The cardboard box ruse

My friend and fellow author Gil Miller, who has suggested many a topic for me here at Skeptophilia, threw a real doozy my way a couple of days ago.  He shares my interest in all things scientific, and is especially curious about where technology is leading.  (It must be said that he knows way more about tech than I do; if you look up the word "Luddite" in the dictionary you'll find a little pic of me to illustrate the concept.)  The topic he suggested was, on its surface, flat-out hilarious, but beyond the amusement value it raises some deep and fascinating questions about the nature of intelligence.

He sent me a link to an article that appeared at the site PC Gamer, about an artificial intelligence system that was being tested by the military.  The idea was to beef up a defensive AI's ability to detect someone approaching -- something that would have obvious military applications, and could also potentially be useful in security systems.  So an AI that had been specifically developed to recognize humans and sense their proximity was placed in the center of a traffic circle, and eight Marines were given the task of trying to reach it undetected; whoever got there without being seen won the game.

The completely unexpected outcome was that all eight Marines handily defeated the AI.

A spokesperson for the project described what happened as follows:

Eight marines: not a single one got detected.  They defeated the AI system not with traditional camouflage but with clever tricks that were outside of the AI system's testing regime.  Two somersaulted for three hundred meters; never got detected.  Two hid under a cardboard box.  You could hear them giggling the whole time.  Like Bugs Bunny in a Looney Tunes cartoon, sneaking up on Elmer Fudd in a cardboard box.  One guy, my favorite, he field-stripped a fir tree and walked like a fir tree.  You can see his smile, and that's about all you see.  The AI system had been trained to detect humans walking, not humans somersaulting, hiding in a cardboard box, or disguised as a tree.

Remember Ralph the Wolf disguising himself as a bush?  Good thing the sheep had Sam the Sheepdog looking after them, and not some stupid AI.

This brings up some really interesting question about our own intelligence, because I think any reasonably intelligent four-year-old would have caught the Marines at their game -- and thus outperformed the AI.  In a lot of ways we're exquisitely sensitive to our surroundings (although I'll qualify that in a moment); as proto-hominids on the African savanna, we had to be really good at detecting anything anomalous in order to survive, because sometimes those anomalies were the swishing tails of hungry lions.  For myself, I have an instinctive sense of spaces with which I'm familiar.  I recall distinctly walking into my classroom one morning, and immediately thinking, Someone's been in here since I locked up last night.  There was nothing hugely different -- a couple of things moved a little -- but having taught in the same classroom for twenty years, I knew it so well that I immediately recognized something was amiss.  It turned out to be nothing of concern; I asked the principal, and she said the usual room the school board met in was being used, so they'd held their session in my room the previous evening.

But even the small shifts they'd made stood out to me instantly.

It seems as if the only way you could get an AI to key in on what humans do more or less automatically is to program them explicitly to keep track of where everything is -- or to recognize humans somersaulting, hiding under cardboard boxes, and disguised as fir trees.  Which kind of runs counter to the bottom-up approach that most AI designers are shooting for.

What's most fascinating, though, is that our "exquisite sensitivity" I referred to earlier has some gaping holes.  We're programmed (as it were) to pay attention to certain things, and as a result are completely oblivious to others, usually based upon what our brains think is important to pay attention to at the time.  Regular readers of Skeptophilia may recall my posting the following mindblowing short video, called "Whodunnit?"  If you haven't seen it, take a couple of minutes and watch it before reading further:

This phenomenon, called inattentional blindness, results in our focusing so deeply on a few things that we effectively miss everything else.  (And honesty demands I admit that despite my earlier flex about my attention to detail in my classroom, I did terribly watching "Whodunnit?".)

Awareness is complex; trying to emulate our sensory processing systems in an AI would mean understanding first how ours actually work, and we're very far from that.  Obviously, no one would want to build inattentional blindness into a security system, but I have to wonder how you would program an AI to recognize what was trivial and what was crucial to notice -- like the fact that it was being snuck up on by a Marine underneath a cardboard box.  The fact that an AI that was good enough to undergo military testing failed so spectacularly, tricked by a ruse that wouldn't fool any normally-abled human being, indicates we have a very long way to go.

