Taking the plunge

When I was in my twenties, I lived near Seattle, Washington.  It's a lovely part of the country -- absolutely a gardener's paradise, and I was only a few hours' drive from both the ocean and the mountains.  I spent huge chunks of my summers back-country camping in the Cascades, Olympics, and along the Pacific coast, getting as far away from the noise and traffic of the city as I could reasonably manage.

On one particularly memorable trip, I did a solo hike up and over Teanaway Pass in the Cascades, and camped by lovely, crystal-clear Ingalls Lake.  (Fans of my fiction might recognize this as the setting of a very important scene in my novel Kill Switch.)  On the hike in, it'd been one of those unusual blistering hot days the Northwest occasionally gets; not a cloud in the sky, temperatures around 85 F.  By the time I got to the lake and my planned campsite, I was drenched with sweat.  The lake looked really inviting, so I first shucked my backpack, then all of my clothes, and took off at a run for the water.

I was literally mid-swan-dive when I had a sudden, horrified realization.

Ingalls Lake is fed by glacial meltwater.

I must have looked like one of those comical Looney Tunes characters, frantically bicycling my legs in a futile attempt not to plunge into water that was probably around 40 F.  The cold shock was one of the most intensely unpleasant sensations I've ever experienced.  I was out of there, standing naked and shivering on the shore, in five seconds flat.

At least I wasn't hot and sweaty any more.

So I learned a valuable lesson that day: never jump into water before you've tested the temperature.

I have since that time only had one other cold plunge experience, this one knowing ahead of time what I was in for.  It occurred when I was in Iceland in 2022 with a group of nine other guys.  There's a general rule that the overall intelligence of a group of guys is inversely proportional to the number of guys in the group, and this was no exception.  So yeah, we all got naked and jumped into a freezing-cold lake in Iceland.  I don't have any photos of the actual plunge -- which, after all, would be NC-17 rated anyhow -- but this was my reaction afterward, when I'd gotten at least partially dressed:

I think the V-for-Victory stance was more "Yay, I survived" than "Gee, that was fun."  Because the fact remains that I hate being cold.  I have a nice swimmable pond in my back yard, and I take advantage of it when the water is warm enough to suit me, which in the upstate New York climate is the first two weeks of August.  I've got nothing against showing skin -- I'll shuck my shirt without hesitation if it's hot out, and skinnydip if those I'm with have no objection -- but when the weather's cool, I'm in several layers of Smart Wool.

The reason all this comes up is because of a study at the University of Ottawa that was the subject of a paper in the journal Advanced Biology last week that looked at whether the whole trendy Ice Plunge thing actually has any measurable health effects besides making your teeth chatter, and to my surprise, it turns out it does.  They took ten healthy young men, and subjected them to cold water immersion for a grand total of an hour spread over seven days, and then did blood tests to see how their bodies responded on the cellular level.

The results -- after only a week -- were striking.  Cold tolerance increased, which is not all that surprising; but what is more interesting is that autophagic function, which is the body's cellular waste disposal system, improved dramatically.  This process is involved with response to stress, and is critical for repairing damaged or aging tissues.

"We were amazed to see how quickly the body adapted," said study lead author Kelli King.  "Cold exposure might help prevent diseases and potentially even slow down aging at a cellular level.  It's like a tune-up for your body's microscopic machinery...  This enhancement allows cells to better manage stress and could have important implications for health and longevity."

Even so, I don't think I'm going to be joining our local Polar Bear Club any time soon.  The sheer discomfort of being that cold isn't worth any gains I might achieve.  Maybe, like the guys in the University of Ottawa study, I'd acclimate, but I doubt I'll ever get to find out.  I'll stick with relaxing hot showers, and swimming in my pond when the water's nice and warm.

And -- above all -- testing the temperature of lake water before I commit myself to a head-first dive.

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The letter and the labyrinth

A year and a half or so ago I wrote a piece about some of the biblical apocrypha -- books and epistles and letters and whatnot that didn't make the cut to be part of the canonical Bible when the whole thing was hashed out at the Council of Rome (382 C.E.), the Synod of Hippo (393 C.E.), and the Synod of Carthage (397 C.E.), after which the Bible had something close to its current form.  (As I mention in the post, the idea that canon was established at the Council of Nicaea in 325 is a commonly-held misconception; Nicaea had nothing to do with decisions about what was scripture and what wasn't, but was about the nature of the Trinity and how to determine the date for Easter.)

What's interesting is that even since all of the late-fourth-century wrangling by the church fathers, there hasn't been an end to what is Holy Writ and what should be written out, because new documents keep popping up.  The most famous are the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered between 1946 and 1956 in the Qumran Caves near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank; those, although they were certainly a fantastic historical and archaeological discovery, didn't much affect religious belief, because they were mostly composed either of (1) canonical Old Testament books, (2) writings that we already knew about but had been declared non-canonical apocrypha (like the supremely weird Books of Enoch), or (3) descriptions of religious and secular law.

Sometimes, though, a document is discovered that leave both the historians and the devout scrambling for an explanation.  And that brings us to the "Mystic Gospel of Mark."

You ready for a tangled tale?

