Cosmic storms

Because we clearly don't have enough to worry about, a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society A describes apparent solar storm events captured in tree ring data that, if they happened today, would simultaneously fry every electronic device on Earth.

Those of you who are history buffs may think I'm talking about the 1859 Carrington Event, that caused auroras as near the equator as the Caribbean and triggered sparking, fires, and general failure in the telegraph system.  But no: the repeated Miyake Events -- which occurred six times in the last ten thousand years, most recently in 993 C.E. -- are estimated to have been a hundred times more powerful than Carrington, and worse still, scientists have no clear idea what caused them.

The evidence comes from carbon-14 deposition rates.  Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope of carbon that is produced at a relatively steady rate by bombardment of upper-atmosphere carbon dioxide by cosmic rays.  That C-14 is then incorporated into plant tissue via photosynthesis.  So tree ring C-14 content is a good indicator of the rate of radiation bombardment -- and the team, led by astrophysicist Benjamin Pope of the University of Queensland, have been analyzing six crazily high spikes of C-14 in tree rings, called "Miyake Events" after the scientist who first identified them.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the United States Air Force]

Identifying the events is not the same as discovering their underlying cause, and the Miyake Events have the researchers stumped, at least for now.  Solar storms tend to coincide with the eleven-year sunspot cycle, but the Miyake Events show no periodicity lining up with sunspots (or anything else, for that matter).  There has even been speculation that they may not be of solar origin at all, but come from some source outside the Solar System -- perhaps a gamma-ray burster or Wolf-Rayet star -- but there are no known candidates that are anywhere near close enough to be responsible, especially given that the phenomenon (whatever it is) has occurred six times in the past ten thousand years.

So the Miyake Events may be real, honest-to-goodness cosmic storms.  Not, I hasten to add, the nonsense from the abysmal 1960s series Lost in Space, wherein Will Robinson and Doctor Smith and the Robot would be amusing themselves, then suddenly the Robot would start flailing about and yelling "Danger!  Danger!  Cosmic storm imminent!"  Then some wind would happen and blow over cardboard props and styrofoam rocks, and Will and Doctor Smith would pretend they were being flung about helplessly.  In the midst of all this there would be a cosmic noise ("BWOYOYOYOYOYOY") and an alien would appear out of nowhere.  These aliens included a space pirate (complete with an electronic parrot on his shoulder), a bunch of alien hillbillies (their spaceship looked like an old shack with a front porch), a motorcycle gang, a group of hippies, some space teenagers, and in one episode I swear I am not making up, Brünhilde, wearing a feathered helmet and astride a cosmic horse (which unfortunately appeared to be made of plastic).  She then proceeded to yo-to-ho about the place until eventually Thor showed up, after which things got kind of ridiculous.

But I digress.

Anyhow, back to the real cosmic storms.  The weirdest thing about the current research is the discovery that these were not sudden, one-and-done events like Carrington, which only lasted a few hours.  "At least two, maybe three of these events... took longer than a year, which is surprising because that's not going to happen if it's a solar flare," Pope said, in an interview with ABC Science.  "We thought we were going to have a big slam dunk where we could prove that [Miyake events were caused by] the Sun...  This is the most comprehensive study ever made of these events and the big result is a big shrug; we don't know what's going on...  There's a kind of extreme astrophysical phenomenon that we don't understand and it actually could be a threat to us."

So that's cheerful.

What's the scariest about an event like this is that even though it wouldn't directly cause any harm to us, it could cause a simultaneous collapse of the entire electrical infrastructure, and that the damage would take weeks or months even to begin to fix.  Can you imagine?  Not only no internet, but no GPS, no cellphones, maybe even no electrical grid.  Air travel would be impossible without the radar and navigational systems that it relies on.  For the first time since electricity became widespread, the world would suddenly go dark -- not only figuratively, but literally.

Research into what caused the Miyake Events is ongoing.  Even if they can figure out what caused them, though, it's hard to see what, if anything, we could do about it.  Chances are they'd occur without warning -- everything toodling along normally, then suddenly, wham.

Probably best not to worry about it.

Have a nice day.

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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.

Mattresses, crude oil, and superpowers

Given the ongoing lunacy happening in the United States right now, I find it strangely comforting when I find out that there are people doing stupid stuff in other countries, too.