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It's all becoming clear

The phenomenon of transparency is way more interesting than it appears at first.

I remember thinking about the concept when I was a kid, the first time I watched the classic horror/science fiction film The Invisible Man.  Coincidentally, I was in high school and was in the middle of taking biology, and we'd recently learned how the human eye works, and Claude Rains's predicament took on an added layer of difficulty when it occurred to me that if he was invisible -- including his retina -- not only would we not be able to see him, he wouldn't be able to see anything, because the light rays striking his eye would pass right through it.  Since it's light being absorbed by the retina that stimulates the optic nerve, and Rains's retinas weren't absorbing any light (or we'd have seen them floating in the air, which is kind of a gross mental image), he'd have been blind.

So an invisibility potion isn't nearly as fun an idea as it sounds at first.

It wasn't until I took physics that I learned why some objects are transparent, and why (for example) it's harder to see a glass marble underwater than it is in the air.  Transparency results from a molecular structure that neither appreciably absorbs nor scatters light; more specifically, when the substance in question has electron orbitals spaced so that they can't absorb light in the visible region of the spectrum.  (If not, the light passes right through it.)  Note that substances can be transparent in some frequency ranges and not others; water, for example, is largely transparent in visible light, but is opaque in the microwave region -- which is why water heats up so quickly when you put it in a microwave oven.

The second bit, though, is where it really gets interesting.  Why are some transparent objects still clearly visible, and others are nearly invisible?  Consider my example of glass in air as compared to glass under water.  You can see through both, but it's much harder to discern the outlines of the glass underwater than it is in air.  Even more strikingly -- submerge a glass object in a colorless oil, and it seems to vanish entirely.

The reason is something called the index of refraction -- how much a beam of light is bent when it passes from one transparent medium to another.  A vacuum has, by definition, an index of refraction of exactly 1.  Air is slightly higher -- 1.000293, give or take -- while pure water is about 1.333.  The key here is that the more different the two indices are, the more light bends when crossing from one to the other (and the more the light tends to reflect from the surface rather than refract).  This is why the boundary between air and water is pretty obvious (and why those amazing photographs of crystal-clear lakes, where you can see all the way to the bottom and boats appear to be floating, are always taken from directly overhead, looking straight down; even at a slight angle from perpendicular, you'd see the reflected portion of the light and the water's surface would be clearly visible).

Likewise, the more similar the indices of refraction are, the less light bends (and reflects) at the boundary, and the harder it is to see the interface.  Glass, depending on the type, has an index of refraction of about 1.5; olive oil has an index of 1.47.  Submerge a colorless glass marble in a bottle of olive oil, and it seems to disappear,

The reason all this comes up has to do with the evolution of transparency in nature -- as camouflage.  It's a pretty clever idea, that, and is used by a good many oceanic organisms (jellyfish being the obvious example).  None of them are completely transparent, but some are good enough at index-of-refraction-matching that they're extremely hard to see.  It's much more difficult for terrestrial organisms, though, because air's lower index of refraction -- 1, for all intents and purposes -- is just about impossible to match in any conceivable form of living tissue.

Some of them come pretty close, though.  Consider the "skeleton flower," Diphylleia grayi, of Japan, which has white flowers that become glass-like when they're wet:

The transparency of the flower petals is likely to be a fluke, as it's hard to imagine how it would benefit the plant to evolve a camouflage that only works when the plant is wet.  An even cooler example was the subject of a paper in the journal eLife last week, and looked at a group of butterflies called (for obvious reasons) "glasswing butterflies."  These are a tropical group with clear windows in their wings -- but, it turns out, they're not all closely related to each other.

In other words, we're looking at an example of convergent evolution and mimicry.

