Chapter 1: What is the context of today's episode?
You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Your escape to reality. Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, April 16th, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Kara Santamaria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein. Good afternoon, everyone.
Evan, you finally emerged from your tax hell.
I liken it to a cocoon, you know, when a- Chrysalis. Yeah, chrysalis, thank you. You know, an insect has to go into this state and makes a hard shell around them and- Only whatever exists in their world is inside of that show. And then crunch, crunch on April 15th, at the end of the day, you can finally start to break out.
So now you're saying you're a butterfly? Is that what I'm hearing?
Absolutely. I'm spreading my wings.
Or a moth. Or a moth.
Can other things?
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Chapter 2: How does Evan describe his tax season experience?
If you were a moth, what kind of moth would you be? Ooh, not the death's head moth. Oh, I would. I'd do moth rock.
Mothra?
Nice, Jay.
I'm over here Googling prettiest moths. Okay. No, it's easy. Lunar moth.
Oh, yeah.
Those are the big furry ones, right?
They're big boys. Oh, those... Is that the one that Gandalf had in Fellowship of the Ring? No. Remember he talked to a moth and sent it away?
What about the ones that look like they have birds on the tips of their... They got big eyes? There's a lot like that, actually.
There's a lot of moth... The kind of moths you don't want are the ones that, you know... Hide in your pantry moths, are they called? Yeah, pantry moths are horrible if you get them.
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Chapter 3: What issues arise with pantry moths?
Oh, I love them. They're so like, I don't know, witchy. They're fuzzy butterflies. Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we have a day to celebrate moths in the United States. It's the, what, the second Sunday in May? That Mother's Day?
Oh, no. I was waiting.
I was like, where is he going with this? That was too bad to anticipate, right? Thank you. I did not see that coming.
High compliments, guys.
I appreciate that. We're going to chalk that up to tax brain.
He's free now. He's free. I am free. I am free. This was a tough season. There were lots of changes to the tax codes that happened mid-year.
in 2025 so so the irs isn't quite wasn't quite ready to handle everything and in fact we had a couple cases some unusual cases that the they wouldn't accept the returns from some of our clients because of these very uh specific things having to do with those tax laws so then these clients we have to go back them tell all you have to file manually on paper as opposed to electronically what Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How does the conversation shift to the Artemis II mission recap?
Yeah, exogenous. Exactly. Yeah. Like drugs. But also, I think even the word drug at this point, Steve, would you agree is sort of like, we need almost like a bigger word than the word drug, because now we're talking about all sorts of like synthetic biological compounds, and different elements and smart drugs and, and even potentially biological weapons that all sort of act like drugs in a way.
Yeah, I mean, the drug has different definitions based on context. Drug, from a regulatory point of view in the United States, is anything that treats or cures a disease.
Right, that's therapeutic.
Yeah. If you'd mentioned a disease, it's by definition a drug. It gets regulated as a drug. But it doesn't necessarily mean a chemical pharmaceutical. That's only one category. As you said, there are protein therapeutics. There's lots of different things, antibodies, monoclonal antibodies, et cetera.
So, yeah, it's sort of the bigger, like biological therapeutics, you know, which has many subcategories.
And we need something catchier than that. Yeah, than biological therapeutics. Biotheres or something like that.
Well, then let's look at the flip side of that, because the way that biological therapeutics work, and there's myriad ways that they can work, depending on, like you mentioned, if we're talking about monoclonal antibodies or we're talking about synthesizing new proteins, blah, blah, blah.
But I think the key word that you mentioned there, and that's what makes them kind of fit within that drug or be related to that drug category, is therapeutic. But of course... any technology, any protocol that we use to make something that could help could also potentially harm, right?
And not just because of side effects or because it wasn't tested in full, but intentionally developing compounds that when they bind to certain receptors in the cause downstream changes to, you know, the genetic coding will intentionally cause harm. So now we're talking about bioweapons, right?
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Chapter 5: What breakthrough was achieved with Cooper pairs in superconductivity?
They pair up. They get together and do their thing. So that makes it, when the atoms are pairing up, it makes, it turns it into a much more controllable investigation. You know what I mean? So if we, we can't examine electrons in this way using this ultra cold atom microscope.
We need to use these lithium atoms to make it so that it's something that we can investigate in a very controlled, accurate way. So that's why they're using this method. Does that make sense why the guys, they're creating this Fermi gas, ultra-cold Fermi gas using lithium atoms, and they act like electrons.
They form Cooper pairs together, and that way we can see what's going on a lot easier than if we were using electrons. So what did they find? After they paired up, after they formed Cooper pairs, these atoms moved in what they described as a synchronized dance.
So if you have one pair, if you're looking at one pair, one Cooper pair of atoms or electrons, the position of that pair is actually dependent on the position of other pairs. And that's the key breakthrough right there. So this is where, of course, where the ballroom dancing metaphor crops up. That's why I'm seeing it everywhere I look.
Because when you're ballroom dancing, you pair up with somebody, and as you're dancing, there's a part of your brain that's making sure that you don't hit other dancers, right? Even though you may be doing complicated moves, you always make sure that you're not going to hit anybody else. So that's kind of what these Cooper pairs are doing.
Tariq Yefsa, who's the experimental research lead at the French National Center for Scientific Research, said, the BCS theory gives us a view from outside the ballroom, right?
So he means here is that the old theory, the way we understand it right now before this experiment, it gives us a view from outside the ballroom where we can hear the music and see the dance come out, but we don't know what's going on inside in the ballroom. Our approach is like taking a wide-angle camera inside the ballroom.
