The Skeptics Guide #1060 - Nov 1 2025

At AJ Bell, we believe every customer deserves brilliant service, which is just one reason we're rated excellent on Trust Pilot. And we all trust pilots with their smooth, captainy voices that make you feel like you'd let them land anywhere they like. Sorry, where was I? Right, AJ Bell rated excellent by sexy pilots. I mean Trust Pilot. I'm a flight risk. AJ Bell, feel good investing. The value of your investments can go up or down. 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 Thursday, October 30th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody, Cara Santamaria. Howdy. Jane Novella. Hey guys, and Evan Bernstein. Good afternoon everyone. So Bob, tomorrow's Halloween. You all ready? You set? You're cramming or... What is that? Oh, it's a scream. That's Bob's wife. She's under the table. I usually ask if Halloween's ready for Bob. Yeah. Yeah, I'm in decent shape for Halloween and the party which is the next day. Not too bad shape for that either. Of course, no matter how ready you are, you will... I was still worked in the last minute trying to tweak, tweak the final tweaking of various things. But I'm very happy with my output this year. Bob, you to Halloween is what Stanley Kubrick was to movie making. Cooper has that. That's huge. See that too. It's Cooper. It's Cooper. It's all like cue from Star Trek. All right. Well, it's Emu, not Emu. Emu, we all say Emu. We all say it's Emu. And it's Emu. And it's Emu, and it's you can say that wrong, Lou. Erie Geller, not Yuri Geller. What? If you understand what the person is saying, you got to be cool, you know? Also, we got an email from somebody in Australia this week who was like really mad that we all say, solder instead of solder. I guess. Oh, wow. Oh, my gosh. Actually, three L's in solder. But I looked into the etymology, and it comes from the French, but then it was changed. So it's like the original, it doesn't even have an L in it. But this happens a lot in American English because it's so informed. That's like saying, why don't we say canigot? Well, they do say like, why don't you say fillet or herb? Yeah. And it's like, because it comes from the French. And we pronounce it like the French, because American English is a mix. Yeah. Yeah. You know what's funny, though? You could see your own language evolving over time. Like herbs with an H to me sounded so utterly ridiculous. And I've been kind of like training myself to realize it's probably the better way to pronounce it. You don't like it. I don't like it. I don't think it's Al. Al. Al. You don't like it. And. But then there's the name Herbert, which adds a layer of confusion to the whole thing. Because you do pronounce the H in that sense herb, for short. Well, what about Houston and Houston? That one always gets people. It texts as Sam Houston, right? But in New York City. New York and Houston. Yeah. What about honor? You don't pronounce the H in honor. Honour. Honour. And like, what don't say ballet? They say ballet, but then they say fillet. Fla-le fillet. It's okay. Language is fine. It is. It is. Bob, sorry. Yes. Where do you stand on the Halloween should be the last Saturday in October, rather than October 31st? Oh, good question. Which should always be a weekend. It's Saturday. Because it's a party day. I get it. I say I'm a traditionalist. I say stick with the 31st because it doesn't matter because wherever Halloween is, if it's Wednesday, I'm not working. I'm not going to job to a job. So Bob, that doesn't matter to me. That's a Bob centric thing, right? Like, what about all the kids whose Halloween could be significantly truncated if it's on a school night? Well, don't get me started because the tradition that we need to worry about is this stupid truncated treat where there, where a lot of families, a lot of families are doing truncated treat and then instead of trick-or-treating, which to me is scandalous and should be illegal. I think it's the same for the other day. I think it's the same for the other day. And apart from not doing that. But you have to remember there are parts of this country where people don't want you coming to their homes. It's not safe to go into neighborhoods. People, all the lights are off, truncated treat does allow kids to trick-or-treat safely. If that's the only option, that's fine. But I don't think that's as common as you do. I do. I'm in the middle of LA in a very, very family-friendly neighborhood in a development of houses where half of the people here have kids. And on Halloween, nobody has their lights on. And it's so sad. One year, I turned on my light. I had the whole thing. I had all the candy. I got like, you know, king size candy bars from Costco. Not a single person came to my door. It was depressing. I know, Terrible. I think partly this is a COVID holdover because all truncated treat things started in COVID. And we did it when we were kids. It was just regaining down our actual physical interaction with other people. I mean, Halloween night. I think it increases it. I actually don't know. I don't know. Kids who truncated treat are more likely to get more face-time with people. I don't know. The thing about taking your kids around the neighborhood is you get to, you know, an event every year where you meet every neighbor in their house. They meet your kids. You know what I mean? That died like 30 years ago. No. I really didn't. No, my kids were young. We did that. And now again, last year's zero people came to our home. Okay. We'll say 20 years ago because your kids are getting... When they were young. Yeah. I was like, oh, time. I know. I trigger treated when I was young too. But I also stayed out with my friends until the street lights went out. My parents had no idea where I was. We don't live in that era anymore. We live in an era where kids can't walk home from school without being released by an adult. Like, it's just a different time. Is that good or bad thing? I think it's bad. Yeah. I think it's bad. It's the hell of a cop-reparenting which is bad. Yeah, it's just a lot better. It's a holdover of that. Well, it's not even their fault. It's like school policy now. It's, you know what it is. It's C-Y-A. Yes. It's all C-Y-A. Yeah. Liability. Uh-huh. Right. Accountability. Yep. But kids who are relevant for Halloween almost. Adults. Adults in the United States have taken over Halloween. The kids are just like this. Oh, yeah. That's kind of cool too. So let's focus on what's really important. The parents, they're the ones that are spending the money on decorations, costumes, candy. They're making it the second most popular holiday in terms of money that people spend. And Halloween is the best because you throw a Halloween party. You invite people that you care about. That you talk and thanks giving your Christmas. You've got to go to family shit and nobody. You know, a lot of people don't want to do that because family is fat is full of drama and craziness. So that's one of the things that makes Halloween special is that I just went to the party angle. But the idea of adults taking it over, it's just like it's a done deal. And the kids are just ancillary like, yeah. Get some candy, which is interesting. And I like talking to other people from other countries who love Halloween. But they're like, damn, man, you know, which is not embraced in our country yet. But it's kind of like a slow kind of like a slow migration that is happening for a lot of countries. It's just interesting to see this particular American United States export, an export that I agree with, you know, going out there and finding kindred souls all over the place of people that just love the macabre aspect of Halloween and want to embrace it. Jay, don't you love how Bob see? This is why I love doing throw downs with Bob. You asked him if he thinks it should be changed to the last Saturday of the month. And he said no. And then made a compelling argument for why. It should be changed to the last Saturday of the month. Can I push back on that? So it's another reason not to change. It's not really not really about one day. It's the fall season. It's all of October. All the things that embrace Halloween. It's not just that one night. The problem though is when it's on a Thursday or Friday because you do all the parties the weekend before and by the time Halloween comes, it feels over a little bit. And then it feels weird to have parties on November 1st or November 2nd. It feels only a little bit weird. It's still fine. I think it's still totally fine. First off, you can get amazing deals on, because it's after Halloween, you can get the cheapest costumes, pumpkins, all sorts of great stuff. Also, if you're like me and a few people that I know, where it's actually a little bit of, it's a bummer when Halloween's over and that buildup is done. It's kind of not, I don't get depressed about it, but it's like November 1st sucks. It's a horse stay in the year. But for years now, I've been throwing the party after the first Saturday after Halloween. And it's great, because it extends a season for me a little bit as well. But it's also means that no one's going to a Halloween party after Halloween. So you get a bigger party, because everyone bails on parties when I tried to throw them in October because they're going to so many parties. There's so much competition for really, essentially only two weekends is the big competition. And then that's it. So there's so many good reasons to do it right after Halloween. I mean, maybe next year, Saturday is Halloween, I think, right? That would be a good day. Is it moving forward or backward? So yeah, it'll go with this. Oh yeah, let's just leave you. I don't know if you can get it. No, it's not. So yeah, Saturday, Halloween, man, that's big. I love having a October 19th birthday for that reason. Every year from the time I was kid, my birthday parties were epic. Epic. Because like you said, it's a friend holiday. Yes. It's not a family. It's not necessarily a family holiday. But if you move Halloween off of October 31st, aren't you decoupling it from all saints day and doesn't that kind of defeat half the purpose? Do we really care? Oh god, not at this point. Not in 2025. But those are the origins, right? Yeah, but nobody thinks about that. Except me. OK. Well, you know, I mean, there are maybe there are people. How many people celebrate Easter and are hiding eggs and stuff? Or thinking about it? For all saints day next time. Yeah, but like, you know, how many people who are celebrating Easter are thinking about like fertility? They're not. They're thinking about Jesus. Or they're just like candy. Easter is one of those holidays. It does fall differently each year. No, I know. But I'm saying like it's coupled to a fertility, like a pagan fertility festival. And it's coupled to the souls to say thought. And fertility festivals. That's why we have like bunnies and eggs. Yeah, that's what most of our holidays are. They're like the magnations of multiple cultures. Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, I get it. I get it. There's a reason why Easter drifts and all saints day does not. Yeah, Easter is calculated. And it was very important historically to get that calculation correct. Otherwise, you're going to help. Well, I suppose it was a way of people tracking exactly where the heck they were in any given year. Yeah. All right, let's move on. Do you want to use that? Why? Why? Can't we just spend three hours talking about that? Jay, you're going to start us off by talking about therapeutic nanoparticles. Alzheimer's disease has been blamed on what, Steve, the sticky clumps of amyloid beta protein that builds up between the brain cells, right? I mean, it's complicated. Alzheimer's is a complicated disease. It has lots of pieces. Lots of things are happening at the same time. And the complexity is we don't know what is driving the disease and what's an effect of the disease. And there may be multiple different things driving it in different people. There also could be feedback loops where A causes B, which reinforces A, which causes C. You know what I mean? Yep. But those are markers, right? Those are good markers of the disease. But the thing is, it's not all pure markers. Like, amyloid beta is the big thing, right? Is amyloid beta just, because that's a waste product that builds up in the brain cells. And it definitely causes problems. But it's that what's driving the disease. And the only way we're going to ultimately really know is if we fix that problem, does it fix the disease? Which is why there was so much excitement about the recent treatments that are amyloid-based that did have some clinical improvement. It would not dramatic. So which means it's probably not the whole story. What did they do? Did they slow the progression? They did slow the progression. Yeah, they didn't stop or reverse it, but they did slow the progression. Well, I thought that this study was pretty cool. I mean, again, it's still in mice. But there was a team co-led by the Institute of Bioengineering at Catalonia and West China Hospital, Sejuan University. They were in collaboration with partners in the UK. And they published a study that suggests the real problem may be broken clean up system, not just excess waste. So right now, like Steve said, the amyloid beta is building up. It's a protein that builds up in the brain. And this is one of the things that people that suffer from this disease. They can see that build up. And in the past, of course, there really isn't that much we can do about it. Although we do think that it is one of the very important markers. The human brain, our brains rely on the blood brain barrier. Brains. We can call it B, B, B if you want. Easy, Bob. It's main job is to control what can pass from the blood into the brain. And it also is there to help remove waste from the brain. So it does a couple of critical things. One critical protein that's called LRP1, and almost says the word larper, which I thought was funny. That works like a conveyor belt system that brings the amyloid beta out of the brain and into the bloodstream. And actually, when we see that happen, we can tell. We can detect it in the blood. So with all hyamers, that system fails. LRP1 levels fall. Its function weakens in the brain's waste begins to pile up. And that pile up can actually stop your brain from functioning. Well, it could even be doing damage to your brain. Those leftover proteins and protein fragments clump into these plaques that disrupt the damage to nearby neurons. So instead of trying to invent new drugs, though, this team decided to try something different. They wanted to try something that isn't based on chemicals. It's based on more like the plumbing of the brain. I thought that was a really cool way to put it. They looked for a way to fix the brain's natural waste removal system. They built these tiny hollow particles, and you could visualize them as microscopic bubbles. And they call them polymersomes. And these bubbles were coated with a molecule called angiopep2, which can attach to the LRP1. And the protein that normally carries waste like amyloid beta out of the brain. So each bubble has just enough of this angiopep2 to get the LRP1 working again, but not so much that it would overload or damage it. And that was a big issue, and a very hard thing for them to do. They had to find the right balance and how to tightly the particles stick to the LRP1. And they ended up finding the right balance there. And again, that little detail was difficult. And it just shows you how cool science is and how they can actually change the properties of things like molecules, which I find just incredible. So in the Alzheimer's model mice, a single injection of these optimized polymersomes reduced the amyloid beta in the brain by about 45% within a few hours. Now Steve, that idea that I just said to me is, that sounds amazing. Yeah, don't get excited. It's a good proof of concept. That's what these mouse models are for. But I mean, you know how good mouse models are predicting Alzheimer's treatments? Not much. Basically almost zero. I mean, they're famously terrible at predicting the outcome of clinical trials in humans. Because it's not the same disease. It is a model. It is a model to test very specific mechanisms. It really, it isn't the disease. It's not the same disease as it is in humans. And so you just cannot extrapolate at all clinically from mice to humans. But you can do is ask very specific mechanistic questions. Will this increase the clearance of amyloid beta from neurons? And in these mice, it does. Will that have a clinical benefit in humans? Will no one 10 to 20 years? Sure, but the point is though, and again, this is just science doing its thing. This is another test that they found. Another, they created something that has an effect. And they might be able to someday have a version of this that works in humans. Yeah, and as is often the case, with these kinds of news items, like don't get so focused on the Alzheimer's bit, in my opinion, what's really cool about this is, they are engineering these polymer soams and that they can fine tune to have very specific effects. It's the therapeutic model that I find more interesting. Not this very specific application, which may or may not pan out. Yeah, I was just saying what you just said, but not as cool. That's what I meant. The idea that they can modify these molecules and have them have varying properties. And they're like, we got to change this property. That to me is such a fantastic thing that they're able to do today. So anyway, the point is that when they applied this, they were able to detect in the blood that there was an increase of amyloid beta, which shows that the brain was actually moving it outside the brain barrier and dumping it into the blood, which means it's waste product. And so they were able to 100% verify that that process was happening. It showed that the peptide was being essentially flushed out. And that's exactly what we want to have happen. Myroscopy confirmed that the nanoparticles restored normal placement of the LRP on blood vessel cells and shifted the blood brain barrier internal machinery back towards healthy function. Then they were testing the mice's behavior and the mice treated with the new therapy performed almost as well as healthy animals in memory and navigation tasks. The improvements also lasted up to six months. So there were some very interesting outcomes here from this study that they did. And they made sure that researchers obviously know what Steve knows that there are cool things about this. And there's some early, early things that are happening that might pan out to humans one day. But it's too early. And you'll see some headlines actually say, all the time, where it's completely eradicated in mice, that type of thing. That's not what's going on here. But the nice thing about what they're doing again is this isn't giving somebody medication and trying to figure out medications that can sneak through the blood brain barrier. Again, becoming dependent on chemicals. They're changing the function of the plumbing in your brain, which I find to be a more... Well, they're optimizing it. They're restoring it. Really what they're arguing. And just as for further background, which I think impacts on this study, there's a huge correlation between vascular health and Alzheimer's. And the number one risk factor for Alzheimer's is, what do you think? Well, yeah. Age is just like the universal recycling. Yeah, let me just say other than age. Other than age. Are disease? Like cardiovascular problems? Yeah, specifically high blood pressure. And what does high blood pressure do? It damages these small blood vessels. Yeah. The very same small blood vessels that this study is saying are necessary in order to clear the amyloid. And so that makes sense. Yeah, so which again, main be a coincidence, but I think it probably all has something to do with itself. You get the buildup, which damages the vascular term, which worsens the buildup. And this is reversing that by introducing this optimized polyrosome that's in that sweet spot, where it's binding just strong enough to get it, but not so strong that it gets backed up. And so it facilitates the clearing of the amyloid, which restores the blood brain barrier and the vascular health so that it could clear it even more. Yeah, that's so interesting, because I feel like it's always more complicated than that first idea. Like, oh, we see this stuff. Something about Alzheimer's must be causing us to make more of this stuff, or maybe we'd always make this stuff. And something about Alzheimer's causes us to not be able to clean it out, or both. Or both. Yeah. And then there's Tau. Don't even get me started on Tau. It's a totally different ways product, which again, there's probably different subtypes in different people. Then there's different genetic subtypes. It's very complicated. And what you're talking about is what commonly known as the plaques is what we've been talking about. You're talking about. Well, the plaques form from these waste products. Yeah. So you've had you have like amyloid, for example. Then you have amyloid plaques. These are two different things. And then you also have other pathological features that form like the tangles. Then you have inflammatory activity, which how much of that is driving it, how much of that is reactive or secondary. Even if it is secondary, does it exacerbate and worsen it? Is there any room for clinical improvement for right treating the specific components of the inflammatory reaction? These are all open questions. And there's not going to be one answer. It's not going to be one. That's the thing. It's too complicated a disease for there to be one simple treatment. Yeah. It may get to the point where we need to, you know, unless we find this missing key that we've been missing all this time. And it's like, oh, if we change this one thing, the whole cascade doesn't happen. I doubt it's going to happen at this point. I can't rule it out though. But more likely we're going to have a suite of treatments like with cancer. You have to do two days. I was going to say that. Yeah. And the way to get rid of cancer is to prevent it from ever happening. That's hopefully what we could do with Alzheimer's, right? If we could get to a point where we prevent it, then we don't have to treat one million components. Well, that's the promise of the treatments that prevent like the build up of amyloids. Like, oh, if we can get to people 20 years before they would become symptomatic, maybe they'll never become symptomatic. But how do we identify people that early? Well, it's easy if they have a genetic form where you could say, you're going to get it because your parents had it or whatever. It's harder if it's not genetic. And we have to figure out some way to accurately screen people in a way that actually predicts who should get treated early on. Who should not? Or if the treatments become cheap and they're not very invasive, we just do it to everybody like we do with vaccines. But that we're not there. The treatments are high risk, they're expensive, and they have high bad side effects. So, yeah, that's the thing. You can't just give it, you can't put it in the water as we like to say, even though putting aside whether that's practical or not. Just meaning we can't just give it to everybody because you get, end up causing way more harm than good. We're definitely at the vaccine point where we can just give everybody a Alzheimer's vaccine. That would be great if we do get to that point, but we're not there. Yeah. All right, thank you, Jay. Kara, what killed off Napoleon's forces? Oh, so this is a really interesting study that I came across and I have to admit, I'm not a war buff and I definitely haven't done deep dives onto or into the 1812. I even had to look up what was this called because it has like five different names. The French invasion of Russia, the Russian campaign, the Second Polish War, and in Russia, they actually call it the Patriotic War of 1812. Anybody here have any sort of personal interest? In that particular war? Yeah, like if you've been reading books about it or... Oh, a lot, but no. You know, it's like that. How often do you think about the Roman Empire? I've read about the Roman Empire just now. Right. Not so much Napoleon. Not so much Napoleon. So I had to read up a little bit on the background. So I want to talk about the background first so that then I can talk about this study that sort of challenges some of the previously held ideas. So long story short and like very short. Napoleon invaded Russia in June of 1812 with over half a million soldiers. Big mistake. Yeah, like a lot. Yeah, we know. Russia is not, and it's never a good idea to invade Russia with the ground war. And so then there was this big battle on September 7th that was super, super bloody and Napoleon and his troops actually were able to invade and occupy Moscow. So they thought they were