Acupuncture + biophotons = colorpuncture

Acupuncture is one of those "alternative medicine" treatments that has long seemed to me to live in that gray area between scientific soundness and woo-woo quackery.  It has a lot of woo-woo characteristics; all manner of goofy explanations about why it works (qi and chakras and energy meridians), and that mystical haze that always seems to surround something that comes from China.  However, enough friends of mine (of the decidedly non-woo-woo variety) have tried it, with positive results, that it's always made me wonder if the treatment itself might be beneficial, even though the explanations were incorrect -- in much the same way that medicinal plants were used to treat disease, and were thought to be inhabited by the spirit of healing magic, long before pharmacological chemistry was a science.

Just yesterday, however, I came across a piece from a few years ago in the excellent, well-researched, and multiply-sourced medical science blog, Respectful Insolence that takes acupuncture's claims and evidence apart at the seams.  It particularly attacks the so-called scientific studies of acupuncture, citing major methodological flaws that render the studies that found positive results invalid.  Whether or not you are a believer in acupuncture, it's an interesting read and makes some points that are difficult to counter.

In any case, all of that is just a lead-in to what I wanted to write about today.  Today's topic is about a new therapy that grew out of acupuncture, one that was developed because you can't undergo acupuncture without letting yourself get stuck by needles.   And a lot of people are afraid of needles.   So practitioners gave a lot of thought to how you could somehow achieve the same thing -- stimulating the qi and jump-starting your energy meridians, or whatever the hell it's supposed to accomplish -- without punching the patient full of tiny holes.

Enter "colorpuncture."

Interestingly, from what I've read about it, "colorpuncture" has been around for a while.  First proposed in 1988 by a German woo-woo named Peter Mandel, it combined the ideas of acupuncture with the ideas of Fritz-Albert Popp.  Popp is a German biophysicist who believes, despite a rather unfortunate lack of evidence, that cells in living organisms communicate via "biophotons."  So, Mandel's plan: combine an alternative medical technique that is questionable at best (acupuncture) with a hypothesis that seems to be complete nonsense (biophotons), and use that as the basis of a new treatment modality.

You'd think that Mandel would be aware that the more ridiculous ideas you incorporate into your theory, the more ridiculous it becomes, but evidently that line of reasoning escaped him somehow.

So, in "colorpuncture," rather than having the practitioner stick you with a lot of nasty needles, all (s)he does is point a little beam of colored light at the correct spot on your skin, and that stimulates the qi (or whatever).  Or maybe your "biophotons" get all excited and happy.   Who the hell knows? All of the sites I looked at spent so much time blathering on about energy meridians and vibrational frequencies that it was impossible to determine what they actually are claiming is happening in your body.  One of the funny things I read about "colorpuncture" is that "warm" colors such as red, orange, and yellow are supposed to increase your "energy flow," whereas "cool" colors such as green, blue, and violet are supposed to decrease it.  Why is this funny?  Because as you go up the spectrum from red to violet, the frequency of the light, and thus its energy, actually increases -- violet light is considerably more energetic than red light is.  But there never was any real science behind this, so why start now?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Philip Ronan, Gringer, EM spectrumrevised, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In any case, it took a while for "colorpuncture" to catch on after Mandel had his big idea back in 1988.  But apparently it's really made a jump into the woo-woo scene recently -- and given the hunger people have for "alternative treatments" that don't require a visit to an actual, trained doctor, I suspect this one is going to be big.

Interestingly, there are plenty of reputable studies that have looked into the effects of light on human physiology -- two of the more interesting ones are Richard J. Wortman's study out of MIT, and one by Jeanne Duffy and Charles Czeisler, from Harvard School of Medicine.  Most of the papers I saw looked into the effects of light on human circadian rhythms -- the sleep cycle, for example.  (Reading these papers made me wonder how all of our artificial lighting is affecting our physiology, especially apropos of the entrainment of our biological cycles -- it's certainly incontrovertible that the light from computer screens affects melatonin levels, and thus our ability to sleep.)

