The Skeptics Guide #1053 - Sep 13 2025

The Skeptics Guide to the Universe is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states. You're listening to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Your escape to reality. Hello and welcome to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, September 10th, 2025 and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, everybody, Kara Santa Maria, Howdy, Jane Novella, hey guys, and Evan Bernstein. Good evening everyone. So did you guys hear the announcement today from NASA about a possible biosignatures on Mars? Uh huh, yes. I did and I'm cautiously, whatever. Well, I think it builds more evidence in the correct direction, saying that there was once life on Mars, yes? It's a candidate, you know what I mean? It's not confirmation. So they found, basically they found speckles. You know, like these are visible, like naked eye visible with the camera from perseverance. You know, they found rocks that have deposits which on Earth can be created with microbes. Yeah, so yeah, there's two minerals that they found. One's associated with decaying organic matter and the other one is created by microbes on Earth. But of course, these minerals can be generated abiotically, so don't get really excited at all, really, about this. But you would need high temperatures and acidic conditions to create these on Earth. So the most important but here is that there is no evidence currently for any high temperatures or acidic conditions in this area. So what they've basically done is that they've reduced the non-biological origin probability a little bit, but you can't rule it out yet, more studying to be done. And I think chances are it's abiotic. You know, it was created, you know, either at low temperature, you know, low temperature, which we're not sure how possible that is in that area, but it's probably the, you know... But here's probably the bigger point, Bob, is we can't really know for sure unless we get them in an Earth lab. Yeah, we gotta retrieve those samples and bring them back to Earth before we could resolve that question. Had they cut funding for that program to retrieve the vials? No. Jay, did you talk about that on a prior news item? Oh yeah, that was like scrapped and then there was like talk about trying a different way to do it. So NASA's Mars sample return mission has faced significant funding cuts and potential cancellation. Oh my gosh. Cancelization. Cancelization, yeah. Did you hear the NASA administrator, Sean Duffy give a little shout out to Trump to try to, you know, save, you know, to help NASA here? He said, this finding by perseverance launched under President Trump in his first term is the closest we've ever come to blah, blah, blah. It's like he just threw that out there like, wait, okay, I understand what he did. What good is it going to do unless we get the samples back? Yeah, well, I mean, at this point, I think any extra funding from the government would have them make them overjoyed at NASA. Absolutely. And saving, you know, saving any jobs, I think, a little like, you know, Schindler, like I could have saved, you know, 10 more jobs if I just got some more, a little bit more money out of Trump, you know, that kind of scenario. Yeah, or the legislative branch could do their job, you know. Right, and appropriate for money. Well, that's silly what you're talking about, really. They did appropriate the money. They should just assert their right to the purse strings, which is in the Constitution rather than just laying down and letting constitutions, executive branch steal their power. There's not much meaning anymore. Well, back to the point of the significance of this particular news is that it says here, NASA's science mission chief, Nikki Foxx, said, and this is a quote, it's the closest we've actually come to discovering ancient life on Mars. Now, I understand we're inching that direction, but for her to say that seems pretty significant. It's news, it's certainly news, but I'm just not getting my hopes up. Of course. Burned too many times. You know, if there's an abiotic pathway, that's probably going to be it. At least so far, every time that's turned out to be the case. Right, just get back to me when you got something that's three incremental steps and not just one. But I mean, the bottom line is we got to get those rocks back from Mars. And perhaps today's announcement is a, in a political sense, a way of reestablishing the political will to get the funds to get this back. That could be a strategic announcement. Like we really do have to get these samples back to Earth. Most importantly, I just want you to be happy, you know? Oh, Bob's happy. Evan, tell us about Earth's new quasi moon. Yes, I will do that. Can I start by giving a hat tip to Bob for allowing me to borrow the title of his reoccurring segment on the SGU? Yeah, man. I was meant to actually read this and I just got too hip deep into my stuff. So like, please, I'm curious to see what this is all about. Well, Bob, I know you can't see it right now, but I am raising my hat off my head in your direction. This is your quickie with Evan and I'm going to let you know about Earth's newest moon-ish thing that has been added to Earth's slate of naturally occurring companions. Earth, okay, so to review, Earth has one official permanent solid natural satellite object. All those words. That is what? The moon. The moon. The moon. And then we have these mini moons. You know what these are? I think we've talked about these. That's no moon. Yeah, I think we briefly mentioned them. Yep. They're like temporary moons in a sense, right? They're just kind of, oh yeah, we're kind of sharing an orbit for a little while and then they move off, right? Correct. And then the small asteroids temporarily captured by Earth's gravity entering the orbit. And it could be just for a couple hours and some last several months, but eventually the Sun's pole reclaims it. Mine, mine, mine. Exactly, like the ring of power getting cast back into the fires around the tomb, almost like that. As a side note, I looked, there's this thing called Kordolowski clouds, K-O-R-D-Y-L-E-W-S-K-I clouds. Clouds. Stable clouds of dust located at the L4 and L5 Lagrange points. Okay. That's a good place to hang out. Yeah, and they call them ghost moons. Ed Warren would be so proud of that. Oh, God. But they're just, they're just clouds. They're not like real aggregations. They won't form. They will never form. They will never congeal together to form, but they are clouds that orbit, so that's pretty cool. That's why they're ghostly. And look at what they call them ghost moons, yes. Back to mini moons though for a second, and I'm going to get to the quasi moon. Earth doesn't, no fixed number of mini moons. Average of 6.5 of these, six or seven, orbiting Earth at any given time. Now, here's the question. Have we talked specifically on the SGU about quasi moons? Yes. I don't remember. We did? Yeah, because last time they discovered a new, one of these temporary satellites, we talked about it. And that's what we've got again. Because I'm a brand new, well, a announced, recently confirmed and newly announced quasi moon. 2025, PN7 is its designation. This is courtesy of earthsky.org, by the way. Meet Earth's new quasi moon detected on August 29, 2025 by the Pan Stars Observatory on Haleakala, Hawaii. I hope I repeat that. Haleakala. Haleakala. Haleakala. Yeah. They looked at some data on this thing. They had it back in, as far as 2014, from what I could find, and that they've added it all up and they've observed it recently. But 2025, PN7, it has been co-orbital with earth for 60 years now. What? I know. I know. It's been hanging around for a long time, but only now is essentially effectively official. And it's expected to remain for another 60 years before it will transition back to its original horseshoe orbit. I don't know that we've talked about horseshoe orbits, but that is a co-orbital motion in which a smaller body moves in a path that appears horseshoe shaped relative to a larger body. And they describe it like two planets or a planet and an asteroid sharing an orbit around a star. The smaller body's orbit oscillates, but it's overall path when viewed from the reference frame that rotates with the primary body, it forms a horseshoe. So that's why it's called the horseshoe orbit. But for a while, this thing is the earth has it for now, and it will continue to have it for about 60 more years. Two big questions. Yeah. How big and how far away? Yes, those are my next two. 19 meters in diameter, far away, closest, 2.8 million miles farthest, 37.2 miles. So it's out there. I mean, what? That's like a third of the way to the sun, practically. Oh, man. If 32, 37.2 million. Yeah, right. So 2.8 million miles, it will not, yeah, so it's nothing that's going to come that close to earth. So our regular telescopes can't see it. You have to detect it using very special equipment. So I was wondering if it was worth even, imagine if we can just grab it. I know, wouldn't that be, I know, that would be cool. But we have, yeah, but at least, you know, we do have it in a sense for a little while, 60 more years in that far, far out orbit. But there were seven known current, there were seven known quasi satellites of earth known before this and now PN7 makes number eight. So a heartfelt ahoy to 25. Ahoy, ahoy. PN7. Welcome to the crew, man. Welcome and we're sorry we have ignored your presence these past 60 years. It was not nothing personal. This has been your quickie with Evan. I now send it back to Bob who will send it back to Steve. Back to you, Steve. Thank you, Bob and Evan. Yeah, welcome. Jay. What? I mean, people are developing these tiny robots, but how can we get them to move where we want them to go? All right, well, I mean, this is, this isn't like, oh my God, I can't believe it, research, but it is like incremental and very important piece of research for the idea that we would like to control very, very small machines to do a lot of different things. I mean, just alone, you know, with the ability to help people, you know, like an example of it would be that it could deliver medication to a very targeted area in your body. You know, instead of taking a pill that essentially gives your entire body the medication, right? Yeah. It could be like a targeted delivery that can go exactly where a tumor is, for example, or something like that. It's not a tumor. These tiny robots, like historically, they pretty much, they have to be dumb, right? They don't have the space because they're microscopic, you know, they don't have the space for like a processor or a camera, onboard sensors and that type of stuff. Like that, those components right now, like they just can't be shrunk down that small. So that means that these, you know, microbots, they can only respond to, you know, like environmental cues. If you want to make them do something useful, like you want them to deliver drugs, like I said, or clean a contaminated water supply, you're going to need to control them from the outside. And you'd like to control them real time to figure out, you know, a way to make them navigate to get to where they're going or they need to go without them themselves having to do real processing. That's it at its core. So researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, they came up with a different idea about this. So in a new study, William Reinhart and Mark Miskin, they describe a method they're calling artificial space times, which sounds pretty interesting. And I'll tell you why they picked the word space time. So what happens is they let their microbots follow a complex path without any central controller or onboard intelligence, like a real processor onboard these tiny microscopic robots. The trick is that they're actually changing their environment in just the right way so they will automatically go to where they want them to go. And I'll explain how it works. So the microbots are made out of silicon, and they're powered by these tiny, tiny, tiny photovoltaic panels. And those photovoltaic panels act like motors, but only under specific conditions. So when light hits one of those panels, it produces an electro kinetic reaction, which actually pushes the robot forward. So each robot has two of these. So think of them as like a really small tank, right? With two tre- with two treads, one on the left and one on the right. If both of the motors get the same amount of light, the robot will move in a straight line. But if one side