doing pretty well. The problem is when they got to Moscow, it was like empty and had been burned. So under the orders of the governor there and military officials, Russian military officials, they burned the city and left. So Napoleon gets there and he's like, we got here. Look, we're going to take over. But there was nobody there to take over. It was King of the ashes. Yeah. And then after that, he kind of like squatted for a while to try to supply up and figure out a new way to leave the problem is he probably waited too long. He was also looking for a peace offer that never came. So on October 19th, actually my birthday, they started to retreat. They already had lost quite a few soldiers during battle. Then as they started to retreat, all the terrible things happened, right? There were some ongoing attacks so they did lose more soldiers to battle. But really they were devastated by what do you think? Weather and disease, right? Yeah, yeah. Russian winter kind of. And so this goes down in like military history books as one of the most devastating military campaigns. In history, there are estimates that he lost over 90% Napoleon of his army. So over 500,000 soldiers and horses died. And a lot of people think that Typhus was the cause of the vast majority of disease. And there have even been some early studies where DNA was taken from fallen soldiers in their graves. But older like PCR techniques were used to amplify some of these DNA, these broken DNA fragments. And it was kind of estimated that Typhus was the cause. So Typhus is also known as, I can never say this, Rickettsia, I always want to say Rickcettiia, but it's not. Rickettsia, Prouwa Zeki, and that's a parasitic aerobic best-sylophone bacteria. And it's the main agent of epidemic Typhus. And then they also, there were some ideas that there was another pathogen called Bartonella Quintana, which is spread by body lice. So, okay, let's cut to this new study, which was just published this month, where the authors say, not so fast, we used more modern techniques to look at the remains of a very, very small sample of this much larger group of soldiers who died. So these soldiers died in Vilnius, Lithuania, in December of 1812 and were buried there. So they were able to collect samples from 13 teeth of these different soldiers, and they looked at, it kind of made up about 20 million different DNA reads, and then they used some pretty complicated, I could get into it if you like, but some pretty complicated new approaches that are kind of being called ADNA. Have you guys heard ADNA? I had to Google it, and then I was like, oh, that's so obvious. Ancient DNA. So there's like a whole field now called ADNA. So there's like all these really state-of-the-art methodologies that go far beyond PCR. It's not just about amplification. Now it's about using much more sophisticated techniques. How do they define ancient? Is there a number? There is actually, I looked it up. Obviously we know there's an upper boundary for sufficient DNA for sequencing, which is between half a million and one and a half million. But the oldest DNA that's ever been sequenced was from mammoth molars that are about a million years old. Really? We've recovered genetic material from sediments that was two million years old, but they couldn't sequence it. But it looks like most of it, we're talking thousands of years. OK. A few studies have succeeded. Only a few studies have succeeded in amplifying DNA from remains older than several hundred thousand. Most of it is within like the tens of thousands. So researchers in this study are using, and there's a name for this field, too, which I hadn't heard before either, metagenomics, metagenomics, which is the study of genetic material from entire communities of organisms. So that's where they will often look at like environmental samples collectively so that they can try and understand something. So these are metagenomics researchers that I guess are borrowing from those techniques, and they apply them to these 13 different teeth. And obviously, this is 200-year-old DNA. What they did after this really sophisticated kind of extracting and analysis, what they realized is they couldn't find any typhoid at all. They actually couldn't find either a rachetsia or the Bartonella Quintana, and actually it would be like r-pro-azekki, usually you would say the species name, or b-quintana. But they did find a couple interesting things. They found salmonella in terraca, and specifically, a specific type of salmonella in terraca that causes something called paratyphoid fever. So it's similar to typhoid. They're both types of interic fever. And so comparing that to the records of the time, like what was actually written about how these soldiers were acting and what their symptoms were, it would make sense that it could have been paratyphoid when maybe they didn't know about it, or they just kind of misdiagnosed it as typhoid. So they found not only paratyphoid caused by the salmonella in terraca strain, but they also found a bacterium in the DNA called birelia recurrentis or recurrentis. So this is another body-liced transmitted bacterium, and it causes something called lousy-born relapsing fever. It's not necessarily deadly, but combined with the paratyphoid and the exhaustion and the starvation and the hypothermia that a lot of the soldiers were experiencing. It could have exacerbated or caused their death in addition. So these two main diseases, these researchers found, they say in their discussion, we only looked at 13 teeth. So it could be that there actually was some typhoid and that there actually was some bee quintana too, but we didn't see any of it. And so maybe we just didn't sample the right people or maybe what we thought caused the majority of this death was not actually the pathogen that caused it. And maybe it was more likely this paratyphoid problem along with this body-lices disease called relapsing fever, which is super, super rare now. I mean, both of these diseases are rare in developed countries. You do see lousy-born relapsing fever in some regions of Africa where it's still endemic. Paratyphoid, I actually don't know how common paratyphoid is, because there's no vaccine for it. The typhoid vaccine can help a little bit, but there is no vaccine for paratyphoid. Oh, here we go. Six million people a year are affected, most common in parts of Asia, very rare in the developed world, can cause 30,000 deaths a year. It's very similar to typhoid. So we're talking fever, headache, abdominal pain, malaise, wasting, like muscle wasting, non-productive cough, a slowed heart rate. And I guess spots, you get rosy spots, not everybody does, but some people do. And abdominal pain with nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, all that good stuff. But Karen, do you think it's a fair to say? Because a lot of ancient armies, they die of like disease and exhaustion and malnutrition and climate, whatever. I know Alexander, Alexander the Great's army, like half of them, or more died from dysentery, or other illnesses. So we're, and I know the same is true of Napoleon's army, especially during this retreat from Moscow. But do you think it's a fair to say that they died of diarrhea, whether it was typhus or another disease that could also cause diarrhea? I mean, probably, basically, they originally thought that, you know, dying of whatever this disease is, they actually, in the documented symptomatology, they do say fever, diarrhea, and jaundice. Those were the three things that were like heavily documented. So I think it is safe to say, but historically, we thought it was typhus and what's called trench fever, which is that beat Quintana, and now the researchers are saying, actually it may have been paratyphus, lousy-born, relapsing fever, not typhus, and trench fever. Trench fever is one of those wonderfully archaic sounding diseases. It's all time-eaters. And trench fever and contraption. The drop sheets. Which is why I couldn't come up with it, because when you actually look at modern, right ups of Bartonella Quintana, CDC, or NIH, or WHO, right ups of it, they don't call it trench fever anymore. So you have to, specifically, Google trench fever to learn about the fact that that's what caused it. Shell shock. Yeah, exactly. There's so many of those things. Trench foot. Trench foot. Yep. Well, we're two. That was still pretty big. What was it? Do they still call it a foot? Is it called a foot and mouth disease? It's a foot and mouth disease? Huff and mouth disease? Yeah. That is correct. I think. But trench foot specifically is. That's just from having your feet wet for weeks. Wet, yeah. It's, we now call it immersion foot syndrome. Hold and wet for a long period of time, and it can cause all sorts of horrible things. And eventually you can lose your feet. Yeah, terrible. Yeah. All right, thanks, Cara. Not how Napoleon's army died. Hi, guys. All right, guys, we want to talk to you about photosynthesis. You guys know what photosynthesis is, right? Of course. Yes. All right, Evan, tell me what it is. What's the core of photosynthesis? By core, you mean like plants? You mean plants? Or in plants absorb the energy from the sun, and do end have a chemical process by which it derives its energy. And what's that chemical process? Carbon dioxide. They're fixing carbon. Yeah, the key piece is the taking of carbon from carbon dioxide in the air to build the sugars, right? That is the food. The carbohydrates. And then they also respire. They respire oxygen. They respire oxygen. Yes. They still respire. They respire, and they photosynthesis. Now, does anybody know what the key enzyme is that fixes carbon from the atmosphere? Is it enzyme 4716? No. Are you sure? It is rubisco. Oh, rubisco. You guys know? No. Ribulose 15-by-phosphate carboxylase oxygenase, obviously. Thank you. I will call it rubisco. What? Now, obviously, I'm excited. I'm excited. I did not know that before. Sounds like a hot sauce. It's impressive. This process of photosynthesis using rubisco as a domain enzyme driving it is the key to all life on Earth, right? I mean, most of the energy that is consumed by life is produced in this process. And most of our food we grow is dependent on this process. What's interesting is that in plants, the rubisco-based photosynthesis is really inefficient. It's massively inefficient. Yeah, right. Well, it never needed to be, right? There's just plants everywhere. It is an interesting concept evolutionarily. There was no environment for pressure for it to become more efficient. So I don't think that's accurate. I think it's easy. It's better to say that plants found a very inefficient solution to the rubisco inefficiency problem. Their solution was just to mass produce rubisco. Oh, right. It's much harder to go back than it was. There's the evolutionary constraints that made why didn't we hit upon other solutions. Once plants hit upon that solution, we're going to basically brute force our way to making more food from sunlight by just making tons of rubisco. It was just an easy way to do it. And by some estimates, that half of the protein in a photosynthesizing part of a plant could be rubisco. Wow. Well, but then again, that is its main drive. Yeah. So for plants, it was fine. Yeah, just make a ton of this stuff. We can do it. It is an easy, evolutionarily easy solution. Just make more. But the problem is when now we are trying to feed the 8 billion plus people by growing crops as efficiently as possible, that just brute force your way through it and make a ton of rubisco becomes the limiting factor in the efficiency of agriculture. Right. Like silicon to computer chips. Yeah. So if I specifically, the very high need of nitrogen fertilizer comes from the fact that you need nitrogen to make rubisco. Right. So a lot of that fertilizer and a lot of water. So water use and fertilizer use in crops. A lot of that is due to this very brute force solution that plants evolved in order to maximize their photosynthesis. Now there's a couple of other living organisms that also photosynthesize that are not plants that hit upon a different solution. Sorry. Where were you going to tie your rubisco? Blue green algae. Yes, algae. Absolutely. And some bacteria. And they came up with a different solution rather than just like producing tons of rubisco. You know what solution they came upon? A different enzyme. No. Not about that. What's called CO2 concentrating mechanisms or CCM. So they evolved to get as much CO2 next to the rubisco as possible