Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.

Friday, July 31, 2020

Infinite stars, important dust, and light's vacation home

I get the oddest emails sometimes.

I guess it's an occupational hazard.  Some of them are very earnest, trying to get me to see the error of my ways and just believe in (circle one: homeopathy, astrology, auras, psychic energy fields, ghosts, Bigfoot, chakras, god).  Others are angry at me for not believing in any of the above, and call me all sorts of names, sometimes giving me anatomically-impossible suggestions as a bonus.

The most puzzling ones, though, are when someone simply sends me a link.  What am I supposed to do with this?  Is it an appeal to believe whatever the website is claiming?  Is it a suggestion for a future blog post?  Is a link to a malware site that will destroy my computer?  Or is it a case of trolling -- sending me something intended to raise my blood pressure to near-aneurysm levels?

I got one of those types yesterday -- an unsigned email from an address I did not recognize, with a link to the site "Scientific Proof of the Bible."  Clearly I couldn't see a site with that title and not click the link.  If the individual who sent it was fishing for skeptics, (s)he hooked one on the first try.

The site has the following header:
The Bible is estimated to have been written between 1450 B.C. and 95 A.D.  This chart shows scientific facts and principles referred to in this ancient Bible, but not actually discovered by humankind until later centuries.  Dead sea scrolls, historical documentation, and word of mouth all confirm the authenticity of the Bible.  Since people had no official knowledge of these scientific facts until more than a thousand years after the Bible was written, is this scientific proof that the Bible was inspired by God?
There follows a list of scientific facts and claims, the Bible verse that allegedly predicted them, and the year that the scientists finally discovered them (proving the Bible right after the fact, is the implication).  For instance we have "Light is a particle and has mass (a photon)," which I think is supposed to be some kind of description of the wave/particle duality of light (I'm being generous, here).  The scientists discovered this in 1932 (says the website), but it had been predicated thousands of years earlier, in Job 38:19.  So I looked up Job 38:19, and it says: "Where is the way where light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where is the place thereof?"

Well, I don't know about you, but as far as I can see, that has fuck-all to do with photons and wave/particle duality.  Other than the mention of the word "light," that is.  And it implies, incorrectly, that light dwelleth somewhere, as if light hath a vacation home in Palm Beach or something.

So I thought, okay, maybe that was just a bad example.  So I tried "An infinite number of stars exist," which was supposedly predicted by Genesis 15:5.  Here's Genesis 15:5: "And he brought him [Abraham] forth abroad, and said, Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be."

Well, the number of Abraham's descendants isn't infinite.  In fact, it isn't even close to the number of stars in our galaxy alone (currently estimated at about 300 billion).  So this one isn't so much irrelevant as it is simply wrong.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

So then I looked at "Dust is important to survival," allegedly discovered by scientists in 1935.  And it's true, I suppose; dust storms carry minerals out over the oceans, and have a great effect on oceanic productivity.  But the quote that allegedly should have told those silly scientists all they needed to know about the phenomenon millennia ago is Isaiah 40:12, which says, "Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of Earth in a measure, and weighed out the mountains in scales, and the hills with a balance?"

Well, I certainly haven't, but the preceding verse seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with dust being "important for survival."

Then we have "Radio astronomy (stars give off signals)," which brings us back to the Book of Job -- Job 38:7, to be specific.  And that verse is: "When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."

By this point, I was thinking, "Oh, come on. Is that really the best you can do?"  Because a lot of the rest of them were patently ridiculous -- like claiming that it took scientists until the 19th century to realize that blood was necessary for life, that oceans have currents, and that thunder and lightning were related (hell, my dog figured that last one out).

Oh, and supposedly it wasn't until the 17th century that the scientists realized that both a man and a woman are necessary to make a baby.

How exactly stupid do these people think that scientists are?  I mean, I know that sometimes we nerds can be a little hopeless in the romance department, but even we understand how sex works.

So at this point, I kind of gave it up as a bad job.

I guess I should be, in a way, heartened; that the biblical literalists are feeling threatened enough even to try to create a list like this means that they're recognizing the inroad that rationalism is making.  But man, you'd think if they were going to try to craft a cogent argument, they could manage something a little more convincing.

Of course, this still doesn't answer my initial question, which is whether the person who sent it to me meant it as a suggestion, a criticism, or a dubious attempt to anger me into a coronary.  I'm taking it as the first-mentioned, which is at least the nicest of the three.  And if the person who sent it reads this, please let me know in the "Comments" section if I'm right, just to satisfy my own curiosity.

But do try to avoid any anatomically-impossible suggestions.  Those are kind of off-putting.

*****************************

Being in the middle of a pandemic, we're constantly being urged to wash our hands and/or use hand sanitizer.  It's not a bad idea, of course; multiple studies have shown that communicable diseases spread far less readily if people take the simple precaution of a thirty-second hand-washing with soap.

But as a culture, we're pretty obsessed with cleanliness.  Consider how many commercial products -- soaps, shampoos, body washes, and so on -- are dedicated solely to cleaning our skin.  Then there are all the products intended to return back to our skin and hair what the first set of products removed; the whole range of conditioners, softeners, lotions, and oils.