is brighter than the other, the motor on the left, say, which is getting more light will move faster, and it'll make it, it'll make the robot turn. And I know that sounds simple, but it was a very difficult thing for them to achieve. And what they had to come up with is, you know, they, what they do is they project patterns of light onto the bottom of the Petri dish using a digital project projector. And from above, you know, it looks like a map, say, with light and dark regions in that the light and dark regions are very specific because as the little robots move through this, they can make them go to any point that they want to just by changing the light and dark areas of the projection. Like I said, because they're reacting to the light that they're seeing. So the robots can't see the map. They're not aware of the map in any way. All they're doing is reacting to their environment, which happens to be an environment that has light as a cue, right? The light actually is making the whole thing happen. So the bright regions pulls them forward, the darker ones slow them down, and this allows them to change direction. I watched a video of it and it works remarkably well. I know that they're incredibly small, but they look like they're moving pretty fast. It's a pretty interesting thing. And it does kind of look like a flat tank. It's really cool. The researchers were saying like you could think of it like the grooves on a record, like the robots are the needle and they're blindly tracing the path that are etched into the landscape in a sense, right? Because that's what the light and dark regions are actually doing. So what makes this study different from the past ones is essentially the math behind it. So Reinhardt and Miskin notice that the motion of the robots follows the same rules of light moving through a curved region of space. How about that? So the starlight, for example, that is bending that goes too close to a black hole. And what they did was that they made a connection between their robots in a light and dark space and essentially the way that relativity works. So this connection that they made means that they can borrow mathematical tools from general relativity and optics to describe or design their light fields and it tracks, it works. Interesting. So they're using equations now that the big man came up with. You know what I mean? You don't have to guess. They don't have to do a lot of testing. They could just calculate exactly how a given pattern will guide the robots and it could be a very complicated environment like mazes, branching channels, whatever it is and they can come up with the light pattern as a mathematical equation. They make it and it works and they're doing it. So in one experiment they designed a light field. It caused the robots to patrol a circular path like security guards walking around, right? In another example, they built a maze and they projected a pattern that let multiple robots find their way to a specific area that they chose without ever touching any of the walls of the dish. And I think the most impressive one was when they created a sorting field, a single static light pattern that made different robots exit a junction through different paths purely based on where they started. So it's complicated and it's working. And the important thing here is that they didn't have to make any real-time adjustments meaning, you know, let's say they're looking at the activity of the robots. The robots are just doing what they're going to do by the way that they're designed, meaning they have the photovoltaic sensors that produce the charge and it really comes down to the design of the light and dark areas. They don't have to tell, hey, robot number 25-7, do turn a little bit to your left. There is none of that real-time communication necessary. The robots will go to where the light directs them to go. So once the projector turns on, that pattern stays fixed and the robots don't need any individual instructions or monitoring. It's really cool. It makes it inherently scalable and you could release thousands of microbots and they'll all follow the same rules all at once. So now you're controlling thousands of or even more of these tiny robots instead of only being able to communicate to a handful of them. And they can't even be as small as they are if they're being communicated to. I feel obligated to tell you this is just a lab setup. The robots aren't, you know, they're operating in a shallow Petri dish with liquid, you know, of a certain height under carefully manipulated lighting. In real-world applications, there'd be a lot of noise in the system. They're right. There'd be random disturbances. There'd be imperfect, you know, manufacturing, you know, the projected light field today. Like you can't work deep inside of a human body or in a murky river, right? So there's restrictions, of course. But again, this is just the beginning and it's a really cool thing that they came up with. Going past the idea that it's a leap, you know, this is a conceptual leap that they came up with. What would the real-world applications be for things like this? Like why are they even doing it? The scalability aspect here is really important because the current systems that exist can only control a few of these microbots at a time because each one of them needs constant tracking and external commands like constant. This method uses a single static light field and it can handle swarms of these things. So it's no problem that it just makes it super easy that way. The simplicity brings down the cost dramatically. So the robots are cheap to make. They're simple. They don't need onboard computers. They don't need onboard power sources. It's just all... There is no intelligence. It's all by the design of the light field. I don't think we should just shrug off a lot of these interesting little things that happen like this because it took thousands and thousands of these to make an iPhone, right? It had to start somewhere a long time ago with people coming up with taking small steps in an unknown direction that later got picked up by other engineers and using research that was done 50 years ago to help them figure out how to do something today. So I think this one seems pretty obvious that there's a cool benefit to it with other labs taking this in other directions as well. I just think overall, this type of research is the exact type of things that need to be done and this is why we shouldn't cut science funding because we want people to do wacky stuff like this because again, it's all part of the aggregate knowledge base that other researchers and scientists and people in the lab can use to make even bigger and more cool things. Eventually, maybe they will be able to put these things in somebody's body and it goes right to where they want it to to do something very specific. Yeah. I mean, this kind of technology is one of those, I think for now, it's like a sleeper technology. Working out the basics doesn't really have a lot of applications, but if we get to this threshold in terms of the level of control and the level of functionality, there could be some amazing applications of it medically. Yeah, it's important. But we just don't know at this point. I think it's really important for people to understand the idea that nothing, no new technology today is just invented out of whole cloth and they have a finished exquisite technology. It is dependent on just millions of hours of human research that came before it just to find out, to figure out small things, make all these little things. Okay, look, we know how this functions now and we know what the chemical reaction does over here. Not one of them by itself really means that much, but it's the aggregate knowledge base that allows more complicated things to develop later on. So we need researchers doing stuff like this. Hey, Jay. Did you see the most recent last week tonight? Because that it was like the thesis statement of John Oliver's main piece. No, tell me what you said. I mean, it was basically just that. We can talk about single studies all we want and we can sort of poke fun at studies that ostensibly look like they're not doing something important for humanity. But ultimately, all of the great discoveries we have are made up of thousands of human hours and hundreds of published studies and it all has to work together. And it's often researchers pursuing some quirky interests or curiosity with no idea of what it was going to lead to. Definitely. I mean, look at it like a web, right? Like you could have all of these different epicenters on that web that are discrete pieces of research and stuff. But eventually they do start to connect and people will start to go, oh, we could take from here, take from here, take from here. And exactly what you said his show was about. Like, absolutely. Yes, it costs a lot of money and it takes a lot of time. But that's where science gets all its cool stuff from. Right. So we have to we have to be OK with that. And that's I think the sad part here is that the government is just stripping all of this research, anything like this. It's just so much of it now is being destroyed. And we're not. We're destroying our scientific research infrastructure. It's terrible. It sucks. But anyway, this is cool. Don't get depressed. Be happy. This is cool little robots now will drive around on a light beam, Steve. Thank you, Jay. So you guys remember back in April when RFC junior. Sorry to bring it down with our. When he predicted that, and this is in quotes, by September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and will be able to eliminate those exposures. Let me check the calendar. It's September. It's September. And he hasn't been able to surpass decades of research in five months, shockingly. Of course, you know, we all suspected that he's making statements like that because he already thinks he knows what, quote unquote, those exposures are. Right. Yeah. You can't like start from scratch and complete any kind of reasonable scientific study in five months. Like we're not going to unravel whatever aspects of autism are remained to be unknown in those five months. He was just setting up this idea that he's going to be blaming vaccines for autism. So here we are in September. And there's a report from the Wall Street Journal and some other outlets that an upcoming HHS report, you know, by RFC is going to tout a link between Tylenol, acetaminophen, or paracetamol in Europe, and autism risk, you know, exposure to Tylenol in pregnancy, you know, mothers and the risk of their child having autism. Isn't that debunked already? It's already debunked, which is the great, it's great. The leak of that. That's what the announcement is going to be. Gives us, you know, science communicators the opportunity to pre debunk it before it even comes out. And maybe they won't bring the paper out. Who knows? But let's just review the evidence really quickly, just so you have the information in case your family was like, oh, I heard there's a link, blah, blah, blah. But let me back up a little bit, because I always like to draw generic, critical thinking, scientific literacy lessons from these individual stories. It's important to recognize that whenever you look for correlations, you'll find them pretty much, you know what I mean? There's going to be correlations pretty much everywhere. It's like, if you're looking for patterns, you will find them. And oftentimes when people are looking like they're doing observational research, meaning they're not doing a controlled study where they're randomizing subjects and either giving them a placebo versus a treatment, they're just looking at the world and saying, oh, if we look at this cohort of people, what happened to them? Like what did they do and what happened? They're just observing what's happening out in the world. There's lots of confounding factors, obviously, because you're not controlling for everything. There's lots of variables. And if you just slice and dice the data in a few different ways, chances are pretty good, you're going to find some correlations. And that's often how preliminary studies are done. You may look for 20 correlations or you may look for 100 correlations. And this is not really to confirm any kind of cause and effect relationship. You're literally, you're just on a fishing expedition. You're just saying, Hey, is there any signal out there? And then that is meant really only to create a hypothesis that there may be a correlation there. Then you have