so that the enzyme becomes more efficient. Rather than having 10 times as much, you make it 10 times as efficient. Just a thorough number out there. Right. Just by having CO2 closer. Yeah. Yeah. It's a reaction. It's a reaction. Right. So you need to have lots of interaction between rubisco and CO2 by having lots of rubisco or you could maximize that interaction by concentrating the CO2 over a little bit of rubisco. Does that make sense? Yeah. It sounds like that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's not a good thing necessarily. Think about the fact that our oceans are acidifying and we're seeing these massive algal blooms everywhere that kill everything else off. Well. It's probably because they're able to use that carbon so much more efficiently than like the other organisms. Right. But that would mean it wasn't a problem in nature. We're making it a problem. Right. But it's a problem now. Because we are, because yes, because we are part of the reason for that is we have to give so much nitrogen to our agricultural plants to make them grow optimally. And if some of that fertilizer gets washed into the ocean, now you have these very efficient organisms with all this nitrogen and they just go crazy. Right. Yeah. Tons of that. Not just some. Tons of things. Yes. It's a lot. All right. So. But what if we could get that CO2 concentrating mechanism, that CCM, as they call it, into our crops? That's, this has been the goal for decades of researchers. They were looking for how can we do this? Now, one of these specific mechanisms is what's called a rubisco containing compartment. You put the rubisco in a box and you get CO2 in that box and that's how you increase its concentration of CO2. That makes sense? Sorry. It's conceptually very simple. Just put it in the box with a bunch of CO2 and the reactions happen in the box and you're good. Wow. The algae solve the problem rather than just making a bunch of rubisco. All right. So, researchers have made a proof of concept, right, by creating their own box for rubisco and showing that it can actually work. It can increase the efficiency of photosynthesis. Now, what do you think they make the box out of? PolymerSomes? Very close. Ah. The same kind of idea, right, basically, liposomes. Just, you know, this is that technology that we're talking about, right, where you just encapsulate things into, yeah, these bubbles. All right. So, they made one, but you have to get rubisco inside these cages, right? So, what they figured out is that you have to make the cage around the rubisco. We can't get it in there after the fact. Why? Why can't you shove the rubisco in there after you make the cage? Whatever. This has been the trick, right, making this happen, you know, at a nano level. So they were working with the rubisco containing compartments from cyanobacteria, specifically called carboxysoems. So, we had the polymer soems from Jay. Now we have the carboxysoems from photosynthesis, and they were able to tag it with this 14-amino acids so that would load the rubisco inside of it, right? So, basically, something that would latch onto the rubisco and then build the cage around the rubisco. Does that make sense? So, they had to build it at the right time, you know, as the plant develops so that the cages are forming when the rubisco is being made. Yeah, because they didn't do that then the, it didn't assemble properly and didn't work. This is all the technology, right? You got to get stuff to work because always there's little... How many trials and errors? Yeah, there's a lot of trials and errors. A lot of little things you got to do. All right, so, but eventually, eventually they were able to make the carboxysoems package up the rubisco and they worked. But they haven't completely developed the technology yet, right? This is just a proof of concept. Yeah, it's efficient. There are additional components that they're going to need to get in there in order for this to fully work, right? And then, of course, we need to get them into crops so that our wheat and corn and rice are using this method. And this isn't the only research being done into, you know, again, this carbon concentrating methods. This is the whole approach. But the good news is, you can look at, always look at it in terms of good news. Good news is, there's a lot of headroom on efficiency photosynthesis in our crops. Because by chance, plants evolved this inefficient method, which means all we got to do is figure out a way to get this either algae or say, in a bacteria method into crops. And again, this is a significant progress in doing that. And then if we do that, what that means is not only will our produce be way higher yield, but they will use significantly less water and nitrogen fertilizer. So this could be an absolute game changer for agriculture. Oh my god, we're agriculture. Yes, the adipses are very good. So it's why it's worth, you know, developing this technology and investing a lot in this kind of research and also multiple different ways. Like we can not put all our eggs in one basket. Like we could try to address this issue with multiple different approaches. How beneficial would this be? Just the message. The message. During, especially though, especially during like the zombie apocalypse, all the canned foods go on, you got to actually grow your own food. Oh, look, I've got this new plant 2.0. It's much more efficient. That's going to be a lot easier to. It could be a second green revolution, right? Oh my god. Yeah, if it works as we hope, I can't see how it's wouldn't be. Well, the potential is there. That's the bottom line. The potential is there. They're making progress on the technology. Conceptually, I think we have our heads wrapped around this. We just got to keep track of it and see how it goes. And obviously there's a lot of GMO research that's going on to do the same thing, you know, to get some kind of carbon concentrating technology. There's also different types of rubisco that are more efficient and some plants have them and some don't. So getting the C4 versus C3 into all the plants can also give a boost of 10, 20% to productivity, which is huge, you know. The potential here is just massive. All right, Bob, tell us about second generation black holes. All right. So my title for this is what kind of is black holes zombies in the news. They're dead stars and they ravenously eat their own. Now at least that's what a recent paper is saying, but not in those words, of course, not even closer. They even use those words. But a more conventional opener for this news side, a mic go like this. Gravitational wave astronomers report two unusual black hole mergers that are the best evidence yet for second generation black holes. The paper was recently published on this in the astrophysical journal letters. Okay. These collisions were revealed by not just LIGO, but we're talking LIGO, Virgo and Kagura collaboration. These respectively, those are the gravitational wave observatories for the United States, Italy and Japan and three together. They make quite a team up. So they we know this right. They measure subatomic scale distortions in space time caused by distant cataclysmic events like colliding black holes or neutron stars. It's a new era in astronomy, multi-mesand-gear astronomy where you can look at the radiation from objects in space, but you could also look at what it does to the fabric of space time itself. Okay. So last year they came across two unusual but similar black hole collisions within a month, within a month of each other, although one was 700 million light years distant and the other was over 2 billion light years distant. Imagine there's the traveling through space all that time. They hit our observatories within one month. And the last year spoke to me and Stephen Fairhus described it as among the most novel events among the several hundred that the LIGO, Virgo, Kagura network has observed. So why was this special? So both of these collisions were interesting in that. Now imagine you've got four black holes and they're binary. So they got two binaries. For each of these binaries, one of the pair was extra massive. Like more than twice as massive as as its partner that it's orbiting around. So for example, one was 17 solar masses and its partner was seven and the other binary pair had a 16 solar mass primary and a eight solar mass secondary black hole. So there were much, there were unbalanced in terms of of their mass. But these larger black holes also had very unusual spins. One was among the fastest spinners ever ever seen. I was trying to figure out, okay, this star is spinning really fast almost the fastest ever detected. So how do you put that into context? And it's really hard because there's no solid surface here. It's the dimensionless. So it's hard to actually describe it. But so the best I can come up with was a fair way to think about it is that the space time at the black holes horizon, like 83 kilometers wide, was frame dragging around about 400 times per second. It's literally pulling space with it and it sounds pretty disorienting and potentially specifying as well. So the other larger black hole was bizarre as well in that it's spin wasn't necessarily as as fast, but it was the spin was in the opposite direction of its orbit. So that's a retrograde spin that has literally never been seen with this level of clarity and confidence before. They think they've seen them before, but it was very fuzzy and hard to make out. This one was basically crystal clear as far as I could tell. Retrograde spin on a black hole. So what does this all mean? So what? Seeing that binary black holes where one member has twice the mass and in addition, this atypical rotation implies what? It implies a violent history for that black hole. Something happened in its past that was pretty nasty. So the simplest explanation is that those larger black holes weren't just simple remnants. They didn't form from just one dead star and have been hanging out ever since. They likely formed from previous collisions and the resulting larger mass and the weird spins that they saw initially were basically, you could look at it as like scars from those previous mergers that had happened in its past. So when these black holes smashed together in the past, it left these fingerprints on it. When they merged with other black holes in the future, they showed that these scars from having already merging previously. So they liken these now to what they're calling second generation black holes, which experience what they refer to as hierarchical mergers. Black holes that merge over and over suggest that they formed in these dense environments like star clusters where this can happen. So it's not like a typical when you think of a black hole, an ordinary stellar mass black hole, a very large star goes to its life cycle and it explodes in a supernova and it becomes a classic black hole. They kind of like stay there and encounters with other black holes are very rare because you're kind of like in your solar system and it's not the nearest star or black hole could be many, many light years away. And these look like they formed in dense environments so dense that the closest black holes and other stars were close enough where they could over the years, of course, many millions of years, they could merge together over and over and over. So this helps us elucidate this life cycle or this life cycle of some black holes and what their journey through their existence is like compared to other black holes. So for me though, the real takeaway and potential of these observatories, it was expressed by John Luca Gemmi, he's a spokesperson of the Virgo collaboration. He said these detections highlight the extraordinary capabilities of our global gravitational wave observatories and he couldn't be more right with that. I'm constantly amazed at what these gravitational wave observatories can do. No instrument, no instrument ever created by humanity can detect changes in distance better and smaller than a proton like LIGO and its siblings do basically on a daily basis. It's amazing how exquisitely sensitive they are. They help us interpret these distant laboratories in space that could never exist on earth with the tremendous energies that they unleash. We would never be able to, we could model it on supercomputers probably, but actually observing real reality as a laboratory. These are colliding black holes. We're only ever going to just observe these in distance space. This