But "colorpuncture?"  Not a single peer-reviewed study that I could find.  I suspect the practitioners of this dubious art would claim that this is due to the closed-mindedness of scientific researchers and peer review boards, but come on -- if acupuncture, which at least involves something entering the body, can't prove any therapeutic results beyond the placebo effect, "colorpuncture" doesn't have a prayer.

At least one thing, however, is in its favor; no one ever got a blood-borne disease from a little colored flashlight.  So I suppose that medical science's first rule -- "do no harm" -- is being followed, at least as long as you're not counting your pocketbook.

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The Skeptophilia book-of-the-week for this week is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.  If you've always wondered about such abstruse topics as quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's Cat and the General Theory of Relativity, but have been put off by the difficulty of the topic, this book is for you.  Greene has written an eloquent, lucid, mind-blowing description of some of the most counterintuitive discoveries of modern physics -- and all at a level the average layperson can comprehend.  It's a wild ride -- and a fun read.

Genetic leapfrog

Barbara McClintock is one of the most inspiring figures in the history of biology.  She received her Ph.D. in Botany from Cornell University in 1927 -- in a time when few women chose to go to college, even fewer pursued a major in the sciences, and almost none made it all the way to doctoral-level work.

In the 1940s and 1950s, she was studying the genetics of maize, especially how genes regulate the expression of seed color in multicolored "Indian corn."  What she found, she said, could only be explained if the genes were moving around within the genome -- altering expression because of shifting position.  When she published preliminary papers on the topic, her discovery was derided as "jumping genes," and no one much paid attention.  This led to her decision to stop seeking publication in 1953.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Steve Snodgrass from Shreveport, USA, Indian Corn, CC BY 2.0]

What it didn't do was to slow down her determination to continue her research.  She doggedly pursued her idea -- genetic transposition -- and finally had amassed so much evidence in its favor that the scientific establishment had to pay attention.  "Jumping genes" were a fact -- and in fact, have been found in every species studied -- and the phenomenon of transposition turns out to be a major factor in gene expression across the board.

The discovery, and the body of work that led up to it, earned McClintock the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1983 -- and to this day she is the only woman who has earned an unshared Nobel in that category.

Barbara McClintock died in 1992 at the age of ninety.  So it's unfortunate that she didn't live long enough to learn that not only to genes move around within the genome of an organism...

... they can jump from organism to organism.

Called horizontal transfer, this was initially thought to occur only in bacteria, where it helps them to avoid the bane of asexually-reproducing species, "Muller's Ratchet."  Since in asexual species, the DNA doesn't combine -- i.e., the offspring are clones -- mutations tend to accrue each time the DNA replicates, because replication isn't 100% faithful (it's pretty damn good, but not perfect).  You can think of it as a genetic game of Telephone; each copying process results in errors, and after a few generations, the DNA would be turned into nonsense (it's called a "ratchet" because like the mechanical device, it only goes one way -- in this case, toward converting the DNA into garbage).  But if horizontal transfer occurs, bacteria can pick up extra working copies of genes from their friends, meaning that if Muller's Ratchet knocks out a gene, chances are they have another version of it hanging around somewhere.

What no one realized is that like genetic transposition, horizontal transfer turns out to be ubiquitous.  And in a new paper out of the University of Adelaide, geneticists Atma M. Ivancevic, R. Daniel Kortschak, Terry Bertozzi, and David L. Adelson have shown that horizontal transfer is not only everywhere you look, it also is a major driver for evolution.

They write:

Transposable elements (TEs) are mobile DNA sequences, colloquially known as jumping genes because of their ability to replicate to new genomic locations.  TEs can jump between organisms or species when given a vector of transfer, such as a tick or virus, in a process known as horizontal transfer. Here, we propose that LINE-1 (L1) and Bovine-B (BovB), the two most abundant TE families in mammals, were initially introduced as foreign DNA via ancient horizontal transfer events. 

