The Skeptics Guide #1064 - Nov 29 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 Tuesday, November 25th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Nevella. Joining me this week are Bob Nevella. Hey everybody, Jane Nevella. Hey guys, Evan Bernstein. Good evening everyone. And we have a guest, Andrea Jones, Roy Andrea. Welcome back. Thanks for having me back. Always love hanging out with you guys. So how's it going? Oh you know, everything in the United States in the world is totally fine. That's all good. Nothing interesting to report. Yeah. Yeah, but fine. This is fine. Yeah, I'm hanging in there despite I'm making an apple pumpkin bread as we speak. So once a year, I don't cook, but once a year I'm seized with the desire to do so and today was a magical day for that. So. Do you happen to have a good recipe? No, I just found something online. I was going to just make a pumpkin bread, but I had two apples that were going to go bad. And so I was like, we're having apple pumpkin bread. Nice. Yeah. If it's any good, I'll give you the recipe. And if it's not, I'll keep it to myself. You had me at bread. So I'm intrigued. At least take a picture of it and send it to me. I will. Alright, excellent. How are you all doing? Good. So Andrea, we have four episodes in. We recorded four episodes of our political reality podcast. Yes. Yes. Four episodes and some intro material. Yes. And what's funny is like, you know, because we couldn't record the last two weeks because Steve was in Dubai. And it's really good that nothing like impactful or interesting or noteworthy has happened in the United States over the last two weeks. I'm glad we don't we're not behind the appall on anything. Very slow, very slow news cycle. Yeah. The administration had the courtesy of not doing anything. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. Are you guys going to release those four? Are they just like hopelessly out of date at this point? No, no. No, the podcast is largely evergreen. Yeah. It's not news. It's not like, yeah, it's it's, although sometimes we reflect what's going on in the news, but the topics are more, yeah, they're more evergreen. Yeah. The hope is that they're evergreen. I suppose if we undergo a massive political change, things will stop being evergreen. But it's not the way I continue. Right. That's evergreen. Evergreen enough. But it is something that we, you know, we've all been talking about is like to what extent do we need to tether to the news? And I think to do anything political that's current, it all but has to be a daily show, I think. Definitely. Yeah. Because things have changed too fast. The point of this show is, you know, in the, it could be in the context of things that are happening on a weekly basis, you know, because there is so many different things happening that they would bring up a lot of different topics. Like for example, with the Epstein votes going through the house and the Senate, you know, that would be a great episode to discuss just how, you know, a bill is created and how, you know, what, what's its, its pathway to being approved or denied? Didn't we see that on schoolhouse rock already? I was going to say that, you know, let me tell you that. It was a long day. Oh, day, you know. But you get the idea. Yeah. The point is like we can't be sitting on top of the news like as it comes out because that would mean that we're YouTubers that like are recording, you know, six hours a day. And that's not the point here. Yeah. And then we're choosing them with an eye to what's relevant. So one of the, I don't know if we're allowed to reveal what we've, of course, yeah. So one of the episodes is about voting systems and, you know, where does Rank Choice voting fit in the other types of systems out there? What are the pros and cons of them? And Rank Choice voting is something that has been in the news because New York City uses it locally. It's been used in different elections around the US. It certainly has legs overseas as well. So it's something that's both in the news, but also not like the most cutting edge news ever in the world. But I am reading that Democrats are thinking about using Rank Choice voting for more elections in the future. Yeah. So it's, yeah. Yeah. Well, Stephen, I disagree about a rock-ranked choice voting, but it would be better than what we have. I can tell you the best possible option, but a lot better than what we have. That's right. Okay. I'd love to see it at the presidential level of national elections. Oh, geez. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. It's history. I've only participated in very local elections. And apart from the mayoral race in New York City, there were a lot of races where I didn't know who any of the candidates were. Nevermind knew how to rank them. And so for something like President or Senate or Governor, it's a little more fun. I think you know more about the candidate. You can really think through third party candidates and other things like that. So you didn't agonize over your fifth choice for Comp Troller? I did because I'm a dedicated citizen, but one might not. I did actually sit in the booth forever because the service was terrible and I was Googling all the Comp Troller choices. I couldn't tell you the name of a sink. I couldn't even tell you who I ranked first, but I'm sure they're doing a great job. Nope. They haven't even been sworn in. Yeah. I'm not sure. What's the point of having a job at New York City? Well, then they are doing a good job. Yeah. I believe they spell Controller wrong all the time. All right. All right. Well, let's get to some science news. Bob, give us an update on the Helian fusion. Is it Helian or Helian? Probably Helian. Yeah, probably. I'm just guessing. Thank you, Dave. This is your quickie with Bob back in episode 932. I talked about the company Helian Energy, which was working with Microsoft to commercialize fusion energy. Their design was interesting. It was a hybrid technology. Jay, say it. It's hybrid. They call it Magneto and Nertial fusion, which is a hybrid of magnetic and inertial confinement, which we've talked about on the show. I'll swim. Marvel. You know, many times. It basically bars the ideas of magnetic confinement like iters or is it eater? It's eater, right? Eaters talk about it. And inertial compression, like the laser implosion that Lawrence lived for more that actually had some notoriety. God, I was a bunch of years ago. Now, a few years ago, night where they hit ignition. But in their process, which is interesting, the electromagnetic fields smashed to Tyrion and Helian and three plasma together to fuse some of it, right? So you got some fusion going on. And then the motion of the expanding fusion plasma pushes on these surrounding magnetic fields. And they're taking that energy that's inherent in the magnetic field when it's being pushed. And they take that and convert it directly into electricity. And it's this direct conversion into electricity that's one of the more interesting attributes of their technology. This cuts out the inherent inefficiencies that come along with using heat to make steam and then to run turbines and then using that to generate electricity. So it cuts out a couple of the middlemen in the middle there and this goes kind of directly into electricity, which is really interesting. So all of this ties into their general strategy. They want energy production to be so efficient that they don't need to chase ignition like every other everyone else is doing. And ignition is the point where you've got basically a self-sustaining fusion reaction going on and all through those other little attributes as well. But that's the main thrust of ignition. So they think they don't need to really chase that. So back then, they were, I talked about, hey, they're working on. They have their sixth generation fusion generator and it reached 100 million degrees Celsius. And Rar Rar Rar was in that awesome. And they were talking about that they will create their seventh generation fusion generator called Polaris and it should be ready by 2024. And they said with this first prototype, they wanted to demonstrate electricity produced directly from fusion, potentially even net electric. Okay, so that's what they were. That's what was happening a few years ago in 2023. So now we're seeing helium back in the news and they have in fact created their Polaris fusion generator. And it's a doozy. They have a monster capacitor farm delivering 100 gigawatts into the machine. So think about that, 100 gigawatts. That's like grid scale power, right? In one building. Of course, it's only for microseconds, but it's still quite impressive. Their CEO says it runs at 100 million degrees. I thought that's what Trento was doing. So that didn't really increase at all. It seems if these numbers are right. But that's fine. Ten times the sun's core temperature. That seems like enough right there, isn't it? And they also mentioned that their coaxial cables can carry these pulses. Those coaxial cables are 720 miles long if you put them all to get late to end. So that's a lot of cables, a lot of coax. Now this is one thing that was kind of a discouraging. The details of their progress are only kind of minimally and cautiously available, right? Because they, and they, that's because ostensibly because they had Chinese competitors steal bits of their intellectual property in the past. So that, that theft, of course, is totally believable, right? We read about that in the news all the time. But it does make it hard for the scientific community to properly assess their chances of success. And it also seems like, oh, really? You can't give us a lot of information. That's just, it's a, it's a, it's definitely a red flag. But I understand if it truly is because of that, you know, Chinese competitors stealing their intellectual property, then I would understand why they would be. You know, so reticent. Let's see, also in the, also in the news, they're still aiming for this idea of minimal fusion, which actually wasn't very, I don't think it would, they clearly discussed that a few years ago, because that really, that wasn't in my notes when I looked at them from a few years ago. They were just pushing for fusion. It didn't seem like they, I didn't hear the term or the phrase chasing ignition, that they're not chasing ignition. So if they didn't make it clear a few years ago, they're definitely making it clear now that this is, that they're going to rely on these efficiencies. So here's a quote from Hili on CEO and co-founder David Kirtley. He said, we can recover electricity at high efficiency. We require a lot less fusion. Fusion is the hard part. My goal, ironically, is to do the minimum amount of fusion that we can deliver a product to the customer and generate electricity. So very interesting. Of course, the question remains, you know, is it, is that going to be enough? Is a little, is a little fusion enough? So Hili and has also broken ground and started work on their Orion plant. They did, they mentioned that a few years ago that they were going to do that. So they, they're on track for that. The Orion plant has been worked on and this is going to be their first commercial plant. The technology, the idea is that the technology that they develop in Polaris, which has been running for most of 2025, I believe, that technology will be ported into Orion. At Orion, it's going to be, the plant is to have a 50 megawatt class plant online. They predict by 2028. So that's when they, a few years ago, they were saying 2028 as well. So it's kind of, I don't know what to make of that. It's, it's, it's, I'm encouraged that they, that they're not saying, well, it's going to be 2030 or 2032 now, which is what, which is what we would expect, right? Steve, you'd expect these initial dates that are over, that are a few years old to be pushed back. So they're still saying 2028 and it's going to, when it's done, it's going to be under a power purchase agreement with Microsoft so they can feed their hungry data centers. But heart, Hili and competitors are of course skeptical that they're, that they're competitors are going to hit the 2028 goal. I got one quote from Ben Levitt. He's a head of R&D at ZAPS energy. He said Ben said, I don't see a commercial application in the next few years happening. There's a lot of complicated science and engineering still to be discovered and be applied. He says he doesn't see it happening in the next few years. Does that mean it could potentially happen in five years or is he thinking more 10, 10 years or more? I don't know. I couldn't find any of the quotes around that. Other people are worrying that if Hili unscrews up badly, it could