Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
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, May 21st, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Cara Santamaria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.
Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon.
Is everybody set to go to Australia and New Zealand? Got all your things that you need?
Well, I got reminders about the things I still need.
Right. How is it almost already June? Right.
And you know, it's after June.
July. And that's when we're going. Steve, you know, that's a loaded question for me because I have an incredible, you know, like my, I'm not just thinking like baggage and you know, what's my plane seat going to be like? I'm like, I'm, I had the whole thing on my head. So, But things are going good. I'm like in a mad swag ordering phase right now.
Mm-hmm.
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Chapter 2: What preparations are needed for traveling to Australia and New Zealand?
But I also, you know, anytime we do any kind of trip, I verify everything. You know, meaning like I check that in our hotel rooms.
There's so many details.
Our hotel rooms, our cars, you know.
Hundreds of points to check. Hundreds. Yeah. Which is why we need the constant reminders that we get. Thank goodness. And you're very good about that. I appreciate it. And... Yeah, so apparently you need a passport to leave the country. Who knew? No, I'm kidding.
Not fair.
It's good.
And you need an entry visa to get into these other countries. Yep. But I don't have a visa credit card.
You need a visa credit card to shop at Costco.
It's weird. Should we say at this point, should we just like say we're Canadian or something?
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Chapter 3: How does sleep impact our health and aging?
There's so many things that don't work right when you didn't get enough sleep. But sleeping more than eight hours may not be the problem, but it might mean that something else is wrong. Meaning, hey, in your case, Carrie, you had an actual thing. Yeah, I had a sleep disorder.
But even before we found that I had a sleep disorder, I had to rule out, is it anemia? Well, I had that too. But once we fixed that, I still was sleeping too long. And so, yeah, there's all these rule outs because lots of things make you fatigued.
And I think that's more on the money than not, right? So sleeping longer is a sign that something else health-wise is not right. It doesn't necessarily mean that getting eight hours of sleep or nine hours of sleep or whatever is damaging you, which it's a very different thing than too little sleep.
Yeah, I think that the point you just made there, Jay, bears massive repeating. A lot of people with poor sleep hygiene who think they're sleeping 9, 10, 11 hours a day might only be sleeping four hours a night.
But they think because they're in bed that whole time that they're actually asleep that whole time or that they're getting good uninterrupted sleep and they often aren't, which is why they're tired and go back to sleep over and over.
Yeah, and if you get one of those, you can do it with an Apple Watch, can do it, whatever. There's lots of products out there. The Aura Ring actually seems to rate really well. I looked into that not too long ago. Anyway, so depression or having depression, they were saying that short sleep and long sleep were both linked to what they called late-life depression.
But it wasn't necessarily for the same reason. So short sleep looked more directly connected to people having it. But long sleep may be more of an indirect signal, which, like I was saying before, could overlap with broader signs of biological aging. Um, either way, if you are suffering from depression, um, or anxiety, uh, it could be linked to your sleep quality or lack thereof.
Or if you're getting too much sleep, you know, the people who are depressed, it's not uncommon for them to want to stay in bed and, and, you know, sleep is an escape. And it's like the only place that a lot of people feel comfortable or relaxed. Right. Um, so either one of those, you know, mental health issues, I think you should be talking to a doctor about and, and,
and talking about your sleep as well. So the practical takeaway is not that everyone should obsess over exactly sleeping between six and eight hours. You got to study yourself. If you have a device that you can use to help you get a better idea of what's going on, then you can go and take that information to your doctor.
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Chapter 4: What are the findings from the recent sleep study?
But how much weight is, you know, because we learn to read. We definitely see that adults with innumeracy and illiteracy don't tend to follow the pattern as well. And we also tend to see that it can change based on the sense making that we have.
So a good example that they write is if you're comparing five inches to nine inches, in your mind, you'll think of five on the left and nine on the right.
Why would you ever have to do that? In what context would you make that comparison?
Oh, stop, Steve. Any time anybody says measure this, is it bigger or smaller? You're looking at furniture and you're trying to see what fits in it. Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. But also, let's say you're comparing five o'clock to nine o'clock in your mind, right? I need to be there by five. Sometimes this mental calculation is instant and you don't even think about it.
You might actually see five on the right and nine on the left if you're somebody who grew up looking at analog clocks, right? So it's not always going to follow a number line pattern. But anyway, so they were like, hmm, two questions. Does this follow in animicules, right? Do animals go left to right or right to left? Is there some sort of culture thing? Is it all...
innate is the reason that we read left to right because we're already thinking in terms you know did we develop an entire system around what already felt natural or vice versa so first they wanted to ask what happens when when we do this for animals and then let's actually go back into the data and let's dig deep and see if individuals all follow this pattern or if when we talk about these things in the aggregate we're actually kind of smoothing out individual differences
So what do you think they found when they did these types of studies on orangutans, gorillas, pigeons, rhesus monkeys, and blue jays?
