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, August 2 2022. And this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob novella.
Everybody,
Cara Santa Maria
had it
and Jane and Ella.
Hey guys,
Evan is off this week. Yeah, he's otherwise engaged some family matter. And he'll be joining us for the next episode. This next episode we're going to record actually is Nexus which is it's happening probably right now as you're listening to this. And or maybe it happened to ready for listening to this after Saturday. And that's that show will be airing in two weeks. So guys, the big news this week. Sad news Nichelle Nichols passed away. She was
, man.
Good.
Yeah.
Good. good.
89 The long life what was great. So that means that only Kircher Sulu and check off or left from the bridge crew of the original series. Yeah.
You know, what I loved about about her. And that original bridge crew was when I was a kid watching the original Star Trek series, I didn't realize that there was anything special about the fact that it was a multicultural crew. You know what I mean? It wasn't just, it wasn't just humans and aliens, there was people from different parts of the world, but you know, different. The differences were important back then, it was one of the reasons why Gene Roddenberry actually, you know, constructed it that way. And she was she was key to that, because not only was she black, but she was a woman.
She was one of the first black women on TV like in a major series,
and she had a significant role. I know it's very easy to, to to denigrate. Taleo. She was basically answering the phone, right. It's like sort of the comedian one line about her. But she's actually you know, had a she was part of the bridge crew man. And I remember there was one episode I just watched it I just happen to watch for because I was we're going to be reviewing it on AQ six. Balance of Terror, where they're fighting the Romulans for the first time, and she is called to the helm, she has to actually work at the helm because the helmsman had to be called away. So she, you know, if you're on the bridge crew, we you're you're able to handle any station that that you're called upon to so anyway, it was the point is, it wasn't it wasn't a small position on the enterprise. And it was, and her character was a significant character in the show. But even she, you know, had doubts about about that character that she was portraying.
Yeah, you know, the story is she was she actually gave her resignation letter after season one to Gene Roddenberry and Martin Luther King, Jr. She was talking to him at some point, not too soon, not too far after that. And he told her like, you absolutely have to stay on the show. You don't know how unbelievably important it is, as a black woman that you're on this particular TV show?
Yeah. She is a role model.
Yeah. And he convinced her to stay. And it was, you know, it was really he felt it was very important to have that representation on TV. It really was important. It was very important.
Yeah, I'm reminded of Whoopi Goldberg was talking about it recently. And she said that when she saw it growing up, she was stopped when she was running around the house. And she was saying, you know, she was very excited, very happy. Because from her point of view, this was the first time that she had seen a black woman on TV that wasn't a maid. And to her, to her that was huge, huge. And it was I think it was huge for lots of lots of people growing up at that time this. So yeah, it was clearly a very important role.
Yeah, it's also
very important time,
it's a point that it's kind of the point that Dr. King was making, he was saying that if you leave, they could just fill anybody in that role. Like the great thing about the role you have is that it's not, there's nothing about it, that's black, there's nothing about it, that's female, it's just a strong role. They could stick an alien in there, they could stick anybody to fill your role. And so it shows that, you know, black women are people fully formed people who can have skills and who can engage. It's not just like you said, like, you're not just the maid, and how important for not just young people, not just young black people, not just young black women to see that. But white men to see valet. Yeah, you know,
we care I was a kid. I was a kid watching those Star Trek episodes. And it absolutely had an impact on my life in so many different ways. But I you know, I I remember thinking about her on that crew and not thinking anything odd about it. That's That's my point.
Yeah,
It normalized it
it normalized it
as a kid,
I wasn't looking at her as black or as a woman. I was just looking at her as one of the one of the people on the bridge, and I know it had an impact on me in my life.
Do you guys know that after Star Trek, that Nichelle Nichols went to work for NASA recruiting Women and minorities into the space program. She actually she recruited Sally Ride, who was oh my god and female astronaut.
That is awesome. I didn't know that.
Oh, and let's not forget that in 1968 Wow, what a year 1968. Think about everything that happened that year. It was the first interracial kiss on television.
Yeah, it wasn't in the US. It was but there was british one that preceded it.
Okay. Yeah. First us first interracial kiss on US television.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Which was significant. Absolutely.
And I think if I remember, trudging up some old memories here, they wanted to do multiple takes. And you know, because they were very nervous. Because the, you know, because the people from the, you know, we're very, we're very strict with what you can have and what you can't have on the show in terms of like, you know, that kind of thing. And sexual situations and all that. So if I remember correctly, William Shatner actually screwed up all the other takes to such a degree that they would never be able to use any of them except the one that you saw.
Well, he and her did that they did it together.
Oh, even better, even better.
Yeah, that's actually accurate, bob they they deliberately screwed up all the alternate takes
good for them,
you know, because they knew the system so well. They knew how much time they had. They couldn't like keep doing this, you know, that was it that time was allotted to do it. So they had no choice in the editing room, but to put that in or not show the episode, you know,
and I didn't realize that she she put out albums throughout her life. She did two albums, and they were one of them was was standards and then the other one was like rock and roll. But they they were put out while she was you know filming Star Trek, and they have those like themes like down to earth and out of this world are the names of the album's
and I can guarantee you that they are far superior to the album's that William Shatner put out.
Actually, would you know I could do a better job. If you want to know what we're talking about. Go on YouTube and look up William Shatner, Tambourine Man and you'll see everything that you need to know.
Yikes.
All right, let's move on. Bob, you're going to start us off with a quickie.
Thank you, Steve. Gird your loins everyone this is your cookie with Bob. friction in the news, specifically from the journal Nature Nanotechnology. Recently, using an electron microscope, researchers were for the first time able to image two surfaces coming into contact and sliding across each other with atomic resolution. professor of mechanical engineering and material science of growth Wang Wang said in this study, we were able to actually see the sliding pathway of interface atoms and the dynamic strain and stress evolution on the interface that has only previously been shown by simulations. Now after seeing this atomic process of friction in the real world, researchers were able to go back to the simulation to verify not only what the microscopic visualizations showed, but also understand more about the specific forces at play at the atomic scale. Wang describes one of his main takeaways from this experiment when he said, what we found is that no matter how smooth and clean the surfaces, friction still occurs at the atomic level, it's completely unavoidable. However, this knowledge can lead to better lubricants and materials to minimize friction and wear as much as possible, extending the life of mechanical systems. And also this new method can now apparently be applied to any material to learn more about the role friction and wear plays on it. And who knows what this research can do for Astroglide Lawrence unguarded. This has been your quickie with Bob. Hope it was good for you too,
Bob.
Hey, man. It's dramatic.
It's all but yeah, it's only because he's a loins girded, right. You said Astroglide.
All right. Yes, sure. All right, I'm gonna start off with news items. This is one about the neuroscience of politics.
Oh, geez.
Yeah, this is interesting. So there's a study that came out looking at fMRI scans of, you know, of different people, subjects, you know, that, you know, took a survey, you know, answered a bunch of questions so that they could be characterized from a Likert scale from one to six, you know, from very liberal to very conservative, right. So just using that just one axis, and you're liberal or conservative, which is a massive oversimplification of the political landscape, but whatever, that's the scale they used, and comparing that to different functions in the brain, looking at functional connectivity, specifically, under nine different tasks, one of which is doing nothing, and the quote unquote task is just something it's just a neurological environment that you're putting the subject under like For example. But you could be showing them images of people expressing emotion that would be one quote unquote, task, right? Another one might be a memory task. Another one was trying to get a reward by hitting a button as quickly as you could, the none of these tests had anything to do with politics or ideology, they were considered politically neutral, but they just wanted to see, just want to get the brain to light up in different ways and see if there are statistical differences between liberal brains and conservative brains, right? That was the goal of this research. This is not the first study to do this, although this is the first one to try to look at the look at functional connectivity, previous research of the neuro anatomical correlates of political ideology, as we would say, looked at more of like modules in the brain, like, which piece of the brain is lighting up versus, you know, this one is looking at different circuits in the brain lighting up, you know, the the differences are interesting, though, you know, this is a technically very complicated study, and I don't have the expertise to dissect it technically, like, I don't know, if they're using the right fMRI technique, or they use the AI to sort of analyze the data, I have no idea if their analysis is valid or not. So just wanted to talk conceptually about the research itself, you know, sort of just take the results at face value for now. Did got it, you know, got through peer review, and it will go through further analysis and attempts of replication. So that we'll put that aside. The technical analysis for now, just see, I'm sure it was it was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Right,
right.
So, which is good job. So let's, let's back up a little bit. And look at this research in general, are there brain differences between people with different political ideology? So I've already alluded to one of the issues with this research paradigm, and that is, how are you choosing the ideology to look at, and this research, they did a one dimensional liberal to conservative scale? Right,
right.
But we know that politics is about a lot more than that, you know, we have a two party system in the United States. And so things tend to sort out, you know, it's actually Democrat to Republican, but Democrats are at least several different ideologies, and Republicans are at least several different ideologies. You know, there is a there there are sort of coalition's of ideologies, and they're actually somewhat in flux in the US in the last few years. But,
but that's not what they looked at. They didn't look at Democrat.