to confirm it with a fresh set of data where you're looking just at that, right? Also, these kinds of studies tend to have a massive false positive. Let's just buy their design. Again, this is like screening tests are meant to have false positives. That's how they are designed. Statistically, et cetera. Cause you're screening, right? You want to capture everything. And then you follow up with a more careful or detailed or precise analysis to see if what you're finding is real. Does that make sense? So what that means from a practical point of view is that there's, there's always going to be these preliminary evidence for all kinds of correlations. Of course. And right. And not only that, it goes both ways. If you just look at, oh, let's look at some exposure to some food. If anything gets worse, it's a risk. If anything gets better, it's a cure. You know what I mean? It's like anything can happen and it becomes either, oh, this will prevent this disease or this will cause that disease. It's meaningless. It's noise in the background. That's meant for researchers to say, okay, let me pick up the ball and see if this is real, right? To really confirm or deny this hypothesis. That's the important point there too. It's like you have to actually be doing hypothesis testing. You can't just go, let's look at big data and see what trends in a certain direction because everything's correlated with everything. Yeah, that's right. You're just, you're going to find things. You got to, that's not a confirmation. You have to then later confirm it. Okay. Although there are analyses you could do to see how strong that correlation is and if it's applying a particular or favoring a particular causal relationship. There's always a lot of details in there. Yeah. All right. But if you're, if you're RFK junior, right, or you're a wellness warrior or I'm now, I guess a maha loser or whatever, right? You're somebody whose career is based upon this kind of thing to eat this superfood, to be healthy or avoid this cancer risk or whatever, then all of these preliminary correlations are gold, right? I mean, you could dumpster dive through all of these preliminary, mostly incorrect correlations to weave whatever tail will sell your supplement or make people afraid or whatever it is that you're trying to do, right? Build your guru career, you know, as a wellness idiot, right? This is the world in which RFK junior lives. He clearly has demonstrated he has no idea how to properly interpret the scientific literature and he just cherry picks these scary preliminary data to tell whatever story he wants to tell. And of course, sometimes he will cherry pick studies that were done by pseudoscientists that there are, there are terrible studies just to make whatever point he wants to make, like that vaccines cause everything, for example. Okay. So yes, there is, having said all of that, there is preliminary data where if you just look at the raw data, there is this tiny effect really, there's this tiny correlation between mothers using Tylenol and pregnancy and increased association with either autism or ADHD or other neurodevelopmental disorders, right? However, so that's almost certainly what RFK junior is going to be touting if he does go through with this report or what others have stated that there's this correlation. But the thing is we've already done the follow up research in this case, right? If we hadn't, I would be saying we have to wait, we have to do the follow up studies. We don't really know this is preliminary. But now I get to say we've done the follow up studies, right? So in 2024, which is fairly recent, there was a pretty high quality review. They looked at a national, the Swedish national database and this review included data on 185,000 children. So it's pretty statistically robust. Again, this is an observational, correlational study, not a cause and effect study. So they did find, yes, there's this very small increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders with Tylenol use in pregnancy. But there are two reasons to think that this is not a real cause and effect. One is there was no dose response curve, right? So if a drug is causing a benefit or a substance is causing a risk or harm, you would expect that more of it would cause more of a harm, right? You call that a dose response relationship or a dose response curve. And so it's good to include that analysis of what they did with this. And okay, if we go, if we compare the lowest 25th percentile of exposure to acetaminophen and then the middle medium 25 to 75th and then the highest 75th, greater than 75th percentile, is there an increase and there wasn't. It was a flat line. There was, it was random. There was no dose response curve. So that really argues pretty strongly against there being any kind of causal effect here, but even more definitive than that, the authors did what's called a sibling control analysis. And this is a way to control for confounding factors, right? Remember with an observational data, the biggest weakness is that there are confounding factors, meaning there are factors you are not controlling for and you are not randomizing and that could be seen in the data. For, you know, and like the simplest way to think about this is if a correlates with B, you can't assume if it's an observational study that A causes B. It's possible that B causes A. It's possible that C causes A and B, right? So it's possible that pregnant women who are more likely to take Tylenol have something else going on that could also make them more likely to have a child with a neurodevelopmental disorder. So one way to control for this is to do a sibling control analysis. With that, what you do there is you use the subject's sibling as a control. And so you have like one sibling with the exposure of interest and one sibling without the exposure of interest, right? So you could say during my mother's pregnancy with me, she took Tylenol, but with my mother's pregnancy with Jay, she did not take Tylenol, right? So you've kind of isolated the Tylenol exposure from all of the familial and genetic and some of the environmental factors. There's enough of those kinds of case of candidates to make a study? Absolutely. And so they did that kind of sibling control analysis and the correlation completely goes away. There is no correlation once you control for that basic familial confounding factors, right? And that's for any of the three, any neurodevelopmental, either autism ADHD or other neurodevelopmental disorders. So that's pretty definitive. That means that there is no real correlation between Tylenol use and autism or other disorders. And the authors conclude that prior studies showing a possible link may have been attributable to familial confounding, right? To these confounding factors. So this is pretty robust evidence. It's a large study. It's well done. And again, those two things lack of a dose response curve. The effect goes away when you control for confounding factors. That's always the death now in an observational study. Like when you control for confounding factors, the effect goes away. And it wasn't real to begin with, right? It was due to the confounding factors that you're now controlling for. So, but this is like three layers too deep for somebody like RFK, right? Who doesn't care about this? He's just saying, oh, look, there's a possible link. That's enough to scare a monger about it. Look, I kept my promise. I found the exposure that's causing our autism epidemic or whatever. He'll do a victory lap is what I predict. So we'll see what actually happens. But it's good that the data is already there, that science communicators are already getting out there saying, nope, there's no evidence for this. The evidence does not support a link. The other issue here is that Tylenol is really the only safe way to treat fever and pregnancy. Scaring women against using that could have harm. It's not just like, oh, who cares? You know, so generally speaking, we tell pregnant women not to take any medications they don't absolutely have to take. That's sort of standard procedure. But if you're having a lot of pain, that's not benign. That is potential risk for a pregnant woman. And if you may not be getting enough nutrition or whatever, there's all kinds of things that you may be spending too much time in bed or whatever. You may, you know, there's that's a risk factor. Also, fever, you know, can be a risk factor. So telling women, don't treat your fever or pain during pregnancy is not a benign thing to do. No, it also just perpetuates, I think these, I don't want to even say decades, centuries long biases in healthcare against treating women's pain, just being like, just deal with it, you know, even if, let's say a woman who is pregnant is having a severe pain that is not linked to anything dangerous, right? Even if she doesn't have a fever or it's not indicative of some sort of harm, it will cause bad psychological outcomes. Yeah. She will re like it will contribute probably to depression during the pregnancy. It will contribute to negative emotions about her pregnancy. If she feels unwell and she doesn't have options in front of her, it's like, it, I don't, I just, it just feels like another one of these ways to like blame mothers like we used to do in the fifties. Totally. This is that people have brought that up as well. This is just an extension of the idea that mothers are to blame for their child's conditions, even when it's, we know from mountains of evidence that autism, for example, is dominantly genetic. That doesn't mean to say there are no environmental factors that might affect that, but it's dominantly genetic. It's not dominantly environmental, which RFK seems to believe again, against all evidence and also keep in mind like Tylenols are first line treatment for migraines. We're not just talking about, oh, I have a, I stubbed my toe or something. And, you know, a migraine during pregnancy could mean significant disability, nausea and vomiting, things that are again, not benign for the pregnancy or the mother themselves. And so everything is a risk versus benefit, right? Everything in medicine is risk versus benefit. So it's not as simple as saying, well, just avoid all risk, you know, at all costs. Like, ah, life is not that easy. You avoid one risk, you incur another. Right? If you're by avoiding that risk, you're also avoiding the potential benefit. And so you have to make a more rational sort of decision about where is the optimal balance, you know, of risk versus benefit in any, for each individual patient, each individual situation. This kind of fear mongering based upon misreading of the evidence is harmful. It is literally harmful. And I don't even, I mean, like, I feel like it's even charitable to call it misreading of the evidence. I think it's, it's confirmation bias in a group of people who fundamentally are pushing an agenda that's anti-medicine. Completely. Yeah. It's, it's basically this weird sort of paleo viewpoint that somehow more medicine is worse. And if you can live a quote, clean lifestyle, avoid any pharmaceuticals and avoid any sort of intervention that it's going to be healthier for you. I mean, it's the same, it's the anti-vax. It's all of it. And it's just so dangerous. Absolutely. All right. Well, Kara, you're going to talk next about the music choices we make as we age. Yeah. I'd love to take a mini poll, just of the, of the rogues today. How many of you, okay, first and foremost, do you tend to listen to more music from when you were younger or more music from the recent past? Younger, yeah. I'm influenced by my daughter in this regard. So I don't know how typical I am, but one of the things Rachel and I do, we go to concerts together. So a lot of my music is more contemporary. You're listening to what she listens to. Exactly. Right. And I do like keeping up with what she is listening to. I agree. That's our way of bonding. The second category of music I listen to is music my daughters listen to. Yeah. 100%. And would you say that that makes up like half of your listening? Yeah. Most of your listening? Yes. Yeah. How do you say, probably half and half my youth, their youth, very little like current, you know, music that is not, I'm not being exposed to to somebody. I'm definitely a blend. I'm a 50-50 blend. Okay. And then for, let's say for like Jay and Bob, do you use any sort of service like Spotify or something like that, that recommends music to you? I don't let anybody recommend music to me. So you, you only