Using analyses of 759 plant, fungal and animal genomes, we identify multiple possible L1 horizontal transfer events in eukaryotic species, primarily involving Tx-like L1s in marine eukaryotes.  We also extend the BovB paradigm by increasing the number of estimated transfer events compared to previous studies, finding new parasite vectors of transfer such as bed bug, leech and locust, and BovB occurrences in new lineages such as bat and frog.  Given that these transposable elements have colonised more than half of the genome sequence in today’s mammals, our results support a role for horizontal transfer in causing long-term genomic change in new host organisms.

Which I find simultaneously fascinating and creepy.  That a mosquito bite could not only make me itch, but inject into me the DNA of another species -- which then would colonize my own DNA, like some kind of molecular virus -- is seriously bizarre.

"Jumping genes, properly called retrotransposons, copy and paste themselves around genomes, and in genomes of other species," said project leader David Adelson in a press release from the University of Adelaide.  "How they do this is not yet known although insects like ticks or mosquitoes or possibly viruses may be involved – it’s still a big puzzle...  Think of a jumping gene as a parasite.  What’s in the DNA is not so important – it’s the fact that they introduce themselves into other genomes and cause disruption of genes and how they are regulated...  We think the entry of L1s into the mammalian genome was a key driver of the rapid evolution of mammals over the past 100 million years."

So much of what's in "your" genome probably wasn't originally yours, or necessarily even originally human.  Kind of humbling, isn't it?  But I better go wrap this up, because I've got a mosquito bite that's itching like hell.  I'm just hoping that mosquito hadn't bitten a rabbit previously, because the last thing I need is to have a sudden craving for carrots.  I freakin' hate carrots.

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The Skeptophilia book-of-the-week for this week is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.  If you've always wondered about such abstruse topics as quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's Cat and the General Theory of Relativity, but have been put off by the difficulty of the topic, this book is for you.  Greene has written an eloquent, lucid, mind-blowing description of some of the most counterintuitive discoveries of modern physics -- and all at a level the average layperson can comprehend.  It's a wild ride -- and a fun read.

Invasion of the Nightcrawlers

After eight years of Skeptophilia, it's hard for me to run into a paranormal or cryptozoological claim I haven't heard of before.  But that's exactly what happened yesterday, when I visited the delightfully loopy feature on Ranker called "Graveyard Shift."

The article tells us about a creature that got its start in California, but apparently is gaining ground all over the United States.  They're called the "Fresno Nightcrawlers," which would make an outstanding name for a sports team.  In an article called "Fresno Nightcrawlers Are Terrorizing the Dark, and They're Spreading Far From California," Laura Allan tells us about these strange beings, a "few feet tall," that appear to be nothing much more than a pair of legs and a head.

Here's a still from a YouTube video that purports to be a pair of Fresno Nightcrawlers:

As usual, this video was taken using the videocamera's "AutoBlur" function, also useful when filming ghosts, Bigfoot, aliens, and the Loch Ness Monster.  Here's one of the videos that is supposedly of Nightcrawlers:

Laura Allan says that they've never been encountered in person -- they've only been seen on video footage (the one the still came from was a CCTV that a homeowner had set up in an attempt to catch a thief).  She writes:

Much video footage of cryptids is easily debunked by video analysis, but the weird thing about the nightcrawlers is that the videos seem to be legit.  As goofy and awkward as these mysterious creatures may appear, faking them would prove to be a difficult task. So, then, what exactly are we seeing here?... 

Of course, the biggest prevailing theory is that all of this is just some sort of hoax.  The creatures do look rather silly and awkward, and like they may be some sort of puppet rather than actually alive.  While it's never been proven either way, the videos were weird enough to get the attention of one TV show called Fact or Faked, and they set out to examine the video.

First, they examined the creatures themselves, and soon figured out that they were indeed only a few feet tall, as had been previously reported.  Then they went out looking for the creatures, but were unable to find them.  Then they tried to recreate the video with many different known hoax techniques.  All their attempts to recreate the footage was met with failure.  In the end, they decided that the footage would be very difficult to fake, if not impossible, and that the video footage was authentic.