allows us, these devices, this technology allows us to stress test general relativity in ways that we'll never be able to do otherwise. The fact that LIGO and Virgo and Cogrog and their future descendants continue to be refined and become even more sensitive than ever means that they will be even more sensitive to any new physics that may go beyond Einstein's general relativity or our standard model of physics. So the more sensitive they become, the better they will be to sense new physics when it finally, you know, finally, if ever emerges out of there. Brand new branches of physics like that is a holy grail obviously and would certainly win a future Nobel Prizes and offer insights into deeper layers of our universe. If any of that interests you, of course. That's all I got, Steve. All right. Interesting. Thanks, Bob. All right, Evan. Avilob is that again? What's going on? Oh my God. Yeah. Well, there's news this week because, well, October 29th was just yesterday and comet 3i Atlas made its closest approach to our sun. So that has to do with Avilob and the news. I'll get to him in a moment. The anticipation for this day was built up for several months, actually, as scientists and the public have anxiously, ah, maybe not anxiously, but they've been waiting to see if this stranger from outside our solar system is going to swing around the sun as, well, standard models would predict, or is this something other than a comet that has the capability of altering its own trajectory in some way, which would be a very strong indicator that it's not a comet at all, but rather something out of a science fiction novel. Hmm. I wonder what the results are. We're going to find out. But comet 3i Atlas, yes. First of all, a little history was discovered on July 1st, 2025. And since then, astronomers have been doing everything they can to learn as much about it. It'd be a cause unlike other comets. 3i Atlas doesn't orbit our sun. It's an interstellar comet, one of only three that we've ever seen. Hence the designation 3i, 3interstellar. It is thought to be at least 7 billion years old, which is almost twice as old as Earth. And apparently the oldest comet that's been observed. So that alone makes the study of this comet a rare chance to try and learn something about ancient objects hurtling around from outside of our solar system. But it also unfortunately opens an opportunity for fringe scientists, crank pseudoscientists, and conspiracy theorists to have a field day playing with this chunk of debris from a distant part of our universe. Yeah, so here's something unusual. To our understanding, let's go crazy with our imaginations, they say. It doesn't work that way, folks. We've mentioned 3i Atlas on the show many times over the last few months since that July discovery. And not the least of reasons why is because of that astronomer from Harvard University, Dr. Avi Loeb. He's made quite a name for himself occupying that fringe scientist category in my opinion. He made international headlines back in 2018 for arguing that the interstellar object Omoa might have been a light sale sent by an ancient civilization. And more recently he led an expedition to the Pacific Ocean to recover debris from I am one. That was that 2014 meteor that he also suggested could be of interstellar origin and possible artificially. Both cases drew wide attention, but none of Loeb's extraordinary interpretations have stood up to any peer-reviewed scrutiny. But 3i Atlas, Loeb's theory is that, well, yet again, here's another candidate for extra-terrestrial technology. It is cleverly disguised, maybe, maybe, as a comet. Yet revealing, because the comet does not behave like other comets that scientists have been able to study, the ones that originate and continue move in orbit in our own solar system. He describes these anomalies as such. These are jets of material that are apparently pointing toward the sun rather than away from it, an almost complete lack of a visible tail and an emission of nickel without any sign of iron, or you would normally have the two of those coming out in a predictable ratio. So this is an, that's considered an extremely unusual mix. Almost as if we've never seen an interstellar comet before. Well, that's the point, right? That's what this all boils down to. It's only as if we're vulnerable. It's the first interstellar comet. It's a third interstellar object. Third interstellar object. So it's the first time we're seeing something like this, and he's saying, but there's unusual stuff we've never seen before. Therefore, we need to seriously consider aliens. They're for aliens. I went to Earth Sky. Earth Sky is a good website. They've done good work on tracking three eyetless and its movements and the plausibility at all of what Avi Lowe has to say about this. And there's really nothing here that requires any alien engineering degree whatsoever. It's moving on a hyperbolic trajectory. It's going to sling it back out of the solar system after it passes near the sun as the models describe. And this is observations from multiple observatories. This isn't just one source looking at this. The Pan stars two telescope has been tracking it. NASA's Neo wise mission is tracking this as well among others. And it really has all the hallmarks of a typical, it's volatile, but it's a typical interstellar comet that they say. It's losing water and gas as it warms. It has a faint coma. You know, it's not, they say it's just not dramatically seen as some of the other comets that we've been, you know, have observed in the past. It's pointing towards the sun that can be explained away by as an optical geometry effect because of our viewing angle and solar illumination. So there are answers to all of the questions, all of the anomalies that are being posed here. Again, none of it, you have to go to alien engineering for. Yeah, so what happened? Yeah, it reached the sun just yesterday. And again, the latest observations, it's on its way back out of the solar system now, but it has not made any dramatic turns. It has not done anything out of the usual. It is not displaying any kind of behavior that would say, hey, we need to really scrutinize this and take a second look at it. Maybe Avilob or someone else is onto something. None of that is occurring. This is acting as a comet should act. Oh, did you know I hadn't heard this one before I researched it for this news item. There's speculation that the objects reversed engineered trajectory points towards the same direction as the wow signal that was detected back in 1970. No way, man. I mean, that's, you know, how accurate could that be? A point for creativity, but, you know, I mean, trying to stir up old controversies and old, you know, old conspiracy theories is rather interesting. I thought that they were able to bring back the wow signal and fold it into this, into this event as well. He's spiraling down the crank train disguise. Now he's saying that NASA's withholding photographic evidence that could prove that he's correct. Yeah, just for him, anything for him to be correct, right? So this is the pattern he's falling into. It's actually way worse than we've already documented. For example, he says, oh, it doesn't have a coma. A comet should have a coma. And then there was a paper that showed that it does have a coma. And they said the paper's wrong because it's like it shows that then he had to admit that it did have a coma. And so, well, maybe it has a coma because the interstellar craft picked up dust from it's interstellar travel. Oh my God. Therefore, it just keeps, you know, just changing what he's claiming, you know, just getting more and more silly. And then he said, oh, it's, you know, it's glowing with its own light, you know, which is not true. Yeah, the anti-tail, the tail pointing forward is likely because the stuff that's coming, you know, what happens is the comic gets heated up by the sun. That's what creates the coma. And then the solar wind creates the tail, right? So it blows the stuff away. But if the particles are very heavy, they won't quickly get pushed away by the solar wind. They will, they will just keep going and radiating out from the comet. And the brightest point on the comet is the one that's facing the sun, right? So you're going to have ejected material going towards the sun. And if it's heavy particles, they won't get pushed into a typical cometary tail. Hence you're left with an anti-tail. Does that make sense? And this, and we've seen this before. And then you would expect, well, over time, it still will get pushed into a regular tail. It'll just take longer because the particles are heavier. And that's what's happening. That's what we're seeing as time goes on. But he, you know, the thing is, again, I don't have a problem. With saying, oh, could this observation be consistent with an alien craft, whatever? But this is just not the kind of thing that should be shopped to the public at this stage because this is completely consistent with just a regular comet or, you know, an interest in interstellar comet with some unusual features that we've never seen before, right? Because it's interstellar. That's it. It's, you know, the probability of this turning into something fantastic like an alien spacecraft is negligible. But maybe it's not technically zero, but it's pretty damn low. And it certainly, Occam's razor dictates that, you know, we have to rule out, you know, non-alien interpretations first, this regular old astronomical object stuff first. And he's just making a career going on Joe Rogan now talking about how NASA's hiding data. I mean, this is, he's been calling this a straight up crank now. People aren't just picking this up. He's got a publicist. You know he is. Yeah. He has, he has solid these interstellar close calls for years, for years, whenever, and we're going to get to the point where we could literally, you know, potentially detect two, three of these every year. And now for years, everyone's going to be talking about what is this also an alien craft. I also expected my at this point to say these, those aliens are so smart that they made this one look just like an icy ball of rock and not, you know, not what it really is. That's how good they are. Like really, I expect to hear that from him many time now. Like how good the aliens are at disguising. Real shame. It's a traction, a traction the wonder of the science of all of this. That's what really should be on showcase. Here is how amazing these things are and the fact that we are able to learn these new things about them. That's, that's the real excitement here as far as I'm concerned. How American is this whole thing, right? It's just like, there's a chance of real interesting science. No, it's aliens. I don't think that's uniquely American. As far as NASA not releasing the photo, not all of their devices spit out photos as fast as others. And, you know, I think it was the, what, the high rise camera on the Mars reconnaissance orbiter. That takes time to get those images to come out of that particular one. And that's the one he was referring to. He doesn't bring that into his discussion at all when he's talking about it. You know, that this is, this is, this is, this particular instrument does take a long time to render these pictures. No, no, no, instead it's NASA's hiding stuff. So yeah, that's what throws him into the crank category when he starts doing stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, you guys is probably drunk on money and the, you know, the, the fame that he's getting for it. Yep. And that's his selling. Mm-hmm. It's a good lesson here. You can watch it in real time. Just watch him slide down the crazy hole, you know, just because he's getting other things that he, that are apparently more important than real science. Well, even if you put the motivations aside, I do think there's a feedback loop of why aren't I being taken seriously from my crank ideas than to people are just closed-minded to their hiding data, to their wrong, to there's a conspiracy. And it's all, you know what I mean? Just keep that, I think the feedback loop that he is going down right now. All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time? Yes, it is. All right, guys, last week I played this noisy. That's pretty weird. What do you think? Did Amon suggest it was a Morse code signal of some kind? No, no, okay. You did though. Maybe. Are you going to stick with that? Possibly that's where they were going for. I don't know what, what made the noise though. All