The Skeptics Guide #1067 - Dec 20 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 Monday, December 15, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody, Cara Santa Maria. Howdy. And Evan Bernstein. Good evening, folks. Jay is sick this week. He thinks he has the flu. Could just be a bad cold. His daughter was sick and kids are basically petri dishes. There's just vectors for communicable disease. I hope Jay got his flu shot already. He didn't. Oh, I pressed him down about. But he said he went to get his flu shot and it was not available. They were out so. So then he went to CVS and they were out of Siddak. Well, he tried. Then he basically forgot to be told to be. Then he dropped the ball. He wasn't persistent enough and now he's paying the price. I had the weirdest experience. Tell me if this has ever happened to you. This year I got my flu shot at work because I started my job back again and they require a flu shot if you work in a hospital. But my hospital has stopped requiring that you get annual COVIDs. You have to have had a certain number of shots. But you don't look required to keep getting the booster every time. But I wanted to get the booster. And so I went to CVS like that same day and I got my COVID booster. And I had them do it in the same arm because I don't want two sore shoulders. And my arm lumped up in a way it had never done it before. Who would they give you steroids? I was like, what happened? And I don't know. I remember her getting confused at CVS. She was like, and I was like, do you want me to take the bandaid off and she was like, yeah, that's right, where I need to give you the shot. So I took the bandaid off from the old shot. And I'm like, did she stick it in the same hole? What happened? What happened? Because my arm was not happy. But I've got it in different arms. It's not a big deal. Yeah, maybe I should. I've gotten them together before, but it's usually the same person that does them. And I guess they stuck them in far enough apart. You think it's just like I had a local reaction. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, you had a double local reaction. So you had the two shots in the same room. Not a big deal. But yes. No, no, no. I had eight vaccines in one sitting before when I went to a travel clinic before I traveled to a... So you got super autism then. Africa. Oh. And that woman was incredible. I was like, how did you do that? She was like, I do this all day every day. It was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I didn't even feel it. Amazing. Some people say you shouldn't get like the flu and COVID shot at the same day. You can't. Absolutely. You absolutely can't. I did once. And it was definitely a much bigger wallop than I'm used to either getting just one on its own. So that's just one data point. So you say wallop, you mean like your arm hurt or like you got sick? It will hurt. And I felt sick the next couple of days. Because I haven't felt sick with COVID boosters in a while. Yeah, the first couple were bad. And then after that it hasn't been bad. Yeah. Yeah, it's never been bad for me. But at one time I did the double. It was the worst that I had experienced. It's never been bad for you. You're so lucky. Oh, yeah. I felt like I had the flu for days the first time I got a COVID vaccine. No, the second one. The first one was the worst. It felt like the worst. Yeah. It was only one bad night. You know, we just lose one thing to sleep. But even me. This year I don't think I'm just going to so around for a day. I was it. I got my shingles shot today. First of two. Good for you. Because I was reading up on shingles and horror stories that people go through. Definitely got your shingles shot. When is it recommended again? After 850. They should lower that. My kids sister got shingles in COVID at the same time and she's like 30. Oh no. Yeah, you could get it. How do I got COVID? Got that shingles in this 30s. I was in my 40s and I think I got super lucky because it wasn't bad at all and I keep hearing harsh towards that weight. Shingles is that bad. Like holy crap. I must have looked at this. It's over all the dice. So it's, you know, it's a reactivation of the chickenpox virus that is dormant in the sensory nuclei in your spinal cord, basically. And then if it reactivates, it goes out to the skin and back to the spinal cord, right? So you get the rash, the vesicles, but then also it could cause the nerves to be painful. And the worst is when you get post-herpetic neurologist. So it's not just the pain of the rash and of the acute flare. You can have years of burning pain in the distribution of where you had the shingles. And that's the role of the dice, right? That's what you don't want to get, but that could be terrible. It's treatable. I've treated many patients with it. But it's not that fun. I had patients who got shingles in the middle of their cancer treatment. And these were patients with severe disease and intense chemotherapy and radiation. And they were like, the shingles is by far the worst part of what I'm dealing with right now. Oh, boy. Oh, my God. Yeah, this is what's scary. It's so weird. Yeah, I've put it off too long. I've just got to get this done. Yeah. Your risk of getting shingles is greater if you are in any way under stress. Yeah. So getting chemo's huge risk of doing that. So you can get it when you're not under stress, but I'm just your risk of getting it goes up. For me, I remember the only thing I really remember is this weird tickle itch in my back. Like, whoa, what's that? I never felt that before. But it was not bad at all. It was just weird. That's what you call lucky. I feel like at this point, they should just let us all get the vaccine. Because anybody my age, kids start getting vaccinated against chickenpox. Chickenpox. I never had a vaccination for chickenpox. No, none of us did. I contracted it in my age. I had it in 1981. Yeah. That was when I was 11 years old. Right. But you guys are older than me. I'm saying younger people than me, not that much younger, all got the chickenpox vaccine. So 1970s, well, that's when it was about 1995's when it was approved. That's it. Okay. So kids, people who were kids in 95 or later, they're all vaccinated already. So I feel like I'm kind of in that last loss generation. And I'm only 42. Just let me get the shingles vaccine now. Just let anybody who is not vaccinated. I'm not vaccinated. Yeah. I just don't know if it, I mean, I'll probably have to pay for it out of pocket. Damn, you manage care. Right? How bad could that be though? Yeah. It's just weird. Like, it's the same thing with the, I mean, we've talked about this before. But when Gardasil first came on the scene, people in my generation just kept getting skipped over. Because it wasn't approved for us right away. It was only approved for younger adults. And then they would like extend the coverage to be older and older and older. And finally, we were in the cohort. We were able to get it and it'd be paid for. But it was so silly that a lot of people just got skipped when the vaccine came out. You can still get it though, everyone. I think up to age 45. Yeah. So there are reasons not to get the vaccine early, Cara. One of the reasons is that they don't know how long it lasts. So you wanted to last when you're vulnerable, you know, when you're older. So it's got a lot of... So you get it when you're younger, when you don't really, when the risk of shingles is much lower, it's kind of a waste. It's not really a waste though if you can just re-vaccinate every, however, you know, like tetanus, right? You just get it again every 10 years or... And they said, side effects are stronger than younger you are. That's so the case with a lot of things that's really important. Because your immune system is more robust. So you... Yeah. Kimo too. Yeah. And then you get the vaccine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. We're going to talk to you guys about domesticating animals. Not necessarily domestication, but the whole thing, you know, it's a continuum. And this is based... I want to talk about it because of a recent study. And this is a study looking at brown bears in a specific region of Italy. Now, these brown bears... This population has been isolated, genetically isolated, from other populations of brown bears for a couple of thousand years. And they're pretty distinct. You could... You could tell if I'm looking at them, right? They look a little different. Their faces look different than a typical brown bear. But there's something else about these bears. So this population has been living in close proximity to humans, right? To like, urbanized areas and suburban areas. So the researchers wanted to know if they had adapted at all to being in such close proximity. And they did a genetic analysis for genes that, known to be associated with aggressiveness. And, you know, there are all genes that affect brain development, you know. And they had many genes that are associated with reduced aggressiveness. These are some of the same genes that you would see in domesticated animals. Oh, this is like the fox experiment, don't you? It's like the foxes. Yeah, so I remember the Russian fox experiment where they... Again, they selected foxes for... These are the silver foxes. They selected them for being less aggressive, less nasty, more calm, more friendly. Only to humans, too, which was really interesting. Yeah, to humans. And we forget, too, they also bred the most aggressive ones together. They bred the most aggressive and the least aggressive, they created two populations. Then they compared their genes and they identified the genes, again, for brain development that were associated with sort of domestication versus being very aggressive. Such a great experiment. And really it was just a few generations that you could start to see some significant differences. Oh, yeah. And now they're pets all over the world. Yeah, and because when they selected for the behavior, but a lot of the physical characteristics, because they were not specifically selecting for, came along for the ride. Right, the right age. Floppy ears, spot and coat. Spots, yeah. Yeah, so they looked cuter, you know? And... The problem is they also... They have that thing, like, excited urination or whatever. But all of them, they just eat when they see people. Happy pee. Yeah, happy pee. Good doctor. Yeah, just had happy pee. Yeah. Whenever I would see that dog, he'd run over to me and be just, yep, happy pee's common just to get it. He just loved me too much. Okay, I'm just a... I miss Murray. So he was a adorable dog. All right, so it's interesting to think about though, you know, there's lots of instances where... Just because, you know, the human population is so big and we've taken over so much of the earth, that animals are basically forced to adapt to living side by side with humans. And one of the ways that they adapt is to become less aggressive. So, and we've seen that, you know, the historically, obviously, probably most famously with wolves evolving into dogs, most of that domestication, you know, experts now believe, was probably self-domestication by the wolves. Like, it wasn't due to human selective pressures. We weren't breeding them. They were self-selecting. There was a selective pressure there to become more docile. And that was primarily the availability of food at the edges of human civilization, habitation. And so the less aggressive also means less high strung and a little bit more willing to get closer to people. And that would provide a huge calorie source that gave us selective advantage. And so the wolves that were better able to be around people, you know, were able to get more access to food. And it also meant that they were less dependent on hunting. And so over time, the selective pressures for being mean and muscular and aggressive reduced and the selective pressures for being cute and cuddly and friendly increased. That's how you get a chihuahua. It was working by ways. Yeah. And so you get basically dogs from wolves. And then once people really took them in, then we of course started breeding them ourselves as well. But they basically were domesticated by the time that happened. And now this is happening in other species as well. There's like different species all along this continuum. So there's the golden jackals of Israel, you guys heard of them. Nope. So