The crossroads

I haven't exactly kept it a secret how completely, utterly fed up I am with media lately.

This goes from the miasmic depths of YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok right on up the food chain to the supposedly responsible mainstream media.  I still place a lot of the blame for Donald Trump's victory at the feet of the New York Times and their ilk; for months they ignored every babbling, incoherent statement Trump uttered, as well as the fascistic pronouncements he made during his more lucid moments, while putting on the front page headlines like "Will Kamala's Choice In Shoes Alienate Her From Voters?"

The idea of responsible journalism has, largely, been lost.  Instead we're drowning in a sea of slant and misinformation, generated by a deadly mix of rightward-tilted corporate control and a clickbait mentality that doesn't give a flying rat's ass whether the content is true or accurate as long as you keep reading or watching it.

While the political stuff is far more damaging, being a science nerd, it's the misrepresentation of science that torques me the the most.  And I saw a good example of this just yesterday, with a fascinating study out of the Max Planck Institute that appeared last week in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

First, the actual research.

Using data from the x-ray telescope eROSITA, researchers found that the Solar System occupies a space in one of the arms of the Milky Way that is hotter than expected.  This "Local Hot Bubble" is an irregularly-shaped region that is a couple of degrees warmer than its surroundings, and is thought to have been caused by a series of supernovae that went off an estimated fourteen million years ago.  The bubble is expanding asymmetrically, with faster expansion perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy than parallel to it, for the simple reason that there is less matter in that direction, and therefore less resistance.

One curious observation is that there is a more-or-less cylindrical streamer of hotter gas heading off in one direction from the bubble, pointing in the general direction of the constellation Centaurus.  The nearest object in that direction is another hot region called the Gum Nebula, a supernova remnant, but it's unclear if that's a coincidence.

The Gum Nebula [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Meli Thev, Finkbeiner H-alpha Gum Nebula, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The researchers called this streamer an "interstellar tunnel" and speculated that there could be a network of these "tunnels" crisscrossing the galaxy, connecting warmer regions (such as the nebulae left from supernovae) and allowing for exchange of materials.  How physics allows the streamers to maintain their cohesion, and not simply disperse into the colder space surrounding them, is unknown.  This idea has been around since 1974, but has had little experimental support, so the new research is an intriguing vindication of a fifty-year-old idea.

Okay, ready to hear the headlines I've seen about this story?

• "Scientists Find Network of Interstellar Highways in Our Own Galaxy"
• "A Tunnel Links Us to Other Star Systems -- But Who's Maintaining It?"
• "Mysterious Alien Tunnel Found In Our Region of Space"
• "An Outer Space Superhighway"
• "Scientists Baffled -- We're At The Galactic Crossroads and No One Knows Why"

*brief pause to punch a wall*

Okay, I can place maybe one percent of the blame on the scientists for calling it a "tunnel;" a tunnel, I guess, implies a tunneler.  But look, it's called quantum tunneling, and the aliens-and-spaceships crowd managed to avoid having multiple orgasms about that.  

On the other hand, given the mountains of bullshit out there about quantum resonant energy frequencies of healing, maybe I shouldn't celebrate too quickly.

But the main problem here is the media sensationalizing the fuck out of absolutely everything.  I have no doubt that in this specific case, the whole lot of 'em knew there was nothing in the research that implied a "who" that was "maintaining" these tunnels; the scientists explicitly said there was some unexplained physics here, which was interesting but hardly earthshattering.

But "streamers of gas from a local warm region in our galaxy" isn't going to get most people to click the link, so gotta make it sound wild and weird and woo-woo.

Look, I know this story by itself isn't really a major problem, but it's a symptom of something far worse, and far deeper.  There has got to be a way to impel media to do better.  Media trust is at an all-time low; a study last month estimated it at a little over thirty percent.  And what happens in that situation is that people (1) click on stuff that sounds strange, shocking, or exciting, and (2) for more serious news, gravitate toward sources that reinforce what they already believed.  The result is that the actual facts matter less than presenting people with attractive nonsense, and media consumers never find out if what they believe is simply wrong.