I have to admit that the video gave me a bit of a chill, but that's only because I was reminded of M. R. James's incredibly scary short story "O, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad."  (The link provided has the entire story, which I will suggest you not read at night when you're alone in the house.  You have been warned.)  So despite the fact that the Nightcrawlers look like walking bedsheets -- in fact, because they do -- it gave me a visceral shudder when I watched the video.

Even so, I'm a little doubtful about all of this.  In this day of digital video editing software, "impossible to fake" has almost become a contradiction in terms.  And as far as the creepiness factor, for me that was at least partly offset by the fact that besides M. R. James's terrifying monster, I was also reminded of the Wrong Trousers from Wallace & Gromit.

Okay, the Nightcrawlers are taller and skinnier, but the principle is the same.

Anyhow, it was fun running into a cryptid -- or whatever they're claiming it is -- that I'd never heard of before, but it's perhaps unsurprising that I'm less than impressed.  I keep hoping one of these will turn out to be true -- just because I'm a skeptic doesn't mean I'm blind to the coolness factor of there being some weird, unexplained entity out there, beyond what science has yet encountered.

But what looks like an old bedsheet really isn't doing it for me.


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The Skeptophilia book-of-the-week for this week is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.  If you've always wondered about such abstruse topics as quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's Cat and the General Theory of Relativity, but have been put off by the difficulty of the topic, this book is for you.  Greene has written an eloquent, lucid, mind-blowing description of some of the most counterintuitive discoveries of modern physics -- and all at a level the average layperson can comprehend.  It's a wild ride -- and a fun read.

Dots, threats, and illegal immigrants

Something that has continued to baffle me about the arguments over illegal immigration is how little of it tends to be based in fact.

Just in the last six months, four separate studies have found that the number of undocumented immigrants in an area has no correlation to the crime rate, either violent or non-violent.  This, of course, runs counter to the Trump administration's narrative that "our borders are being overrun by millions of illegals" and that all of those millions, immediately after crossing the border, sign a blood oath to MS-13.

Then there's the claim that the illegals are bankrupting us by stealing our benefits -- again, fostered by Trump's repeated claims that undocumented immigrants are immediately granted "welfare and free medical care."  According to EconoFact, here are benefits that illegal immigrants are explicitly prohibited from receiving:

• Children’s Health Insurance (CHIP)
• Disability, aka Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
• Food stamps, aka The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
• Health insurance, aka insurance via the Affordable Care Act (ACA)
• Medicaid
• Medicare
• Social Security
• Welfare

EconoFact states further:

Despite scapegoating in public discourse, the drain that undocumented immigrants place on government benefit programs is small.  The number of low-income undocumented immigrants is small relative to the size of the overall low-income population, and federal law restricts their participation in most programs.  Because so little federal assistance is available, some states and localities bear a disproportionate burden.  As enforcement efforts become more aggressive, it is expected that undocumented immigrants will be less likely to access public programs on behalf of their children who, as citizens, are legally eligible for these benefits.

Before I go any further, let me forestall any hate mail over this by stating up front that I am not saying we should do nothing about illegal immigration.  However, wouldn't it be nice if the discussion was based on reality rather than on the fevered imagination of the frightened?

The reason this comes up has to do with a study out of Harvard University by psychologist David Levari et al.  Called "Prevalence-Induced Concept Change in Human Judgment," the study looks at why we are so resistant to relaxing once a problem is being dealt with -- why we so seldom say, "My work here is done."

Levari's team did three separate, but related, experiments:

1. Show volunteers a series of dots colored in a range of colors from blue to red, and asked them whether the dots were blue, purple, or red.
2. Show volunteers a series of written requests, and ask them whether they were ethical, unethical, or somewhere in the middle.
3. Show volunteers a set of photographs of human faces, which had been carefully evaluated beforehand to determine how threatening the person looked, and asked them to rate the faces for threat level.