they're like halfway there. They've been again living in close proximity to human civilization for a long, very long time. And they are becoming less and less aggressive. And they are because they're getting access to food. Even if people aren't directly feeding them, they're finding food. But there's another layer to this as well. And that is humans do provide a selective pressure. Even if they're not breeding them, we kill aggressive animals. Of course we do. Yeah. So if you're a wolf or a jackal or a bear or whatever and you're very aggressive and mean, we might just kill you. We're just protecting to protect our people, our pets, our livestock. But that also helps these more friendly versions of these animals as well. Yeah, it's because there's a selective pressure. Right. So not only are they self-selective, then we are killing the aggressive ones that they get too close. So there's a double selective pressure there as well. You definitely see that here in LA with our coyote population. Oh yeah. Yeah. So coyotes get killed. The ones that don't bother anybody live among us now. Like they're fully just walking down the street near us. They're probably also breeding with dogs. And they could be breeding with dogs as well. Yeah. I know the Eastern coyote is part wolf, part coyote and part dog. And they are, so I get off the wolf and the dog parts are fighting with each other. I guess but they're not friendly. I mean, they're wild animals. Yeah. But they are definitely garbage dump hypothesis. Yeah. You know, they're doing it now. They're like right there along with people. Most people just don't bother them and they don't bother us. And I get, I have coyote sightings weekly in my neighborhood. Yeah. Well, that's part just like just staying away from humans is one of the selective pathways that you could take. You don't have to be friendly with them. You can just know how to stay out of their way. Yeah, just don't bother them and eat their garbage. Right. Yeah. And I wonder how mountain lions will adapt because they're very popular in the western part of the west. They are. But the problem with mountain lions is they will hunt livestock and they will get killed. Yeah. And it happens over and over and over. The actually sadly, this is neither here nor there, but the biggest selection pressure. The second biggest cause of death among mountain lions other than other mountain lions is cars. Yeah. So that's another thing I was going to bring up is that a lot of animals like in the Eastern half of the US car, car strikes are a huge problem with deer. So will deer evolve behavior that makes them less likely to be struck by a vehicle? God, I wish they would. Or would, would squirrels, you, you know, would, will their behavior change? Aren't you also the most deadly animal to humans because of that? Yes. Yes. Absolutely. In the US. Yeah. I don't know if it's the most but it's not insect animal. No, no, I think in the US, they are more, they are more deadly than mosquitoes. They are very deadly in the US. And in fact, I know that could have read the article that article and said, hey, if mountain lions were introduced in the East or if they migrate naturally to the East, even if they kill a couple of people a year, they're going to save lives from controlling the deer population, which is now totally out of control over here. It's different to be think about eating by a line versus hitting a deer in your car. Right. Exactly. And mountain lions are so rare. It just doesn't happen. They don't want to eat. It's very rare. Like 12 in the last 100 years. They still aren't like eating the people. Yeah. I think that's pretty, I don't think they're like, well, I'm hungry. I'm going to eat a whole human. They might be attacking them. But that's different. I hit a deer at highway speeds. Yeah, that's scary. Yeah, that's scary. You could have died. Oh gosh, I've seen tore up. That was like, I guess I got lucky. I mean, it was, you know, it was nasty. I mean, it was like fur and blood on my cars. $3,000 worth of damage. But you know, killing something like that. It's just like, it's horrible. It's just a big, beautiful creature. It was so sad. But damn, man, it's like, oh, all of a sudden, there's a deer. And that's happened to me on back roads at three other times. Like, there's no breaking. Or I mean, you could, you should be looking out in certain areas. But all of a sudden, yeah, there's a deer right in front of my car. I have, oh, I have no time to react. Well, you'll see the signs here. The road signs, the warning signs, deer crossing. And that's, oh yeah. Oh yeah. They have some trouble in the country. In Australia, it's kangaroos. You basically have to have like a kangaroo rack on the front of your vehicle. But the best ones, maybe New Zealand, where they encourage you, they have signs encouraging you. Please, the possum. Please kill the possum in the rat. Yeah. Right. If you see them strike them, that is that bloom, that bloom, my mind. That was like, well, they're invasive. I get it. I just didn't expect to see road signs encouraging you to drive your car into them. Hey, man, all hands on deck there. OK. That's right. Almost hit a deer once. It was close, but the buck stopped here. Oh, it's waiting for that. I looked it up. It's 150 to 440 deaths a year. And that's actually makes it the deadliest animal in the US, but like tens of thousands of injuries. Yeah, lots of injuries. Lots of, you know, vehicle damage as well. Good total of your car, easily. Oh, absolutely. You've seen it. So the other thing is that humans have to adapt to animals as well, but our adaptation is more cultural than evolutionary, right? We just basically have to learn the rules. Remember, that time, I had a bear on my backyard, they called the animal control people. And they're basically like, stay out of his way. This is what you should do. Yeah, just bad luck. I know. So you're in his territory. So you have to stay out of his way. So you learn that we have to bring the bird seed. And you can't leave that outside. You should leave your garbage out overnight. If you have anything in the garage that's edible, you got to keep your garage doors closed. We have to have a neighbor warning system where we text each other when we cite bears in the neighborhood. It's a neighborhood watch. Yeah, it is. You can bring your pets in, et cetera. Because our population is growing so much. And because we're restricting their territory so much, we are getting more and more crossover between animal and human living spaces. And they're adapting to us. We're adapting to them. You all got to get along. Yeah, that's not necessarily a bad thing. But it does raise interesting questions about domestication, classic domestication, pets. I definitely see arguments online or people arguing for, why don't we keep raccoons as pets? Raccoons are really interesting animals that have basically domesticated the caromar. That's terrible, man. Yeah, they make terrible pets. I mean, I love it. If raccoons could be a pet, I would be interested in it. Because they are fascinating. They're smart. They're smart. They're cute. They're all density, man. There's a couple of problems with raccoons. One is their assholes. Biting is their go-to move. They bite. Have you ever met a cat? No, no. Way more than cats. Way more than cats. Really? Because cats can be very bitey. No, raccoons are, that's what they do. They bite, they are off the hook bitey. And they also will wreck your furniture and pee everywhere. Yeah. Have you ever met cats? They have to be hand-house break. You cannot house break a. I think it's a lot of this is cultural. It's, we decided that that is a acceptable risk for that animal. India, they bring the cows inside the house, right? Exactly. Yeah. And cats are often bite, my cat has never been... A lot of cats are very bitey and a lot of cats will destroy your furniture too. To show a dog bite. And some dogs, you know, don't ever get house broken. In Sweden, a startup built these devices. They almost look like ATMs. And what they do is they trade little pellets of food for cigarette butt litter. And all of the crows have learned to clean up the cigarette butts deposit them in this little machine and then they get food in exchange for it. That is awesome. I know. I would die hell, man. Because that's just something. Cigarette butts are impossible to clean up. And they said it's, yeah, it's reducing like billions of cigarette butts that are thrown out each year. But the cancer anyone grows is grown. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. So one reason, like many white smoking is it disgusting at it? It is. Yeah. All right. Let's move on. Karen, it's another animal related item. You're going to tell us about pig organ transplants. Yeah. So it helped me remember. But, you know, earlier this year, there was a trending story about a patient, basically part of a new clinical trial where genetically modified pig kidney was transplanted into this patient. That's correct. Yeah, we talked about this in October, I think. We did. And we've talked about zeno transplantation in the past. We've talked about this idea of sort of human animal transplantation, whether we're talking about specific valves in a heart, maybe, or skin grafts or different organs. And, you know, there are some transplants that we can do directly from an animal, like utilizing their tissue and using, you know, drugs and different mechanisms to reduce rejection. And then there's the big, difficult ones, whole organ transplantation. So this pig to human kidney transplant, do you guys remember the kidney? Was it pig or human? It was a genetically modified pig. Yes, it was a genetically modified pig kidney that was modified to sort of mimic human tissue mostly around rejection, right? It was modified to have a lesser chance of rejection. Why was it not a human kidney that was grown in a pig? Does anybody but Steve know? Yeah. Would it even work? Would it have some some rejection issues? Of course, even, you know, a human kidney has rejection issues that goes into another human. Right. So then is that that's not the answer though? That's not the answer. Well, something advantageous about a pig kidney that a human kidney doesn't have, maybe. Nope. Can you think you're rational? Think you're rational. Yeah. It probably would be better to grow a human kidney inside of a pig, but we're not allowed to. Oh, ethics. Oh, it is. Yeah. So that's what this article that was recently written in the conversation is all about it. It was written by Monica Piotrowska, who's an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Albany, State University, New York. And I love just the headline of this. Putting pig organs in people is OK in the US, but growing human organs in pigs is not. Why is that? And really that's the question she's posing. Why is that? It seems that the answer comes down. C'mst down. C'mst down. Yeah, it seems that the answer comes down to the NIH guidelines for human stem cell research. In 2015, they, well, I should say, I shouldn't say they outlawed it, they paused funding for work on growing human organs inside of animals, specifically inside of pigs. They paused that funding in 2015. And the argument here came back to the NIH guidelines for human stem cell research. So when you look at some of the FAQ, they talk about potential benefits of the research funding that could happen in the future. What is their policy on this research? And basically, they said, we can't move forward with this because it is falling underneath. There's a moratorium that falls underneath the purview of the stem cell guidelines due to public outcry and due to some concerns from scientists, from individual experts working in this field. But this is one of those really interesting topics that we sometimes get to discuss on the SGU where 99.9% of scientists don't agree, right? Like there's actually quite a bit of debate within these fields themselves about whether or not this ethical consideration is appropriate and kind of the extreme step of putting a moratorium. And can you really call it a moratorium if it was put into effect 10 years ago? Is that still a moratorium? Or is that it, for all intents and purposes a ban? It's a de facto ban. Right. And so here's something that's interesting, right? So we've got this new clinical trial where basically researchers are trying to sidestep