But saying "just don't read the news, because they're all lying" isn't the solution, either.  The likelihood of voting for Trump was strongly correlated with having low exposure to accurate information about current events, something that was exacerbated by his constant message of "everyone is lying to you except for me."

We are at a crossroads, just not the kind the headline-writer was talking about.

Honestly, I don't know that there is an answer, not in the current situation, where we no longer have a Fairness Doctrine to force journalists to be even-handed.  And the proliferation of wildly sensationalized online media sources has made the problem a million times worse.

At this point, I'm almost hoping the people who reported on the astronomy story are right, and we are in the middle of an alien superhighway.  And they'll slow down their spaceship long enough to pick me up and get me the hell off this planet.

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Hype detector

There's a problem with online science directed at laypeople.

I was discussing this with a friend yesterday.  Although he and I both have a decent science background, we're both very much generalists by nature.  We're interested in many different topics, we're each kinda sorta vaguely good at maybe a dozen of them, but we're actual experts in none.  It's not that I think this is an inherently bad thing; having a broad knowledge base is part of why I was a good high school teacher.  I did a decent job teaching biology, but could still field the occasional pop fly into deep right about, say, the ancient history of Norway.

The issue centers around the fact that curious people like myself are attracted to what we don't know, so when we see something unusual and attention-grabbing, we want to click on it.  Couple this tendency with a second issue -- that when sites like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are monetized, it's based on the number of clicks (or the minutes watched) -- and you have what amounts to an attractive nuisance.

There are some sites that do their level best to present science as accurately and fairly as possible; two excellent examples are Neil deGrasse Tyson's YouTube channel StarTalk and astrophysicist Becky Smethurst's outstanding channel Dr. Becky.  (If you're interested in astronomy, you should subscribe to both of these immediately.)  But intermingled with those are hundreds of others that mix a smidgen of science with a heaping handful of sensationalized hype, designed to get you to say "WTF?" and click the link -- because that's how they get revenue.

I'm not going to give you any links -- they don't deserve it -- but a quick perusal of my "Recommended For You" YouTube videos this morning included the following:

• One claiming that Betelgeuse is ABOUT TO GO SUPERNOVA (capitalization theirs), with a caption of "Life on Earth Will Be Wiped Out?" and a photo of physicist Michio Kaku looking worried.
• "If You See the Sky Turn This Color, Run!" -- turns out it's the "green sky = tornado" thing, and when you strip away all the excess verbiage it boils down to the rather well-known fact that tornadoes are scary and you should avoid being in the middle of one.
• "99% of Humans Die -- Could It Happen Again?"  This one is about the Toba Eruption, the effects of which are far from settled in scientific circles, and the answer to the question is "I guess so, but it's not likely any time soon."
• "Why an Impossible Paradox Inside Black Holes Appears to Break Physics!"  This is about the "information paradox," which is certainly curious, but it (1) obviously isn't impossible because it exists, (2) isn't about the inside of black holes because by definition we don't know what happens in there, and (3) hasn't "broken physics" (although it did demonstrate that our knowledge of black holes is incomplete, which is hardly surprising).
• "Yellowstone Volcano Simulation!" -- heavy on the catastrophizing and AI-generated footage of people being vaporized, light on the science.  As I've pointed out here at Skeptophilia, there is no sign that the Yellowstone Supervolcano is anywhere near an eruption.

And so on and so forth.

The trouble is, science videos and webpages exist on a spectrum, with wonderful sites like Veritasium on one end and outright lunacy like the subject of yesterday's post (about people who have allegedly jumped through time and space and ended up back in the Carboniferous Period) on the other.  It's usually pretty obvious when you find one that's straight-up science; the total wackos are also generally easy to spot.

It's the ones in the middle that are troublesome.  They mix in just enough science to give them the façade of reliability, but stir it into a ton of flashy, sensationalized speculation.  Since minutes watched = dollars earned, these videos generally draw out the message; they're often way longer than the topic warrants, and are characterized by endless repetition.  (I watched one twenty-minute video on Cretaceous dinosaurs that must have said eight times, "a fearsome predator unlike anything we currently have on Earth"!)