Take, for example, the Korean radioactive mattresses.  As reported in the Korea JoongAng Daily, it turns out that seven mattress manufacturers have been found in violation of standards for allowable radiation level in products meant for human use.

How, you might ask, could not one, nor two, but seven companies be simultaneously producing mattresses that bathe you in the warm glow of alpha radiation?  Turns out that there's a pseudoscientific alt-med belief over there that anything producing negative ions is good for you (meaning, of course, that positive ions are bad).  Given that bases have an excess of hydroxyl (OH-) ions, if this were true it would mean that a concentrated solution of Drano would be just the most healthful thing ever.

But little things like "facts" and "science" never dissuade people from espousing this sort of idea, so these mattress manufacturers decided to negative-ionify their mattresses by sprinkling the stuffing with powdered monazite.  Monazite, for you non-geological types, is a mineral primarily composed of cerium/thorium phosphate.

Thorium, you probably know, is highly radioactive.  When it decays, it not only produces alpha particles, but the "decay series" ends up producing the element radon, which is not only more radioactive, is a gas, so it can be inhaled -- and has been linked to increasing your risk of lung cancer.

So using one of these mattresses is taking the chance of seriously compromising your health.  It will not, unfortunately, result in your getting superpowers or becoming the Korean version of the Incredible Hulk.

Oh, wait.  That was gamma rays, not alpha particles.  Never mind.

Then we've got the resort town of Naftalan, in Azerbaijan, which has a spa in which you can do wonderful things for your skin -- by taking a bath in heated crude oil.

At this point, I feel obliged to state outright that I'm not making either of these stories up.  The people running the resort said, "It smells like sulfur, but feels like salvation," and that it's helpful for skin, joint, and bone diseases.

One puzzling thing is that the news story I linked above says that "The oil's effectiveness is credited to its high concentration of a compound used to treat conditions like psoriasis and eczema.  European Union and U.S. regulators have deemed that compound a potential carcinogen, but it hasn't been linked to cancer."

Um.  It's a potential carcinogen, but hasn't been linked to cancer?  This is a little like saying that Donald Trump has been doing everything he can to favor Russian interests over those of Americans, but he's not actually pro-Russian and anti-American.

Oh, wait.  That's what he and his cronies are actually saying.

Never mind again.

This kind of bullshit even makes the wildlife facepalm.

On second thought, I'm not sure how reassuring it really is that people elsewhere in the world are exhibiting the same level of credulous idiocy we have here in the United States.  Wouldn't it nice if somewhere in the world, there was a country that based its decisions on rationality, that behaved nicely toward people and respected their rights, and that took into account long-term consequences instead of basing everything on short-term expediency?  Maybe the fact that we're all in the same slowly-sinking boat isn't really a cause for celebration.

In fact, now that I'm thoroughly depressed, I think I'll go take a nap.  Maybe I'll get lucky and my mattress will emit gamma rays, and I'll get superpowers.  Maybe I'll get to fly and shoot laser beams from my eyes.  That'd be handy.

Especially before the next "Make America Great Again" rally.

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This week's book recommendation is from one of my favorite writers and documentary producers, Irish science historian James Burke.  Burke became famous for his series Connections, in which he explored the one-thing-leads-to-another phenomenon which led to so many pivotal discoveries -- if you've seen any of the episodes of Connections, you'll know what I mean when I say that it is just tremendous fun to watch how this man's brain works.  In his book The Pinball Effect, Burke investigates the role of serendipity -- resulting in another tremendously entertaining and illuminating read.

A tsunami of misinformation

One of the most frustrating things I encounter while doing research for Skeptophilia is sensationalized nonsense masquerading as fact -- especially when it is gussied up in such a way as to make it seem reasonable to the layperson.

This is the problem with the article "Fukushima Radiation Has Contaminated The Entire Pacific Ocean (And It's Going To Get Worse)" that appeared over at Zero Hedge yesterday.  In it, we have a rehash of the Fukushima disaster of 2011, which generated a horrific tsunami and breached a nuclear power plant.  The combined effects of the earthquake and its aftermath cost almost 16,000 lives, and left 230,000 people homeless -- some of whom are still living in temporary housing.