The study found that some of the clear-wings are toxic, and those lack an anti-glare coating on the "windows."  This makes the light more likely to reflect from the surface, rather than pass through; think about the glare from a puddle in the road on a sunny day.  Those flashes of light act as a warning coloration -- an advertisement to predators that the animal is toxic, distasteful, or dangerous.

The glasswing butterfly Greta oto of Central and South America [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons David Tiller, Greta oto, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The coolest part of last week's paper was in looking at the mimics; the species that had the transparent windows but weren't themselves toxic.  Unlike the toxic varieties, those species had evolved anti-glare coatings on the windows, so the mimicry was obvious in bright light -- but in shadow, the lack of glare made them seem to disappear completely.  In other words, the clear parts act as a warning coloration in sunshine, and as pure camouflage in the shade!

Even more amazing is that a number of only distantly-related species have stumbled on the same mimicry -- so this particular vanishing act has apparently evolved independently more than once.  A good idea, apparently, shouldn't just be wasted on one species.

So that's today's cool natural phenomenon, which I hope I've clarified sufficiently.  There seems truly to be no end to the way living things can take advantage of physical phenomena for their own survival -- as Darwin put it, to generate "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."

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It's kind of sad that there are so many math-phobes in the world, because at its basis, there is something compelling and fascinating about the world of numbers.  Humans have been driven to quantify things for millennia -- probably beginning with the understandable desire to count goods and belongings -- but it very quickly became a source of curiosity to find out why numbers work as they do.

The history of mathematics and its impact on humanity is the subject of the brilliant book The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization by Michael Brooks.  In it he looks at how our ancestors' discovery of how to measure and enumerate the world grew into a field of study that unlocked hidden realms of science -- leading Galileo to comment, with some awe, that "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  Brooks's deft handling of this difficult and intimidating subject makes it uniquely accessible to the layperson -- so don't let your past experiences in math class dissuade you from reading this wonderful and eye-opening book.

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

Black as the night

You wouldn't think that fish living three miles deep in the ocean, far beneath the level that sunlight can penetrate, would worry much about being seen.

Well, I'm not sure they're worried, exactly.  But they still have the problem that if they do somehow get seen, they're likely to get eaten.

This lies at the heart of the reason that bioluminescence exists in the deep ocean.  You probably know that bioluminescence is the ability of some organisms to use chemical reactions in their bodies to emit light.  (Fireflies are a common example.)  In the deep ocean, it was thought the main reason animals might do this is to create a lure; the illuminated "fishing pole" of the grotesque angler fish brings in curious smaller fish, which then get turned into lunch.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Masaki Miya et al., Bufoceratias, CC BY 2.0]

There are other functions for light-emitting structures besides lures.  Squid that live in shallow water have ink they squirt into the water then they're attacked, creating a dark cloud to confuse the predator, thus allowing the squid to escape.  But if you live at a depth where its perpetually dark, black ink is fairly useless; so there are deep-sea squid that emit luminescent ink, creating a burst of light to startle the predator and give the would-be dinner a chance to live for another day.

Last week in Current Biology, though, there was a paper wherein I learned about another reason for bioluminescence in the deep ocean.  In "Ultra-black Camouflage in Deep-Sea Fishes," by Alexander L. Davis, Sönke Johnsen, and Karen J. Osborn (Duke University), Kate N. Thomas (The London Museum of Natural History), Freya E. Goetz (Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History), and Bruce H. Robison (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute), we read about fish like the evocatively-named fangtooth, Pacific blackdragon, and black swallower, whose skin is amongst the blackest naturally-occurring substances, reflecting less than 0.5% of the light the falls on it.

But as with the squid ink, why bother to evolve such dark skin if there's no light there to reflect?  The answer turns out to be that there is light there to reflect; the bioluminescence emitted by other predatory fish.  If you're in the complete darkness, even the reflection of a tiny amount of light from your body might give away your position.  So this is a third reason for deep-sea bioluminescence; not as a lure, nor a distraction, but as a searchlight.

