Reversing the core

I get really frustrated with science news reporting sometimes.

I mean, on the one hand, it's better that laypeople get exposed to science somehow, instead of the usual fare of the mainstream media, which is mostly stories about seriously depressing political stuff and the latest antics of celebrities.  But there's a problem with science reporting, and it's the combination of a lack of depth in understanding by the reporters, and a more deliberate desire to create clickbaity headlines and suck people in.

Take, for example, the perfectly legitimate (although not universally accepted) piece of research that appeared on January 23 in Nature Geoscience, suggesting that the Earth's inner core oscillates in its rotational speed with respect to the rest of the planet -- first going a little faster, then slowing a bit until its rotational rate matches Earth's angular velocity, then slowing further so the rest of the planet for a time outruns the core.  Then it speeds up, and does the whole thing in reverse.  The reason -- again, if it actually happens, which is still a matter of discussion amongst the experts -- is that the speed-up/slowdown occurs because of a combination of friction with the outer core, the effects of the magnetic field, and the pull of gravity from the massive mantle that lies outside it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons CharlesC, Earth cutaway, CC BY-SA 3.0]

That's not how this story got reported, though.  I've now seen it several times in different mainstream media, and universally, they claim that what's happening is that the inner core has stopped, and started to spin the other way -- i.e. the inner core is now rotating once a day, but in the opposite direction from the rest of the Earth.

This is flat-out impossible.  Let's start with the fact that the inner core has a mass of about 110,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms.  A mass that huge, spinning on its axis once a day, has a stupendous amount of angular momentum.  To stop the rotation of that humongous ball of nickel and iron would take an unimaginable amount of torque, and that's not even counting overcoming the drag that would be exerted by the outer core as you tried to make the inner core slow down.  (I could calculate how much, but it's just another huge number and in any case I don't feel like it, so suffice it to say it's "a shitload of torque.")  Then, to accelerate it so it's rotating at its original rate but in the opposite direction would take that much torque again.

Where's the energy coming from to do all that?

Here, the fault partly lies with the scientists; they did use the words "reversing direction" in their press release, but what they meant was "reversing direction with respect to the motion of the rest of the Earth."  I get that relative motion can be confusing to visualize -- but giving people the impression that something has stopped the inner core of the Earth and started it rotating in the opposite direction gives new meaning to "inaccurate reporting."

Worse still, I'm already seeing the woo-woos latch onto this and claim that it's a sign of the apocalypse, that the Evil Scientists™ are somehow doing this deliberately to destroy the Earth, that it's gonna make the magnetic field collapse and trigger a mass extinction, and that it's why the climate has been so bonkers lately.  (Anything but blame our rampant fossil fuel use, apparently.)  Notwithstanding that if you read the actual paper, you'll find that (1) whatever this phenomenon is, it's been going on for ages, (2) it represents a really small shift in the inner core's angular velocity, and (3) it probably won't have any major effects on we ordinary human beings.  After all, (4) the scientists have only recently figured out it's happening, and (5) not all of them believe it is happening.

So let's just all calm down a bit, okay?

In any case, I'd really appreciate it if the people reporting science stories in the mainstream media would actually read the damn papers they're reporting on.  It'd make the job of us skeptics a hell of a lot easier.  Thanks bunches.

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Fungus fracas

I suppose it's kind of a forlorn hope that popular media starts doing a better job of reporting on stories about science research.

My most recent example of attempting to find out what was really going on started with an article from Popular Mechanics sent to me by a friend, called "You Should Know About This Chernobyl Fungus That Eats Radiation."  The kernel of the story -- that there is a species of fungus that has evolved extreme radiation tolerance, and apparently now uses high-energy ionizing radiation to power its metabolism -- is really cool, and immediately put me in mind of the wonderful line from Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park -- "Life finds a way."

There were a few things about the article, though, that made me give it my dubious look:

The first was that the author repeatedly says the fungus is taking radiation and "converting it into energy."  This is a grade-school mistake -- like saying "we turn our food into energy" or "plants convert sunlight into energy."  Nope, sorry, the First Law of Thermodynamics is strictly enforced, even at nuclear disaster sites; no production of energy allowed.  What the fungus is apparently doing is harnessing the energy the radiation already had, and storing it as chemical energy for later use.  The striking thing is that it's able to do this without its tissue (and genetic material) suffering irreparable damage.  Most organisms, upon exposure to ionizing radiation, either end up with permanently mutated DNA or are killed outright.