How much of this is necessary, or even beneficial?  That's the topic of the new book Clean: The New Science of Skin by doctor and journalist James Hamblin, who considers all of this and more -- the role of hyper-cleanliness in allergies, asthma, and eczema, and fascinating and recently-discovered information about our skin microbiome, the bacteria that colonize our skin and which are actually beneficial to our overall health.  Along the way, he questions things a lot of us take for granted... such as whether we should be showering daily.

It's a fascinating read, and looks at the question from a data-based, scientific standpoint.  Hamblin has put together the most recent evidence on how we should treat the surfaces of our own bodies -- and asks questions that are sure to generate a wealth of discussion.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]




Thursday, July 30, 2020

The doctor, Donald Trump, and demon sex

As I have mentioned more than once, there's pretty good evidence lately that the aliens who are in charge of the computer simulation we're all trapped in have gotten bored and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us.

For example, consider Dr. Stella Immanuel.  Dr. Immanuel has recently become a darling of the pro-Trump faction for her claims that she's cured people with active COVID-19 infections through a combination of hydroxychloroquine, Zithromax (the antibiotic in the "Z-Pak"), and zinc.  She was one of the leading voices at a "summit" hosted by a group calling itself "America's Frontline Doctors," which I have to admit has more gravitas than the more accurate "America's Batshit Conspiracy Theorists."  The misinformation flew at the "summit," including not only that COVID-19 was curable using hydroxychloroquine (multiple studies have found it to have no positive effects on the course of the illness, and a plethora of nasty side effects, some of which can be fatal), but that the pandemic itself was overblown and that masks aren't necessary to prevent its spread.

Trump, of course, loves Dr. Immanuel, because her message is identical to the one he's been pushing for months.  He tweeted a link to a video of Dr. Immanuel defending her coronavirus misinformation, and Donald Jr. retweeted it, calling it a "Must watch!!!"  Then the powers-that-be at both Twitter and Facebook, showing a rare burst of ethical behavior, deleted her video, tagged tweets promoting it as "containing misinformation," and most surprising of all, locked Donald Jr.'s Twitter account for twelve hours.


Dr. Immanuel, though, follows Trump's model in more than just espousing ridiculous pseudoscience; her personal motto is apparently "Death before admitting error."  After her video was taken down, she and Trump both doubled down on her position.  Dr. Immanuel threatened divine intervention, saying that Jesus Christ would destroy Facebook's servers if the video wasn't restored.  (They didn't, and he didn't.)  Trump, on the other hand, took a more mundane approach, if not substantially more sane.  "I can tell you this, she was on air along with many other doctors," he said.  "They were big fans of hydroxychloroquine and I thought she was very impressive in the sense that from where she came, I don't know which country she comes from, but she said that she's had tremendous success with hundreds of different patients, and I thought her voice was an important voice, but I know nothing about her."

The bizarre ideas of this "important voice" go far beyond misinformation about COVID-19, however.  Dr. Immanuel is a veritable fountain of loony beliefs, which include the following:
  • The medical establishment is working on medicines that are created from extraterrestrial DNA.
  • Gynecological disorders occur when women have dreams about having sex with demons.  It's the "demon sperm" that causes the problem.
  • Wet dreams cause erectile dysfunction, once again because they're accompanied by images of having sex.  With demon women, of course.
  • The demons themselves, though, aren't just in it for the kicks, but because that's how they reproduce.  "They turn into a woman and then they sleep with the man and collect his sperm," Immanuel said in a sermon at the church she runs in Houston, Texas, called "Firepower Ministries."  "Then they turn into the man and they sleep with a woman and deposit the sperm and reproduce more of themselves."
  • She calls herself a "wealth transfer coach."  Presumably that means transferring wealth from your bank account to hers.
  • The Illuminati (of course the Illuminati are involved) are trying to destroy the world, and the main way they're doing this has to do with gay marriage.  Don't ask me how that works.
  • Part of the government is being run by aliens who are reptilian in appearance, and oddly enough, I don't think she meant Mitch McConnell.
  • Scientists are currently working on a vaccine to prevent people from being religious.
  • Even children's toys are suspect.  She calls Pokémon "eastern demons," and has a special hatred for the Magic 8-Ball, which is a "psychic object used to start children in witchcraft."  (Sorry, Dr. Immanuel, "My sources say no.")
So this is the person that Donald Trump called "spectacular" and "very respected."

Then others took up the outcry.  Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, said that because Dr. Immanuel and Donald Trump were saying the same thing, she was being "attacked, ridiculed, and discredited" in a deliberate effort to damage Trump's reputation.  (Not, apparently, because what she was saying was certifiable horseshit.)  Simone Gold, one of the leaders of America's Frontline Doctors, said that social media was committing a crime by "censoring Physicians from speaking about COVID-19 and Hydroxychloroquine."  Radio host Mark Levin criticized several media outlets, such as The Daily Beast, for being part of a "vicious smear machine" -- because they'd quoted Dr. Immanuel verbatim.

As for the doctors who refuse to prescribe hydroxychloroquine for coronavirus infections, Dr. Immanuel said, "You’re no different than a murderer.  You’re no different than Hitler."

Here we have a person who in a sane world would be looked at as a wacko, more to be pitied than censured, but because Donald Trump says he likes her, Trump-supporters nationwide suddenly act as if she's the next Jonas Salk.  (Oh, and simultaneously, they cast Dr. Anthony Fauci -- one of the world's experts in communicable disease research -- as a fool at best and an evil mastermind at worst, for saying such things as "wear a mask in public" and "don't take medications that don't work and can also kill you.")

