The Skeptics Guide #1061 - Nov 8 2025

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 November 6, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody, Cara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jane Novella. Hey guys, and Evan Bernstein. Good afternoon folks. So Cara, guess what? I had my own cardiac calcium scan earlier this week. Can I ask how it went? Yeah, my score was zero. Zero? That's the only good score. I see. Well, that's the best score. I mean, one to a hundred is very mild risk. But it's still a risk. Yeah, but zero is the best. Mm-hmm. Yeah, very happy about that. So I did a deep dive on it just to see like, how good is this? How is this scan? And it's actually pretty good. Yeah, everything I've read says it should be standard practice and it's pretty bananas that insurance companies are not paying for it for the most part. I don't know what it is. Can you explain what it is? Yeah, so basically, we talked about it on the show. When do you think the calcium scan for cardiac risk factors was first introduced? Probably like way longer ago than we would think. Yeah, 1990. Yeah. 35 years ago. Wow. But before the internet, yeah, but medical research didn't just adopt it, even though it's sounds good, they researched it in every way you could possibly imagine. So basically, this is a way of looking to see if there's calcium in the arteries in your heart, which calcium forms inside the plaques. And that is a better predictor of whether or not you're going to have a heart attack than stenosis, let's say, just the narrowing of the arteries. It's actually as good as your previous history, your previous cardiovascular history, which is always the best indicator. It's better than any other predictor, though. Right. And just to clarify, when you get an echocardiogram, for example, it can tell you a lot, but it can't tell you if you're starting to get calcifications in those vessels. And when you get a cholesterol test, that only tells you how much cholesterol is circulating in your blood. It doesn't tell you how much is stuck in your vessels. So all those things collectively and your blood pressure collectively are indicators. Yes. And so, you know, I think that's the most important thing to understand. Yeah, this is the single best indicator other than I have had a cardiac event in the past, which is as good as. But the only thing is it's independent, right? It's not like, yes, if you have these other risk factors, you're more likely to have calcium and to have a heart attack. It's that it's independent of age. It's independent of whether or not you've had a previous event. It's independent of all your other risk factors. So that's important, too. The only time I read that it's kind of not independent of age and tell me if you came across this same research, but there's an upper limit. Once you get to a certain age, it's very likely that you, that it's kind of a moot point because everybody has a risk score after a certain age. Like they were saying that like I think above 80 or maybe 85, it was a pretty high age. Nobody has a clean calcium because just by age you start to have some calcification in your, in your vessels. And so they, they wreck, at least the recommendations I read was to use other indicators. But you always put it in the context about indicators and your cholesterol and your family history and all this other. Well, and that's the question, right? So for me, I had a cholesterol of 202, my total, and I have a family history of high cholesterol. And so the question was, do I need to take a statin? Because I'm sort of in the like borderline gray zone. But the fact that my calcium coronary test was zero, it's not at least my doctor's like, no, we don't want to put you on a satin yet. That's exactly where I am. In fact, my cholesterol is also 202. I have the exact same thing. Oh, look at that. My coincidence. And we're cholesterol buddies. But it was the same thing. It's like, all right, we'll do the calcium scan. If it's zero, we will not start, we'll wait on the statins. If it's not, we'll maybe we'll put you on stands. Yeah. Are people who need calcium supplements at a higher risk? Therefore of heart attack? No, totally different. Completely different. Is because that's a deficiency that they're making up. No, this is a calcifications in your vessel. That's not like calcified plank. That's what they're looking for. I see. Okay. Placts form on the inside of your vessels and then they calcify and then they rupture and form a thrombus which causes a heart attack. That's why there's so it's the mechanism. So this stems from our basic understanding of how heart attacks occur. They don't occur from the plaques blocking the artery. They occur from the plaques ulcerating, platelets forming a clot on that ulcerated plaque and that acutely blocking the artery. So it's just a different mechanism. So that from that flows a lot of our current recommendations in terms of cardiac management, including anti-inflammatories, anti-platelet therapy and calcium scans to predict risk. Steve, who should get this test? Talk to your primary care doctor. Yeah. And if your primary care doctor hasn't heard of it? Well, I can't imagine a primary care doctor. Well, but a lot of them don't recommend it. They may have heard of it, but they may be like, oh, we don't do that because because here's the problem. A lot of insurance companies don't cover it. And so and it's not often done in-house because it's a CT scan. But like I live in the greater LA area, right? So I live in an expensive region and I still, my doctor, knew of a place where she wrote me a referral where it cost me $100 out of pocket to do this test. So to me, it was worth it. Yeah, for me, it was like nothing because I'm basically in like the LHMO. And so they offered it? Yeah, they offered it to me. Yeah, it's the part of my care. We didn't. Maybe it's because I'm of my age, but it was definitely not considered an in-network option. Yeah, but if you have any concerns or any risk factors, it's not a bad addition. It's very reassuring when it's very low or zero. And if it's high, it in and of itself could make it seem like you should be on anti-play the therapy and statins, etc. So it could be a life saver, you know? Yeah, I mean, Steve, I think the recommendation is talk to your primary care physician and try to get this test done because it really does give you a snapshot of if you have any blockages or something that is something that needs to be dealt with. So yeah, not even blockages, Jay, like literally the very start of something. That's what it can detect, which is so great. Yeah, it detects the thing that's the mechanism of having a heart attack. Yeah, it's looking directly at your risk of a heart attack. All right, let's go on with our show. Bob, start us off with a quickie. Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. Researchers have taken an existing cancer drug and improved it so much I was actually startled. This is researchers at Northwestern University, which is in the Northwest somewhere. They've taken it as a Chicago. They've taken a common chemo cancer drug called 5-flora uracil, 5FU, and transformed it. They've transformed it. Typically, this drug is far from ideal. Sounds a little scary, but I mean, it is chemo, but I think it's kind of like the scarier end of some chemo drugs, the popular ones, perhaps. It doesn't dissolve well. It doesn't get taken up efficiently by cancer cells. And it has bad side effects because healthy cells are impacted as well. But still, apparently, it's common. It's a common one. I guess it still has some decent utility. So the researchers essentially rebuilt 5FU as a coded nanoparticle. This is called a spherical nucleic acid or SNA. I predict you will be hearing that initialism a lot in the future, SNA. These are essentially strands of DNA or RNA pointing outwards, forming a sphere around the central core. You got that. So in this case, the core contains the chemo drug, 5FU, but it can contain other things as well. So this radial orientation of the DNA or the RNA is critical because that's what changes the drug's behavior and makes it play nice with the cells in our body. So in this form, the drug can now dissolve more easily and cancer cells can now absorb it like a sponge. So listen to these numbers. Animal test showed leukemia cells took up the SNA drug about 12 and a half times more efficiently. The cancer cells were killed up to 20,000 times more effectively. Not sure how that was measured though, but 20,000 times seems pretty awesome. Disease progression slowed by a factor of 59. And the icing on the cake, the usual chemo side effects did not appear at effective doses. So it just sounds incredible. Steve, can I have a question about this? Is that because the effective doses were so much lower? I didn't see specifically why the side effects were so much more, you know, powerful. Yeah, I don't I guess I'm not understanding. Is it that they're using less and it's more targeted? Like what is this? It's more targeted. I think it's I think it's both. I mean, they're using less because it's it's used because it's so much more efficient and targeted that yeah, they make sense that it's just because it's it's the new effective dose is much lower than it used to be. That just makes perfect sense. Although I didn't add that explicitly. That's great because as I'm reading a little more about five FU, I'm seeing that it has for a long time been a first line treatment, but very often it's given with adjuvant treatments. It's like not rarely, but it's not often given alone. It'll usually be combined with like this platen or something else to make it more effective. And so if they can not have to do that, that's also great. Right. So now, so this technique being employed here has a bigger category. It's structural nanomedicine. I think you'll probably be hearing a lot about that in the future as well. I hadn't really heard too much about it, but structural nanomedicines approach is not to invent necessarily a completely new drug, but to take an existing drug and change it shape and packaging so the body handles it better and tumors are targeted with more precision. So that's I mean, so that sounds like something that's definitely I'd love to follow structural nanomedicine because what a great idea. Here's drugs that we know they work, but for some, but for whatever reasons, they're not used as efficiently, nearly as efficiently as it could in the body. And this just makes takes the drug and just makes your body just absorb it where you needed it and absorb it super efficiently. So I'll definitely be following this. This has been your structural nanomedicine quickie with Bob back to you, Steve. Thanks, Bob. So Jay, tell us about this neo robot I'm hearing so much about the neo robot, Steve. Oh boy. This robot will do everything for you. Everything. But there's a big butt, Steve. Yeah, because they give it a big butt. There's like these details here. The robot has to think about why they do that. Well, if it falls down, it doesn't make a noise. Let me get into the details because I think you're going to be as surprised as I am about what this thing is and what they are saying and everything. So first of all, it's a built by a company called Onex Technology. They're based in Palo Alto and also in Norway. They are marketing a humanoid robot. They're saying it is in the near future household, which means very soon, like within the next year. And this thing will assist you in your home. It's not laboratory. This is in the home. So according to their website and this is their marketing, they say, take on the boring and mundane tasks around the house so you can focus on what matters to you. And here are their key claims that they're making about their robot. Soft and safe design with tendon-driven actuators. It has a 3D lattice polymer shell and it has pinch-proof joints which are suitable for human environments. These are all legit. The robot is indeed soft. It kind of looks like the whole thing is wearing a sweater. If you have animals, think about how stinky that would get. I guess you'd have to wash it. I don't know. They say the intelligence, they hose it down in the back. No, it hoses itself down in the back yard. You have two of them. One hoses the other. They're saying the robot can integrate visuals and the spatial orientation of your house has language capabilities. It can answer questions. It can remember context and adapt