No, they didn't they looked at liberal versus conservative, but the point of why, you know, what is? Why choose that,
you know, that's a prevailing model across all political science.
I know that but um, but my point is, it's does that reflect reality? Or is that a cultural construct? That may not reflect any kind of neurological reality?
Oh, I see. Yeah, I think the interesting thing is that it's a cultural construct that seems to hold in most cultures.
Yeah, but what parts of it though? Because what so what's totally for example, are we talking about socially liberal, right or economically liberal, or liberal in terms of foreign policy? We're what yeah, there's it breaks down met multiple different ways. And they don't always align, you know. And so it's, you can define it in different ways. And then you're looking at basically different, completely different phenomena, that you're just labeling liberal and labeling conservative,
I think the issue. I mean, obviously, this is you dug a lot deeper, but I think the issue is that if we, if we use that sort of, let's say fiscal and socially liberal conservative quad, you're going to find that there are people who are extremely liberal, which means that they are both socially and financially or economically liberal. And then you're gonna find people who are extremely conservative. So they are both financially and socially conservative, and they're going to be the most severe ends. And so if you can take the most severe ends and almost caricature them as an archetype, then you might have a better chance to see differences, but
I think they also did look at extremists versus moderates in this study, and which, to me provokes yet another question, which which is not answered by the data. And that is, so is it is it's an extreme liberal, someone who is just very liberal, or are they a liberal, who happens to have other cognitive qualities that make them extreme right or
don't even define extreme liberal because that definitely, as you mentioned, is, is culture bound like what we consider super liberal in America is like a moderate in A lot of Europeans,
it's relative to the culture. But in this case, this is a study of Americans and they looked at,
and they were using a survey, you answer these questions, and then we grade you on these questions liberal to conservative, you're right that that spectrum may be different in different countries. They may use the liberal labels differently to but we won't get into that's a different thing. But my point is, like, Are there extremists and extremists? Can indepence like as an independent variable of whether they're liberal or conservative? Or are they just people who are really conservative and people who
constructs
and maybe it's both? Maybe it's both? Maybe there are people who are whatever ideology they have, they're going to be extreme. Right? And, and, you know, if they happen to fall on the conservative side, then they would, they would rank as as an extreme conservative, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're really more conservative than a moderate conservative. They're just more they're just conservative, and they have a cognitive style that makes them extreme. But again, this is just and this is just speculation, because again, this study didn't really have any way of sorting all this out, but it's just sort of treating it as one dimensional. Are they
all neuroscientists on the study? Are there any psychologists that are in their political neuroscience, they are political neuroscientists, political neuroscientists. Interesting. Okay.
But with all that in mind, let's look a little bit the data. And then you'll also see what I mean a little bit. So the bottom line is, what they found is that all nine states, all nine tasks that they gave them showed statistical differences between people who ranked liberal and people who ranked conservative on this on their study, which is interesting. Why would you know, they basically chose nine tasks, mainly because they could do that, right? There are just easy ways to do them for fMRI studies will give them a reward task and a memory task. And whatever I got, I mean, they weren't picked because they thought they would relate to ideology. In fact, they thought that they wouldn't relate to ideology. That's why they picked them. So why did they all have show statistical differences between liberal and conservative? They the authors suspect that it's because that there are just some fundamental differences between the liberal to conservative on neurological function, if you will, that just shows up in every fMRI you do, even when they're doing nothing, you know, just, you know, the brains are just functioning differently and that and it just contaminates every every state that you look at.
And did they only look at people who, whose self like on those self report surveys who kind of fell at a certain threshold of liberality? Or conservatism?
No, that was good. That was a Likert scale, six point scale. So you could have been in the middle,
right, right. But they didn't use anybody who's like me? Well, yeah,
it was it was it was mild, liberal, liberal, extreme liberal, right? Mild, conservative, conservative, extreme conservative. Right. So those are the six points on this. And
they found significant differences between mild liberals and mild conservatives across all six. Is that surprising?
No, I think what they, if they like, included all of the liberals and included all conservatives, they showed differences. But they also looked at extremists versus moderates. And for that, I'm so I'm going to back up a little bit and just ask you guys a question. What do you think, is the factor that predicts somebody's political ideology? More than any other factor? This could be anything?
What is like, for example, like education? Something? Yeah,
yeah. age factor,
I'm gonna say where they're born family history,
Bob's correct it pretty much it's their parents, right. So your, your, whatever your parents ideology are, that is the strongest predictor of your ideology. It's, it's not where you're born. Because that because if you're a liberal born born in a red state, you're still a liberal parents, you're still going to be liberal, not red, right? Not conservative. And then, of course, this cuts both ways. This doesn't tell you if it's nature versus nurture, because you could say that they inherited the genes from their parents, but they also were raised by their parents to the liberal or to be conservative. And so you don't know. But there are twin studies, you know, you do like twins separated at birth. And that shows that it's at least partly genetic, it does appear to be at least partly genetic, but not fully, like pretty much everything with the brain, right? It's a combination of genetic and, you know, hardwiring and also environmental factors. Okay, so with that in mind, they said, How much does every you know, all of these states predict whether or not somebody will be on the liberal or the conservative end? And also, Does it predict who will be extreme versus moderate? Like who will you counting extreme as the two ends of the spectrum, the very liberal and very conservative? So first of all, they found that overall, the functional con activit connectivity patterns were as predictive as their pet the ideology of the parents,
which is like the gold standard. So it was as predictive as parental ideology. And for the tasks that they looked at, there were three that correlated the most. So there are three standouts. One was the empathy task, which was looking at pictures of people who are expressing an emotion. Right? So it was supposed to, like, how much are you reacting to the emotion that you're seeing?
Like a bleeding heart liberals? Yeah.
Well, that's not correct.
Oh, really
would that correlated with is, is being politically moderate or moderate? The reward task, on the other hand, correlated with extremism, you know, the reward task was trying to win a prize by hitting the button fast, and a retrieval task, which involved you know, there's a memory retrieval thing, and how that task was the most different among liberal to conservative spectrum, right. So you can see that you could predict
in what direction
I'm just saying, like you could, you know, you can predict based upon the way their brains looked on that task, if they're liberal or conservative more than other tasks.
Yeah. But I'm saying what it like, what was the pattern?
It's a statistical thing using AI looking at the patterns on fMRI scans. So I'd have to show you pictures of fMRI scans.
Okay, so they weren't using predefined circuitry that they know is like, Okay, this is a reward circuitry or this retrieval circuitry, and we want to see who has is loading more on it and who's loading.
Now they were just saying what's happening in the brain when we haven't do this? Oh, in this lab, let's now let's see if they sort out into different patterns. And
then we're can we use those patterns to predict their and their how they scored on the on the test? You know, I'm a liberal,
interesting.
So it's almost like, it's meaningful insofar as it has predictive power. But it's not really meaningful insofar as it tells us anything,
right? We don't know what it tells us. Yeah. So this is really hypothesis hunting, if you will, because they're just saying, Hey, what's going on in the brain when we give liberals and conservatives different tasks? Oh, I wonder what that means? What does it mean that certain patterns in your brain when you're doing a reward task, predict if you're an extreme extremist or a moderate? You know,
there's also no way to know if we're just loading on a completely different construct that like,
exactly
confabulating variable, kind of like those old studies where it's like, we took smokers and compare them to non smokers, and we ask them X, Y, and Z. And it's like, well, but maybe it's because the smokers drink more coffee? Or maybe it's because our problem
I'm sure there's confounding factors go in this kind of study, because we don't get we don't we and this is what I was alluding to at the top of this is that we don't know that we are dealing with fundamental phenomena, or just, you know, one or two layers removed from those fundamental, we don't it? What is it about someone that makes them liberal like liberal, this may not be a thing unto itself neurologically, it's just a cultural manifestation of more fundamental neurological functions, like you could think of things like empathy, for example. And but then, what's that? What is empathy? Is that even a fundamental neurological function? Or is that a manifestation of other things that are happening in the brain, other circuits that are firing? And so was true, we're trying to dig down, but we are not at at the base level yet.
No, and but there's something about the there's like a face validity, kind of component to this, which has long interested me, and I'm assuming it really interests, the author's to that there's something that feels fundamental about ideology. Because once you sort of start to develop an awakening into ideology, you know, as your as your child, you don't really know what's going on in the world. But once you start to say, this becomes part of my identity, it actually is very fundamental to a lot of people's identities. It's very rare for people to switch parties, unless there's some sort of personal insult to their reasoning. Like, currently, their party fails them.
Yeah. We're like the were you going through a realignment like we're like we're doing now.
Exactly. Yeah.
So you'll go so this study does not tell us if what the arrow of causation is right, looking for only for correlation. So it doesn't tell us that people are liberal there because their brains function this way. They could be that their brains function this way, because they're liberal,
right? Because these are pathways these aren't like this is just used in disuse kind of stuff.