listen to what you want to listen to. That's right. Yeah. I mean, you know, I will hear stuff that my kids like. And, you know, there's a few, few recent artists that I definitely like. And I'll, every once in a while, I hear some of their new stuff. But I mean, in my mind, you know, I just can't find anything that's better than the stuff from the late 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Like I, you know, I just, I don't know. Is it my age? I don't know, Cara. And so I'm going to talk about a study that is not going to tell us the why it's going to tell us more the what. And it's going to tell us something that we already knew, but this is the first time apparently that we have like scientific evidence to back up the claim that as we get older, we focus on fewer and fewer favorite songs and our musical taste narrows. But what I love is that the authors, instead of talking about our musical tastes narrowing, they use, I don't want to call them euphemisms, but I guess their, their language bias is probably because they're older as well towards our musical taste becomes more refined as we. And so here's what they did. It's actually a really interesting approach. So it's three. Season. Yeah. More seasoned. And I want to hear what your answer is to Cara. Oh, I'm 100% same. Like I listen to stuff I listen to in high school all the time, all the time. And, and some kind of vintage stuff from before that I do listen to some current and modern music, but by and large, I would say that. So I work out of, at a gymnastics gym and I'm definitely the oldest person. Well, I think technically the second oldest person there. And oftentimes when they're playing music, I'm, I'm like, I've never heard this before. I have no idea who this is. They'll mention the name of the artist and I'm like, okay. Yeah. And, and I'm, by the way, 41 years old, like I am, I'm not old. I'm not young. But so these universities, this international study, what they decided to do is try to understand people's music habits a little bit more, especially focusing on like different artists and different genres that individuals listen to. And the way they did it is by looking at big data from a service called Last FM. This is a music service where you can sort of feed in your listening habits, like from a place like Spotify and build out a profile so that you can get more sort of more of an analysis of your own musical habits and tastes. And when people make profiles on Last FM, they put in their age. Now we don't have a lot of data on how these algorithms work over long periods of time because they haven't been around for that long. So this is one of the earliest studies that was able to look at 15 years of data. And they looked at over 40,000 users. So we're talking like almost 550 million plays. And they looked at over a million different songs across those 15 years. So they wanted to see how people's music listening habits changed over time. And they were especially curious because this was actually published as an extended abstract in a proceeding, like a conference proceeding at UMAP, which is user modeling, adaptation and personalization. So these are scientists who are interested in how these different services feed you what you want to hear. Like how do these algorithms work in such a way that the end user is enjoying their experience? And basically, they found that programs like Spotify or companies like Spotify, they're not targeting older people in a different way than they target younger people. But older people's habits are different than younger people's habits. Younger people are really interested in new music. They're really interested in novelty. They're interested in trying on different hats, different personalities, different genres. They want to hear stuff they haven't heard before. Older people by and large, not everybody, but by and large, they tend to, and this is their quote, which I think is lovely, middle-aged listeners appreciate a balance between new and familiar. While older listeners want more tailored recommendations that reflect their personal tastes and nostalgic reminiscences. What they found is that older people's music habits by and large focus on songs from their youth. That people do go back and listen to songs from when they were younger. And as they put it, musical tastes becomes more quote, unique, the older the listener is. So like they claim that teenagers will often find a lot of common favorite songs with other people their age, even if they're sort of in different cliques or, you know, go to different schools. Whereas as you get older, your musical tastes may become more specific. And it may be harder for you to meet other people your age who are into the same kind of music you are. You know, like I have an ex-boyfriend who just listened to like death metal all day, every day. I mean, he would hate that that's how I'm classifying his musical tastes, because in his view, it was incredibly varied, right? But it was all just hard. He listened to a ton of hardcore music. And, you know, he was in his mid-40s. I don't think he had a lot of friends who were listening to music that was as intense as the music that he listened to. He had a handful of them, but for the most part, people were like, bro, I can't get into this. It's like loud. Can you turn it down? And I see that across the board, you know, I've got a lot of friends who still listen to punk rock. They love their punk rock. And for my friends who aren't into punk rock, they just don't like it. And so it's hard to find commonality and to talk about music with your friends and to go do musical things with your friends unless you maybe went to school with them or you already bonded over those musical similarities, but definitely kind of making new friends as an adult. You do learn that you might have a ton of stuff in common and then you're kind of surprised by how different their musical taste is than yours. I've found that that's happened a lot. Kara, I just reconnected with someone I hadn't spoke to since 1991. I mean, this year, and this was during this was my last year of college. This person was into heavy metal. I mean, real heavy stuff. I asked him kind of what he's listening to now. He's like, oh, Billy Joel. Like what? No way. It took me for it through me for a loop. Had no idea. So that's interesting. I wonder how much of it is just a changing music itself versus our changing life situation. Like when we were younger, we were in school and we had lots of exposure to people who were like playing new albums and you would get to hear them. And you know what I mean? Like there seemed like there was a set of new stuff coming out that you got exposed to and you could sort of choose what you liked. And now I wouldn't know where to go. Like there's just so much out there. And the stuff you hear on the radio is largely crap, you know. Well, but that's also an older person perspective. You have to remember that too. Because like if we take any cross section of time, the older set is going to say that that that new fangled music is crap. But it's not just that. Because when I had, when my daughters were at that stage, when they were still living at home, they were in high school or whatever. And they were sampling a lot of different groups. First of all, they were into a lot of older groups. They were listening to foreigner and stuff from our generation. Then they were listening to new groups that they otherwise wouldn't heard about. So I was able to select the ones that I liked. And then I got into, you know, Muse and Arctic Monkeys and stuff like that. That I otherwise never would have gotten into. Which is now old again. I know it's not old. So there's got to be good bands out there that I would get into now if I had the ability to get exposed to them. But I just don't think it's the pop stuff that you're hearing. It's more like the next layer stuff that's maybe not alternative. It's alternative stuff. Well, but even if we're talking about one genre like alternative, which is a has a million sub-shocs within it. I think probably what not just what these researchers are kind of getting at, but also what individuals working behind the scenes at companies like Spotify and Pandora, hopefully are focusing on is the idea that people get dialed in to their tastes and they like the nostalgia of their youth. But there is always new music that has some sort of connective tissue, some sort of flavor, some sort of vibe. And it is hard to pick out what those variables are. Right. Is it a tempo? Is it like a beat? Is it, you know, the the timbre of somebody's voice? Is it sort of the sounds of the guitars? But there were always Spotify doing that. Why aren't they? They are stuff that I should like. They are. And so you there are settings within all of these different apps where you can have a mix and then you can put it on like a smart mix or whatever they call it, where it will recommend things to you. But what these individuals are saying is that they're doing that to an 18 year old and to a 65 year old the same way. And what they probably should be doing is narrowing that algorithm for the older individuals so that there's not as broad a mix being kind of thrown at them because they're less likely to go, oh, I like this. And they're more likely to just downvote everything that doesn't sound just like what they liked before. They're just not intentionally searching for new music. And so it's not to say that older people wouldn't engage with newer music, but that newer music probably needs to be more narrowly focused on their established tastes, as opposed to having, I guess, a really eclectic, let's throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks approach, which works with younger people. What do you think, Che? I mean, you know, if it weren't for Rick Beato, I would be agreeing with Cara. I mean, it seems like every generation kind of has this experience. The bottom line is I think that there's a very, very real world reasons why music, the quality of music in general is not as good as it used to be. And this comes from a deep analysis of the complexity of the popular music today. So I think it's kind of both. I think that because of companies like Spotify and Pandora and that whole streaming model, it's denutted bands from being able to make money. And it's changed the industry so much that there isn't the same quality of bands out there. The vetting process is not the same. There used to be promoters and people that their job was to find new talent. And there was a there was a cream rising to the top effect here. Yeah, I disagree. I think now we have a cream rising to the top effect. It doesn't rise as high to the top, but we're not also buried in more stuff. That was just so much out there. But that's the thing to us. It's buried, but not to people. You know, a 17, 18 year old right now who is on TikTok knows who the hot people are, who is like using SoundCloud, who is looking at these different outlets and they're finding people who have a completely democratized approach to music. There aren't the barriers to entry that they used to have. And yes, there is so much more music out there. And it's harder for us like old people to figure out how to dig through it. We're just not plugged in. Is that what you're saying? We're just not plugged in. But the thing is I would argue, J, that actually removing all of those barriers to entry, yes, it might make it harder for you or for me to find that incredible music. You know, pop's going to always be pop. There's always going to be the stuff where we're like, I don't get this. I don't get this top 40. Why is this so popular? But when you can, when anybody can self produce an album and publish it, the quality of music is going to go up. It just is because there are going to be people who didn't have access before that now have access. I think it's largely the pop music that that Rick Beato is talking about. And sure, I mean, there could be millions of diamonds in the rough. Throughout all of these streaming services that I just don't have a pathway to get to. Yeah. And that's I think that's really what this is about is how can these music services improve that pathway for older adults who just don't want to dedicate that much time or energy? But I think we all have to be careful not to fall victim to. I mean, I guess this could be a name that logical fallacy where we tend to compare the best of our tastes to the worst of other people's tastes. That's not fair. Because I hear I hear