ASM204 Blue blockers, Germs on Mars, and the Science of Cults

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blue blockers germs on mars and the science of cults all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike [Music] welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where we believe that every sincere question deserves a non-judgmental and honest response i'm your host mike mccarrick the internet calls me science mike and then well hell that's a long story for now we're just going to answer a bunch of science questions with a focus on honoring questions and giving them good responses so what do you say friends let's get it started well if you listen to ask science mike you know this is a show about your questions and your questions being responded to in a sincere way but did you know how to get your questions on the show it's very simple just go to asksciencemike.com and once you go to that website that's where the podcast is hosted if you scroll toward the bottom of the page you'll see that there's two ways to send a question first you can record a voicemail he can hear your voice on the show and second especially if you want to send a question that is maybe anonymous you can email me a question using either of those systems will get a question into the team behind ask science mike where they are reviewed and collated and i literally don't even know what happens and then some of those questions get selected and they get posted on the patreon page for ask science mike where the patrons of this program pick the questions every week i thought i was doing a peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers there for a second with all those peas gosh anyway um we'd love to answer your questions so just go to ask sciencebike.com and submit your question of course some tiers of patrons get questions on the show automatically and every patron gets to vote on the questions that go on the show so if you're not a patron of asking spike and you've thought about it as little as one dollar a month gets you into the ask science mike patreon crew uh where you get to vote on questions and we do some monthly q a's and uh there's there's special perks for those people who make this show financially possible so uh didn't mean to do a patreon plug there right up front it just seemed to naturally fit with reminding you to send in questions because we always need questions or this podcast well it doesn't happen without questions i don't want to just listen to what i want to talk about i don't i mean gosh what would we do uh talk about how much i love magic and dungeons and dragons be a completely different show so please keep this podcast interesting by telling me what you want me to talk about also in january i'm going on the road again uh medical rest has gone really well i am feeling so much better so i am going to take a couple of trips in january starting january 11th i'll be at trinity church in buffalo new york for the fresh voices series and then this is wild i've done this a couple of times and really enjoyed it i'm going to fort smith arkansas for a full week beginning on january 20th and going through the 27th i'll be doing a week's worth of events and first presbyterian church and fort smith arkansas for an event called a week with mike mccarg so i'd love to see you at either those events if you want more information just go to ask sciencemike.com and click on that events button our first question this week was an email question and it's actually a really fun one here it goes hi mike at the beginning of the movie the martian which you should see if you haven't already astronaut mark watney gets caught in a dust storm on the surface of mars and suffers a pretty serious puncture wound my husband remarked that at least he wouldn't have to worry about infections since there's no bacterial life there but i can't imagine that getting sterile or sterile not sterile sterile martian dirt inside a wound wouldn't be problematic for healing well a foreign body is a foreign body what do you think is mars antiseptic thanks sonja that's a great question number one let's talk about the martian gosh i love the martian i read the novel first i mean when it first came out there was a review on a website i read called ars technica and i was so fascinated because this journalist who's a total nerd and i trust a lot said that the fidelity of the science of the novel was really high and so i read it and sure enough i you know if you study orbital mechanics or cosmology or rocketry or rocket science at all most books and films become really frustrating to read now there are certain genres in literature especially hard sci-fi where sometimes people go through great detail to make sure that the action depicted their narrative is at least plausible if not actually simulated sometimes according to the laws of physics but those books can also sometimes be a slog to read so what was fascinating to me about the martian is that it was well researched and scientifically plausible with a couple of small exceptions and a great read just a phenomenal story and then you could have knocked me over with a feather in the martian atmosphere when the movie turned out to be just about as accurate as the book i mean there are only like two scenes in that whole movie where i just go are you kidding me one of course is the uh storm in the beginning yes there are dust storms on mars but because the atmosphere is so thin high speed winds on mars don't actually carry much force you could walk right through a martian tornado and pretty much be unaffected other than the problems you would have with visibility so that was one problem the second problem was the whole um you know guiding well in the end you know i don't mind saying the beginnings if you haven't seen the film i'm not going to ruin the end there's another scene toward the end involving a glove that although possible i just didn't think anyone had the skill level to do but i'll go ahead and accept those two things in that film because the film and the movie were so good but we didn't want to talk about how good the martian was this isn't a uh question asking me to review the film you wanted to know about germs and that is a complicated question um let's talk about the soil of mars first or mars in general is there microbial life on mars we don't know we have rovers on mars and uh the results are inconclusive number one the equipment we have on mars today is not designed to specifically