to your home. So this is a question mark for me on whether or not it can do all this. I don't see why. It can't do this. Essentially it would be similar to what I would think of as a standard LLM that you're used to interacting with. Then they say the home service tasks and from the press coverage they're saying that it can fold laundry, organize shelves, it can answer the door, it can go and get objects for you and more to come. Now that's where things get a little dicey and we'll cover that in a second. That's where things get dicey? I think we're waiting. You're ready. Everything I set up until that last bit, Steve, I feel like all that is completely doable. Sure, it has pinched proof joints. No problem. It's light. It's not going to fall down and kill anybody. But when they get into what it can do physically, that's where we're going to focus in on. But there's a couple of other things. One X says that Neo is built for home. So it's lighter weight. It's quiet operation. It makes the sound of no louder than a refrigerator and that they're going to start deploying it in 2026. And the price and availability, they say you could pre-order it now and it's around $20,000 or a monthly subscription, which I think is about $500. And you'll get it sometime in 2026. Okay. Out of all this, the claims that I have to zoom in on are of course like what it can actually accomplish. This is the reason why I think most of us want a robot. Of course, some people might want one as a companion. Some people might want to have just another presence in the house, whatever. The bottom line is, can it do stuff for me that I don't want to do? I don't want to wash dishes. I don't want to load and unload my dishwasher. I don't want to do laundry. I don't want to pick up after my kids. All the stuff that parents are supposed to do, I don't want to do. You've had your filter. Just those few that you mentioned, laundry, dishes, just those two things alone I think would be like, yeah, here's my take my money, please take my money. That would be fantastic. Of course, we've been talking about this really well. You know, Bob, Bob, Steve and I, Evan, I know you feel the same way because we're all part of the same generation. We were essentially sold this subliminally through science fiction. Oh, yeah. For decades. It started off with cartoons when we were kids. The Jetsons had a fully functioning nose. But the problem is, is that even though they have built this thing to be autonomous, you know, the people that have seen it in person and the reviews that have happened so far, you know, they're flat out saying like, this thing can't do complex tasks and here's the kicker. Now, Kara, most of the time when I tell you, I hope you're sitting down before I say something, it's usually a joke. This one is not a joke. This is a, what the hell was this company thinking? I know you guys know, but Kara, what do you think the big gotcha is with all of this? With this robot? Yeah, yeah. So it's like, I don't know, $100,000. No, it's $20,000. It's $20,000. Oh, here's that though. It's a soft robot that could be in your home and can do all these tasks. But there's one thing in the fine print that changes the whole picture. You have to put it where it goes. No, I'll give you a hint. I'll give you a hint. No. All right, so Kara, they say you can do all these things. And here's the hint. It can do all these things. It actually can't. But it actually can. There's certain circumstances. It can actually do it. It can theoretically do that. But there is something happening behind the scenes when you clear away the smoke and mirrors. Wait, there's a person operating in there. There is a person operating it. That's not a robot. Come on. Yes, there's a tele-authorated. How did they sit in there? And I said to these guys, I go, we had some guy that's high in California. That's driving him this freaking robot around your house. That is acting like a robot. Now the joke is it's powered by AI and Indie. Oh, no. Oh, no. That's like a really bad thing. Oh my god. But guys, remember, it's not designed out of the gate that it needs a tele operator all the time. It's designed to do stuff autonomously and the stuff that it can't do, it can get help by a tele operator. So it's a way to do it. It has a lifeline basically. It makes it unusable, low guys. It's not like there's always someone sitting there at the ready. You kind of have to make an appointment. You do. You have to make an appointment. You have to make an appointment to get your freaking washing machine emptied. It's like, are you kidding me? It doesn't really take that freaking long. I'm not going to like get on that some app and wait on a waiting list just to watch this stupid robot do something I can do in three minutes. But okay, but what if the lifestyle change was that you had a list of chores for the next day and you just queued them up the night before and then as tele operators became available, they did them in time so that when you got home from work, they were all done. I have two responses to that, Cara. Uh-huh. And I'll start off by saying you're very smart, but we have to think about this. There is a person in your house at that point. Well, that's the thing, right? So basically they should be targeting this as remote domestic helpers. But right, this is a machine that it prevents them from actually entering your house, but they do have access to, you know, you're looking at your credit cards. Yeah, they give all of them back to you. Yeah, you're accessing everything. There's a huge security issue here. Plus, that's like the person who's supposed to be operating it. What if somebody hacks into it? Right. Because you can't tell me that the security is going to be airtight on this thing in the home. Much less of a risk when you actually hire a housekeeper. I think, and also there's an abuse potential here, right? That's true. Oh, yeah. If you hire a housekeeper, you know who they are. You can vet them. I've had a relationship with, you know, you probably get a different tell-off here every time. Cara, I have you covered, okay, because I'm launching a new business. It's made that are dressed up like robots and they will cost you a lot less than getting the robot. You got a car. Well, you got a car. That's the thing too, because then at least they're employed here in this country. You know that they're getting a fair wage. Right. That's the thing that really worries you. So you want to invest in my company, right? You can purchase a lot of domestic help for $20,000. Oh my God. And it actually gives you services for three years. Yeah. You know what I mean? Right. And then you have to start paying for the services. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But for extra context, extra context here. Right now, when people that have used it now, they basically say, it really needed help for most anything it did. It really didn't do anything fully autonomously, like emptying the dishwasher or anything like that. It needed help. The CEO says. Great. So it's like having a man in your house. So wonderful. Exactly. You want to go do it? Okay. Let me help you the whole time. Exactly. I don't know. Oh. Exactly. It'll yell from across the house, hey, do you know where the pasta is? Hey, do you know where the car keys are? Do we use fabric software? We're doing it. Oh, I can't. So, but also guys, importantly though, but wait, importantly though, what the CEO says is this. The CEO says that this is how it is now. And the plan is to get this in houses because it's using deep reinforcement learning. So it's like hands-on training, trial and error. So the more, right, the more that people use it, the better and better it's going to get. And the CEO does say this. He says that the plan, the plan now is that next year when this is offered to people, that it should be able to do most things autonomously, but the more complicated things will need a teleoperator. So that's his plan. And if that, if that's what really comes to fruition in a year where it, where literally most of what it does is autonomous, that would, that would be great. But that's, that's the question. That's the question. How many reach this? The optimistic projections of a CEO of a tech company worth. Exactly. Exactly. And also, exactly nothing. Exactly. But nothing. We talk all the time about bias when it comes to AI and when it comes to these like training algorithms. I say this only half and just, the people who are going to adopt this technology early are like lonely tech bros who have a lot of money. And I don't want my domestic robot trained in one of his Silicon Valley apartments. But they will be. That's a whole new car. I know. You don't look, the training thing, it's not a bad idea. Like if we take out the fact that they're putting in like something that I wouldn't say half baked, it's, you know, look, there is a lot of legitimate technology in this thing. It's not a good one. Yeah. But it is as big as an actual home appliance and it's utility. Yeah. Like, this is a $20,000 rumba. I mean, come on. Yeah. When people were beta testing, they got to do it for free. That's the same. Yeah. They had to be their testers. If it's true, they have to be trained. Call it a beta. Give it, give it, give it to people or give it to them at a really cheap price and let them do the beta training rather than selling it with this wink wink nod nod. It's really a tele operator and we're really doing it so we could train it because hopefully then it will get better. Hopefully. We've actually talked about this on the livestream yesterday with Christian Hubecki who's a robot, who's a robot assist. He's a robot. I knew it. I knew it. Oh, man. Now I got to kill all of you. You're a robot, robot assist. Anyway, we're talking about the fact that, you know, within home is like the hardest place for a robot to function because there's a chaotic environment. It's very open-ended, et cetera. Especially if you have kids or pets. I mean, forget about it. Stairs. I have so many stairs. Yeah. So it's a very, very challenging environment and it's the probability of this being actually cost-effective and useful is almost negligible at this time. True. And you also have to consider the safety issues like with driving cars like 95% may be a technological tour de force but it's pretty useless for the end user. If it's dropping your plates 5% of the time or even 1% of the time, that's unacceptable. You need to get the error rate of these things down to a million to one or something in that order of magnitude. And that we're a long way away from that. Oh, that ain't happening any more time soon. No. Other than that, it's great. My primary question is, let's say that you could fast forward five years and you take all the training data that they collect and you put it into the current Neo system, right? This particular robot. How much better would it be able to perform? And I think the answer is it probably would be able to perform a lot better. So of course it's going to get better. There's a silver lining here because and I wanted to talk about this very briefly. The idea is companies are starting to and I think this is the first real, real, real robot in your home thing. Everything else has been from what I can tell and talking to Christian and just being a fan of all this for my whole life. It's all a non-starred humanoid robot or an angel. A humanoid robot, right? No room, but I'm talking about something walking around and doing stuff for you. Yeah, but really? Interacting with you. This is like the first one that a company is selling like, you know, this is a milestone. And I think it's an important one because money is being put into this and companies are developing this technology. And it means that just like autonomous cars that even though the bell curve, you know, that it might be super steep to get up to the really high end things that it'll be able to do. It's not unreasonable to say that within the near future, five to ten, that there could be a real robot in some people's houses that are getting some stuff done. Yeah, but you remember the other question is, is an Android robot the way to go? And why are we even focusing attention and developing? Why do we need, why does it have to look like a person? Because that's maybe not the best form for a domestic robot to be. And also does it need to be such an intense multitasker or can we have small hubs, yeah, specialized robots around the house? Yeah, right. That