it a lot, especially with the older people argument that like in my day, music was amazing because the Beatles were great. But now what is this crap? And it's like, well, but you're picking like a top 40. I agree with you. I just want people to tell me who are the great bands of today so I can listen to. Yeah. Why would it be so hard for them to for people like us to even find out about them if they're that freaking good, you'd figure we'd know about them. And we're going to get emails with people telling us, giving us their recommendations and do it. I want to hear them. I seriously, I would love to be plugged in to ways of finding great new music. So I don't get bored. I love this stuff from the from the old days, but I'm getting bored with it. Yeah. And here's the thing. Here's the big difference, right? Teenagers have more time than we do. Yeah. They put their time and effort into this. Young people go to festivals. I just don't go to festivals. No, I know. When I was young, I would listen to the radio. When I was in the car now, I listen to the news. Exactly. And like when I want to see a band, which is rare anymore, and that's not because I don't love music, but I need to I need to have my earplugs and I need to have a seat. I don't want to be standing all night. But when I want to see a band, I'm going to go see a band I love and I want to, you know, and I actually am annoyed if a band that I love just put out an album and I haven't really had a chance to get into it. And that's all they play at the show. Like I want to hear the stuff that I love. Whereas when I was young, I would go to huge musical festivals like music festivals that had like 15, 20 bands playing. And I might go, oh, I've never heard this before. This is pretty good. Yeah, I don't do. I don't seek that. I don't seek novelty out the way I used to. Yeah, it's complicated. And so we've got to remember, too, it's a lot of it. This is user error. Yeah, I totally agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. You know, 41 is kind of old. I don't know. Listen to the kid sing like Sinatra. It's crap. Get off my lawn. And we didn't even talk about A.I. creating music. Well, then the A.I. Slop is going to be we're going to get buried in that for sure. Yeah. Oh my gosh, there's going to be millions of songs. Does anybody do people like A.I. Slop? Nobody actually likes A.I. Slop, right? No, but it's out there. I know it's out there and it's burying everything. But are people actually choosing to listen to it? Or is it like that U2 album that was on the iPod? And not know they're listening to it. Yeah, yeah. That's or it may be the favorite music of all. And the thing is, it's going to get just good enough that it's like mediocre. And it already is. It's in the range of the shit that's already out there. You know what I mean? It's going to definitely come across songs before where I'm like, I don't think these are this is a real band. It's going to explode the low end of the music distribution. Make it even harder to find the good stuff. Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Quince. You know, here at SU, we love Quince. They have all the false staples that you will wear all the time, like super soft, 100 percent Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at just $60. And they partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen. So you get top tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands. But it's not just clothes. They've got all sorts of things for your home and jewelry, too. Right, Jay? So last Mother's Day, I gave my wife those those earrings. Remember I told you about the Quince earrings? So my wife goes ahead and loses one of them. So the bottom line is she calls up Quince and they said, send us back the one you have and we will send you a brand new pair. Who does that today? That's amazing. Great customer service. This brand is fantastic. You know, that cinched it for me. I love their clothes, but like their customer service is fantastic. So keep it classic and cool this fall with long lasting staples from Quince. Go to quince.com slash SGU for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash SGU free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash SGU. All right, guys, let's get back to the show. All right, Bob, tell us about mind reading wearables. I'll premise this by saying the article you sent me I did not like. Yeah, actually there was. There's not a lot about this out there. So I'll take some of this with the grain of salt. Some of the text seemed interesting, but let's just jump in and we can discuss it. Alter Ego is a startup spin off from MIT was recently in the news again describing a wearable device that allows people to silently communicate back and forth with either an AI or a computer or other people just by thinking the words. They claim they claim their primary focus is to help people with speech disorders, but it also has a plethora of other potentially interesting uses as well. The MIT website describes the device like this. Alter Ego is a noninvasive wearable peripheral neural interface that allows humans to converse in natural language with machines, artificial intelligence, and assistance services and other people without any voice. So yeah, so this started as a project at the MIT Media Lab in 2018 and it was spun off officially, I guess, this year as a for-profit company called Alter Ego. Arnav Kapoor is an MIT graduate, Harvard Medical School researcher and of course CEO of Alter Ego. So he said this, he describes his technology at a TED Talk back in 2019. So what six years ago, he said, imagine talking to yourself without vocalizing, without moving your mouth, without moving your job, but simply by articulating those words internally. Thereby, very subtly engaging your internal speech system, such as your tongue and the back of your palate. When that happens, the brain sends extremely weak signals to these internal speech systems. Kapoor then describes next that they had developed a sensor that they developed for your face and neck that could pick up those subtle signals, allowing an AI to turn these patterns into the words that they represented that you were consciously sub vocalizing. The AI then silently answers your query with whatever it may be by using bone conduction that travels to the inner ear that you can then hear seemingly normally, but without apparently drowning out, apparently without drowning out whatever else that you may be hearing at the time. Right? So you could, it's not going to disrupt what you may be hearing necessarily. So that's how Alter Ego works in a nutshell. That process kind of makes sense how this works. One question I had here, you may have as well, why does this inner speech even send these faint muscle signals in their first place that they don't even move the muscles, but these signals are being sent when you're just thinking about words, specifically thinking about why does that happen? It's the motor planning area, Bob. Yeah. Well, yeah. There was a lot of technical reasons why that's the case. One way to describe it that made some sense and see if you agree with this, Steve, one answer is that it's ultimately faster and cheaper for the brain to allow some of the signal leakage to the speech muscles than it would be to perfectly isolate those muscles from inner speech. So we're just like, oh, yeah, some of the signal gets out. It doesn't do anything. It doesn't really, it doesn't move any muscles really, but it's just like, it's easier to do that than to really isolate the muscles. I would go further than that because, go further. You know, I wrote recently on Neurological blog about a study where they're charting the brain process. This is in a mouse brain, but they basically totally mapped out everything that's happening in a mouse brain when the mouse is doing certain tasks. Right. Right. Specific decision making tasks. And what they found was is that the sensory and motor areas were far more involved in that process of thinking and decision making than was previously suspected. So we actually think with our motor cortex, if that makes sense, to some extent, it's involved. That's why we're so embodied, you know, and it's absolutely these circuits are all really so it makes perfect sense. Like if you're thinking about yourself hitting a tennis ball, the muscle, the motor part of your brain that is involved with that task is lighting up, even if you're not moving, right? Right. So it's actually a nice feature that we can exploit to do this sort of thing. Right. Exactly. And that's exactly what we're doing. And Steve, it also reminds me of, I remember studies that I read many years ago. Hopefully it's probably still correct that when you're dreaming and doing things in your dream and moving that they could detect those same those those same patterns in your brain that are that are being activated because you're because you're big, you know, you are moving in the dream. So your your brain kind of thinks you are moving. Right. And in a real way, when you are thinking of a picture, you're the same part of your brain lights up as when you're looking at the picture. It's the same thing, right? So it works with perception as well. So Kapoor says at this point in his TED talk, he was he was very clear that he said, just to be very clear, the device does not record or read your thoughts. The control resides with the user. And so yeah, he specifically said that he seemed it seemed like he was making a very important point. And of course it is. You don't want to have you don't want to think about some device actually reading your thoughts and you having no control because that's obviously quite scary. And that's not the case with this specific tech. And this idea though ties ties into the big distinction between this specific technology and most brain interface technologies that we've discussed in the past. Directly recording brain activity. You need something that's somewhat evasive. Either it's going to be a full on implant in like under your skull in your brain somewhere, maybe even the surface of your brain, but in your beyond your skull. But also it could be all the way down to something like electrodes that are attached to your bare scalp, right? So is that right? Is that accurate enough, Steve? That's kind of like the range of invasiveness that you'd be dealing with. Yeah, there are scowl electrodes. There are stent electrodes in your in the vessels in your brain. Then there's like brain surface electrodes and then deep brain electrodes. So those are obviously quite problematic. You know, they're effective for that type of technology, but it's invasive. It's invasive and they really need to nail down how to make it less invasive and more permanent because even connections in the brain eventually will drift and need to be addressed. So alter ego is less invasive than in two ways. It slips on easily and gives users more control over what is shared. It's only things that you are specifically and volitionally saying or thinking with your mind. So it's less invasive in those ways. And this technology, I guess it's not a surprise. It fits very well with what Kapoor has his earlier beliefs about the relationship of humanity with technology. He's long advocated for technologies and AI to be developed that integrate and extends human capabilities, but to augment us instead of diminishing us, as he says, or replacing us. And I'm sure many people would agree with that these days, with what's going on with AI, especially with artwork and things like that. So Kapoor describes alter ego as giving you the experience of a conversational AI that lives inside your head that you could talk to like you're talking to yourself internally. It's like basically your alter ego, if you will, your other mind in a sense is the entirety of the internet could eventually be accessible as a way of talking to yourself. So that he finds that very interesting. So what are some of the potential uses for this technology? Technology. So I kind of categorize this into several, several buckets here. So one category of use cases, if you will, would be for disabilities. So people that have trouble communicating due to due to conditions like ALS or stroke, cancer, laryngectomy or dysphonia, which I think is that what RFK Junior has? He has dysphonia. Yeah, exactly what I said. So so that's that's like the they said this was their primary focus is to help people with these disabilities. And I mean, people that can't really talk or communicate