Right? Exactly. This could just well be learned, you know, this could be the patterns of functioning in the brain because this because you were raised this way, rather than predisposed to being liberal or conservative, doesn't answer that. I also think it doesn't answer if these things that we're looking at like the circuits in the brain that we're looking at. If they are fundamental to ideology or incidental to ideology. We don't know that but There's one other way to sort of look at this data, which is interesting. And that is, so what are the parts of the brain that were different? Let's just ask that question from liberal to conservative, not the necessarily the functional circuits or what tasks they were doing, but just the what parts of the brain were involved. And they were mostly the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the frontal lobes. So those are all involved with emotional processing. And that's very provocative in my opinion, because that suggests that ideology is really tied very strongly to emotional processing. It wasn't so much the more rational cognitive parts of the brain, it was the emotional parts of the brain that were able to predict liberal to conservative extreme to moderate. So it's really, your political ideology may say more about our emotional makeup than our cognitive style, which is interesting to think about, which kind of does jibe with other you know, other research that shows that we tend to come to opinions that are emotionally salient to us, based upon our our emotional instincts, and then post hoc, rationalize them with motivated reasoning, which is why it's so hard to resolve political or ideological or religious disagreements with people aren't reasoning their way to them in the first place. They're just using motivated reasoning to backfill their emotional gut instinct. And that's really their worldview, what feels right to them. Now, this I this, this is the way it is because it feels right to me. And I will make sure I figure out a way to make it make sense. And it's why sometimes you have to shake your head at the moment at the motivated reasoning that the quote unquote, other side is engaged in. But of course, we all do this. This is a human condition.
It also kind of speaks to I mean, I'm curious if you agree, but it speaks to, I think, a fundamental construct that's involved in political discourse or political thinking, which is moral reasoning. And moral reasoning is fundamentally emotive, like is cognitive and emotive. But you can't strip emotive reasoning away from moral philosophy. It's part of totally,
yeah, totally. Yeah, we feel injustice. Yeah, absolutely. And then we've then we've then we rationalize why that's unjust. Because if we feel at first,
if we were totally cognitive, and like a kind of extreme example of like, a cool, cold, calculated cognitive, the humanism would be not there. That's also dangerous.
Yeah, and that's why I kind of like science fiction shows that explore that through characters that have a different emotional makeup than humans like volgens, or Androids or whatever. Because it's like they are they have only rational reasoning, no emotional reasoning. And it's just a good thought experiment. What would that result in? And even to the point of taking what seemed like really extreme moral positions, but they make perfect rational sense, right? But they don't feel right. They don't feel right to us. So they gotta be wrong. All right. Let's move on. Very fascinating. This is something that I sort of follow. And so I'm sure we'll be talking about this. And again, in the future, and this is one tiny slice of obviously, very complicated phenomenon. No one study is going to give us the answer as to what like a liberal brain is or a conservative brain or even if there is such a thing, but it is very interesting. All right, Jay, this is cool. Actually, it literally and figuratively. Cool. Tell us about lava tubes, and the temperature of them.
Alright, first, I want to start by saying, Bob just calm down. Yeah.
I tried to select this topic for this week, and I was shut down. So
I was very surprised when you said Jay and not.
God, I need you to breathe.
Breathe, man. Just get your facts right, baby.
Alright, so we've talked about lava tubes as potential locations for future future Moon habitats, haven't we? Quite? Well, a little later in this news item, I'm going to blow your mind about lava tubes. But let me let me fill your brain a little bit with some interesting things that will make you appreciate it even more. So I recently talked about I think it was last week about the Artemis one mission that could be launching very soon. This mission sends an uncrewed command module in orbit around the moon. If everything goes well, the Artemis two mission which will be crude can launch as early as 2025. It's NASA's intention. This is important there. It's their intention to send people to the surface of the moon, build habitats and have people live there. That's what they want. And I couldn't agree with this more. This is the best thing that I think they could be doing right now. I imagine that this whole effort is going to be similar to how people stay on the space station right you know, they rotate crew on and off. So they probably will rotate crew to and from the moon. Some of them will be staying for longer periods of time. They'll conduct experiments and that's On point, they'll start building a place for future visitors to live. There's a ton of details that we all have to consider about people living on the moon, especially NASA, NASA. NASA has been thinking about this for a long time. First, what the moon has no atmosphere, almost. There's a tiny little bit of atmosphere on the Moon. It's about as dense as the atmosphere that's around the space station, which is in low Earth orbit. There is atmosphere there. But it is essentially a vacuum. Not a fastback fascinated to. It's tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny. I mean,
one example I heard Jay, if you took the air that's within, like a baseball or football stadium in the United States, that kind of size, if you take the air that's inside that and spread it around the moon, that's the density we're talking about.
Yeah, it's
quite fascinating though. It's a thing. It's a it's a thing.
So Bob has a point of curiosity, an average human can stay conscious for about 20 seconds in a vacuum.
Yep. About
and the next thing about the moon that we have to be concerned with is the temperature. The moon has extreme temperatures, the daytime temperature there is 260 degrees Fahrenheit or 126 degrees Celsius. Nighttime, it goes way down to minus 20 280 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 173 degrees Celsius. Super hot, super cold. So with no atmosphere or magnetosphere, visitors on the moon will also be exposed to solar wind and cosmic rays. This means that the moon's habitat has to provide a lot of amenities in order for people to stay for long periods of time. So all that said, keeping in mind how hostile the surface of the Moon is, it's looking like lava tubes are even more awesome than we thought. NASA figured out that some lava tubes have a consistent enter temperature of 63 degrees Fahrenheit or 17 degrees Celsius.
Do I need to repeat that?
Amazing,
amazing, it's like the perfect temperature. It's the perfect freakin temperature, you know, or within 10 degrees of the perfect time i God for people to live, you know, it's like the perfect fall day literally put it that way. And these lava tubes can be as big as 1600 to 3000 feet, or 500 to 900 meters in diameter, which is very, very large, which is fascinating as well. And there's a reason why lava tubes are large on the moon, it's because there's less gravity, right so the more gravity a planet has, the smaller the lava tubes get, well, the moon doesn't have a lot of gravity. So the lava tubes got to be really big. Now lava tubes can also if we build habitats in them, they also can help block harmful effects of radiation and micro meteor impact which happens quite often on the moon, it might even be possible to pressurize a lava tube. Even if like we can't pressurize a lava tube. For example, there's still a massive benefit to building a habitat inside of a lava tube itself. So first of all, who would have thought that lava tubes have a cozy temperature that's saying that I've been rattling around in my head last few days, I just simply can't believe that these things are a perfect temperature for humans to live at. NASA figured this out by analyzing data from the diviner lunar radiometer that's onboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The data shows that the consistent lunar cycle which is 15 straight days of light, and then 15 days of dark, the DIVINER instrument measure the temperature of the lunar surface for over 11 years. And when the sunlight is hitting the surface, the temperature like I said before it skyrockets way up. And then when it gets dark, the temperature plummets very quickly, way, way down to a very, very low temperature. So there's things that are called pits that are on the moon, and most of these were likely created by meteor strikes, right? That 16 of these pits so far that have been discovered, likely dropped out into a lava tube, right, so there's a meteor strike, it creates a hole, that hole cracks into a lava tube that was below the surface. Right? Can you visualize that?
16 of them were prob are probably a lot of collapse into a lava tube. But there's no reason to think that they're from meteor strikes. It's just that the the ground over the lava tube collapsed into the lava tube.
Oh, it sounded to me like those were Meteor sites.
Now the other ones the other pits are caused by meteor strikes.
Alright, but the important fact here is that the important fact here is that they collapsed down into a lava tube for some, right? You have a you have a hole, the
ceiling of the lava tube collapsed, you know, fell in because it was unstable, whatever. It could have been from a nearby impact, you know, shook it and cracked the rocks, whatever, whatever just something happened. And it eventually collapsed down.
Now the pits have something though that's important. They have a protective overhang that blocks some of the sunlight
right? That's critical it seems for this for this cozy to temperature that seems very critical.
Yeah, this this, I guess, Bob without that rocky overhang that's partly covering up the hole that was made it things wouldn't behave the exact right way in order to create this nice even temperature. But so it does a couple of things, it blocks light from coming in, and it also inhibits retained heat from leaving too fast. Now, this is probably why the temperature stays at such a nice temperature. This is called black body equilibrium, by the way, with a constant temperature of 17 degrees Celsius or 63 degrees Fahrenheit, there's less than in this is my point, there's less than a one degree Celsius variation throughout the 30 day lunar cycle.
It's amazing how efficient that is.
So if we get lucky one of these pits will indeed connect to a pre existing lava tube. And if we find that we're in business,
yeah, they also their simulations also showed that that one degree variance that 63 degrees, or 17 degrees Celsius with one degree Celsius variants probably holds true throughout the entire lava tube.
Yeah, so I was wondering,
so now we have a lava tube.
That could be pretty long, right? It could be it could be very long. And you know, it has a pretty large diameter.
