The latest flap over drone sightings in New Jersey and other states in the North East appears to be – essentially nothing. Or rather, it’s a classic example of a mass panic. There are reports of “unusual” drone activity, which prompts people to look for drones, which results in people seeing drones or drone-like objects and therefore reporting them, leading to more drone sightings. Lather, rinse, repeat. The news media happily gets involved to maximize the sensationalism of the non-event. Federal agencies eventually comment in a “nothing to see here” style that just fosters more speculation. UFO and other fringe groups confidently conclude that whatever is happening is just more evidence for whatever they already believed in.

I am not exempting myself from the cycle either. Skeptics are now part of the process, eventually explaining how the whole thing is a classic example of some phenomenon of human self-deception, failure of critical thinking skills, and just another sign of our dysfunctional media ecosystem. But I do think this is a healthy part of the media cycle. One of the roles that career skeptics play is to be the institutional memory for weird stuff like this. We can put such events rapidly into perspective because we have studied the history and likely been through numerous such events before.

Before I get to that bigger picture, here is a quick recap. In November there were sightings in New Jersey of “mysterious” drone activity. I don’t know exactly what made them mysterious, but it lead to numerous reportings of other drone sightings. Some of those sightings were close to a military base, Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, and some were concerned of a security threat. Even without the UFO/UAP angle, there is concern about foreign powers using drones for spying or potentially as a military threat. This is perhaps enhanced by all the reporting of the major role that drones are playing in the Russian-Ukraine war. Some towns in Southern New Jersey have banned the use of drones temporarily, and the FAA has also restricted some use.

A month after the first sightings Federal officials have stated that the sightings that have been investigated have all turned out to be drones, planes mistaken for drones, and even stars mistaken for drones. None have turned out to be anything mysterious or nefarious. So the drones, it turns out, are mostly drones.

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Some narratives are simply ubiquitous in our culture (every culture has its universal narratives). Sometimes these narratives emerge out of shared values, like liberty and freedom. Sometimes they emerge out of foundational beliefs (the US still has a puritanical bent). And sometimes they are the product of decades of marketing. Marketing-based narratives deserve incredible scrutiny because they are crafted to alter the commercial decision-making of people in society, not for the benefit of society or the public, but for the benefit of an industry. For example, I have tried to expose the fallacy of the “natural is always good, and chemicals are always bad” narrative. Nature, actually, is quite indifferent to humanity, and everything is made of chemicals.

Another narrative that is based entirely on propaganda meant to favor one industry and demonize its competition is the notion that organic farming is better for health and better for the environment. Actually, there is no evidence of any nutritional or health advantage from consuming organic produce. Further – and most people I talk to find this claim shocking – organic farming is worse for the environment than conventional or even “factory” farming. Stick with me and I will explain why this is the case.

A recent article in the NYT by Michael Grunwald nicely summarizes what I have been saying for years. First let me explain why I think there is such a disconnect between reality and public perception. This gets back to the narrative idea – people tend to view especially complex situations through simplistic narratives that give them a sense of understanding. We all do this because the world is complicated and we have to break it down. There is nothing inherently wrong with this – we use schematic, categories, and diagrams to simplify complex reality and chunk it into digestible bits. But we have to understand this is what we are doing, and how this may distort our understanding of reality. There are also better and worse ways to do this.

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A recent BBC article highlights some of the risk of the new age of social media we have crafted for ourselves. The BBC investigated the number one ranked UK podcast, Diary of a CEO with host Steven Bartlett, for the accuracy of the medical claims recently made on the show. While the podcast started out as focusing on tips from successful businesspeople, it has recently turned toward unconventional medical opinions as this has boosted downloads.

“In an analysis of 15 health-related podcast episodes, BBC World Service found each contained an average of 14 harmful health claims that went against extensive scientific evidence.”

These includes showcasing an anti-vaccine crank, Dr. Malhotra, who claimed that the “Covid vaccine was a net negative for society”. Meanwhile the WHO estimates that the COVID vaccine saved 14 million lives worldwide. A Lancet study estimates that in the European region alone the vaccine saved 1.4 million lives. This number could have been greater were in not for the very type of antivaccine misinformation spread by Dr. Malhotra.

Another guest promoted the Keto diet as a treatment for cancer. Not only is there no evidence to support this claim, dietary restrictions while undergoing treatment for cancer can be very dangerous, and imperil the health of cancer patients.