So that's the upside-down world we currently live in.  I'd like to tell you that things will sort themselves out and that wiser and saner heads will ultimately prevail, but if there's one thing I've learned in the past four years, it's that predicting what will happen next is a loser's game.  I even tried asking the best source I have, hoping to get some clarity, desperately seeking a reason to believe that things will improve soon.

But all it would say is "Reply hazy, try again."

*****************************

Being in the middle of a pandemic, we're constantly being urged to wash our hands and/or use hand sanitizer.  It's not a bad idea, of course; multiple studies have shown that communicable diseases spread far less readily if people take the simple precaution of a thirty-second hand-washing with soap.

But as a culture, we're pretty obsessed with cleanliness.  Consider how many commercial products -- soaps, shampoos, body washes, and so on -- are dedicated solely to cleaning our skin.  Then there are all the products intended to return back to our skin and hair what the first set of products removed; the whole range of conditioners, softeners, lotions, and oils.

How much of this is necessary, or even beneficial?  That's the topic of the new book Clean: The New Science of Skin by doctor and journalist James Hamblin, who considers all of this and more -- the role of hyper-cleanliness in allergies, asthma, and eczema, and fascinating and recently-discovered information about our skin microbiome, the bacteria that colonize our skin and which are actually beneficial to our overall health.  Along the way, he questions things a lot of us take for granted... such as whether we should be showering daily.

It's a fascinating read, and looks at the question from a data-based, scientific standpoint.  Hamblin has put together the most recent evidence on how we should treat the surfaces of our own bodies -- and asks questions that are sure to generate a wealth of discussion.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]




Wednesday, July 29, 2020

The pursuit of pleasure

It will come as no great shock to anyone who knows me that my patronus is a border collie.

Relaxation is not easy for me.  I'm kind of in perpetual motion from the moment I wake up.  Part of it is pure physical nervousness; even when I'm sitting still I'm not sitting still, and usually I'm bouncing one leg or swinging a foot back and forth or something.  In the last couple of months, driven by the fact that the pandemic closed the gym we belong to, my wife and I have been doing an online yoga program (we really like the one on YouTube with the ever-cheerful Adriene Mishler).  The problem is, for me at least, yoga isn't just about trying to twist your body into a Möbius strip, it's equally about focusing on your breath and finding inner stillness.  It usually begins, and always ends, with some sort of quiet meditative posture.

This is harder for me than trying to force myself into the Inverted Pretzel Asana, or whatever incomprehensible position she is encouraging us to bend ourselves into during the session itself.  As soon as my body stops moving, my mind starts to race, and it's a struggle not to start thinking of the list of things I need to accomplish next (or, if it's in the evening, all the things I didn't accomplish during the day that I need to see to tomorrow).

So retirement has had its challenges.  I know the idea is, "You worked hard during your entire career, you deserve some time off just to chill."  For me it's more like, "Now there are even more hours in the day during which I will feel tremendously guilty for not being as productive as I for some reason think I should be."

Q: How many border collies does it take to change a light bulb?  A: Only one.  He will do it quickly and efficiently, and afterward he will check to make sure all the wiring in your house is up to code.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Thomas Vaclavek from Woodstock, USA, Border Collie panting, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Add to this the fact that I have an insanely competitive streak, and it's a wonder I haven't stressed myself into a heart attack yet.  As an example, I can't just enjoy running; I had to join the OneNYChallenge, a "virtual" race where you run each day and log your miles online (the whole thing is a fundraiser for COVID research).  We had from May 15 to August 31 to log 500 kilometers -- I finished the race a month and a half early, and now am looking around like, "Okay, c'mon, what next?"

Anyhow, all this neurotic stuff comes up because of a paper last week in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, describing research from the University of Zürich that found that being hedonistic makes you happier than being goal-oriented -- that the old conventional wisdom that true happiness comes from self-control and delayed gratification leading to accomplishment might not be all that accurate.

The authors write:
Self-control helps to align behavior with long-term goals (e.g., exercising to stay fit) and shield it from conflicting hedonic goals (e.g., relaxing).  Decades of research have shown that self-control is associated with numerous positive outcomes, such as well-being.  In the present article, we argue that hedonic goal pursuit is equally important for well-being, and that conflicting long-term goals can undermine it in the form of intrusive thoughts.
"It's time for a rethink," said study lead author, social psychologist Katharina Bernecker, in an interview with Science Daily.  "Of course self-control is important, but research on self-regulation should pay just as much attention to hedonism, or short-term pleasure...  It was always thought that hedonism, as opposed to self-control, was the easier option...  The pursuit of hedonic and long-term goals needn't be in conflict with one another.  Our research shows that both are important and can complement each other in achieving well-being and good health. It is important to find the right balance in everyday life."

My question is whether this may be a correlation/causation error; that happier, more well-adjusted people gravitate toward occasional hedonism because they're confident enough to be a little self-righteous about their own needs and desires, not that increasing hedonistic behavior in people who are already wound a little too tight would make them happier.  To be fair, Bernecker did address that point: "But really enjoying one's hedonic choice isn't actually that simple for everybody because of those distracting thoughts...  Thinking of the work you still need to do can lead to more distracting thoughts at home, making you less able to rest."