In each of the trials, the experimenters decreased the frequency of one of the types as the test went on -- in the first, blue dots; in the second, unethical requests; and in the third, threatening faces.  What happened was remarkably consistent.  In the first experiment, test subjects responded by identifying more purple dots as blue -- even ones that were shades of purple that they'd previously seen and identified as purple.  Similarly, requests analogous to those labeled as ethical were identified as unethical later in the experiment -- once truly unethical requests had become less frequent.  In the third, more neutral faces were identified as threatening once actually threatening faces were less commonly seen.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Apparently, when we are made aware of something -- even something as innocuous as whether a dot is blue, purple, or red -- when the thing we're looking for decreases in frequency, we broaden the parameters of what we'll accept as fitting the description.

As Levari writes, in a discussion of his team's research in ScienceAlert:

Why can't people help but expand what they call threatening when threats become rare? Research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggests that this kind of behavior is a consequence of the basic way that our brains process information – we are constantly comparing what is front of us to its recent context. 

Instead of carefully deciding how threatening a face is compared to all other faces, the brain can just store how threatening it is compared to other faces it has seen recently, or compare it to some average of recently seen faces, or the most and least threatening faces it has seen. 

This kind of comparison could lead directly to the pattern my research group saw in our experiments, because when threatening faces are rare, new faces would be judged relative to mostly harmless faces. In a sea of mild faces, even slightly threatening faces might seem scary.

Which may explain some of the furor over illegal immigration.  Not only is most crime in the United States not committed by undocumented immigrants, illegal immigration itself has decreased -- it's been steadily dropping for about twenty years.  So, as the problem gets better, we respond not by breathing a sigh of relief, but by looking around us even more frantically for problems connected with immigrants that we might have overlooked.

Of course, the whole thing isn't helped by Donald Trump and his proxies over at Fox News screeching about it on a daily basis, whipping up the fear and anger -- largely, I believe, because frightened people will vote for the folks who are saying they know how to fix the problem, not for the ones who say the problem isn't as bad as it seems.

What the study by Levari et al. doesn't address, unfortunately, is what to do about all this.  How do you counteract what seems to be a natural tendency to see threats where there are none?  Knowing about the effect might help -- if you are aware of a perceptual bias, you might be able to compensate for it.  But other than that, it looks like we might be stuck with calling purple dots blue -- and seeing neutral faces as dangerous.

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The Skeptophilia book-of-the-week for this week is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.  If you've always wondered about such abstruse topics as quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's Cat and the General Theory of Relativity, but have been put off by the difficulty of the topic, this book is for you.  Greene has written an eloquent, lucid, mind-blowing description of some of the most counterintuitive discoveries of modern physics -- and all at a level the average layperson can comprehend.  It's a wild ride -- and a fun read.

Educating the educators

In today's reading from the collected works of St. Obvious of Duh, we have: a study out of the University of Vermont showing that students get substandard science education if their teachers are not trained in science.

This apparently is some kind of revelation.  What they did was to look at the use of inquiry-based instruction in eighth-grade science classes, and they found that the use of inquiry methods varied directly with the teacher's level of formal education in science.  Hearteningly, they found that teachers with little science background can eventually catch up with their better-educated peers -- if they are mentored by teachers who themselves have a solid foundation of understanding how science works.

Lest you think I'm overstating my case, here's what the authors -- Tammy Kolbe and Simon Jorgenson -- write:

For two decades, science teachers have been encouraged to orient their instruction around the practices of scientific inquiry; however, it is unclear whether teachers have the knowledge and skills to do so.  In this study, we draw upon data from the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress to examine the extent to which eighth-grade science teachers’ educational backgrounds are related to using inquiry-oriented instruction.  We focus on aspects of teachers’ educational backgrounds that are most frequently used by teacher education programs and state licensing agencies as proxies for teachers’ content knowledge and professional preparation to teach science.  We find that teachers’ educational backgrounds, especially in science and engineering disciplines and science education, are associated with differences in the extent to which teachers engage in inquiry-oriented instruction, regardless of teaching experience.  Findings suggest that teachers’ educational backgrounds are relevant considerations as standards-based efforts to reform science instruction in middle-level classrooms move forward.