to me makes more sense. We talked about the robot arms that cook for you or whatever. You could have like the laundry arms or whatever, but there is some utility to an all-purpose robot. I could see that just like absolutely. You're everything. A lot of tools we use are designed for a humanoid shape. Right. They're economics, of course. So that's the utility of it being humanoid, but the utility of it being a single multitasker. There is utility in that, yes, but there's also a massive downside, which is when something goes wrong, now you don't have any of your tasks completed. That's right. And I think we might be in the phase for the next decades, 50 years or whatever, where we should be focusing on whatever shape works best doesn't have to be Android and maybe more limited range of activity so that it gets good at some things rather than being crappy at everything. Yeah, like what if there's a laundry bot that's dedicated to your laundry room and it does multiple tasks within one room, it doesn't ever leave that room of your house. That's like building on the Rumba example. Like it does one thing, it doesn't well. It's not an all-purpose robot, it's not a humanoid robot. It doesn't have security breaches because it doesn't have a flyer or a child operator. Or even if it does need a teleoperator, it stays in that room. I mean, what would this thing look like though? I mean, would you have to change the layout of your entire laundry room? Probably. And that's what I think is problematic. Like, all right, so we're going to change the structure of your laundry room. Every time we've had huge improvements in appliances, that's happened though. Like when the shape and size of washing machines and dryers or go to a house in the UK and often they'll have a washing machine in the kitchen. Ours are in a dedicated space. Refrigerator sizes have changed. Robot ranges have changed. Yeah, but what if it is your washing machine, right? Exactly. By a new washing machine and it incorporates robotic arms that will load it, unload it, run it, fold the laundry when it's done, put it in the dryer. I don't know when the last time you bought a washing machine, man, they are ridiculously expensive. Looking about quintupling the price, I'd rather just do my own laundry, man, that's a lot of money. I would too, but I think that there are, you know, some people wouldn't. But some people wouldn't. And then the price will come down. And then the idea of a lot of refrigerators. Look at refrigerators. Look at refrigerators. That does not have robotic arms would be crazy, you know? Yeah, look at every single appliance in your home. There's a version that costs a few hundred dollars and a version that costs tens of thousands of dollars. Yeah, that is true. And there's a market for all of it. And there's everything in between. We just bought a dishwasher and the range was crazy. And every increment gives you some new functionality. Like, oh, boy, that would be nice, you know? But you have to figure out where you land. And it's just this, yeah, this would definitely be at the high end. But then the high ends come down over time. That's usually what happens when technology. And ultimately, that is the direction we're going. I know it sounds like a leap because we're talking about humanoid robots. But like, I just bought a new washer and dryer when I moved back into my house after I had tenets when I was in Florida for a year. And it has sensor features that are robot. I mean, they must be robotic, right? Or at least the technology is massively improved. You know, it's funny, though, despite all of these problems, sure, this is problematic. And it's probably not going to do nearly as well as the company hopes. Right? All these problems we laid out still, though, I get a little excited thinking about Holy Crap. That's why we're doing it. Next year, and it's just like, oh my God, we're there. We're at that point where this is happening. Hopefully, it won't be like Google Glass, where it just like, it fails so horribly that no one even thinks about it. But it might be. It might kind of set the industry of domestic robots back by failing. It's hard. I know. So hopefully that won't happen. But just the idea is so like, wow, 2026, baby. It can't be the first company offering this, right? This type of thing. Yes. What Japan doesn't have this? China doesn't have something like this happening. As far as I know, this type of universal type of robot that can do many different tasks in your house, I've been humanoid, you know, bipedal robot. I'm not aware of anything that is at this point where you could. I don't know. Other countries tend to be ahead of the curve. I know, but even it's on these things. But also, you would watch the other countries. I'm pretty sure he said that this was a first of its specific kind. It's a first of its kind if it actually does what they say it does. But to me, this is a gimmick. This is a way because they know that they can get funding because it's sexy. But it's not reasonable. And it doesn't make sense to jump 10 steps ahead like this. It's also part of the fake it to you make it culture. It's like we're going to get a picture of a robot. It's a classic starter. But it's all teleoperated. And then just to sell people on the idea and then eventually you will make the tech work. Trust me for a little work. Once you train it, it's all that. And if they just said that outright, it would be online. It's not driving cars. It's not driving cars. Someone in a desk driving. That's what Christians said. They said, if you had one wish, what would it be? He said transparency. He just tell us what it actually is. Because some people would want that. Like we have robotic laparoscopic surgery where we know it's not a robot making the decisions. It's a surgeon operating it. We have things like that. There are plenty of people in this world who want live in or not live in, but domestic help. But they have such crippling social anxiety or they really can't afford it. I think for elderly barely able to live on their own, that's going to be an early adoption. Oh my god. Imagine if our mom had physical limb, like this that worked. Yeah. And one more quick thing at risk of sounding a little bit egest over here. But we often will say this, right, that the population who thinks like this could help the most are, let's say, older individuals who are medically frail or who have folks with disabilities who need additional support in their home. But then there's, of course, the, we'll call it a stereotype because it doesn't always hold. But I'm only reminded of it because I rewatched an SNL. You know, those like fake commercials. They do a SNL about Alexa when it first came out where all of the actors were playing. And they were calling it like, Audra, Amanda. And then they're like, what'd you say again? And so it's like, the confidence of the older people. Yes. So like, there's a sort of weird paradox here where the very people who might benefit the most from this, it's such a complex tool for them to have to learn how to use. Well, that's the thing is to make a user friendly. That's part of why the Android form might be helpful. You really can't, if it had powered by chatbots that are good enough and it can do certain things, you could interact with it as if it were a person. But we're so far from that. I had a hard time chatting with a chatbot at my bank the other day. Cara, I have to close this off by directing this at you because you're younger and you'll see these wonderful things. When you finally do get a robot in your house, just tell him about me, okay? I will. Or whatever it is. You know, I don't care. Yeah, your memory will live on in robot space. I get to see you sitting there really old. You're knitting. I'm knitting. I'm knitting. I'm knitting. I was on a podcast with the boys. You just tell a podcast. Tell it about it. All right. Cara, tell us about the new UN Climate Report. Oh, wow. What a segue. Let's just bring it down. I'll bring it down. Oh, I'll keep it kind of short and sweet. I could get in the weeds here. But basically, there's a climate report that's put out every year by the UN Environment Program called the Emissions Gap Report. This year's Emissions Gap Report is depressingly called Emissions Gap Report 2025, colon off target. Yeah. So that's fun. We've never been out here. We need to know. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, target. We haven't been on target, but there are a few kind of hopeful. And then I'll just take that hope right back away, things that are kind of interesting here. So the big, I would say the big takeaways of this 76-page report. First and foremost is that under a third of the, they call them parties. So basically, the countries or the nations who were in the Paris Agreement submitted new versions of what they call their NDCs, which stands for nationally determined contributions. So basically, that's the calculation or the record of how their country is actually performing based on their targets. And that's really what this report is, right? It's called the Emissions Gap Report. And what the Emissions Gap Report does is it compares the target, the sort of aspirational goal to what the countries are actually doing. It's the disparity between their promise and what they're actually doing in order to reduce emissions and therefore limit the rise in climate change in global temperature. Here are a third of the nations who were involved in the Paris Agreement. So this is interesting because it's 10 years on. Submitted new NDCs, nationally determined contributions. So we only really have the data for less than a third of the countries anyway. Now there is one cool thing. So last year, global temperatures based on all of the algorithms were predicted to reach 2.6 to 2.8 degrees of warming. And remember, that's a Celsius measurement. This year, it's down to 2.3 to 2.5. So that's a drop of 0.3 degrees in terms of the prediction. But there's a few problems with that. What do you think contributed to the drop? COVID? Anybody? COVID? Maybe. But I think this is only over the last year. Are you spiking prices of fossil fuels because of the Ukraine war? That might have. I don't even know if they even touch on that. But basically, what they say is the main driver of that change is just improvement in their methodological ability. So yeah, they've dialed in their algorithm better. And so the new method says, oh, it's a little bit less. So that is good, but it doesn't mean we've done anything to get there. Right. Yeah, it just means the measurement is tighter. We haven't changed our behaviors enough. Well, that's there have been improvements in the projections of technological advances in green energy and how that will decrease our carbon footprint. And that's a big contributor. Yeah, that's tough to measure year by year, though. Isn't it take five years, 10 years? Well, no, but that's the thing. Remember, what this report looks at is just the gap. So they look at the estimates versus the actual delivery on those estimates. So if a nation says we plan to implement policy that increases the number of electric cars and increases the tax on greenhouse, and then we look at the last year and say, did they actually do that? And to what extent did they do it? So that's why they do it year after year. And then they take all that data and they update their projections based on that data. So yes, Steve, you're right. They do, as part of the algorithm, they do look at cheaper technology and more ubiquitous adoption. And that is actually improving. When you look at all the graphs, they don't go up. Like they go up. How do I put this? The trend is up. But the individual countries are curbing emissions. They really are. Like we're seeing change. But here's the kicker. And this is the big takeaway from this. Even though we've seen a point three degree reduction between last year and this year, the United States alone is estimated to contribute a point one percent increase. Because we have fully left the Paris Climate Accord. We have not vowed to do anything that we said we were going to do before. And we've taken basically an exact opposite stance with regards to how we're going to proceed. And that's detrimental. And so all of the reports are like the US is undoing any progress that we've made based on new policies. That's the real scary thing. So the executive summary basically says, and I'm just going to quote this directly, while holding