So it makes me wonder what I can do about my own situation, since I doubt that merely eating a slice of chocolate cake for lunch and then taking a nap is going to fix my rabid goal-orientation.  And there is a good side of being as driven as I am; I have thirteen novels and a collection of short stories in print, I entertain the masses by writing here at Skeptophilia six days a week, and given that I ran five hundred kilometers in 65 days, I'm in pretty good physical condition for a 59-year-old.  But I would like to find a way to cycle down the nervous energy, and especially, get rid of the guilt, a relic of a childhood where there were two classes of activity: "accomplishing something worthwhile" and "wasting time."  (Sadly, in my parents' view, reading, writing, and playing music were all in the latter category.)

So it's time for the border collie to give it a rest.  I don't want to switch my patronus to a hound dog sleeping all day on the porch (which honestly is probably outside the realm of possibility in any case).  But it seems like I need to take the Bernecker et al. study to heart.

Maybe starting with the chocolate cake.  That actually sounded pretty good.

*****************************

Being in the middle of a pandemic, we're constantly being urged to wash our hands and/or use hand sanitizer.  It's not a bad idea, of course; multiple studies have shown that communicable diseases spread far less readily if people take the simple precaution of a thirty-second hand-washing with soap.

But as a culture, we're pretty obsessed with cleanliness.  Consider how many commercial products -- soaps, shampoos, body washes, and so on -- are dedicated solely to cleaning our skin.  Then there are all the products intended to return back to our skin and hair what the first set of products removed; the whole range of conditioners, softeners, lotions, and oils.

How much of this is necessary, or even beneficial?  That's the topic of the new book Clean: The New Science of Skin by doctor and journalist James Hamblin, who considers all of this and more -- the role of hyper-cleanliness in allergies, asthma, and eczema, and fascinating and recently-discovered information about our skin microbiome, the bacteria that colonize our skin and which are actually beneficial to our overall health.  Along the way, he questions things a lot of us take for granted... such as whether we should be showering daily.

It's a fascinating read, and looks at the question from a data-based, scientific standpoint.  Hamblin has put together the most recent evidence on how we should treat the surfaces of our own bodies -- and asks questions that are sure to generate a wealth of discussion.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]




Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Space germs

I'm fully in support of pure research, which should be obvious to anyone who is a regular reader of Skeptophilia.  But sometimes I run into a paper that leaves me scratching my head.

This happened this past weekend when I stumbled upon a press release from the University of Exeter entitled, "Mammals Could Struggle to Fight Space Germs."  The gist was that a team led by microbiologist Neil Gow did a series of experiments exposing mammalian cells to lab-synthesized peptides containing two amino acids that have been detected in space but not found in terrestrial proteins (isovaline and α-aminoisobutyric acid), and they found that the cell cultures had a "weak immune response."  From this, they concluded that if we're exposed to extraterrestrial microbes, we might really suck at fighting them off.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Phoebus87 at English Wikipedia, Symian virus, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This seemed like a rather overblown conclusion, so I went to the original paper (always a good idea; even university press releases are often oversimplifications or miss important points).  In this case, though, the press release was pretty much spot-on.  Here it is, straight from the paper:
The discovery of liquid water at several locations in the solar system raises the possibility that microbial life may have evolved outside Earth and as such could be accidently introduced into the Earth’s ecosystem.  Unusual sugars or amino acids, like non-proteinogenic isovaline and α-aminoisobutyric acid that are vanishingly rare or absent from life forms on Earth, have been found in high abundance on non-terrestrial carbonaceous meteorites.  It is therefore conceivable that exo-microorganisms might contain proteins that include these rare amino acids.  We therefore asked whether the mammalian immune system would be able to recognize and induce appropriate immune responses to putative proteinaceous antigens that include these rare amino acids. To address this, we synthesised peptide antigens based on a backbone of ovalbumin and introduced isovaline and α-aminoisobutyric acid residues and demonstrated that these peptides can promote naïve OT-I cell activation and proliferation, but did so less efficiently than the canonical peptides.  This is relevant to the biosecurity of missions that may retrieve samples from exoplanets and moons that have conditions that may be permissive for life, suggesting that accidental contamination and exposure to exo-microorganisms with such distinct proteomes might pose an immunological challenge.
Okay, I'll admit that this is one possible conclusion you could draw; it certainly has been riffed on often enough in science fiction, starting all the way back in 1969 with The Andromeda Strain.  (You could argue that it goes back further than that, given that at the end of H. G. Wells's 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, the invading Martians are destroyed by terrestrial microbes to which they have no natural immunity.)

The other possibility, however, is that the microbes wouldn't affect us at all.  When pathogens attack our cells, they usually obtain ingress by bonding to receptors on the surface.  Those receptors can be amazingly specific; this is why there are so many strains of flu, some of which only attack birds or pigs... or humans.  The immune species, in this case, lack the surface proteins that can form bonds to the viral proteins, so they don't get in.  The result: no disease.

In fact, it's even more specific than that.  In 2006, an outbreak of H5N1 bird flu generated worries about a pandemic, until it was learned that although highly contagious in birds, it only affects humans if the virus binds deep in the lung tissue -- the receptors in the upper respiratory system aren't able to bind to the virus efficiently (fortunately for us).  The only ones who became ill were poultry workers who were exposed to dust and debris in poultry houses.  No cases of human-to-human transmission were recorded.