Unfortunately, that's about where the Zero Hedge article stops being factual and starts relying on sensationalist exaggerations and outright fabrication.  Here's a brief list of the inaccurate claims that appear on the article:

• "[The Fukushima earthquake was] believed to be an aftershock of the 2010 earthquake in Chile."

Well, it might be true that someone believes that.  Presumably the writer of the article does.  But there aren't any geologists who do.  The earthquakes occurred a year apart and over 17,000 kilometers from each other.  There is no seismic process that could possibly connect the two.

If that weren’t bad enough:

• "Fukushima continues to leak an astounding 300 tons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean every day."

This isn't incorrect so much as it is misleading.  Note that nowhere in this statement (in fact, nowhere in the article) does it state how radioactive those 300 tons of water are -- i.e., how much radioactive cesium (the most common radioisotope in the leaked water) was present.  In fact, marine radiochemist Ken Buesseler has stated that ocean radiation levels near the disabled power plant are one thousandth of what they were immediately following the accident, and at any distance at all from the site the contamination is "barely discernible."

• "It should come as no surprise, then, that Fukushima has contaminated the entire Pacific Ocean in just five years."

Cf. my previous comments about quantities and measurability.

• "Not long after Fukushima, fish in Canada began bleeding from their gills, mouths, and eyeballs.  This “disease” has been ignored by the government and has decimated native fish populations, including the North Pacific herring."

This is referring to viral hemorrhagic septicemia, a deadly disease of fish that is caused by (note the name) a virus.  It has nothing to do with radiation or the Fukushima disaster, and was recorded in fish populations long before the earthquake.

Also, correlation does not imply causation.  Even if viral hemorrhagic septicemia had only been seen after debris from Fukushima washed ashore, it wouldn't necessarily mean that the contaminants in the debris had caused the disease.

• "Elsewhere in Western Canada, independent scientists have measured a 300% increase in the level of radiation."

300% of a minuscule amount is still a minuscule amount.

• "Further south in Oregon, USA, starfish began losing legs and then disintegrating entirely when Fukushima radiation arrived there in 2013.  Now, they are dying in record amounts, putting the entire oceanic ecosystem in that area at risk.

This is another viral disease called starfish wasting disease, and like the fish disease mentioned earlier, has bugger-all to do with Fukushima as there have been outbreaks of it since 1972.  However, there is some evidence that increasing water temperatures have made starfish more susceptible, so there's a connection to climate change, which is something we should be concerned about.

And no alarmist article would be complete without some scary pictures.  First, we have this one, from NOAA:

This has nothing to do with radiation leakage.  It's a map tracking wave heights of the tsunami as it crossed the Pacific, as you'd know if you had looked at the scale on the right hand side.

Then there's this one:

Which shows a bunch of dead starfish.  But as I established a couple of paragraphs ago, this has nothing to do with radiation poisoning.

And so on and so forth.  The alarmist foolishness in articles like this is dangerous from a couple of standpoints. First, it makes it sound like the scientists themselves are ignorant of what's going on, or (worse) are actively covering it up for their own malign purposes.  Second, it misrepresents what the science actually says.  Third, it distracts us from problems that actually are global catastrophes in the making by focusing our attention elsewhere.

At a less-than-careful reading, though, such an article sounds well researched and factually accurate.  It has links, sources cited, uses technical vocabulary.  It's only if you take the time to do some research yourself that the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.

So caveat lector.  As usual.  And to the people who keep forwarding this article around, I'm respectfully asking you to stop.  It's hard enough to get people to trust legitimate science these days; this kind of thing only makes it worse.

Tower of power

When I read woo-woo conspiracy nonsense, one of the first things I often do is to shout at the computer, "Learn some damn science, will you?"

Not that it accomplishes anything.  The writers can't hear me, and my computer has a stress gauge on it that measures my irritation levels and uses that data to decide when would be the optimal time to malfunction so as to get the maximum possible freak-out.  So cluing it in that I'm already frustrated is probably a bad idea, a little like acting scared in front of a potentially vicious dog.

This all comes up because of a post over at the dubiously sane website Nutbarfactor.com, called "Why are WEAPONIZED Cell Towers Popping Up All Over the Country?"  This article raised a number of questions, the first of which is to ask whether the website is "Nut Bar Factor" or "Nut Barf Actor."  Because clearly those aren't the same thing.