Probably a mixture.
They found that there was... Good guess, Bob.
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Chapter 5: Where did T. rex live on a modern map?
On a modern map, where did T. rex live? Where did it roam? North America. North America, yes. More specifically? Montana. Montana, yep. Also Wyoming. That's, I think, where the majority of the T. rex fossils have been found and uncovered. Number three, how quickly did T. rex move? How do they estimate in miles per hour?
20 miles an hour.
That's pretty close.
Wow.
Okay. It's a little high. I saw 15 and 20 something kilometers per hour. Oh, and there's evidence suggesting that it didn't run. It just walked very fastly or kind of, you know, plotted around at 15 miles an hour.
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Chapter 6: How fast could T. rex move?
Could you imagine that thing coming after you? Question number four. True or false. It is believed that more than half of all T-Rex... T-Rexes died before they reached age one.
Yeah, probably. Yeah, maybe.
That is true. 60% thanks to disease, accidents, food scarcity, and mainly fights with other predators. Imagine these things fighting each other. Oh my gosh. Number five, and the final question, have humans created T-Rex leather in a laboratory? No. No. Hey, you guys did wonderful. Very, very good.
Chapter 7: What is the truth about T. rex leather?
You know your T-Rex. I saw this over at Futurism, but a lot of other places picked up this particular news item. Their headline read, scientists say a $600,000 lab-grown T-Rex leather handbag is actually something laughable. All right, good. So at least they're, you know, understanding the assignment here. In other words, questioning it pretty much right out of the gate.
What the heck is T-Rex leather? A good example of what I would say is, you know, there's some interesting science ideas here, but they're wrapped in a very charitable way, I'll say, with an aggressive and clever marketing campaign. So this project is the brainchild of a company called VML. They're a creative marketing firm.
But along with the organoid company, Lab Grown Leather Limited, and a fashion label named FN Levee, which is a company in Poland, apparently fashion designers. And here's their news release. World's first T-Rex leather product unveiled. A luxury handbag designed by FN Leve, the designer. This is right from their news release.
Prehistoric meets high fashion as the world's first product made from T-Rex leather, trademark. A one-of-a-kind luxury handbag debuts alongside a colossal T-Rex statue.
In a world first that sounds more Jurassic Park than luxury fashion, scientists, creatives, and designers have come together to create the world's first product made from lab-grown T-Rex leather, a handbag designed to showcase the material's potential. Engineered using reconstructed dinosaur collagen and brought to life without harming a single animal,
T-Rex leather makes its first public debut in Amsterdam this April, and it did last April, where the handbag was displayed beside a full-sized T-Rex statue, marking the moment prehistoric biology meets future-facing couture. Oh my gosh, seriously. Wow. This is them. To engineer leather from an extinct species, the team began with fossilized T-Rex collagen sequences. Wow.
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Chapter 8: How do scientists synthesize T. rex leather?
Using advanced computational biology and AI modeling, scientists predicted and reconstructed the remaining genetic information required to form a complete collagen blueprint. This fully synthesized DNA was inserted into a carrier cell line. Billions of these engineered cells were then cultivated using their own proprietary tools and things.
The piece demonstrates that by going back 68 million years, it's possible to create the leather of the future. What do you think of that when you hear that? I mean, how can you not be skeptical of that right off the bat? Of course. I mean, there's just so much there that seems, feels wrong, is wrong, but is it wrong? I mean, what are we really talking about?
So the handbag obviously is not made from actual Tyrannosaurus Rex skin. That's first and foremost. I would say here's a more accurate description. This is lab-grown collagen-based leather inspired by a computer-generated reconstruction of a possible T. rex collagen sequence using mostly modern biological data and engineered cells. Emphasis on the word possible.
The sequences they claim to have used to make this product, they might not even be T-Rex at all. So you just have to dig a little bit into it, and you already find out that this is, you know, is this a bait and switch, a pig and a poke, or whatever colloquialism you want to use. Something's not right here. Because some researchers are arguing that the tissue...
that they claim to have gotten this from is actually bacteria that colonized within a fossil instead of genuine dinosaur flesh. And for this, we have to go back 20 years. I don't know if we've covered this, guys, on SGU at the time. This was right as we were starting. 20 years ago, researchers in Montana discovered parts of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton.
The find drew more attention after one of the paleontologists announced that her team had identified soft tissue remains, including protein fragments inside the bones. Up until then, scientists had largely believed such organic material couldn't survive for millions of years. Yet many researchers remained skeptical.
Some argued that bacteria colonizing the bones may have created the structures that they identified. And the debate over exactly what this team found continues today. And this is the material. This is the sequence. The actual... whatever you want to call it, that they found, that's what this handbag project relies. It relies on the material from that particular discovery in Montana.
Do you guys remember that from about 20 years ago? Because I don't. Yeah. Nope. You do remember it, Steve.
Yeah, the whole thing. I've been following it ever since.
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