What baffles me is that anyone is surprised by this.  It's not like you would be shocked to find out that a person's level of expertise in architecture and engineering predicted how likely it was that the house (s)he designed would fall down.  Why did they even need a study to show this?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gulliver Schools, Gulliver academy, CC BY 2.5]

The sad fact is that we're facing a shortage of well-trained science teachers.  This itself is not to be wondered at.  In the last ten years, we've heard teachers and teachers' unions demonized by politicians and talking heads whose last stay in a public school classroom was when they were in twelfth grade.  Teachers are derided as lazy slackers who only became teachers because they couldn't hack it in a "real" profession.  Unions get clobbered for protecting lousy teachers from getting fired -- tenure as immunity from the consequences of incompetence.

It's appalling how inaccurate this all is.  Even though the market for competent science teachers is getting woefully thin, the majority of us are doing whatever we're able to.  The fact is, I've taught in high schools for the last 31 years, and the truly bad teachers stand out in my memory primarily because they're so uncommon.  Most teachers work their asses off to provide their students with the best education they can.  They are committed professionals, who put in so much more time than the eight-to-three class schedule that it's a wonder any of us have a private life.

But honestly, I don't blame college graduates for choosing a career path other than teaching.  If I was a 2018 graduate, no way in hell would I become a teacher, and that's speaking as a veteran who (honestly) has had an overall awesome experience.  Why would you join a profession where you are working like crazy, while constantly facing salary, staffing, and budget cuts (to the extent that I purchase about a quarter of the lab supplies we use out of my own pocket), and still are portrayed negatively in the media?

So the University of Vermont study is correct, but is looking only at the surface of the problem.  The better question is: why are any students in eighth-grade science classes being taught by teachers with no background in science?  We wouldn't accept this in any other profession; why do we accept it here?

It's not an easy question to answer.  Here in New York, a lot of it has to do with the arcane funding formula, which bases part of school funding from state aid and the rest from local property taxes.  Since districts vary tremendously in the tax base, this creates huge inequities in funding -- it's unsurprising that rich districts in Westchester County have well-fitted-out, state-of-the-art science classrooms, and here in upstate New York I've more than once had to run to the store in the middle of the day to restock some lab supply we've run out of.  Even worse, school districts are forced by the funding formula into the solution of cutting the biggest-ticket item they have control over -- staffing.  Cutting staff (usually on a last-in, first-out basis) bumps up class sizes, another factor that affects how successful teaching is -- it is, quite simply, impossible to do deep, far-reaching, inquiry-based teaching in a class of 35 kids.  (No exaggeration; my first class ever in my career was 35 seventh-graders, in a classroom with 32 desks.  I had kids sitting on the lab tables.)

The result is a terrible synergy -- overcrowded classrooms, overworked teachers, poor working conditions, denigration in the press, budget cuts, and a thinning population of qualified applicants.  Why should we be surprised at poor outcomes for students?

The worst part is that this problem is a snake swallowing its own tail.  A generation of poorly-educated science students leads to a generation of poorly-educated science teachers, and on and on it goes.  However, until quality education starts being the first priority of voters -- and therefore, the first priority of politicians -- nothing's going to change.

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The Skeptophilia book-of-the-week for this week is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.  If you've always wondered about such abstruse topics as quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's Cat and the General Theory of Relativity, but have been put off by the difficulty of the topic, this book is for you.  Greene has written an eloquent, lucid, mind-blowing description of some of the most counterintuitive discoveries of modern physics -- and all at a level the average layperson can comprehend.  It's a wild ride -- and a fun read.

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.

Astronomical Whack-a-Mole

Because we all clearly needed something else to worry about, today we have: the mega-asteroids of doom.

This comes up because of a new program at NASA, now that the Trump administration has freed them from the necessity of worrying about climate change.  Called the "Large Synoptic Survey Telescope," this project involves building a huge telescope in Chile that will be looking for "potentially hazardous asteroids" (PHAs).  The idea is that they'll scan the sky looking for any hitherto-unrecorded astronomical object that shows apparent movement against the background stars in an hour.  "Anything that moves in just one hour," writes project leader Michael Lund, astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University, "has to be so close that it is within our Solar System."