Be that as it may, we hear right from the get-go about why you should worry if you live near a cell tower:

WHY DO CELL TOWERS REQUIRE MULTIPLE 300,000 WATT ELECTRIC CABLES? 

SHORT ANSWER?  THEY ARE NOT CELL TOWERS!

Apparently, one of the bad effects is that they cause your computer's caps lock to get stuck on.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But it's worse than that, as he goes on to tell us:

(A) communications satellite uses 2,400 watts of power (about the same as used by 2 hair dryers).  A microwave oven uses 1,000 watts (1 kilowatt) of energy.  The satellite gets the energy from solar panels and the microwave gets it from your electric utility (the electrical power grid)...  (T)he cables leading into a typical cell phone tower, which he describes as “A giant microwave oven on a stick,” capable of releasing 3,000,000 watts (3 megawatts) of output power to the tower’s magnetron – or even more megawatts, if there is an amplifier at the top.

So why would they have such a power capacity?  Surely it can't have anything to do with power transmission intensity dropping off as a function of the inverse square of the distance, or the necessity of broadcasting over a long range, right?

Of course not.

These megawatts of extra power are NOT for data transfer – nothing close to that amount of energy is required for data transfer – which is an important point, because this suggests to him that cell phone towers are easily capable of being switched to Weaponized Mode. 

That cell phone towers are wired with the capability to release millions of watts of microwave radiation makes them veritable of “towers of death”, the perfect weapons against an “invasion” – or the mega-slaughter of the domestic population... (I)f whoever we elect turns out to be so crazy, batshit evil, that they could fake a reason to turn on the ‘Last Line of Defense,’ the ‘Anti-Foreign Invasion’, ‘Anti-Zombie Apocalypse Network’ to cook the entire population within the city limits within an hour, in the middle of the night, with robot armies to mop up the people living in the countryside.

Sure they will.  Because what does government exist for, if not to cook us all like reheating yesterday's leftover pork roast?

Anyway.  Let's look at what people who actually understand physics have to say about the danger.  From an article by Elliott Drucker in Wireless Week, we have the following:

As a worst-case scenario in terms of exposure to RF radiation, consider a cell tower located only 30 meters (about 100 feet) away, and transmitting a total of 500W effective radiated power (ERP).  Of course, if you are only 30 meters from the transmitting antennas, you also are likely well below their horizontal beam centers even if severe downtilt is used. But for the sake of our worst-case analysis, let's assume that the full 500W is aimed right at you.  In that case, the RF power density where you are standing would be 4.4 microwatts per square centimeter.  For comparison, the FCC's mandated power density limits for continuous uncontrolled RF exposure by the general public are 600 and 1,000 microwatts per square centimeter for 900 and 1900 MHz signals, respectively.  Even in our highly unlikely worst-case scenario, RF exposure levels would be well under 1 percent of the maximum deemed safe by the FCC.

Put another way, by a physicist friend of mine, "A common number given for the power output of a cellphone tower is 100 watts.  So in terms of its power output, the tower would be as dangerous as a 100 watt light bulb."

What about his claim that there is a 3 megawatt power consumption rate by cell towers?  Besides the fact that he apparently pulls this number out of thin air, there's the problem that the input power of the cell tower isn't only used for broadcasting the cell signal, it's used for other things -- like lighting.  Most of the lights on cell towers are high-wattage incandescents.  According to my physicist pal, "I'd have to do the math to be certain of this, but my guess is that a significant fraction of the input energy of a cell tower is actually going into peripherals like lighting.  The output signal runs at a surprisingly low wattage."

So unfortunately for the conspiracy-minded, the likelihood that the government is planning on microwaving us all to death is completely unfounded.  It's a pity, especially given that one of the uses that the guy at Nut Barf Actor came up with was as an "Anti-Zombie Apocalypse Network."  Which I have to admit to being a good idea.  You have to wonder how well zombies would deal with being microwaved until they were piping hot on the inside.

Inconvenient evidence

There is nothing good to be gained by the politicization of science.

At its most fundamental level, science is not a political pursuit at all.  It is, or should be, the pursuit of a rigorous standard of inquiry to broaden our knowledge of how the universe works.  The goals and methods of science should not change based on whether you're liberal or conservative, political or apolitical, religious or secular.