the regulation, not, sidestep isn't really the appropriate term because they're not breaking with regulation. They're trying to do everything they can and still follow the rules. And in doing that, they're having to go through quite a few hoops, okay, instead of growing a human kidney inside of a pig, which nobody's done before, by the way. But when the moratorium was put into place, they had shown proof of concept by growing, I think a mouse pancreas inside of a rat, which I know sounds like, oh, it's mouse to rat. It's basically the same. It's not the same. Those are two different species. And so they were showing proof of concept there and they were able to do that successfully. And that's sort of when all the research stopped. So we know that it could potentially work, but we don't know if it can work because we haven't been able to figure out if it works. So instead of growing these kidneys, these human kidneys, and when we say human kidneys, we don't mean like generic of the human ilk. We mean kidneys grown from the genetic information of the actual recipient. That's the goal here. That's the goal here. From human cells. From human cells, but not just human cells, the recipient cells. The individual. Yeah, the individual. The idea here would be that they would be a match to not just their blood type, but all of the different factors that they're coding for that would promote, or I should say, decrease the chance of rejection. Yeah. Because the recipient would recognize this cell or this organ as its own. That's the hope. What they're having to do right now is they're having to use different genetic modification techniques to sort of trick the recipient's immune system into thinking that the organ is not a threat, into thinking that the organ is human. Or maybe even into thinking that the organ is the recipients. And it kind of works. And that's what we talked about a few months ago when we described this. If you guys remember, ultimately, these recipients are having to have these organs removed. There was one example. 271 days was the length of time that the New Hampshire man who was on the transplant list was able to keep the pig kidney. I shouldn't say was able to survive with it because he didn't die. He just had it removed it and then went back into dialysis. And then that was after an Alabama woman's pig kidney lasted 130 days. And we've had some other examples in the past. But we have to remember that the transplant list is long and it's growing. There are over 100,000 people on the transplant list in the US. And most of those are for kidney transplants, actually. You would think it's mostly heart, but it's not. It's still mostly kidney transplant that's needed. No, interesting. I know. Right? Because heart is by far the most difficult. And you can't donate a heart, obviously. And the rules are much, much stricter. But yeah, most people who need an organ need a kidney. And they're just aren't enough. They're aren't enough donors. And so we are, or should say, were on track. I'm not saying it was there yet. And I'm not saying it was perfect, but on track, to be able to, and you can read some really fascinating articles from 5, 10, 15 years ago about growing human organs in animal hosts, and specifically pig is usually the one that's used. But where are the ethical concerns? Like, I do think it's important to highlight both sides of this debate. What do you think that the largest ethical concerns are? Why would people not be OK with growing a human kidney inside of a pig? So what are they inserting? They're not inserting stem cells? I mean, right? They are. It's a sort of the general stem cell argument. Human stem cells into animal embryos. But even beyond the general kind of like, the fear of come, you know, come errors. That's a pretty interesting fear for some people. What's the main fear of chimeras? That chimeras are going to vote democratic? I mean, no. Well, but it's funny. You say that. I mean, that's actually obviously really funny. But it's that the pig would be more human. And how human is too human. And that is right. Are we making a new human type of species here? Is it we playing God? Like the NIH literally used this quote. They were concerned of possible quote alterations of the animal's cognitive state. Yeah. Oh, they were concerned that putting kidney human stem cells that will ultimately code for a human kidney into an embryonic pig could somehow those cells could migrate to neural tissue? Wait, was that the real fear or was it the fear that this is the slippery slope? And this is the first step that will lead to like neural transplants? Is it a panel of people, doctors and things, and they have to placate a couple of them who are fringe on the panel by saying something like this? What's the ultimate reason? I don't know if anybody really knows. And Bob, I think that's an interesting question. We can only go off of what's published. And what they published is a warning of possible alterations of the animal's cognitive state. Now, you do see animal rights activist groups or animal advocacy organizations arguing against sentience or awareness or whatever kind of terminology they want to use, not sentience sapience. Sorry, animals are already sentient. They can feel pain and pleasure, but arguing against a fear of sapience. And you're right, I think a distinction needs to be made between a slippery slope of what happens if we try or we get to a point where we have the technology and the know how to insert human stem cells into a pig's brain, for example, intentionally to try and grow a human-like brain in a pig. That's very different than a concern that a few cells might migrate into the brain of a pig when the intention with a lot of safeguards, yes, is to prevent that from happening. And I think also it shows just like a general lack of understanding of how this kind of scientific research happens. You don't just throw some cells in an animal and see what sticks. It's really hard to make this work, really hard. It's hard enough. Something like that actually happening, I don't think so. No, no, no, I'm saying it's hard enough just to make growing a kidney work. Right, right, let alone worrying about brain developing as some sort of random oopsies. And this bioethicist or philosopher, I should say, who obviously specializes in bioethics, their argument in their article about the flawed logic of the band, as they call it, is that in practice, they're saying it's not about the concept of self-consciousness at all. It's about species membership and human exceptionalism. They're saying that if, if, and this is a direct quote, if certain cognitive capacities such as self-consciousness conferred higher moral status, then it follows that regulators would be equally concerned about inserting dolphin or primate cells into pigs as they are about inserting human cells, but they are not. They are not equally concerned about that. It's specific to humans. This idea of human to not human chimeras. We're responsible for it all, I suppose. Where's a dolphin's not? True, true. And I think that's that is an important argument. But I think there's also this concern of where is the cutoff. And this is something that we've talked about a lot on the show. And I know I'll probably get feedback from people arguing against certain stances on eating meat or arguing for veganism. And I think that these are all valid arguments. But there's always a line in the sand at which a decision has to be made, whether it's personally or collectively from a policy standpoint that says, what is, at what level is this ethical and is it not? Because I think we often forget that fruit flies our animals. Yeah. We often forget that fish can feel pain. It's a continuum. Yeah. I think there's already about the island of Dr. Morrell. That's what came to my head. It's a slippery slope, I think, at the end of the day. It's like, well, we have a pig with human parts, the human parts. How many parts, eventually, like the end of that is basically a human being with a pig brain. Or you have a pig with a human brain. I think either of those are abominations that people would recoil at. And so they don't want to go in that direction. Whereas if you're genetically modifying a pig, it's still a pig. It's just genes, or I guess that's a little bit more easy to take. I don't think there's a rational science based, or even really ethically based distinction there. You know, growing a human kidney in a pig versus a genetically modified pig kidney to look more human to be functional. Right, because either way, the pig is a host. Yeah. Well, and not just as it's still a pig, it's still a host. We're still harvesting the organ and sacrificing that pig so that the human may live. If that's the argument, if that's the concern that we don't want these pig farms, which is a valid concern, right, that we don't want to use animals just for our health purposes, justice, lauter them at the end of the day. It's a valid concern, but it doesn't hold water here because we're already doing that. It's not the distinction that they're making. The distinction that are making is this idea of a human chimera. And at what point is that animal, should that animal have similar rights to human beings due to its makeup being some percent human? But I would make a huge distinction between neural tissue and everything else. Absolutely. Absolutely. A lot of us are saying, come on. Yeah. But we're seeing this with a lot of technologies. We just talked last week about the fact that they're making the European Union to make it a distinction being genetically modified and genetically altered, genetically engineered, that's really splitting hairs. And if you remember, back in 2001, with President Bush's ban on stem cell research, on your Harvard-Stanney new lines, eventually they worked around it. They found a way to make cell lines that did not have to be harvested and basically made the law obsolete. I see they're doing that in this case, but it is holding back the research, which is... Oh, it's absolutely... Which is a problem. ...which is a problem. Yeah, hopefully it works as well as the false start that we had. But I see there being a line where we go, we just can't go any further without this organ being of human origin, like we just can't. And I guess I'll close with another quote from the article, because I mean, she says it better than we could. If a pig embryo infused with human cells truly became something close enough to count as a member of the human species, then current research regulations would dictate its owed human level regard. But the mere presence of human cells doesn't make pigs human and Steve, you made this point. Then she goes on to say, the pigs engineered for kidney transplants already carry human genes, but they aren't called half human beings. When a person donates a kidney, the recipient doesn't become part of the donor's family. Yet current research policies treat a pig with a human kidney as if it might. Yeah, I think it's scientifically incoherent. Yeah, and it's holding back research in a major way. And which we need, because again, you said it's a massive shortage in organ transplantation, especially kidneys. Yeah. All right, thanks, Cara. Bob, you're going to talk about another cutting edge, high-tech issue here. Japan's plan to beam energy from space. Yeah, Japan is about to test for the first time solar power beam from space, guys. This is, it's a, oh, he's summer project. And it will soon launch a satellite to collect solar energy, beam it down to Earth as microwaves to be turned into electricity, enough to run a toaster, I hear. So we've touched on this before here and there. Right, Steve, our reaction has always been something like, oh, this is such a cool idea, but give me a break. It's way too expensive compared to simple ground-based solar power collection. I mean, how was this even a discussion? So that's basically what, how we've been dealing with this, I think. I mean, at least in talk Steve, you and I have had. It's like, oh, it's cool, but come on. It's this way too. It's ridiculously expensive. Why is that even on the table? So let's revisit this a little bit. Space-based solar power, S-B-S-P, first proposed by aerospace engineer Peter Glazer. And what do you think? What year do you think this was proposed, this idea, guys? It's 68. Yeah, you bastard. What if I should have just 1868? 