Back in 1958, an American historian named Morton Smith was poring through some old manuscripts at the Monastery of Mar Saba, and found a handwritten Greek text appended to the end of a seventeenth-century printed edition of the writings of Ignatius of Antioch.  Smith identified the text as an eighteenth-century copy of a letter from the theologian Clement of Alexandria (150 - 215 C.E.), which made reference to the Gospel of Mark -- not the standard version, but a longer, "secret" gospel (τοῦ Μάρκου τὸ μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον).

Smith hand-transcribed the document, then requested (and was approved) to take the original to the Greek Orthodox Library in Jerusalem.  Despite Smith writing a paper on the discovery in 1960, little attention was given to the document; as far as we know, only three other scholars ever set eyes on it, the religious historians David Flusser, Shlomo Pines, and Guy Stroumsa.  Stroumsa, who saw it in 1976, appears to be the last person who gave the manuscript a close look.  Smith took photographs of the pages in question, but the document itself mysteriously disappeared some time between then and 1990 and hasn't been seen since.

One of Smith's photographs of the alleged "Mystic Gospel of Mark" document [Image is in the Public Domain]

The putative Clement of Alexandria letter included two passages that occur nowhere in the current Gospel of Mark, but were supposedly from the longer "Mystic Gospel."  One passage is much lengthier than the other; and it's that one that caused a furor, especially given how Morton Smith translated and interpreted it.  Here's Smith's translation:

And they come into Bethany.  And a certain woman whose brother had died was there.  And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, "Son of David, have mercy on me."  But the disciples rebuked her.  And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb.  And going near Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb.  And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand.  But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him.  And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich.  And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing only a linen cloth over his naked body.  And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.  And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.

So yeah.  Smith interpreted the naked young man "remaining with Jesus that night" to mean that not only did Jesus condone homosexuality, he participated in it.

You can see why that turned some heads.

Whether this interpretation alone was the cause, historians immediately started claiming the whole thing was a forgery.  Quentin Quesnell stopped just short of accusing Smith outright, but said that the "hypothetical forger matched Smith's apparent ability, opportunity, and motivation" (Vigiliae Christianae, vol. 71, no. 4, pp. 353–378).  Stephen Carlson went even further, as you might surmise by the title of his book on the subject -- The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark -- and points out that a 1910 catalogue of the holdings of the Mar Saba Monastery Library doesn't list the book where Smith allegedly found the document, and from that (and the book's later mysterious disappearance) Carlson concludes that Smith forged the letter, then made sure the original vanished so that modern hoax-detection techniques such as ink analysis wouldn't reveal what he'd done.  Jacob Neusner, a historian specializing in ancient Judaism, called it "the forgery of the century."

Not everyone is so sure, though.  There are a good number of historians who point out that the photographs of the document (which still exist) demonstrate a sure hand at writing eighteenth-century Greek calligraphy, and further, that the writing style and word choice is completely consistent with known writings of Clement of Alexandria.  Producing such a close match, they say, would have been beyond Morton Smith's knowledge, skill, and ability.  New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, in his book Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, writes, "It is true that a modern forgery would be an amazing feat.  For this to be forged, someone would have had to imitate an eighteenth-century Greek style of handwriting and to produce a document that is so much like Clement that it fools experts who spend their lives analyzing Clement, which quotes a previously lost passage from Mark that is so much like Mark that it fools experts who spend their lives analyzing Mark.  If this is forged, it is one of the greatest works of scholarship of the twentieth century, by someone who put an uncanny amount of work into it."

And the historians are still arguing about this.  One of those impossible questions to settle, as far as I can see, given that the original document is AWOL, whether by accident or design.  Responses by scholars and interested laypeople vary from "it was a hoax from beginning to end, and Smith did it" to "the letter isn't authentic but was an earlier forgery, and Smith got fooled but was acting in good faith" to "the letter was an authentic transcription from Clement, but the passages weren't actually by the Evangelist Mark" to "okay, they're by Mark, but the gay Jesus passage is being mistranslated or misinterpreted" to "yay!  Gay Jesus FTW!"

It's hard to escape the conclusion that everyone's taking this and finding ways to use it to support whatever it was they already believed.

The problem here is that the evidence we actually have is somewhere beyond thin -- a photograph of an eighteenth-century transcription (for which the original is lost) of a third-century letter (for which the original is even loster, if it ever existed in the first place) of some extra passages for a Gospel that a even lot of the devout think wasn't itself written until at least three decades after Jesus's death.  So from that, you can conclude damn near anything you want.

I mean, I love archaeology and history, but really.

So that's our excursion into the labyrinth of biblical scholarship.  Me, I think I'll move on to something I can be more sure about, like quantum physics.  At least there, the whole concept of the Uncertainty Principle has a clear definition.

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Haunted housewares

I don't own many things that are all that old.

I'm referring to human-made objects, of course.  I have a couple of Devonian-age brachiopod fossils that I collected in a nearby creek bed that are around four hundred million years old.  In general, rocks are more unusual if they're really new; I have a piece of basaltic lava rock I brought back from my trip to Iceland a couple of years ago that was part of an active flow only a few years ago.