These fish, however, are so dark that even in bright sunlight they look like black silhouettes, as study co-author Karen Osborn found out when she tried to photograph them.  This confers a significant advantage over other fish, even if there's only a marginal difference in the skin blackness.  The authors write:

At low light levels, as is the case with a fish reflecting <2% of an already dim source (i.e., a bioluminescent flash, lure, glow, or searchlight), against the black deep-sea background, the model predicts that the sighting distance is proportional to the square root of the number of photons being reflected back to the viewer.  Using this relationship, we find that reducing skin reflectance from 2% to 1% reduces sighting distance by 29% and that decreasing further to 0.5% or 0.05% reflectance reduces sighting distance by 50% and 84%, respectively.  Because visual predators typically search a volume of space, and this reduction in sighting distance is linear, the camouflage benefits of ultra-black skin may be even greater than the reduction in sighting distance calculated here.  Given the small size of the fishes studied here, it is likely that predator-prey interactions occur over short distances, where even small differences in sighting distance can have meaningful effects on interaction outcomes.

I've read that we know less about the abyssal regions of the ocean than we do about the surface of the Moon.  I don't know if that's true -- it's a little hard to quantify what we don't know about something -- but what's certain is that the deep ocean harbors some astonishingly weird creatures.  I'll end with a quote from H. P. Lovecraft, in whose writings the ocean represents everything that is dark and mysterious about the universe: "But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean...  The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination."

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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!]

Sparkling camouflage

Natural selection is such an amazing driver of diversity.  As Richard Dawkins showed so brilliantly in his tour-de-force The Blind Watchmaker, all you have to have is an imperfect replicator and a selecting agent, and you can end up with almost any result.

The only requirement is that the change has to enhance survival and/or reproduction now.  Evolution is not forward-looking, heading in the direction of whatever would be a cool idea.  (It'd be nice if it were; I've wanted wings for ages.  Big, feathery falcon wings from my shoulders.  It'd make wearing a shirt impossible, but let's face it, I hate wearing shirts anyway so that's really not much of a sacrifice.)

Anyhow, the trick sometimes is figuring out what the benefit is, because it's not always obvious.  The extravagant tail of the peacock is clearly an attractant for females, although at this point the male peacocks may have maxed out -- reached the point where the tail's advantage of attracting females is counterbalanced by the disadvantage of being so cumbersome that it makes it harder to escape predators.  When two competing selecting agents hit that balance point, the species -- with respect to that trait, at least -- stops evolving.

A good bunch of the wild colorations you find in nature have to do with sex.  Not only attracting mates in animals, but colorful flowers attracting a specific pollinator -- because pollination is (more or less) plant sex.  But not all; the stripes of the Bengal tiger are thought to break up its silhouette in the dappled sunlight of its forest home, making it less visible to prey.  The bright colors of the dart-poison frogs are warning colorations, advertising the fact that they're highly poisonous and that predators shouldn't even think about it if they know what's good for them.  A recent study concluded that one advantage of stripes in the zebra is that it confuses biting flies, including the dangerous tsetse fly (carrier of African sleeping sickness) -- horses that were draped with striped cloth (mimicking the zebra's patterns) were far less susceptible to horsefly bites.  It's probable that the stripes also confuse predators such as lions, which frequently try to target one animal in a fleeing herd and separate it from the rest, a task that's difficult if the stripes make it hard to tell where one zebra begins and the other ends.  So zebra stripes may be a twofer.

Sometimes, though, the reason for a bright coloration isn't obvious.  In the summer here in upstate New York we often see brilliant little tiger beetles, named not for stripes (most of them don't have 'em) but for their role as a voracious predator of other insects.  The ones we have here are a glistening emerald green, which I always figured camouflaged them on plant leaves -- but there are ones that are an iridescent blue, and one species is green and blue with orange spots.

Hard to call that camouflage.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ryan Hodnett, Six-spotted Tiger Beetle (Cicindela sexguttata) - Mississauga, Ontario 01, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Turns out that even the non-green ones might be using their sparkling colors as camouflage, however implausible that sounds.  A study that appeared this week in Current Biology, led by Karin Kjernsmo of the University of Bristol, concluded that the iridescence itself confuses predators, as much as it seems like it would attract attention.