1868, wow, that was a long time ago. Yeah, so, I mean, there's so, but there's so many benefits to collecting solar energy and space. It's easy to get a little entranspired. The benefits are just like, oh, man, it's just so wonderful. So traditional solar farms on the ground, they've got the classic disadvantage, right? At night, the earth gets in the way of the sun. It's like the dammer, there it is. It's blocking the sun. So yeah, nighttime really sucks for solar. It's like half the time, you can't, you can't, by definition, use it. And then of course, even when the sun's shining, there's cloud cover, then you got to deal with a limited area and even just respect for the environment. It's like, oh, my God, you know, because some of these installations can be so big and there's always concern there. But now the orbital solar collectors in, say, geosynchronous orbit, now that's geostationary, right? Yeah, right. There's that whole thing. It's in, it would be in a geosynchronous orbit, but it would be in a specific type of geosynchronous orbit, which is geostationary, so that it's in one spot, right? So if you've got it, you've got to get me off on it. Save your email, it's not a spot. It's geostationary, so it's basically hovering in one spot, whereas a generic geosynchronous doesn't have to be in one spot, it could move a little bit. All right, so when you're in, when you're in this orbit, sunny 24-7 earth is no longer in your way at night. There's no weather, right? Especially the clouds don't get in the way. You also, here's an interesting angle, you avoid most common forms of wear, because you're not like on the planet dealing with a weather, so many types of wear won't be happening that you would see on the ground. And the environmental impact is basically non-existent, except for some of the collectors, but nothing compared to the big solar rays. So it's just like so many interesting advantages to solar orbital solar collectors, and we all know how much energy is hitting the earth. I mean, if you look, here's a stat I found interesting. Our deserts absorb in one day, all the energy humans use in a year, and as great as that is, space is even better. It's even better. Sunlight in orbit is approximately, it's like 144 or 150% stronger than the ground, and if you factor in no nighttime or weather, orbital systems can yield 40 times the total output over time. So yeah, it's just an amazing place for this to happen. So now to transmit the power home efficiently, my first thought would be, well, it's use lasers, right? Why don't we use lasers? But they can cause issues due to the interference with the atmosphere, the atmosphere, can be problematic for lasers in this scenario to a certain extent. So for decades, many decades, and most recently in 2008, it's been shown that power beaming with the microwaves would be much better. It just slides through the atmosphere almost effortlessly. It's really microwaves are great for this application. So there we go, microwaves. So this is what Japan is gonna test. And the microwave beams, you know, it sounds like, oh boy, this is what's happening in my microwave, that's heating food, it's safe. It's very safe for us and for wildlife. The energy densities are not anything that we really need to worry about here. But this is the process. If this worked, the process would happen this way, which is a generic solar installation in space. So the solar panels intercept the solar radiation and they convert that to DC, direct current. That DC powers the microwave generator that sends this signal to Earth, right? Converting the microwaves into electricity on the ground, for me, that was the real slick part of this tech. Because I didn't really understand how that worked. How were you taking microwaves and producing, you know, usable electricity from that? So to deal with this, they have special antennas. These are called rectifying antennas or rectanas. If you guys heard about rectanas or rectifying circuits, yeah, they're fascinating. I didn't really have a full grasp of how they actually did their work. So it's basically two devices in one. This rectana, hence the portmanteau, right? Rectifying antenna, you know, rectifying circuit and antenna, rectana. So the antenna part of this device is just a regular antenna, but it's designed to harvest microwaves instead of, say, you know, member Steve or old school TV signals, which were our radio waves on the roof of our house. Now, microwaves, by the way, are really just energetic radio waves. So they're just basically, I think technically they are radio waves, but they're just, you know, the far end there. So now you got the antenna, the antenna is grabbing onto these microwaves. The microwaves drive the electrons back and forth in the antenna, right? Imagine the antenna, the microwaves are hitting it, it's driving electrons back and forth. This is basically alternating current. This is AC right here that we're dealing with. The rectifier takes this back and forth of the electrons and blocks the backward part, right? So the current mostly goes in one direction. Instead of both directions, it's just going in in this one direction. And then you're basically done. The only thing that you need to do additionally here is that a filter will take that kind of bumpy direct current and make it into a smooth direct current that we normally use in our everyday lives. So that's what's happening. This rectifier takes some of that back and forth of the electrons and makes the current go in one direction. And that's what that's what it's doing to turn microwaves into direct current. But oh, he's some of the project is going to launch a 400 pound washing machine-sized satellite into low-earth orbit, about 400 kilometers above Earth. It's a two-square meter solar panel. That's going to collect the solar power. And it's going to beam it down in the microwaves to an array, a 13 and 10 ground away. That's array, that's the plan. And the test is designed to validate two things. They want to make sure that the accuracy of the microwave to ground targeting is spot on and that the efficiency of the wireless energy reception on Earth is also good. I mean, if it's not efficient and not accurate, this is not going to work. I think this is going to work for them. I think when they finally get this up here, probably I would guess they keep saying the end of 2025 and we're getting damn close to that. I assume it's going to be the first quarter of 2026 that they're going to launch this and they'll do a test. I don't think this will work fine, this very narrow specific test because mainly because this isn't the hard part, scaling this up cheaply, that's the hard part. It's the steps that come after this that are really get kind of rough. And it boils down to what is it boiled down to? Is this worth the extra expense of launching this entire system into space? Why would Japan even consider this? And it's kind of obvious if you think about Japan. Japan imports something like I've heard numbers from 90 to 97% of their energy. Any country should consider that untenable long term. This is ridiculous. I mean, we can't be, how do we survive long term if we're importing almost all of our energy like that? So yeah, so they're looking at this hard and they've been working on this specific technology for decades. This has been a priority for them. Well, look more Japan, a ground-based solar array that's very limited in Japan. There's limited space, right, in Japan. The terrain is difficult. There's a lot of people in a tiny area. So yeah, so ground-based solar arrays are not going to really do that much. Let's say nuclear energy, that's a tough sell, right, Fukushima. I mean, I think that's something that they're not, they're trying not to focus on too much. I just think the gut reaction to people over there is just like obviously pretty tainted. Geothermal isn't much of an option in Japan. There is some geothermal activity there, but either they can't use it where it is or it's being used for hot bads and stuff and they don't want to start a huge construction thing there where tourists go and whatever. Offshore wind farms, I think that's pretty viable. They've got a lot of coastline, but I think that this is going to need to be kind of a scenario where they do different things, including a wind farm. And maybe some space-based solar, I don't know, but let's see how much more expensive this could be. So I found a NASA study that's only, I think it's only a couple of years old, so it's pretty new. They looked at two designs. Each design would add two gigawatts to the grid. So that's pretty intense right there. Japan is only imagining one gigawatt solar array up in space. So the NASA was thinking about two gigawatts and what would this cost? They calculated the cost of electricity comes to about 61 cents, USD, 61 cents per kilowatt hour for one design, and their other design was a $1.59 per kilowatt hour. And Steve, do you know the latest ground solar is like four cents per kilowatt hour, something like that? So it's, yeah, so clearly this is going to be more expensive. Does that's kind of obvious? Bob, because I was looking at that too, I was very interested in what the relative cost, that NASA study, which I also came upon, is at the very high end of estimates. I've read other estimates that put it as low as like 10 to 20 billion for a one gigawatt system where NASA is like 250 billion for the two gigawatt system. So NASA's estimates is 10 times more than some other estimates. There are even super optimistic estimates that put it at one to two billion dollars, I think that's pying the sky. But if they could get the cost down to 10 billion for a one gigawatt system, that's in the cost range for a nuclear reactor. That's now as expensive as nuclear. And that is totally doable. Best case scenario is interesting. I mean, they did conclude that space-based solar power would cost either 12 to 31 times higher for one design or 32 to 80 times as much as the other. So I didn't really focus on the dollars, if I focused on how much more expensive would it be because of the launch. And of course, it's mostly launch costs. Remember, we're talking thousands of launches, right? To get this into space, thousands of launches they're predicting. So NASA says 70 to 80% of the life cycle cost is just launching. But then if you keep reading, it says that best case scenario, if there's multiple major improvements made, like say that the launch is even cheaper, it gets it's more efficient and this and that. So if you have multiple stacking major improvements, they say the cost could drop dramatically, even down to get this single digit sense per kilowatt hour. So that would mean instead of four pennies per kilowatt hour now on the ground, they're saying space-based could eventually be something like nine cents per kilowatt hour. That would be like, oh my god, that'd be a no brainer. Who knows, there's so many complex variables interplaying here, who knows what it's going to be. So what's the takeaway? I'm not sure, generally, I think the takeaway is this. It's too expensive now, but it will get better and perhaps it could get way better potentially. I don't know, but I think if we just wait, it's going to get better, just wait a little while, it's going to get better. I'm not sure when we might see a gigawatt class, instrument deployed, very complex instrument deployed into space. I don't know if we're going to see that, that still could be 20, 30, 40 years away. I don't know. I think if Japan figures that their cost is at the lower end of the estimate, they may go ahead and try to do this and launch their planned gigawatt system into space. But one problem with that is that some people are saying that this is going to require an international effort like the Large Hadron Collider. It's just too big for one country to do it, but the problem is what other countries are going to put all the millions of dollars, millions of whatever currency they use into this project and their time and their smartest people, and if it only benefits Japan. I mean, the Large Hadron Collider, this data is available for everyone, but for this is like, why would Germany then spend millions on something that is directly just for Japan? I mean, the technology that you come away with, maybe that kind of joint intellectual property would make it worth it? I don't know. I think the