like that, they can use a computer in some ways and and and craft sentences. But it takes it takes a while to do that. This is something that could help them communicate so much more simply and easily and quickly. So I think it could be an incredible boon for a lot of these these these sufferers. But another use case category here is for when obviously when silence is important. So when, for example, when talking to somebody in a medical setting could increase infection risk, right? Because sometimes you just don't want droplets being shared, you know, being launched into the air. So the less you talk, the lower the infection risk. So this could be used for that specific example. But also there's broadcast sets, there's courtrooms, libraries, covert research where silence is important, that this technology could be very helpful. Another another category is if hearing is obscured for whatever reason. So fire rescue teams are trying to coordinate information amongst other rescue team members and their sirens and other noises on site. You could communicate this way without worrying about people not hearing you. But also construction sites, concerts, factories, motorcyclists. All these are all scenarios where hearing could be greatly impaired. And this type of communication could be great, great, you know, greatly helpful. Now, a lot of this technology, I was surprised that a lot of this technology seems to have already been fairly well developed, at least according to the demos that I saw for at least like for five or six years, they had the basics of what I've been discussing. It's it seems it seemed to me. So some of the limitations that they that they experience, I think, would be something like speaker training. There's probably a deal, a great deal of speaker training that's probably going to be required if you had this technology right now. Also, I think that remember when I said that this this device will read those signals and map using an AI to map those signals to words. Well, I found out that they had a 92 percent accuracy rate, but that was only with a very constrained vocabularies. So that's so and so these weren't really real world world testing with people that you have normal vocabularies. So so 92 percent, you got to take that with a you know, with the grain. So that's not I mean, yeah, so that's so maybe this is one of the areas where they've improved in the past five or six years. And there's also reliability issues that are that are very likely. Like if what if you're walking and sweating and what if you're you're you're walking fast and the motion of your body interferes with this device? It's and this isn't a subtle device. This is hanging over your ear down the side of your ear face, cross the top of your neck and then up under your lips. I mean, this is not a subtle thing that you're wearing. It's not very covert at all. If you wear this, it's like those Google glasses with the with the beeping light, the leaping, you know, the flashing light on it. I'm just curious what improvements have been made in the past half decade on this. And I think we're going to find out pretty soon. Kapoor will discuss alter egos technology live this September 17th at Axios AI Summit in Washington, D.C. So next week, I might be able to have a quick little update on this technology and where it is now as opposed as opposed to a lot of the information, which is kind of at a date, probably by this point right now. But it seems interesting and it's got some possibilities for some niche scenarios that could help a lot of people. But Steve, so what's your take? What's your take on this and what I said? My take is that it looks dorky. The guy's wearing the device. Yeah, it's not subtle. It's not subtle at all. Yeah, I mean, sure, it's it's not implausible that if you're like sub vocalizing basically and it's picking up on your muscle contractions and interpreting that with 90 something percent accuracy, that's not implausible. But the question is how transparent are they being about how big the whole thing is and like what is connecting to and what its real functionality is? I'm just trying to find like really solid technical details and there's just not a lot of that out there. Hopefully next week we'll have more information. So I'll definitely chime in next week as to what what was released since then. I don't like them calling it telepathy, though. That's just no. No, I think that's all like other. You know, I didn't see MIT referring to it as telepathy at all. I mean, I have seen like near telepathic in some places. So yeah, they they're not saying that this this is telepathy. And of course, you know that that websites are going to grab on to that idea and couch it in those terms. I worry about this technology because it sounds like it could really mess people up. Why? Because, you know, if you're if you're like have a direct connection in your brain just by thinking to access the internet and all that stuff, like, come on. Yeah, you're just talking about the application of being plugged in. Yeah, plugged in without a deeper level. Interact overtly with the world. Right. It's definitely a deeper connection that we can experience now. Hands free, voice free. It's, you know, it's any kind of is. Imagine, imagine you think a question and then you hear an answer with no external keyboards or voice interactions. That's got to be a weird feeling. I think we need to we got to like stop moving in the direction of being insular and actually like, you know, have communities and kids got to go out and ride their bikes. You know, how to survive those days. I don't know. Evan, tell us about these decreasing science scores. Yeah, sorry, I wish I had better news here. Latest results from the National from the Nations Report card officially known as the National Assessment of Education Progress or N A E P. We have some we have some problems here about science, education in America. OK, so this assessment, they assessed 23,000 eighth grade students at 600 different schools that participated in this science test, which covered physical science, life science, as well as earth and space sciences. And this test was taken in 2024, but the assessment is now been analyzed and they've released the results. 2024 eighth grade science scores dropped by four points. And that erases all of the gains that had been made since 2009 when they started to perform this particular assessment. So we can't go back more than 15 years on this particular one. And we also need to point out that this is the first time they've resumed it since the pandemic, so for what that's worth. On the test, the scores ranged from zero to 300 and a four point drop on a scale like that, you know, it doesn't sound huge, but in the world of educational assessments, they say that's considered a serious decline. Only 31 percent of eighth graders scored at or above the proficient level. And that means roughly two thirds of middle schoolers do not have a solid grasp of science concept that they are expected to know by the end of middle school. More than one third of the students scored below the basic level, indicating they don't fully understand fundamental concepts. For example, plants need sunlight to grow a concept like that. This particular assessment parallels a trend in math and reading scores for fourth and eighth graders, which was done by another assessment that was released in earlier this year in January, which showed similar declines. They also did an analysis or part of the assessment. Students enjoyment and interest in science. In 2019, 52 percent of eighth graders said they enjoyed science activities. 20, 24, 42 percent, a 10 percent decline. Interest in learning science fell from those years, 47 percent down to 39 percent, eight percent drop. Fewer students are believing that doing well in science actually matters in the real world, either for their future careers or understanding how the world actually works. Around them. And you can, you know, there's there's reasons they believe are attributable to this. You know, they call them the equity gaps who's being left behind. Unfortunately, girl scores dropped by five points. Boys scores dropped by three. So we have another gender gap here in science that is on the widening path again. And that reverses years of having made progress in that particular area. Asian American students were the only group to improve, gaining two points. Caucasian students averaged 161 just above the basic threshold. Hispanic students averaged 137 on the scores. American Indian and Native Alaskan, Alaska Native students, 132. And Black students 130, all considered below basic level. Cool. Yeah. A little bit of, you know, if you if you pick through it a little bit, you do find maybe a sliver or a, you know, what is called silver lining. The science test scores, they don't contain state level data that would paint a better picture, say of how California is faring compared to the rest of the country. There's something called the California Science Test, CAST, CAST. And that test that is done annually has increased a point, actually went up one point. So maybe we need to, you know, turn to states like California to see kind of what they're doing to help reverse this this overall trend nationwide. Yeah, I mean, that's sure. But who's going to actually do that? I mean, we're so polarized, you know, the government isn't going to do anything that California is doing. Yeah, that's a fair point, Jay. We're kind of in a climate right now in which that's less likely to happen, maybe then more likely. But Evan, I wonder how much of this is still just all the pandemic effect? It could be. Experts point to several factors and many of them. It's not a good time to identify a long term trend. Right. Right. We're in the midst of this short term effect. Yeah. And I'm not even sure how long 15 years is. I mean, that's it's a decent amount of years, but I don't know if that's really if that's really long enough even. I mean, we have to they're going to run this test again, apparently in 2028. And we'll get results in 2029 and figure out, you know, and let's see how another post pandemic set of tests come out. So let's remain a little optimistic there. You know, that this is limited, but we do have to be aware of it. We need to make sure that teachers get the resources and support and training that they need to do the job, the real hard job that they have. And, you know, and spread out. And we got it. We got to do better and making sure that all students have have as much access to science learning as possible and not make it, you know, just spotty, you know, for some students rather than others. And I don't know anything we can do to help reignite students curiosity, you know, and make it applicable to the real world, which is which is exactly what it is. We have to get them to get into that mindset as well. Yeah, I know it's easily said, but I know we have to be aware of it, though. We have to be aware and we have to want it. Yes, we have to like parents have to want this. They have to vote for people who are promoting this. Correct. All right. Jay is who's that noisy time? All right, guys, last week I played this noisy. Yeah. All right, you guys recognize this? Yes, that's from the band Tangerine Dream from the 1970s. Speaking of old music, thank you. Next one. OK, well, I'm going to start here with Visto Tutti because he is my standard bear. Visto says this sounds like the sounds one hears when under a steel bridge as vehicles pass over above the bridge in quotes sings as it resonates with the load of traffic. I really, really like this guess and I've heard that sound that he's talking about. I get it and it definitely has a very similar vibe to it, but that is not correct. Michael Saucito said, hey, Jay, sounds like audio from an external camera on the ISS during a spacewalk or external repair. That one, too, is a cool guess. That is not it. I have not heard that sound. I'd like to hear that if I can find it. And, you know, again, of course, that sound has to be like vibrating through solid matter because it's not going to go from an external source outside to anywhere because there's no atmosphere. But yeah, I could see that it would have a similar sound because it would have to go through metal, of course. Right. Michael Blaney wrote in. He said, hi, Jay. Really getting the Star Trek, the original series vibes here. Some glowing orbs making a weird sound. Kirk is keeping an eye out for danger. Not really paying attention while Spock