Kjernsmo was studying the aptly-named Asian jewel beetles, which like our North American tiger beetles come in a wide range of glittering colors.  She took the wing cases of jewel beetles, both the iridescent and the matte species, and baited them with mealworms to see if birds had a preference.  85% of the targets with matte wings (of various colors) were picked off by birds, while only 60% of the iridescent ones were.

"It may not sound like much," Kjernsmo said, "but just imagine what a difference this would make over evolutionary time."

Her next question, though, was why.  This is much harder to determine, mostly because you can't ask a bird why it picked a particular insect for lunch.  (Well, you can ask.)  So what she did was a simple but suggestive experiment using human subjects -- she stuck various-colored wing cases to leaves at eye level on a forest trail, and had thirty-six human subjects walk the trail and see how many they could find.  They found 80% of the matte ones -- and only 17% of the iridescent ones!

It's a surprising result.  It may be that the shifting, sparkling surface of an iridescent insect confounds the ability of your visual cortex to make sense of what it's seeing by rendering it more difficult to perceive the edges, and therefore the shape, of what you're looking at.  The result: you can see the colors, but you don't recognize it as a beetle.  It's a plausible guess, but it will take more research to find out if it's the correct one, and if the reason the humans couldn't see iridescent wings is the same as why birds didn't eat them.

But once again, we're left with a slight difference in selection by a predator leading to what Darwin called "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful."  The natural world is deeply fascinating, and is even more wonderful when you not only can appreciate its beauty -- but understand where that beauty may have come from.

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The brilliant, iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman was a larger-than-life character -- an intuitive and deep-thinking scientist, a prankster with an adolescent sense of humor, a world traveler, a wild-child with a reputation for womanizing.  His contributions to physics are too many to list, and he also made a name for himself as a suspect in the 1950s "Red Scare" despite his work the previous decade on the Manhattan Project.  In 1986 -- two years before his death at the age of 69 -- he was still shaking the world, demonstrating to the inquiry into the Challenger disaster that the whole thing could have happened because of an o-ring that shattered from cold winter temperatures.

James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman gives a deep look at the man and the scientist, neither glossing over his faults nor denying his brilliance.  It's an excellent companion to Feynman's own autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?  It's a wonderful retrospective of a fascinating person -- someone who truly lived his own words, "Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter.  Explore the world.  Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

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

A botanical chameleon

One of the things I love most about science is its capacity to astonish us.

You can be really knowledgeable in a field, and then the natural world slings a curve ball at you and leaves you amazed.  Sometimes these unexpected twists lead to profound leaps in our understanding -- an example is the discovery of the parallel magnetic stripes in igneous rocks along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge leading to the theory of plate tectonics -- but sometimes it's just a fascinating bit of scientific trivia, one of those little things that makes you smile in a bemused sort of way and say, "Science is so cool."

I had a moment like that yesterday.  I taught biology for 32 years and have been interested in plants -- especially tropical plants -- a great deal longer than that.  I have a fine collection of tropical plants, currently jammed into my greenhouse so tightly that I can barely walk through it because the ones who spend the summer on my deck have to be tucked away in a warm place during our frigid winters.  I have bromeliads, cacti, three species of ginger, two different kinds of angel's trumpet (one of which got to be seven feet tall last summer, and sometimes had twenty giant, peach-colored flowers all blooming at once), a fig tree and a lime tree that produce every year, and two species of eucalyptus.

Among others.

While I wouldn't call myself an expert when it comes to tropical plants, I'm at least Better Than The Average Bear.  So I was startled to run, quite by accident, into an account of a species I had never even heard of -- and even more startled when I found out how truly bizarre and unique this plant is.