test for life although this is testing for some byproducts related to life we found some fascinating things on mars more water than we expected in some places less water and others a more defined seasonal cycle of liquid water availability some fascinating variations in atmospheric levels on the localized basis of both methane and oxygen that could be driven by life cycles of blooms and and uh declines of microbial life as some description would that life be bacteria we don't know it would potentially be xenobiology there are some theories that life on earth didn't begin on earth but began on mars and was brought here uh basically from you can imagine something similar to a bacterial spore or endospore following a meteor collision on mars that ejected matter from the surface of that planet and then by sheer chance some of it made it here survived atmospheric entry and became the origins of life on this planet that is one theory for a biogenesis on earth so it is possible that there is microbial life on mars we don't know how similar or dissimilar that life may be to our microbes but that is the bigger issue it is possible there could be some exotic bug on mars that makes us very sick i don't think that's likely but it is possible what we do know my friends is that every human being is covered in and full of bacteria by some counts there are 10 bacterial cells for every one human cell in your body now i've heard that figure disputed and i've heard it validated and all of the people both disputing and validating those figures know much more about microbiology than i do so i will simply tell you that there's a debate on that matter that i personally am not qualified to solve but what is unanimously understood by everybody is that there's a whole bunch of bacteria in on and around your body and that you are structured with an immune system and an epidermis specifically designed to protect your inner cells from encountering unfriendly bacteria that don't belong inside of you for example i often have a staff colony staff bacteria that lives in my nose pretty gross huh yeah well you know oversharing is what i do for a living and so sometimes if i get a cut or a scrape it gets really really really badly infected if that staph colony that we think lives in my nose gets somewhere on my skin like maybe i sneeze and then i get a really really bad infection that's hard to clear up in that wound now if i got on a rocket ship and i went to mars and i had an accident and i was impaled by a metal rod there would be a risk of infection even if that metal rod and that martian soil had no germs in it at all because there are germs on the outside of my body that don't belong inside my body the actual foreign matter of martian dirt could be irritating especially because we understand that there are alkaline components that are somewhat toxic to people that was another part of that movie that's probably wrong you could you may be able to grow potatoes in the martian soil you probably couldn't eat them they would probably make you pretty sick or even kill you but assuming you wash the wound the primary risk of infection in my mind for mark whitney watney would not be martian germs but the germs he brought with himself from earth which by the way if the martian was a documentary and those events had really happened it's possible that in that moment the bacteria of mark watney's body in and out colonized mars so even when humans left and even if there were no bacteria on mars before bacteria are so tough that it's possible some of them could survive some of them could even thrive and spread and that's why in human and robotic space travel we have sanitation and sterilization protocols to minimize the risk of microbes on this planet migrating to other planets and becoming natives there because you can imagine we are a very competitive planet we've got some tough generalist and specialist species of microbial life and imagine they end up in the atmosphere of saturn or the surface of one of those moons or yes on mars could it be that our bacteria got there and wiped out alien life before we ever found it it's entirely possible and that's why mark watney would have had to watch out for infection because the earth is a planet absolutely thriving with microbial life and mark watney came from the earth [Music] ask science mike is made possible by sponsors one of whom is kiwico my longest running at this point sponsor who i just absolutely love you hear me talk about kiwico all the time if you haven't kiwi co is a service where you sign up for a subscription and then someone in your life probably a child gets a crate in the mail every month and that crate is about hands-on experiences with steam and i don't mean scalding steam i mean science technology engineering art and math there are seven lines to choose for children of all ages and all developmental levels that incorporate all of the topics above they're tons of fun i found in my house this is the best way to get my teenage daughters to set down their cell phones and special right now kiwi co is perfect for the holiday season don't go down to toys r us aisle uh don't go to target or whatever and buy another plastic toy that someone else probably got anyway and you might be the wrong movie franchise who knows get kiwico there's something for every kid on your list it makes the perfect gift for every young explorer engineer or artist in your life and kiwico has gifts for kids of all ages and types of interests if you go to kiwico.com science i'll say that again kiwico.com science kiwi co is offering listeners of this podcast their first crate for free so that means the crate under the tree you don't even pay for it all you do is pay shipping and kiwico sends it and then for the rest of the year that special person or child in your life will continue to get crates every month i love them especially the new eureka crate for older teens and adults we're getting them at our house uh and i'll i'll be honest my family sits down together and we all make our kiwi crates and we have so much to so kiwi co's mission is to empower kids to not just make a project but make a difference and you can be a part of that just go to kiwico.com science to learn more and our second sponsor this week oh man i just love you've heard me talk about them before not as a sponsor but as my friends biologos is sponsoring this episode of ask science mike to celebrate something i was recently a guest on their podcast which in a second