embarrass and taint the whole industry. So yeah, that's a concern as well. I mean, that's something that we seem to be making such cool progress in the past decade. I'd hate to have a, you know, what was that called? The AI winter where, where, you know, resources dry up. Bob, let me ask you a couple of questions really quick. So I'm reading that they have not achieved net energy production. Yeah, I didn't see, I didn't see, like I said, I didn't see too much information about what the status is and because they're saying that because they, you know, they're trying to, yeah, but they're just even saying like that's not information. That's not technical information. That could be stolen. Just saying we have achieved net energy or be, this is how close we are to net energy. That's sort of the bottom line here. That's like a big thing. So it is. And I am just curious that they're not saying. Yeah. Yeah. That's definitely, that's definitely, you know, a red flag right there. And they've been running this thing apparently from what I could tell Polaris, they've been running this thing like all year like every day, they say every day. So here's the other thing. So the question has, so this is producing electricity directly, right? It's not going to keep steam and turn a turbine like like the other reactor. It's as there's the fusion will create a, you know, magnetic field that can induce current directly in, you know, their coils. Right. The plasma is expanding because the plasma is going to be energized by the fusion that's happening inside, right? So the fusion is going to be happening within within the plasma and that's going to expand the plasma field and the magnetic field around it is going to kind of try to hold it in. It's going to be, it's going to be, you know, expanding. So the energy that the plasma is putting into the magnetic field to expand it is what they tap into and convert directly into electricity. So that's one of their things. Is that worked? That's a theory. Is that actually happened? They've approved for concept there? I think they approved that with with generation six, I think, but how efficient it is is is another question. I'm pretty sure that that's actually happening and that's one of the key interesting aspects of their technology. And but I don't know how well it's happening, you know what I mean? So yeah. But like I said, I'm fascinated by their approach of not chasing ignition, but will it be good enough? You know, is that going to be enough? It's not having ignition just because it's your whole entire process is super efficient. So you're kind of like making the maximum use of what little fusion is actually happening. Happening. I will say I'm optimistically skeptical about this, you know, even burn too many times. Some of this looks really interesting, but I'd like to have some other people, some other real scientists looking at this because we had some, I looked at a member a few years ago, some scientists were skeptical. So check out that episode for some of those, some of their quotes. So yeah, so they were skeptical a few years ago. I haven't come across too much of that right now, but it's still kind of, you know, still kind of early in terms of this polaris. I mean, it's been running for a while, but I haven't read too much about it. But if this works, this would be a hell of a coup and they could actually say, you know, our fusion is on your power bill. There would actually be power bills going out that might list fusion. That's one of the sources, which would be really cool. All right. Thanks, Bob. Jay, we have another sort of cutting edge science news on him. You're going to tell us about using CRISPR to make GM a wheat. Yeah, this is really cool. So wheat draws almost everything it needs from, of course, the soil, right? It's roots take up minerals like, what would it be, Steve? Do you have any idea of what we would need from the soil nitrogen fast for us? That's pretty good. Anybody? Potassium, zinc, iron, right? So the soil microbes and the fungi, are you guys like fungi or fungi? I don't know, man. I go back and forth. Yeah, it depends on the time of day. What about evening, Evan? I don't think I like fungi. Definitely fungi. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, well, more of a fun. So you have the soil microbes and you have the fungi and they help unlock these nutrients that the wheat roots either physically can't reach on their own or can't use in the form that's present in the soil, right? And water acts as this delivery system that moves those nutrients into the roots as the water is moving around in the soil or if someone is watering, that helps distribute these nutrients around the roots. Now the atmosphere contributes carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, right? But there is one critical nutrient we cannot access directly from the air even though it surrounds the plant. Now, I will ask you again, do you guys know what nutrient that is? Talking about nitrogen. Steve, you're so smart. I'm so proud of you. Yeah. It is nitrogen. So nitrogen is the main ingredient we use to build the proteins in the healthy leaves. Now protein, as you may know, is present in wheat and gluten is a protein but gluten doesn't improve the flavor. It only improves the chew and there's other reasons why bakers want it. But that's a side note. We can't use atmospheric nitrogen because it's locked up as N2 and this is why modern agriculture has to rely heavily on nitrogen fertilizers, right? And there's a ton of money in that. The problem is that wheat is not an efficient user of it. Meaning that your typical wheat field takes up to about 30 to 50% of the nitrogen that is fertilized to it, right? Or that's applied to it. And the rest goes into... Well, the problem is that there's downstream effects literally, like run off into water ways. It's terrible problem. It really is a big problem. Do other plants have a more efficient use of the nitrogen? I did not check all 3,292. I'm sure some do, but wheat being a massive crop, like this is like a worldwide, unbelievably necessary crop it's used for so much. Yeah, it's one of our most important crops. In fact, it was one of the crops that let humans not have to be nomadic and let them stay and grow wheat. And then you know, yeah, without a doubt. There's a couple of other things that happen. It converts into nitrous oxide, which is a greenhouse gas. And there is a process called volulization, which means that the nitrogen goes into the air as ammonia. So lots of different things, lots of chemistry happening here. And of course, there's a real monetary downside here is that farmers lose money because they're buying a lot more nitrogen than that is actually being applied to the thing that they're trying to fix. And like I said, waterways will get polluted. That Mr. picks up more nitrous oxide. Just a lot of nasty things happening with all that fertilizer. The good news here is that like Steve said, these researchers that you see Davis down the way to push wheat into working with soil bacteria that can convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form that the plant can actually use. So this is not a full replacement for fertilizer, but it changes how the plant interacts with the microbial world around its roots. And this is really interesting. So let me get into some of these details here. Their work is built around a pretty simple idea. Instead of trying to convert the wheat into something, it's not like a bean that grows nitrogen fixing nodules, right? You know, sure, they could borrow some programming from a bean and try to push it into the DNA of the wheat and all that. But that's a big deal and it's really difficult. And it's expensive, time consuming, and there's no guarantee that it's going to work. So they decided to make a small change in the wheat that influences the soil microbes. And they decided that if they could pull this off, that bacteria would do most of the work here. And that's what the study actually tested. The researchers started by first testing thousands of natural plant chemicals to see which ones could influence the bacteria that live in the soil. And this was of course like a very time consuming process, but they scroll through all of these different chemicals. Only a few of the chemicals actually panned out. And one in particular called, apeninjan, apanin, a pigeon in. It's a pigeon in. There is a pigeon. Yeah, not an easy word to pronounce for people like me. This one stood out as the best. And a pigeon in is a natural compound that many plants make. And it belongs to a family of chemicals called flavones, right? And flavones are substances plants used for communication. It's kind of like their pheromones. And they also use it for defense and dealing with stress. In the soil, these chemicals connect. They can act like messages that guide or influence nearby microbes. When wheat roots release apogenin into the soil, certain nitrogen fixing bacteria respond very strongly to it. So the bacteria that responds, it actually draws them towards the roots and encourages this bacteria to form a protective biofilm. This is crucial to this whole thing. The biofilm gives the bacteria the low oxygen conditions that they need to convert nitrogen that's in the air and to a form that the plant can use. So the team used CRISPR gene editing and what they did was they increased the amount of apogenin that wheat produces in its roots. And it's, you know, it actually worked. It was brilliant how they figured this out. The roots will then release extra apogenin into the surrounding soil and... It's apicheninjan. Every gen, and they know what I mean. Under these nitrogen limited conditions, though, the edited wheat performed actually better than regular, you know, quote, unquote, normal wheat. It had higher nitrogen content in its leaves and the roots. It had stronger photosynthetic activity and better grain yield, which is fantastic. Yeah, that's... The soil over... I mean, I was really surprised to read about that. That it didn't just equal and solve a problem with... Better yields, I mean, all across the board with everything we needed. And to clarify, that's under what they called limited nitrogen fertilization conditions. So that's with less fertilizer than you would normally give. So the soil around the engineer plants, it also showed increased nitrogen conversion activity when they measured it using standard isotopes and biochemical tests. The pattern actually held across all their experiments and more apogenin, and the root zone apigenin. There's more of it in the root zone, and allowed more bacterial nitrogen fixation, which leads to healthier plants. When, you know, let's say, fertilization is scarce, so the farmer can't afford it or whatever the problem is, the plants can survive more likely to survive with a lot less fertilizer. And there is, of course, a practical angle here. So the wheat plant that can supplement part of its nitrogen requirements through this co-op bacteria, this is a really big deal. It doesn't eliminate the need for fertilizer, but it really does reduce how much it needs. And of course, the downstream effect, like I said, all of that decreases when you use less fertilizer. So the CRISPR wheat stayed productive. When they cut the nitrogen to half or even to 30% of the normal application, it continued to function perfectly fine. And under those low fertilizer conditions, it still outperforms conventional wheat by a wide margin. Of course, we have to be cautious here. These are controlled experiments. They're useful, but you know, trying this in the real world. They just feel troughs. They just feel troughs. Yeah, these feel trials, there's a lot more variables in the soil. There's unpredictable weather. There's complex microbial communities that are all working with each other, and maybe even sometimes competing with each other. You have soil, ecosystem shift, not just from global warming, but like just as you go throughout a region, the ecosystems are different from here to there. It could be even 50 miles away. You have a totally different scenario going on. And of course, these bacteria might not behave consistently from season to season. But again, this is the beginning. They found something. It works. It's a definite thing. The mechanisms work. It's one of those things that it seems likely to pan out. I know that they're going to have to make modifications and it's going to take some time. This is a real win here. So just to clarify a couple of things that you said, but I just wanted to emphasize them a little bit. So there are crops that fix their own nitrogen. They all do it through these bacteria, right? The plants aren't