So my suspicion is that extraterrestrial microbes probably wouldn't be able to attack us at all.  And given that our tissues would lack the two oddball amino acids the researchers used in their experiments, it seems pretty likely that if the microbes did get in, they'd starve to death.  (Put more scientifically, our proteins would lack two amino acids they need, so we wouldn't be of much use to them as a food source.)

Of course, it's possible that Gow et al. are right, and extraterrestrial microorganisms would consider the Earth an all-you-can-eat buffet.  But given that (1) the number of extraterrestrial microorganisms we've actually studied is zero, and (2) there are equally persuasive arguments to the contrary, it might be a little bit of a premature conclusion.

Now, that doesn't mean we should be bringing outer space debris to Earth, sans quarantine.  Hell, I've read The Colour Out of Space, and last thing I want is to have a gaseous entity from a meteorite cause my limbs to crumble and fall off.  COVID-19 is bad enough, thanks.  We really don't need any more reasons to panic, however.  So for now, let's confine ourselves to dealing with threats that currently exist.

*****************************

Being in the middle of a pandemic, we're constantly being urged to wash our hands and/or use hand sanitizer.  It's not a bad idea, of course; multiple studies have shown that communicable diseases spread far less readily if people take the simple precaution of a thirty-second hand-washing with soap.

But as a culture, we're pretty obsessed with cleanliness.  Consider how many commercial products -- soaps, shampoos, body washes, and so on -- are dedicated solely to cleaning our skin.  Then there are all the products intended to return back to our skin and hair what the first set of products removed; the whole range of conditioners, softeners, lotions, and oils.

How much of this is necessary, or even beneficial?  That's the topic of the new book Clean: The New Science of Skin by doctor and journalist James Hamblin, who considers all of this and more -- the role of hyper-cleanliness in allergies, asthma, and eczema, and fascinating and recently-discovered information about our skin microbiome, the bacteria that colonize our skin and which are actually beneficial to our overall health.  Along the way, he questions things a lot of us take for granted... such as whether we should be showering daily.

It's a fascinating read, and looks at the question from a data-based, scientific standpoint.  Hamblin has put together the most recent evidence on how we should treat the surfaces of our own bodies -- and asks questions that are sure to generate a wealth of discussion.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]




Monday, July 27, 2020

Bad moon rising

It's been a good while since I've written a post about a story that's just plain loony.

Maybe it's because here in the United States, it's not so funny any more because the loonies appear to be in charge of the place, led by a man who spent ten minutes in an interview bragging about how he had successfully passed a test to detect dementia.  ("The doctors were amazed," he said.)

But yesterday I ran into a story that was so completely wacky that I would be remiss in not bringing it to your attention.  As with so many strange things lately, it began on TikTok, the bizarre social media site wherein people upload short videos of themselves doing dances or singing songs or whatnot.  Me, I don't honestly see the point.  It was ages before I was even willing to get on Instagram, and mostly what I do there is upload photographs of my dogs, my garden, and stuff about running.  (If you want to see pics of my dogs etc., you can follow me @skygazer227.)

Be that as it may, TikTok is wildly popular.  It has remained popular despite allegations that the app contains some kind of spyware from China.  TikTok users have been credited with reserving hundreds of seats at Donald Trump's Tulsa rally and then not showing up.  And apparently, it is also the host of a "vibrant witch community," which is called, I shit you not, "WitchTok."

But this is where things start to get a little weird.  Because a rumor started to circulate on "WitchTok" that a group of "baby witches" had put a hex on the Moon.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Luc Viatour, Full Moon Luc Viatour, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It's unclear how the rumor got started, but once it did, it gained a life of its own, spreading to those estimable conduits for bizarre bullshit, Twitter and Reddit.  When the elder witches who were panicking about the thing tried to find out who these alleged "baby witches" were, they were unsuccessful.

For most of us, this would have been sufficient to conclude that there was nothing to the rumor, and to say, "Ha-ha, what a silly thing I almost fell for, right there."  But no.  The apparent absence of the "baby witches" could only mean one thing, they said: the hex on the Moon had backfired and killed all the "baby witches."

Well, with all the "baby witches" dead, surely that would put an end to it, right?  If you believe that, you don't know how social media works.  This made the rumor spread faster, with other witches claiming that they were the ones who'd hexed the Moon, not the "baby witches," and next they'd go after the Sun.  Some said that not only was the Moon hexed by these evildoers, but so were the "fae," the non-human denizens of fairyland, and admittedly this would be a pretty nasty thing to do if the fae actually existed.  One Twitter user, @heartij, cautioned that all this was walking on some pretty thin ice.  "Upsetting deities is the last thing any rational practitioner would want to do," they said, and I can't disagree with that, although none of this seems to have much to do with anything I'd call "rational."

@heartij added rather darkly, "the people behind the hex are more than likely being handled accordingly."

Others said that there was nothing to worry about, that the Moon was perfectly capable of withstanding being hexed, and that everything would settle down once the stars went into a better alignment.  "The Moon is a celestial being which controls us," said Ally Cooke, a trainee priestess.  "We’re currently in a new Moon that takes place in the sign of Cancer, which explains why so many practicing witches report disconnects with the Moon or personal odd feelings, but they’re confusing them with evidence for malpractice.  This new Moon is centered around releasing, and Cancer is a water sign, so emotions are running high at this time."

Makes perfect sense to me.