This reminds me of the 2014 study that found that, “For recommendations in The Dr Oz Show, evidence supported 46%, contradicted 15%, and was not found for 39%.” Of course, evidence published in the BMJ does little to counter misinformation spread on extremely popular shows. The BBC article highlights the fact that in the UK podcasts are not covered by the media regulator Ofcom, which has standards of accuracy and fairness for legacy media.

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Why does news reporting of science and technology have to be so terrible at baseline? I know the answers to this question – lack of expertise, lack of a business model to support dedicated science news infrastructure, the desire for click-bait and sensationalism – but it is still frustrating that this is the case. Social media outlets do allow actual scientists and informed science journalists to set the record straight, but they are also competing with millions of pseudoscientific, ideological, and other outlets far worse than mainstream media. In any case, I’m going to complain about while I try to do my bit to set the record straight.

I wrote about nuclear diamond batteries in 2020. The concept is intriguing but the applications very limited, and cost likely prohibitive for most uses. The idea is that you take a bit of radioactive material and surround it with “diamond like carbon” which serves two purposes. It prevents leaking of radiation to the environment, and it capture the beta decay and converts it into a small amount of electricity. This is not really a battery (a storage of energy) but an energy cell that produces energy, but it would have some battery-like applications.

The first battery based on this concept, capturing the beta decay of a radioactive substance to generate electricity, was in 1913, made by physicist Henty Moseley. So year, despite the headlines about the “first of its kind” whatever, we have had nuclear batteries for over a hundred years. The concept of using diamond like carbon goes back to 2016, with the first prototype created in 2018.

So of course I was disappointed when the recent news reporting on another such prototype declares this is a “world first” without putting it into any context. It is reporting on a new prototype that does have a new feature, but they make it sound like this is the first nuclear battery, when it’s not even the first diamond nuclear battery.  The new prototype is a diamond nuclear battery using Carbon-14 and the beta decay source. They make diamond like carbon out of C-14 and surround it with diamond like carbon made from non-radioactive carbon. C-14 has a half life of 5,700 years, so they claim the battery lasts of over 5,000 years.

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As I predicted the controversy over whether or not we have achieved general AI will likely exist for a long time before there is a consensus that we have. The latest round of this controversy comes from Vahid Kazemi from OpenAI. He posted on X:

“In my opinion we have already achieved AGI and it’s even more clear with O1. We have not achieved “better than any human at any task” but what we have is “better than most humans at most tasks”. Some say LLMs only know how to follow a recipe. Firstly, no one can really explain what a trillion parameter deep neural net can learn. But even if you believe that, the whole scientific method can be summarized as a recipe: observe, hypothesize, and verify. Good scientists can produce better hypothesis based on their intuition, but that intuition itself was built by many trial and errors. There’s nothing that can’t be learned with examples.”

I will set aside the possibility that this is all for publicity of OpenAI’s newest O1 platform. Taken at face value – what is the claim being made here? I actually am not sure (part of the problem of short form venues like X). In order to say whether or not OpenAI O1 platform qualified as an artificial general intelligence (AGI) we need to operationally define what an AGI is. Right away, we get deep into the weeds, but here is a basic definition: “Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that matches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities across a wide range of cognitive tasks. This contrasts with narrow AI, which is limited to specific tasks.”

That may seem straightforward, but it is highly problematic for many reasons. Scientific American has a good discussion of the issues here. But at it’s core two features pop up regularly in various definitions of general AI – the AI has to have wide-ranging abilities, and it has to equal or surpass human level cognitive function. There is a discussion about whether or not how the AI achieves its ends matters or should matter. Does it matter if the AI is truly thinking or understanding? Does it matter if the AI is self-aware or sentient? Does the output have to represent true originality or creativity?

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What is Power-to-X (PtX)? It’s just a fancy marketing term for green hydrogen – using green energy, like wind, solar, nuclear, or hydroelectric, to make hydrogen from water. This process does not release any CO2, just oxygen, and when the hydrogen is burned back with that oxygen it creates only water as a byproduct. Essentially hydrogen is being used as an energy storage medium. This whole process does not create energy, it uses energy. The wind and solar etc. are what create the energy. The “X” refers to all the potential applications of hydrogen, from fuel to fertilizer. Part of the idea is that intermittent energy production can be tied to hydrogen production, so when there is excess energy available it can be used to make hydrogen.