Despite this, there are two points where politics impinges on science.  One of them, at least, is defensible; that is the decision regarding what to do when scientific findings impact directly the lives of humans.  For example, whether anthropogenic climate change exists, and predictions regarding how great an impact it will have on sea levels, storm intensity, and so on, are scientific questions.  Those should be answered irrespective of political concerns.  On the other hand, how a country responds to whatever threats do exist -- to what extent money should be appropriated to remedy the causes, or mitigate the effects -- those are political questions, and need to be decided by policymakers.

Unfortunately, there is a second, and more toxic, way that politics impinges on science.  Because science is a pursuit that requires funding, and funding for scientific research often comes from the government, there is a desire by many politicians to support only science that fits the current political narrative.  When it becomes expedient for scientific findings to be discredited, politicians begin weighing in on whether the science itself is valid, regardless whether they have any expertise in the field in question.  (Witness Ted Cruz's recent statement that "climate change is not science, it's religion" -- a comment that is odd from a variety of standpoints, but most strikingly that he's apparently calling something a "religion" to discredit its validity.)

It's not only the conservatives who do this, however.  The focus of the left on such issues as health, diet, and the environment has led to broadside criticism of anyone who calls into question the prevailing wisdom (Monsanto is evil, GMOs are dangerous, the pharmaceutical companies are corrupt).  Just this week an article appeared in The Globe and Mail about the harassment a Canadian scientist is receiving over his discovery that the radiation released from the Fukushima disaster is not causing any problems in the eastern Pacific.

Jay Cullen, of the Integrated Fukushima Ocean Radionuclide Monitoring project, conducted a serious of rigorous tests for radioactive contamination in the water along the Pacific Coast of North America, in response to considerable public concern over the potential for dangerous levels of radioisotopes showing up in seawater, and getting into the marine food chain.

Cullen was motivated by the best of intentions.  "The goal… was that people were asking me, family and friends and the public at large, what the impact of the disaster was on B.C. on the North Pacific and on Canada," he said.  "I started looking for quality monitoring information so I could answer those questions as honestly and accurately as I could."

And after detailed analysis of the data, Cullen determined that the threat was negligible.  Levels of radionuclides in seawater on the Pacific coast of North America were so low that they were barely detectable at all.

You'd think that ecologically-minded types would be glad about this, wouldn't you?

Nope.  Didn't fit the narrative, which is that the threat is too there, and that all of the powers-that-be are conspiring to cover it up.  Cullen was denounced as a shill for the nuclear power industry, and derided as a "sham scientist."

Ultimately, he received death threats.

Interestingly, Cullen is hardly an anti-environmental type.  He has repeatedly railed against the practices of overfishing and dumping trash in the mid-ocean.  The oceans are in peril, Cullen says.  No argument there.

Just not from the radiation released from Fukushima.

Nonsense, say his critics.  Look at this map released before the government clampdown, that shows the radiation plume from the disaster:

This map has been posted over and over again on blogs and environmental scare sites -- despite the fact that it's not a map of radioactive contamination, it's a map of wave heights from the tsunami.  (A clue would be that the scale on the right is labeled "centimeters," not usually a unit used to measure radioisotope concentration.)

Bringing us back once again to the wonderful quote from Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts."

The trouble is that the people who do this sort of thing -- be it the right-wingers who claim that climate change isn't happening, or the left-wingers who claim that Monsanto is trying to kill us all -- are getting the whole process backwards.  Science should inform politics, not the other way around.  Data has no spin.  Because science is, at its best, one of the least biased ways there is to gain information, we should be using the science as a guiding force for determining policy, not using our political beliefs to figure out which bits of science are valid.

But such views aren't politically expedient, because that means we have to be willing to let ourselves be driven wherever the evidence demands, not plant our feet, science-be-damned, in order to retain the favor of our constituency.

Which in the current milieu would be political suicide.

Crayons, asbestos, and risk

Let's have a little chat about the topic of risk.

It's something that a lot of people don't understand, but in principle, it's a simple concept.  Actuaries, and other folks who get paid to think about such things, define risk as the product of two probabilities: the probability of exposure and the probability of harm.