idea is that the advances reduce the cost until it gets down into the range where it's viable for the EU or for the United States for other countries to do this. So what's interesting though, that's the whole thing. That's the whole thing. How expensive something is, that depends on the country, it depends on the use case. Japan is kind of unique in that it is. They have their landlock, they have a severe land restriction. So this only needs to come down to the relative cost of nuclear, it doesn't need to come down to the cost of ground-based solar because they don't have a land-for-ground-based solar. So it's not really an option for them. They are absolutely a special case, and I think we'll see it with them before any other country, essentially. They are more motivated than everyone in the world. They should be, they could push this forward, but they could be, you know, if that R&D brings it down, because there's other things you didn't talk about that really could affect the price. It's so complicated. Like, what else? How are they going to be constructed in space, right? Are you going to send up individual units that are built on earth and then unfold in orbit or are you going to have robots assembling a massive multi-kilometer array in orbit? We don't have the technology to do that right now. So a lot depends on how we develop that technology, and if that we can get that to that's reliable, and it's cheap, you know, then it changes the equation further. Yeah, NASA's study went through a lot of the different types of technologies, you know, the ways and different methods and ideas, just that super high level, you know, what are they going to construct up there? Like you mentioned, so maybe we should, we'll put the link to that PDF on the site. I wish I had time to read every word of it. It was kind of big, but yeah, a lot to digest there. But so yeah, interesting topic, I think we'll probably be talking about this again, maybe once it launches, but we'll see how it goes. I think it's going to go, it's going to go well. It's what happens afterwards that don't really matter. So we'll see. Now, old Musk would have just invested $100 billion in this and made it happen and made people, just that right. Tesla space or whatever, you know what I mean? Yep. Of course. All right, thanks Bob. Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week or a frames or a frames. It really is. I mean, it's not a cliche, the gift that keeps on giving. It's really shocking. We gave it to our mom, you know, a few years ago. And so it was just so ridiculously easy. And it is the only gift that I can think of over the past decades where every day, you notice it and you comment on it. 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Support the show by mentioning us at checkout terms and conditions apply. All right, guys, let's get back to the show. All right, I have a tell us about this anti-yogurt. Sounds yummy. Yeah, that's a sound yummy. It's a little bit of maybe. I hadn't, I hadn't anti-yogurt. She was wonderful. And I have a question. All right, Bob, I know you have- All for one. You have expressed your concern about aging. But I think we all have, you know, maybe to some degree, right? Sure. So down with those are vitalities, so forth. Would you consider sucking on a straw that had ants crawled all over it to get benefits of helping with that aging issue? Would you do that? Depends on the extent of help. I suppose it would. This is an actual folk practice that existed in parts of Europe as something I had never heard about before. Are any of you familiar with this or have you heard this in any machination? Ants, straws, sucking on a straws? Nothing like that, man. Ants used to be- I don't understand what you're saying. Is it a so straw full of ants? It's a straw that ants were at, it's a little unclear, but that ants had crawled onto. Oh, well, that wouldn't bother me. I mean, it sounds like it wouldn't do anything either, but it wouldn't bother me. But what it, but how it's described is that if you then, you know, drink something through it, you'll get this taste, it's almost like bitter, maybe sour taste, and that relates to some kind of health benefit, right? Sounds kind of crazy, but a lot of these stories from antiquity, you know, we've heard crazier stories than that. And this turns out to be an actual practice that existed in parts of Europe. Joe Schwars, over at McGill, at the McGill Office for Science and Society, wrote an article about this recently. But according to the story, children would place a straw into an ant hill, wait for the ants to climb up it, and then they would suck on the straw to get that sour taste, supposedly absorbing the ants' vitality in improving their own health. And someone wrote to Joe, saying, talking about this, and claimed that it may have contributed to someone in their family living to the age of 93. OK, so first of all, that's wrong. One thing has nothing to do with the other. So that the fact that somebody lived to age 93 and sucked on a straw that an ants once crawled on, that's not anything, right? So we already know that part. But underneath that folklore, there appears to be maybe something real, which is cool stuff when it comes to science. So when you talk about these things generally, the category that anthropologists term, the term they use is sympathetic magic. The idea that you can absorb the qualities of something by contact or consumption, answer energetic, resilient. So if you ingest something associated with ants, maybe you get some of those benefits as well. Eating animal organs for strength, wearing animal skins for power, bloodletting, the humors, so many different things in our history have pointed in that direction, and they're all wrong, of course. But now that we know that, but this was a time before really science and medicine came together. So wait, why would the straw taste sour in the first place? That's a good question. There is a scientific explanation for that. Fair amounts. Ants produce, right, formic acid, which is responsible for the sharp acidic sensation, like when you're bitten or stung. So that sour taste that children would have is real. It's a real phenomenon. But there's no evidence that ingesting those tiny amounts of formic acid would do anything beneficial for your health. So strike one there. But in some regions of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, people didn't just suck on the antstro, as what they did is they would add ants to warm milk, allow it to ferment, and that produced a yogurt-like food. So it's a form of fermentation. The ants carried lactic acid bacteria on their bodies. Those bacteria can lower the pH of the milk, cause it to curl, producing something yogurt or yogurt-like. And so the ants become the delivery system for this particular bacteria. And there could be some narrow, but some health benefits that could be derived from a product like that. If you isolated that bacteria and culture it directly, you would really get the same results, and you wouldn't even need the ants at that point. So does that mean we should all go out and start sticking ants into our foods and getting those benefits? No, it's not that at all. But you can kind of get the sense of where this came from, the ancient folklore behind it, and how it sort of translated through time up to the point where we now are able to sort of isolate it and figure out, okay, this is really what they were talking about in a real scientific sense. And so the fermented foods, including yogurt, can have modest health benefits, can we say? Maybe certain strains of bacteria might help with lactose digestion, help prevent antibiotic-associated diarrhea. This is according to what? The American gastroenterological association, the AGA, and the World Gastroenterology Organization, the WGO. It's all pretty thin. It's been. It's been. It's a number of articles on science-based medicine about it. The evidence only supports the highest count, you know, colony count, probiotics, and only if you take them before you initiate antibiotics. So like in the most favorable situation, maybe there's a little bit of a benefit. That's about all you could say. But like using it routinely, no, using anything other than the highest colony counts, no. For any other conditions or general gut health, no. They do say it has extremely narrow and specific potential in those particular cases, Steve. That's right. They are not saying this is a general practice for overall health. Very, very. And the end, you know, strain-specific, condition-specific with small effects. So yes, there's something there. But it's kind of interesting how we look into these stories. And frankly, this is one I had never heard of before, maybe our listeners in Europe are a little more familiar with it, something their grandparents or great grandparents handed down to them. It's in their culture. And in their history. But this was something, you know, I mean, we've come across so many things over our, you know, 20, 30 years of being exposed to this. And I had never heard of this before. So anytime I find something new like this, I become really interested in how it went from its original, its origins to where we are today understanding it. I mean, I do it to grow an exoskeleton. That'd be cool. Well, yeah, if it would do something like that. You know, Vladimir Putin is said to bathe in reindeer blood. reindeer antler blood. We've talked about that on the show before. Same idea. You know, pretty much the exact same idea. That's Siberian culture with, you know, roots and they're folklore essentially. But no basis whatsoever. There's no evidence that it does anything. Yet there is. There's, you know, one of the most, you know, infamous people right now on the planet who's doing it. And, you know, who knows who else is doing it on TikTok? Let's say. And Evan, in this case, think of the poor ant. They didn't have to be sucked up. That's true. That is absolutely true. We don't think of them not nearly enough. All right, guys, well, I want to finish up with just a quick, quick news item here. How far back in time do you think evidence for fire use by hominids goes? Oh, I don't know. 400,000 years. 150,000 would have been my guess. So your incorrect, Bob, goes back about one and a half million years. Oh, I see. I'm way, long. Oh, that's what I meant to say. Oh, the physical. 400,000 that you're citing. And then you were trying to do to me what I did to you. I did. I failed. So you have to make a distinction between evidence for fire use, which is what I said versus evidence for fire making, which means starting, like starting your fire, starting your own fire. So there's 400,000. So the evidence for fire use goes back to probably home where you're at this. And essentially, you could see evidence of fire pits with animals that they were eating, like the bones were charred. So we were at the bones. They cooked the food that they were eating multiple times at that site. So that's clear evidence of fire use. But that doesn't mean they made the fire. You guys remember the movie Quest for Fire? I do. Lightning Baby. 1981. Yeah. So that movie wasn't really accurate. I'm not citing this right now. No. It wasn't. But Steve, I remember we were in Italy in the 18 Italy, 80, what? 21 or three. Yeah. We're in Italy. And I see the sign, and I had read about it. And I'm like, wait, I know there's no language in this movie. And we're in Italy. We could still watch it because it's not going to be any more. It was just grunt. Just grunt. Right? That was awesome. So they were two basically different humanoid species there. And one had fire, but didn't make it. They had to protect the fire, right? The keeper of the fire. And the other more advanced species could make fire. And so that's the distinction we're talking about here. Of course, because we don't have evidence that home erectus or early home or nano to lenses or whatever, that they couldn't make fire. That doesn't mean they couldn't, right? Just means we haven't been able to prove that they could. We knew they were using it, but it could have been opportunistic, like lightning strikes, et cetera. And maybe they were able to keep the flame going for a while. But the earliest evidence for making fires goes back about 50,000 years to humans until, of course, this new study, which was just published, is comes from a site in Eastern England. And this is a site that was occupied by Neanderthals and is 400,000 years old. That has the number. Pretty convincing evidence of fire making, not just fire use. What do you think that might be? Why would be the evidence that they were making fire, not just using fire? They were scraping the rocks together. Well, rocks. Oh, flint, right? Flint. Yeah, exactly. A lot of flint, baby. So flint and what else flint and, no, and, and lasers. No, of course, no. Pyrite. Iron pyrate. So flint and pyrate will spark together. And what a pyrate's doing here and now? Sorry, I misheard. So they found both pyrate and flint. And there's two, by OK, so there's flint and pyrate at the site. And they were cooking it. They were using fire at the site. And burned bones. The clay was subjected to high temperatures over a long period of time. Well, it's a little circumstantial at this point. What was the proof? Pretty strong. You tell me. So what are the other? So one is there were flints there that were heat shattered. So there was flint, which is used to make fire. And it was in the fire. So that is circumstantial, but that's pretty good. Is that a technique to make it a better tool? No, it just means they were using it and some of it ended up in a fire at some point. You know, they were doing for decades, right? 