It's not like this is an inconsequential threat.  Barringer Crater, in northern Arizona, is a huge hole in the ground that was caused by collision with a nickel-iron meteorite fifty meters in diameter.  The Chesapeake Bay Impact Event, about 35 million years ago, is 85 kilometers across, and was caused by an object about three kilometers wide -- the impact was enough to cause a tsunami that hit the Blue Ridge Mountains.  The mother of 'em all, though, is the 150 kilometer wide Chicxulub Crater, 66 million years ago, which blew up a layer of dust that settled out as clay all over the Earth -- and is thought to have kicked off the Cretaceous Extinction, the final straw for the dinosaurs (except for the ones who were the ancestors of modern birds).

What is cheering, however, is that these events aren't frequent.  The Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013, which exploded 32,000 meters above the Earth's surface but still was able to generate a shock wave big enough to injure 1,200 people.  The object that caused the blast is thought to have been about twenty meters across -- nothing compared to Chesapeake Bay and Chicxulub, but still a little on the scary side.

[Image courtesy of NASA/JPL]

No one doubts that there are lots of objects out there that could potentially play Whack-a-Mole with the Earth.  The LSST gives us hope of finding them before they find us.  The unfortunate part, however, comes when Lund addresses the question of what we could do about it if we discovered that a huge rock was on a collision course with Newark:

If an asteroid is on a collision course hours or days before it occurs, the Earth won’t have many options.  It’s like a car suddenly pulling out in front of you. There is little that you can do.  If, however, we find these asteroids years or decades before a potential collision, then we may be able to use spacecraft to nudge the asteroid enough to change its path so that it and the Earth don’t collide. 

This is, however, easier said than done, and currently, no one really knows how well an asteroid can be redirected.  There have been several proposals for missions by NASA and the European Space Agency to do this, but so far, they have not passed early stages of mission development.

 So it looks like if you found out that day after tomorrow, your home town was going to get clobbered, you'd have two options: (1) get in your car, drive like hell, and hope for the best; or (2) put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.  I suppose that's better than nothing, especially considering that the alternative is thinking you're going to take a nice nap in your hammock and instead getting vaporized by an enormous superheated rock.

But even so, there's the problem of what it's going to be like for the rest of the Earth, the ones not in the impact zone.  Any impact -- even a relatively small one, like the one that formed Barringer Crater -- is actually going to have an enormous effect even on very distant places, just from the standpoint of kicking up a crapload of dust.  (Recall that when the volcano Tambora erupted in 1815, it caused "the Year Without a Summer," during which crops froze in mid-July and hundreds of thousands of people died of starvation.)

Nearer to the impact site, things get even worse.  Consider the Chelyabinsk meteor, which by comparison is a popgun -- not to mention the fact that it self-destructed 32,000 meters up, and never hit the surface.  The shock wave would be astronomical.  Pun intended.  Closer still, and the heat blast would flash-fry anything in its way.

You don't even get a pass if the impact is in the ocean, because then you've got hundred-foot-high tsunamis to worry about.

So yeah.  Not fun.

The best-case outcome, here, is that Lund and his colleagues scan the sky with the LSST for a while, and say, "Welp.  Nothing much out there.  I guess everything's hunky-dory.  As you were."  Or, that any projected impact will take place thousands of years from now.  (I figure that anyone around then will just have to fend for themselves.)  Or, perhaps, that we could use our technology to redirect the asteroid away from colliding with us.  Lund says this is already being looked into:

The B612 Foundation, a private nonprofit group, is also trying to privately raise money for a mission to redirect an asteroid, and they may be the first to attempt this if the government space programs don’t.  Pushing an asteroid sounds like an odd thing to do, but when we one day find an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, it may well be that knowledge that will save humanity.

I'll be watching the results, though, because being a little on the anxious, neurotic side, I definitely need another thing to keep me up at night.  On the other hand, it's at least temporarily taken my mind off all the other problems we're facing.  Which is good, right?

Of course right.

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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 mindblowing 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.