It's called the "chameleon vine," and its scientific name is Boquila trifoliolata.  It belongs to a small and rather obscure family of dicots called Lardizabalaceae, which contains forty species found in two places -- southeast Asia and western South America.  (How a group of plants with common ancestry ended up in such widely separated locales is a mystery in and of itself; populations like this are called peripheral isolates and are a perennial puzzle in evolutionary biology.)

Boquila is one of the South American ones, and lives in southern Chile and Argentina.  It's a woody vine whose leaves are composed of three leaflets (thus the plant's species name).  Here's a picture:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Inao, Boquila trifoliata [sic], CC BY-SA 2.0]

It's not really much to look at, and you non-botanical types are probably tapping your fingers and saying, "So what?"  But wait till you hear what this plant can do -- and why it merits its common name of "chameleon vine."

Boquila trifoliolata has an extraordinary ability called mimetic polymorphism.  It's capable of altering its leaf shape to mimic a variety of different (unrelated) plants -- including the ones it most commonly twines up as a support.  We're not talking about small differences, either.  It can be glossy or dull, have different petiole lengths, have different leaflet sizes and shapes, and even change whether or not it has serrations or spines along the edge!  

This ability, first described in a paper by botanists Ernesto Gianoli and Fernando Carrasco-Urra in Current Biology in 2014, was first attributed to genetic transfer from the host to the vine, a sort of genetic parasitism.  I'll admit that was the first explanation I thought of -- although how a plant could take up DNA from another species and only express the genes related to leaf morphology left me scratching my head a little.  But Gianoli and Carrasco-Urra were able to rule out this possibility, because Boquila can alter its leaf shape without touching the plant it's mimicking.

All it has to do is be nearby.  So it isn't a parasite at all.  The current guess is that Boquila is picking up volatile organic compounds emitted by the other plant, and those are altering gene expression, but those organic compounds have yet to be identified -- nor has any kind of specific mechanism by which that kind of alteration in phenotype could happen.

Even though we still have no idea how Boquila is managing this neat trick, the why is pretty clear.  If it's hiding amongst the foliage of another plant, herbivores can't single it out for a snack.  Gianoli and Carrasco-Urra found that when Boquila is climbing up a non-living support like a chain-link fence, herbivores actually seek it out for browsing.  But when it's camouflaged within another plant's leaves, it can avoid being seen and identified -- and, they found, browsing of its foliage dropped by as much as 50%.

Fascinating, isn't it?  And yet despite study, we haven't been able to figure out how the plant evolved this amazing (and apparently unique in the plant world) ability, nor what kind of information it's gleaning that might say, "Okay, time to change color and grow some spikes!"

So yet another example of how science is really freakin' cool.  It also illustrates how every new discovery opens up new avenues for investigation.  The crazy chameleon plant should make it absolutely clear that if you go into science, you'll never be done learning.

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Last week's Skeptophilia book recommendation was a fun book about math; this week's is a fun book about science.

In The Canon, New York Times and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Natalie Angier takes on a huge problem in the United States (and, I suspect, elsewhere), and does it with her signature clarity and sparkling humor: science illiteracy.

Angier worked with scientists from a variety of different fields -- physics, geology, biology, chemistry, meteorology/climatology, and others -- to come up with a compendium of what informed people should, at minimum, know about science.  In each of the sections of her book she looks at the basics of a different field, and explains concepts using analogies and examples that will have you smiling -- and understanding.

This is one of those books that should be required reading in every high school science curriculum.  As Angier points out, part of the reason we're in the environmental mess we currently face is because people either didn't know enough science to make smart decisions, or else knew it and set it aside for political and financial short-term expediency.  Whatever the cause, though, she's right that only education can cure it, and if that's going to succeed we need to counter the rote, dull, vocabulary-intense way science is usually taught in public schools.  We need to recapture the excitement of science -- that understanding stuff is fun.  

Angier's book takes a long stride in that direction.  I recommend it to everyone, layperson and science geek alike.  It's a whirlwind that will leave you laughing, and also marveling at just how cool the universe is.

Hey, you, get offa my cloud

Along Cayuga Lake, near where I live, is Milliken Station Power Plant.  On cool days its smokestack can be seen topped with a plume of steam.   Nearby is Portland Point, a renowned Devonian fossil-collecting site.