It's hard to know what to do about this.  Even people who are intellectually curious and want to learn actual science like to be entertained; and there's nothing wrong with framing scientific content in a way that's engaging to the audience, something that the three outstanding sites I mentioned certainly do.  But the monetized social media model feeds into the practice of using science as clickbait, and therefore encourages content creators to exaggerate (or outright fabricate) the story to make it seem more exciting or edgy or dangerous than it actually is, with the result that people come away less well-informed than they went in.

Which is frustrating, but isn't going to change any time soon.  And I guess this sort of sensationalized garbage is nothing new; all that's changed is the delivery mode.  Growing up, every time I went through a grocery store checkout line I was assaulted by The Weekly World News, which featured headlines about BatBoy and the Lost Continent of Atlantis and Elvis Is Still Alive And Was Spotted In Tokyo, and I came away mostly unscathed.

So the important thing is teaching people how to tease apart the good science from the hype.  But honestly, it always has been.

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Put down the ducky

Yesterday, we looked at the fact that scientists have actually not admitted that vaccines cause autism.  Today, we consider the fact that your child's rubber duck is not going to kill them, either.

You'd think this would be unnecessary, but in this time of fearmongering and sensationalism, no claim is too outlandish to gain traction as long as it plays on someone's anxiety.  In this case, the whole thing started with a paper in Nature called, "Ugly Ducklings—The Dark Side of Plastic Materials in Contact With Potable Water," by Lisa Neu, Carola Bänziger, Caitlin R. Proctor, Ya Zhang, Wen-Tso Liu, and Frederik Hammes, which found that after several uses, plastic bath toys were covered with bacteria (including fecal coliform bacteria) and various species of fungi.

When I read the paper, my general response was, *yawn*.  Of course bath toys are covered with bacteria.  Everything is.  Add to that the fact that (1) bath water is warm, (2) tubs are generally not spotless to start with, and (3) the bath-taker is immersing his or her naked body into the water with the purpose of washing dirt off, it's no wonder bath water is a soup of various bacteria.

Even fecal coliforms.  Because, I hope, we all periodically wash our butts, too.

But there were people who stumbled on this paper, with its alarming-sounding title (which, as scientific researchers, Neu et al. should have known better than to give it), and immediately interpreted the study as implying that rubber duckies posed a deadly danger to children.  Bacteria!  Oh no!  Must immediately throw away all bath toys!

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Let's just clear up a few things, here.

Even in a healthy human, the number of bacterial cells in or on you exceeds the number of human cells you have.  You read that right; a study way back in 1977 estimated about 39 trillion bacterial cells in or on a typical human, significantly outnumbering the 30 trillion human cells you have (84% of which are red blood cells).  More to the point, the vast majority of these bacteria are either neutral or actively helpful; disturbances in the "intestinal flora" are thought to have roles in such horrible diseases as Crohn's disease, peptic ulcers, CDiff (Clostridium difficile) infection, and ulcerative colitis.  (Which is why there is a promising therapy to treat those using -- I kid you not -- fecal transplants from a healthy individual, to reestablish the right intestinal flora.)

So if your rubber ducky is coated with bacteria, the fact is, so are you.  And most of us are still healthy most of the time.

But that logic evidently wasn't sufficient; there have been various alarming articles on "alternative-medicine" and "natural parenting" sites claiming that not only were bath toys deadly, but there was a systematic coverup of the research, presumably sponsored by Big Ducky.

The whole thing was debunked roundly by Alex Berezow over at the website of the American Council on Science and Health last week.  Berezow went even further with regards to the Neu et al. study; he claimed that they were actively seeking an alarmist reaction for the purposes of publicity:

Amazingly, the authors cite mommy blogs and the sensationalist book Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things in their paper.  The book is about the dangerous "chemicals" that are poisoning everybody, a chemophobic tactic that we've debunked over and over again. 