doing it. It's always bacteria. Like the legumes, you mentioned the nodules, what the nodules do is they create a low oxygen environment for the bacteria to thrive and fix their nitrogen. There are programs to try to identify the set of genes necessary to make that happen so that we could then make fully nitrogen fixing crops like out of the ones that aren't, right? Yeah. Including wheat. This is like a, they found an easy way to do a partial fix where, yeah, again, rather than these complicated nodules, it's going to create the biofilm to create the lower oxygen environment. And it remains to be seen how much they'd be able to whack back fertilizer, but even reducing nitrogen fertilizer by 10% could save a billion dollars a year. Yeah. Yeah. And also, this is the beginning of this study. It doesn't mean that they couldn't even make it more productive with a lot more experiment and everything. But the reason why I picked this news item is we talk a lot about these types of things. Okay, there's a cool thing that happened. It's in play. They're studying it. But I think it's important for us to recognize here that like CRISPR, which is a platform, when you think about what it takes to create a platform like CRISPR and how many years and years and decades it takes to just get scientists to start using it. So CRISPR was discovered essentially in 1987. And I think it took until like, you know, what we're going like 2010 plus before it started to kind of hit the science scene and people were really using it to do stuff. And then of course, since then we've made tons of advancements on it. It's incredibly powerful. It's incredibly useful. And we need scientific funding to let scientists just experiment and try different things and see what we can do with it. Now, particularly in a situation where we have global warming, which is, which is going to change so many things about where the air at land even is on the planet, let alone how productive it's going to be. We do need advancements to help us continue to feed the 8 billion plus people that we have and more as the decades go by. So I think it's an important reminder that we show some respect to the scientists who created this and who are working with it now and realize that it is important that money is leveraged this way to find these discoveries. Andrea, I noticed that you're quiet here and I'll take that as disrespect. Do you not like Christopher? No. No, I like some of my best friends are Chris Bridget. No. I literally was like, oh, I have two questions, but both of them might be things you've already covered on the podcast. So one is a really simple one, which is, is there such thing as wild wheat or if we domesticated all of it? You know how there's no more wild cows? And then my other one is what sorts of things happening with CRISPR are you all covering on the show that you're super excited about? Because this seems awesome. And I remember being super excited about CRISPR when it came to malaria and when it came to a couple of other sorts of infectious disease-related things. And I'm not familiar with it in agriculture. So I was just curious what else I should be excited about. Well, there is wild wheat and it's still out there. And it's one of the ancestors of domesticated wheat. Probably can't I know. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I'd have to take a look at it to see what the head of it looks like to see if there's actually anything there that you can turn it into. I only thought of it when you were talking about the importance of the agricultural revolution. I was like, oh, yeah, did we just find it and make it into something? We co-insulated a very dumb question. You know, way more nutritious and... Right. And just like a lot of other things that we eat today, guys, it can't survive all the wheat that we rely on, right? It cold and soy probably. Yeah, it won't continue to exist if people don't grow it. It has to be grown, it has to be fertilized, it has to be taken care of. It's not the type of thing that we just keep growing on its own if we didn't tend to it. It really does need us now. We have a co-dependent relationship. I mean, I also was thinking about the various uproars from the non-GMO side of things. And Jay, you raised a good point, which is we've been modifying these things forever. Yeah, oh my gosh. Thousands of years, right? Yeah. There's almost nothing that you eat that's not massively altered from it. Carl Sagan said, just look around you. Everything you see is artificially enhanced. Yeah. All right. This is interesting. You're going to talk to us about our LLM's large language models. Are they changing how we think as a group or thinking groups? I'll look at it up real quick and see. Yeah, so it's, I have a note you're going to look at the answer. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to chat GPT that one in. Yeah, perfect, perfect. That's great. Yeah, I'll just read that out loud in my voice and we'll call that good. Yes, Steve, so I have come to the show and every now and again, I managed to muster some research that is not squarely political science. This is social science and I'm going to talk about political science briefly, but it's not exclusively political science by any stretch. So there's a paper that came out in late August that I'm super into. Full disclosure, the author is my PhD advisor, Scott Page at the University of Michigan and I'm a big fan of his and he and I work together. And so a lot of this research is stuff that I work on with him. And so big, big bias alarm bells going off, but it also means that it's something that that I think is super interesting and wish more people knew about. So okay, so he published a paper the end of the summer called Everyone Everywhere All At Once. LLMs and the new physics of collective intelligence. And if you didn't get excited at the movie reference, I hope you got excited by the phrase physics of collective intelligence. Because that's just the coolest phrase I've heard in 2025. Except for that word that Jay mispronounced. Do you want to know? I'm not even going to try to say it. So there's that. All right, so this is a paper about how we can use large language models to change the physics of collective intelligence. I'm going to come back to the physics part, but first I want to ask you all, are you familiar with the term collective intelligence? Is it a term or do you have a guess as to what it might mean? I've seen that reference to just trying to accomplish things in groups basically. Like the crowd is smarter than the individual. Right. And sci-fi is kind of like a hive mind with the collection of multiple many minds. That's right. Are you all watching Pluribus by the way? Oh my god, yes. Okay. No spoiler premise. No spoilers. All right, small size. But that is exactly the hive mind piece. So yeah, so that's exactly the idea. So it's this idea of the wisdom of crowds. And how can we make it such that groups of people working together become smarter than say the some of those people or ideally smarter than and not just more knowledge, but more innovative, more adaptive, more creative, all kinds of interesting things that an individual could never come up with. Sort of the idea of like you're all sitting in a room in your brainstorming and you all come up with really great ideas because you've been bouncing those ideas off of one another as opposed to if the five of us all sat in a separate room and thought of things by ourselves. That said, you may also be thinking about every single time that the crowd is maybe not so wise, right? You know, we think about herd mentality and we think about people all rushing to false information or to political views or religious views or whatever or homey up with the or whatever it is that that we would consider not so intelligent, but it's definitely part of that group think. This is the whole area of research basically that crosses a number of social sciences that says, what can we do to make it so that when we put a bunch of people in a space together and they have some kind of common problem to solve that they do it intelligently as opposed to not so intelligently. And so this is where I'm going to crowbar a teeny tiny bit of political science. And so if you're thinking about collective intelligence in economics, you're probably thinking about how do you design a market so that people can trade things and exchange value and innovate and all that stuff. In political science and Steve, when I talked about this on the political reality podcast already, the idea of how do we get a group to make a good decision or come to some kind of agreement is pretty much what's happening every time we think about what does an election system look like? How do jury deliberations work? What are the ways that Congress, you know, deliberates with one another before they have a vote? And so all that stuff in politics is also collective intelligence. And there's all kinds of other ways that, you know, a community might come to some kind of agreement as a group. I spent a lot of time with Scott working in the space of companies. So companies are very interested in collective intelligence. So if I'm going to put together a team to solve some problem, you know, a tech problem or a crisper problem or whatever it is, it's not enough to just get a whole bunch of smart people and put them in the room and hope for the best, which is what most of us tend to do. What you want to do is be thoughtful about how those people interact and what are the processes by which they bring different bits of information, deliberate over those pieces of information and then select the best one. And immediately you should be thinking and, and I don't know, maybe anyone listening who's ever been in a work meeting. I can certainly speak to faculty meetings at NYU and pretty much everywhere. It's, I don't feel like a lot of those meetings lead to collective intelligence. Usually what happens is someone comes in with a strong opinion. That person, if they're also the loudest person, will dominate the conversation for a while, perish forbid they're also the most senior person in the room. And so no one really feels comfortable pushing back. A couple people might ask a few questions and then everyone nods and then we just do the thing that the guy who's called the meeting wanted you to do. Or you try to introduce new ideas and say, well, actually you brought me in because I have a different perspective and I think there's X, Y and Z problem. And then the rest of the room says, what? No, that's silly and shuts it down. And so again, it's like why even bring this outside expert into the room. And so all of that is to say is that there's lots of things that we can do and this can be in our own work, in our own lives and our own communities, to make our groups smarter. This article is about how we can use LLMs in a way that I at least, I'm curious if you all have seen this, but in a way that I don't normally see people talk about the use of LLMs. So the idea here is picture a meeting that you're going into. We got to solve this problem. We got to go through whatever decision making process that we have to go through. How are we going to get to collective intelligence? Well, there's three steps. One, we want to have as many independent inputs as possible. So if we're all sitting around trying to solve a problem, we need to hear from Bob and Evan and Jay and Steve and me and we all need to talk it through and get that information out there. We then need to also be able to consider all the options and then we need to choose over those options. The problem is that those three things take forever. If we were all sitting down to say, you know, in a meeting today, this is why we do it before the podcast and said, well, what should we talk about on the podcast tonight? And it's like, Evan will say his ideas for 10 minutes and then Jay will say his ideas for 10 minutes and I'll say my ideas for 10 minutes. And before we know it, an hour has gone by and we haven't even gotten to the deliberation. So the idea in this paper is what if before the meeting, before anyone gets to the room where we're going to talk about whatever it is, each person talks to an, you can type it, you can talk it, talks to an LLM about what their ideas are. So you know, maybe it's us braving, stirring for the political reality podcast. So I'll say 10 minutes into my phone. I think we should do this. I mean, while Steve is somewhere else doing that into his phone, Jay is doing it. And we're doing it. And then while we're walking to the meeting and while we're sitting down and saying, hey, everyone, how are you? Get some coffee, blah, blah, blah. And LLM is