Human-made things, though, don't usually last very long.  I don't have anything "passed down in my family" that goes back more than two generations.  I have a couple of beautiful old bookcases that belonged to my paternal grandmother, and that's about it.  As far as other antiques, the two oldest things I own are both musical instruments -- my Ivers & Pond piano, which was made in Boston in 1876, and a wooden keyed flute I got (no lie) in a used-goods store in Tallinn, Estonia, which was made in France in around 1880.  Interestingly, I got both of them super cheap.  The flute was unplayable because the middle joint had a crack, which I had repaired when I got back to the States, and the piano I got for free -- it'd been sitting in someone's garage, unplayed, for years -- so the only cost to me was hiring some piano movers, and then getting it tuned once I got it into my house.

Otherwise?  Most everything else we have is pretty recent.  We've been told our home decorating style is an apparently real thing called "Shabby Chic."  I don't know about "chic," but we've definitely got the "shabby" part locked down.  The fact that my wife and I are both Housework Impaired, combined with owning three dogs, makes it unlikely we'll ever be featured in Home Beautiful.

The reason this all comes up is that I just stumbled across a curious Japanese legend called Tsukumogami (つくも神) that says if you own an object that is over a hundred years old, it becomes a Yōkai (妖怪, literally, "strange apparition"), a sentient being imbued with its own spirit.  These spirits can be benevolent or malevolent, or sometimes maybe they just need a hug:

The Lantern Ghost, by Katsushika Hokusai, ca. 1830 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Some of the objects that allegedly became Yōkai include a pair of sandals, a lute, a folding screen, a sake bottle, a gong, a vegetable grater, an umbrella, a mirror, a teakettle, and a clock.  There are lots more, though -- an eighteenth century book called Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro (百器徒然袋 -- literally, "One Hundred Haunted Housewares") describes all kinds of haunted objects, including the terrifying Menreiki (面霊気), a horrible monster composed entirely of masks:

The Menreiki, from Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro [Image is in the Public Domain]

I love masks, and actually collect them, but if they start coming to life and chasing me around, I'm done.

What I find fascinating about stories like this is how specific they are.  It's not just a vague "things going bump in the night" kind of legend; this is a koto (a Japanese zither) suddenly growing a horrible face and lots of extra strings:

Koto-furunushi, from Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro [Image is in the Public Domain]

My reaction to all this is not simply my usual rationalism kicking in, wondering, "Why would people believe this when it so clearly doesn't ever happen?"  It's also considering how scary it must be for people who think the world actually works this way.  Of course, I've had the same thought about fundamentalist Christians, who think that an all-loving and compassionate God would make you burn in agony for all eternity because you occasionally look at naughty pictures on the internet.

So Tsukumogami is an interesting legend, but I'm just as happy it's not real.  If my piano suddenly became self-aware and started playing eerie melodies at one in the morning, I think I'd opt right out.  Or, worse, if it started critiquing my playing.  "Merciful heavens, Debussy would be appalled.  Maybe you should go back to playing 'Chopsticks,' or something."

I'm hard enough on my own self, thanks.  I don't need some possessed musical instrument weighing in.

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Lightning rod

In 1904, biologist Joseph Grinnell formulated what has since become known as the Competitive Exclusion Principle: if two species overlap in their niches, the degree of overlap correlates to the degree of competition between them.  If the competition becomes too high, eventually one of them is outcompeted and dies out.

Contrary to the "Nature is red in tooth and claw" view of the natural world, however, many species solve the problem of competitive exclusion in remarkable peaceable ways.  Some partition the habitat -- for example, species of insect-eating warblers in my part of the world avoid competing for food by splitting up where they forage, with some species mostly staying in the treetops, others in the the forest midstory or undergrowth.  Elaborate cooperative strategies are also remarkably common -- witness lichens, which are a symbiotic pairing of an algae species and a fungus, where the fungus gives the algae housing, and the algae photosynthesizes and donates some of the nutrients to its host.

So despite how it's often characterized, nature doesn't always land on the violent solution.

Sometimes, though...

There's a rain forest tree found in Panama called the almendro (Dipteryx oleifera).  It's in the bean family, Fabaceae, which you can tell if you look at its pinnately-compound leaves and showy flowers:

It can get up to 55 meters tall, which is a necessity in the rain forest.  Dense patches of rain forest have such a thick covering of leaves that only two percent of the incident sunlight reaches the forest floor.  Understory plants have evolved to cope with the perpetual twilight -- this is one of the reasons why rain forest plants often have very dark green leaves.  The density of pigments allows them to trap every photon of light they manage to receive.

Trees, though, compete by elbowing each other out of the way, trying to grow as tall as possible so as to access light, and in the process, shade out the abundant competition.  But not only do rain forest trees have to worry about nearby trees, they also have to deal with lianas, vining species that twine up tree trunks and drape themselves over the canopy, hitching a ride on their taller, sturdier neighbors, and shading them out in the process.

Well, the almendro has evolved a strategy for dealing with all of that at once.

A study this week in New Phytologist looked at a peculiar pattern that ecologist Evan Gora, of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, had noticed: almendros seemed to have an unusually high likelihood of being struck by lightning, but almost never sustained any significant damage from it.  Well, after a five-year study, Gora and his collaborators found that almendros that were struck usually just lost some leaves and small branches, while other species sustained significant damage, with 64% of the struck trees dying within two years.

Not only that, but the lightning strikes completely wipe out any lianas.  Almendros that were hit by lightning not only recovered quickly, they had their tangle of vines blown to smithereens.  And neighboring trees that were jolted by the strike -- through sparks jumping from the almendro -- often died, too, freeing up more living room.