Quite honestly, I don't think I've ever seen anything like this in my professional career. Serious scientists don't cite mommy blogs and sensationalist popular science books in peer-reviewed journal papers. 

The authors had a clear strategy in mind: (1) Do a study on a common household object; (2) Produce boring data that doesn't surprise any microbiologist; (3) Write a provocative, fearmongering headline; (4) Market it to a gullible, clickbait-hungry press (like the New York Times), who would repeat their claims without any criticism or critical thinking; and (5) Watch the media interview requests and grant dollars come rolling in. 

Mission accomplished.  The deceitful manipulation of the press for their own professional benefit would be a thing of fascination if it wasn't so utterly disgusting.

And I have to admit he's got a point.

Of course, the craziest thing about the Natural Organic Health people who started running around in circles flailing their arms and making alarmed little squeaking noises after reading the study is that they apparently never thought of the simplest expedient for dealing with the situation if you're worried: wash the fucking toys.  I mean, seriously.  If you think there are nasty bacteria on the rubber duck, scrub it with a little soap and water after your kid's done in the bath.  Or, if you really want to go crazy, wipe it off with some rubbing alcohol.

Voilà.  If not no bacteria -- there nothing that could do that, short of an autoclave, which would turn your bath toys into a puddle of brightly-colored melted plastic -- at least there'll be fewer.

All of this goes to show that if there's nothing to be scared of, people will find something.  Added to the problem that (if Berezow is right about Neu et al. being guilty of deliberate sensationalization) fearmongering sells.  So if you like playing with a rubber ducky in the tub, have at it.  I hear you have to put it down if you want to play the saxophone, but other than that, it's perfectly safe.

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.

Crash course

As if we needed one, there's another clickbait sort-of-sciencey-or-something site that I should warn you about.

It's called the Mother Nature Network, and it bills itself as follows:

MNN is designed for people who want to make the world a better place.  Its content is engaging, non-political, and easy-to-understand and goes well beyond traditional "green" issues — encompassing topics that include family, health, home, travel, food, and community involvement. It has been labeled “The Green CNN” by Time, “The USA Today of Sustainability” by Fast Company, “Green Machine” by Associated Press, and “one of the hottest web properties out there” by NBC News; highlighted on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon; selected “Best Idea” at Fortune Magazine’s Green Summit; and chosen as a “Top Pick” by Newsweek.

Well, that may be, but it makes me wonder about how Time et al. are deciding who to laud.  MNN is even a cut below I Fucking Love Science as regards to sensationalized headlines, shallow analysis of actual science stories, and the usual smattering of "the world of the bizarre" kind of articles (as an example, on of their "trending stories" is "Weird Things We Stuck In Our Bodies in 2016").

My objection, though, is not that there's another clickbaity website that exists solely to grab ad revenue -- heaven knows those are a dime a dozen, and include sites that claim to be legitimate media, such as The Daily Mail Fail.  My main beef with these places is the misrepresentation of science.  Because, heaven also knows that given the general low comprehension of actual science by the voting public, we do not need media making it worse.

As an example, check out their story from this past Wednesday called "A Whole Other Star Is On a Crash Course With Our Solar System" by Bryan Nelson.  Well, don't actually check it out unless you want them to get another click's worth of advertising money.  But let me tell you the gist, and save you the moral dilemma.

First, what the hell is with the headline?  Is Bryan Nelson in third grade?  "A Whole Other Star?"  So, it's not Part of Another Star?  Or the Whole Same Star As Before?

But we'll let that pass.  The topic does sound alarming, doesn't it?  But when you read the text, you find that we've got a while to prepare:

[I]n around 1.35 million years, that's close to what might happen.  Scientists have been plotting the course of a rogue star, Gliese 710, which currently sits in the constellation of Serpens some 64 light years from Earth.  Turns out, it's headed straight for us.

And "close to what might happen?"  What the fuck does that even mean?  Turns out Bryan Nelson isn't really sure either:

The star isn't scheduled to collide directly with Earth, but it will be passing through our solar system's Oort Cloud, a shell of countless comets and other bodies in the outer reaches of the Sun's gravitational influence.  You might think that's a safe distance, but the star is likely to slingshot comets all over the solar system, and one of those could very well have our name on it.