right, well, we got, I got a lot of guesses. Some fun ones. There was a lot of people sending in a lot of joky stuff. Thank you for the laughs, but you know, obviously I can't really, I can't go, I can't go all in on that. But this one, this one made me laugh. This guy is named Kevin Walsh and he says, hi Jay, I think you're at the point where, if it sounds like a bird, it's probably not, but if it's a bird, it doesn't sound like one. That being said, this doesn't sound like a bird, so I'm going to guess it's a woodpecker. I'm like, okay, it is not a woodpecker. And Steve, have you ever heard a woodpecker make any kind of sound like that? No, but you should weigh more rhythmic. Yeah. And they laugh a lot to wear into the cartoons. Absolutely. That's only a pilliated woodpecker. I have another listener named Gary Blanford. Gary said, to me, it sounded like a lead worker flattening or shaping the lead sheet prior to welding or other processes. Keep up the great work. That's an interesting guess. I haven't worked with lead. I've only worked with iron. So I don't hear that, but that was interesting. I actually want to know what that sounds like now. Another listener named Nicole H. said, hi, this is my first time writing. I was bummed a few weeks ago because I recognized the roller coaster noise, but I didn't send an email. This is a lesson to everyone out there. Take the chance, send the email. Sometimes you're going to be right. To continue, this week's noise sounds like liquid-filled bottles rolling downstairs. Interesting. Okay. I've heard this noise. This is not correct, but thank you for the guess. Scott Wesley writes in, sounds too simple and I think you've done it before, but it sounds like one of those playground pipes where you can tap with your hands or slip on flat shoes to make these sort of noises. It sounds very clean, though, either well-practiced or I'm wrong. So Scott, did you mean did I have I played the playground pipe noise before or I wasn't crystal clear on what you said or what you meant by that? But the bottom line is, I'm almost sure I have never played this noisy before. I mean, it is a hard thing because the noise you go back into when Evan used to do it as well. So I don't have perfect clarity. I have okay clarity on that, particularly things that are like over five years ago. Anyway, you are incorrect and that's all fine. It's okay to be wrong. As Steve says, he's wrong all the time, right? No, he never says that. Hi. Anyway, so nobody won. And I, you know, it always completely baffles my mind when people don't guess that it's a bird, when it's a bird. And this is a bird. Steve, do you want me to play it again and you want to try to guess? Sure. All right, here we go. Where's it? I have no idea. It's an e-moo. What's it doing? You're right. I actually got down to pronouncing it's an e-moo. I told you, later in the show, I was going to mispronounce it. You heard me say that. All right, so it's an e-moo. E-moo. And these are large, flightless birds they live in or native to Australia. They are the second largest bird in the world after the ostrich. The adults can grow to about six and a half feet tall and weigh around 100 to 130 pounds. And of course, they have long necks. That's how they get up that high. Strong legs, brownish feathers that look shaggy because each feather has a double shaft. Very cool bird. I have a new noisy for you guys this week. And here it is. I'll say it now. You got to put it in before Steve. Ready? Yeah, so this noisy this week, guys. This one has very high pitched, somewhat annoying, tingling sounds. So if you want, turn your volume down a little bit just to make sure you don't hurt yourself. The people in the background have nothing to do with this. Just say no. All right, guys. If you think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, email me at WTN. And finish it, Steve. At theSky.org. There you go. All right, Steve, there's stuff. Yeah. There is stuff. Okay, so first off, we have tickets for sale. We have a bunch of shows planned. We're calling this the ERE, the exclusive rogue encounter. What is it you might ask? This is the result of people emailing us like for a very long time asking us if they want something, they like the VIP things that we do. But they want something more intense, like an intense VIP thing. So we thought we'd turn this kind of like into a Disney role attraction where you will encounter us like we are dinosaurs. No, that's not what it is. This is going to be exclusive meaning the numbers are going to be very low and it's going to be more intimate. We are going to have, you know, it's going to be like you and a handful of other people hanging out with the SGU. We don't know exactly. We're not performing. We're engaging. We're talking. Yeah. Private time with the SGU. Yeah, I mean, it's going to be a lot of fun. We don't know exactly what we're going to do because we'll think about it. We could do anything. It could be anything from listening to music to playing games, to slapping George around, just whatever we decide. But it'll be fun and this will happen on a Friday night. I'm not going to say anything else about that because the tickets are not up yet or they might be by the time this episode comes up. It's not exclusive. That's what exclusive this is. Yeah, they'll be next week. Bottom line is watch out for that on the home on the SGU homepage. Then, you know, that will be January 9th and on January 10th, we have two shows. We have the SGU private show and we have the SGU extravaganza with George Robb. All those tickets are available on the SGU.org site. And then we fast forward now to Saturday, May 16th. That's in Madison, Wisconsin at the Atwood Music Hall. It'll be the same exact arrangement I just said. Friday night, exclusive Rogan counter, the Saturday, which is actually the 16th. We'll have both the SGU private show and the skeptical extravaganza stage show. And just to let you know, we're going to be doing a show in New Haven at some point that's New Haven, Connecticut. Those dates will be coming out soon. It'll be sometime in the probably early spring. And also, if guys, if you want to support the work that we do, you can go to patreon.com forward slash skeptic sky. Thank you, Jay. All right, we got a quick email. This one comes from Norbert, who asks, here is my paraphrase of what I psychologist said on a radio program many years ago. Humans have reflexes, drives, and urges, but humans do not have or act on instinct. At the time, I simply accepted the comment that's accurate, but what are your thoughts? I thought that this might make an interesting segment for the show. All right, well, thank you, Norbert. I think it is an interesting question. Or what do you think about that? Do humans have instinct? I have to look at specifically how they worded this. Your immediate reaction is it depends on the details, which I mean, how do you define it? Reflexes, drives, and urges, but they do not have instinct. Well, how is a reflex not an instinct? Like, this is all just operational definition. Exactly. I read them like, this is, but depends on your definition. This is a semantic argument. Because we do have reflexes and drives and urges. And I don't think there's a difference between an instinct and an urge or a drive. I think what they're asking is, do we have things that are innate versus environmentally influenced? And we do. Totally. We totally have in the flight thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and like suckling exactly a coughing, like, yeah, all of those things. So we have these basic kind of neurological ones. But I think even more complicated, I think the parenting instinct is absolutely real. Yeah, there are definitely instincts. I mean, and people have them when they have pets, even, I think, whenever there's something in your charge that you're caring for, there are certain neurotransmitters, there are certain brain states that you experience. But then again, there's always an exception to the rule, because there are some people who have weaker versions of that. There are people with psychopathy who might struggle with empathy and probably those things are triggered. Yeah. Now, I think where people might make a distinction is that, because all of these things reflexive drives are just instinct, whatever you want to call it, the more neurologically sophisticated a species is, the more higher level cognitive processes will be affecting these behaviors and feelings, et cetera. Right. So just because, like as human beings, we can think about stuff and alter our behavior accordingly, doesn't mean we don't have the instincts. Right. Doesn't mean the instincts aren't there. I think there's also a big difference between what we're talking about, like quote, neurological, what I would actually not use the word instinct, I would use the word reflex or drive or urge. And what we often think of as instincts are can be learned, but there's still instincts because we have heuristics and we have biases. And so even though there's a lot of environmental influence, there is still the quick reaction, you know, the thinking fast and slow. And when we have the quick reaction, whether it is socially influenced or whether it is biologically influenced, there it's the immediate reaction versus the higher level I need to sit and think about this. Yeah. And so some people might call that an instinct. It depends on how you define it. Right. But I think by any reasonable definition, we have instincts in that, you know, the core part of the definition is it's there are some things that are innate that affects our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Absolutely. Yeah. And pulling away your hand from a hot fire, you can call it a reflex, sure, but we also have the cognitive ability to override that and force our hand there, even if it burns. So it's like even a reflex is more complicated than that. So I think the word instinct is just a loaded word and they're using it. Whatever your professor was or the psychologist on the radio program was my hope is that they contextualized it more than that. They didn't just say that sentence and then like go dead silent. Right. You can't leave it there. Yeah. I mean, I reflexes have a very specific definition in neurology. So I would reserve them for that. Those are those who usually things that are happening at a peripheral level, you know, or they are in the knee with or they are in the brain. They're in a subconscious level. It's like a circuit. It is literally a circuit that does not involve any higher level thought and may in fact be completely independent of it. Like you can't even impact it with your higher level thought. Right. So like instinct, for example, as opposed to reflex would be like maybe pulling pulling your hand away or it's like there's all the obviously famous little Albert experiments which were flawed, but whatever. And most psychologists generally agree that there are two main fears that infants have. Loud noises and heights. Falling. Yeah. Like falling and loud noises that those are just things that quote unquote innately. They're instinctive. They're instinctive. They're instinctive. Yeah. But then they can learn all sorts of other ones and they feel instinctive. It feels instinctive to recoil to a snake, but that is learned. That's totally learned. Uh huh. There's all sorts of cool experiments where they put babies with snakes and the babies are just like grabbing at them and like totally not concerned at all. Right. Yeah. Right. Okay. We're going to do a name that logical fallacy as well. This one comes from TikTok. So this is also from TikTok, but this was someone who care. I believe is a Mormon who who according to their their faith, there were horses, modern horses in the Americas prior to contact with the Europeans. Right. And of course, scientists, you know, historians say that there is no modern horses in the Americans prior to the arrival of Europeans. Okay. Only only like extinct horses. Yes. Yeah. And those extinct horses probably all migrated over from Europe. And of course, he evolved in Europe and Asia and then there were waves of immigration from over the bearing straight when that was passable, et cetera. And then modern horses evolved in Europe and Asia and were brought to the Americas by Europeans, basically. According to the Mormon's Native Americans are a quote, lost ribob is real. I know. Right. This is all I ever do. Yeah. Yeah. We don't have to get into for this piece. Okay. But this