Apparently the fungus is able to pull off this trick by having huge amounts of melanin, a dark pigment that is capable of absorbing radiation.  In the melanin in our skin, the solar energy absorbed is converted to heat, but this fungus has hitched its melanin absorbers to its metabolism, allowing it to function a bit like chlorophyll does in plants.

Another thing that made me wonder was the author's comment that the fungus could be used to clean up nuclear waste sites.  This put me in mind of a recent study of pillbugs, little terrestrial crustaceans that apparently can survive in soils contaminated with heavy metals like lead, cadmium, and mercury.  Several "green living" sites misinterpreted this, and came to the conclusion that pillbugs are somehow "cleaning the soil" -- in other words, getting rid of the heavy metals entirely.  Of course, the truth is that the heavy metals are still there, they're just inside the pillbug, and when the pillbug dies and decomposes they're right back in the soil where they started.  Same for the radioactive substances in Chernobyl; the fungus's ability to use radiation as a driver for its metabolism doesn't mean it's somehow miraculously destroyed the radioactive substances themselves.

Anyhow, I thought I'd dig a little deeper into the radioactive fungus thing and see if I could figure out what the real scoop was, and I found an MSN article that does a bit of a better job at describing the radiation-to-chemical-energy process (termed radiosynthesis), and says that the scientists investigating it are considering its use as a radiation blocker (not a radiation destroyer).  Grow it on the walls of the International Space Station, where long-term exposure to cosmic rays is a potential health risk to astronauts, and it might not only shield the interior but use the absorbed cosmic rays to fuel its own growth.

Then I saw that the MSN article named the actual species of fungus, Cryptococcus neoformans.  And when I read this name, I said, "... wait a moment."

Cryptococcus neoformans is a fungal pathogen, responsible for a nasty lung infection called cryptococcosis.  It's an opportunist, most often causing problems in people with compromised immune systems, but once you've got it it's hard to get rid of -- like many fungal infections, it doesn't respond quickly or easily to medication.  And if it becomes systemic -- escapes from your lungs and infects the rest of your body -- the result is cryptococcal meningitis, which has a mortality rate of about 20%.

So not really all that sanguine about painting the stuff on the interior walls of the ISS.

Anyhow, all this is not to say the fungus and its evolutionary innovation are not fascinating.  I just wish science reporting in popular media could do a better job.  I know journalists can't put in all the gruesome details and technical jargon, but boiling something down and making it understandable does not require throwing in stuff that's downright misleading.  I probably come off as a grumpy curmudgeon for even pointing this out, but I guess that's inevitable because I am a grumpy curmudgeon.

So while they're at it, those damn journalists should get off my lawn.

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In the midst of a pandemic, it's easy to fall into one of two errors -- to lose focus on the other problems we're facing, and to decide it's all hopeless and give up.  Both are dangerous mistakes.  We have a great many issues to deal with besides stemming the spread and impact of COVID-19, but humanity will weather this and the other hurdles we have ahead.  This is no time for pessimism, much less nihilism.

That's one of the main gists in Yuval Noah Harari's recent book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.  He takes a good hard look at some of our biggest concerns -- terrorism, climate change, privacy, homelessness/poverty, even the development of artificial intelligence and how that might impact our lives -- and while he's not such a Pollyanna that he proposes instant solutions for any of them, he looks at how each might be managed, both in terms of combatting the problem itself and changing our own posture toward it.

It's a fascinating book, and worth reading to brace us up against the naysayers who would have you believe it's all hopeless.  While I don't think anyone would call Harari's book a panacea, at least it's the start of a discussion we should be having at all levels, not only in our personal lives, but in the highest offices of government.

Don't throw out your textbooks

It'll come as no surprise to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I get really frustrated with how scientific research is portrayed in popular media.