So a star is going to be in our general vicinity over a million years from now, and it might disturb some comets, which are likely to get flung in toward the inner Solar System, and one of them might hit the Earth.  Or not.

But that's not all:

Scientists calculated that Gliese 710 is the star that's expected to come closest to us within the next 10 million years (which is as far ahead as scientists could project), but it's not the only close encounter.  As many as 14 other stars could come within 3 light-years distance in the next few million years, and there are numerous fainter, red dwarf stars with unknown trajectories that could be headed our way too.

So we shouldn't just worry about Gliese 710, we should also worry about other stars which might or might not come close to the Solar System in the next few million years, not to mention other stars which might or might not exist and could do indescribably bad things if they do.

"Hoag's Object" -- the remnants of a collision between two galaxies [image courtesy of NASA]

I decided to do a little research, and find out where all this stuff had come from.  I found a paper in Astronomy Letters from 2010 (i.e., actual research and not hyped silliness) called "Searching for Stars Closely Encountering the Solar System" by Vladimir V. Bobylev, and it included the following:

Based on a new version of the Hipparcos catalog and currently available radial velocity data, we have searched for stars that either have encountered or will encounter the solar neighborhood within less than 3 pc in the time interval from −2 Myr to +2 Myr. Nine new candidates within 30 pc of the Sun have been found. To construct the stellar orbits relative to the solar orbit, we have used the epicyclic approximation. We show that, given the errors in the observational data, the probability that the well-known star HIP 89 825 (GL 710) encountering with the Sun most closely falls into the Oort cloud is 0.86 in the time interval 1.45 ± 0.06 Myr. This star also has a nonzero probability, 1 × 10−4, of falling into the region d < 1000 AU, where its influence on Kuiper Belt objects becomes possible.

Did you catch that?  The "nonzero probability" of Gliese 710 influencing the Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud comets is 1 × 10−4.

For you non-math-types, that's one in ten thousand.

If you needed any more indication that the Mother Nature Network article was sensationalized clickbait, there you have it.

So add that one to our list of suspect media sources, along with the usuals -- Natural News, InfoWars, Mercola, Breitbart, Before It's News, and so on.  My general advice is not to go there at all.  But if you disregard this, whatever you do, don't click on "Weird Things We Stuck In Our Bodies in 2016."  You have been warned.

Science as gossip

One of the things that really bugs me is when people accept the vague hand-waving fears of laypeople over the hard evidence and research of actual scientists.

I suspect it's because we've been taught to respect common, down-home, folksy talk more than the esoteric vocabulary of the ivory-tower intellectuals.  We read articles online, and they seem to have been written by "ordinary folks like us," and after all, "ordinary folks like us" wouldn't lie, right?  Add that to the fact that scientific papers are often confusing and difficult to follow, many of them using abstruse mathematics to support their conclusions, and I suppose it's not really that surprising that we're more likely to trust The Daily Mail than Nature.

But for criminy's sake, at least try to understand what the scientists are saying.  Otherwise we'll be stuck forever with nitwits like Jenny McCarthy altering national vaccination rates, and mental midgets like James Inhofe driving environmental policy.

This tendency, I suspect, is also why you see articles like the one that appeared a few days ago on Intellihub called "Yellowstone Supervolcano On Verge of Eruption: USGS Suppressing Information."  The title is self-explanatory; we have more fear-mongering over the potential for a catastrophic eruption, one which (according to the article) would "destroy a 1000-mile swath of the United States."

But this article is different, because it claims that the eruption is going to happen in the next two weeks.

Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park [image courtesy of photographer Clément Bardot and the Wikimedia Commons]

First, the article states that the warning came from one Hank Hessler, a park geologist.  This sounds pretty authoritative; and, in fact, Hessler is a real guy with real credentials.  But if you listen to the YouTube video where the whole nonsense started, you find that what Hessler actually said was that regarding what the volcano is doing, he "can't see past two weeks" -- in other words, the conditions in the magma chamber shift quickly and unpredictably, so making a prediction about what this or that hot spring will do is impossible more than two weeks out.  But how this was interpreted by the YouTube commentator, and every other damn blogger and news source that picked this up, was that Hessler couldn't see past two weeks because after that, we'd all be dead.

The Intellihub article goes further; there's a massive coverup by the United States Geological Survey, designed to keep us in the dark about all of this.  Why?  Who knows?  Because it's government, that's why, and obviously government exists only to kill us all.  But this is where it gets interesting, because Shepard Ambellas, author of the article, starts waving his hands around like mad to support the claim.  "Although no one knows for sure if Hessler’s prediction will come true," Ambellas writes, "it does set an eerie overtone for people located within a 1000 mile swath of the park."

Why is it eerie if no one knows if it's true?  How about we check with a scientist that Ambellas hasn't had a chance to misquote, like Ilya Bindeman of the University of Oregon:

Our research of the pattern of such volcanism in two older, 'complete' caldera clusters in the wake of Yellowstone allows a prognosis that Yellowstone is on a dying cycle, rather than on a ramping up cycle. Either the crust under Yellowstone is turning into hard-to-melt basalt, or because the movement of North American plate has changed the magma pluming system away from Yellowstone, or both of these reasons.

Based upon his studies, he believes that the next Yellowstone eruption might actually happen...

... in one or two million years.

But let's go back to Ambellas:

On March 4, 2014, Intellihub came across information, by an unnamed source, who reported that the White House had ordered the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to suppress earthquake swarm data within the region to hide what may be coming from the general public.

Oh, those unnamed sources.  So much more reliable than actual scientists.

And we're already overdue, Ambellas says, because clearly volcanoes are like trains and run on schedules:

In fact reports suggest that ancient Helium4 gas has breached the surface layers of Yellowstone’s crust and is now escaping into the earth’s atmosphere.  Coupled with the recent and abrupt ground level rise in the park we may be looking at a recipe for disaster...  In fact, the last Yellowstone eruption was thought to have happened around 630,000 years ago, meaning we are about 30,000 years overdue, literally putting us in the hot seat, front row.

Ooh, helium-4!  That sounds terrifying.  And "30,000 years overdue" definitely equates to "a catastrophic eruption in two weeks."

But the best part comes right at the end:

And it gets even worse. Although there is no way I can vouch for the information, I simply can’t. But according to a random individual who posted a video on YouTube, the USGS has likely been ordered by Washington to suppress information regarding recent seismic activity and gaseous releases in and around the Yellowstone region as a possible ELE [extinction-level event] is on the way.

Not a "random individual who posted a video on YouTube!"  Those guys know everything.  Certainly more than the evil scientists, who are in the pay of the USGS and the NSF and the NOAA and all sorts of other agencies whose names are made up of a bunch of scary letters.

But the part that jumped out at me was "there is no way I can vouch for the information, I simply can’t."  If you can't vouch for the information, then for fuck's sake, why are you writing about it?  This is science you're talking about, not the latest gossip on the Kardashians.  There are ways to verify science, and you don't do it by looking at what Mr. Random Individual posted on YouTube.  You read scientific papers (like this one and this one).  You (gasp!) learn some actual geology.

So sorry, Mr. Ambellas (because you actually sound like you're looking forward to it): the US is not about to be destroyed by a volcanic eruption.  The only scientist you even considered in your article, you misquoted and misinterpreted (and if I were Hank Hessler, I'd be pissed).  You're getting a lot of non-scientists stirred up, which I have no doubt was your goal.

But I wish you'd stop.  Because the last thing we need is to give the general public a more jaundiced view of science.  And that's what's going to happen, you know?  When two weeks passes, and we're all still here, unvaporized, your average layperson is much more likely to say, "Those dumb scientists, forecasting gloom and doom, and wrong as usual" than the correct response, which is, "Shepard Ambellas lied to us so that we'd click on his website."