The problem is that misassessment of one or both of these two probabilities leads people to (in some cases) wildly overestimate the risk of certain behaviors, and (in others) to wildly underestimate it.  Often, these misassessments have to do with the familiarity of something -- familiar, everyday things are usually considered safer than they really are, and unfamiliar ones more dangerous, regardless of whether those perceptions are at all rooted in reality.

Dan Gilbert, in his wonderful TED talk "Why We Make Bad Decisions," illustrated this perfectly with a photograph of a burning skyscraper, a plane crash, a terrorist bombing site, and a swimming pool.  He then asked the audience to play the Sesame Street game of "Which Of These Things Is Not Like The Other?"  "If you chose the swimming pool, you're correct," Gilbert said.  "Because of the four, it's the one that is by far the most likely to kill you."

This becomes even worse when we start looking at the risk of "chemicals."  I put the word "chemicals" in quotation marks, because of course, everything is made up of chemicals.  (I once saw a sign for "U-Pick Organic Chemical-Free Strawberries."  Ponder that one for a while.)  The problem is, lots of people don't understand chemistry, and so anything with a fancy-sounding name immediately gets put in the "unfamiliar/dangerous" column, even if it's a perfectly innocuous compound, or even one that is essential for life.

Even dangerous chemicals, of course, don't necessarily act straightforwardly.  It's not enough to say that a compound is toxic -- you also have to ask how likely it is to get inside you and cause trouble, and whether the dosage you're being exposed to is, in fact, dangerous.  It's why all of the panic earlier this year about "radioactive water from Fukushima" being detected on the shores of western Canada was unfounded -- the radioactive isotope detected, cesium 134, was only discovered because it's unlikely to get into seawater any other way.  Jay Cullen, oceanographer at the University of Victoria, said, "We're more than a thousand-fold below even the drinking water standard in the coastal waters being sampled at this point.  Those levels are much much much lower than what's allowable in our drinking water."

So the dosage was far smaller than our daily exposure to naturally-occurring sources of radiation, and would be entirely harmless even if we were drinking seawater, which most of us don't.  But it didn't stop people from freaking out completely about how we were being poisoned, irradiated, and (of course) all gonna die.

A more recent goofy claim that has the interwebz in a tizzy lately is the claim that asbestos has been discovered in crayons.  Asbestos, of course, is one of those words like "radioactivity" -- all you have to do is say it and people start thinking they're being killed.  In fact, the danger of asbestos for most people is minimal -- the majority of the asbestos that's still around is safely locked up in wall board and ceiling tiles.  It's only when asbestos-containing materials get broken up, and the dust produced that way is deeply inhaled, that it increases one's likelihood of getting certain lung cancers, such as mesothelioma.

So what about the asbestos in crayons?  First of all, there's the difficulty in telling apart asbestos fibers from talc.  Talc, a chemically related mineral, is used in all sorts of things, up to and including baby powder.  You also don't want to inhale talc -- but the same could be said for any finely-powdered mineral.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Second, even if there was asbestos in crayons, could it hurt you?  The answer is "almost certainly not."  All the way back in 2000, the Consumer Product Safety Commission was prompted to do an analysis of crayons, and found "a trace amount of asbestos in two Crayola crayons made by Binney and Smith and one Prang crayon made by Dixon Ticonderoga" but stated that "the amount of asbestos is so small it is scientifically insignificant."  Add that to the fact that this "scientifically insignificant" quantity of asbestos is bound up in the colored wax that makes up the rest of the crayon, so the likelihood of inhaling it is nil, and you have what is commonly called a "tempest in a teapot."

Snopes put it succinctly: "In other words, if trace amounts of asbestos were encased in a waxy substance such as crayons, those fibers would not be friable and would pose no risk of becoming airborne."

It'd be nice if more people would learn about risk and toxicity -- not only would it get them to calm down about the stuff they're exposed to on a daily basis, most of which their bodies handle just fine, it would also stop people from forwarding ridiculous claims on Facebook and Twitter, which is getting to be annoying.  In any case: don't worry about letting your kids use crayons.  Coloring in a coloring book is not going to give them lung cancer.  All you have to do is make sure that they aren't grinding up their crayons and snorting the powder.

But I'm hoping you'd do that in any case.

Seeds of doubt

C'mon, people, it's time to grow up a little.

