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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 Monday, May 25th, 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.
Happy Monday.
Yeah, rare Monday recording for us.
What the hell? Monday? What are we doing here on Monday?
Well, we're going to Wisconsin this weekend. This is the only night we can record early enough to get the show done before the weekend. Correct. Wisconsin. Here we are.
Oh, we're actually here already, if you're listening. If you're listening to it, yeah.
Time travel. Yeah, so have any of you guys been, specifically, been to Wisconsin before? Nobody's had their cheese. I don't think so.
I've been only when it was winter, so it was cold.
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of Wisconsin's geography?
Who travels the lakes?
You mean by boat? Yeah, by the boat. Why? Commerce, man. Commerce. We've got to go all the way around Lake Michigan and just cut right across it.
Oh, that's true.
Yeah, but if you're sending anything over there, you might as well be a lot cheaper, just pure expense of just shipping instead of trucking it all around.
Yeah, but aren't there, Bob, I'm looking at the map too, aren't there just like bridges? I don't know. It's pretty far, isn't it?
Over some very narrow points. No, it's too big for bridges, man. These lakes are enormous.
Really?
It's too big for bridges? The main girth, the main width, sure. But I'm sure there's smaller areas with plenty of bridges.
The I-10 looks like it goes straight across Lake Michigan. I don't know if it goes over or under.
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Chapter 3: How do the Great Lakes influence local ecosystems?
Right here, I'm looking at an overview here. It's like Lake Superior is exceptionally dangerous. Yes. Why is it dangerous? Because it's big? Let's see, temperamental weather, hurricane force winds. It doesn't have waves? Unpredictable and massive waves. Wow.
It sunk the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1875, which is an enormous ship. Titanic size almost. Do people surf there?
You don't want to fall in that water. It's saying here that the annual average is 40 degrees Fahrenheit. You fall in there, it won't take long before you are done.
It's 20 seconds and you're probably toast.
It says here, after a few minutes, you lose fine motor control. I think that's underselling it. I think 40 degrees is some nasty. That will suck the heat out of you.
But Bob, you want to know something about Lake Superior? Yeah, what is that? It's very far away from Connecticut, so you should not be scared.
No, but we're going to Wisconsin.
We think Lake Superior is going to crawl across the land and suck us into its depths.
I would like to go on it. I want to go on it, and I want to see it. Bob likes being scared, though. He does, yes. Bob, you do have a spear. Fear minus death equals fun.
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Chapter 4: What are the dangers associated with Lake Superior?
Now, if you have a regular toilet that isn't like $30,000 and blows hot air on you. You'll see that there's like, you could see the pathway of the water on the side. You can see almost like the piping inside of the porcelain. And that has like a big turn in it, right? Yeah. I mean, Bob, I hear you. I know what you're saying about the siphon.
I don't know exactly how it works, but I know that it's kind of just, it keeps pulling the water after itself.
Is it kind of like your lungs? Yeah.
hang on hang on all right like it's backward yes you're getting close bob said the magic words let me put it all together for you but first i'll give you an explanation why i was thinking i know my shit i knew bob would know that's why i asked cara did your wallet get stuck in the in the turn this thing so this past weekend i was opening we have a little we have a small cabin on a lake in new hampshire that we bought for my wife's cousin right just to keep it in the family
And so we were opening ā it's not winterized. We have to prepare it for winter. Then we have to open it in the spring. So we went up there to open it for the spring. And it's always a gamble, like what's going to be working, what's not going to be working. And this time, the one toilet was leaking. The tank was leaking around the water intake.
So I replaced the intake just to see, because that's like a $20 part. It's nothing, right? And hoping that that would fix it, but it didn't. So then I needed to call a plumber. So now I'm there with four women. I mentioned that they're women because they were incredibly unwilling to do their business in the woods. Far more unwilling than I would have been.
So I had to turn off the water and empty the tank, flush the tank, just so that all that water wouldn't leak into the bathroom. But I said, listen, the toilet bowl itself is still working, and we could use it. You know, we're near our lake, so we could get a bucket of water from the lake and do what's called a bucket flush. Have you guys ever heard of a bucket flush?
I've done it. I've done it. So you add that to the back?
During a power outage, during a nasty power outage.
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Chapter 5: What are the benefits of regular exercise?
It's important because it gets you in the game, right? It has real tangible benefits. And there's far, far too many Americans and I think probably people throughout the world that don't reach that goal. They don't do 150 minutes of activity, at least moderate activity every week. So this is an important goal for a lot of a lot of people.
Did they define moderate activity?
Chapter 6: How can we define moderate activity?
I know what the standard definition of moderate activity is. It's enough to get your heart rate up, but you could still talk while you're doing it. Oh, okay. That's a good way to... Severe, rigorous exercises like you're too out of breath to talk significantly.
Right. It's important to understand and to stress that what this study is saying or what the study is reinforcing is that 150 minutes a week is the floor.
Chapter 7: What are the implications of the latest Ebola outbreak?
That is not the ceiling.
But overall, it sounds like this is good news. It basically just means that there isn't as much of a ceiling on the benefit of regular exercise as we thought there was. So you could do even better. So just do as much as you can. If you could do more, there's more benefit to it. But we do have to emphasize the caveat that this is an observational correlational research.
Yep.
Chapter 8: How do societal factors impact public health responses?
And it's a big study, and a lot of it is in sync with other smaller studies, and there's ways this study could be even better. And I don't think because of this, public health agencies should start saying, everyone needs 10 hours a week. That would absolutely backfire. Yeah, people would just say, I'm never going to get that, so I won't even try.
Oh, my God, because 10 hours a week is just way, way too much. That's like talking to a new skeptic and going right for their heart in terms of like, God doesn't exist. You know, like, whoa, whoa, take it easy, slow down. You know, you got to teach them, you know, the skeptical mindset before you jump down their throat with that.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That minimum is like, yeah, if you do the 150 minutes a week, that's kind of where the benefits start.
If you could do more, great, you know, but... Yeah, right. If I put it in a sentence, it would be 150 minutes is a meaningful minimum, but the benefit curve does not stop there. All right. Thanks, Bob.
Evan, do birds really fear women more than men?
Well, if you read the headlines, you might be able to think.
What?
Once again, we have a baffle of scientists making headlines, literally. A baffle? Here's the headline that I came across. Why are city birds more afraid of women than men? Scientists are baffled. Of course they are. The actual research paper is titled, Sex Matters, European Urban Birds Flee Approaching Women Sooner Than Approaching Men.
This was published in the British Ecological Society's journal titled People and Nature. Researchers examined flight initiation distance. That means it's how close a human can get before a bird flies away. I am extremely familiar with that distance.
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