global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100 remains possible, the size of the cuts at 55% off 29 emissions levels by 2035. And the time available to deliver them amid a challenging political climate means that a higher exceedance of this level will now happen. They're basically saying, it's possible, but it's not happening. And we don't think it's going to happen because we're not doing it. And so then they talk at great length about what would happen if we did overshoot, but then we're able to dial it back. And that would mitigate a lot of risk. It wouldn't solve the problem. There would still be a lot of detriment. There would still be a lot of like life lost. There would still be a lot of probably drought and famine and extreme weather and all of the things that happen when we have escalation of climate risks. But they are starting not to predict just because we often talk about this. We couch it in terms of like, if we can keep to this, this is what will mitigate. If we can keep to this. And now the language is changing too. If when we pass it, we can fix it faster. If when we pass it, we can work to come back sooner. These are the things that will probably happen. So those aren't like the big takeaways. They're basically saying, it's possible, but lack of ambition and action means exceedance of 1.5 is approaching. It's pretty much inevitable that we're going to have at least a temporary overshoot above 1.5, but it's still possible not to. It's very unlikely. And so now if we're going to be reasonable about this, we have to talk about what it looks like if we overshoot it. So they do not hold back in saying the new American stance and policy is detrimental. We have historically been one of the largest polluters per capita. We make a massive difference per human being living in the country because we have a relatively small population compared to the other large polluters. And our new policy stance is undoing all the progress that collectively a lot of countries are making. And I think that they didn't want to hold back in saying that maybe the hope here is that Blame and shame is going to help. I worry that it won't with this administration and it's just a function of waiting. I mean Trump stood up in front of the UN and said climate change is a hoax. Exactly. And I don't do anything about climate change. There's no way that in this administration anything goods going to happen. He's climbing that was already approved for climate mitigation strategies. And we've already seen, I think it was the secretary of state. I've got to find where this was written already disavowed this report and said like we do not, you know, not we don't believe in it, but we don't promote it or we don't, you know, I want to find it. It's a USPS. Yeah, but yeah, exactly. Like we don't think, I think in their argument as always, we don't think the US should have undue burden. It's like they completely forgot about history. Nobody's asking the US to carry the sins of the rest of the world. They're asking them to clean up, they're asking us to clean up our own mess. Exactly. Now, Karen, did you read Bill Gates' infamous memo on climate change? I read it. I read it. I read it. About it. Okay. And I'm really curious. Like where? I'm curious so many different people's stances because on the one hand, it's like, I don't know, I kind of get what he's doing psychologically, but also like, is that what he's doing? There's a meta level here. There's what he said and then there's why he's saying it. I think if you look at his actual prescriptions about what we should do, they align pretty much 100% with what I've, and we've all been saying for the last time to 10 years. And what he's been saying. He's been saying the framing is horrible. It is a horrible piece of science communication. He was the frames it like this. And I get his ultimate conclusion is we should be spending our finite resources in a way that have the maximal impact on the quality of life for people, especially vulnerable people, people who are poor and starving, et cetera. It's hard to argue at that. But the way he gets there is so bad. Because he starts with this premise, which is in my opinion, a blatant straw man, and other people have called him out of the straw. He's premise is that climate activists often say that climate change is an existential threat that is going to have mass, it's going to decimate the human population in the next few decades. That's just not true. The scientists have never said that. The UN has never said that. We have never said that. That is not the sector. But you think that some activists say it. I think even among activists, I think that's an extreme fringe thing to say. Who is it? I don't think I've ever read somebody argue the human population is going to be decimated by climate change within a few decades. Who is saying that? I don't know. And it's certainly that is not part of the conversation. It is an absolute straw man argument, even if there's some fringe guy far on one end of the spectrum, who cares? That's not where the conversation is happening. And so if that's it, he's reacting to that. And he's saying, and the other thing is, he threw out, he acts as if it is a zero-sum game in a way that it really isn't. Right. Like we have his limit. And like paying for climate change mitigation strategies, like somehow divorced from health and human safety is going to take away. But that's not true because he counters his own argument by saying reducing emissions will only serve to increase life years. So it's a strange thing. Like if he had just said from the beginning, we need to change our messaging on this. We need to put people at the front and center. We can't talk about the globe as some arbitrary ineffable thing. We have to talk about how climate change is killing people. Well, I get that argument. But that's not really what he was saying. And this was, it was not about messaging. He was talking about strategy. He said, where we should put our funds. And the specific things that he called out are things that we have called out ourselves. It's like I agree with that. Like for example, he's like one poor country decided to just ban artificial fertilizer and then they ended up starving their people and having to buy it from other countries. Like yeah, it's real. Yeah, it mentioned by name. But yeah, I agree. That was a bad thing to do. That was short-sighted. But he could have talked about it from a completely different framework that wasn't totally tone deaf about how the right was going to predictably respond to what he was saying. Because they responded in the way that we would have 100% predicted, namely, like Trump tweets out, Bill Gates admits he was wrong about climate change and I was right the all the time. And he Gates, lately responds, that's a misreading of what I wrote. Yeah. It was totally predictable. That was totally predictable. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. Do you think that that was intentional? I don't think so. I think it was. Oh, yeah. Because Gates is a smart man. Five-ditches thing. It's better for Trump to be high in mighty and haughty and then still talk and still engage and still adopt certain policies and have that, you know, it's the South Park thing, right? Like you are such a great president and no, you don't have a small penis. And then he's like, thanks, guy. And moving on. Like if it's better to do that with a authoritarian figure, then it is to have him be your adversary. I don't think he was talking to Trump. I think he was just like, this is, and he actually is just talking to me. He's a reasonable people. He was saying. I think he's talking to everybody and he's saying we don't need everybody. To everybody. He's basically thinks that he has this massive insight into how we need to realign our priorities when it comes to climate change. And he said 20 years ago, I said for my company, we have to realign our priorities for the internet. And I was right. And now I'm saying this about climate change and I'm right this time too. And it was a little bit. Well, and he said the same thing about human health, right? And how they do it. A lot of what he's doing is great. And again, his a lot of his prescriptions are like, we need to invest in green technology. We need to invest in policies that work. And he says, climate change is a problem. We need to address it. We need to continue policies and investments that will fix it. But he's just saying, don't do that instead of helping poor people be resilient in the face of climate change. It's like, well, who's saying that? The thing is, I think he's partly responding to the fact that the wealthy nations of the world are dialing back their support for aid to poor parts of the world. It's like, yeah, the people who are doing that are the people who are not doing anything about climate change. So who are you talking about? The people who are in fit, like Trump is the guy who gutted USAID. And now you're response to that is to say, we can't, it's because we're putting too much emphasis on climate change. Plus, he's way too much of a techno optimist. He's like, we're going to have fusion power. We're near, near economic readiness for fusion power. We are nowhere to say that. We are nowhere to be a role in this show. But when he says, we need solutions. We need to focus our research on getting the green premium down to zero. 100%. I've been saying that for years. I 100% agree with that. Yeah. That's his number one priority. You keep doing that because that is fantastic. That will be the ultimate solution. But there's, the green premium is basically, if you have low carbon energy or industry or whatever, how much more it costs than high carbon alternatives. So if fossil fuels are way cheaper than non fossil fuel, like green technology, people aren't going to do, they're not going to pay for the expensive green technology over cheap fossil fuels. I get that. 100% get that. But there's basically three ways to reduce the green premium. And he talked as if there was only one way. His way is, we have to technology our way out of this. We need to invest in technology that brings down the green premium. But there's a couple of other things you could do too. And although we mentioned, like we need to have policies that support green energy, but he doesn't, he doesn't in no way talks about how policies like subsidizing fossil fuels, for example, you know, like it's not even about having a, what do you call it? Like a fossil fuel premium because we could do that too. Yes, right. So we could have a fossil fuel premium that's arbitrary, but we do the opposite of that. Exactly. We subsidize it. And then we could have a fossil fuel that's going to reduce the premium is to essentially tax carbon, which nobody wants to do. Exactly. Yeah, that's an idea. And that's really don't let them externalize the cost of the carbon that they're emitting on health and the environment, and which, you know, some people consider that to be part of this subsidy. But whatever, however you frame it. So you could say, you could, yes, invest in technology that reduces the premium. Also have policies which support in which reduce the green premium. And also make sure that we're fairly pricing carbon. And that's another way to reduce the green premium. Yeah. And take all that money from the fair pricing, the taxing that feels like it's going to be pressure because that's always the argument, right? Is that the individual end users going to feel that economic pressure and put it into subsidies so that they can forcibly get the electric car or so they can easily ride the bus or for the poor. You know, it's so worried about. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Make it so that they don't carry the cost of this. So it did at the end of the day, I mean, I like Bill Gates. I think he does a lot of great chairs. I like the fact that he's investing billions in building like a salt and my power plant. You know, I wrote all that. But it did come off a little bit as a kind of a tech bro kind of a perspective on all this. That is who he is. I mean, I guess he couldn't get away from that enough for this. And it's just also, I felt it was just tone deaf. It's like you're not aware there are climate change deniers in the world. And you didn't make this bullet proof against them completely misinterpreting what you're saying. What do you think about this, Steve? What if? I mean, I'm speculating here. So Bill Gates runs in very particular circles, right? He runs in these billionaire tech bro Silicon Valley circles. And we're seeing a very explicit movement with like the Elon Musk's of the world. He's a very interesting character because he was an early innovator of climate change mitigation strategies that were very capitalistically oriented. He's also increasingly becoming right wing. He's always been a bit right wing, but increasingly that sort of libertarian bank. What if that's his audience? The tech bros of the world who aren't climate deniers, but who are increasingly becoming more libertarian, more maga, and he wants to catch them. But if that were his audience, he failed because what they're taking from that is, oh, we were right all along. We don't have to do anything about climate change. What if what they're taking is we were right all along and here's more things we can do? But yeah, well, I hope I'd love to see that. That's not what I'm saying. I hope that's the case too because I do think it, I don't want to give him too much credit, but I feel like he does get something that we aren't getting here, which is they're not even a part of the conversation if they feel insulted. But they become a part of the conversation if you. Yeah, but he basically just insulted the left in order to do that. Yeah, but we know. But the straw man worked with the straw man. He didn't salt the left, but we're all like, we still like him. That's the problem, right? He insulted the left, but we're like Bill Gates, you know, really ultimately he's saying all the same thing. He knows he's not going to lose us. He's not going to accept arguments that something which at face value doesn't look good is really three dimensional chess if we just give them like super credit. I'm usually receptive to those kinds of arguments. I wouldn't be if we were talking about Trump's messaging, but I might be if we're talking about Bill Gates' messaging. I really do. Yeah, I think he has a lot of advisors and he's a very smart man. I wonder if he ran this by anyone and it's just he needs to be more savvy with this kind of statement though that he just didn't display the necessary level of savviness if he would. I mean, it's disappointing that, you know, maybe he should have run it from chat GPT. I don't know what he should have done, but we should have run it by a skeptic because what it should have done. Well, ideally, ideally, that should always be the case, Frank. It should be, but again, I don't think we're his audience. I think he already has us. And my guess is that this is actually very savvy messaging for a particular audience that we have a hard time understanding. He's trying to reach out to make a broader tent out of it as a maybe idea. That's my hope. Well, yeah, we can hope. That's the charitable way to look at this without just saying. I agree. I just keep thinking of the many people, countless people that now will think probably forever. Yeah, Bill Gates admitted he was wrong and we were right. I'm already doing damage control on this. And I think I'm going to be doing this for a long time. Let me just say that. But what's the difference between somebody saying Bill Gates admitted he was wrong and Bill Gates won't admit it, but he's wrong. What is the difference, ultimately, in their position? I don't think that makes any practical change. Oh, I think it makes a huge difference. There's a big difference right there. They want to take Gates down a peg because he's vaccinated, you know, because he's pro vaccination. You know, that's another part of the problem. Well, what does that mean? Take him down a peg. You're affecting change with his billions of dollars. But if you get to right now in article like, like, Trump did and like a lot of people on the right are doing, but just a lot of, a lot of, a lot of people on the right are who people who have tried to come off as semi reasonable, like you see people were overreacting about climate change. We don't have to focus our attention on it. And you know, the, the, you know, conservative approach was correct all along. And. But that's also a massive drama. Of course it is. The point is he, he gave them a gift and, and the, you know, the majority of the people are not going to read this entire report and figure out that it, that's not what he was saying at all. You know, it's just, it, I think the net effect is going to be people like us are going to have to do a lot of damage control. That's what I think the net effect is going to be. And it's already happening. I don't know. I guess, yeah, but I want to see what the long term, okay, I think it's a ripple right now. And my guess is that he's going to actually have some connections and some conversations that he wasn't able to have prior to this. But we'll see. All right. Let's move on. All right guys, let me ask you a question. How long in the past, do you think human tool use goes? And I mean like hominid human ancestor, how long have our, our clay been using tools? Are you asking for years or like who the species was? Well, if you want to, years ago, and if you want to name the species, you get bonus points. I think it was, uh, Bostro-Lopithecus 2 million. I think it was pre-homo sapiens, but I have no idea, I have no idea. Probably at 1.5 to 2 million years ago. That seems like an overestimate. It's getting hundreds of, many hundreds of thousands. I don't know. Well, we've been people for 250,000 years. All right. So the oldest known stone tools, date back to 3.3 million years ago. Oh, wow. Wow. What, and what was, what was crawling around the earth, 3.3 million years ago? So at that time, you know, there were, there were Australia Epithesines. Australia Epithesines. Okay. This is like at the end of the Australia Epithesines. These were from tools found at the Lemekwi 3 site in Kenya. However, the stone tools were found only intermittently, meaning, what is that mean? Like it's an early evolution there. So in other words, they would, they would find them in one place and a time for a number of years, then they would not, then we wouldn't see them anymore. So they, they were reinventing the wheel, so to speak. Yeah. So the thinking was, right, thinking was that the use was sporadic. And so definitely Australia Epithesines were the first tool users. And then Homo Hablos and Homo Rudolfensis came into the picture around 2.8 to 2.75 million years ago. Oh, okay. But the, but among the Australia Epithesines, they've only found evidence of sporadic tool use, right? So when you say the Australia Epithesines, it's a whole, it's, it's a genus, right? There are a lot of different species. Yeah, it's a genus. There's different species. Yeah. But we don't know, Karen, we don't, I'm saying that because we like, here are some stone tools. We don't know who was using them, but these are the creatures that were around at the time. So it could be that only one species was using them and other species weren't. It's also possible that only some populations were using them and then they would, it died out, died out, died out. And then it would have to get rediscovered by a later population. Oh, interesting. Mm-hmm. So that was the thinking. That was what, then the evidence for continuous, like a continuous culture of stone tool use, the, the evidence for that goes back to 2.4 to 2.2 million years ago. And that was, now we're getting close to the emergence of homo erectus. So this is now like the tail end of homo habilis, homo Rudolph ends this in the beginning of homo erectus is when we have clear evidence of a continuous culture of tool use. Anybody know what the name of that tool use culture is? Is it something? Flint. Flint. Flint? No. It's the, that's the older one, older one, not Obi-Wan, but older one, toolkit from old DuVai Gorge, which is where they were. Right. Of course, I know old DuVai Gorge. Yeah, old DuVai Gorge. All right, so now here comes the news item, right? So paleontologists have now found evidence of continuous stone tool use going back 400,000 years earlier than previously known, back to 2.75 million years ago, which is like the very beginning of homo habilis. And this is still Australopithecus was. They were still around. But this was, this was the beginning of homo habilis. And the evidence that they present shows continuous tool culture spanning a 300,000 year period. So that's, that's pretty good evidence for continuity, right? Wow, man. Could it be that they stole million years? Yeah. So what kind of tools were they using? So they, this was lightsaber. So, yeah, so they, they would find good rocks, right? So part of the culture was, there was some geological knowledge. They knew how to find and identify rocks that were good for flint napping, right? And then they would, they would have like a core and they would knock off flakes. The flakes themselves could be used as cutting edges. Yeah, but also hell, man. Yeah, but also they would, you can sometimes you just had a core. That was like you're just making, you're flaking tools off the core, but the core itself is not a tool. And at other times like if you're making something bigger like an axe, you're flaking the edge, you know, to make a cutting edge there. Right. And then they would also sharpen it by, by refreshing, you know, flaking off new pieces to keep the edge sharp. And yeah, it's, you know, even today like the paleontology like you, if you're not careful, you'll cut your fingers on these stones even today. Wow, man. They can be very, they can be very sharp. And this, so the other component, there's a couple of interesting components here. One is tool making would definitely expand their dietary range. Because now they could hunt more, they could hunt bigger game. And they can get more meat off the bones and, you know, break the bones for bone marrow. And there's definitely also evidence of tool marks on bones. So we know when they were the ones who were working the bones. And so that enabled bigger brains, right? So there was this reinforcement between tools allowing for bigger brains, allowing for more tool use, you know. And that's when things really started to take off, you know, right? When this continuous tool culture and hunting, that's basically with home where you're wrecked is. That's when things really started to take off. But probably beginning with, you know, the homo habilis, homo redol fence is leading to, like, home erectus and then, you know, the Neanderthal Homo sapiens clade. Right. So the paleontologist had this chicken and the egg question of, well, what came first? Did you need big, big brains to have continuous tool culture or continuous tool culture to have big brains? Sounds like tools first. Sounds like tools first now, right? Because now we pushed it back to the, you know, 400,000 years earlier than we thought. Like before, the emergence of home erectus, which is really when, you know, the brain size really started to take off. Yeah, you needed some baseline brain development to even conceptualize doing this, right? I mean, but what a pair of things. Like what is big brain? A lot of hypotheses had that, right? So yeah, yeah. The cellopimsy brains are not really much different than say chimpanzees. We're able to make these tools. And yeah, but are you implying that chimps could potentially do this? Well, I saw I said they were not that different, but they were bigger than chimps, but they really are not that different. Different enough. I mean, different. It's like they clearly had a lot of tools. They crossed the Rubicon, between chimps and them, I think. And, hum, there was some critical mass that made that, but it seems like, yeah, we crossed this threshold of tool use, which then allowed for much better nutrition. That and fire, by the way, also did. Yeah, huge. And then that really allowed brains to explode. That literally. The other interesting question here is, well, how do we know how far back tool use goes? Right? And we're basically, our window into that question is rocks, because rocks can survive for many years. But how do we know they weren't using wooden tools? And of course, we don't. And we think they probably were using wooden tools. But the questions are relevant scientifically, unless you think of a way to test it. Right. Now, do you guys, clearly they must have. I mean, chimps now will use rudimentary wood-based tools like branches. So I think it's pretty clear that they probably almost certainly did, but unfortunately it doesn't fossilize. Yeah, so we