Huge Yeah, because a little gravity make can make them go much bigger than anything found on the earth,
we're absolutely going to investigate these these lava tubes and these pits and see what we find. And if if things happen correctly, the way that we want them to, then we most definitely will, we'll be building some type of habitat inside of one of these woods to good, it's just two
benefits really seems like a no brainer in a lot of ways because the surface of the Moon is far deadlier than people generally can appreciate. Jay, you mentioned, you mentioned the the micro meteoroids, absolutely, these things can come in. And if you get hit, you will be taken out. I don't care what you're wearing. But but not only that, even if it hits near you, the debris that's kicked up can cause damage could ruin habitats. So that you've got that you mentioned the radiation, cosmic radiation, solar radiation, and also the radiation that's created at your feet by the rate by the other radiation that's hitting the ground by your feet can also do more damage ended the other things that you didn't quite mention, Moon Dust is horrible. The astronauts hated hated it more than Darth Vader when he was a kid who's a pump and cat advocate. He he they hated it more more than he hated sand because that stuff, think about it. You've got abrasive, I know it's sharp, it's sharp edges, there's no weathering, there's no water, it's very sharp, you you breed that in not good. And it also gets everywhere. We got to get you know, people are going to want to get away, you cannot stay there. Yeah, you can stay there for three days, like our astronauts did, that's fine. But if you're gonna stay there for longer than that, you got to get out of that that is a horrible place to be for an extended period of time. And it's like right there waiting for us. Now it's even more comfortable than we thought, you know, it's just a much better place and much safer. It to me. I mean, you're going to spend resources and the money to dig deep holes and bury yourself into the regolith that way. I mean, when there's places just waiting for you that are better gargantuan.
Now, Bob, how about a pressurized lava tube? Sure,
if there's one that's deep enough that it can hold pressure, all you'd really need to do is build two end caps. Yeah, airlocks right, that will contain the airlocks and you might have to smooth out the the interior surface and maybe even coded to reduce any leakage. You pressurize that thing and you just kind of you got to a huge underground city
right? And also it's not like what people think that you think oh, you get a little crack and whatever in this in this block in this block area so that the the air maintains pressure, you get a little colder crack and the air is going to go rushing out and people are going to get sucked out No, you wouldn't actually have hours and hours and hours and maybe even days before this would reach a critical threshold. You have time to fix these. These any any problems, any cracks or holes that might appear. You have time. It's not like Red Alert. It's more like a soft yellow alert.
I read a good science fiction story I forget which one but there was this was aboard a ship at the principal could apply. You basically have these floating balloons that are filled with a sticky substance.
I have this story as well.
Yeah, yeah, if there's a leak, the balloons would float to the leak. Again, the you know, when they get into the crack, they break and automatically fill it with the sticky substance that seals the crack. So you could have this just these balloons floating around in the lava tube that would just automatically passively seal. At least you know, small size cracks. Not if not bigger ones.
That's pretty cool.
But you'd probably want to have some airtight habitats inside there as a backup. I wouldn't want to shore two layers but absolutely. You know, maybe you're Living in the habitats, but you can have a farm that is just in the, you know, the regolith, just in the lava tube. But with artificial lighting, you could put a friggin nuclear power station down there.
Yeah, baby.
So yeah, I think if we're going to build any permanent or long term, large bases or settlements on the moon, they're going to be in lava tubes.
I mean, it's so provocative, right though it just it just, it's like stories writing itself, I'm just envisioning all the cool things that we could be doing in there. And, you know, imagine, you could go to the moon eventually, you know, there might be a living space, you know, where people can go to the moon and vacation there for a week. You know what I mean? That's incredible.
Why No, Kara is probably asking herself right now, why would we even go to the moon? Like, why have bison people there? Why not just send rocket robots there to do whatever we want? I mean, there are definitely, you know, you could make an argument for we should do whatever we need to do on the moon with with robots. But there are lots of things to do on the moon, like research, industry. Mining, you know, if if we end up using h3 for our fusion reactors, then the best source of that is a lunar surface, and as a platform. So if we want to get to the rest of the, you know, the rest of the solar system, the moon, we're going to go through the moon. And
the question isn't why it's should we? It's not why would we it? Should we? Well,
if there are reasons to go? Thou shalt those reasons. Yeah, which they are.
I will agree with some of them, but not all
of them. But I think that also, you know, it's good to have humanity not on one planet, in case something happens. Yeah.
There's always that Which reminds me, of course of an image is still image that this is kind of unforgettable, where you see an astronaut on the moon, looking at the Earth, and you see the Earth has just been basically run through by a, like a mini planet. So the earth is basically been utterly destroyed. And this guy's looking at it happens, like, Oops, whoa,
that
will that be one we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week. Better help.
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Alright guys, let's get back to the show. Okay, Kara, tell us about video games and well being this endless debate that we seem to be having.
Yeah, so new study, really interesting. Very, very large study. So I'm just going to ask you guys point blank. What do you think? Does playing video games have a detrimental impact on wellbeing? No,
I would say generally, no, unless you abuse it, like, like, like anything else things. Yeah. Okay. But not especially what do
you think? Does playing video games have a positive impact on wellbeing? It can.
I think it can probably not generically, but I think it can in some contexts,
right? So this study looked at, probably it was more on the generic side than on the specific context side. Because it was a really, really large study. Ultimately, they looked at 38,935 players data, and it started way bigger than that, like hundreds of 1000s. But of course, with attrition, and people not getting back and dropping out of the study, they ended with 38,935 solid participants in this study. So that's a big, big, big data set. Their basic takeaway was there's pretty much no causal connection between gameplay and well being at all, it doesn't improve doesn't. It's not detrimental. It has no effect at all on well being for the most part. Of course, we want to deal with that. Yeah. So they looked at something else, which was kind of interesting, which we'll get to in a second, which is the motivation for playing and how that motivation might be. sort of underlying variable. But first, let's talk about what they actually did. So it was pretty cool. These researchers were able to partner with, I think it was seven different gaming publishers gaming companies. And in doing so they were able to get direct objective data about frequency of play, because they found that most of the, you know, obviously, the reason for this study is exactly what you asked at the beginning, Steve, like this endless debate. And what we've seen is that there's a fair amount of public policy like legislation, and not just here in the US, but across the globe, that directly concerns the fear that playing video games is detrimental to health, but it's not evidence based. Like there's, the researchers cited that in China, there is like a limit to the number of hours people are allowed to play video games a day, for fear that if somebody plays longer than that, it can be detrimental. And they were like, Okay, if we're making like policy decisions based on this, we should probably get to the bottom of whether whether or not this is even true, because the data is complex. So they were like, a lot of the data when you look at previous studies is subjective in nature, or it's, I shouldn't say it's self report. So not only are individuals saying this is how I feel, but they're also saying, Oh, I kept a journal and yeah, look, I played seven hours yesterday, or I play an average of two hours a week and it's like, Okay, we just got to take your word for it. So what they decided to do is figure out how to partner with these different companies. So they partnered with Nintendo and EA, nice and Microsoft and Square Enix and Sony. And so they looked at a handful of games. They were Animal Crossing New Horizons that was Nintendo Apex legends, which was EA EVE Online, which is CCP Games, Forza Horizon four which is a Microsoft Game, Gran Turismo Sport, which is Sony outriders, which is Square Enix and the crew two, which is that last one Ubisoft, and they had players from, I think they wanted to make sure that there were English speaking so that they could complete all of the surveys, but they had players from all over the world, English speaking world, Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, UK, US. And they basically said, Hey, if you play this game regularly, you can participate in this research study they defined regularly as you've played, let's see in the past two weeks to two months, and then they were able to objectively record based on these players who participated the hours that they logged on these games, yes. And then they were cross referencing that or they were actually doing their statistical, statistical analysis, comparing those numbers to the different self report surveys. Oh, nice. Yeah. And they used multiple different self report surveys. So let me find them here. So they use something called the Spain which is the scale of positive and negative experiences. That's a Likert. Scale one to seven, where people basically just say how frequently they felt a certain way in the past the past two weeks. So like, How often did you feel this positive experience or this negative feeling so you know, from very rarely to always, or never to always, they also used the Cantrill self anchoring scale, and that asks participants to imagine a ladder with steps from zero to 10. The top of the ladder is the best possible life for you. The bottom is the worst possible life, which step were you on in the last two weeks?
And then they did some very, very complicated statistical analysis where they basically, were comparing how often people were playing like the time that they spent playing, and also the changes in the time like, did they play more or less over the time that they measured them? Because I think they'd had three different measurement points, this sort of before, during and after. And they were slightly different. This is one of the problems with doing this kind of study where they're using the publishers to help provide the data because of course, the collections were slightly different between them, but they were able to sort of normalize everything, and look at these changes over time. And that's how they were able to statistically try to develop a measure of causality. So it's not that they were
they didn't study anyone would limit how would they do it? Like people that aren't playing games?