i'll play a snippet of that so if you'd like to hear me in what i thought was a very tender and beautiful conversation uh with my friend uh james stump uh i'd absolutely love um for you to listen to that you get you get to hear a second here uh for free and uh well it's free over there as well uh but anyway it's a good conversation i like biologos because for those of you who are trying to fit in contemporary understandings of science especially evolutionary biology with what i would call a more orthodox view on christianity that's what biologos does they were founded by francis collins who you may or may not know led the human genome project and was the direct is the director of the national institute of health appointed by obama and continuing continuing to serve under trump which is a pretty rare combination he wrote a book called the language of god which is a new york times bestseller and uh i just love biologos because you know we kind of fit in different lanes i like talking about science in a way that helps people regardless of their faith background feel more comfortable with science i like people who aren't religious to understand a little more about the science of religion but let's be honest like my beliefs to most christians are pretty out there and what i really enjoy about my friends at biologos is the way that they offer people who want a more traditional and orthodox christian theology to still integrate good science and friends this is so so important not only because i understand that differing views on evolution really actually cause pretty significant mental health issues especially for young people but because science literacy matters and biologos can reach people including people listening to this podcast who hold more traditional christian theologies while allowing them to grow in their science literacy and i believe that science literacy is good for the world so i hope you'll listen for the next four minutes as i share a clip of my conversation with james over on the biologos podcast and uh after that we'll get back to our show as scheduled i've heard you talk about the fact that the word god gets used very differently by lots of different people and so when we're sitting here talking about the existence of god even what do we even mean by that what i try to do when i talk about god is be aware that all of us in the room probably think different things so now what do we do right well it means we probably shouldn't make universal claims about god without admitting we're talking about different things some of the ways i think about god atheists are very comfortable with they're like why do you just just say cosmos dude well no if i say cosmos that activates a different set of neural pathways in my brain based on how human brains process language and i like really like the whole mystery spirituality thing that's why it's the god label it just activates different parts of my brain like and there are other conceptions of god that atheists reject that i'm perfectly comfortable rejecting too absolutely atheist about that kind of guy totally thank you so um i'm less interested in putting it forward my idea of god is the one everyone should get behind i mean i'm more than happy to share my conceptions of god but i'd rather just have everybody admit like hey you've got a thing in your brain with the word god that's different than that brain and that brain and that brain and that brain so now what do we do and i think it means we have to be patient and loving and humble when we talk about matters of faith and anything that invokes the g word so one of the big dividing lines um between conceptions of god is whether god is ultimately personal yes what do you think about that i mean we have difficulties with what is personal mean though too yeah right again the trouble with language but yeah so the if i like if i go through physics to find god if god is like some kind of creator sustainer for everything we can see and measure then that means god has to be somewhere north of a relativistic understanding of the universe and in a relativistic understanding of the universe a time-based consciousness is nonsense this is not a thing like the way we conceive of the universe is inseparable from 86 billion neurons sitting on a planet right a cosmic entity simply could not conceive of reality the way we do and exist a cosmic entity would probably not differentiate between present past and future right that gets really hard to call personal but somehow when i pray and meditate god shows up in a personal way and those two things uh in my philosophical mind are at odds but being a good mystic i just sit and contemplate it it's super i hate i hate like when rigorous thinkers talk to me i just i know they will leave disappointed because i'll forrest gump every time maybe it's both maybe both are happening at the same time do you see what i mean like that the problem is if we really push to what my primary framing of the world is it's a brain-centered understanding of the human experience so what i understand is that if i apply an analytical reductive or philosophical lens to my pursuit of god it moves into my left hemisphere of the brain and it moves towards the front of my brain and that's the opposite corner of where spirituality lives so i'll play that game but i won't go hard because it neurologically re-biases my brain away from what i value most in my faith which is the experience of god's presence so i intentionally make sure two-thirds or more of the time i spend with this word god are spent in practice and experience and not in analysis i'm not sure but i think this might be the most succinctly stated question in the history of this show do blue light glasses actually work what is the science behind them roger do blue light glasses actually work what is the science behind them that's a 12 word question for ask science mike i cannot recall one with such brevity so roger thank you for your direct communication uh let's talk about blue blockers for a second uh well first of all what is a blue blocker or blue light glasses these are special lenses on on glasses you wear that are designed to reduce the amount of blue light that gets to your eyes now why would you want to block blue light from your eyes let's talk about where most blue light comes from in our lives first of all and that's from the sun and let's be very clear that based on the research i've seen blue light is not harmful for your eyes however something that's