Skeptics Guide #1023

The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe Skepticast #1023 February 12th 2025 Segment #1. News Items News Item #1 – Demographics of Misinformation https://theness.com/neurologicablog/who-believes-misinformation/ News Item #2 – The Toll of Fake Research https://www.livescience.com/human-behavior/fake-studies-are-slowing-slowing-lifesaving-medical-research-all-while-fraudsters-are-getting-rich-investigation-reveals News Item #3 – Dangerous Street Drugs https://www.sciencealert.com/theres-never-been-a-more-dangerous-time-to-use-street-drugs-heres-why News Item #4 – Nearby Habitable Exoplanet https://phys.org/news/2025-02-exoplanet-potentially-capable-sustaining-life.html News Item #5 – Reverse Engineering Alien Technology https://www.ft.com/content/7b83f0f5-4d03-40c4-b79d-36cc4e247d54 Segment #2. Who’s That Noisy Segment #3. Science Quiz Segment #4. Your Questions and E-mails Question #1: Starlink Reentries One of the items in last week's Science or Fiction was space junk. Just before I heard that, I read that 4-5 Starlink satellites de-orbit *every day*. That's nuts. I hope they are de-orbited purposefully. https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=07&month=02&year=2025 Bill Wohler Menlo Park, CA SETI Institute/NASA Ames Research Center Software engineer for Kepler, SOFIA, TESS, Ziggy. Segment #5. Science or Fiction Each week our host will come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine, one fictitious. He will challenge our panel of skeptics to sniff out the fake – and you can play along. Item 1: Biologists have engineered a bacteria that can continuously deliver drugs into the intestine and demonstrated its effectiveness in treating chronic inflammation and obesity. Item 2: In a recent study adults were able to learn absolute pitch after 8 weeks of training to a >90% accuracy. Item 3: Astronomers announce the detection of a super high energy “cosmogenic” neutrino that is the most energetic elementary particle ever detected at 120 PeV. Segment #6. Skeptical Quote of the Week “One of the problems with anecdotes is that they tend to be provided by the satisfied customers, not the unsatisfied or dead ones.” ― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!