I don't think they had a control group at all of non game players. But I don't think it would be that hard to just look at the norms data tables of you know, responses to the ladder and the Spain the Cantril, self anchoring scam, the st. They're all gonna have norms, tables, there's going to be a bunch of published literature on like, pretty much every demographic you can think of and how just like people standardly answer those scales. So you can like us So that as an anchor, but what they what they were able to do is, by using this, the the type of statistical analysis that they utilize, they were able to sort of model causality. And you see this quite a lot with sophisticated statistics. So if you're not doing a randomized controlled, double blind, placebo controlled trial, basically, if you're not saying, Here's time point a, here's time point B, we're going to give half of them a placebo and half of them a drug. And then we're going to actually see what the outcome was, it's very hard to say whether or not something is causal, you know, when you're looking at like longitudinal data or sampling data across time points. But there are statistical ways to try to model causality, the basic outcome of looking at the amount of time was that if a person played more, or if a person played less, it neither improved nor decreased their well being statistically, there were some small changes, but none of them reached any sort of statistical significance. And they they sort of utilizing some not terribly sound, but interesting guestimation. They were like, let's assume that there's linearity. And let's assume that some of these response categories are equally distant. Basically, the outcomes looked like they could say, this is not based on the data, it's based on projecting the data into the future, that the average player would have to play like 10 more hours per day than typical to notice a change in their well being Wow. Yeah. And also that even if there was a steady accumulation over time of training, because of course, they were only looking at like a six week window. But even if there was a steady accumulation over time, players would only notice a difference after they were playing that much for 17 weeks straight. And that's all again modelled because they were only looking at the data that they collected. So they were saying, based on this data, assuming things like linearity, it would take this long to notice a difference because these differences that we saw were so small, they weren't they didn't reach any statistical significance. But what they did find was a wholly different question, which was an important and interesting one, which was, Why are these people playing video games to begin with? And maybe the y gives us some indication of well being outcomes, right? Isn't the game play? No, we're not saying that playing more or playing less is having any sort of effect on well being? But is it the motivation for why they're playing and they looked at internal and external motivation? So they used as a measure called the pens, which is the player experience and need satisfaction scale, which asks the different study participants to think about the past two weeks of playing the game? And answer questions on a Likert scale, about a bunch of different constructs, like your sense of autonomy, your sense of competence, your sense of how related you felt to other people. And then two big ones. intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation were you playing because you want it to were you playing because you felt pressure from the outside to play. So interestingly, they found that when they were comparing intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation on, they looked at two different things effect, which is like their, their the way that their mood was represented, and also life satisfaction, they actually found a positive relationship between the two. And they found an a negative relationship between effect and life satisfaction and extra extrinsic motivation. So basically, if people felt drawn to play because of external pressures, they also were more likely to show a trend towards negative life satisfaction and, and poor effect. If people were internally motive motivated to play they played because they wanted to, you actually saw a positive relationship there. So basically, what the study authors say, and they list all the limitations, you know, we've got a lot of standard limitations of this study, certain types of conclusions can be drawn, we only looked at seven different games, maybe different types of people play different types of games may be games that are more like fighting games, or more like driving games or you know, whatever, might have different outcomes. But basically, they're saying, not sure these policies that say we need to limit the amount of time people are spending playing video games, because it's so detrimental to their mental health are evidence based, because our study shows that we couldn't find a relationship between the amount of time these people were playing and their well being, or at least their self reported well being and we know how much time they were playing, because we have objective measures of it.
What if somebody or some or country government replied, Well, sure, but what the games though, that are more violent, those are the ones that we need to
write. And that's, you know, that's what they talk about in their limitations, like they could only access the stuff than games, the seven games, you know, they didn't do any sort of scale to say they were, you know, from less violent to more violent, but they do obviously in their intro and their discussion section cite other studies that show and we've talked about this before on this show a lack of evidence supporting that violent video games have much of an outcome at all. And you know that the relationship is complicated, because some psychologists will show studies and they'll actually show good supporting evidence and theories based on that good supporting evidence that certain types of violent play allow for an outlet. Yeah, and others will show that certain types of violent play exacerbate. And so it is complicated,
good evidence that there's good evidence to show that violent games can exacerbate and
no, I'm saying violent play across the board. Right? Not necessarily video games, per se, but a lot of that has to do with who's playing them. And you have to remember that too, if a person who has certain personality styles, certain maybe DSM diagnoses, a history of torture, violent, you know, something like that, yes, you're probably going to see exacerbation in utilizing violent play paradigms. But you might also see it's sort of the the age old argument about I think we talked about this years ago on the show, do you guys remember when we talked about child pornography, and specifically modeling of child pornography sort of digitization, so they're not real people, and whether this was a healthy outlet for individuals who are ready, feel drawn towards engaging in this and want a healthy outlet to be able to do it legally and safely? Where there are no victims? Is that going to contribute and exacerbate their behavior and codify it and normalize it? Or is that something where they're going to do it anyway? So how do we give them a safe usage that doesn't harm individuals, right? So I think there is a more complicated conversation to be had there. But when it comes to general use, you know, everyday people, sort of vanilla test subjects who aren't scoring high on certain, you know, psychopathologies and don't have violent histories, and bla bla bla bla bla, yeah, a lot of the data shows that there's no correlation at all between playing violent video games and violence in the real world. And so you add that to this very interesting study, that shows that also playing for a lot, you know, the more I play doesn't make me sadder, or less connected or more angry or feel like my well being is worse off. People. I do think that governments organizations, EDUC academic and educational organizations, even parents, something to think about, it's really something to think about, you know, this is a person to person experience. I think you know, your children well, but let's not just assume that because somebody's playing video games, they have poor well being because the evidence
just doesn't bear that out. Yeah, it's a moral panic kind of thing. You
know, it's like Satanic Panic of the of the 90s. Yeah, absolutely.
whose role playing games are going to turn kids into demon worshippers?
And why isn't this going away after all these years? I know. People
are afraid of things they don't know. They want
easy scapegoats
too. Good. It's a compelling media narrative also. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Interesting. Thank you, Kara. Bob, tell us about the latest research trying to image dark matter.
Yeah, a lot of dark matter news. Recently, this one caught my attention. Australia finished its first round of experiments for its first major Dark Matter detector, called the oscillating resonant group ACCION, also called Oregon. So I figured it'd be good to do a little primer, to put this into context. So when you're looking into a dark matter detector, and you don't know much about it, one of the first questions should be, well, what kind of hypothetical type of dark matter isn't made to look for. So there's two broad classifications there's hot dark matter, and cold dark matter, you probably heard the latter one much more than the first one here. So hot dark matter. What is it hot in this context means fast as in near Lightspeed and dark. The word dark, of course, implies that it does not interact much with matter or light, basically, almost invisible in a lot of ways. So an example of hot dark matter would be a neutrino. It's it goes very, very close to the speed of light, because it's nearly massless, but not totally masses, but it goes very, very fast. And it's really neutrinos. I remember, when they found out that they had mass. They thought for a little while that mail maybe this is what dark matter is, but no, it's just not a popular candidate for dark matter these days. Then you have the other big category cold dark matter. So cold in this context means slow compared to the speed of light, and the two major classes of cold dark matter that I'll talk about our mottos and wimps. which was pretty funny when they, you know, when they first came out because there's such, you know, macho and when two ends of the spectrum. So Macho is an acronym for massive, astrophysical, Compact Halo object. So this was actually one of the very first mottos it was one of the very first candidates for, for dark matter. It seemed, you know, it seemed kind of obvious. Oh, yeah, maybe neutron stars or brown dwarfs or primordial black holes, they could potentially, you know, if you add them all up, add up all the masses, maybe that's what dark matter is, maybe there's halos of these much more than we than we than we would ever think a massive halos of these around, say every all the galaxies that are causing this extra mass that we can't see. But it didn't take that long before. It's basically now considered to be very unlikely. The data just doesn't show enough of these. Like I remember reading about some studies looking for primordial black holes and gravitational lensing that they would cause and they're just not seen enough of them out there to possibly be considered a candidate a serious candidate for dark matter. The other one of the other big option for cold dark matter is wimps. This group, I think is the one that's getting the lion's share of research these days. Wimp stands for weakly interacting massive particles, weakly in this context, I just found out to me, I always thought that they interact weakly right, they just don't interact a lot. But actually, a refers to the weak force. When it says weakly interacting massive particles. A wimps are assumed to be non baryonic, so they are not made of protons, neutrons, quarks, etc. And there's some examples here, you might not have heard of the Kaluza Klein particle is a potential wimp candidate for cold dark matter, acoustic clues a client particles are supposedly potentially curled up in a hidden fifth dimension, and we therefore cannot see them, you look, no matter where you look, you're not going to see this particle, because it's hidden away in a super tiny fifth dimension. But the theory states that it should be able to decay into neutrinos and photons, which we don't see in our accelerators. So that means perhaps that that this doesn't exist, or maybe our accelerators just aren't powerful enough to see them. And one day we made would not be interesting. We have a solution to dark matter. And we have a hidden fifth dimension. That will be pretty amazingly awesome. The other potential wimp that is an example of cold dark matter is gravity nose, and travertino is a silly name and I won't discuss it anymore.