even a smaller wavelength than blue light which is ultraviolet light is harmful for your eyes and that's why most uh optometrists and opticians recommend that you wear sunglasses especially a polarized sunglasses if you're going to be outdoors because uv light is just as bad for your eyes as it is for your skin based on our understanding of medicine today and so now because we know that uv light is bad we started to wonder if blue light is bad for our eyes because the tv screens and iphones and android phones and computer monitors and tablets and everything we look at tends to just throw blue light out our eyes let's be clear the blue light of these screens is less intense than even a pretty dim day outdoors right the sun is very very bright few things in our life experience offer anywhere near the intensity of light or frankly radiation that our own sun offers but uh because that blue light from the sun is kind of one of the primary factors governing our sleep schedule we do understand that devices with blue light in them can help disrupt the rhythms the circadian rhythms that help us get quality sleep so in addition to being suspected in causing eye strain and eye soreness we also understand that perhaps all this blue light is interfering with our sleep and therefore glasses that reduce the amount of blue light that gets to our eyes might help with both of those things you've also seen efforts from different computer manufacturers and phone manufacturers to shift the color temperature of screens as the days get more advanced so that you're looking at more yellow light and less blue light as it gets later in the day and now today not only is that feature built in for free in most operating systems on any recent vintage phone or computer system uh blue blocking glasses are relatively affordable they're not a very expensive item to procure especially for health and so the american academy of ophthalmology says they're okay they're certainly not harmful however they indicate and my research as well shows that there's far from a clear picture on blue blockers doing anything we know they're not well it's very unlikely they're harmful in any way but studies have failed to show any significant contribution to improved sleep quality reduced eye strain reduced headaches or any of those things with people wearing blue blockers that said my optometrist recommends them and wants me to get a pair since i work on the computer so much but the larger uh studies and and there's not that many and the sample sizes aren't that big but preliminary research doesn't seem to uh show anything big happening here if you do want to protect yourself from eye strain the american academy of ophthalmology recommends that you sit an arms length from your computer screen and you position your screens that you're gazing slightly downward my desk is set up that way and it certainly helps you don't want a lot of screen glare and if you have some get a matte screen filter and you want to take regular breaks every 20 minutes look at an object 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds which is called 20 20 20 rule if your eyes feel dry artificial tears can help although you want to be careful about the composition of those tears and lighting matters and as always you know if you wear contacts try glasses they're actually can be easier on your eye um so that's what they recommend instead of blue blockers i'll put a link to a meta study as well a study of studies on ask sciencebike.com where they went through and they looked at multiple studies that had seemingly solid methodology and not huge but decent sample sizes where they did not find high quality evidence to support using blue blockers to improve visual performance or sleep quality or to alleviate eye fatigue or conserve macular health so the science behind them the theory is absolutely sound blue light does interfere with our sleep quality um that's a given we know that unfortunately right now it doesn't look like blue blockers help improve sleep quality and we do have lots of eye strain and eye health issues but that's mainly because um we you know we're using these devices too close to our faces a lot and maybe something free instead of uh buying a pair of blue blocking glasses could help and that's following that 20 20 20 rule to improve your eye health [Music] okay our last question is a little heavier so if you have backgrounds or experiences with extreme religious fundamentalism or cults consider this a trigger warning if you need to pause and come back later or anytime during this answer you need to pause and take a break feel free to do so take care of yourself and take care of your mental health okay so here's the question hey science mike i was wondering if you would share a little bit about the science of cults there was a brief discussion of what constitutes a cult in the suffering episode of the liturgist podcast where michael gunger called a church he attended a cult i've since attempted to do my own research on the topic but it seems academics nowadays don't use the term cult and hardly acknowledge they are harmful at all the reason i ask is quite personal as my family was in a real deal separate from society cult child brides were the norm i've attended many evangelical churches over the years before my deconstruction and while that belief system has indeed been harmful to me and many others it really bothers me when people call those churches cults it's not the same as living on a commune run by an ego maniacal child abusing dictator i was just wondering if you bring any clarity to the topic thanks well let's start [Music] and start by saying i'm sorry that you went through that your email is so well written and so clear and i can tell that your thoughts are clear and composed as well but if that was me there'd be a lot of hurt inside me if i'd been through what you've been through if it was me it would be a lot of emotional scarring it would be a lot of bitterness and resentment and anger that perhaps would be so intense i would have a hard time even accessing it so no matter what i say in my response to your question i just want you to know that that experience sounds really hard and i'm so happy that you made it that you not only survived but you made it out and i just wonder if we you and i together right now could just take a moment to savor that you're out you're free you made it and here's the difficulty my friend so many people have trauma so many people have trauma