The data shows that living near an almendro raises a neighboring tree's likelihood of being killed by a lightning strike by 48%.  "Any tree that gets close," Gora said, "eventually gets electrocuted."

How the almendro has managed to evolve into a natural lightning rod is uncertain, but it has been found that the cells in its wood have wider channels for water transport, making the wood more electrically conductive.  Most of the damage to trees from lightning strikes occurs because internal resistance causes the electrical energy to dissipate as heat, making the sap boil and triggering the trunk to explode.  Lowering the electrical resistance allows the current to pass through the trunk and safely into the ground with less heating.  This means that not only does the almendro not suffer as much damage, it actually attracts lightning -- electrical discharges tend to follow the path of least resistance.

So even if sometimes the natural world does evolve nice, friendly, cooperative solutions to the problems of survival, sometimes it... doesn't.  Even the trees don't always.  Like the Ents and Huorns from Tolkien's Fangorn Forest, sometimes the trees deal with their enemies by taking matters into their own... um... branches.

Think about that next time you're going for a nice stroll in the woods.

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The broken branch

When I first became interested in paleontology, I think what came as the biggest surprise was how many lineages had become completely extinct.

I knew about the dinosaurs, of course; everyone knew about the dinosaurs.  But I remember one of my books on prehistoric animals showing a family tree of mammals, and branching off way near the bottom was a line marked multituberculates, that suddenly just... ended.  What on earth were those?

Turns out they're a group of small, superficially rodent-like mammals with strange knobbly teeth, that thrived for 130 million years -- coexisting with the dinosaurs for much of it -- before suddenly and inexplicably vanishing during the Miocene Epoch.  But they were hardly the only broken branch on the tree.  There were also the massive, hulking brontotheres, including the famously slingshot-horned Brontops, that lived during the Paleocene and Eocene, dying out around 34 million years ago.  And around the same time there were the mesonychids, scary-ass carnivorous mammals that looked like a cross between a bear and a wolf but were actually more closely related to horses.

All three groups gone forever, leaving no descendants.

Far from being the common picture of a slow, gradual progression, from something like a worm to a fish to an amphibian to a reptile to a primitive mammal to primates to *trumpet fanfare* Homo sapiens, sitting of course on top of the evolutionary tree as befits the Pinnacle of Creation, the family tree of life is more like an unruly and tangled shrub with thousands of splits and bifurcations -- and just as many snapped-off branches.  Whole groups of organisms have turned into dead ends; I wrote a couple of years ago about the bizarre Ediacaran Assemblage, a group of Precambrian species that are so different than the familiar life forms we see around us today that paleontologists have been unable to determine where exactly they fit in the overall taxonomic scheme, or if perhaps they, too, left no descendants.

But they are hardly the only species that are, as the researchers put it, "of uncertain affinities."  In fact, the whole topic comes up because of a paper by Corentin Loron of the University of Edinburgh et al., that looked at a peculiar life form that was one of the first really huge terrestrial organisms, an eight-meter-tall... um... something called Prototaxites.

From their cell wall structure, they pretty clearly weren't plants.  The hypothesis was that Prototaxites was some kind of enormous fungus; a mushroom the size of a small tree, more or less.  But now... well, here's what Loron et al. found:

Prototaxites was the first giant organism to live on the terrestrial surface, reaching sizes of 8 metres in the Early Devonian.  However, its taxonomic assignment has been debated for over 165 years.  Tentative assignments to groups of multicellular algae or land plants have been repeatedly ruled out based on anatomy and chemistry, resulting in two major alternatives: Prototaxites was either a fungus or a now entirely extinct lineage.  Recent studies have converged on a fungal affinity...  Here we test this by contrasting the anatomy and molecular composition of Prototaxites with contemporary fungi from the 407-million-year-old Rhynie chert.  We report that Prototaxites taiti was the largest organism in the Rhynie ecosystem and its anatomy was fundamentally distinct from all known extant or extinct fungi.  Furthermore, our molecular composition analysis indicates that cell walls of P. taiti include aliphatic, aromatic, and phenolic components most similar to fossilisation products of lignin, but no fossilisation products characteristic of chitin or chitosan, which are diagnostic of all groups of extant and extinct fungi, including those preserved in the Rhynie chert.  We therefore conclude that Prototaxites was not a fungus, and instead propose it is best assigned to a now entirely extinct terrestrial lineage.

After reading this, my brain (being basically like the neural equivalent of a giant, out-of-control pinball game) immediately bounced from there to thinking about the "Abominable Mi-Go" from the Lovecraft mythos, which were giant race of creatures that lived in Antarctica when it was warm and habitable hundreds of millions of years ago, and were "fungoid, more vegetable than animal, but truly allied to neither."  Of course, in Lovecraft's universe, the Mi-Go also had wings and kidnapped people and stored their consciousness in what amounted to big metal test tubes, and I don't think Loron et al. think Prototaxites could do all that.

In any case, the current study is fascinating from a couple of standpoints.  First, that the world in the early Devonian would have looked drastically different than it does today -- no trees, and in fact barely any plants larger than club mosses and (very) early ferns.  And second, that there were these towering things sticking up in the landscape, like giant accusing fingers, bearing only a distant (and as-yet uncertain) connection to any other living organism.