And then we have another whip is an ACCION and this is what Australia's Oregon experiment is looking for ACCION, X yawns are hypothetical particles, they were theory theorized decades ago, initially to deal with CPE violations of the strong force. So you don't know what that is? Well look it up. It's out of scope today, but it's worthy of a rabbit hole. If these axons exist, they would move very slowly and would interact, they wouldn't interact much at all. But we do know that they would likely have a very certain mass range, because they would need to have a minimum and maximum mass. Because if they were heavier or smaller than we would see them. So that's pretty solid. So if you're going to look for these, you're going to you should you need to look within this mass range. And that's what people have been doing. The other major part of the series says that x yawns should be able to transform by very, very strong magnetic fields into into photons. And I think also what neutrinos as well. Regarding Oregon, Dr. Ben McAlister, from the University of Western Australia said it's IT engineers and corrects conditions for ACCION photon conversion and looks for weak photons signals, which are little flashes of light generated by dark matter matter passing through the detector. So the big engineering problem then here is dealing with a noise and I'm not talking about the machine making loud noises like Jay eating meatball after meatball at dinner. Oh, God happens all the time. noise noise in this context refers to the random light signals that are caused by the high temperatures, which are in turn caused by the intense magnetic fields themselves. So this the heat creates random light that tends to swamp out any of the photons that would be caused by axons that have been converted into photons and then being detected. So they had to deal with that. And apparently they have they have dealt with that. So what happened? What happened after Oregon's recent experimental run? They basically found no X yawns at all zip zero Zero zilch. And how does that expression and what's the last one? Nada? Yes, very good. Steve, you are very well convert versant with nada, zip, zero zip, zilch, nada. And that sounds bad, right? That sounds they didn't say looked, they didn't find it. Holy crap. That's not good. But that doesn't mean it's not good. It's not necessarily bad. That reminds me of the quote attributed to Edison, I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. So it's kind of similar to this ACCION research, this lack of discovery is just one, it's really one step forward towards the goal of discovering that dark matter is made of axioms, or we're not, it's we're still going in the right direction. So to clarify that, I'll give you another quote by McAllister, he said, when we don't see any little flashes, as was the case, this time, we instead place exclusion limits, where we rule out axons that our experiment would have been sensitive to. So then we tell the rest of the Dark Matter community, hey, no dark matter here. And we move on to search for X eons of a different mass. So basically, there's a chunk of mass ranges that this that x eons could have. And they basically just took away a little piece of that they get up they can't be there. Let's look over here. So as you may have guessed, this was just Oregon's phase one future phases. We'll be testing other unexplained unexplored mass ranges. And hopefully there will be there'll be quite quite a day if they if they did find it. And we did find out that dark matter is composed at least partly of these axons. So explaining the significance of their quest, McAlester had another good quote, he said, we never would have discovered the TriCity or radio waves if we didn't pursue things that at the time appeared to be strange physical phenomena beyond our understanding, dark matter is the same. So yeah, I, you know, this is was a very interesting experiment. And going through it that, you know, there wasn't a huge amount of meat necessarily in this specific news item. It was pretty simple. You know, here's the experiment. They looked for it. They didn't find it, but, but I think the significance of the idea that they're just, they're just eating away at one possibility. And eventually, they'll have Swan at some answers one way or the other, at least, according to ACCION. And I also thought it was, it was fun to just give a little primer on you know, what exactly the different types of cold and have a dark matter with a cold or hot or whatever. So this is kind of a fun little research thing. So that's it.
Yeah, it's a good reminder that negative results are results, and they do push the ball forward, they remind you of like the the experiments looking to see if the earth was at rest, with respect he asked for it wasn't moving with respects to the ether? And the answer was no, it's neither. And they're free experiment. They did show there is no ether. And but if there's no ether, then what is light propagating through what is light removing at speed, see, with respect to that eventually led to the answer of everything and the theory of relativity. Yeah. Reality. Okay. So that was a negative result that that transformed physics. So it's good to remember that.
And it's good also, that they didn't just double and triple and quadruple down. And because we've seen that, of course, and in our community, we see that where we're like, remember that, that that flat Earth show where they they did a really differently definitive test with a, you know, with, with a laser beam that would have that, you know, that would have gone above the hole that they that they created, because of the the curvature meant that it went above and they're like, wait a second, and for a second, you know, you could see them just flirting with the idea, or wait, the best explanation here is that the earth is a sphere, and it's not flat, and you see them kind of nibble at it for a second, right? And then they're like, we did something wrong. And then then they totally double and triple down and said, No, the earth is flat. And something is wrong with the experimental setup. It's like, oh, yeah, and she's like, Come on, guys.
There was so much of that in that movie. It was so brilliant. I mean, my favorite was the woman who was, you know, a conspiracy theorist, but then someone who was even more nerdy than her was, was had a conspiracy theory about her. And she was saying, Well, this guy is just making stuff up and doing a and b, and then she like, looks off it goes, Is it possible that that's what I'm doing? Like she had this moment of insight but wait a minute, that Oh, yeah. And then she had a total Theodoric of your moment. Like that, you know, like
she Oh my god, you're right. I'm alright. And what a great
scene. Yeah, I just, you know, there was a lot of that or Ah, yeah, we should do this experiment this global spend $20,000 on a gyroscope that will show that the Earth is not rotating. UPS it Israel. Turning. Okay. Huh? motivated reasoning kicks in. And then eventually they figured out that it's because this sky is moving around the Earth. That's what's making the gyroscope what was dragging it along with it. So there's been some new physics there. But yeah, just to die movie is a master work of just documenting the process of conspiracy thinking and motivated reasoning and how people can get stuck in it just wonderful. All right, so frustrating. Okay, let's move on. We're going to we're going to skip ahead to a few emails. We had some fun emails. These are just like kind of quick science questions or science feedback. So it's gonna go through a few. First one comes from David Allen from Stuttgart, Germany and David writes, I've just recently heard about your podcasts and have downloaded many of the back numbers which explain why my feedback has to do with an old podcast in podcast 891 Is not that old. chirality was a topic of discussion that this term was coined by Lord Kelvin aka William Thompson, one of the broadcasters used a posh English accent in connection with this, practically assuming this would be the accent Lord Kelvin spoken, actually having been born in Belfast and brought up from an early age in Glasgow he was a pronounced he had a pronounced Scottish accent. Furthermore, he was not a hereditary Pierre. I have seen something similar in one of the around the world in 80 days where he was also given an upper class English accent and manners. Imagine if Benjamin Franklin was similarly misrepresented in a film or documentary. Otherwise, I thoroughly enjoy your podcast Keep up the good work.
Benjamin Franklin always have a posh upper class English accent and every film about him too. Because it was colonial everybody talked like this in colonial America,
but it wasn't a British accent. It was a close yeah, accent Well, fine,
whatever.
But yeah, so I didn't know that I mean, so Lord Kelvin Yeah, was born William Thompson. He's He's considered Scot Irish. And he was knighted and became Sir William Thompson because of his scientific contributions, and then later landed and became a baron Lord Kelvin, but we I was not I wasn't a hereditary title for him. I guess he was he was granted it. But he would have had a Scottish accent.
Not okay. But to be fair, also, Scottish accents are really hard to
do. Yeah, I think we do
the we do the posh British accent cuz that's the one we could do not because
yeah, because it's intentionally a caricature.
Yeah, well, not just that my take on that was and I think probably was a J who maybe did that accent? My My take is this is that because to me in my mind, Lord Kelvin, to me seems like he would have just by the fact that it has Lord to me equates to upper class British,
which is what we know. That's why we assumed that but he was yeah,
that's the thing. It doesn't mean it's English. Just because it's British doesn't mean it's English.
I know to me, Lord, it just I think I just connects automatically with that with the stereotypical accent that that was used I don't know who did it or whatever.
Well, by because of BBC America, that's why right
right, not just BBC America. It's literally every film ever made us about another culture uses a British doesn't matter if they're German doesn't matter if they're Polish doesn't well maybe Polish they'll try and pull something off. But definitely any like, like kind of European well, most European countries they just use British accents. It's ridiculous. Why do they do that?
Cuz we just we like it we like that damn accent marks so yes, it's it's such a pleasing sound.
They choose accents based upon the character not the not would make sense historically. Disney is the worst at this, you know? Oh, so yeah, a British accent. It means you're smart. A Scottish accent means that you are a barbarian or your rough. Yeah, so I remember like in Right How to Train Your Dragon. The Vikings had Scottish accents. Why did they give Vikings Scottish accents? Well, because they were tough barbarians. And that's our, that is now the trope of that's that's what gets the accent you have if you're a barbarian, you have a Scottish accent. It doesn't matter that you're a Viking. So when we get
similar feedback, I remember we got an email from somebody and I mean, good on them. And like I agree, but it's it's a hard habit to break. And I'm from there, that when we do a southern accent, what does that mean? And this is I mean, this is across the board. You see this in television, you see it in common in other countries in here. And of course, there are plenty of brilliant people with Southern American accents. But I think there's this stereotype that the more colloquial it accent becomes Almost like the more specific and entrenched it becomes, the more kind of regional it becomes, the less metropolitan the person is, and that stereotype. And so anywhere very deeply New York accents, we think of having all of the stereotypes, a very deeply New York people very deeply Texas accents. You know, we think of George W. Bush. It's just, it's the stereotype.
