man got to get my hands on that stuff

all right good job everyone

yeah bob i mean you know is it does it have human like dna did we seed it did it seed us or is it brand new i'm i'm hoping for brand new it's an ancient relative of yours bob be kind to it like a like a triple helix or weird proteins but yeah what you're assuming about but you mean you've got to get your hands on you mean you want earth scientists to get there oh good yeah i thought you meant you know you physically Bob.

I thought that was obvious, but yeah.

Bob, it was not.

No, no.

It's like going into the ball pit in McDonald's kind of thing. Hey,

all right, Evan, give us a quote. This week's quote is suggested by Brad from Troy, Ohio, who sent this to us not too long ago, said a suggestion for a quote.
Hi, Evan.

I have a suggestion for a skeptical quote of the week from an unlikely source, the Christian Bible. I've never read it.
Specifically, 2 Timothy 4, verses 3-4.

I didn't even know there was a 2 Timothy, so that's new to me. I haven't even heard a long time.

Reading from 2 Timothy 4, verses 3-Time. Oh, I see.

Like they did in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is the book of Archives. How they say it in church.

Please turn to page.

Here's the quote. The time is coming when people won't listen to good teaching.
Instead, they will look for teachers who will please them by telling them only what they are itching to hear.

They will turn from the truth and eagerly listen to senseless stories.

And then Brad commented, sometimes they are so close together.

Yeah, there are little kernels like that in scripture, right?

Little nuggets that you could pull, but then they fail to

bring it to its correct conclusion. The Christian Bible is based upon Greek Enlightenment.

It was

the philosophy of the time. There's no reason, you know what I mean? It wasn't.
Yeah, but that does happen all the time. I expect to see things like this.

You guys have all done god-awful movies, right? Yep. You've done it at this point.
I feel like whenever I'm on that show, at least once an episode, we're like, man, the point was right there.

It just went right past it. You had it in your hand.

It's like Theodoric of York.

Thank you, Brad. What a great scene.
I'm going to watch that. The Doric of York.
Steve Martin, baby. Well, thank you guys for joining me for the last regular episode of 2025.
Oh, birthday.

Wow. Next week, we have the year in review.
Hopefully, Jay will be back to fighting trim. He's basically lost his voice.

Like, there really wasn't an option today, but hopefully he'll be back by Thursday when we record. Which is two days from now.

Two days from from now, yeah, I got to double up this week so that we're off

for well. But Chris was coming in.
Oh, man. He has a program.
Wait, wait, wait. He has access to a program that simulated your voice.
Couldn't he just simulate his own music?

Type it in? What he's going to say? He could. He was bedridden.
He was wiped out. He wasn't doing any work.
Feel better, Jay.

All right. Well, until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

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