and everyone has pain and if we compare the experiences that caused our pain and our trauma we might try to rank them so someone who was embarrassed because if a friend didn't show up to dinner one night and they were left sitting at a table alone compared to someone like me who didn't have any friends that is a child and was very bullied compared to someone like you who was abused in a cult environment we might be tempted to rank some people's pain and trauma is worse and some other people's pain and trauma is less bad but what i've been learning for the last two years is that our brains don't work that way the meaning making parts of our brain certainly do we we can rank and compare experiences against our own and imagine that they are more or less severe but in the ways that our brains and bodies respond to emotional pain to trauma our brains only know what has hurt us and how much it hurt and our bodies they bear the marks of those experiences the release of hormones changes in tissue composition even a heightened or suppressed startle or polyvagal response so if i were you and i heard someone on a podcast use the word cult to describe their experience and it was less intense than mine i think i would feel erased and forgotten as well and yet when i look at the impact of many parts of evangelical christianity i mean specifically white evangelical christianity the gay teen suicide the suicides of people who've lost their faith and are afraid of being ostracized which by the data we tell us is we find is quite common the stunted emotional development the patterns of codependence the elevation of narcissists occult and mainstream american white evangelical christianity are different but they both hurt a lot of people and perhaps the average impact on one person of evangelicalism is less i would say almost certainly but evangelicalism is such a massive system it's it's implicated in the foreign policy of the united states what i'm saying is your hurt about people misusing the word cult is real and is valid and important and people who've escaped the toxicity of white evangelical christianity while their use of the word cult helps to liberate them and this is where language and feelings and the intersection of our words and our feelings gets complicated by technical definition occult is a charismatic leader who increasingly becomes an object of worship as the general principles that may have originally sustained the group lose power a process that uses coercive persuasion or thought reform to control people an economic sexual and other exploitation of group members by the leader or the ruling group that's according to the cult education institute and you were in an insular self-contained toxic abusive and horrible cult but the evangelicalism of today it seems to fit that definition better than it ever has and seems to be coming more and more cult-like so what do we do with that what do we do with your experiences and my experiences i believe that every person's feelings matter every time every feeling people have is important and every person who has feelings is important and every time people have feelings it's important it should be paid attention to and that means that as you express you're hurt with the word cult being misused i want to sit with you in that and say yes your feelings of hurt matter they come from a real place and then when my friend michael uses the word cult to describe his experience i understand that also comes from a place of hurt and woundedness and trauma and in that moment michael's feelings they matter to me as well for me i've decided that as people process their feelings i want to try to be gracious and patient and careful and in those moments that people are processing trauma i just want them to be able to do so unless they feel safe and secure and accepted then we can have conversations about language and when to use it i don't know the right answer to this question what i know is that there's a lot of hurt a lot of pain and a lot of trauma in the world because the days are so hard as we become aware collectively of the changing climate as global and national politics seem to lose their minds and become worse than they've ever been in living memory we can't rely on our earth because we've harmed it we can't rely on our politics because it's metastasized into something singularly corrupt and frightening at the same time we're all there at least many of us are learning to be emotionally sensitive and aware it seems like at the same time millions of people their traumatic experiences are outgassing as they're in a a cloud of fear and anxiety friend these are these are difficult times for everyone and it seems like they're uniquely difficult for you i don't know the science of cults what i know is that insular social groups often called cults like the one you grew up with well they really do cause lasting and significant psychological harm and i see that i name that and i accept that and i'm so sorry that a friend of mine on a podcast that i helped create triggered some of that trauma for you and i don't expect you to be gracious in that situation i validate your expression of pain and as you validate that experience of pain i hope for you something happens that has happened for me that you become more sensitive and aware to not only your own pain which there's probably more there than you even know but to the pain and trauma that surrounds us everywhere i believe so strongly my friends that we have to be truly careful with each other that if we learn to relate to our own feelings we can learn to relate to each other better and maybe just maybe we can create a world that we want to live in together my dear friend andre henry says it doesn't have to be this way he even sells shirts that say that i've got a sweatshirt like that in my closet it doesn't have to be this way and i wonder if maybe a first step in the process of changing things is to learn to be patient both with our own feelings and with the feelings of others ask science mike is brought to you by the most wonderful team in radio our producer is caitlin hermstad our director and sound designer is greg nordin andrew golucky provides pre-production services and brent cradle handles management i'm your host mike mccarg and the show is sponsored by run by and taken care of by my patrons on patreon the theme song for science mike was written performed and recorded by jeff bodford thanks for listening everyone and i'll talk to you next week