My first inclination upon reading this was to point out that through all this, the Moon has continued to circle around the Earth completely unchanged, and in fact not even looking a little worried.  But upon reading a bunch of the posts from WitchTok members and commenters on Reddit and Twitter, it became apparent that they're not saying anything physical has happened to the Moon.  It's all just invisible "bad energies" and "negative frequencies" aimed in the Moon's general direction.  But my question is -- forgive me if I'm naïve -- if (1) the hex itself operates by some mechanism that is invisible, and (2) it hasn't had any apparent result, how do you know it happened?

I guess we're back to "personal odd feelings."  For whatever that's worth.

Anyhow, that's today's dip in the deep end of the pool.  Me, I find it a refreshing change of pace from stories about elected officials who studied at the Boss Tweed School of Ethics and a president who thinks you get extra points for successfully saying "person, woman, man, camera, TV" from memory.  Compared with that, witches trying to stop other witches from aiming invisible hexes at distant astronomical objects is honestly a welcome diversion.

*****************************

Being in the middle of a pandemic, we're constantly being urged to wash our hands and/or use hand sanitizer.  It's not a bad idea, of course; multiple studies have shown that communicable diseases spread far less readily if people take the simple precaution of a thirty-second hand-washing with soap.

But as a culture, we're pretty obsessed with cleanliness.  Consider how many commercial products -- soaps, shampoos, body washes, and so on -- are dedicated solely to cleaning our skin.  Then there are all the products intended to return back to our skin and hair what the first set of products removed; the whole range of conditioners, softeners, lotions, and oils.

How much of this is necessary, or even beneficial?  That's the topic of the new book Clean: The New Science of Skin by doctor and journalist James Hamblin, who considers all of this and more -- the role of hyper-cleanliness in allergies, asthma, and eczema, and fascinating and recently-discovered information about our skin microbiome, the bacteria that colonize our skin and which are actually beneficial to our overall health.  Along the way, he questions things a lot of us take for granted... such as whether we should be showering daily.

It's a fascinating read, and looks at the question from a data-based, scientific standpoint.  Hamblin has put together the most recent evidence on how we should treat the surfaces of our own bodies -- and asks questions that are sure to generate a wealth of discussion.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]




Saturday, July 25, 2020

The rocks drawn down

The map of the world's continents is so familiar that for most of us, it seems permanent.  Even when you find out that the Earth's land masses have moved dramatically, that (geologically speaking) you don't have to go back very far to get to a time when the map would be unrecognizable, it's a little hard to fathom that the map is still changing now.  The tectonic plates are sliding as you read this, and every earthquake adjusts their positions a little bit.

Practically speaking -- and to any readers who are geologists, I will apologize for what will seem to you a drastic oversimplification -- there are three ways plates can move relative to one another:
  1. Divergent plate boundaries -- where the two plates are moving apart.  This is what's happening in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where the Mid-Atlantic Rift Zone is upwelling magma that drags the North American and South American Plates toward the west and the European and African Plates toward the east.  New divergent boundaries can tear a continent in half, which is currently happening in eastern Africa, where the East African Rift Zone is eventually going to rip the continent in two, sending most of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania, and all of Somalia, eastward, and creating a new ocean in between.
  2. Convergent plate boundaries -- where two plates are moving toward each other.  If both are thick, cool continental plates, this causes a pile-up -- i.e., non-volcanic mountains, such as the Himalayas.  If one or both is a thin oceanic plate, one will dive underneath the other and melt, creating a line of volcanoes more or less parallel to the plate boundary.  Examples include Japan, Indonesia, and the Cascades.
  3. Strike-slip boundaries -- where two plates are moving alongside one another in opposite directions.  An example is the famous San Andreas Fault and the other bits and pieces of the southern California fault system.
The result is that the continents are being moved around, torn apart, and slammed back together all the time, just at a pace so slow we usually aren't aware of it.  But the reality is that the western bits of California are in the process of sliding northward along the North American coast and will eventually smash into Alaska; Australia will run into New Guinea, and north Africa into southern Europe; and Antarctica will slide northward, away from the South Pole and into what is now the southern Pacific.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

But new plate boundaries can form, as the subterranean forces in the mantle create new breaks or seams.  That's actually what brings this whole topic up; a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about research that's a few years old but that I'd somehow missed, that there's an "embryonic" subduction zone -- a convergent plate boundary -- forming off the coast of Portugal.  These things don't happen overnight, and the surmise is that this developing subduction zone is responsible for the devastating earthquake that hit Lisbon on November 1, 1755, and damn near flattened every building in the city.  It killed an estimated twenty thousand people, and geologists estimate that it had a magnitude of 8.4, more powerful than the more famous San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

This complicates the picture in the Atlantic, however. The conventional wisdom is that the divergent boundary in the middle of the Atlantic -- shown in red in the above picture -- is moving North and South America away from Europe and Africa, but if there's a convergent boundary off the coast of Portugal, that'll eat up bits of the oceanic plate off the coast and pull Europe closer to North America.  (It also creates the possibility of Andes-type volcanoes in Portugal and Spain.)  Geologists are still investigating how, and how fast, this new convergent zone is moving, and what its capacity is for generating earthquakes and tsunamis -- we really only have the one significant data point, the 1755 earthquake, to make a stab at what the potential for seismic activity is.  And how this will affect the positions of the continents in the long term is at the moment anyone's guess.

