There were giants in the Earth

It's always a peculiar kind of joy to me to find out I wasn't understanding something correctly.

I know, it's an odd thing to get excited about, but I find the process of refining my comprehension of the universe to be a thrill.  I vividly recall when my freshman physics teacher demonstrated via a clever apparatus that if you shoot a gun horizontally, and simultaneously drop a bullet from the same height, the two bullets hit the ground at exactly the same time.

It didn't seem possible, but I couldn't argue with experimental evidence right in front of my eyes; the vertical and horizontal components of velocity are completely independent of each other.

And my picture of the world shifted a little bit.

Here's another one: how many of you have heard that before the dinosaurs became extinct when the Chicxulub Meteorite hit 66 million years ago, all the lineages related to mammals were small and fearful, scampering about in the shadows to avoid the fierce "terrible lizards" at the top of the food chain?  Any primitive mammals that grew too large, the story went, would either (1) be turned into lunch, or (2) be stepped on and converted to a Primitive Mammal Pancake.

Well, check off another piece of conventional wisdom as "refuted."  Because a recent discovery near the town of Lisowice, Poland, dating from the Late Triassic -- 220-odd-million years ago, right as the dinosaurs were approaching their peak -- shows that during this time, which was quickly leading up to the all-time-record-holders for terrestrial animals, behemoths like Brachiosaurus, Diplodocus, and the aptly-named Giraffatitan, there were already cousins to the lineage that led to mammals that were the size of African elephants.

This fossil, of dicynodont Lisowica bojani, looked like some bizarre cross between a turtle and a rhinoceros.  Here's an artist's reconstruction of Lisowica:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Creator: Dmitry Bogdanov, Dicynodont from PolandDB, CC BY 3.0]

Lisowica is so large, said Tomasz Sulej, paleontologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences's Institute of Paleobiology in Warsaw, that at first he and his team didn't recognize it as a dicynodont.  Its estimated mass is nine tons -- as much as a full-grown male elephant.

"Who would have ever thought that there were giant, elephant-sized mammal cousins living alongside some of the very first dinosaurs?" said Stephen Brusatte, a vertebrate paleontologist at The University of Edinburgh.  "We've always thought that early mammals and their relatives retreated to the shadows while dinosaurs rose up and grew to huge sizes.  That's the story I tell my students in my lectures.  But this throws a wrench into that simple tale."

But that's what's cool about science, isn't it?  You think you get what's going on, and nature turns around and astonishes you over and over.  

So picturing the prehistoric world dominated by T. rex and Triceratops and the rest of the big, lumbering creatures popular in children's books, with our cousins all the size of mice scurrying around and hoping not to get noticed, needs to be revised.  Right smack in the middle of the Age of Reptiles was a close relative of ours who looks like he was ready and able to defend himself.

And maybe even turn some of the smaller dinosaurs into Dinosaur Pancakes.

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Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Notes from the other side

Dear Readers:

I'm going to take a short break, for the rest of the week -- but I'll be back next Monday, November 26, so keep sending me links and ideas!

cheers,

Gordon

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A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link that I knew was going to be good even before I opened it, because it was from a site called Daily Vibes.  First, one of my pet peeves is the way people use words like "vibration" and "frequency" to basically mean "any damn thing we want," and I figured the "vibes" part presaged a lot of that sort of thing.  But I was even more excited when I perused their home page and saw a list of recent articles, which include the following:

• "What Does Your Zodiac Sign Reveal About Your Innermost Thoughts?"
• "How You Sit Can Reveal Your Personality"
• "Five Gemstones Traditionally Used to Clear Negative Energies"
• "Five Ways Crying Makes You Stronger"
• "Have You Seen a Feather Tattoo?  Here's What It Can Mean"

So I started reading the various posts, and very quickly ran into a troubling problem: what if your zodiac sign says basically the opposite of what you learn from how you sit?  Because I found that the way I like to sit means I'm outgoing, dynamic, dress well, have high goals and aspirations, and have a difficult time taking criticism.  My zodiac sign, on the other hand, says that I'm mysterious, aloof, and secretive, hard to get to know, and very moody.  So am I both?  Or somewhere in the middle?  Because right now, I'm confused as to whether I should smile and schmooze with people, or wear a black cloak and just give people a meaningful raised eyebrow to make them uncomfortable.