It's not just the way it's explained -- it's the all-too-common impression media give that every new scientific discovery undoes everything that came before it.  How many times have you seen headlines that say, "Scientists Are Back to the Drawing Board Because...", as if the scientists were all sitting around sipping glasses of wine, thinking they had the entire universe figured out, when along comes some pesky upstart making a discovery that causes it all to come crashing down?

Yes, there are times that a discovery overturns a huge chunk of what we thought we knew, but the reason those stand out is because they're so infrequent.  (This is the subject of Thomas Kuhn's seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which should be required reading for anyone interested in the scientific process.)  Most of the alterations caused by new discoveries are small course changes, not capsizing the entire boat.  Not that they're unimportant -- refining the model is what science is all about.  But refinement doesn't require destroying the superstructure, any more than remodeling your kitchen requires that you tear down your entire house.

It's why I get frustrated with students who say (usually about evolution) "it's just a theory."  "Theory" is a word that is consistently misused by many laypeople, who take it to mean "a wild guess that could just as easily be disproven as proven," when actually what it means is "a complex explanatory model well supported by all of the available evidence."  Yes, it's possible that the theory of evolution could be disproven, but in the same sense that it's possible you could throw a deck of cards into the air and have them land in a stack by number and suit.  It could happen -- but I wouldn't bet on it.

I saw a frustrating example of this phenomenon yesterday in the usually excellent site Science News, apropos of a discovery in South Africa of a rock that may force a revision of our timetable for the tectonic history of the Earth.  Pretty cool, even if the revision isn't that large, in the grand scheme of things -- pushing back the start of tectonic activity from 2.7 to 3.3 billion years ago.  The most interesting thing is that this means tectonic movement started right around the same time as life did, leading to speculation that there may be some kind of causation there.  (Recall that tectonics isn't just responsible for earthquakes and volcanoes, but for recycling large chunks of the Earth's crust.  It may be that this movement of minerals and seawater kicked off the chemical reactions that led to the first living things -- although this is still highly speculative.)

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So the article is cool, but the headline made me cringe: "Drop of Ancient Seawater Rewrites Earth's History."  Yeah, okay, maybe technically that's true, given that the timetable of geological activity has been altered by the discovery.  But don't take away from it that the sequence of eras and periods in every high school earth science text has been trashed, and that geologists are now completely at sea.  The headline is factually correct but gives the wrong gist, way too reminiscent of the "Discovery Makes Scientists Throw Out the Textbooks!" headlines you see in popular media.  It leads to the all-too-common impression of scientists as bumbling around in their labs making wild guesses, and writing paper after paper (and textbook after textbook) that each supersede the previous ones like the fall of a row of dominoes.

The truth is, perhaps, not nearly as sexy, but popular media (and especially science-for-laypeople media like Science News) should try to reflect it.  In this time when our leaders are actively trying to poison our belief in scientific research on climate change, pollution, and ecology, it is incumbent on media of all type to be as careful as they can about being accurate not only in denotation but in connotation.  As a group, scientists are extremely cautious about publishing until their conclusions are supported by a wealth of evidence, and the impression fostered by many elected officials -- that scientific research is biased, tentative, and inaccurate -- is simply false.

So I wish the people who write about research for popular consumption would take this to heart.  We can't afford any more blows to our confidence in the experts.  Without them, we'd be left with only the politicians to rely on -- and given the choice, I'm trusting the scientists.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is sheer brilliance -- Jenny Lawson's autobiographical Let's Pretend This Never Happened.  It's an account of her struggles with depression and anxiety, and far from being a downer, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read.  Lawson -- best known from her brilliant blog The Blogess -- has a brutally honest, rather frenetic style of writing, and her book is sometimes poignant and often hilarious.  She draws a clear picture of what it's like to live with crippling social anxiety, an illness that has landed Lawson (as a professional author) in some pretty awkward situations.  She looks at her own difficulties (and those of her long-suffering husband) through the lens of humor, and you'll come away with a better understanding of those of us who deal day-to-day with mental illness, and also with a bellyache from laughing.

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

Buzzing off

I have great respect for scientists, which I hope is obvious from the content of this blog.  Even so, there are times I read scientific research and say, "What the hell were they thinking?"