It's endlessly fascinating to me how the face of the Earth can change -- for example, there have been at least three times that more or less all the land masses were fused together into one supercontinent (and the rest of the world was covered by one superocean).  Mountains and oceans have been a symbol of something eternal, unchanging, but in reality everything is in flux.  It recalls to mind the lines from Percy Shelley's evocative poem "Mont Blanc," which seems a fitting way to end:
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destin’d path, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shatter’d stand; the rocks, drawn down
From yon remotest waste, have overthrown
The limits of the dead and living world,
Never to be reclaim’d.  The dwelling-place
Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil;
Their food and their retreat for ever gone,
So much of life and joy is lost.  The race
Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling
Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream,
And their place is not known.  Below, vast caves
Shine in the rushing torrents’ restless gleam,
Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling
Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,
The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever
Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves,
Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.
*************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is about as cutting-edge as you can get, and is as scary as it is fascinating.  A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution, by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg, is a crash course in the new genetic technology called CRISPR-Cas9 -- the gene-editing protocol that Doudna herself discovered.  This technique allows increasingly precise cut-and-paste of DNA, offering promise in not just treating, but curing, deadly genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease.

But as with most new discoveries, it is not without its ethical impact.  The cautious are already warning us about "playing God," manipulating our genes not to eliminate disease, but to enhance intelligence or strength, to change personal appearance -- or personality.

A Crack in Creation is an unflinching look at the new science of gene editing, and tries to tease out the how much of what we're hearing is unwarranted fear-talk, and how much represents a genuine ethical minefield.  Doudna and Sternberg give the reader a clear understanding of what CRISPR-Cas9 is likely to be able to do, and what it won't, and maps out a direction for the discussion to take based on actual science -- neither panic and alarmism, nor a Panglossian optimism that everything will sort itself out.  It's a wonderful introduction to a topic that is sure to be much in the news over the next few years.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]




Friday, July 24, 2020

Portrait of distant worlds

This week's news from astronomy is pretty amazing; we now have the first-ever photograph of an exoplanet system around a star very much like our Sun.

The star is the euphoniously-named TYC 8998-760-1, in the southern hemisphere constellation Musca (the Fly).  It's about three hundred light years away, so not exactly in our back yard, but still fairly close on the astronomical scale.  It, and two of its planets, were featured in a paper by a team led by Alexander Bohn of Leiden University, in the following photograph:

The two exoplanets are denoted with arrows; the other bright points of light near the star are distant stars lying behind the stellar system.

The photograph was taken by the Very Large Telescope array in Chile, which also has a fairly underwhelming name:
Astronomer 1: *takes swig of tequila* "So, what are we gonna name this thing, anyhow?" 
Astronomer 2: *also takes swig of tequila* "Got me.  Maybe name it after Edwin Hubble, or something?" 
Astronomer 1: "No, that's already taken." 
Astronomer 2: "Damn.  Well, okay, what's this telescope's outstanding feature?" 
Astronomer 1: "I dunno.  It's very large, I guess." 
*pause* 
Astronomer 1 and Astronomer 2, together:  "HEYYYYYY....."
Be that as it may, the photograph is stunning.  It bears keeping in mind, though, that the only reason it was possible is because the planets are so different than the ones in the Solar System, even if the star is similar to our Sun (although a lot younger; only an estimate seventeen million years old, so it was forming in the mid-Miocene Epoch, almost fifty million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs).  The two planets in the photograph are both enormous gas giants, the inner one fourteen times the mass of Jupiter, and the outer one six times; and they are very far away from their host star, with the inner one about 160 times further from its star than the Earth is from the Sun, and the outer one twice that far.  To put that in context -- the furthest human-made object, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, that flew out of the Sun's magnetic influence and into interstellar space in 2012, is still closer to the Sun than either of these planets are to its host star.

Nothing precludes this star having other planets, of course.  Multiple-planet systems seem to be the norm, the most famous of which is TRAPPIST-1, which has seven planets -- one of them of Earth-like size, and in the habitable zone, so a prime place to look for signs of life.  The likelihood is that TYC 8998-760-1 has other planets which were too small (or too close to the star) to show up in the photograph.  But as our ability to photograph astronomical objects continues to improve -- maybe with a Very Very Large Telescope -- we might well be able to see some of those, too.

In any case, the photograph released this week from Bohn et al. is breathtaking.  A portrait of two distant worlds in a planetary system very unlike our own in some respects, and startlingly similar in others.  It is a step toward beginning to comprehend the scale of what's out there, in a cosmos that seems to have planets everywhere we look, some of which almost certainly host life.  And maybe, on some planet around a distant star, there's an alien astronomer looking back at the Sun through their own Very Large Telescope, and thinking, "Look at that stellar system.  I wonder what it could be like?"

*************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is about as cutting-edge as you can get, and is as scary as it is fascinating.  A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution, by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg, is a crash course in the new genetic technology called CRISPR-Cas9 -- the gene-editing protocol that Doudna herself discovered.  This technique allows increasingly precise cut-and-paste of DNA, offering promise in not just treating, but curing, deadly genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease.

But as with most new discoveries, it is not without its ethical impact.  The cautious are already warning us about "playing God," manipulating our genes not to eliminate disease, but to enhance intelligence or strength, to change personal appearance -- or personality.