Recent advances in paleontology have shown that the nineteenth-century conception of the Great Chain of Being was missing out on some of the most interesting parts -- organisms so different from today's nine-million-odd species that we can't even figure out quite where to pigeonhole them.  And as we uncover more fossil evidence, we're sure to find others, and add further branches to the snarled and twisted family tree of life on Earth.

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Bang or whimper

I've always loved Robert Frost's razor-sharp poem, written in 1920, called "Fire and Ice":

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

How the world will end has fascinated people for as long as we've been able to think about the question.  Various mythologies created their own pictures of the universe's swan song -- the best-known of which is the Norse tale of Ragnarök, when the forces of good (the Æsir, Vanir, and their allies) teamed up against the forces of evil (the Jötnar, trolls, and various Bad Guys like Surtr, the trolls, Midgard's Serpent, Níðhöggr, and, of course, Loki).  Interestingly, in the Norse conception of things, good and evil were pretty evenly matched, and they more or less destroyed each other; only a few on either side survived, along with enough humans to repopulate the devastated world.

Once we started to take a more rational view of things, scientists naturally brought their knowledge to bear on the same question.  After figuring out about stellar mechanics, we've become fairly certain that the Earth will meet its end when the Sun runs out of hydrogen fuel, swells up into a red giant -- at which point it's likely the Earth's orbit will be inside the radius of the Sun -- then ultimately jettisons its outer atmosphere to become a white dwarf.  

But what about the universe as a whole?

When I was in school, just about everyone (well, just about everyone who understood science, anyhow) accepted that the universe had begun at the Big Bang.  The mechanism for what caused it, and what (if anything) had come before it, was unknown then and is still unknown now; but once it occurred, space expanded dramatically, carrying matter and energy with it, an outward motion that is still discernible in the red shift of distant galaxies.  But would that expansion go on forever?  I think the first time I ran into a considered answer to the question was in Carl Sagan's Cosmos, where he explained that the ultimate fate of the universe depended on its mass.  If the overall mass of the universe was above a particular quantity, its gravity would be sufficient to halt the expansion, ultimately sending everything hurtling backward into a "Big Crunch."  Below that critical quantity -- the expansion would slow continuously but would nevertheless keep going, spreading everything out until it was a uniform, thin, cold gas, a fate that goes by the cheery name "the Heat Death of the Universe."

But it turned out the picture wasn't even that simple.  In 1998, Adam Riess and others discovered the baffling fact that the universe wasn't slowing at all, so neither of the above scenarios seemed to be right.  Data from distant galaxies showed -- and it has since been confirmed over and over -- that the universe's expansion is accelerating.  The existence of a repulsive force powering the expansion was proposed, and nicknamed dark energy, but how that could possibly work was (and is) unknown.

Then they found out that dark energy comprises just shy of three-quarters of the universe's total mass-energy.  Physicists had a huge conundrum to explain.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons NASA/ESA, SN1994D, CC BY 3.0]

It also led to another possibility for the universe's fate, and one that's even more dire than the Heat Death.  If the amount of dark energy per unit volume of space is constant -- which it appeared to be -- then the relative proportion of dark energy will increase over time, because conventional matter and energy is thinning out as space expands (and dark energy is not).  As this happens, the relative strength of the dark energy repulsion will eventually increase to the point that it overwhelms all other forces, including electromagnetism and the nuclear forces -- tearing matter up into a soup of fundamental particles.

The "Big Rip."

Confused yet?  Because the reason all this comes up is that there's just been another discovery, this one by DESI (the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) indicating fairly strongly that the force of dark energy has been decreasing over time.  I say "fairly strongly" because at the moment the data sets this is based on range from 2.8 to 4.2 sigma (this is an indicator of how strongly the data supports the claim; for reference, 3 sigma represents a 0.3% possibility that the data is a statistical fluke, and 5 sigma is considered the threshold for breaking out the champagne).  So it appears that although the quantity of dark energy per unit volume of space is constant, the strength of the dark energy force is less now than it was in the early universe.

So what does this mean about the fate of the universe?  Will it be, in Frost's terms, fire or ice?  A bang or a whimper?  We don't know.  The first thing is to figure out what the hell dark energy actually is, and how it works, and -- if the DESI results hold up -- why it seems to be diminishing.

All I can say is the cosmologists have a lot of explaining to do.

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Walkabout

There's an ongoing war of words between people who consider themselves generalists and those who consider themselves specialists.

I recall being in the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Washington -- a placement that only lasted a semester, for a variety of reasons -- and my advisor sneeringly referring to generalists as "people who lack the focus, drive, and brains to stay with something long enough to learn it thoroughly."  Countering this is the quip that specialists are "learning more and more about less and less, until finally they'll know everything about nothing."

Although I am squarely in the generalist camp, I'm strongly of the opinion that we need both.  The specialists' depth and the generalists' breadth should be complementary, not in contention.  The focus of specialists has given us most of our detailed knowledge of science and technology; the wide-ranging interest of generalists -- who, in a kinder time, were called polymaths rather than dilettantes or dabblers -- allow them to draw connections between disparate fields, and bring that curiosity and wonder to others.