That was my first thought when I read a BBC News article claiming that playing dubstep music by Skrillex makes mosquitoes less likely to bite and mate.  If you don't know who Skrillex is, that's probably a good thing if you've got reasonably refined musical sensibilities.  I try to be tolerant of other people's musical tastes and acknowledge that what you like is a matter of opinion, but it is my considered judgment that Skrillex sounds like a robot having sex with a dial-up modem.

So apparently what they apparently did is to play Skrillex for some mosquitoes, and the mosquitoes apparently didn't feel like eating or mating, which I have to admit is kind of the effect it has on me.  "[T]he occurrence of blood feeding activity was lower when music was being played," the scientists write.  "Adults exposed to music copulated far less often than their counterparts kept in an environment where there was no music...  The observation that such music can delay host attack, reduce blood feeding, and disrupt mating provides new avenues for the development of music-based personal protective and control measures against Aedes-borne diseases."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons, Aedes aegyptii, photograph taken by Muhammad Mahdi Karim]

When I finished reading the article, my first thought was that this was a typical sensationalized report on scientific research, where popular media completely misrepresents what the scientists did in order to get clicks.  Sadly, this is not the case.  The BBC News actually did a pretty good job of describing the research -- it's just that the research was kind of... um... terrible.

Here's a piece from the paper itself, which appeared in Acta Tropica last week and is entitled,
"The Electronic Song 'Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites' Reduces Host Attack and Mating Success in the Dengue Vector Aedes aegypti," by a team of researchers led by Hamady Dieng of the University of Malaysia:

Sound and its reception are crucial for reproduction, survival, and population maintenance of many animals.  In insects, low-frequency vibrations facilitate sexual interactions, whereas noise disrupts the perception of signals from conspecifics and hosts.   Despite evidence that mosquitoes respond to sound frequencies beyond fundamental ranges, including songs, and that males and females need to struggle to harmonize their flight tones, the behavioral impacts of music as control targets remain unexplored. In this study, we examined the effects of electronic music ("Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" by Skrillex) on foraging, host attack, and sexual activities of the dengue vector Aedes aegypti.   Adults were presented with two sound environments (music-off or music-on).  Discrepancies in visitation, blood feeding, and copulation patterns were compared between environments with and without music.  Ae. aegypti females maintained in the music-off environment initiated host visits earlier than those in the music-on environment.  They visited the host significantly less often in the music-on than the music-off condition.

Which is pretty much what the BBC News article said.

What's wrong with this research is that it falls into what I would call "so what?" studies.  It's the kind of thing that even if the protocols and controls were appropriate, doesn't tell you very much.  Okay, Skrillex screws up mosquitoes.  Why?  They only did "music on" and "music off;" they didn't try different kinds of music, various pure tones, harmonics, combinations of sounds, and other sorts of sounds.  So the outcome really gives us very little information about what's actually going on, and why -- nor how this could be used to reduce the spread of mosquito-borne diseases.

Because frankly, if I had a choice of getting dengue fever and listening to Skrillex all day, I'd have to think about it.

So anyhow, I guess having a paper in a scientific journal doesn't necessarily guarantee that the research it describes isn't kind of silly.  And it also highlights the importance of going from the account in the popular media to the research itself before making a judgment.  Most of the time, if there's a problem or a misrepresentation, it's the popular media that's at fault.

But not always.  So if you want to repel mosquitoes, you might want to do your own experiments.  There must be a better way than subjecting yourself and everyone around you to dubstep.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation combines science with biography and high drama.  It's the story of the discovery of oxygen, through the work of the sometimes friends, sometimes bitter rivals Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier.   A World on Fire: A Heretic, an Aristocrat, and the Race to Discover Oxygen is a fascinating read, both for the science and for the very different personalities of the two men involved.  Priestley was determined, serious, and a bit of a recluse; Lavoisier a pampered nobleman who was as often making the rounds of the social upper-crust in 18th century Paris as he was in his laboratory.  But despite their differences, their contributions were both essential -- and each of them ended up running afoul of the conventional powers-that-be, with tragic results.

The story of how their combined efforts led to a complete overturning of our understanding of that most ubiquitous of substances -- air -- will keep you engaged until the very last page.