100 years maybe. But the pyrate, here's the thing. The pyrate is not local. The most local source of pyrate was 40 miles away. So they brought the pyrate to their campsite. How did they know? How did they know? Because they learned from somebody else. Oh, how did they figure it out? Yeah. That was 40 miles away. You know, if you have a rock making culture, you're figuring out that these two particular rocks spark is probably not that unusual. But to the point where they traveled with the pyrate 40 miles, in other words, why weren't they building fires at the pyrate site? Well, that's because this was a watering hole where they were hunting game. So we also don't have every site fossil. No, we don't know. We discovered sites, of course. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, so this site was good for them to camp at. They needed pyrate. It was 40 miles away. So they brought it from there. So clearly it was important to them. It's probably not a coincidence. They had both flint and pyrate where they were using fire. And it was definitely exposed to the fire. So it's, again, it's not direct, direct evidence, but that's pretty darn good. I think that's the simplest explanation for all those pieces of information. I think they make a very strong case that those Neanderthals 400,000 years ago were making fire. And again, it may go back long before then. It's just things are always older than our earliest evidence for them, right? Because all the chances are probably low that we found the very first fire used starter. You know what I mean? Ever in the history of the world that we have caught it in the act. So we're always only going to see evidence later than when it really started. So does that also push anything else on the timeline into a different, you know, I mean, 50,000 compared to 400,000 is a long time. Like, other tool making and things like, do they have to move anything else as a result of discovering this? No. OK. We knew that fire use goes back one and a half million years or so or two million years, something like that. And so it's not a big, it's not a stretch. And then we also suspected this was going to be the case. The really the only trick was how do we prove it? How do we find evidence for fire starting? Extensive fire use does imply that at some point in time they figured out how to make fire, although not again, not necessarily because they could have just been very good at finding it when it occurred naturally. You're holding on to it. But also you think of, you could estimate how common it was by how easy it is to find, right? So, but unfortunately now we just have, we have an end of one, right? One instance of over a long period of time but one location where there's evidence of fire use 400,000 years ago. But still, it was pretty hard to put these pieces together. It doesn't mean that it wasn't common. It could have been common knowledge among human ancestors at that time. It's amazing just to think that something that people were doing, hundreds of thousands or over a million years ago, is discernible now. So, I mean, talk about a cold case. I mean, that's ridiculous that this stuff would be something that we could figure out kind of these details. It's just both our minds sometimes. It's like, you imagine, you know, in a million years, this not gonna be a trace of us. At all. That'll be, sure there will be. There will be. There will be. There will be. Something I know the most about. They say, we'll last a very long time. You can't say a trace. There'll be people with fillings in their teeth and stuff like that. There'll be some technical issues. There'll be the plastic layer in the surface that's to be discovered. But nothing we do is gonna be there around. Oh, I think that's not a problem. Now, first of all, they think they say it was gonna be one of the last things to be done. By we, I mean, many hundreds of thousands of years ago. By me, I'm talking about us four. Oh, the four of us. Yeah. Well, okay, we'll work on that. Bob, let's put a time capsule of something together. We have to record all of our podcasts in the most adorable, medium, possible. And then we have to put it someplace where it's gonna be preserved. Well, I read a news item that engraved information onto these glass discs for billions of years. So that's what I'm working on. Oh, that's what we need to do. Up by a billion to years, that's good. Yeah, billions of work on that. I'll take that. All right, so it's supposed to exist. No, who's that noisy this week? It's Jay's. Well, who is the winner though? He'll get us updated next week, which will be the year in review show, but he'll do the, I guess, say a noise review. Oh my gosh. Either that will reveal in for the first show in January. But we are going to do a couple of emails, a couple of quick emails. The first one is, I sent this article a couple months back as a suggestion for a segment. I am rescending it because of the science or fiction last week. It is about Mercury and lakes in Minnesota. They are bioengineering fish to get rid of it. So, yes, a Mercury is a fish is a problem. That's one of the avenues that Mercury, especially the methyl mercury that's very toxic, gets to people, right, is through fish. That's because the bacteria alter the mercury into the methyl mercury toxic form. And then a bio accumulates up the chain, up the food chain, right? And so, then you have the fish that eat the fish, that eat the plant that eat the bacteria. And then they eat it. Then, right, they have bio-ecumulated a lot of this Mercury. So, this is a problem in many of the lakes. Like, it's pretty rampant in the lakes of Minnesota. They have to, you know, have, and alert as to, you know, warn people like, don't eat fish from these lakes. It's basically most of them. Isn't it a problem in the ocean, too? Yeah, oh, yeah, absolutely. But, it just happens to be an area of high concentration. You know where most of the Mercury in civilized areas comes from? And it's naturally occurring in the soil. There's going to be a certain amount of it, but vaccines. No. Col-fired plants, right? Any fossil fuel, but especially coal, and especially certain types of coal, is very, the way sturdy coal has a lot of Mercury in it, as well as radioactivity and other stuff. So that, you know, Mercury from coal gets into the ecosystem, gets into the water, the bacteria convert it, then it concentrates up the food chain, then you have fish that are kind of at the top of the food chain, ones that are popular to fish and to eat, and they can have Mercury levels that are higher than the cutoffs of recommended cutoffs. Sometimes 10 to 15 times as much as the upper limit of what is considered generally safe. So they're obviously interested in ways of reducing the amount of Mercury that makes its way into the food chain and these lakes. And so one would obviously be releasing less Mercury into the air, and you could do that by burning less coal, but also by having better standards of capturing, you know, the pollution at the coal power factories, power plants. But there's another way that they're investigating, and I remember when we talked about this as a scientific, it's about some plants and plankton have a pathway that allows them to convert the methyl Mercury to the non-toxic form and then into the gaseous Mercury and release it back into the atmosphere. Well, they're taking those same genes and they're putting them in the fish into some specific fish to see if that can reduce the burden of Mercury and the fish and the lakes. So they're targeting minos. Minos, minos, good job. Oh, yeah. We thought of them all. Yes, that's mino. That's that's mino. Yep. So the other, what they want to do is make genetically modified minos, which are small fish that the fish, the game fish eat, right? And there are any human components in that? No, no. No, no. It's just plant genes that allow them to get rid of their Mercury, so it's not bioe accumulating. And then their hope is that that would reduce the Mercury burden all the way up the food chain because not the fish that eat them will be also getting less Mercury, because they're the ones, that's where they get their Mercury from, right? Right. So we'll see how it all works out, but that's what they're doing that. And hopefully that will work. Basically cut off the chain of accumulation of mercury in the system. Genetic engineering has tremendous potential, putting a plan G and a two fish. This would be a trans gene, right? Ethical considerations. Not in my opinion. Yeah, right. Okay, one more. This one comes from Guy Henry, and he writes, long time listener, one time helper of Steve for his son run solar panels. You guys remember that saga? Yeah. Oh, yeah. You had to call him and saga. Oh, God. Anyway, yeah, he helped me, because I had to get my solar panels, take it off the roof to repair the chimney and put back on the roof. And I couldn't get them put back, but he made it happen. The company was in transition, blah, blah, blah. It was a big, yeah. So thanks for that guy. So he writes a strip mall right near my house has a quote unquote compounding pharmacy. I've never heard of such a thing and haven't heard it mentioned on the show. I knew it had to be BS, and apparently it's an alternative medicine that is not regulated. I'm wondering if you've talked about this on the show, and if not, it might be worth a segment, thanks for all you do. So what do you guys know about compounding pharmacies? Don't they take medicines, put them into candies and stuff, isn't that kind of pharmacy? No, I mean, guys, do they compounding pharmacies are real? Yes, I know they're real. So basically, there are drugs that are developed by drug companies, and those drugs are produced, but there are certain instances when drugs need to be combined, or they need to be offered in a different formula, and that's what compounding pharmacies do. They're run by pharmacists. They also do retail stuff, like they might add multiple derma drugs to like a skin cream and then sell that as like a combination dermatological topical treatment or something. But these are all RPH it, like they're pharmacists. Yes, they're legit. They're legit. They are regulated, the idea that they're not regulated by the FDA or by state boards is not correct. No, it's just that the compounds that they offer are not FDA approved. Yes, they specific, each, a specific compound has not itself been FDA approved, but the components are FDA approved, and they either are, they have to be approved in one way or another, either they are an approved drug, or they are part of the FDA's approved bulk pharmacy list, which is the bulk drugs are the ones that they would use as their compounding, right? And they are also regulated by the state boards of pharmacy, which oversee their daily operations and force guidelines of purity and cleanliness and all that kind of stuff. They can't just put whatever they want in there, right there, the ingredients all have to be approved on some level, right? They have to have proper labeling, all, you know, et cetera, et cetera, accredited. So they are legitimate, they are regulated, they're just differently regulated, then just like a specific drug, that's like you have one drug, it met so many milligrams. I would order them all the time. And most of the time I would order them, it was for the creams, as you say, care like I want to treat. Yeah, there's a lot of derma uses. Would it 1% this, 2% that blah, blah, blah? I would use it for patients who have like post-operative neuralgia, ironically, which came up previously, where it's a topical treatment for neuropathic pain, for one use that I would frequently order it for. And yeah, so they're legit. Now whether there are pharmacies playing hinky alternative medicine stuff, I can't tell you that regular pharmacies do that too. They sell homeopathy. Exactly, yeah, homeopathy's on the shelves at CVS and Walker. So I'm sure there are compound pharmacies also selling bullshit too. But you know what we would a common one that I shouldn't say common, it's very, very rare. But what I know them best for now in my work is that a medicillate in dying drugs have to come from a compounding pharmacy because it's all these different powders that are mixed together. It's like grams and grams of material. And so of course, you're not gonna buy all the pills individually and mix them together. They compound it for you. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. How do you know if a pharmacy is a compounding pharmacy? They say it. It says it in the title. Yeah. So they distort compounding. You have to order it. Yeah, it does. With like each compounding pharmacy, you've had their own order form that I had to fill out in order to order like the specific thing that I wanted. Like you're saying as a provider. Yeah, as a physician. Yeah. So as a writer script, you fill out a compounding form. Right. As a consumer, your provider will tell you, oh, this specific thing that I, you know, that I'm recommending can only come from the compounding pharmacy here's their number. Or lots of times they're like male order now and you can do it all online. Yeah, I told some pages, just find a compounding pharmacy near you, send me their form and I'll fill it out for you. Yeah. Yep, compounding is interesting. Yeah. Hi, oh. That was better than your other one, which is. I've had like five, which one? I'm like, keep going. You just keep throwing a bunch of crap at it. The one that had more growth. So I'm just digs. Yeah. The buck stops here. That was a big one. That one was not good. Yeah. Look at the most females on that one. All right, one from TikTok. TikTok is an endless source of, it's down my god. What do you guys know about the inventor of the diesel engine? He died of moita. Dead of moita. No, that's the controversy. Yeah, but that is the actual issue at stake here. So that was Rudolph Diesel. It was the guy's name. It was a German engineer. He developed the concept in the 1890s. Do you guys know, this is like an engine, walk the engineering thing, but do any of you know what a diesel engine is? What makes a diesel engine a diesel engine? It's a compression scenario. Yes. So instead of igniting the fuel with a spark plug, it compresses it so that it heats up and ignites spontaneously. Wow, I know you need something called like ad blue, right? Isn't that a common, you need like additives when you run a diesel engine. Well, diesel engines always mean that. Advantage slash disadvantage. Vantages of the diesel engine primarily are that it's more efficient. It's more energy efficient. The disadvantages, when they were first invented, they were huge. They actually were too big for a car, so they were used in trains and ships. Yes, trains. Or as generators, right? So that's like they're initially used generators, ships and trains, you know, things like that. Not good for airplanes. And then in the 1920s, other people came up with smaller versions of them. Then they sort of were usable in trucks. And it wasn't until the 1930s, the first car, like diesel engine car was on the market. All right, but so the diesel engines were initially used basically in ships and, as power generators. And so this is now in the lead up to World War I. Germany was using the diesel engine in its navy. And Rudolph Diesel was visiting England. And he vanished from the ship that he was on and was later found drowned floating in the water. So there are three hypotheses as to what happened. And this, so the TikTok video that I was responding to about this is Joe Rogan interview. Where he's interviewing some guy who's basically touting one of these three hypotheses, right? So the one that historians think is most likely is that he died by suicide, right? That he jumped overboard. What was going on in his life? That's what his two biographers conclude. So, you know, I'm kind of leaning towards the two biographers. Was he dealing with like, money problems? Yes, he had gone bankrupt. OK. What money he had, he left in the bag for his wife. That's kind of like your giving stuff. Yeah, that's a big tip. Yeah, that's a tip. And there's no evidence that it feels happened, right? But there's two other hypotheses, both involved Moida, right, Evan? So one. What about the inaccident? Why can you accidentally fall an overboard? I guess so. And the 30s that happened. Got drunk. Nobody thinks that that's not usually proposed. It's one of them, but I guess that's not all. OK, all right, sorry. You also kind of left a note. He's so, anyway. So one hypothesis is that Germany had him killed, because they were afraid he was going to give the diesel technology to England. And then that would beef up their navy and have it and so that it would compete with Germany's. Again, this is in rising tensions prior to the First World War. So that one, at least it's, I think, plausible that that could happen. I guess there's no evidence that it did happen. But the idea that Germany would assassinate this engineer who was about to sell his patents to an enemy that they might be going to war with soon, that could actually affect the balance of power. Again, I don't think it's that plausible, but at least it's semi-plausible, right? I think it's plausible. Yeah, right. I mean, it's not crazy. If the evidence supported that chart, but then, but the rogue in the interview was touting the third hypothesis. Anybody want to guess what that was? Oh, gosh. Aliens? No. That's a great question. Great question. That he's still alive? No. Or that he did, he faked his death. No. That he was killed. That he was murdered. Someone's spied by Rockefeller. What? Oh, gosh. In order to protect his oil interests. Oh, I see. Now, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Because so first of all, this is the only sort of kernel here where you could at least, there's a threat to pull on, is that the diesel engine is a flex fuel engine. You could burn anything. Anything, yeah. It doesn't have to be gasoline. It's a versatile. So the thinking is Rockefeller was trying to protect his gasoline interests against this flex fuel engine. So we tried to have, you know, he had diesel killed, you know, in 1913. But it's ridiculous because first of all, you'll notice that we still have diesel engines. Right? I mean, killing the engine of an engine that's already out there doesn't do anything. Rockefeller was not a dumb guy. He probably would not have, oh, I want to kill the diesel engine by killing Rudolph diesel. I don't do it. If he did, obviously, it completely failed. But it's dumb. That's not how you silence an invention. First of all, you can't. Like the idea, we're going to use compression to whatever. Somebody was going to come up with that. It's something. He was just the first guy to come up with it. It's not like you can kill an idea. You know what I mean? So it's just stupid. That whole idea that all these people and these brilliant inventors get killed by people trying to suppress their inventions, it's dumb. It's not how it works. It's not how technology works or how advancement works. You can't just kill one guy. And then you think forever, we're going to silence this idea. And again, if anything, the diesel is a counter example because the diesel engine is still around today, 100 years later. Also, as I said, there was no diesel car engine at the time. It was still 20 years away, which means it didn't have any idea if it would ever be developed. So it wasn't competing with car engines. And it may never have. And the third thing is, there was no infrastructure of any alternative oil that could compete with gasoline. It's not like there was a peanut oil magnet out there who was going to take over the oil industry by running diesel engines on peanut oil. Like there was nothing like that. Rock-a-Bahler had nothing to worry about in terms of, and of course, he didn't, right? Because the diesel engine had its niche in technology. It didn't do anything to decrease the fossil fuels. And diesel engines run on fossil fuel. You know what I mean? They're telling me we're running the monpino oil. We had electric engines that were in fact as prior to oil being, prior to gasoline. So it's not like, no way prior, gasoline came after electric car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gasoline, like you're right, not oil. But like refined oil, gasoline as we know it came after steam and electric were like well on the scene. And so they clearly, they had incentive to use these fossil fuels because they had alternative options available. And people were choosing to use gasoline-powered cars. Yeah, it was two things. That really, this is a separate conversation. Very quickly, we wrote about this in our book. I've done extensive research on this very question. And no one knows for sure, but the two primary facts that come up. One is infrastructure. There was, you know, the infrastructure, this is something that Rockefeller did, right? You know, just had plenty of mechanisms to massively refine gasoline and distribute it everywhere, right? We were about 20 years behind the time on electrification. If we were 20 years ahead of where we were, the electric car might have won out or at least succeeded side by side with gasoline. You imagine. The steam engine, it was water. Like you had to replace the water frequently. And there wasn't an infrastructure for refilling your tank with water to get from one city to the next. So it was mainly an infrastructure thing. But the other one is just quirky history. Ford planned on making a gasoline car and an electric car. And he just chose to do the gasoline one first. He was fully flipped. Yeah, so it was mass produced early. Yeah, but he had designs for a mass-produced electric car. And Edison was going to build the batteries for him. And it was going to be a nickel metal battery. Nickel metal is the issue there. And then, but his R&D was a little behind schedule. So he sent Ford some lead acid batteries. Ford got pissed and canceled the whole project. That was it. That was it. It was a quirky thing. They did not have to go down that way. We could have not. We could have had electric cars. I think as the range was always going to be an issue, but you could have existed side by side for interest city driving or small commutes or whatever. Yeah, because that's how most people drove. Yeah, it's how exactly it was. It's still how most people drove. These were horse trails and stuff that people were driving on. They didn't want to go drive 40 miles. It was a bumpy as hell ride. Exactly. Their electric car looked exactly like a horse carriage. Yes. Just had a wheel instead of like rain. Yeah. It was a horse's carriage. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. All right. Let's go on with science fiction. It's time for science or fiction. Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine, one pretentious. Then I challenge my panel and skeptics tell me which one is the fake. There's a theme this week. Bob, this theme is for you. Oh, the theme is astronomy news from 2025. Oh, jeez. We'll see if you caught these news items. Oh, all right. All right. Last item. And Bob's going last. I know what's going first. I don't know what's going on. Astronomers discovered a nearly perfect spherical bubble of gas and dust within the Milky Way, which they named telios, but do not yet have an explanation for its formation. And number two, scientists confirmed the existence of four Mars-sized planets orbiting Barnard star, the closest single star system to Earth at just six light years. And number three, NASA's Curiosity Rover discovered evidence of complex organic chemistry on Mars, including 12 carbon atoms and simple nucleic acids. Carrega first. Um, nearly perfect spherical bubble of gas and dust within the Milky Way named telios, but they don't know why it formed. No, telios, by the way, whether that word means. It's Greek. It's Greek for perfect. So like, oh, telestial, like T. Lee. Perfect. Perfect. That makes sense, right? Because you've got the terrestrial, the telestial and the celestial kingdoms and Mormon, with all the Gera. You have a planet here. Probably comes from that. No, I don't have an advantage on. Let's see. So we've got that. I would think that a lot of things started spherically and then got weird, but it's within the Milky Way. So that's interesting. Then we've got the existence of four Mars-sized planets orbiting Barnard star. So that's the closest star system. So I mean, that wouldn't really surprise me because I know that we found so many exoplanets at this point. Most of them are probably gas giants, but I think that we're just getting better. So I wouldn't be surprised if we started to see like rocky looking things. We discovered complex organic chemistry, including simple nucleic acids. I feel like I remember there being some stuff found that nucleic acids is getting me. Complex organic chemistry. So 12 carbon atoms and simple nucleic acids. Okay. So the two that I think that the four Mars-sized planets orbiting Barnard star is science. So I'll throw that one out. So I think the two that are getting me are if telios is this close, like is it here or is it really, really far away? I don't know. Is it super, super old? Not that the Milky Way is not old. And they don't know why it looks the way it looks. Is that what you mean by that? Why it's a perfect solution. Yeah, like for why it's spherical. And then the other one is the curiosity. I don't think they found nucleic acids. Wouldn't we have been talking about that? I think that that's the fiction. Maybe they found some stuff but not nucleic acids. Okay, Evan. I'm going to start with the fourth one. Moving on. Okay. The first one about telios. You've not yet have an explanation for its formation. I don't know. Could that be the kink in that one? If that one is the fiction, maybe they do have an explanation for its formation. I don't know if you'd go that way with a science fiction like that though. But a nearly perfect spherical bump. If you made this up, Stevie did a good job naming it. I mean, I'll give you that. But I don't recall this news item at all. The second one about Barnard star. Certainly know about that one. The closest single star system to earth. It just six light years. So I guess what? Sentory. Alpha Sentory must be a multi star system. I thought that one was closest. But in any case, the existence of form. Yeah. That one's a system. Okay. That's, yeah. That's a ticket. Three stars. So six light years away is the single star system. That's our closest. The existence of four Mars sized planets orbiting. I agree with Kara. I think that one turns out to be science. And then this last one about NASA's curiosity rover. We've talked a lot this year about chemical analysis of the OSIRIS-REX analysis among other things. Certainly, what's going on on Mars? We've talked about a lot. We didn't talk about this though. Twelve carbon atoms and a simple nucleic acid. Simple nucleic acids. I'll bet it $5. We did not cover this. So if any one of these three is going to be the fiction, this one is probably as the highest probability of being the fictional. I'll join Kara and say it is the fiction. Okay. For Bob. Yeah. Good choice, Steve. These are kind of obscure. But yeah, I'm going to go with the crew. New clake acids on Mars. Good job, Chair. We would be talking about it. Bob is bottom line for these. So yeah, I'll stop now. All right. All right. Let's take these in order. Astronomers discovered a nearly perfect spherical bubble of gas and dust within the Milky Way, which is they named, which they named telios, but do not yet have an explanation for its formation. You all think this one is science. And this one is science. Okay. He sounded really happy for him. You did. All right. I have to throw you off. So yeah. So they don't know why it formed. It probably is a supernova remnant, right? New supernova explodes. It sends out a bubble of energy. Wonderly uniform. But they very quickly get oddly shaped as they push up against different, in different directions, they're going to have different pressures that they're pushing up against. More or less concentration of hydrogen gas. So what would keep this one perfectly spherical for so long that it could get so huge, right? It's got to be a weirdly uniform chunk of space. Yes. And what would make it uniform vacuum that it's very well that it's relatively emsuper low density, super low density. It's a recipe just happening in a relatively empty part of the galaxy so that there's nothing to disrupt the perfect sphere of the other supernova supernovas in the past could have cleared it out. Oh, yeah. It was like, why would something be empty? Okay. Well, remember, the galaxy does have arms and in between the arms, it's relatively empty, right? The galaxy is not a uniform. We don't live in a globular cluster galaxy like that's, yeah. That's a spiral. Yeah. We live in a spiral galaxy. There are arms and then between the arms. But I don't know if that's where it is. So there's still trying to sort it exactly why, but that's the current theory. All right, let's go on number two. Scientists confirmed the existence of four Mars-sized planets orbiting bar-nard star at the closest single star system to Earth at just six light years. You guys also all think this one is science. This one is science. Good job, guys. No way. Yeah, man. I got to read more about this one. This is cool. This did feel the most like science. I know they know to exoplanes, but it's. You know, four-nard star, man. Four-nard star. Six light years away. You're the way they poppy. They have the image of it. Like one of our telescopes captured an image of it. I thought that was AI. I thought that was AI. This is the wobble method. This is a wobble method. But the thing is, I feel like if we're going to detect something small, it's going to be to the closest star. Right. Yes. Right. And the second closest system, like the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, Alpha-620. Six light years, right. Four-nard years away. But that's a multi-star system. This is a single star system. Yeah. I mean, this is like in your back pocket, not even in your backyard. Yeah. Six light years away. Nothing. So yeah, this was, you know, the wobble method is that you could see the wobble in the orbit, the, the movement of the star because it's being tugged a little bit by the planets orbiting it. And that works best for systems where we're looking at them face on, not edge on. Face on, right. More face on than edge on. And also when they're close. So this is, you know, a perfect candidate for that. As opposed to the transit method where you need to be looking at them edge on, but it's only going to be a certain number, you know, percentage of systems. Yeah. I guess it's liver. All right. That means that NASA's curiosity rover discovered evidence of complex organic chemistry on Mars, including 12 carbon atoms and simple nucleic acids is the fiction. So this isn't item that we just missed. I didn't miss it. I read the item at the time, but it just never got, it could fell between our weekly cycles. You know, it's something. Yeah, we just never reported on it. What, what NASA's curiosity rover found, Bob, do you remember? Well, it was, was it organic chemistry? It was organic chemistry, right? It's not, not nucleic acids. Not nucleic acids. So you're right. They did find carbon atoms that are 12 carbon atoms big. Oh, wow. So that's complex carbon based chemistry, but they did not find nucleic acids. We've never found nucleic acids on Mars. We recently found nucleic acids on asteroid Bennet. Yeah, right. Yes. So hoping you would get that confused or at least think, well, we've found nucleic acids out there. So why not Mars? But we just, we just haven't, they may be on Mars. We just haven't discovered them yet. Carbon based life, baby. It's a way to go. So it's not a proof that there was ever life on Mars. It is the simplest explanation, though. And there's other evidence emerged this year. Yeah. So it's not proof that there was life on Mars, but it is proof that there's ingredients for life on Mars. And, and that there was ancient life on Mars is the simplest explanation for the evidence that we have so far. But it's not proof that there was life on Mars. So we haven't discovered life on Mars, but it's looking good that there was ancient life on Mars. Evidence that there was. Right. That's cool. There could still be extent life on Mars. We haven't ruled that out. I've got a place. But what we haven't found evidence. It's a whale back to your house. Deep in the soil. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, man. I think it's a lot of evidence on that stuff. All right. Good job. No, you do not. It's really a bob. I mean, does it have human-like DNA? Did we seed it? Did it seed us or is it brand new? I'm hoping for brand new. It's an ancient relative of yours, Bob. Be kind to it. Like a triple helix or weird proteins. But yeah, I'm so soon, Bob, but you mean you've got your hands on it. You mean you want earth scientists together there? Oh, good. Yeah, I thought you made you use that basically. I thought that was obvious. But yeah, Bob, it was not. I'm going on. Like going into the ball pit in McDonald's kind of thing. You know, all right. Evan, give us a quote. This week's quote is suggested by Brad from Troy Ohio, who sent this to us not too long ago, said a suggestion for a quote. Hi, Evan. I have a suggestion for a skeptical quote of the week from an unlikely source, the Christian Bible. I've never read it. Specifically, two Timothy chapter four versus three four. I didn't even know there was a two Timothy. So that's new. I mean, you have to say reading from two Timothy chapter four versus. Oh, I see. I like they did it. Right. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is how they say it in church. Please turn to page. Go ahead. Here's the quote. The time is coming when people won't listen to good teaching. Instead, they will look for teachers who will please them by telling them only what they are itching to hear. They will turn from the truth and eagerly listen to senseless stories. Oh, yeah. And then Brad commented sometimes they are slow. Yeah, there are little kernels like that in scripture, right? You little nuggets that you could pull. But then they failed to bring it to its correct conclusion. The Christian Bible is based upon Greek enlightenment. You know, it's not it was so right. The philosophy of the time. There's no reason. You know what I mean? It wasn't. Yeah, but that does happen all the time. I'll expect to see things like this. You guys have all done a God awful movies, right? Yep. You've done it at this point. I feel like whenever I'm on that show, at least once in episode, we're like, man, the point was right there. It just went up. What? You had it in your head. It's like Theodore Good York. Yeah. Thank you, Brad. What a great scene. I'm going to watch that. The door comes. Steve Martin, baby. Well, thank you guys for joining me for the last regular episode of 2025. Oh, God. Wow. Next to me, we have the year in review. Hopefully Jay will be back to fighting trim. This basically lost his voice. Like it really wasn't an option today, but hopefully he'll be back by Thursday when we record, which is two days from now. Two days from now. Yeah, I got to double up this week so that we're off for Christmas coming in. Oh, man. Yeah. Program. Wait, wait, wait. He has access to a program that simulated your voice. Couldn't he just simulate his own music? Exactly. Could type it in. What are you going to say? He could. He was betridden. He was wiped out. He wasn't going to do any work. He'll better, Jay. All right. Until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Skeptic's Guide 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. 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