guy is saying that that argument that there were no modern horses in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans is a logical fallacy. It is the argument from ignorance. And then he backs it up by saying the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So he's trying to use skeptical logic, you know, the kind of arguments that we make. Yeah. In order to say we don't know that there were in to modern horses in the Americas prior to Europe. You're just basing it on this conflation of absence of evidence with evidence of absence. But that's just another semantic argument. We can't prove that there were no horses, but we can say reasonably that there's no evidence that there were horses. So it's likely there weren't. I don't understand why. Yeah. Yes. We say the same thing all the time. We operate as if there were no horses because there's no evidence to think there were. Exactly. You weren't here for the interview with a philosopher a couple of years ago where he made a very good point. We need to constantly reinforce which we have, but he put a good term on it. That's operates by the inference to the best explanation. Yes. That's it. It's all inference to the best explanation based upon the totality of evidence and not proof, right? It's not math. It's not proof. And so in the context of science, we could say that if you look at all the evidence, right, there's evidence that horses evolved in Europe and Asia, right? They did not evolve in the Americas. There's no evidence for horses in the Americas prior to contact with Europeans. And we know that Europeans brought their horses over here. And so the simplest, actually, we have Alcombs razor kicking in, the simplest explanation of them, the one that introduces the fewest new assumptions as we like to say more accurately. And the best inference to the most likely conclusion is Europeans brought modern horses to the Americas. They were not here before. I'm trying to call that a logical fallacy means it's the fallacy fallacy, right? He does not understand how these fallacies work. I also often point out that saying absence of evidence is not evidence of absence is technically wrong. It is evidence of absence. It's just not proof of that. Yeah, it's a form of evidence of evidence of absence. It's a form of evidence. And how good is the evidence? Well, it depends on how much you've looked and how effective whatever your survey technique is. And what we have the population, can we sample? Yeah, what would we have expected to find horses, evidence of horses, pre-Europeans, if they were here? Like, would we have expected to find Typhus in the remains of Napoleon's soldiers? It doesn't prove they didn't have Typhus, but we didn't find what we expect to find if they did. And that is absolutely evidence of absence. It is. Yeah, it's just not proof. I use the same argument when people ask me why I call myself an atheist and not agnostic. And I always tell people, I think that the term agnostic is a global label. We are all agnostic. We are either theistically agnostic or we are atheistically agnostic, meaning nobody has full proof. All we can do is operate as if there is no God or as if there is a God or multiple gods. I operate as if there is no God, meaning I am an atheistic agnostic. Some people operate as theistic agnostic. So I drop the agnostic label because it's redundant, but I feel like it's the same thing. There's evidence of absence all around me, which is why I choose to subscribe to that view. It's not proof. That is no God. In front of the best explanations, we don't need to hypothesize God or gods or supernatural things to explain the world that we see. And it's not a very useful hypothesis anyway. Exactly. What makes it extra frustrating is the fact that a lot of people will say that they absolutely do have evidence, which of course is no evidence at all. Yes, they're wrong. So frustrating. I always say both. I'm an atheist and an agnostic. I just have a slightly different formulation. I agree with what you said, but I think this is a communication thing. Because agnosticism. No, it's operational. Yeah, agnosticism professes the inability to know what you are saying. So you are agnostic. Right. So I am professing you're right. Some people don't profess it, but my argument is I don't think you're professing. I'm still thinking. Yeah, atheist. Right. And I got into this argument before too. Atheism is strong atheism and weak atheism. And strong atheism is, I know there is no God. Whereas weak atheism is, I don't believe in God. That's my argument. I'm afraid to God. Yes, we are weak atheists and agnostics, which is the only scientific stance. It is. And etymologically speaking, I'm sorry, but atheism is a lack of theism. Yes, right. That's all that is. It's not an assurance that theism is wrong. It's not anti-theism. It's atheism. Okay, but we like to be philosophically accurate. Yes. And we just grab our beliefs. All right, let's go on with science or fiction. It's time for science or fiction. Each week I come up with three science news items or facts to real and one fake that I challenge my panel of skeptics to snip out the fake. There's a sort of theme here. And the theme is good news, everyone, which I've used many times before. These are all news items. They're all current news items, but they all tend to also be good news. All right. Here we go. Item number one, engineers have created a form of gallium-doped germanium, materials already used in electronics, that is superconducting at ambient pressures and in the temperature range of liquid nitrogen. I number two, a new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses less than 1% of the energy of current methods while achieving equal or better results. Item number three, researchers demonstrate a liposomal delivery system that can be used to safely deliver a previously unusable anti-cancer drug with 1,000 times the toxicity of similar drugs, resulting in highly effective treatments for even drug-resistant cancers. Jago, first. First, what engineers have created a form of gallium-doped germanium, materials already used in electronics, that is superconducting at ambient pressures and in the temperature range of liquid nitrogen. It is gallium-doped. It is so dope. It just means that you include it. It's an engineering term. It means you added it to the gallium atoms have been added to the germanium. So Steve, instead of superconduction happening at a much lower temperature, it's happening at the liquid nitrogen level. That's essentially what you're saying here, right? For that, you're framing it interestingly. We already have superconducting material at this temperature range, but it's ceramics. This is the first time which is using like metals we're already using electronics, getting up into that range. That's a big deal. I can clearly see that. Okay. I mean, it would be fantastic. I can't think of anything off the top that would go against this being a possibility. Yeah. So I'll just say that's a maybe. Number two, a new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses less than 1% of the energy of current methods while achieving equal or better results. Less than 1% of the energy of current methods of that, if true, would be a massive, massive gain and help in so many freaking ways, not using all that energy and all the heat that's produced. When you say deep learning, are you including LLMs? What ever uses the deep neural net learning methodology? Okay. I mean, I'm pretty sure that includes LLMs. I mean, that's massive. Sub 1% of current energy use. I can't imagine how they could have figured that out. The framework allows them to use a hundredth of the energy. I don't know. Okay. That's a big what if. No, I don't think so. That's on my top list now. The third one here, researchers demonstrate that a liposomal delivery system can be used to safely deliver a previously unusable anti-cancer drug with a thousand times of toxicity of similar drugs, resulting in highly effective treatments for even drug-resistant cancers. Well, the good news is it's either like this awesome cancer thing or the 1% less than 1% energy usage, which either one of those being true would be fantastic. You know, for some reason, I think the cancer thing is true and the energy one is false. Number two, Steve, the deep learning using less than 1% of the energy usage of current methods is a fiction for me. Okay, Cara. Yeah, I'm kind of leaning that way too. I don't really understand the first one, the gallium-doped germanium. So we've got these materials that are already used in electronics and they've created this form that's now superconducting in ambient. I feel like we get this all the time. Superconduction at ambient temperatures, and we haven't been able to crack it in the temperature range if of liquid nitrogen. Okay, it's still pretty cold. So that's considered ambient temperature. Ambient pressure. Oh, sorry, ambient pressure, but still really cold. Okay, yeah, that one actually seems like it can be true. Because you know, some superconducting materials are like millions of atmospheres. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice. It's not very cool. Yeah, yeah. Because I feel like I've seen like the, yeah, maybe it was ceramics like you guys mentioned, but the displays of like the thing like floating, but it had to be super, super cold. Like learning models, yeah, less than 1% of the energy of current message. What I don't like about this news item is it doesn't say something like a new framework for deep learning models has been shown to train faster or like has been modeled to train faster. It just says it does train faster and it uses less than 1% of the energy of current methods. So that makes it sound like it's not theoretical or it wasn't a proof of concept. They actually did it. And so that's like, wow, that's a big deal. I think the liposomal delivery system being used to safely deliver anti-cancer drugs is, I think that's already science. So the big question here is it was previously an unusable drug and it had a thousand times the toxicity of similar drugs, but now it can be used safely. That would be the new bit because I think we're all, we already have liposomal delivery systems for anti-cancer drugs. So that's why that one seems like it's closer to reality. So I'm going to say the deep learning model is also the fiction. That's what you said, right, Jay? Yeah. Yeah, I'm with you. Okay, Evan. I can't really add much more to that than what Jay and Kara have already said and led me to the same conclusion. I don't know how you get to the less than 1% of the energy of current methods and achieve equal or better results. That's like, you know, win and winning winner, winner beyond that win win. So I think that's the least plausible of the three. I'll just say that that's the fiction that's all I've got. Okay, and Bob. All right. Well, I mean, this superconducting advance seems interesting. As you said, Steve, yes, we for many years, we've had, we've matched this with ceramic based materials. And it's been great. But one of the classic problems was, well, how do you, you know, how do you turn ceramic into like a, you know, wire, you know, superconductive wire or something like that? So perhaps this was mainly beneficial because it's since it's metallic based, it would be better to use at the liquid nitrogen temperatures and ambient pressures. I don't know how much of a, of a big plus this one is considering that we're, we can already do it with ceramics. But yeah, there certainly can be some huge advantages, potentially that I'm just not really can bring you to mind here. Let's see, the less than 1% of the energy, isn't that what, do you remember early in this administration, Trump was talking about spending like what, some crazy money, a billion dollars for, for these, these, you know, super, you know, these computer centers to, you know, for AI. And then was it, was it China that just came out with, with the similar, AI's that your LLMs that were just like use much less energy, I'm forgetting the details, I try to, I try to forget that period of my life, but I don't, so it reminds me of that. So in that sense, it seems very similar to what we've already knew or seemed that China could do or admitted to being able to do many, you know, many months ago. I don't know, it's just too foggy to really remember those details. So this is the third one here. Yeah, this like a somal delivery system. That sounds great. I want that to be true so much, so