A Crack in Creation is an unflinching look at the new science of gene editing, and tries to tease out the how much of what we're hearing is unwarranted fear-talk, and how much represents a genuine ethical minefield.  Doudna and Sternberg give the reader a clear understanding of what CRISPR-Cas9 is likely to be able to do, and what it won't, and maps out a direction for the discussion to take based on actual science -- neither panic and alarmism, nor a Panglossian optimism that everything will sort itself out.  It's a wonderful introduction to a topic that is sure to be much in the news over the next few years.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]




Thursday, July 23, 2020

Hair raiser

I've been fascinated with evolutionary biology since I was a kid.  Along the way, I recall more than once learning some new piece of it and breaking out in a grin, thinking, "That is so cool!"  When I found out that all mammals have the same bone structure in their forelegs, regardless of function -- that a human arm, a dog's front paw, a whale's flipper, and a bat's wing are all made of the same set of bones, just with different relative sizes (and, of course, different soft tissue covering it).  When I found out that birds are dinosaurs, and that they retain non-functional copies of genes for making teeth.  When I found out that race is primarily a social and cultural construct, not a genetic one -- that two people living a mile apart in Botswana, one a San and the other a Shona, are about as genetically distinct from each other as a typical western European Caucasian is from a typical Japanese person, even though most of us call the first two the same race (black) and the second two different races (white and Asian).

Another one was when I found out that we not only have vestigial organs, we have vestigial behaviors.  You probably know a vestigial organ is sort of an evolutionary leftover, something our ancestral species had some use for -- but the usefulness went away, leaving behind a functionless structure (a familiar example is the human appendix, which apparently evolved in the context of breaking down cellulose in animals with a high-plant-material diet).  I'd known about this since Ms. Jane Miller's high school biology class.  But I didn't find out until college that we have some responses that are vestigial -- like goosebumps.

Goosebumps occur because of the little arrector pili muscles that surround each hair follicle, mostly in our arms, legs, and the back of the neck.  When these contract, it makes the hair stand on end, leading to the familiar experience of "goosebumps" or "gooseflesh."  (I'm not sure why geese have apparently cornered the market on this phenomenon.)  So the structure itself is vestigial, but it turns out, so is our response to what triggers it.  We typically get goosebumps when we're cold or when we're frightened, alarmed, or threatened.  But why?

The answer lies in observing cats.  If you're a cat owner, you've probably seen your pet with its hair standing on end, usually in one of two situations -- when it's cold (so that its raised hair traps heat better), or when it's angry (so that it looks bigger and more threatening).  Very few humans have enough body hair that they are significantly warmer or more threatening when they have goosebumps.  Fortunately.  But we still retain the response, even though it's not much use any more.

Old evolutionary habits are hard to break, apparently.


Well, as with most things, it turns out that it's not that simple, and is even cooler.  A paper this week in the journal Cell, written by a team led by Yulia Shwartz of the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University, describes research that shows that the underlying neurology of goosebumps might serve a purpose after all -- stimulating hair growth.  As the nerves fire that trigger goosebumps, neurotransmitters like norepinephrine are secreted into the tissue surrounding the hair follicles, and these act as a chemical signal that modulate gene activity in some pretty fundamental stretches of DNA, including the critical developmental gene Sonic Hedgehog.

The way the whole thing sets up is fascinating.  "We discovered that the signal comes from the developing hair follicle itself," Shwartz said, in an interview with Science Daily.  "It secretes a protein that regulates the formation of the smooth muscle, which then attracts the sympathetic nerve.  Then in the adult, the interaction turns around, with the nerve and muscle together regulating the hair follicle stem cells to regenerate the new hair follicle. It's closing the whole circle -- the developing hair follicle is establishing its own niche."

The function of the system works by a feedback mechanism, Shwartz said.  "This particular reaction is helpful for coupling tissue regeneration with changes in the outside world, such as temperature.  It's a two-layer response: goosebumps are a quick way to provide some sort of relief in the short term.  But when the cold lasts, this becomes a nice mechanism for the stem cells to know it's maybe time to regenerate new hair coat."

And again, we retain this response even though most of us aren't that hairy any more.  The underlying neurological structure hasn't gone away.

Makes me wonder what other evolutionary leftovers we have still hanging around in our behaviors and responses.  We are constructs of our lineage, for better or worse, inheriting both its advantages and its constraints.  As advanced as we like to think we are, maybe a lot of what we do is because of some quirk of our ancestry -- which is both fascinating and humbling.

*************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is about as cutting-edge as you can get, and is as scary as it is fascinating.  A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution, by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg, is a crash course in the new genetic technology called CRISPR-Cas9 -- the gene-editing protocol that Doudna herself discovered.  This technique allows increasingly precise cut-and-paste of DNA, offering promise in not just treating, but curing, deadly genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease.

But as with most new discoveries, it is not without its ethical impact.  The cautious are already warning us about "playing God," manipulating our genes not to eliminate disease, but to enhance intelligence or strength, to change personal appearance -- or personality.

A Crack in Creation is an unflinching look at the new science of gene editing, and tries to tease out the how much of what we're hearing is unwarranted fear-talk, and how much represents a genuine ethical minefield.  Doudna and Sternberg give the reader a clear understanding of what CRISPR-Cas9 is likely to be able to do, and what it won't, and maps out a direction for the discussion to take based on actual science -- neither panic and alarmism, nor a Panglossian optimism that everything will sort itself out.  It's a wonderful introduction to a topic that is sure to be much in the news over the next few years.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]