[Note:  If you purchase this book by clicking on the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

Bubble physics

I'm going to ask you for a favor, and yes, this applies even to anyone reading this who is a non-science type: before you post and/or comment excitedly upon the latest popular-media article about some scientific research, go to the original research and see if it's really what the popular media are claiming it is.

I mean, at least read the abstract.  That's often enough to convince yourself that no, NASA hasn't developed warp drive yet; no, almost no reputable astronomers think that the mysterious light-intensity wobble from "Tabby's Star" is due to an alien megastructure; and no, the Yellowstone Supervolcano is not going to have a cataclysmic eruption soon (unless you consider "some time in the next 100,000 years" soon).

All, by the way, claims that I've seen posted on social media in the last month.

The latest example of this, however, comes from some research published a couple of months ago by physicists at the University of Rochester, in which they are said to have "created a device that generates 'negative mass.'"

This resulted in a number of near-hysterical articles about antigravity and "unknown forces in nature" and "rewriting everything we know about physics."

To which I respond: just hang on a minute.

Let's go to the original paper itself, which has the remarkably unsexy title, "Anomalous Dispersion of Microcavity Trion-Polaritons," which appeared in Nature: Physics.  Here's the abstract:

The strong coupling of excitons to optical cavities has provided new insights into cavity quantum electrodynamics as well as opportunities to engineer nanoscale light–matter interactions.  Here we study the interaction between out-of-equilibrium cavity photons and both neutral and negatively charged excitons, by embedding a single layer of the atomically thin semiconductor molybdenum diselenide in a monolithic optical cavity based on distributed Bragg reflectors.  The interactions lead to multiple cavity polariton resonances and anomalous band inversion for the lower, trion-derived, polariton branch—the central result of the present work.  Our theoretical analysis reveals that many-body effects in an out-of-equilibrium setting result in an effective level attraction between the exciton-polariton and trion-polariton accounting for the experimentally observed inverted trion-polariton dispersion.  Our results suggest a pathway for studying interesting regimes in quantum many-body physics yielding possible new phases of quantum matter as well as fresh possibilities for polaritonic device architectures.

Got all that?  Frankly no, neither did I, and I have a degree in physics.  But if you go through it carefully, and look up a few terms like "exciton" and "polariton" and "optical cavity," you find out that the researchers didn't invent a new sort of matter with "negative mass," as at least some of the popular-media summaries claimed.

It turns out that an "exciton" is related to a concept I ran into when I was taking a course in electromagnetism as an undergraduate; that you can treat the absence of an electron -- a "hole" -- as an actual particle, map how it moves, interacts, and affects other electrons or holes in the vicinity.  No physicist claims that these holes are actual things; simply that you can model how electrically-charged particles act by treating them as if they were.

In that sense, they're a bit like bubbles rising in water.  You can model the behavior of bubbles as if they are made of some exotic negative-mass object being repelled by gravity, and come up with completely consistent physics about their behavior; that doesn't mean they actually have negative mass.

They simply behave as if they did, so it's convenient to look at them that way.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem, of course, is that this is not nearly as thrilling to the general public as saying that bubbles represent some strange new form of matter that experiences antigravity and will lead to Star Trek-style transporters and faster-than-light travel.  And since clicks and/or subscriptions are what keep popular media in business, you can be certain that they're going to characterize it whatever way it takes to make you click the link.  The vast majority of media outlets honestly don't give a damn what happens after that, up to and including whether you actually end up understanding what you read.

So please, please go to the source.  Look, it's not like I'm perfect in this regard myself all the time.  I get carried away by wishful thinking and confirmation bias, especially with regard to warp drive, which I really really REALLY want to be real.  But try to hold your preconceived notions in abeyance for at least as long as it takes to find the original research and see if what's being claimed is what the scientists actually said.

Then, and only then, decide whether you want to share the link.

My guess is that this would cut the amount of spurious media sharing by about 90%.  Of course, it's not like I've done any research on this myself.  Only a supposition based on no particular empirical evidence.

I.e.  I pulled the 90% figure out of my ass.

So please don't quote me on that.