much. But yeah, I'm going to just have to go with the crew here. Less than 1% still, that's so dramatic. I hope it's true, but it just seems less likely than the other one. So fiction. Okay. So let's, let's start with number three. Researchers demonstrate that a liposomal delivery system can be used to safely deliver a previously unusable can, to cancer drug with 1000 times the toxicity of similar drugs resulting in a highly effective treatments for even drug resistant cancers. You guys all think this one is science and this one is science. This is very cool science. So yeah, the question of like was the 1000, like the guy could easily have been 100 or even 10 times the toxic, you know what I mean? So as we've discussed before and I know is, is very well aware of, you know, chemotherapy is very toxic. It is poison. Oh, yeah. And there's a therapeutic window. The therapeutic window is it has, you know, clinically significant anti-cancer effects with tolerable side effects, right? The benefits are more than the side effects. But like, and so toxic that for example, in chemo centers, there's a dedicated bathroom, the workers and the guests do not use the same bathroom as chemo patients. And chemo nurses, the infusion nurses have to get their blood tested regularly. It's that toxic. Yeah, white salt, your immune system. No, absolutely. So they like the nurses working around chemo have to make sure they are not getting, yeah, that they're healthy to be able to use it and that they're not getting any chemo. Right. How's your contamination happen? Well, some of it's so toxic. Like, I think it's what's it called red, not red devil. But there's this one like for triple negative breast cancer treatment that's so toxic that like if you spill a vial of it, it like burns a hole in the linoleum. Like it's pretty intense blood. Alien blood, what the hell? Right. Right. So there are lots of drugs which kill cancer cells quite nicely, but there isn't a therapeutic window because at the, at the, they're so toxic that there's no safe dose for people, basically, like injecting bleach for COVID. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. So, but as Cara said, the idea of well, we're going to take liposomes. This is the third, some, you know, news item now that we're talking about this week, which is these little packages. And if we can deliver, deliver them selectively to cancer cells, that then might open up a therapeutic window. It might increase the amount of toxicity to the cancer while decreasing the amount of toxicity to non-cancer cells. So this is just doing that really well, basically. They developed this, you know, liposome that can target cancer cells, specifically like certain genetic changes that make cancer cells, cancer cells, and they make it so that they can't repair their own, they cause DNA damage that can't be repaired. So eventually those cells die because it is so super selective in its delivery. It was encapsulated what's called a paginated liposome. It says in vivo efficacy, this is all animal studies, but in vivo efficacy was evaluated in three allograft models of cancer, melanoma, breast cancer, lung, and a xenographed model of uterine sarcoma. So basically they're trying to give mice human cancers, right? And they were highly effective, even in the very drug-resistant cases, and in some of the mice like eliminating the tumors completely. Because it's good. I want to be a mouse. Cancer, Alzheimer's, what else? They got to go in. So this approach could open up a whole new list of possible anti-cancer drugs that previously were just too toxic to use, and now we can use them, and they're more effective, even against previously drug-resistant tumors. How would the side effects, though? Well, we're talking more partial than conventional. No, that's the thing. No, it would be less. The idea is to make it even less, necessarily. No, it would be because it's more targeted. Yeah, the targeting is, this is a mice, so it's hard to say, like what would be like in people, but the idea is to get it at the same or less than conventional chemotherapy. Hopefully, much less. If it's more targeted, then what couldn't you just use is for all chemo drugs, then? Yeah. That's where we're headed. That's where we're headed. Absolutely. And the idea, there is a correlation, I wouldn't say they're the same thing, but there's a massive correlation between toxicity and side effects. Yeah. Side effects are a function. They're the effect. Yeah. It's just, you want to use drugs that, where cancer drugs are more susceptible than non-cancer drugs for whatever reason. And that's why, that's why diseases like triple negative breast cancer, you have to hit people with just like this horrible toxic drug because it doesn't have any genetic markers. It doesn't have any more of those markers. The markers that you sometimes use to target therapies, yeah. Yeah, triple negative, that's what that means. There's no markers in it. All right, let's go back to number two, a new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses less than 1% of the energy of current methods while achieving equal or better results. You guys all think this one is the fiction and this one is science. This is science. No, this is science. Oh man. This is got the same thing. Now, how do you think they did it? Who cares? You got the sweep. So this is the title. This is the title of the paper. I don't know. Topographical sparse mapping. A neuro inspired sparse training framework for deep learning models. So they model it after the brain. And specifically, so you know in these neural nets, this is now the, this is my oversimplified understanding based upon the articles that I'm reading, right? So I know the experts will be cringing it like how inaccurate it is, but this is the basic concept that they're discussing in this paper that neural nets, you went the, the nodes all connect to nodes at the next level, right? Like every node connects to every node for one level to the next. But in the sparse mapping, you only hit the node only connects to the nearby nodes at the deeper level. And that's it. That's the breakthrough. That's a big piece of it. And so there's far fewer fine tuning that you have to do in the training. You don't have to use, you don't have to, they say, they call the old models over parameterization. Right? Oh, yeah, yeah. And by getting rid of that, you know, basically you're getting rid of a lot of the, you know, parameterization that you have to the tweaking that gets done to these connections. So that it's, it uses less than 1% of them, right? And you still achieve the same results. And in fact, you get there faster. And the reason, yeah, because of course the training is faster because you're not having to make as many computational changes each step of the way, right? So essentially you're using a sparse connectivity patterns rather than an over unnecessarily overly robust connectivity patterns. The other thing that they do also inspired by brain function is pruning. The connections that don't get used get pruned. Oh my god, what a great idea. Yeah. And just for evolution is trying to just use only the connections that are absolutely necessary for the functionality rather than just having this default, everything connects to everything, right? Because that's the oversimplified way to say it. And the results were impressive. They, again, the training worked went a lot faster, used less than 1% of the energy, which is, you know, huge in terms of obviously one of the big issues with the AI is the massive energy footprint that they have. But also the reason, that's the reason why it costs tens of millions of dollars to train AI models because of all the energy usage. So this could also make it a lot cheaper, you know, to train these models as well. So yeah, that's pretty cool. I hope this all pans out. Yeah. All right. And that means that engineers have created a form of gallium dope to germanium materials already used in electronics. That is superconducting in ambient pressures and in the temperature range of liquid nitrogen is the fiction because they did make gallium dope to germanium that is superconducting, but only at 3.5 K, 3.5 Kelvin. Whereas the liquid nitrogen starts at 77 Kelvin. Right. So it's super expensive if you want to get it down here. But you just can't use it. Yeah, it's not. It's not used. So again, cheaper. It's fine because I was reading first the press release and then the study itself. And then the press release, they don't mention like the whole time like at what temperature, at what temperature, at what temperature, they didn't mention it till the very end. Oh, that's bullshit. I know. I wouldn't have been long before that. That's your first paragraph. I'm a perigrabinger. Yeah. I'm God. That's how they keep you reading to the end actually. So I mean, obviously like like a lot of superconducting research, like the very high ambient, very high pressure of superconductors or whatever. The idea is that this is sort of a new way of achieving superconductivity and then hopefully we'll be able to keep going with this research and get to the point where it is at liquid nitrogen temperature, which is still super cold. But because you can cool it with liquid nitrogen, it becomes, which is actually relatively cheap. It becomes functionally very, you know, useful. Whereas I read once that says cheap is milk. Yeah. So it's not in day, right? But when the first superconductors that hit the public awareness in the 80s, the breakthrough was getting those ceramic superconductors up to liquid nitrogen temperature. Oh, yeah. That was the big breakthrough, not room temperature. We're not there yet. Not at ambient pressure, is anyone? Yeah. Now, if we could make, germanium is similar to silicon. Germanium and silicon are kind of the workhorses of electronics, right? And computing. It is a big deal that we can get to superconducting in germanium at all. That's great. Now we just have to figure out how to get it at much higher temperatures. And it does essentially work in the same way, ultimately as other superconductors, Bob, which you know is what? Well, it cooper pairs. Yes. That's a little way that it's the cooper pairs. It's the cooper pairs talk about. Yeah. The doping of the gallium allows them to get two electrons to form together to form a cooper pair and then they're superconducting. But it's still more complicated. It is. Yeah, yeah. That's the simplistic level of description. So it seems to be more, eventually you get to that same end point of cooper pairs. Interesting, but not useful at present, just maybe might lead to something in the future. But the other two are massive and those are very, very good news indeed. I had a cooper pairs once. He gave me both barrels. Did he? I don't get it. I don't need it. Oh, a cooper cooper in looking at barrels. Yeah, I guess. That was pretty weak at the cooper. Pretty weak. All right, Evan gives a quote. Wouldn't describe it as weak. Some might say clever. All interpretations made by a scientist are hypotheses and all hypotheses are tentative. They must forever be tested and they must be revised if found to be unsatisfactory. Hence, a change of mind and a scientist and particularly a great scientist is not only not a sign of weakness, but rather evidence for continuing the attention to the respective problem and an ability to test the hypothesis again and again. Ernst Meier. Yeah, correct, although said in an age before science denial was a thing. True. So he's missing a lot of nuance that was not necessary back in the day. Good old days. Right. Yeah. That's a good point. But now we would say, but I'm not saying that we can't act upon science that we have now. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, he died in 2005, right? Right before we started this podcast, basically. We could have had a man. I know. Clarify that for us, but he was gone. And then you could mention he was an evolutionary biologist. You could say that. It was his claim to fame. All right. Thanks, Evan. Thanks. And thank you all for joining me this week. You got it, brother. Thanks, Steve. And until next week, this is your SkepticSky to the Universe. SkepticSky to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at the SkepticSky.org. Send your questions to infoattheSkepticSky.org. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com-SkepticSkyde and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community, our listeners and supporters or what make SGU possible.