get the evidence of it. Yeah, so evidence for wooden tools, like actual wood that was worked and used by humans and human ancestors, goes back hundreds of thousands of years, several hundred thousand years. However, there's indirect evidence. And the indirect evidence comes from, they're looking at the where patterns on stone tools. Yeah. Was it attached to wood? Yeah, or was it working wood? Were they using this to work wood? Okay. And the other thing is wood residues on stone tools. And they have found wood residues on stone tools going back 1.5 million years. Like found in the pores of the stones? Yeah, there's like, there's like, oh there's a case of wood on this stone. Microscopic residue. But by definition, if your indirect evidence depends on stone tools, it'll never go back further than stone tools. So we may never know for sure what wooden tools, perishable tools they were using prior to three million years ago, prior to use of stone tools. Too bad. Yeah, unless we could figure out some way of getting indirect evidence or some wooden tool, somehow got mineralized or something. Yeah, amber, you know, we're all on a bunch of amber. So far, whatever, so far we don't have any evidence of it. Interesting. I'm going to throw in a quickie guys because there was another paneling to logical item. I just want to mention very, very quickly. Have you ever heard of nano-terranous, nano-terranosaurus? Sounds like an oxymoron, but okay. Yeah, so this has been a debate among paneling etologist, whether these smaller specimens of what look like, they're in the same clade as tyrannosaurus rex, were these young tyrannosaurus or these young T-rexes, or these mature specimens of a different species of small tyrannosaur? This debate has been answered. We found a near complete specimen of a clearly mature nano-terranous. It was definitely a separate species. Actually, we found there was two specimens of a Tyrannosaur, a nano-terranosaur and a triceratops who were in combat and killed each other, basically, mutual demise. Yeah, so they actually did find each other. So, interesting. The reason why it's so hard is because dinosaurs really change a lot as they age. They're extra epidermal appendages can change shape and size and everything. A lot of them are late in eggs, so they're so small, even their big eggs, but still. Yeah, they started small in the wild. They can continue to grow throughout their life. We know really nothing about them except from the bones. So, figuring out male, female, adult juvenile, these are the same species or different species, whatever is really challenging. And we have to wait until we get really good specimens where we could say, oh yeah, based upon the growth rings and the bones and other features, we could say this is definitely a mature, like that helps. There was also some other anatomical differences like the cranial nerve paths through the skull, which were different enough that, yeah, this can't be the same species. This has to be two different species. So, probably what this means is that, you know, again, T-rexes were at the very end of the critatious, so they were part of the end-cretaceous ecosystems. So, we want to know as much as we can about them. Like what was the dinosaurs, what was happening with them when the asteroid hit? And it seems that the, the tyrannosaurus clade was a much bigger and more diverse, you know, group than we previously thought, which means that because they're probably apex, all apex predators, that the ecosystems were probably fairly robust. You know, there's an older theory that maybe dinosaurs were on the way out when the asteroid hit, but that is clearly not the case. All right, Evan. Yep. You're going to talk about pants smurfing, but I love it when you said this to be, I agree. This is the worst headline ever. I mean, isn't it? It's an ever. Isn't it though? Every once in a while, you come across a headline of a science news article. That is so ridiculous. It makes you ask yourself, at least I ask this. Does the editor really even care about this item? Or are they under orders to come up with something so click-baby that basically they cash in all their integrity chips and you're out the window on this one? Sure. How's this for a headline, folks? Human DNA found in a two billion year old meteor, right? Wow. I mean, human DNA. Now that is some tabloid level frame right there. That's the kind of stuff that gets splashed on the front page and the national inquire. But no, this comes from an online magazine called Geekspin, which I looked it up. It's a New York City-based publisher that covers a range of topics for a geeky audience, including tech, lifestyle, and pop culture news. Their content also includes entertainment and embrace a wide variety of geek subcultures such as cost playing, Android and Apple fans, Lego builders, and science enthusiasts. All right. So they're not specifically science. But at least they try to put on a patina that they do care about science. But not with a headline like this. Yeah, I mean, based on your description, it sounds like something that I would might want to probably check out. Right. But not now. Not exactly. Exactly. Human DNA detected in a two billion year old meteor, right? New NASA data revives the theory that life on Earth came from space. So is NASA really saying that about human DNA in a two billion year old meteorite? No, not whatsoever. What the hell is this article talking about? Well, here's, they're basically just rehashing some already reported news from months ago, frankly. Osiris Rex, that mission that brought back dust from asteroid Benu and Japanese Hayabusa 2 did the same from the asteroid Rugu. And Jay, I think you last talked about this. Maybe a few months back, I recall you mentioned having a news item about the retrieval of dust from space and rocks from space and things. So, I mean, this is an ongoing science news item that I've also touched upon over the years. It's unfolded. It's been unfolding for many years. When the researchers analyzed those samples that they got back, okay, they found carbon compounds, amino acids, and nucleobases, you know, chemical precursors of DNA and RNA to be generous. But that's a long one. I mean, my gosh, that is such a leap from DNA itself and then human DNA. I mean, you're way out of your league there. No freaking way. How the heck did this even go wrong? I'd like one person I saw online commented. I don't know if it's a scientist or not. But they said, this is the equivalent of saying, I found flour and sugar, therefore I discovered cake. Right. I mean, you know, you have to jump so far ahead. So here's how it works. You get a technical paper that uses phrases like what, organic compounds or nucleobases. And then some wire service picks it up and summarizes that as what, ingredients of life maybe. And then the headline writer, yep, trying to grab attention, says, oh, life discovered. And finally, social media gets a hold of it and says, human DNA on a media, right? So that's kind of for one possible evolution of how these things become kind of runaway trains. Looked for NASA, NASA says, no way, no biological molecules, there's no DNA, there's no RNA or no proteins. They absolutely, you know, said that clearly, there's not even room for interpretation there. What they find are amino acids, right. And base pair and bases, you know, from the adenine, guanine, the building blocks of DNA, the building blocks of proteins, but not proteins or DNA RNA, as you say, and not life. It's a tying this to pan spermia is just not accurate. Pan spermia says that life started elsewhere and was seeded onto the earth, not the building blocks of life are out there, which is a completely different claim. And it's not pan spermia. And I went further to look for recent news articles about pan spermia, to see if perhaps they were really maybe alluding to something else here and maybe got their wires crossed or something. But no, there's really not a lot that's new about it. Other than what I did find out though, is that pan spermia is kind of now being subdivided into different kinds of categories, which help define it a little bit better, such as molecular pan spermia. It's also known as pseudo-pan spermia, which is the idea that the building blocks, right, those amino acids, you talked about Steve Horn's seed. Otherwise known as not pan spermia, am I right? Right. Oh, Litho-pan spermia is a term being used now. Micro-organisms are spores that travel inside rocks between planets. And there's still very scant hard evidence that pan spermia is really something that scientists are willing to throw their hat on. Also, evidently, because we make a distinction between stellar pan spermia and interstellar pan spermia. It is perfectly plausible. Mars? Critters from Mars got to Earth. I'll buy that. Sure. But not interstellar. It's a completely different picture and it's the plausibility plummet to basically zero. Oh, it goes so down. Yeah. Origin versus local emergence absolutely, such a huge, huge component of that. So yeah, worst headline of the year, I'm going to say, and I'll probably be bringing this up at the end of the year review show. Yeah, right. I think no. And basically, I read the article like, there's nothing new here. This is exactly where we have been for years. You know, that there's the components are out there. Maybe we're still thinking it's possible life may have come from within our own solar system, but but not interstellar. This is just absolute, unforced error of bad headline writing. Even the article itself wasn't that much better. No, there was no meat on that bomb, frankly. The super click-bady rehash of the old news. Yep, that's exactly right, Bob. Click-bady rehashable, that's a perfect description. All right, Bob, tell us about this AI powered wound healer. Yes, sci-fi band-aids in the news. This one was fascinating as hell. Researchers have developed a smart bandage with AI in the loop to optimize wound healing. Resultant pigs are quite promising, I think. This was developed by Professor Marco Rolandian, colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz. So this was published in the journal Biomedical Innovations, the title of their paper was, towards adaptive bio-electronic wound therapy with integrated real-time diagnostics and machine learning driven closed loop control. So, all right, so what does that actually mean? And could I say at this point, Bob, I am not impressed, but really? It seems like a really overly complicated way to do things that we already do. And the only justification I saw for this was, well, maybe in places that don't have access to real healthcare, this might be a substitute. That's kind of what they stress. So let's go through what I have here. So the authors of this paper, this was funny. They estimate the humans have about 24 billion wounds a year. Okay, yes. They've formed three each. Three each, three each? Yeah, one to, they say one to three each. Yeah. And that, of course, runs the gamut from scrapes, little minorscapes to surgeries, you know, so it's all over. And I'm just talking about having three scrapes a year. I have more than that. I have three scrapes a month easily. Right? Well, I mean, I looked at it was like how many times do you need a bandaid? Yeah, a few times a year is close enough. I think I am not a careful person. All right. So maybe that was closer to 30 billion. I don't know. So this device went when and if ever it's available won't be designed for most of those wounds, obviously, right? They say in their paper, while many wounds heal with basic at home care, others require timely medical intervention to ensure proper healing, delays in access to healthcare can lead to complications, including scarring, permanent tissue damage, infection, sepsis, and even death, wound type and individual variability further complicate the selection of optimal treatments. So this is aimed at clearly, this is aimed at chronic high risk, hard to monitor wounds, not paper cuts. So that's kind of the slice of wounds we're dealing with here. So Bob, I agree with that, but that context a little bit what they're saying there, because they're saying like timely, what does that mean when they say timely? Because these interventions are for chronic wounds, right? And also, if you have a chronic wound, these are mostly in a medical setting, which again, so what's the use case here? What exactly are they aiming this at? Okay. Well, and one thing I did was I