I'm hoping this doesn't come across as self-defensive, given my B.S. in physics, attempted/abortive M.S. in oceanography, final M.A. in historical linguistics, and teaching certification in biology.  Perhaps my long-ago advisor wasn't entirely incorrect; my "oh look something shiny!" approach to learning would likely have made a Ph.D. in anything unattainable.  But it does have the distinct advantage that I'm still unendingly curious about the world, and almost on a daily basis stumble on cool things in a vast array of disciplines that I didn't know about.

Take, for example, the fact that yesterday I learned about a language I'd never heard of before, belonging to an entire language family I'd never heard of before.  Illustrating, perhaps, that even at the master's degree level, my study of linguistics had already narrowed to the point of excluding all but a tiny fraction of what's out there (my study focused primarily on Scandinavian and Celtic languages; my only real work in a non-Indo-European language has been my recent attempts to learn some Japanese).  But this odd language I found out about has a curious history -- and a possible connection to another language family, on the opposite side of the world.

The language is called Ket, and is spoken by a small number -- estimates are between fifty and two hundred -- people in the remote region of Krasnoyarsk Krai in central Siberia.  It is the sole surviving member of the Yeniseian language family; the last speaker of the related language called Yugh died in 1970, and other members of the Yeniseian family, Kott, Arin, Assan, and Pumpokol, were all extinct by the mid-nineteenth century.

A Ket family, circa 1900 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Here's where it gets interesting, though.  There's some evidence that Ket and the other Yeniseian languages are related to the language spoken by the Xiongnu Confederation, a group of interrelated nomadic peoples who dominated the east Eurasian steppes -- what are now parts of Siberia, Mongolia, and northern China -- from the third century B.C.E. to the first century C.E.  And one hypothesis is that when the Xiongnu Confederation fell to pieces, in part because of a climatic shift that led to severe drought, they upped stakes and moved west, where they became known to history as...

... the Huns.

So an obscure language currently spoken by under two hundred people may be the closest surviving cousin of the language spoken by one of the most feared warrior people ever, who made it all the way to what is now eastern France before finally being defeated.

But it gets weirder still.  Because linguistic analysis has suggested one other possible relative of Ket -- the Na Dene languages of western North America, including Athabaskan, Tlingit, Eyak, and Navajo.  Linguist Bernard Comrie calls it "the first demonstration of a genealogical link between Old World and New World language families that meets the standards of traditional comparative historical linguistics."  Supporting this is a study by Edward Vajda of Western Washington University finding that the Q1 Y-chromosome haplogroup is extremely common in Na Dene speakers, and close to universal amongst the Ket -- but is found almost nowhere else in Eurasia.

How the Ket (and the other Yeniseian speakers) got where they are is a matter of conjecture.  One possibility is that the ancestors of the Yeniseians (including, possibly, the Xiongnu and the Huns) were left behind when the ancestors of today's North American Na Dene speakers crossed Beringia into Alaska during the last Ice Age.  Other anthropologists believe that the split occurred later, as some of the North American migrants crossed back into what is now Siberia, and got stranded there when the seas rose.  It's hard to imagine what evidence could settle this conclusively; but the relationship between the Yeniseian languages and the Na Dene languages, along with the highly suggestive DNA connection, seems to support a relationship between those two now-widely-separated groups.  However the walkabout happened, it's left its fingerprint in three different continents.

So there you have it.  A link between the Huns, the Navajo, and a tiny and declining group of Siberians.  That's our excursion into linguistics for today.  Tomorrow it might be astronomy or geology or archaeology or meteorology or, perhaps, ghosts and Bigfoots or whatnot.  You never know.  I presume you must on some level enjoy my random musings, or you wouldn't be here.  Even if I might well "lack focus, drive, and brains," I still have more fun jumping from topic to topic than I would if I'd buckled down and focused on one cubic centimeter of the universe.

Here's to being a generalist!

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Antique ghosts

Once upon a time, there was a man who was looking for a house to buy.  He came upon a large home on a lovely piece of land, something that most would consider a mansion, at a very cheap price.  He was interested, but (understandably) suspicious -- at that price, there had to be something wrong with it.

"What's the catch?" he asked the seller.

The owner reluctantly admitted that it had a reputation for being haunted.  Everyone who had taken up residence in the house, he said, had been visited nightly by the horrifying specter of a man in chains, whose appearance was so ghastly that it made sleep pretty much impossible.  Not only that, but even when the ghost wasn't visible, there was a palpable miasma of fear around the house.  No one, the owner said, stayed there long; some had even fallen ill from the effects of the haunting.

The prospective buyer thanked the seller for his honesty, and (to the seller's shock) said he was interested in purchasing the home anyhow.  The owner, simultaneously giving thanks for his luck and questioning the buyer's sanity, sold him the house, and in due time, the transaction was completed and the new owner moved in.

Sure enough, on the first night, the man was awakened by the rattling of chains.  Soon a hideous ghost appeared, an old man dressed in ragged clothes, chains around his waist, his face pale and glowing with a sickly light.  Unmoved, the house's new owner stood his ground, and asked the spirit what he wanted.

The specter crooked one finger as if in summons, then turned away, leading the owner outside, to a place on the property.  The ghost met the owner's eyes, pointed downward -- then vanished.

The next day, the owner contacted the local magistrates, who gave the order to dig at the place the ghost had indicated.  After an hour's hard work, they uncovered a skeleton -- still bound by chains.  Who the man had been was unknown; it was obvious the body had been in the ground for a long while.  But the house's new owner made sure that the skeleton was respectfully unearthed, its fetters removed, and given a proper burial in a cemetery.