summarizing all the key pieces. And so then by the time we start the meeting, we start from step two, which is, let's deliberate over what the different ideas were. And there's a bunch of benefits to that. One is obviously you're saving a ton of time of having to sit there and listen to everybody. The tradeoff is you don't hear all the nuances. You hope that the LLM summary is correct. And so obviously depending on the importance of the conversation or the level of nuance and privacy, you wouldn't want to use it for everything. But for pretty standard stuff, this could get you pretty far. And the other great thing is that one of the best ways to generate collective intelligence is to have these independent inputs that are truly independent. It doesn't work. And we've all seen these psychology studies where you sit in a room and you show a participant a circle on the wall and everyone else in the room says, ah, it's a square. And then the person who's the subject kind of doubts themselves. And so I guess it's a square even though it's a circle. We are so quick to say, oh yeah, I agree with what this person said or you all have been podcasting longer than I have. So let's do what you say or just to agree with the majority that these independent inputs that we submit before I hear anyone else's ideas. And I just say it to an LLM, that's going to get much richer information from me and take more advantage of each of our individual perspectives as well. So it's just a teeny tiny paper. Oh, and the reason it's about the physics of collective intelligence is because if we think about physics, we think about the constraints on groups working together and those constraints are often around space and time. We all have to get to the same place to have the conversation and we all have to be free at 4 p.m. In this case, we saw during COVID, we've seen ever since that the constraints of space have really gone away not completely, but largely, right? We can do podcasts from Beirut and we can do podcasts from Tokyo and we can do podcasts from Connecticut. But the time issue has been a problem. And so this idea that we could use LLMs to speak simultaneously to have meetings not at the same time, but then have a separate meeting where we actually talk about, you basically get to start meetings halfway through but have the full amount of time you always had. So I just thought it was a super cool idea. It's not a heavy duty experimental research paper in that sense. It's more of a thought piece that says, like, we've been thinking about LLMs as more of an individual tool. You know, I sit and it's my sidekick and it helps me, but we could actually really get group minds working a lot better and faster and more creatively if we start to think about them at the group level as well. But you're basically laundering your ideas through a chatbot. Yeah. I would be interested in how that might distort, correct? Yeah. The everyone's ideas, you know? Yeah. Well, what you would want to do, and this is where you would hopefully work with an LLM that is either tailored to your organization or, you know, if it's a bunch of doctors in the room, you know, I wouldn't just use mass available chat GPT or something like that. But yeah, you would also, especially early on, you would also want to go through and make sure that the summaries of what you've said are correct. There's certainly issues where if someone speaks with an accent or speaks in a slightly different style, that their input would not be measured exactly the same way. And I certainly wouldn't use it for big decisions around like, should we fire somebody or promote somebody, but I don't know about you. But a lot of meanings that we go to are really not that high stakes. And so, you know, I have one tomorrow morning where it's like, yeah, rather than each of us recap, what if we did the recap separately and then read a bullet point in summary right before we started. And then over the course of the meeting, you can then say, oh, is this what you meant and go back and dig in. But it's certainly not perfect and certainly not for every conversation. And there's also plenty of conversations where the murky middle of like saying a bunch of stuff and then saying, well, actually, maybe I disagree with myself for, let me restate that that might spark an interesting idea and you would lose some of that. But you know, think of your average insufferable corporate meeting. There are some ways to improve them, I think. Yeah, and I was just, you know, someone I know not too long ago had a meeting where they had to like, approve bylaws or something, right? They have to have a public comment period. So literally they had a meeting where 100 faculty members all could every one of them if they choose could state their opinions about that. And it took forever. They had to actually have a separate meeting because it took twice as long as they were planning on taking. And it was just interminable. So I think that's the kind of thing where anything is about that, you know. I mean, think about voting, right? Yeah. So voting is largely simultaneous. Yes, we have early voting and mail and voting. But for the most part, within a very contained bit of time, we all show up and we turn in our ballots. And if we did it sequentially, which is how most meetings and most public hearings are done, we would still be going through our first election. You know, like, okay, you can't go until Steve is done. Like, okay, am I right? You can't happen that way. Yeah. So it's like, so what are the sorts of things? And I think it's a great question is like, what sorts of meetings or gatherings or what types of collective intelligence are we trying to capture here? If what we really want to do is just get a sense of what everyone's perspectives are, it could work well. If we're trying to sit down and say, like, let's talk through our ideas for a new title, maybe we want to be in the room and hear all of the ideas, not just the shiny one we got to at the end. I don't think this is strange at all. I think, you know, this is us interfacing with our latest and greatest technology. I mean, this is what we're supposed to be doing. Like, you know, it's worth even trying just to see if it works for you in a group or under what circumstances or whatever, but, you know, efficiencies are going to be found only if we look for them. And I think to Jay that maybe one thing that is potential real upside for this is, is, again, thinking in the corporate world, it's like there's so many meetings where, or there's so much research that shows that women are more likely to be interrupted. Someone who's a racial minority is more likely to be dismissed if their idea doesn't align with the ideas of the group. But I'm not trying to, to rattle, you know, woke slogans or anything like that. This is like, actual research that typically, you know, people from different backgrounds, different preferences, introvert extrovert, different, different levels of comfort speaking up in a meeting. We're missing a lot of people's perspectives. Because the dynamics of the meeting are such that someone's interrupted or someone's talked over or someone doesn't feel comfortable speaking up in the first place. Or like I said, you feel afraid to disagree with the majority. But if you all have to say your thing ahead of time, like, I think this is a great idea. I think this is a terrible idea. I think we're missing X, Y, and Z. You're going to get everyone's information equally as opposed to just hearing from the loudest or more confident person in the room. So I think that is potentially really powerful. That said, the opposite could be the case. If we're, if we use the wrong aggregator, we use the wrong type of tool, we could be replicating those biases. But I think sort of like you said, Jay, it's worth it's worth giving it a shot to see if we could actually make meetings more inclusive this way. I think it's worth mentioning that there is a lot of information out there about how working with LLMs is bad. There's a lot of, you know, we get a lot of emails from people and I've been having discussions with people. I think we should mention that. They do consume a ton of energy. We don't know from a big brother perspective, like how much of our information is private and everything. So I mean, I think it's fine for us, of course, to talk about this stuff. I think those are legitimate concerns. You know, we were facing a genuine dilemma. We have a useful tool that has some serious downsides, you know, one of the biggest being its energy use, which is, you know, we've had to revise all of our projections about energy and climate and everything to account for the AI factor. Yeah. There's no way around that by a little either. But the thing is, I mean, it's a good point because if it produces only like marginal advantages, it may not be worth it. But that's not typically how people think. I think if it's even slightly more efficient or people like doing it, a lot of people are going to do it, you know, regardless. Yeah, I think, Steve, I similarly, usually when I think about LLMs and how I see people using it or how various outlets on the internet recommend streamline your workflow with Gemini's, whatever, whatever. Okay. And it doesn't really, am I, is it really worth it? Like the, the risks with the climate and the energy consumption to summarize my emails for me. Like, this is shaving 30 seconds off my life, maybe, but not really. It's mostly just bothering me and I'm going to go read the emails either way. This one was one of the few instances of using LLMs that I was like, oh, this is a genuine change in how we do things. And if it's possible that this generates more collective intelligence, it could be that it is the sort of thing that helps get us more quickly to more innovative solutions like the cool crisper stuff that Jay was just talking about. And even what Bob was talking about is, you know, like greater collective intelligence could really get us there. But, you know, I'm more excited about this than I am about like, oh, we're going to summarize emails. But, but yeah, no, it's a, it's a huge concern. If I put it back in the bag, I'm what's wrong. I consider it. Is this a current concern? In other words, it will likely become more energy efficient in the future. So I mean, kind of like, maybe about something now in 2025, but by 2035, it will be 90% more energy efficient, for example. Be hopes so. Not be working on it for a long time. Yeah. So it's, it's probably, that's hard to say. But like a lot of things, if they do get efficient, they use that to make it more powerful. So we never actually get the savings. It's like as we, as electricity gets cheaper, we get more electricity, we get more light. And just, you get more devices to clean our house, our house has to be clean. Yeah, like multi-terabyte hard drives. We just do, man, how big they get. We fill them up. But, but the other concern here though is that, as you say, yeah, you should proofread the summary. No one's going to do that. Everyone, most people are going to do lazy row and just read your terms and conditions. Yeah, right. Right, right. Right. Yeah. You can ask, chat, G, B, T to summarize it for you. That's right, give me the, give me the second term, terms, conditions. I've done that. Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Aura frames. Guys, we've all been there, right? The holiday season, you got to buy a million, get, gifts for a million people. You run out of ideas, what can you get? 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This deal is exclusive to listeners and frame cell at fast, so order yours now to get it in time for the holidays. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout, terms and conditions apply. All right, everyone, let's get back to the show. All right, let's go on. Do you guys remember Thia? Yeah. Yeah. That's sure. That's the- I don't remember- I wasn't there at the time, but I ran about it. The Mars-sized planet that crashed into the proto-earth- Oh, no, is it okay? Creating 4.5 billion years ago, creating our current Earth and Moon system. Right. Oh, yeah. The scientists leading theory- scientists have a question, and the question is, where did Thia come from, specifically what part of the solar system did it come from? Over Thia. And- So, how could they answer this question? So what- so, do you guys know, like just generally, how do scientists know where something in the solar system comes from? Mineral composition. Yes, and what specifically- Yeah, exactly. And what specifically- you're right up to- I-it-oops, right? It's the isotope ratios. Exactly. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I mean, so apparently the isotope ratios tell you like so much about the history of- So much. So much of stopping the solar system, including where, like, how close to the Sun did it form? Because there's different isotope ratios in different locations in the solar system. So there's a recent study trying to address this question of where did Thia come from by looking at isotope ratios. Smart. But there's a problem. Uh-oh. Where do you look? Where do you look at Earth and Moon? Because when- it's- it is believed that the Moon is made mostly of Thia, right? Yeah. But the Earth is just a complete mishmash of Earth and Thia, right? Mix together. And here's later, you know, all kind of, you know, where do- yeah, where do you find something that happened for- Are we all made of Thia? There's a little bit of Thia in each of us. That's right. That's right. So what they did was they looked at a lot of mineral samples from different strata and they also looked at samples from- of moon rocks. Sure. So the Earth and the Moon pretty much looked the same in terms of isotope ratios. Uh- but by doing an extensive survey, there- because you can't look at a piece of rock as a this piece of rock it's Thia, right? I mean, you just can't do that. But what they could- what they could do is they said, okay, if Thia came from the outer solar system, what would we expect, you know, a random survey of Earth rocks to look like? And we do have samples of those, right? Well, yeah, we have- yeah, it's Earth Rock, it's all over the place. No, not Earth Rock, but samples of non-solar system material. Sure. Not non-solar system material, non-Earthmajelle. So we have- As a reference, as a reference, we have samples of meteorites from all different places in the solar system. Yeah, so we have a catalog. We do. We know what an outer solar system rock looks like in terms of its isotopic ratios. We know what an inner solar system rock looks like, et cetera, et cetera. So the Earth and the Moon obviously look like inner solar system rocks. They look pretty much the same with each other. So they sort of addressed this question by saying, what if Thia came from different places in the solar system, what would, you know, a survey of Earth rocks look like in terms of its ratios? And they concluded, what do you think they concluded, where do you think Thia came from? It's a local boy. Yeah, I'm with the problem. I would say, yeah, it would make sense inner solar system like the other rock. Yeah, it did not come screaming in from the outer solar system. It was probably our neighbor. They think, this is a little speculative. This is like a statistical kind of thing. They think it was probably a little closer to the Sun than the Earth. So you could imagine these two planets in very close orbits, but eventually they crossed, you know, and then, and see it smacked into the Earth or Earth smacked into Thia depending on you. Oh, yeah. It's going to be much more than the Earth. I know, right? Can you imagine? What Thia have had to be smaller than the Earth, and that's why the Earth hung on and it was. I mean, yeah, it was. It was like Mars sized. Yeah, okay. Again, I think Bob's correct in real. The best way to think about these two planets hit each other and merged and spit out the moon, basically. Change the orbit of the Earth, change the Earth. Change the Earth. The mass of the Earth. Yeah. So, what's our satellite? What's really poignant though is that, I mean, it's possible. We know, we know how early life arose on the Earth. It's basically as soon as, you know, the mag mode wasn't in a place, then life kind of started. It's really, we push it back every, you know, millions of years all the time. So Earth, Mark one, right? The Earth that was destroyed could have had life on it, and then it was utterly destroyed in the gut. Let's try this again, Chow. You said, um, yeah, just hit a reset. It's massive. Was there life on the Earth? Could there have been? Sure. Sure, but we'll never know. Yeah, but we'll never know. Didn't think of that one. That's interesting. Yeah. And how long ago did all this? Four and a half billion. Yeah. Give it take. Give it take. Yeah. Long time ago. In the before, I'd love to go back, I'd love to go back right after the moon formed to see our moon. I always see it 16 times the size in the sky. Yeah, 15, 16 times. Imagine a moon gargantuan. You would just don't be near the water. The show right now. The tides. Hundreds of tides. Whereas big as a mountain, mountainous tides. But actually, and I keep, I've probably said this on the show four separate times over the years, but it's actually probably a good thing that happened because those immense tides, we know, went hundreds of miles into onto land and just scoured everything and brought it back into the ocean. And there's your, your classic, you know, primordial soup, primordial soup. This is a good thing. All right. All right. Evan, tell us about some upcoming holiday scams. Tis the season two. What would Chris is coming in? Oh, exactly. Exactly. And every year around this time of year, the holiday season, as it were, cybersecurity researchers published their annual warnings about holiday scams. And they say that 2025's holiday season is shaping up to be one of the worst yet. Of course, that you're going to say that because they'll always say that in the current year. But in any case, the company malware bites, they are famous in a way for many things, but also every year they release a report on how cyber criminals adapt to our habits from year to year. And basically, it's not so much about the fancy hacking or anything that kind of goes on. It's just about how to take advantage of human weaknesses, you know, kind of the the weaknesses of our of our brains that they exploit predictable, measurable human behavior. Their report this year has a very common shopping habits that they point out that make people the ideal targets. For example, one of the strongest risk factors is being a last minute shopper. Those are the people who wait until the final days for the holidays are nearly are very close. And there are those people are nearly twice as likely to click on a fraudulent tracking link or fall for a fake delivery problem notification. You guys have received those right? I mean, you know, emails, all the time. It's a very last minute shopper. Why didn't know I was in such a high risk category? If you are because when the merchandise, you know, it's either supposed to be on its way and you're tracking it, there is this urgency or an anxiety spike. And that's when people's decision making is becomes perhaps less than ideal. And they'll let their guard down sometimes. And the scammers definitely know this. And their fishing campaigns coincide with peak shipping windows. So that's why we see these fake emails and texts claiming, hey, the package can't be delivered or you need to update your payment information. That's a big one. And then they're designed to look like the, well, the pig shippers, you know, Amazon, UPS, FedEx, United States Postal Service even. And these imitation pages, they're using what AI generated layouts? Yep. So these things are becoming much harder to just detect upon glance. The wording is becoming neater, CRISPR, right? You can't find the typos or the bad verbiage that's going on in these things. They're cleaning it up and they're using AI to do it. So yeah, here's another major risk factor. Impulse shopping from social media ads. So instant by traps, they call it look, look out for things like limit additions and, you know, phrases like that that will get you to a click on this because, you know, it's going to be, you know, better, easier for you and just more alluring. So you see a list, you click it and you enter it. And then what, the store really never existed or you get some kind of knockoff of what you were going to be buying kind of a bait and switch in that sense. And FOMO, right? Fear of missing out. They definitely rely on that. Fear of losing a potential bargain is sometimes more motivating than the desire to avoid a possible scam. So you have to be able to, you know, kind of check yourself in those, in those instances. This year the criminals are also exploiting a behavior that didn't used to be risky, they say, price comparing across multiple tabs or apps. J. I know that from our conversations, you have done price comparing shopping before extensively. Yeah. Right. I mean, you know, I thought of you immediately of this, not that you would fall for it because you're good skeptic and you have defenses against this. But this is where, this is another weakness where they, where the scammers come in. You know, you're flipping back and forth between what Amazon, Walmart, Target, Tiktok, Timo, and whatever, looking for the lowest price, right? Nothing wrong with that. But in that rapid fire mode, they say that the consumer will become much more likely to mistake a fake storefront for a real one and then boop, fall right into that trap. Scammers are also capitalizing on this by cloning legitimate storefronts almost perfectly. Same fonts, same product listing, same color schemes. It's becoming much more difficult to identify. The only thing that changes is the URL. But how many people really look at the URL to make sure that they're going where they're supposed to be going, I have gotten myself into that habit, especially when it comes to things like banking among other things. You know, I never, I, I have trained myself to get in the habit of looking at the URL to make sure and to use the built-in security features that are in a URL. You know, if you cite information and those kinds of things, they're right there. You know, you just need to just go and click on them, take the extra second to protect yourself. And then, you know, if you're working, they're talking about package tracking updates. That is where they're really apparently making good inroads because people are getting more tracking notifications more than ever. And again, given it's the season that gives people, you know, just more activity in that area and it becomes an easy target for the scammers to exploit. So they also make some suggestions as to what you can do, how to prevent this, some easy habits to get into or easy, easy steps you can take to minimize this kind of damage. First, they say, slow down even by two or three seconds because studies have shown that when subjects deliberately pause before clicking a link, the rate of falling for a scam plummets. And that micro-puzz interrupts the automatic emotional response scammers depend on. We have a friend, I won't name her, but we all, Andrea, you don't know her, but the four of us do know her. Oh, it's like I'm right here, Evan. Jeez. And she and it's not you. And shit. I've seen it, I've seen her do this in real time. She will absolutely go nuts ordering stuff while she's on her phone and definitely not take those pauses. That's her habit. I've seen her do it many, many times. So, you know, people, this does happen, this does happen a lot. Another tip, don't trust links in the tracking messages. Instead, go directly to the retailer or carry your website through your own bookmarker app. If there's really a problem, you'll see it there. They're also suggesting do not buy directly from social media ads, especially the ones that promise, you know, rare items, scarcity, items exclusivity, or, you know, big discount. 