is raising an eyebrow, scanning away and saying, fascinating. That's funny. Because I see what you're saying with this guess. He says, as to what made the noise, I'm going to guess that some underwater steel pipes being struck by a hammer. These are all good guesses. However, none of them are correct. But a listener named Paul Levine wrote in and said, hi, Jay, this sounds like it could be an excerpt from I Am Sitting in a Room by Alvin Lucier. So do you guys know what this is? Have you heard this? No, I don't. No, I don't recognize. Let me let me play this for you. Let me play the original for you real quick. So this is the original recording. I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice. OK, so he talks for, I think, a couple of minutes. Then what they do is they so they record that then as an example, they upload it to YouTube and then they download the audio and they repeat. So let me go a few generations forward. The room articulated by speech. Right here. The difference. I regard this. Now go forward a few more generations. Oh, the sound of my speaking voice. You can still hear words. And then going to get back into the room again. Now let me jump ahead like dozens of iterations. So there is a there is a this is not lossless. Right. This is there. There is a definite audio quality loss and there is anomalies that are happening that have an effect on the audio that comes out after the compression process. Does that make sense to you guys? So there's a degradation and it's just a cool experiment. I don't know how many times they did it. I think overall it I don't know what point it actually makes. I do think it's interesting in its own right, though. And I and I do find the sound very like I picked one where you could just barely maybe make out some words because if people could make out the words, then they would be able to figure it out by looking it up. But anyway, you know, this was a hard one. I didn't get a lot of guesses and I only got one person. I guessed it correctly. It's if you know it, you know it. That's the thing. So now you guys know it and you could not be fooled by this. I have a new noisy Steve. I don't know why I said your name right there, but this was sent in by a listener named Ada, who is from Seattle. What a coincidence. We were just talking about Seattle. Yeah. I'm going to help you guys on this. It is not someone using an electric razor while riding in a helicopter. So that's not the guess. So don't send that in. I think this one's cool. And I'm really looking forward to telling you what is actually going on here. So if you're interested in submitting a guess or you heard something cool this week, email me at WTN at the skeptics guide.org. Steve, this show comes out on Saturday. The date on Saturday is going to be the 13th. So people who are hearing this, like on the 13th or the 14th or the 15th, even the 16th, you could still buy tickets to our shows. I've been deliberately booking venues that have large audience sizes just so I don't have to turn anybody away because I really hate to do that. So we have seats available. The private show, the VIP and the extravagants are all going to be in the same theater. This is about the Kansas shows that we're doing on the 20th of this month. So if you're interested in attending any of those shows, if you heard the show last week where George was giving details about what we'll be doing, it's going to be a ton of fun. There's a lot, a lot of good entertainment here. You can go to the skeptics guide.org to buy tickets for those things. All right, thank you, Jay. It's going to do a couple of emails. First one comes from Wichita, Kansas, speaking to Kansas. Oh, hello. Have you or can you cover Gold, Nano Wire, gel, electrolyte batteries, pros and cons? Thank you for your very informative and entertaining show. Curtis. All right. Thank you, Curtis. Have you guys heard of this Gold, Nano Wire, gel batteries? Nope. Well, they are great. They are. We have them. They're extremely durable. So it has a Gold, Nano Wire core with a manganese dioxide shell. Mancoding kind of fixes. It stabilizes it so it prevents the like the cracking and disintegration. That is a problem. And then the entire assembly is in case in flexible plexiglass like gel. And that is the electrolyte. Right. So advantages, extremely durability, huge lifespan, 200,000 cycles without any significant degradation. Right. High performance, high, high specific density of energy density. So they're great except for the fact that you are never ever going to see them in any device. Well, right. I mean, yeah. So this information is often 2016. It's been nine years. So I looked for updates since this was reported in 2016 and there are no updates, basically, if there is anything happening in some lab somewhere I have, I was not able to find information about it. The problem is that they like did the proof of concept. This all works. It's great. It's completely economically not viable. Right. Number one reason. That falls into the con. That's it. It's just not going to happen. Number one reason. What do you think? They can't get the resources. Gold, gold nanowire, whatever you see, like gold or platinum or whatever. Like if that's the key, it's like not going to happen. We're not going to be mass producing gold nanowire batteries. So you hate gold, Steve. That's what you're saying. I'm just saying when a precious metal is involved that dramatically decreases the probability, it's going to be economically viable. Number two, it's really hard to manufacture. This may be the bigger reason. It's just very hard to manufacture. So making a cost effective mass production process is not in the works. Right. So no time soon are we going to see this technology. And I suspect they either have to reformulate it so that it is not made out of gold and it's easier to manufacture or it's going to have to wait 10 or 20 years. And who knows if it'll even be cutting edge by then. Maybe some of the insights they got from this battery can be applied to other batteries, but it's just a step towards whatever. It's just it's stuck. It's stuck because it's of those two big problems that are insiable. So it's a great proof of concept, not practical. Unfortunately, because it would be great. All right, question number two. I don't have the person's name in here. This is about our otter discussion from last week. I get the appeal. I personally like river otters more than sea otters, but otters are monsters. And then he links to an article by Vox, our otters, the violent necrophiliax serial killers, killing firm monsters of the sea. Wow, we've spoken about this before as well. Yeah, otters. So listen, here's the thing. We tend to anthropomorphic anthropomorphize animals and we tend to think of this cute furry animal that holds hands and float on its back and, you know, put stuff in his little pouches. They are adorable. They're absolutely adorable, but they are wild animals. We can't these are not domesticated animals. They're wild animals. They are in the weasel family and they are their behaviors are typical of wild animals. But even at the extreme end of the bell curve, you know what I mean? So they're one of the species that they're they're typical mating behavior is violent. Right. The males push the females heads under water. They bite them. They cause injury. They kill them sometimes. They're they're, you know, that's where the necrophilia comes in. They won't necessarily stop their rate, their mating behavior if they kill the female in the middle of the process. So yeah, they they're wild, vicious animals. Right. Just like you would expect a giant weasel to be. So it's and every site you read about it is like, listen, I get it. They're cute. They're adorable. If you encounter them in the wild, keep your distance. They are wild animals. Do not be put off by the fact that they're cute and fuzzy and adorable. So they do store shanks in those little. They might. They might. Yeah, of course they do. Steve, we got some emails from people saying that they don't have favorite tools. But there's a video. They said that the one said that they don't store rocks. But I saw that saw him putting a rock in its pouch. Oh, yeah, they definitely store rocks. I don't think it's because it's their favorite. They just happen to be using it, I think at that. No, I think that a lot of them do use the same tool over and over. I think that's pretty well established. I'm just telling you the emails we got. I don't know. I sourced it pretty well. I agree with the person who wrote in. I also prefer river otters. They are definitely always my favorite to watch when I go to a zoo, because they're just really active and really fun. Yeah, they do seem like they have even like a little sense of humor there. You know what I mean? They're so playful, like they play with toys. But it's just a perfect example, though, Steve, right? Like it looks cute. It's doing cute things. I mean, it'll take a chunk out of you. Yeah, like you got to stay away. It's a wild animal. Like don't don't put honey on your kids' faces. Don't let it hump you. You know, clearly. All right, guys, it's time for science or fiction. It's time for science or fiction. Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious. And then I challenge my panelists, skeptics to tell me which one they think is the fake. There is a theme this week. Do you guys know what happened 10 years ago? Yes. What? A lot of things, but anything science, technology related, having to do with astronomy, the way the detecting stuff in the universe. Oh, was that the Einstein? Multi-messenger astronomy. No, gravity. Well, gravity is like a gravitational wave. Twenty fifteen, wasn't it? Yeah. So that was LIGO coming online. Ten years already. Yeah, it's been ten years. Ten years of LIGO. That was awesome, man. That was a big, big new category of astrophysics, like a new course. So the theme is gravitational waves. OK, here we go. Item number one, gravitational wave detectors are the second most precise measuring instruments in science in terms of relative uncertainty. Second only two atomic clocks. I number two, a recent detection by LIGO of colliding black holes confirms Stephen Hawking's theorem that the surface area of the event event horizon of black holes cannot decrease and the combined area of the merged black holes will be greater than the sum of the two areas. And I number three, the smallest gravitational type of event, current gravitational wave detectors can detect is the merger of two neutron stars. Let's see, Bob, you are not going first. So, Jago first. Oh, Christ. I literally just said to myself, well, at least I'll hear what Bob says. All right, you want to play it this way? So the first one here, Steve, gravitational wave detectors are the second most precise measuring instrument in science in terms of relative uncertainty, second only two atomic clocks. I like what I'm hearing here. This is a hard question to answer because, you know, if you're not in the field and you're not intimate with these instruments, you know, you have to have been very lucky to read about this at some point, but I do find this one to seem very sciencey. I think it's true. The second one, a recent detection of LIGO of colliding black holes confirms Stephen Hawking's theorem that the surface area of the event horizon of a black holes, they cannot decrease and the combined area of the merged black holes will be greater than the sum of the two areas. I'll give you a little bit more info since this is a very wordy one. So what Stephen Hawking said was that the area of and some other guy too, but the area, the area of a black holes event horizon is proportional to entropy. And because entropy can never decrease in any closed system, this area also cannot ever decrease. And so when two black holes collide, if thermodynamic supplies, right, so not only can the surface area can't decrease, it has to increase by at least a little bit. And a recent collision detection confirmed that. I mean, how could I, you know, that sounds great. Right. I mean, it's so complicated and it's so specific. I couldn't possibly, you know, give a good answer here. I'm just going by what my gut is saying. And I mean, I just feel like that made sense with what you just said. But what else could I possibly do? So the third one, the smallest gravitational type of event, current gravitational wave detectors can detect is the merger of two neutron stars. You know, Steve, this one sounds like BS to me. There's something about