The spirit, satisfied, was never seen again.

Sound familiar?  The bare bones (pun intended) of this tale have formed the basis of hundreds, possibly thousands, of folk legends and tales-around-the-campfire.  But what may surprise you is this particular version's provenance.

It was related as a true story about the Greek philosopher Athenodorus Cananites (74 B.C.E. - 7 C.E.) by the famous author, lawyer, historian, and polymath Pliny the Younger (61 C.E. - 113 C.E.), and is one of the very first written examples of a ghost story.  Athenodorus himself was the home-buyer who allegedly sent the spirit to its eternal rest and scored a nice house and property at a bargain-basement price in the process.  (The source is Pliny's Letter LXXXIII - To Sura.)

Athenodorus Confronts the Spectre, by Henry Justice Ford (ca. 1900) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Athenodorus Cananites was neither ignorant nor superstitious; he was a prominent Stoic, learned in a variety of fields, and in fact was one of the tutors hired to teach Octavian (later Augustus Caesar).  I don't want to overstate the case, of course.  Even scholarly Greeks and Romans of his time were steeped in the legends of gods, demigods, and spirits, and mostly bought into a worldview that many of us today would consider unscientific nonsense.  But it's interesting that two prominent figures of the Classical intelligentsia are responsible for a story of with same flavor as countless other "restless spirit finds justice and is now at peace" tales told since.

It makes me wonder, though, how all of this got started.  Once the first few ghost stories are told, you can see how people would continue telling them; they're good scary fun, and also, humans are pretty suggestible.  Once your cousin tells you the house is haunted, it's easy enough afterward to interpret every creak and thump as the footsteps of a spectral resident.

But if you go back far enough, someone has to have told the first ghost story.  What could have spurred that?  What occurrence led one of our distant ancestors to decide that Great-Aunt Bertha had come back from the dead, and was still stalking around the place?

Impossible to know, of course.  But what's certain is that just about every culture on Earth tells ghost stories.  True Believers use that as an argument for their veracity; if there was no such thing as an afterlife, they say, why the ubiquity (and commonality of themes) between ghostly tales the world over?  Me, I'm not convinced.  After all, I've written here before about the widespread occurrence of stories similar to "Little Red Riding Hood" -- and no one believes that's because there ever was a wolf dressed up like Grandma waiting to eat a little girl with a basket of goodies.

At least I hope they don't.

In any case, I thought it was an interesting story, not least because it involves two prominent historical figures.  Whether it, and others like it, have any basis in reality very much remains to be seen.  So think about this if you're ever purchasing a house, and the price is way lower than it should be.  Maybe there's a man in chains buried somewhere on the property, and you're about to be recruited by a long-dead specter to fulfill its quest for justice.

Or maybe the roof just needs replacing or something.

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Stone age

I've only got a few real obsessions.  My dogs.  Doctor Who.  Anything to do with astronomy.  Lost in Space.  The X Files.  Star Trek - The Next Generation.  The movie Contact.

I bet you're sensing a theme, here.  Other than my dogs, all of these have to do with the universe, space travel, and alien life.  And given how oddly my dogs act some days, I find myself wondering if they might not be alien spies as well.  Especially Rosie, who so often seems to be judging us.

"Unless I start getting steak for dinner, the report I'll be sending to the Mothership will be highly unflattering."

But even with that possible exception, it's evident that I have a bit of a fixation on the possibility of extraterrestrial life.  I'm well aware of the fact that with regards to life, we've still got a sample size of one; despite decades of looking, we have yet to find any unequivocal biosignatures, signs that life exists, anywhere else but here.  (Much less any signs of extraterrestrial intelligent life.  Much as I would love for some astronomer to become a real-life Ellie Arroway, no such luck... yet.)

In spite of all this, I still am very much of the opinion that life elsewhere in the universe is likely to be abundant.  I base this on the known facts that there are trillions of stars out there, in billions of galaxies, and that exoplanetary systems are common (i.e. the formation of the Solar System wasn't just a lucky fluke).  Optimistic estimates of some of the other variables in the Drake Equation are harder to defend, but I stand by my statement: a purely statistical argument suggests that many star systems have planets that support some kind of life.

One of the things that in my mind argues for life existing elsewhere in the universe -- even in environments that we might consider inhospitable -- is how many extreme habitats here on Earth turn out to host living things.  There's life in the desiccated, perpetual cold of the dry valleys of Antarctica, in highly alkaline (or highly acidic) hot springs, in boreholes miles deep, in hydrothermal vents in the oceanic abyss.  The odd little animals called tardigrades can survive extremes in temperature and pressure, radiation, and dehydration; they've even survived exposure to the vacuum of space.

And we're still finding new ones in unexpected places.  Take, for example, the microorganism -- or, rather, the traces of it -- that was the subject of a study this week in the journal Geomicrobiology.  A team out of Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz was studying samples of marble and limestone quarried in the parched deserts of Namibia, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, and found microscopic tunnels apparently excavated by some as-yet-unidentified microbe.