Now we can see how the dancers are pairing up and paying attention to one another so they don't bump into each other. So that's his metaphorical description of the advance. So the takeaway here is that this was not predicted by the 70-year-old theory. This is a new insight into what's happening with superconductivity that we did not have before.
And it's advances like this, having a better, more fundamental understanding of superconductivity itself at its lowest level that can lead to whole new industries, essentially. And that's what gets me really excited about this.
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Chapter 6: How could room temperature superconductors change our future?
And that leads me to like, what's the future hold for this? And one of the big takeaways, one of the biggest takeaways from this is that it could lead toā¦
the solution to one of the one of the holy grails of modern physics and what's that room temperature superconductors if we had that the the impacts to to our lives and to to industries are it would it's kind of hard to predict and just how dramatic it would be i mean we're talking about ultra efficient electric grids electric the changes to electronic devices it would be a game changer um
I tried to come up with a list of some of the things that you would notice, some of the big, big changes. Like imagine if all the power grids had almost no transmission losses. Imagine if your electric motors and generators were fairly quickly cheaper, denser, and much more powerful because of this. Magnetic levitation and frictionless transport would be ubiquitous eventually, right?
Massively stronger magnets, far superior energy stored on the grid. The list goes on and on. It could be extremely dramatic and people have been waiting and hoping for this. But of course, I got to bring in some caveats, right? To be really revolutionary, room temperature itself, just having room temperature S-con cable, you know, S-con cables is not the be all and end all.
Chapter 7: What are the limitations of room temperature superconductors?
There needs to be other things need to also happen. It would also need to be cheap. It would also need to be stable. You would also need to have it manufacturable. If it's too hard to manufacture, then all of this means nothing, essentially, except maybe in the lab. It also is going to need to carry very high currents in strong magnetic fields. That might not even be possible. So we don't know.
So there's a lot of things that would need to come into place to make this truly revolutionary, as I hope it could be. But if we're ever going to get there, It's a fundamental breakthrough like this that's gonna do it. So let's see what happens. That's all I can say.
Machines operate at higher than room temperature.
Right. Well, that's true. That's an interesting point, yeah, because sometimes will they be able to operate at 100 degrees Fahrenheit? That's an interesting point that I haven't really ā can't remember even coming across in terms of superconductivity and room temperature. But, yeah, see, that's another thing that's potentially limiting.
Even if you have room temperature, does it mean, oh, we're going to have all this great stuff? It's a very ā complicated interplay of all these other characteristics that also need to work.
Yeah, usually technology has to function at a range of temperatures, including much hotter and much colder than room temperature.
Yeah, I mean, even if they got it to superconduct at just barely above freezing, that would be amazingly fantastic. Yeah, that would be huge. Yeah.
Yeah. Evan, could superconducting cables be used in red light therapy?
Sure, why not? Red light therapy, it's a boundless horizon. Anything's possible. The therapy would be cheaper. So how about this? From Gentleman's Quarterly, how often do we refer to Gentleman's Quarterly? Never on the show, never. Oh, I love firsts on our show, anytime. How about the title of this article? The Skeptic's Guide to Red Light Therapy.
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Chapter 8: What are the scientific claims about red light therapy?
reduced soreness after exercise, and even improved athletic performance. And more recently, it's been promoted for things like chronic pain and improving your mood and brain health. So a pretty wide range of things there.
Red light therapy can be called a non-drug and non-invasive solution, so you can see why it would have an appeal to many people who, for whatever reasons, have a distrust of modern medicines and treatments. And red light therapy is very much in fashion right now. It's being touted for all sorts of things, some of them within the scope of reasonableness and things really outside on the fringes.
But is it some kind of panacea? Hardly. I don't think so. But what do physicians who understand science-based medicine have to say about red light therapy? Steve, you directed me to an article that Scott Gavura wrote for science-based medicine recently about red light therapy. I'll give you a couple lines from his article there.
Proponents claim that this light stimulates mitochondria, the powerhouses of our cells, to produce more energy, ATP, which supposedly improves healing, reduces inflammation, and accelerates fat breakdown. How red light stimulates mitochondria is thought to be through interaction with cytochrome C oxidase, CCO for short, which is a key enzyme in the mitochondrial electron transport chain.
Bob has nothing to do with the electrons you were talking about. Red and near-infrared light are thought to be absorbed by CCO, displacing nitric oxide , which otherwise blocks mitochondrial respiration. The idea sounds appealing and astonishingly simple. You shine light, energize your cells, and your body performs better. But while this effect on mitochondria has been observed in vitro,
Very important there, you know, cells in a lab. When you're translating that effect into outcomes that we actually care about, like weight loss or some other measure of improved health, that is a very different challenge. That's what Scott wrote. And this is where the skepticism is definitely warranted.
What are the quality of the studies that have been done on people as opposed to, you know, seeing cells react in petri dishes or test tubes? Well, apparently it's not all that impressive. You have small studies, short duration trials, manufacturer sponsored trials, relying on less accurate surrogate measures. And the risks of biases, of course, are always high.
Do they also look at things like the longer term safety and frequent prolonged exposure to red light therapy? That's not really been well studied. And ultimately, the safety depends on the specific product in use and how it is used. And there are a lot of these products out there. You'll see them in face masks, lamps, wearables, all sorts. I've seen they have pictures of dogs.
You sit your dog in front of a red light for red light therapy. And there are thousands, actually, of these products that get marketed. So does it have a real scientific basis to it? Yeah, maybe it does. But how does that translate to all the uses that red light therapy claims it can help with? It depends. Are you using it to help with your skin condition? Okay, dermatologists will do that.
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