this I don't like. I don't know, have you feeling that? I don't like it. That one's a fiction. OK, Kara. So you went with the smallest is two neutron stars as the fiction. Yeah, I don't like it. All right, I'll go with J. I have no idea. Oh, please let me be right. OK, Evan. Oh, LIGO next. Yeah. Oh, God. Nice. Nice. I hope everyone stayed around for the payoff on that. OK, I'll I guess I'll try to nail these in order a little bit. Second most precise measuring instrument in science. So what they, Steve, was LIGO was LIGO the first or there were gravitational wave detectors before that? No, that was the first. And there's now two other ones. So in 10 years, we have the second most precise measuring instrument in science in a 10 year window. That seems quick. I don't know. Right. I mean, how did that happen? But I look, I have no idea about any of these. The second one about colliding black holes confirming Stephen Hawking's theorem. Sure. I mean, I'm glad you gave a little extra descriptor there, Steve. It helped me definitely understand it a little better. And I don't see why that I'm trying to find something in there to see why that would be wrong. The last one, Jay and Cara, about the smallest. Why smallest in quotes here? Well, because, you know, what does small mean? You know what I mean? This is the this would be the least amount of disturbance in the gravitational space time continuum, whatever that is getting picked up by LIGO. Not not even Luke could detect that disturbance in the right. All right. Well, I don't I'll go with my gut. I don't think in 10 years they made the second most precise measuring instrument in all of science. That seems like that would be incredible. But I don't know. I'll take the odds and say that one's fiction. OK. And Bob. All right. Start with two here. So LIGO detected two colliding black holes and confirmed Stephen Hawking's theorem. OK. So the surface area of two colliding black holes, the event horizon, cannot decrease greater than the sum. That's true. That is correct. I don't know, however, if they've confirmed this based on LIGO. That's that's what I'm not sure of if they actually confirmed it. But it is true. The theory is that it's the you know, it's going to be greater and not not less. Not not it's not going to be it's not going to decrease. So so I don't know about that one. The smallest gravitational type of event to merging neutron stars. That's correct. That's the smallest. So it's so it's like two. It goes like two neutron stars and a neutron star in a black hole and then two black holes. So yeah, the smallest is two neutron stars. Damn you, Bob. Pretty combinations on a slot machine. I'm confident on that one. I mean, I mean, I like that. But could you be wrong, Bob? On that one, probably not. Shit. Unless unless he pulls his typical Steve bologna and comes up with some weird, weird crappy thing that I hadn't. I would be but I would be shocked. I would be shocked. There's nothing. No, there's nothing smaller that it can detect. I mean, what's smaller? What's too colliding? I don't know. What else makes gravitational waves? Well, anything. Move your hand up and down. You're making gravitational waves. You have it. So all right. So then let's go to let's go to one now. The most precise measuring instrument. So you're saying the second LIGO is second. That technology. Yeah. The second most precise. See that one. I'm pretty skeptical of. I mean, LIGO can they that is so precise it can detect. Imagine this something on the order of five or 10,000th the diameter of a proton. It's yeah, it can detect that that type of movement because that's what's over across over what four kilometer arms of the LIGO. I mean, it's ridiculous. And even even a even an atomic clock, I think, is quite. But it depends how you define, you know, most precise. How do you define that? I mean, a second over billions of years is pretty damn precise. So I'll tell you, since you're asking, yeah, it's change in X over X. Right. That's it. It's just how much of a change can it detect versus the size of the thing that it's detecting. So that's how you compare time and distance. Otherwise, you have to make it dimensionless. Right. Otherwise, there's no way to compare those two things. So if you're just saying this relative uncertainty, you know, regardless of units, which one is more precise? Yeah, I'm going to say I'm not certain on this one. I'm going to say that this one is is the fiction because the other ones are probably probably correct with the with the okay. The caveat. So what's the split? Okay, even split between one and three. So you all agree on the second one. So we'll start there. So we have a recent detection by LIGO of colliding black holes confirms that Stephen Hawking's theorem that the surface area of the event horizon of black holes cannot decrease and the combined area of the merged black holes will be greater than the sum of the two areas. You all think this one is science. I guess the question here is was it recently confirmed? That's it. That's the question. Yeah. Was it was it just neither confirmed nor disconfirmed or was it disconfirmed? Right. So which of those three possibilities? And this one, hopefully, maybe not like a science. This is I wouldn't know it was an atlas that did it. Not like I wouldn't do that to you, obviously. But yeah, so it was nice. Yeah, two two merging black holes. They were able to estimate the surface area of the event horizons. And it's like, yep, it confirms what Hawking's predicted. So from the gravitational waves, they confirmed the area of the. Wow, pretty cool. Now, this only includes classic relativistic understanding of black holes. It does not the idea that the event horizon can never decrease. It can because of quantum radiation because of Hawking radiation. Exactly. So if you include that, it can. But the idea that other than that, other than Hawking radiation. Yeah, but that's not really happening. It is. But it's interesting that black holes are thermodynamic objects. Yes, that are obey the laws of thermodynamics in terms of entropy and huge revelation energy and everything. Yeah, it's massive. Very interesting. All right, let's go back to number one, I guess. Gravitational waves detectors are the second most precise measuring instruments in science in terms of relative uncertainty. Second only two atomic clocks, Bob and Evan. You both think this is fiction, but for opposite reasons. Bob, you think it's the most sensitive and Evan, you think that even second is too much because it's only been had this technology for 10 years. Right. Well, this one is the fiction. Yeah, baby. Oh, man, Jay, we were on a good street. You were. But why is that? I took you guys down. Bob's right. Bob is right. It is the most the most precise measure by several orders of magnitude. Atomic clocks are the second or number two. And it's interesting because I was thinking about that. What's more precise? Atomic clocks are getting pretty damn precise. They are. They've thought that. And they've been jumping up in the past 10 years. They've been like, oh, I know 10 times more. Exactly. That's why it was like until you look at this specifically, I wouldn't. I don't know that I would be able to have guessed the answer to this question. Yeah. Steve, do you remember that comparison, except when you're made formulating a science or fiction, right? Right. Do you remember we did a news item about atomic clocks where that if one atomic clock is higher on the wall than the other one, then their times drift because they're there in the gravity. That's precise. But it's like 18th versus 10 to the 21 in terms of the relative uncertainty. So it's three orders of magnitude for light. That makes sense. I mean, yeah, like I was like, Kingman, that's ridiculous. The fraction of the width of a proton. It could just crazy. Nuts. Now, there are some some physics calculations like we could make statements about the size of particles, but that's not the same thing as now relative uncertainty, right? So it didn't really apply. All right. That means that the smallest gravitational type of event current gravitational wave detectors can detect is the merger of two neutron stars is science. And those are Bob's correct. Those are the three types of events. Neutron star with neutron star, neutron star with black hole, black hole with black hole. That's it. Those are the three types of events. If you guys paid more attention to me, you wouldn't have gotten that wrong. Now, but Bob, the thing is, the thing that might have thrown you on that was what if we just discovered a gravitational wave from the merger of a neutron star and a white dwarf or a black hole and a white dwarf? Then right, for example. Yeah, that's right. But that I would consider that incredibly unlikely based on what I know about. Yeah, I agree. I agree. But that's the other thing is like so definitely two neutron stars colliding is this quote unquote smallest gravitational event that gravitational wave detectors have detected, definitely. But I don't know if that means that's the theoretical limit, but it probably is. No, I would I would think that it would require a change to the technology. Like to detect to detect massive black hole collisions, you need to tweak the tech to do that as it is now. It's not going to do it. But they are getting way more precise and in that they are mainly because they're decreasing the background noise. So this is the reason why this is the first time we've confirmed. OK. The Hawking. Interesting. Because the previous ones, we didn't there was too much background noise to say this with any certainty. But now it's the signal is just way cleaner. And that allowed for this calculation and the confirmation of Hawking's theorem. Yeah, yeah. Probably the processing of the signal is just so much better with the software. Maybe even AI, maybe even AI being used as well. This was this was my what you had. You describe. Oh, yeah. This is your slumdog. Yeah, slumdog millionaire. All right. Well, good job, Bob and Evan. Oh, thanks. Evan, give us a quote. I'm offended by you not telling me and Kara. You feel bad about yourself? Did I? Well, I don't like that. Did I hurt you? Why are you singling us out? No, I mean, give us a quote. Quick. We have heard the expression the pen is muddier than the sword. The penis mightier than penis. Joked about many times, many times. Well, you know, you go to you go to make that your quote for the week and then you go to look up exactly where it came from. And guess where you go down the rabbit hole? A rabbit hole. Where did this come from? Oh, it was actually, yes, it was made popular in 1872. But it was also written in 1700. It was also written in, you know, 1690. It was and it goes all the way back the way, way, way back to the earliest iteration of this. The word is mightier than the sword. By a high car, the Assyrian sage from the folklore titled The Story of a High Car. The earliest written version of this appeared in Egypt in the fifth century BCE, and the folklore is said to be even hundreds of years older than that. And that is the earliest written substantiation for this, for this particular phrase. I like that they say the word is mightier than the sword, you know, as compared to the pen is mightier because the word is it's not it can be also the written word, the spoken word, language itself, using our ideas, using our brains, using our ideas as opposed to, you know, resorting to, you know, some of the, well, shall we say, weaker parts of the human character. Yeah, but the pen is a tool, like a sword. The pen is the pen is. I understand when this was when right, there were no pens were there. No. That's why that's why they didn't call it that to begin with. We're just the clay tablet. Does it roll off the tongue? The chisel is my dear. It would have been good in a Mel Brooks movie to make it to have fun with that. But the word is mightier than the sword. Nice. All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week. Sure. Thanks, Steve. You're welcome, brother. And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Skeptics Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info at theskepticsguide.org. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com. Skeptics Guide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community, our listeners and supporters, or what make SGU possible. The Skeptics Guide to the Universe is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. 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