looked at ways and I looked at for urgent care near me and I found eight of them within five miles. So I think part of the things that they're saying is that many people aren't that lucky. They just don't have the access that we have. You know, we're very lucky in that regard. But again, to be clear, this is not for urgent care. This is not for urgent wounds, acute wounds. This is for chronic wounds. I thought of it as chronic wounds as definitely part of what it's for and not necessarily the whole tamale right there. So yeah, I didn't think chronic was the interventions have only been shown to work on chronic wounds. What do you mean? What interventions? Like the electricity, that only works on chronic wounds. It doesn't work on just general. The evidence is only exists for things like chronic pressure ulcers or chronic non-healing wounds. Okay. They also say that even with standard care, it's often a one-size-fits-all approach that's only checked occasionally. So any important wound changes that might have happened in the interim could kind of get worse before anyone really realizes it if nobody's looking at it. This reminded me of Jay's hand wound where he actually, where the material actually grew into your skin because my skin grew into the material. Oh, yeah, right. Right. So yeah, I never, never forget that image day. That was pretty nasty. All right. So this new device is called A-heel. How would you pronounce this? A-heel. A-heel. A-heel. A-heel. It seemed like a weird, just A-heel. So the major components of this device is you got a camera with ring LEDs for consistently being able to image the wound. You've got electrodes for electrically stimulating the wound site and reservoirs and actuators for storing and delivering liquid medication. So those are the major players. And plus, of course, the power source. And all of this adheres directly over the wound, kind of like some of those diabetes, but they're like diabetes pumps for diabetics that you see. It's like heavy duty, heavy duty, you know, adhesion onto the wind, onto the skin that doesn't really, you know, fall off easily like a regular band-aid. So how does it work altogether? So every, every two hours, images of the wound are taken and wirelessly transmitted to an AI agent that they call ML Physician Software. So ML here clearly means machine learning. And the machine learning angle was interesting. And that manifests itself in two ways. They have a trained model to estimate which healing phase the wound is in, right? So it can distinguish visually the clotting phase, which is the initial phase of the wound. The clotting phase, it can distinguish that from the inflammation phase, which is also distinct from the rebuilding tissue phase. And then towards the end, there's this remodeling phase that happens. But the AI also uses deep reinforcement learning, which is essentially a training through trial and error, right? And I'm sure it wasn't training on real people. And through the literature or virtual training or whatever, it learns to recognize what treatment actions help most. You know, what kind of incremental intervention is warranted at this stage based on what it's seeing. So after the images are received, the AI assesses the wound and it builds an ideal healing timeline, which is essentially the fastest, reasonable path from a fresh wound to a closed wound. And it tries to keep the wound on that path by giving it little, little nudges. And it can determine if the wound is stuck in the inflammation stage or is it just generally lagging too far behind where it should be. So then once it makes that decision, the AI has essentially two knobs it can turn to nudge the wound along on its healing trajectory. It can use an electric field, which has been shown from what I researched. This electric field has been shown to accelerate healing by doing things like promoting cell migration and enhancing growth factors needed for tissue repair. You're saying that this is really only for chronic wounds and not... Well, those are the mechanisms. Yes, those are the mechanisms primarily promoting cell migration to the wound. Right. It has been necessarily shown to work for regular wounds. Yeah. Everything I read is all in chronic wounds. Okay. It can also... So the AI can also release into the wound a dose of drug. In this study, they used fluoxetine, which is anti-inflammatory and can help with wound closures. So that's what they... Fluoxetine is prozac. That's prozac, yeah. I don't think that's an anti-inflammatory. Well, they say it decreases inflammation. Wouldn't be my choice for the drug-decrease inflammation, but it's interesting. Yeah, I wouldn't call it an anti-inflammatory though. Okay, so they might have anti-inflammatory properties or something. Okay, so they used it then to reduce inflammation and help with wound closures. Maybe that's a better way to say it. Interesting how they didn't use a specific anti-inflammatory. So, okay. So this can all be adjusted two hours later based on the next batch of images that the AI gets. Now, you're probably thinking how safe is this? And so there's two major safety features that they use. First off, there's preset safe ranges on how much it can zap a wound or use that drug. So it knows what these safe ranges are and it will never go beyond them. So that's one. And secondly, and probably most importantly, there's a dashboard available where human doctors can see what the AI is doing. And if necessary, it could change the decision that the AI makes. You know, it could override it if it's necessary. So the AI, according to the research, is the AI component here. Continuously watches. It makes small but informed adjustments and it's all under these human set boundaries. That's kind of like an overview of what the AI is doing. So testing of A-heel was on pig wounds, as I said, and they used pigs because pigs have a lot of similarities to humans, especially regarding the skin. So they followed it for the healing for 22 days. I think the device was used for, I think, for seven to ten days and they continued tracking after that. This was like a, they called the closed loop word. The AI just had, basically, had full control and did what it did without really any intervention. I'm sure they were tracking it, but they didn't change any of the decisions that the AI made. So compared to controls, the wounds healed 25% faster. The new skin was thicker and more mature. The inflammation was less, other than controls and most importantly, all the chemical and structural cues that indicate that the wound just didn't close faster, right? The wound was further along the healing process itself, but just didn't accelerate the wound closure. It was clearly in their mind from what they're saying, the healing process was further along than the control. So I thought that was pretty slick, but keep in mind, this is a proof of concept. They still need longer and larger studies using more types of wounds and eventually with people, of course. Now this isn't the healing laser thing that was used in Logan's run. You guys remember that? I remember that. Of course, we forgot that image, right? But it's for problematic wounds, especially for people with limited access to facilities that we take for granted. And I think this sounds like this could be a game changer, but Steve, you're not as outgain changer. No, no, no, no, no, we're near a game changer. This is an overly technological way of doing something that we already do way more simply. And the justification for it seems to be this is in places where doctors are not available and yet you're supposed to have a doctor monitoring it. And you know what I mean? I don't know. Again, I'm thinking what's the use case here? What's the scenario where this is going to be an advantage over just doing what we already do? This just seems like an overly high tech way of doing something. And when they compare it basically to doing nothing, what they really need to compare this to is usual care. That's the standard. And I wonder not to do that. It may not even be as good as usual care. I don't know. They didn't provide any data for that. So this is an interesting idea, but it's also like an overly complicated way of doing something fairly basic. And I'm not convinced there's any advantage to this. And is the extra expense and complexity worth it? Right. In what scenario? I'm still confused about what scenario. This is a good idea. Yeah, one thing I was thinking, like if you don't have access to good healthcare or urgent care, are you going to have access to this high tech piece of equipment? How are you going to get this thing then? That struck to me. So my takeaway then is that maybe I should wait for the Logan's run healing laser thing. Maybe that I'll hope for that. And this one. All right. Jay, it's who's that noisy time? All right, guys. Last week I played this noisy. I know what that is. What is it? That is care forging a ring. And you know, I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. 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I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. I mean, it does sound like that. Pretty much, you know, anyway. Another listener named Joe Iandria. Joe, you know, I came close to that last thing. He says, hello, Jay. I'm going to guess this week's Noisy was a group of workers driving in a railway spike with sledgehammers. Since that's the picture I had, my head listening to it. This is a good guess. There's a lot of elements in that guess that I think I would consider to be mostly correct. You're not completely correct, though, and I'm going for a perfection here. So let's move on. Another listener named Ben Simon. That's the second Ben this week. He says, hello, Jay. I have guessed who's that Noisy a few times before, but this is the most confident I have been about it. I've been wrong every time so far, and I could still be wrong in this week. But all my guesses of all my guesses, this feels most likely to be right. This sounds like a video of a team of people pounding a stake into the ground with sledgehammers. My social media algorithm is constantly feeding me clips like this of workers performing skill tasks. Anyway, that's a good guess. These guesses here are very reminiscent of the vast majority of people who wrote in, and as you guys know, I usually use the person who wrote in first about that particular idea. Now we're going to move on to something a little bit closer. And this is from a listener named Ben Neal. What are the chances, guys? Three bends in one show. Oh. We have Ben Simon. We have Ben Brown. And we have Ben Neal. How many choices? It's not hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. That means it's an octillion to one. Now I mean what? I got to like 100 people. I just wanted to say octillion. Yeah. So it's pretty good. All right. So Ben Neal says, hammering a large piece of metal possibly an anvil with nothing on it. Sounds like the hangar is being dropped and allowed to bounce freely, making the increasing frequency before the next drop. All right. That was about as close as anyone has gotten. So Steve hit me. What do you think it is? So, yeah, I promise this by saying I've heard this sound so many times because I've watched every episode of Forge. It's definitely metal pinging, right? This is the sound of somebody forging iron on an anvil because you could tell the sort of frenetic pace of them because you have to once you heat the metal you got to work it very quickly. And then as it cools towards the very end they do some high frequency lighter taps because they don't want to hit it as hard because you'll stress the metal out. So that sequence of pinging, again, I've heard it a million times. It's somebody forging iron. You're close. You're close. You're close. Another listener was close to this is Aaron Allison and he says, hey, Jay and all, I think this noisy is two blacksmiths at a Renaissance fair. So far he's correct. Maybe working on one thing together. Well, yeah, that's your correct, but that's pretty general. And then he said, my son recently found his love of going to those, I guess, Renaissance fairs so we have gone multiple times. Anyway, lots of near misses including Steve. Now again, I'm going to say, this could be many things. What's the guy building? Are these people, whoever the hell they are? Like swords? That's what everyone thinks. I was correct just incomplete. I didn't miss. Well, go ahead, complete it. Yes, two guys out of rent fair forging something. So something small, maybe like a nail. Holy shit, Steve. Very good. Yeah. It's a medium-sized nail. I'd say that the head of the head was probably around the size of a quarter. Not like the super small nails that we use like for a two by four or whatever. This nail was much bigger, but not like a spike. Yeah, I had a spiky little nail thing going on there. You never know. So look, we got a lot of close guesses. This one had a very specific thing. It would have sounded pretty much exactly like that if they were making almost anything. Right, Steve? Yes. Something small. That's the only thing that I can say. But is that again that increasing frequency just towards the very end is the typical thing? Well, that was a good piece of information that you gave me there, Steve. I'm going to play it again just to see how close Steve was. Ready? Just to see how close Steve was. Ready? Yeah, I know. Far really, far really, far really? Yeah, so there you have it. That's the people making nails. I have a new noisy for you guys this week. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Mike. And here it is. What the hell did that hear? That is the noise. If you think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, please just email me at WTN at the SkepticsGuide.org. Stephen, I have things to tell you. Yes. We will be at Scycon, the Scycon conference. You can go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go to the website. 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I'm going to go to the conference homepage. I'm going to go to the conference homepage. I'm going to go to the conference homepage. I'm going to go to the conference homepage. I'm going to go to the conference homepage. I'm going to go to the conference homepage. I'm going to go to the conference homepage. I'm going to go to the conference homepage. I'm going to go to the conference homepage. I'm going to go to the conference homepage. I'm going to go to the conference homepage. I'm going to go to the conference homepage. I'm going to go to the conference homepage. I'm going to go to the conference homepage. I'm going to go to the conference homepage. I'm going to go to the conference homepage. Oh yeah. Yeah. Until we get it to the point where nothing can go in space for a few centuries. Like Wally. All right. Let's go on to science fiction. It's time for science or fiction. Each week I come up with three science views. I go to our facts. Two real. One, the pictures. I challenge my panel skeptics to sniff out the fake. If a theme this week, the theme is frogs. What do you guys know about frogs? All right. We'll find out. Let's find out. All right. Here we go. Item number one. Most frogs have teeth with one species having a full set of upper and lower jaw teeth. Item number two. Frogs do not have ears and therefore do not have true hearing. But they can sense vibrations, especially through the water. And item number three. While most frogs lay eggs that hatch as tadpoles, some species give birth to live tadpoles, and even birth fully formed froglets from their womb. Evan, go first. Okay. Most frogs have teeth, but one species has a full set of upper and lower jaw teeth. Yes, that species is called the Michigan J Frog. I saw it in a documentary on WVWans. I don't know. Frog teeth. I can't recall. I've ever paid close enough attention to frogs to notice teeth. My memory is saying there are no teeth, but that doesn't mean anything. I could be misremembering. Number two about frogs not having ears. And therefore do not have true hearing, but they can sense vibrations, especially through the water. So there's a thing called a fire call from my biology class. What a tempanic membrane is what they have instead of the ears. And it would be, yes, so vibrations or the tympani aspect of that. Certainly that seems to make sense with what I know about no ears on the frogs. I'm going to say that one's science. The last one here about, while most frogs lay eggs that hatch as tadpoles, yep, some give birth to live tadpoles or even birth-fully-formed froglets from their womb. Hmm, well, I don't have a problem. I don't think with that. I mean, certainly we know about, you know, tadpoles is something you do learn about, but giving species to live tadpoles and froglets. Oh, boy. So it's either that or the teeth, which one am I going to go with? I'll say the teeth one. That one's just of the three. That's that one. I have the least positive feeling about. So I'll say the teeth one is fiction. Okay, Bob. Well, I'm not too sure about the teeth and the hatching thing, but I would classify that membrane on the side of a frog's head as ears. They're not like human ears, but the vibration of that membrane is translated into sound. So I think those are ears. So I'll say that one's got to be fiction, assuming, you know, depending on the definition of ear here, but I'll just go with that. Okay, and Jay. Okay, so this one with the most frogs have teeth. Most is a nice general thing because we can lean heavily either way, so I'm just going to say that science. Frogs do not have ears, and therefore do not have true hearing, but they can sense vibrations. Yeah, especially through the water, that makes perfect sense. I mean, I've seen the little areas on their some frogs' heads where there might be like an ear type of thing happening, but I don't ever think I saw like a hole or anything like that. So that makes sense to me too. Okay, so most frogs lay eggs that hatch as tadpoles, some species give birth to live tadpoles or even birthfully formed froglets. Well, look, that's fiction. Thank you. Okay, and Kara, you know what's fiction? Jay can't get through without laughing. Kara, actually, I'll spread out. So you have no help on the road. Yeah, I'm struggling because these all seem like science to me. I do think frogs have teeth, but I don't think they're like RT. They're probably like teeny tiny and kind of soft. I agree with what, who said it, Bob said that like a tempanic membrane is still an ear. How do you define ear? The important part of the ear is what's on the inside. The outside is just like a cone. So that's not your ear. Yeah, the ear is the ear drum, right? The canal, the hair cells, all that. Yeah, and then I don't know. I mean, I'm assuming that yes, there's always an exception to the rule. Like there are dinosaurs that gave, or I guess not dinosaurs, but marine reptiles that gave live birth, even though most of them lay to egg. So why wouldn't there be a frog? I think the one thing that nobody brought up is I don't know the difference between a frog and a toad. And what if like some of these things happen in toads, but not frogs? That would screw me. Like if you did a, if you did a news item about rabbits and you're like, well, that's not really a rabbit. That's in a hair. I would be like, okay, whatever. So that could get me on this, but I think I have to go with what Bob said. Like I do think those are ears. So that's got to be the fiction. Okay, so you guys are spread out. So we'll take these in order. Most frogs have teeth with one species having a full set of upper and lower jaw teeth. Evan, you think this is the fiction? Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is science. Yeah, you don't think of frogs as having teeth, but they do. Yeah, right. But they do. They do not use them for chewing. They just use them for holding on to prey. Right? Just a gripping mechanism. But there is this one dude who's got a full grill, like upper and lower teeth. But they are these like small pointy teeth. They're not like R-T. It's not like the frog smiles. They've got a full set of human-like teeth. There is a fish though that's strangely human-like teeth. Yeah, as I've seen that. Oh, yeah, so creepy. Oh, yeah. But no frogs. Is that the little bit clear head? No, that's the transparent head. I don't think so. I think there's a few. I would totally, who's with me here? I would totally. Totally. Totally. I would totally trade my teeth for their lasso tongue. Because how cool would that be? All right. All right, let's go on number two frogs. It do not have ears. And therefore, it do not have true hearing. But they can't sense vibrations, especially through the water. Bob, and Carrie, you think this one is the fiction? Jay and Evan, you think this one is science? Now, Carrie, to answer your question, Toads are a type of frog. So all Toads are frogs, but not all frogs are Toads. Oh, so this would be harder if it was the opposite. Yeah, yeah. So it's the, yeah, so I can't say like, no, it's only in Toads. Because they are frogs, so it would still. Nice. Right. And I guess, yeah, you guys hit upon the question here, is because yes, those are tempanic membranes, those round areas behind the eyes, usually, that you could see on many frogs. But are they just sensing vibration? Or are they, as Bob says, translating that vibration into sound? Right? And in order to do that, you need to have an inner ear, right? That inner ear with hair cells that does, that are connected to neurons that does translated into actual sound. So the question is, do frogs have an inner ear? Is that the question? Yeah. To me, it's like, sound is vibrations. If you're using a membrane to sense vibrations and act on that information, that's a primitive ear. In my, in my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, Yeah, but then it's like, it's a rice pop. Yeah, but then it's like, it's a rice pop. It's a rice pop. Yeah, they actually do have an inner ear. They have it, they just don't have an external ear, right? But they have the tympanic membrane connected to it with inner ear. What's that they're called again? And they hear just like we hear, just through this exposed tympanic membrane. What's the external ear called again, the foldy bit, the meat, meat is no malius, meat. Those are the bones. No, no, the, yeah. On the human. Yeah, yeah, yes, we have, yeah. I think it's called the EE, external ear. Oh, the oracle. There's always that it. I'd like that. The external auditory canal and then there's the pinna, which is the ear part that you see on the outside. Yeah, the pinna or the oracle, it's called the oracle. Right. Yeah. So they don't have an external, have an auditory canal, they don't have the bones, you know, and they don't have any, any external ear that just have, it's their ear starts with the tympanic membrane, but then they have an internal and inner ear with all the usual components of an inner ear. That's cool. Yeah, so it is, it is true hearing. And that means that while most frogs lay eggs at hatch as tadpoles, some species give birth to live tadpoles and even birth fully free. Even birth fully formed froglets from their womb. Some of them are toads and they're called toadlets, which is adorable. Even froglets are adorable. Yes, they are what we call the viparis or theveparity, like nembitodes, for example. They give birth to live children from their womb. And some of them as tadpoles, but some, they carry them until they are fully formed, you know, froglets or toadlets, which is cool. But yeah, in your right, like in amphibians and reptiles, like all kinds of things happen. Like the idea that they all lay eggs is not true. It's not true of snakes, it's not true of other reptiles, not true of dinosaurs. So yeah, this is not surprising. All right, well, good job, Bob and Cara. Yeah, good job, guys. Yeah, enjoy it, I'll less. I think it works. Yeah, it has been, give us a quote. And informed appraisal of life absolutely requires a full understanding of life serena, the universe. By deepening our understanding of the true nature of physical reality, we profoundly reconfigure our sense of ourselves and our experience of the universe. Brian Green. Brian. Very nice. Love it. All right, well, thank you all for joining me this week. Sure, man. Thank you, Steve. Hey, next week's episode is the live show we recorded that we, when we were in Kansas, because I'm going to be out of the country next week. I'll be in Dubai. But next week's episode will definitely be our Kansas show. And until next week, this is your Skeptic Squad to the universe. Skeptic Squad to the universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at the SkepticSkyde.org. Send your questions to info at the SkepticSkyde.org. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com slash SkepticSkyde and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Are listeners and supporters or what make SGU possible?