When we're toddlers, we accept things without question.  If our parents say something, we pretty much believe that it must be true.  (Whether we do what they tell us afterwards, though, is another issue.)  After a time, we start experimenting, and testing the world -- sometimes with unfortunate results, such as when we decide to find out why Mommy says that Mr. Finger and Mr. LightSocket can't be friends.

But this highlights an important principle, which is that our first and best way to find out about things is by finding evidence.  "Show me why" is a pretty important first step to knowledge.

It's not the last step, though.  After the "show me why" stage we should move on to "but how do you know it's true?", which is a deeper and more sophisticated question.  Okay, from the evidence of my eyes, it looks like the Sun is moving across the sky.  In order to move past that to the correct explanation, we have to ask the question, "What if there is a better explanation that still accounts for all of the evidence?"

And in this case, of course, it turns out that there is.

There are other facets to this mode of inquiry.  What confounding factors could there be?  What if there are uncontrolled variables?  What if the person who made the original claim was lying?  What if my preconceived biases made me misjudge the evidence, or (perhaps) ignore some of the evidence entirely?  What if there is correlation between A and B, but instead of A causing B, B causes A -- or, perhaps, some third factor caused them both?

This whole process is what is collectively known as "Critical Thinking."  What is unfortunate, though, is that a lot of people seem to be stuck at the "I see evidence, so it must be true" stage, which is probably why the whole WiFi-kills-plants thing is making the rounds of social media... again.  Just a couple of days ago, a friend of mine ran across it, and asked the right question: "can this actually be true?"

The claim is that five ninth-graders from Denmark had noticed that if they slept near their WiFi routers, they "had trouble concentrating in school the next day."  Because clearly, if ninth graders are distracted, it must be because of WiFi.  So the kids allegedly set up an experiment with cress seeds, placed some near a router, and had others in a "room without radiation," and had the results pictured above.

Well.  The whole thing is suspect from the get-go, because we're told nothing about other conditions the seeds were experiencing -- light, humidity, temperature, air flow, and so forth.  Was the "room without radiation" well-lit?  Were the seeds near the router warmer than the supposed control group?  There are a hundred things about this so-called experiment that we're not being told, and yet we're supposed to buy the results -- in spite of the fact that "control all variables but one, or the results are suspect" is the first thing taught in high school science classes.  (For a nice take-apart of this "experiment," take a look here -- and note, especially, that attempts to replicate the girls' experiment have not produced any results.)

What else?  First, it's from Spirit Science, a notorious peddler of woo.  Second, unless they were in a lead-lined vault, I doubt whether the control seeds were actually in a "room without radiation."  Even if you're some distance from the nearest router, you (and your room) are constantly being pierced by radio waves, which pass easily through most solid objects (if they didn't, old-fashioned (i.e. pre-cable) televisions and almost all modern radios would not work inside houses or cars).  Then there's the issue of how many thousands of WiFi routers in the world are sitting near perfectly healthy house plants -- for years, not just for thirteen days.  And even if WiFi did kill cress seeds, there's no guarantee that it would have the same (or any) effect on humans.  Don't believe me?  Go for a nice swim in the ocean, and then pour a cup of seawater on your marigolds, and see if the results are the same.  (In all seriousness, researchers face this all the time when developing medications -- therapies that work well in vitro or on lab animals might have different effects on human subjects.)

So to the people who are unquestioningly passing this around, just stop.  Exercise something past the You-Showed-Me-A-Picture-So-It's-True level of critical thinking.  If you see something that seems suspect, ask someone who might know the answer (as my friend did with this claim).  Or, in this day of information accessibility, you could simply Google "cress seeds WiFi experiment debunked" and you'll find everything you needed to know.

We all were toddlers once, and no harm done, unless you count unfortunate encounters with light sockets.  But let's exercise a little higher-level thinking, here, and not just accept whatever comes down the pike.

Giant radioactive mutant dog attack!

It's funny to what extent people will believe unscientific bullshit when they've been primed to do so by fear.

And by "funny" I mean "so frustrating that I facepalmed hard enough to give myself two black eyes."

The tsunami that struck Fukushima, Japan two years ago still weighs heavily on people's minds, and for good reason.  It was a disaster of massive proportion, causing almost 16,000 known deaths (another 2,500 are still missing and are presumed dead).  Add that to the damage to a nuclear facility, and it's no wonder that people consider this one of the scariest events in recent memory.