"We were surprised because these tubes are clearly not the result of a geological process," said Cees Passchier, who co-authored the paper.  "We were looking at the structure of the rocks to find out how continents came together to form the supercontinent Gondwana five hundred to six hundred million years ago.  At that time, carbonate deposits formed in the ancient oceans and turned into marble due to pressure and heat...  We noticed strange structures in this marble that were not the result of geological events.  These are old structures, perhaps one or two million years old...  What is so exciting about our discovery is that we do not know which endolithic microorganism this is.  Is it a known form of life or a completely unknown organism?  It must be an organism that can survive without light because the tubes have formed deep inside the rock.  We don't currently know whether this is a life form that has become extinct or is still alive somewhere."

Samples of marble with the "microburrows" [Image credit: C. Passchier et al.]

It seems like everywhere we look on Earth, we find life, which strengthens the hope of those of us who'd like to find life out there amongst the stars as well.  That microorganisms can live by tunneling their way through solid rock certainly suggests we should expand the parameters of the phrase "capable of supporting life."

Although most of it may not be at the point of sending out messages that could be picked up by our radio telescopes, my surmise is that most even remotely hospitable locales in the universe will turn out to be inhabited.  And just judging by the diversity of our terrestrial organisms, I also strongly suspect that what is out there will indeed turn out to be, in Darwin's immortal words, "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."

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Up, down, round and round

I recall seeing a comic strip a while back making fun of one of the features of Star Trek that doesn't seem ridiculous until you think about it a little.  Have you noticed that whenever two starships are near each other -- whether it's the Enterprise and other Federation ships, or they're being threatened by the Romulans or Klingons or whatnot -- the ships are almost always oriented the same way?  The only time this is not the case is when the showrunner wanted to make it clear that the other ship was disabled and drifting.  Then it was shown at some odd angle relative to the Enterprise.  In the comic strip, it showed what it would look like if all the ships were at random orientations -- how ridiculous it appeared -- but really, isn't that what you'd expect?  In the Star Trek universe, each ship is supposed to come with its own artificial gravity, so within any ship, up is "toward the ceiling" and down is "toward the floor."  It wouldn't need to line up with any other ship's artificial gravity, so except for an occasional coincidence, they should all be at various angles.

In space, there's no preferred direction, no "up" or "down."  You always have to describe position relative to something else -- to the axis of the Earth's rotation, or the plane of the Solar System, or the plane of revolution of the Milky Way.  But even those aren't some kind of universal orientation; as I described in a recent post, the universe is largely isotropic (the same in every direction).  Just like the starships in Star Trek, there shouldn't be any preferred directionality.

Well, that's what we thought.

A new paper this week in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society describes a set of data from the James Webb Space Telescope that is absolutely astonishing.  Here's how the authors describe it:

JWST provides a view of the Universe never seen before, and specifically fine details of galaxies in deep space.  JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) is a deep field survey, providing unprecedentedly detailed view of galaxies in the early Universe.  The field is also in relatively close proximity to the Galactic pole.  Analysis of spiral galaxies by their direction of rotation in JADES shows that the number of galaxies in that field that rotate in the opposite direction relative to the Milky Way galaxy is ∼50 per cent higher than the number of galaxies that rotate in the same direction relative to the Milky Way.  The analysis is done using a computer-aided quantitative method, but the difference is so extreme that it can be noticed and inspected even by the unaided human eye.  These observations are in excellent agreement with deep fields taken at around the same footprint by Hubble Space Telescope and JWST.

This adds a whole new twist (*rimshot*) to the horizon problem and the isotropy of the universe as a whole.  Not only do we have the issue that causally-disconnected regions of the cosmic microwave background radiation, that are too far apart to have ever influenced each other (something I describe more fully in the above-linked post), are way more similar in temperature than you'd expect -- now we have to figure out how causally-disconnected galaxies on opposite sides of the universe could possibly have ended up with correlated rotational axes.

The authors admit it's possible that this measurement is due to something about the Milky Way's own rotation that we're not compensating for in the data, but there's a more out-there explanation that the paper's authors are seriously considering.

"It is not clear what causes this to happen," said study co-author Lior Shamir, of Kansas State University, in an interview with Independent.  "[But] one explanation is that the universe was born rotating.  That explanation agrees with theories such as black hole cosmology, which postulates that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole."

Black holes are defined by three properties -- mass, electric charge, and... angular momentum.  That we're inside a rotating black hole would explain the anomaly JWST just observed.  Since -- at least as far as our current understanding goes -- anything inside a black hole's event horizon is forever inaccessible, perhaps this means that event horizons are boundaries between universes.  As bizarre as that sounds, there is nothing about what we know of the laws of physics and cosmology that rules that out.  Which would mean that...

... black holes are bigger on the inside.

The Doctor tried to tell us.

Of course, the more prosaic explanation -- that the data were somehow influenced by our own motion through space -- has yet to be decisively ruled out.  I can't help but feel, though, that if the authors thought that was likely, they (or their reviewers) would have suggested waiting and re-analyzing before publishing in a prestigious journal like MNRAS.  The greater likelihood is that this is a real signal, and if so, it's mighty odd.

As far as what it would mean if we found out we are inside a black hole, well -- I'm hardly qualified to weigh in.  It probably wouldn't affect our day-to-day life any.  After all, it's not like we were going to find a way out of the universe anyhow, much as recent events here on Earth have made many of us wish we could.  All I can say is stay alert for further developments, and keep looking up.

Whatever direction that actually is.

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