Totally. I remember I had a professor in medical school who spoke with like a Brooklyn accent, and it was like, it totally was jarring. Because this guy's a medical professor. And he was speaking with an accent you don't normally associate with a scholar, you know, and an academic. But of course, why would why wouldn't people who are born in New York be medical doctors and teach at a university? Yeah, yeah, but we get totally trained. We're totally try remember, you know, when why wouldn't we? You know, I know I think I mentioned this when we when I went to Vienna, and just hearing a bunch of everyday people speaking German, and it totally realized, like, Oh, my God, up to this point in my life, every German accent I've ever heard was coming from a Nazi. And you're like, so program. You had to like deep get deep, deeper, like, No, this is just a normal people accent you know, this is just the way it's not. But that's we are we are absolutely programmed by media. All right, question number two. This comes from Chris in Florida. And he says, I recently found this article, which claims that Musk's new rocket engines based on methane can be carbon neutral Fact or Fiction. So I'm just gonna focus on the can methane be carbon neutral? And the answer to that is, well, yes, it can be came from you can make methane Well, you could create methane as like a biofuel, if you're using if you're using as a source of that things that are that are carbon neutral, like if you're using plant plant matter. And also, or if you're, if you're carbon capturing if the energy you're using to make the methane because methane is a high energy molecule, right? So if you're quote unquote, making it, you're allegedly going from lower energy molecules like carbon dioxide, or water, and you're going to this methane, which is a high energy molecule, your energy is coming from somewhere. So where's that energy coming from? So if you're, if you're powering the process with solar panels, yeah, you could theoretically have carbon neutral methane. Absolutely. Just all depends on how you're making it. If you're sourcing it from fossil fuel and releasing previously sequestered carbon into the atmosphere, then no, not at all. Or if you're burning coal to power the process to make the methane, then no, but if you're powering it with solar or wind or whatever, then then it could be sure, absolutely. All right. And then one more This one comes from Pedro, he gave us location as capital P small t, I have no idea what that refers to. I couldn't find out because PT is like too generic to search on. Because know what that
is? I don't know. Because I don't have any, any narrow in context. Is that a state
is? I don't know. Yeah, that's all the information and I voted for Pedro and he. Alright, so he asked if we analyze the universe in all directions, from our point, no matter of Earth's Solar System, or galaxy? Do we see any direction where universes older than others? Because maybe this way we could position ourselves in a kind of universe map, in case it is limited or until the visible universe and actually check if the universe is bounded or not speaking a little bit of a broken English there.
Such a baby, right,
so that's exactly right. So I emailed the back to let them know that so the answer to pagers question is no. So if you look in any direction, on obviously on large scale, the universe looks the same. That's a property called isotropy.
Yeah, I was gonna say I pronounced it Eisah. Trophy. Yeah, like I saw trophy. That's fun.
I saw it. Yeah, I
think that's what that's how Bob pronounced I remember I did a What's the word on this? We talked about kind of standing up on top of a hill and looking in all directions,
and not having that would be an isotropy. And now, there's also the universe also has another property where no matter where you are in the universe, it looks the same again, at a larger center point. Yeah. And what's that called? The universe is homogeneous, homogenous. So the universe is isotropic. Not like a special term. Yeah, the universe is isotropic and homogenous at large enough scale. But of course, the question is, at what scale? Right, have we talked about this previously on the show? Because there was a news item about that.
But so one good way to remember it, though, for both of these isotropy esotropia homogeneity is that they're both they're both have to do with uniformity. Homogeneity is uniformity of position and isotropic uniformity with respect to the angles like viewing angle. So that's, that's one my easier way to remember because I kind of like, confused them sometimes. So that might be one way to make it pithy in your head.
Yeah, and this is very important concept causally magically, basically, there's no privileged location in the universe, every point in the universe is pretty much equal to every other point, you know, in terms of its relationship to the universe as a whole, there is no center, there is no edge, right? There is no middle or whatever. It's just all homogenous, right? Just all the same. In fact, the universe is, is so isotropic and homogenous, that physicists have a hard time explaining why there's any clumps of anything like why did galaxies form us? Back on radio? Why isn't it 100%? Uniform to some?
It had to be why is their pattern a city at all
in homogeneous at some scale, at some point quantum fluctuations, you know, once, once any clumps, even slight perturbations in the homogeneity form, then gravity will take over and form those into clumps, stars and galaxies and whatnot. But what started off why aren't we just a uniform haze of hydrogen, you know, you know, mostly hydrogen, little helium and whatever. I mean, some still an open question. All right, Jay, EJ, who's that noisy time? Alright, last week,
I played this noisy. Right, so we got two people talking. Do you guys have any guesses? dog? A dog? It's a lie.
It's a marine mammal, isn't it?
Well, we have a listener named Michael prexy. And he wrote it Hey, longtime listener, a huge fan of the show. We just had our second kid yesterday. And after all the verses left, and we were hanging out, in postpartum, we turned on the latest skeptics guide. So you know, all voices that chi heard outside of the womb, that's pretty cool. Anyway, I think this audio is a reconstruction of a conversation happening at the other end of a fiber optic cable using a technique similar to this thing that he he said to me, that is not correct. Although I think that's really cool, like an early fiberoptic message that they were encoding and decoding. Not correct, but that was a cool guest. I'm going to click right into the winner. I have two people here. So I have a guy said his name is pronounced like chubby and he's from Romania. So I'm just gonna say chubby. Hello, J. The voices belong to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during Apollo 11. Specifically, they were speaking at the one hour 25 minute mark. And then they were discussing the camera that they were using to take pictures on the moon very freaking cool. Another random listener who did not send it in first, but they did win, because they gotta correct. And you guys know who this person is? Joe Anderson wrote in and said, Yo, is he is Neil talking with buzz on the goddamn Whoo. That's what they were talking about. Aos and F stops and all that. So we have those two people got it correct this week, and I have a new noisy for you guys.
Wait, do you know what camera they used? Yes,
it was a housing blog. Right Bob Hasselblad?
Yeah. Today How do you pronounce it?
Close enough? Yeah, all right. Here's the new noisy this noisy was set by a listener named Quinn English. This one I dedicate to Bob and you will know why in a second.
Very weird, very Halloweeny sounding Yeah. If you think you know what this week's noisy is you can email me at EWTN at the skeptics guide.org. Please don't forget if you heard anything cool. Email me at the same address. Whatever you heard, Steve. Yeah, our patrons are what keeps our podcast going? Do you realize
this? Absolutely. I look at the number every day. So if you want
to, if you want to support the ftu if you enjoy this show, if we taught you something and you want to show some appreciate some appreciation, please go to patreon.com forward slash skeptics guide become a patron. You can join us and curing this planet of misinformation.
Join us.
Alright, Thanks, Jay. Guys, let's go on with scientific fiction.
It's time for science fiction
Each week I come up with three science news items or facts to reveal and then one steak. And I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake is a theme this week, although these are all news items, they just happen to cluster in a theme. The theme is material science, that is a frequent theme. No, no. Science News and you know, you see a bunch of around, I use it. Alright, here we go. Three news items about material science item number one, chemists have developed a method for essentially printing complex designer molecules. Using specific frequencies of light. I number two, scientists have produced a method for combining single walled carbon nanotubes into highly ordered structures, such as a regular helix with minimal errors by using DNA as a lattice. And number three, researchers have produced a biocompatible fiber optic sensor out of spider silk gaago.
First try this first one, chemists have developed a method for essentially printing complex designer molecules by using specific frequencies of light. Whoa, pushing around molecules with light. How can that possibly be? I mean, it can't be that the photons are pushing anything because they're massless. But maybe they do something with temperature or I don't know that's, that sounds iffy, but super interesting. The second one, scientists have produced a method for combining single walled carbon nanotubes into highly ordered structures, such as regular helix with minimal errors by using DNA as a lattice. I think that one is science, I think that's really cool. I know there's a ton of research in this type of processing nanotubes, you know, hugely wanted hugely useful. So I could see that they use DNA to help them do something. So I totally get that one a science. Last one, researchers have produced a biocompatible fiber optic sensor out of spider silk, a biocompatible fiber optic sensor. So I sensor, I'm guessing what Steve is saying here is the fiber optic sensor is one of the pieces of hardware that they use, to this case, receive the signal of light that is then transformed into information. Spider silk is one of those things have you heard a lot about in your life, but they never do anything with it? You know, and it's always like, can you scale it up? Can you produce it? Sure, they might have been able to do something in the lab, it was sensing sensing fiber optic? I don't know. That's so weird. I'm gonna say that that one is affection. I don't think we've done anything with spider silk. Okay, Bob,
as spider silk biocompatible, I could see what a fiber optic sensor, I mean, I suspect that the silk is a component, maybe even a major component. So I'm kind of moved by that one, the nanotubes into a regular helix shape, using DNA as a lattice, I guess I can see that. The one that's getting me though, is this first one, basically printing designer molecules using specific frequencies of light. And I'm not buying that. That's that would be amazing. And it's just kind of a little bit too amazing. At this point, so I'm gonna say that was fiction.
And Kara? Well,
it's funny because I would say I'm gonna go with Bob and Jay on this because Jay basically made the exact same argument and then picked a different picked a different choice. So like, as Jay was going through his reasoning, I was like, yeah, yeah, the frequency like there's no way. And then And then you said the same thing. So I think I have to go with you, Bob and say that, yeah, the designer molecules with frequencies of light feels like the fiction.