70, 80% off electronics. Find it through a standard Google search, not, or on a known retailer site, but not directly from social media ads. They also give a tip about re-entering payment information on an email notification. Retailers will not ask for that through email or text. So if a message that claims your payment failed, you know, if you get that, you have to really log into the retailer's website independently to verify it, do not ever click the embedded link. And that's something we've been talking about, I think, for years on all kinds of scams that they use through our electronic devices, smartphones, and whatnot. So they're pointing out this year that the biggest vulnerabilities are not technical so much as they are behavior. Right? They're using our brains against us. And our brains make us an easy target to exploit sometimes in certain situations and this happens to be one of them. Yeah, there's just so much noise now, especially with the SGU, like between Jay and I, we're ordering a lot of stuff for the studio and sometimes he does it. And so I get, getting constant notifications, like two or three notifications per item that's ordered, you know. And so that creates the background noise that it would be hard to detect the scam one thrown in there. That's why I just don't click anything. I don't click anything in any email ever. That's just the, you have to have universal precautions. Yeah, especially if it's a number you don't know. Or, you know, like Evan said, like usually if it's a tracking update, the store itself will send it as well as the, you know, the text. So I just do the store one. But I just really, you know, I mean, this is something we've probably been talking about with related to scams forever. But people who are not particularly tech savvy or don't really realize that AI can replicate entire websites like I just, I could really see, despite the fact, Evan, that you said that this happens, you know, every year claims to be the worst year. Or I could see these really being a problem for, I'm just thinking of people in my own life who wouldn't know to double check the URL. Exactly. Yes. Yes. And as always, the older population is always the most vulnerable of the population when it comes to technology related scams, definitely. So we got to watch out for our friends, our family members, you know, our parents, our grandparents help keep an eye on them always. Thanks Evan. Bob, tell us about hypervelocity white dwarves. Zombie bullet stars in the news. I'm already with you. Yeah. I hardly endorse this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's what I do. Try to suck you in and then I'm in. Okay, you're in. Let's see if I can sustain this as good clickbait probably not. Yeah. So a recent study and simulation offers what some consider the most compelling answer yet to what would cause hypervelocity white dwarf stars traveling at 2,000 kilometers per second, which is fast enough to leave the galaxy. What would cause that? And if it verified, if this theory is verified, this would all happen because a heavier companion white dwarf blows up twice. So this was published recently in the journal Nature Astronomy. Now we all know about white dwarf stars, right? Stars around the mass of our sun eventually will slough off their outer layers, right? Leaving behind a massive but earth sized core, but with a stellar mass. So this thing is quite a beefy dude. And if it's solitary, just hanging out, it's going to cool very slowly over potentially trillions of years. But then in 2018, the Gaia space observatory discovered a handful of these white dwarf stars traveling at insane speeds. The very fastest that they detected were traveling at 2,000 kilometers per second. That would get from the earth to the moon in about three minutes. That's a what, 239, 249,000 miles. That's a moonshine. That's a moonshine. It takes me to microwave my burrito, right? Remember when we went to the moon, it was like three days, so 4,300 minutes compared to three minutes. So this thing is booking. Now, some of these white dwarfs, they weren't even just speedy. They also were very unusually hot and puffy, kind of like these puffed up surfaces. And some of them also had heavy elements, which kind of shouldn't have been there. So three mysteries here. What did this? And no theory could explain all three of those unusual attributes until these researchers ran their simulations. So in the simulation, they had, they created two binary white dwarfs. And these were helium carbon oxygen white dwarfs. And those are white dwarfs that can be together in orbit around each other. For a very long time, and kind of evolving together. So that's why they selected these helium carbon oxygen white dwarfs. So what they are is essentially a helium skin over a carbon core. It's a good way to think about them. The primary, the biggest one in their simulation was about right around just under 0.7 of a sun mass. So 70% of our sun's mass, the secondary white dwarf was a little bit smaller. That was just a little bit more than 60% of our sun's mass. So definitely similar to our sun, little smaller. So this is what the simulation described when they ran it. Imagine you've got these two white dwarf stars in orbit around each other, maybe getting closer and closer. Some of the helium from the surface of the smaller white dwarf is transferred to the larger white dwarf. So that's number one. That's the first big step there. The smaller one is losing mass. This extra helium is building up on the bigger white dwarf. So what happens is that causes a supersonic fusion detonation that races around their white dwarf, meeting at the other side. So the surface essentially explodes. So this is the first explosion. Then those shock waves, remember those shock waves that met on the other side from where the fusion started? That converges. Those shock waves converge at the core of this larger, remember, this is the larger white dwarf that's been siphoning off helium from the smaller one. So that detonation converges on the far side of the white dwarf and it goes down to the core. And so what you're essentially having is a deeper carbon detonation in the core of the larger one. And that annihilates the entire white dwarf. So that's the second explosion. So the first explosion is the helium skin igniting and the second explosion is the rest of the carbon in the core of the white dwarf exploding the white dwarf. It's basically no longer there. So this is what the simulation said is happening. So this is then the trigger. This is the trigger to turn the remaining core. Remember the smaller white dwarf into this zombie bullet. It's the trigger. The forces that are created in this explosion of the larger one are on the scale of all the energy the Sun releases in its entire existence. So we're talking about a tremendous amount of energy. I have to assume that these white dwarf cores are pretty hardy because in this simulation it actually survives. The smaller dwarf survives the detonation of the nearby larger dwarf star that just blew up. And this is what flings it at these ridiculous velocities sometimes over 2,000 kilometers a second. Okay. Because that is happening now imagine you've got this large white dwarf that explodes, that flings the smaller one away. As it explodes it's impacting the smaller white dwarf. So it's stripping away some of its outer layers but it's also heating the core, the surface of the core that's exposed. And so that explains why we're seeing a very hot puffy outer atmosphere to these hyper velocity white dwarves that explains that. And the third, the final mystery seems to be solved because what's happening you have a lot of fusion taking place on the larger white dwarf. You've got the outer skin, helium skin that detonated, you know, infusion fire but you also have the interior that also had some fusion taking place. So you've got lots of fusion taking place. So it makes sense then that the simulation would put this freshly forged heavy elements into the mix of the outer layers of the of this smaller white dwarf. And so that explains all three anomalies like no other theory has. This isn't a home run of course. This is just one, this is just a simulation that they ran. But it's the single best explanation for these three big anomalies, the extreme speeds, the puffed up heated state of these hyper velocity white dwarves and the odd compositions that all the other earlier models struggle to fit all of these at once. And none of them did but this, this theory does fit all of these anomalies at once. So that thought that was very, very interesting, pretty cool stuff. In the future, these researchers are going to use wide field surveys like the Varacy Ruben Observatory to help put these theories to the test. A best case scenario, I'm not even sure how achievable it is, but a best case scenario would be to actually observe this happening in real time, which would be a hell of a coup. They'd be, that'd be a hell, what, that'd be what, what, three 20s in a row rolled entry. I think that's right. Yes. Okay. But in a sense, this whole talk has been a preamble, I think, to answer the question that a lot of you are thinking, I hope some of you are thinking about it, what would happen to the earth if it was hit by such a hyper velocity white dwarf? So I have, of course, I had to go down that rabbit hole. So the question itself is actually technically wrong because a billiard ball like impact would not happen. It would not be like billiard balls hitting. If a white dwarf hit the earth at this velocity or even even smaller velocities, just the fact that a white dwarf would be heading towards us, we would probably be spegetified. I think I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself here. So as the white dwarf enters the solar system, our orbit would drastically change. It would become more, either more eccentric. We could be, the earth could be ejected. We could spiral right towards the white dwarf. So a lot of different things could happen. Lots of different variables going on here. We would not only have huge ocean tides, but they, we would also have crustal tides. The crust of the earth would form tides like it does right now, but they're super tiny. You can't even notice them, but it does happen. Well, we would have huge crust tides. It reminded me of the movie 2012 and what happens. You know, we'd have incredible volcanism. We'd have quakes. Yeah, it would be a very, very bad day on the earth when, as we were approaching, as we were approaching each other. And then we would hit the infamous Roche limit. This is the limit, the distance from a larger celestial object where a smaller object, zone gravity, no longer holds together. So once we approached the Roche limit of this white dwarf, heading towards us, the earth could not hold it, could no longer hold itself together. Our gravity would kind of be like, oh, sorry, doing the best I can here, but I'm done. And the earth would just kind of start falling apart. And this is all at about a million kilometers from a typical white dwarf. Depending on the size, it could be, it could be a, you know, it could be a few hundred thousand kilometers, it could be a million kilometers. But when we were still at a solid distance, comparable to the earth moon distance, the earth would just start falling apart, couldn't, couldn't no longer hold itself together. And this is all because of the title disruption that's happening, right? So all about the tides, title disruptions are, are can be so powerful. And so what's happening is the near side and far side of the earth would be, would feel dramatically different gravitational forces. And that's, that's the, basically the essence of title disruption. The far side, because it's farther away, would be feeling significantly less gravity. And because the gravity is so huge to begin with, it's, it's a dramatic difference. And that would basically tear the earth apart. And this is where this big edification starts happening. It breaks apart into these glowing chunks and in short order, all of those glowing chunks would then become plasma and intense radiation like X-rays and ultraviolet. The plasma could form a disc around the white dwarf and kind of slowly fall into it or it could, it could form a stream directly spiraling right into it. You know, I'm not sure which one would happen. But luckily, luckily, this is ridiculously unlikely. But it's, it's a macabre and scientifically interesting at the same time, which of course appeals to me. It's a fun combination. So, it's a lot of stuff slamming into earth on this episode. Yeah, right. I mean, yeah, but it's so interesting to think of what would happen. But man, imagine scientists are like, yeah, we see a hyper velocity white dwarf heading towards the earth area. So basically, you've got about, I don't know how long, weeks or months before it's so close that it's just going to rip the earth apart. So have fun while you can. You know, if you didn't get that close, you probably would fling us out of the solar system or into the sun or something. Oh, yeah. If it's just bad, it's good to have a good solar system. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Depending on where we were, you know, we're in orbit around the sun compared to our proximity to the white dwarf. Yeah, it could just fling us out of the entire solar system or send us right into its moth like the, like the Star Trek episode, the, what you're going to call it, the Doomsday Machine, nasty stuff. So luckily, hopefully we'll never see that. Star Trek, the original series, by the way, would live if Earth got flung out of the solar system. Like if we got flung into the sun, I feel like it's over instantly. I think it would be pretty instant, right? Yeah. It would be bad. I recommend the short story called the pale of air. Essentially our atmosphere would rain down as snow at different, at different times, because different gases in the atmosphere have different freezing points. Then we would become a rogue planet, right? Stayed with a rogue planet. And, uh, oh. Well, that's hopefully, uh, yeah, it would probably, if you live near a nuclear, an underground nuclear facility, you could probably last the freezing. But yeah, things would be bad on the surface. Being a rogue planet sounds a lot more fun than it actually is. Yeah. I'm free to do what I want. Oh no. All right. Thanks, Bob. Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś Ś and isn't it obvious? Go ahead, Ab. It's George Robb trying out new voices for his geologic podcast, which is true. That is so close, it's awesome. That would not be a strange, correct answer. I like that, I have to talk to George about it. Andrew, I know you know what this is. Yeah, I know exactly what it is. It's the background actors from Twin Peaks working out their lines. Oh, I like that. That's good to go. Oh, God. All right, let's dig into this one. Of course, you know, I love this one because it's so strange. Okay, so we got a listener named Matthew Cutler and he said, I think this week's noisy is AI Slop. I love this answer. Specifically, I think it's one of those audio generating AI's that has been prompted to make up a scene from a comedy TV show. We live in a world, guys, where that is an excellent answer. That's a solid guess, absolutely. It's a very good answer. Not correct, but much appreciated. Another listener named Matt Soskins, he said it's Vladimir Putin's duck. Yeah. And yeah, it's a joke, I get it, but there was a little bit of a step in the right direction there, so we'll keep going here. Another email from Visto to TV, so it says I could say a bird, like I always do, but the language is definitely Slavic, so the parrot would freeze in the winter. I have convinced it is an animal talking, so what animal can talk and survive the snow and ice while walrus? Walrus can talk? I think it was a sea lion that I had a recording of where he could mimic his handler, and it sounded like a human voice, definitely. I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if walrus can vocalize. If somebody has a sample of that, send it to me. Here's a sample of a J ready? Yeah, okay. Okay. So I got an incredible number of correct guesses. Now, every once in a while, someone, well, people sent me in things all the time that are recent, you know what I mean? That have like been in a lot of people's news feeds and stuff. This was one of them, but it was so good. I had to play it anyway, so I know a lot of people had recently seen this one, but the first person who guessed correctly, this is absolutely the first person, and only a couple of people admitted that they saw it recently, but I do know because it was out recent that a lot of people saw it, but I do believe this person guessed it. This is Dennis S and Dennis says, hello, Jay, I'll skip the whole long time, listener, first time caller, Spiel, because I'm too excited. I actually recognize this one as I'm sure all of your Russian speaking listeners did too. It's Carlusha, the Raven who got super famous about two years ago. I hope I guessed it before thousands of other Russians did, and thank you so much for your work and for the bestest podcast ever. No. And that is Dennis, second. Dennis, thanks so much for that. Yeah, I did get a ton of emails from people that can speak Russian. I'm sure a lot of them are in Russia. Yeah, this is exactly what Dennis said. This is a Raven that apparently was raised by people in Russia, and they had taught it a bunch of different words and everything, and they're kind of having a conversation with it, and it's definitely entertaining them. But it's really cool. It should look up the video to watch this because seeing a Raven talk is pretty weird. Mm-hmm. And Raven's a very big... The Raven seem... Yeah, did the Raven seem unusually large? It's a big Raven. Yes. I mean, Ravens are large. Like in the normal... Yes, but it's not within the normal Ravens. Yeah, because that was a sure thing with some... Ravens are bigger than crows. They're big, they're very big birds. So I think it's more compelling because it's in a foreign language. Yeah. So like, we would pick up on the new watches. We're missing, yeah. Yeah, it sounds like perfectly good Russian to us, so it sounds even more uncanny, but to a native speaker, they could tell that something was a little off. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, absolutely. Steve, I agree. I thought of that in my own as well. And listen to it again. It's the male voice. Yeah, good. Oh, cool. We're going to the cat. Good. Good. Now a lot of people are filming this show. Okay, you're running away. Are you in the course? Of course. Of course. Oh, cool. Good. Good. Good. It even interrupts. Like the flow is very human-like. Definitely just kind of sounds like a kind of grumpy old guy. It totally does. Yeah. I don't know if there's much difference between a drunk Russian and a Raven. You're kidding me. I mean, I'm just kidding. Come on. All right, guys, I have a new noisy this week. This was sent in by a listener named Aaron. Oh, and I'll warn you that this has some very high pitch noises in it that may bother some listeners. So this is your chance to turn down a little bit. And here we go. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. to different things going on. So anyway, anyway, calm down. I know you're excited. But if you think this week's noisy or you heard something cool, you got to email me at WTNatthescepticsguide.org. Steve, as we speak, the tickets for the Seattle show and the Wisconsin show, or shows, I should say, are up. Now, we have three shows in both of these venues, right? So Seattle and then Wisconsin. In Seattle, we have three shows. Friday night, we're going to have a very low number, very high profile meet and greet. It's going to be a small number of people hanging out with the SGU. I think we're going to have like 20 tickets for it. We're trying this out because we've got and a ton of emails from people that just wanted something exactly like this. So we thought we'd give it a shot for a couple of different show weekends that we're doing. So if you're interested, go to the website, thescepticsguide.org. You can see this Friday night show. I have to formally name it. I came up with something fun about two weeks ago. I can't remember. I'll look it up. But anyway, it's the Friday night hangout. Then we have Saturday starting some time between 11 and 12 a.m. We're going to be doing an SGU private show plus. That's a three hour show. This includes George Robb, of course. And it's a live recording of the SGU. And then we have fun with the audience for about an hour. It's different every time. You got to come check it out to know what it's all about. And then Saturday night, which is that night. We're going to have a VIP, which is available. If you're interested in buying tickets, this is for the extravaganza. And then there's the extravaganza itself. So honestly, there's four different things that we're doing in those two days. The extravaganza starts at 8 p.m. All the details are on the ticketing sites, which your links are found on SGU's website. Please come. We'd love to see you. I'm getting tons of emails from people saying they missed it last time and they're coming this time. We have a great series of shows for you guys. So please join us. And then again, repeat everything in Wisconsin. The dates are up there. And then as a future mentioned, we're going to be doing all of this in New Haven at some point. Hopefully maybe March or April will let you know when details come. All right, thank you, brother. Just one quick correction on last week's show. I said that cellulose was a protein. I blame this the jet lag on this. It was just a brain fart. I was taking collagen. I was like in my mind, I was taking collagen, which is a different, that's more for animal, structural protein. Cellulose is a polysaccharide, right? It's a ribbons-shaped polymer of glucose molecules. It is the most common, I think it's the most common structural molecule implants. Whereas collagen is an anemicals. Sounds right. So I just got that wires crossed. I'm still massively jet lagged, by the way. I do, right? You guys can tell, through clever editing, I kind of hide it as much as possible. You think there'd be a fix for that? Or routine something they've figured out, people can do a hack of some kind that will help people. But after all this time, they, yeah. And time. Melatonin may help a little bit, but it's not so much my when I'm sleeping at night, it's just that I just have it. Obviously. Yeah, I just can't consolidate my sleep. I can't get enough sleep at once. I'm waking up at two in the morning. Thinking of things, I'm sure. Right, and then now I'm also, I have a colonoscopy tomorrow. So I'm prepping for that. Oh wow. And prepping me as you're drinking, you know, basically drinking motor oil. That begins right after I get off the show. So if you went with the, go use Bob's toilet. Yeah. Yeah. I'll be over there Bob. We ride for the show. I'm coming over there. Yeah, right. Got my bowel prepped and my iPad. Are you going, which prep did you go with? The small liquid. This, all right. Not the big liquid. There's a big liquid. There's a small liquid in this appels. That's the one to your thing. No, typically once every five years, it's 10 years if it's good, five years if they want to follow stuff. For me, it was three years. Yeah, it's been, oh, it's been what they found the last time. And they say, that's a little suspicious come back in three years. But if it's like totally clean, I think you can go 10 years between. Yeah, that was a key. Bob rolls. No, one would have been. Robrol is three. One would have been, yeah. Yeah, I wrote the worst. It turns out the smaller liquid didn't work, didn't clean me up as much as it did. You got to chase it with a ton of clear liquids. That's the thing. You can't just drink that. I think you're done. You have to, anyway, that's the guy that's the fire hose. That's the night I have in store for me. Well, in the meantime, let's go on with science or fiction. It's time for science or fiction. Each week I come up with three science news items for a fax, two-wheel and one fake. One of the night challenge by panel of scutts. It's telling me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is scientific fraud. Scientific fraud. Okay, you guys ready for this? Yes. Here we go. Item number one, the famous experiment in subliminal advertising in a movie theater to increase sales of Coke and popcorn never happened and was entirely fabricated. Item number two, a recent analysis finds the number of fake publications in biomedicine was at least 5.8% with 15% being suspicious, amounting to over 100,000 fake papers published every year. And item number three, researchers find that 40% of published peer reviewed papers show signs of AI co-authorship with 10% being fully authored by AI. Jago first. Okay, the first one here, the famous experiment in subliminal advertising in a movie theater to increase sales of Coke and popcorn never happened and was entirely fabricated. That mean that seems so likely that that sentence is true. You know, it's an urban legend. I could see someone making that up. I could see it both ways, but I think that one is science. The second one here is a recent analysis finds the number of fake publications in biomedicine was at least 5.8% with 15% being suspicious, amounting to over 100,000 fake papers published every year. Okay, so this is a recent analysis. And I mean, it's hard to know what the numbers would be, but I absolutely believe that there are increasing number of fake papers going out. You know, biomedicine definitely is a category. I would expect a ton to be in over 100,000 fake papers published. If anything, I would say that number is a lot more if this one isn't correct. The last one here, researchers find that 40% have published peer-reviewed papers show signs of AI co-authorship with 10% being fully authored by AI. Oh my God. That one has got to be science. Man, wow, Steve, I will say that the last one is the one about the researchers find that 40% of published peer-reviewed papers show signs of AI co-authorship. I'll say that one is false. Okay, Evan. The one about advertising in a movie theater increasing sales of Coke and popcorn, that is classic urban legend, like urban myth kind of stuff right there and that it was entirely fabricated. I believe that is science. Boy, I bet you there are even other examples of things like this. We know the culture just climbs onto things, whether it's true or not. And if it has legs long enough, last throughout a generation or decades or whatever, yeah, stuff like that. This would be a classic case of that, I think. So that one is science. The second one about the number of fake publications in biomedicine was at least 5.8% with 15% being suspicious, amounting to over 100,000 fake papers published every year. Holy moly. So there's more than a million biomedicine papers published every year. Yeah, that 100,000 is based on the 5.8%. So that's the lowest. That's the lowest. Millions of biomedicine. Oh my gosh. Well, I guess it's happening all over the world so then publishing all, but that's a lot. All that information. Oh my gosh. It's this last one though that I think is going to wind up being the fiction. 