A recent paper explores the question of why, despite all the hype surrounding PtX, there is little industry investment. Right now only 0.1% of the world’s hydrogen production is green. Most of the rest comes from fossil fuel (gray and brown hydrogen) and in many cases is actually worse than just burning the fossil fuel. Before I get into the paper, let’s review what hydrogen is currently used for. Hydrogen is essentially a high energy molecule and it can be used to drive a lot of reactions. It is mostly used in industry – making fertilizer, reducing the sulfur content of gas, producing industrial chemicals, and making biofuel. It can also be used for hydrogen fuel cells cars, which I think is a wasted application as BEVs are a better technology and any green hydrogen we do make has better uses. There are also emerging applications, like using hydrogen to refine iron ore, displacing the use of fossil fuels.

A cheap abundant source of green hydrogen would be a massive boost to multiple industries and would also be a key component to achieving net zero carbon emissions. So where is all the investment? This is the question the paper explores.

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Astrophysicists come up with a lot of whacky ideas, some of which actually turn out to be possibly true (like the Big Bang, black holes, accelerating cosmic expansion, dark matter). Of course, all of these conclusions are provisional, but some are now backed by compelling evidence. Evidence is the real key – often the challenge is figuring out a way to find evidence that can potentially support or refute some hypothesis about the cosmos. Sometimes it’s challenging to figure out even theoretically (let alone practically) how we might prove or disprove a hypothesis. Decades may go buy before we have the ability to run relevant experiments or make the kinds of observations necessary.

Black holes fell into that category. They were predicted by physics long before we could find evidence of their existence. There is a category of black hole, however, that we still have not confirmed through any observation – primordial black holes (PBH). As the name implies, these black holes may have been formed in the early universe, even before the first stars. In the early dense universe, fluctuations in the density of space could have lead to the formation of black holes. These black holes could theoretically be of any size, since they are not dependent on a massive star collapsing to form them. This process could lead to black holes smaller than the smaller stellar remnant black hole.

In fact, it is possible that there are enough small primordial black holes out there to account for the missing dark matter  – matter we can detect through its gravitational effects but that we cannot otherwise see (hence dark). PBHs are considered a dark matter candidate, but the evidence for this so far is not encouraging. For example, we might be able to detect black holes through microlensing. If a black hole happens to pass in front of a more distant star (from the perspective of an observer on Earth), then gravitational lensing will cause that star to appear to brighten, until the black hole passes. However, microlensing surveys have not found the number of microlensing events that would be necessary for PBHs to explain dark matter. Dark matter makes up 85% of the matter in the universe, so there would have to be lots of PBHs to be the sole cause of dark matter. It’s still possible that longer observation times would detect larger black holes (brightening events can take years if the black holes are large). But so far there is a negative result.

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Climate change is a challenging issue on multiple levels – it’s challenging for scientists to understand all of the complexities of a changing climate, it’s difficult to know how to optimally communicate to the public about climate change, and of course we face an enormous challenge in figuring out how best to mitigate climate change. The situation is made significantly more difficult by the presence of a well-funded campaign of disinformation aimed at sowing doubt and confusion about the issue.

I recently interviewed climate scientist Michael Mann about some of these issues and he confirmed one trend that I had noticed, that the climate change denier rhetoric has, to some extent, shifted to what he called “doomism”. I have written previously about some of the strategies of climate change denial, specifically the motte and bailey approach. This approach refers to a range of positions, all of which lead to the same conclusion – that we should essentially do nothing to mitigate climate change. We should continue to burn fossil fuels and not worry about the consequences. However, the exact position shifts based upon current circumstances. You can deny that climate change is even happening, when you have evidence or an argument that seems to support this position. But when that position is not rhetorically tenable, you can back off to more easily defended positions, that while climate change may be happening, we don’t know the causes and it may just be a natural trend. When that position fails, then you can fall back to the notion that climate change may not be a bad thing. And then, even if forced to admit that climate change is happening, it is largely anthropogenic, and it will have largely negative consequences, there isn’t anything we can do about it anyway.

This is where doomism comes in. It is a way of turning calls for climate action against themselves. Advocates for taking steps to mitigate climate change often emphasize how dire the situation is. The climate is already showing dangerous signs of warming, the world is doing too little to change course, the task at hand is enormous, and time is running out. That’s right, say the doomists, in fact it’s already too late and we will never muster the political will to do anything significant, so why bother trying. Again, the answer is – do nothing.

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