Alright, so you all agree on the middle one. So we'll start there, scientists have produced a method for combining single walled carbon nanotubes, or FWC ends into highly ordered structures, using a regular such as a regular helix with minimal errors by using a DNA as a lattice all think that the DNA lattice is science? And this one is science, this one is not a new thing. Yeah. So it's, it's actually hard, you know, to get these pesky carbon nanotubes to do we want them to do with very, very few errors. And those those errors interfere with the structure of you know, of the material that we're going for, and therefore really limits their utility, for example. They can form breaking points that can unzip, you know, tap, right, carbon nanofibers, etc.
To what No,
yeah, so Well, that's an interesting question. So this is how they did it. So first of all, they use a specific sequence of DNA, in this case, you know, with C and G amino acids, and I mean base pairs with C and G base pair. As they, for example, they use the one sequence that was C, three G, C seven, g c three, and those contain cytosine and crosslinking binding spots for carbon. And so when that becomes a lattice on which these, the single walled carbon nanotubes then bind to each other, and that particular sequence formed an ordered helical structure with a 6.5 angstrom periodicity. But so it writes, I just created a helical structure out of the carbon nanotubes, but with with very, very few errors, because they're being guided into position by this DNA lattice. And you could basically customize the lattice by the sequence that you give it, but which changes the relative positioning, you know, these, the crosslinking reactions. So it's pretty cool. Now, the all of the reporting on this said that you could use this to create superconducting materials. But that's that's like they're putting the cart before the horse gonna be like they're putting one potential theoretical application of this technology could be making metamaterials that have properties like oh, I don't know, superconductivity. But it's not hasn't really doesn't have anything to do intrinsically, to do with the process that they're developing here, which is just, oh, look at this, we can have exquisite control over linking up these carbon nanotubes by using a specific sequence of DNA as a, essentially a template or as a lattice.
Yeah, I mean, they wouldn't even have to mention superconductivity just just mentioned metamaterials, and you got my attention.
Yeah. But they all say, superconductivity and like, oh, okay, we look at that. And like, this has nothing to do with. All right. All right. Let's go back to number one, chemists have developed a method for essentially printing complex designer molecules using specific frequencies of light. Bob and Kara, you think this one is the fiction? Shay thinks this one is science? And this one is? The fiction? Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it's a little bit too much. I made it up. The the the news item was using photochemistry. As a step in a process of forming organic molecules, you're basically using the light to break up to, you know, a molecule into two components that can then be used to form other organic molecules. It's just photochemistry. But the idea of using light like to print molecules, designer molecules I made up, I had to come up with something that was that was different enough, because so you could do so much with late. You can't push molecules around with light, they've done it. You can
also combine light with matter. And in some cases really heavy.
I had to make sure it was it was, you know, Steve significant enough that it's like, it's not actually happening out there. Well, Steve, I
gotta say,
Wow, I mean, I went through this this week, in SDU. History has the has the distinction of being the longest most amount of time I went through news items to find something that grabbed me, I read so I went to every damn science news website I could think of it was unbelievable, it was the worst, the hardest one the most amount of time. So I have a lot of familiarity with a lot of news items that came out this week. And this one, specifically, I related this to another news item entirely. And this one, get this though, it was a way of using lasers to polarize atoms so that one side is more positive one side or negative, so that you're that you're bonding atoms together with a with a very, you they're bonding together, but it's not a strong bond. It's not a molecule, like bond doesn't have the strength of a molecule, which is why I thought this was fiction, because the word molecule meant that no, you this was absolutely fiction, because it doesn't have the binding strength of molecules. It's just very, it's really just a very light attraction. And so it's so weird how this
LED because there's so much with those photochemistry is that the article that inspired me was light as a tool for the synthesis of complex molecules. But the here they're using light to break apart a chemical bond. And then using that to then in something in between interesting creating organic molecules, but that's the reason I had to make sure it was fiction because there's so much out there I could easily if I if it wasn't specific enough, right, using light to push Adam's router to make more. Yeah, that just happened. All right, all of this means that researchers have produced a biocompatible fiber optic center of a spider silk is science but I don't know if you saw this one. I didn't this one I didn't see the here's the actual title of the article, the published article biocompatible spider, silk based metal dielectric fiber optic sugar sensor. So yeah, I didn't realize Isn't that spider silk, certain kinds of spider silk actually can have fiber optic properties. You know, fiber optic is something that the refractive index inside the substance is such that the light will stay inside, it won't, it won't go outside. So it travels down along the fiber, right? That's what makes the fiber optic. So sweet, I suppose so could be used as a as a fiber optic, they did coat it with like a metal, not something that made it the fiber optic, but with something else. And then they used it as a sensor for sugar for different types of sugar. So like this would be like a bio sensor. And then it's very, very, very precise, could tell the difference between glucose, sucrose and fructose. How about sucralose didn't did not mention. And it's biocompatible. Because you can put it in the body and it will like cause a reaction or anything. So yeah, very, very interesting.
Morris, spider silk applications, please. I want my shirt my bulletproof shirt.
Maybe I had another one that I didn't use. I couldn't use it, though. But I just thought it was too obvious because they you know, it, this was a process for making cement that is 40% Stronger than regular cement by putting basically nano ground up shrimp shells in there. So yeah, so there's a seafood byproduct, right? Yeah, there's a stream of waste from the seafood industry for chitin shells from things like shrimp, right? Or crabs or lobsters or whatever. But it's a great one shrimp 40%. Yeah, man. Yeah, but that's for the cement, not necessarily the resulting concrete, but it probably would translate well to the concrete, they just haven't looked at that yet. And also makes it more flexible, so it's stronger and more flexible. And it so that translates to the final product that could really reduce the need the amount of cement, right or concrete that you need in a build, or therefore. Because remember, we talked about the fact that steel is responsible for 10% of greenhouse gas release. Concrete is responsible for 5%. Yeah, so yeah, between the two of them, it's 15%. of our greenhouse gas emissions. Yeah. So we are reducing the need for for cement for concrete by 40%. Could be significant. You know, that could could take a big chunk out of that. And also, just having stronger cement is nice and more flexible. Plus, it also could last longer might last like twice as long. Oh my gosh, that factor alone would reduce our need by you know, by a significant chunk because you don't have to replace it, you know, as often. Yeah. So more durable, longer lasting, stronger cement using a waste stream, a waste stream,
I like like, talk about a win win.
Right now. We just dump it back in the ocean, which is probably not a bad thing, you know, but, and chitin it's basically made Okay, so kite is a biopolymer. And it is the second most common, second most common or abundant biopolymer in the world. What is the first hair hair? No, no.
Polycarbonate? No, what's it called bike bicarb. The thing that makes up seashells,
calcium bicarbonate, calcium blend carbon that's in the seashells to that is in cement. So that is part of why it's so useful additive, but no no biopolymer so it is cellulose. So it was made by plants, right? That's like the basic Yeah, it's a plant speed out insects I guess in terms of their, their structural biopolymer in terms of the just the raw amount in the world. But chitin is the second most common in spider silk. It's also a buyer biopolymer not a favorite, as abundant as cellulose or chitin. But very desirable properties. Yeah, these are all structurally very strong things. Cool. Okay, well, good job. Bob and Kara. I can't close to you. You did you're almost there. Jay, you just doubted yourself at the last moment. Okay, I am taking over the quote for today since Evan is not here. This was submitted by a listener called grant that's all he gave us his name. And I thought it was appropriate in the quote is from Marcus or religious meditations, book six number 21. Marcus, a religious skeptic of the ancient world. I don't know if you guys know who he is. And he wrote, If anyone can refute me, show me I'm making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective. I'll gladly change. It's the truth I'm after and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist and self deceit and ignorance.
Oh my god. Wow.
Marcus are really a skeptic man. Total right. And total skeptic living in naturopathic is a philosopher, right? Yeah. Yeah. We've quoted him before too, because he's sort of, he's very quotable. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Very portable. He lived from 121 to 180 AC II. He was Roman. emperor, Roman Emperor from 116, one two when entered into stoic philosopher, yeah, the last of the rulers known as the five good emperors. But yeah, this guy's just overflowing with skeptical philosophy. I'm gonna read more about him. I'm interested to see what he has. Yeah, yep, totally. It is it is fascinating. And one of you know, I took a course in Greek philosophy in college, and the professor said, like, they basically thought of everything. And like, the first time, they started thinking systematically about stuff, they basically had all the ideas, you know, in terms of just basic, you know, philosophical ideas, like everything has its roots is like variations on a theme from the Greek philosophers. It's probably not literally true, but it does seem like Yeah, yeah. But I believe Greek led to Roman led to, but
I'm playing between the two. Yeah, I mean, they also did something really smart. They wrote it down,
they wrote it down.
They probably weren't the first people to think of this stuff, either. But they wrote it down. They
didn't think status, systematically thought about things philosophy, and they wrote it down towards it survived. And so it's like, oh, like, they thought of all this stuff. You know, it's just
yeah, I mean, they grappled with concepts that we still grabbed. Yes, today. Yeah.
Called the human condition. Yep. Right. All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week. Sure, bro. Thanks, Dave. And until next week, this is your skeptics guide to the universe. Skeptics guide to the universe is produced by fgu productions, dedicated to protein science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at the skeptics guide.org. Send your questions to info at the skeptics guide.org And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/skeptics guide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the fgu community. Our listeners and supporters are what makes SUU possible