So let's start there; horrible earthquake, terrible death toll, radiation release from a nuclear plant.  So far, frightening enough.  But the problem is, the last-mentioned -- nuclear radiation -- is a phenomenon that few people understand well enough to judge accurately the hazards it might generate.  This combination of fear and lack of information is a powerful one, and probably explains why hundreds of sites started cropping up last year (and continue today) claiming that the radiation plume from the damaged nuclear reactor was "frying the west coast of the United States."  Usually the story is attached to this map, that allegedly shows the progress of the radioactive water across the Pacific:

The problem is, this isn't a map of radiation -- this is a map, made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shortly after the tsunami, showing wave heights across the Pacific.

But boy, it sure looks scary, doesn't it?  All those reds and oranges and purples.  That's got to be bad.

And just to (I hope) put your mind further at rest, a study done at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems found that the radiation, when it reaches the United States west coast, will be so dilute that it will pose no threat to human health, thus further highlighting the difference between the words detectable and dangerous.

Yet the panic continues, which as I mentioned, sets people up to believe nonsense.  And the nonsense reached new heights in the past couple of weeks, with a set of claims that evidently originated with Topeka's News, an online media outlet that apparently is "news" in the same sense as The Weekly World News is.  Now, let me be up front; I think this could be satire.  It could be that Poe's Law has reared its ugly head again.  But honestly, I'm not sure, and it really doesn't matter, because I'm beginning to see these stories making the rounds of social media -- and people believe them.

Let's start with this one, about a giant radioactive killer dog.

Here's what they have to say:

Russian officials are confirming the existence of a new dog species: the giant Tibetan Mastiff.

Genetic tests have confirmed Fukushima radiation in the dog’s genes, confirming that runoff from Japan has contaminated Russia waters and is not creating genetic monstrosities in the nation [sic: I'm guessing they meant "now creating...," although "not creating..." makes more sense in context].

To date, dozens of reported sitings [sic] of giant Tibetan mastiffs running throughout the Russian Siberian tundra have been reported, but it was not until this week that researchers were able to confirm the dog.

Well, there are a few problems with this claim, beginning with the fact that (1) Tibetan mastiffs are not new (the Wikipedia article calls the breed "ancient," actually); (2) they're not a separate species, but are just ordinary dogs, albeit really big ones; and (3) since Tibet is up in the mountains, it's hard to imagine how "runoff from Japan" could have gotten there since water generally doesn't flow uphill all that well.

Oh, yeah, and you can't have "radiation in your genes."

Yes, but they have photographs, to wit:

Big!  Scary!  Look at the teeth!  Must be a radioactive mutant, right?

Of course, right.

Oh, but they're not done yet.  Not only do we have giant scary mutant dogs running around, we have the rare Fukushima Radioactive Mutant Hamster Lion:

The writer for Topeka's News admits that this photograph hasn't been verified, but says, "the picture does provide an excellent opportunity to once again delve into the topic of nuclear energy."

Then there's the Fukushima Radioactive Mutant Megaturtle:

If you're curious, this photograph is actually a still from the 2006 Japanese horror movie Gamera the Brave.  [Source]

But the problem is, these are being circulated around all over the place, usually with headlines like, "What is the radiation from Fukushima doing to animal life, and what could it do to humans?"  And very few people, that I've seen, are responding to those posts with, "You're joking, right?"

I have a solution to all of this, and it's the same one I always recommend; before you start panicking, learn a little science.  Apply some logic and skepticism to what you read.  And for cryin' out loud, find out what the scientists themselves are saying.  These days, you can often find out the straight scoop just by appending the words "skeptic" or "debunk" to a search (e.g. "giant Fukushima mutant dog debunk"), and you'll pull up what usually reputable sources like Doubtful News or The Skeptic's Dictionary or Skeptoid or Snopes have to say about it.

To sum up; no need to worry about the radiation from Japan causing mutations that will result in gigantic herds of carnivorous Bunny-Jaguars terrorizing downtown Omaha.  As devastating as the situation was (and still is) in Japan, the radiation isn't going to have much of an effect on us here in the United States, and that's not how mutations work, anyway.

Which is unfortunate, actually, because the idea of a "Bunny-Jaguar" is kind of cool.