It was the fossils that brought a ninth-grade Earth Science class there, some years ago, which I had been asked to help chaperone.  The kids were all happily mucking around in the shale, looking for fossils, when one young lady -- who was known not to be overendowed with brains -- looked over at the nearby power plant smokestack, and said, wonder in her voice, "So that's where clouds come from!"

There are times when my natural compassion and my tendency to guffaw at people who say stupid things do war with each other.  I think I didn't laugh at her, but it was an effort.

But lest you think that this lack of understanding about concepts like "water vapor" and "condensation" is limited to this long-ago student, allow me to introduce you to Diane Tessman.  Now, Diane doesn't think, as our student did, that clouds are manufactured in Ithaca, New York and then exported all over the world.  No, that would be ridiculous.

Diane Tessman believes clouds are manufactured by UFOs as camouflage.

At first, I thought her claims were a joke, intended to make fun of the whole UFO/alien coverup crowd.  Sadly, it is not.  She has written an entire article in which she describes how alien spacecraft produce clouds to hide within or behind.  These are not oddly-shaped clouds, Ms. Tessman says; no, they are ordinary, puffy white cumulus clouds, because hiding behind an oddly-shaped cloud would call attention to the UFO instead of hiding it.

[image courtesy of photographer Michael Jastremski and the Wikimedia Commons]

By this point, you're probably asking yourself: if they don't look any different, how can I tell a UFO cloud from a regular cloud?  Answer: you can't.  You just have to watch a bunch of clouds, and wait until the camouflage slips and you see a UFO.

It's kind of an odd camouflage, when you think about it.  Picture yourself as the alien captain, on a mission to conquer Earth, and there you are, sitting inside a cloud, just drifting along with the other, non-UFO-generated clouds.  You can't change direction or speed, because it's not like the cloud is going to come along with you.  It means that whatever your mission was intended to accomplish, you'd better hope that it was downwind of your current position, and not needing attention any time soon:

Alien First Officer:  Captain!  We're off course!  We're supposed to be bombing New York City, and we're drifting the wrong direction! 

Alien Captain:  *slams fist into his palm*  Drat!  There's nothing we can do about it!  We've got to stay inside this cloud, and the wind is blowing the wrong way!  Where can we float over and bomb into rubble? 

Alien First Officer: "On this course, our next possible target is..." *consults map* "...Newark." 

Alien Captain:  Dammit!  That won't do!  No one will be able to tell!

Of course, Ms. Tessman says, we also have to consider the possibility that clouds may not just be camouflage; it's possible that clouds are naturally generated by "dimensional travel."

Whatever that means.

The whole thing is kind of spooky, isn't it? How many times have we had nice picnics on beautiful summer days, and lain on blankets looking up at the peaceful white clouds sailing by?  Now, you have to wonder how many of those clouds hid evil aliens, spying on us, waiting until we fall asleep so they can steal the oatmeal-raisin cookies we brought for dessert.

At this point, some of you may be questioning Ms. Tessman's credentials.  If so, they're provided at the end of the article.  She states that she is a former public school teacher; one can only hope that her subject wasn't physics.  She participated in many projects with MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network), and after many years discovered that she had a personal reason for her interest; while under hypnosis, she discovered that as a child she had been visited by, and had "shared consciousness with," an alien being called "Tibus."  Tibus has apparently provided her with such vital information as the fact that hurricanes are dangerous and it's a problem when a nuclear power plant explodes.  Considering Katrina and the meltdown at Fukushima, I think we can definitely all agree that Tibus knows what he's talking about.

But mainly, I'm glad that we now have an explanation for clouds other than Milliken Station Power Plant.  Because frankly, given the demand for clouds in places like the Amazon Rain Forest, it's been hard for Milliken Station to keep up with production quotas.  It's a relief to know that all we have to do is to send some UFOs down there to do "dimensional travel," and there will be clouds aplenty.