40% have published peer reviewed papers showing signs of AI, co-authorship and 10% being fully authored. How could you have a peer reviewed process that would allow for that? That is just why I have it at all. I mean, if you're not gatekeeping for things like that in 2025, what are you doing? So I imagine they are really doing everything within their power to stop this or detect it as best as possible. I don't think 40% of the stuff is getting through. I say that one's fiction. Okay, Bob. I agree with you guys. I think you're pretty much spot onto what I'm thinking as well. Subliminal, yeah, I've heard about it for literally decades. It wouldn't surprise me that it's fake. It wouldn't surprise me if Steve, you know, if you're whatever. Trying to med a game too much this time. I think the bottom line for me is that the bio medicine seems reasonable. 5.8, 15% sounds reasonable. For this third one with peer reviewed, 40% is just, I don't want to believe it. That would just, it's such a dramatic number. 10% fully authored, even one in 10 sounds a little bit too dramatic at this point in 2025. I hope I'm right here. So I'm gonna say this one, the 40% published peer reviewed sewing signs of co-authorship. I'll say that one is fiction and that puts me with J at this point, I think, right? And that didn't wait. And then you guys roll. Yeah, we're in the same boat. All right. Okay, and Andrea, you get to go last. Yeah, so I'm gonna go against the group here in the spirit of collective intelligence. So what's gonna be going on? So it might as well be me. Tushia. So I'm gonna go with, so I think the 5.8% bio medicine publications being fake. I think that's science. I've had anything I agree with others who said it's, it's probably higher, you know, in 15% or suspicious. I'm gonna say that the researchers find that 40% published peer reviewed papers show signs of AI co-authorship. I'm curious about what time frame is that 2025 thus far is that the last year that's coming. But since recent, this is all very recent. Just recent. Okay, I'm gonna say that that is science because I have less confidence in the peer review process, perhaps having been a part of it myself, you know, it's truly often appear. And if you're working, you know, AI co, the 40% is just AI co-authorship. So that could mean, you know, very small segments or AI and faculty who are, they should be reviewing for these things, but I don't believe that they are necessarily. And I also, this is across all fields. I bet there's some fields just pumping out some wild stuff. So I'm persuaded that that number is real, which leaves very controversial. And I'm a bit torn on this, but I'm gonna say that the experiment about popcorn and coke being fabricated, I'm gonna say that that is the fiction. And I'm largely basing that on one thing, which is I've never heard of this experiment. And so I'm not really like, oh, of course it's false, because I don't know what the study actually was. I could see a version of it just seem unlikely that we're in a world of subliminal advertising that's not fiction, but I'm gonna say that maybe the claim itself is that it never happened and was entirely fabricated. I bet some version of it happened and it got way blown out of proportion. So I'm gonna say that's the fiction. Okay, so you guys all agree on number two. So we'll start there. A recent analysis finds the number of fake publications of biomedicine was at least 5.8%. With 15% being suspicious, amounting to over 100,000 fake papers published every year, you guys all think this one is science. And this one is science. Great. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, we're not. I've read a lot of things. Huge problem. And this number is growing fast. So one thing you have to change about how you may be thinking about, you know, fake scientific papers. It's not just individual bad actors anymore. There are actually now systems of people basically like organized crime. Syndicates, you know. Or like murder. Yeah, they're paper mills, you know, cranking these things out. They hook up researchers who were trying to buy, you know, to pat out their CV by reputation with journals that will publish the article with people who will write the fake papers. And the numbers are increasing significantly. And the journals don't have a sufficient mechanism to really prevent this. You know, think about that. One in 20 papers, at least. It could be, you know, more like three in 20, you know, are fabricated or just completely fake. You know, not that they tweak the numbers or something. It's a paper mill. Part of the reason for this too is that there are so many pay-to-play journals that are a very low quality, which also impacts the third one too. You guys gotta keep in mind how many low quality, they may be technically peer reviewed, but it doesn't mean that there's somebody doing a good job there. They're just trying to publish as much as they can because they get paid per paper. Some are straight up predatory, but other ones just have really low standards. Well, their industry is gonna collapse if that's the case, I mean, right? Totally. People lose faith in the public science. And, you know, if it's just you're buried with fake papers, it's just the, it's not sustainable. Right. Well, and the cost to generate papers is basically zero on an individual level. So you can just keep pumping all, like that was the big barrier was like, oh, at least a paper takes a while to write. But that's not the case anymore. Yeah, yeah, right. Well, let's go to number three then, since these are closely related, researchers find that 40% of published peer reviewed papers show signs of AI co-authorship with 10% being fully authored by AI. The boys think this one is a fiction, Andrea, you think this one is science. The gender, the other one. And again, it's the same kind of thing. It's like, you know, are those numbers reasonable? If you're thinking that there's a ton of poor quality paper journals out there, this is another way to just pat out your CV, just have AI write a paper, publish it, and some peer paid to play rag, and there you go. I hope nobody looks too close. Yeah, yeah, and if they do, you retract it and move on, which is what they do. So this one is, this is the fiction. You guys are correct. All right. The numbers are, the numbers are, it's a nice try. I mean, I could absolutely agree with your, but your angle as well, Andrea. But we may get that. Well, it was a wrong angle, so don't agree too hard. So 10% are co-authored. That's the upper, there's no, they didn't even give it fully authored. Didn't even give it a number for a fully co-authored, fully authored by AI. I just, they found that recent studies show that 10% of published peer review papers are show signs of being co-authored by AI. So this is, you know, greatly exaggerating those numbers. Does AI have a role in these, in papers? Yeah. Right. You could use it, but not in the terms of publishing. But it shouldn't be authoring it. No. Editing, analyzing. Yeah. This means that the famous experiment in subliminal advertising and a movie theater to increase sales of Coke and popcorn never happened and was entirely fabricated is science. So yeah, this wasn't really an urban legend so much as this, an ad man, James Vickery, made it up and said it was real. And so it was, but then he later said, I was all just a quote unquote publicity stunt, which means he lied and got caught, right? But, but the thing is that it kicked off a whole generation of people believing in subliminal advertising. Yeah. I've heard this since I was a boy. Yeah, I've heard that many times. Yeah. And that's where the urban legends then take over, right? And then they've been bellish it. But the science never showed that it was true. And then eventually people did do actual research on it and it just was a complete bust. It doesn't work. Yeah. I was going to say, is there any evidence? I would be shocked. Yeah. There is priming, right? You can, you can't prime people. And you could prime people very subtly. But the idea of subliminal is that it's imperceptible consciously, but it's still affecting you. And there's no evidence for that, right? One of my favorite priming studies, not me if I've already said it, was a study where they had people come into a little cubicles in an office and like draw a picture or solve a crossword puzzle and then they gave them like a little cookie or a snack. And the treatment and control, they told them the treatment of control were something with like the puzzles. But the treatment of control were whether or not they were pumping a lemon scent into the room where they were doing the study. And the rooms that got a lemon scent, the people were more likely to pick up the wrapper from their little snack and throw it away than the ones that did have a little scent. Oh, because they wanted to maintain these perceived cleanliness. There's like, yeah, something about this smell primes us to think about cleanliness or order. Oh, there's someone in here cleaning up. I don't know exactly what the mechanism was. So why did the lemon scent all those cleaners? Right, yeah, because that's what I think about when I go, you know, or that's why everyone did it is because yeah, we're already programmed. And so we now associate it, yeah. But I mean, yeah, that's not subliminal, but it's pretty clever. And you are perceiving it. You just don't really know the effect of having it. Yeah, right. Cool. Fascinating. All right, Evan, give us a quote. This week's quote was submitted by listener, Terry from American Canyon, California. Thank you, Terry. It is easy to get international agreement and science. Scientists have all the same standards. They are set not by beliefs, but by what works best of necessity. There is therefore universal unity and unity makes for goodwill. And that was said by a burned Heinrich, who is a professor emeritus of the biology department at the University of Vermont. And an author of a number of books about nature and biology is also made major contributions to the study of insect physiology and behavior, as well as bird behavior, including talking ravens. Thanks. All right, well, Andrea, thanks for joining us. Of course, thanks for having me. I love having you. You're always awesome, Andrea. Oh, you're always awesome. This was super fun. I'm always happy to be here. And I'll be seeing you next week. We'll be recording the next two episodes of the Political Reality Podcast. And one day people, besides us, can listen to me. They'll actually be out there in the week. We're getting ahead. It's more of a personal podcast. A backlog while we do the, we're having discussions with the editor and we're sorting all that stuff out. But once they hit, they'll be every week. Yeah, that's very exciting. And it's been a lot of fun, so I'll see you then. And then you're committed. Then we're committed. That's it. Andrea, we haven't missed an episode in 20 F and years. So your dance card is going to be filled for a long time. Wow, not a single episode. Not a single week in 20 years. No, I'm impressed. And we're not stressed out at all. Yeah, and it doesn't. It doesn't. I'm not taking a toll on anyone's health yet. But now it's like, we don't want to break our record. So we've got to do it now. Yeah, if you ever miss a week, we'll all know that everyone does. Yeah, something bad happens. If we miss a week, at least two of us are dead. Yeah. Or we're about to get launched out of the solar system as a way. Exactly. That's my prediction. Yeah, Steve, if we get approached by a hypervelocity, white dwarf, I am not recording this. Noted. This is the ultimate show to record, Bob. You got to release this short one. I'm going to be with Bob. I'm going to be with Bob. Yeah. I think we're quick to that. All right, well, thanks again for joining me this week, everyone. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Skeptics Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at the SkepticsGuide.org. Send your questions to infoatthe SkepticsGuide.org. 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