Then I had to give a look at the one about crying, because I'm one of those people who is very easy to launch into a complete tear-o-rama.  My wife was at an art show this past weekend, so Saturday evening I decided to sit on the couch with my dog, drinking wine and watching Dr. Who.  I rewatched one of my favorite episodes, "The Girl in the Fireplace," and ended up hugging my dog and sobbing into my wine glass.

Okay, it's a pretty sad episode, but geez.  I mean, it's not like it's the first time I've seen it, or anything, so you'd think I'd have been somewhat immunized.  But no.  There I sat, blubbering like an idiot.

At least my dog understood.

Anyhow, I was curious about what Daily Vibes had to say about crying, and I was heartened to find out that because I cry a lot, I don't care what other people think about me, and I'm brave.  I also learned that crying "relieves stress and pent-up emotions... [removing] negative emotions and [instilling] positive ones."  In that respect, we're told, "it's almost as effective as sex."

So next time your significant other is feeling amorous, you should turn to them and say, "Not now, honey, I think I'd prefer to have a nice long cry instead."

Oh, and if you have a feather tattoo, you're "strong, independent, courageous, and cherish freedom."

Anyhow, all of this is sort of beside the point, because the article that my friend sent me the link to was none of the above, but was to a post called "Five Signs Your Deceased Love Ones Are Trying to Help You."

Naturally, I was curious about what they thought were signs that Grandma Bertha was still hanging around, and I suspect you are, too, so without further ado:

1.  Animals Acting Strangely.

If this were true, it would mean my house has been continuously haunted for years, because in my experience my pets act strangely all the time.  For example, I went outside this summer because our coonhound, Lena, was having a complete barking fit, dancing around yapping like mad.  I thought she had a possum cornered, but no.  When I came up to her, I found out she was barking at...

... a stick.

To be fair, it was a pretty ferocious-looking stick.  But still.

2.  Poltergeist Activity.

I hear bumps and creaks and knocks in our house all the time, but I think that's mostly because (1) it's an old house, and (2) there's a family of squirrels that we have been unable to evict from our attic.  I haven't seen anything else really suspicious on this front, so this one would have to be in the "no" column for me.

On the other hand...

3.  Electronics Acting Up.

I am halfway convinced that my mere presence makes computers malfunction.  My school computer, for example, frequently and unpredictably decides to draw little gray Xs on all of my document icons, and the only solution is to restart the computer, which takes fifteen minutes because this particular machine is powered by a single hamster running in a wheel.  It's kind of a relief to find out this is caused by ghosts, because I was beginning to think I'm just a techno-idiot.

4.  Vivid Dreams.

This one is also in the "yes" column for me.  Last night I woke up in the middle of the night because I was dreaming that I was defending our back yard from a flock of very threatening owls.  So my dreams tend to not be just "vivid," but "really fucking weird."  And if this is Grandma Bertha's fault, I wish she'd lay off, because I need my sleep.

5.  Extrasensory Perception.

For this one, the site says, "ESP is a pretty wide umbrella in terms of definition. It can mean a bunch of different things.  But in this case, it’s as if the spirits in our lives put ideas in our heads before we can have them."

Well, I'm always coming up with strange ideas, which is why I'm an author, because I can write out bizarre ideas that pop into my head and people pay me to read about them.  But I don't think that's ESP.  It may be, as one of my friends once speculated, because I was dropped on my head as a baby.

So the checklist for whether my house is haunted generates mixed results, which I suppose is to be expected.  Myself, I think it's not haunted, although my younger son swears that he's seen a shadowy figure out of the corner of his eye, moving about in our basement.  Maybe that's Grandma Bertha, I dunno.  If it is, I wish she'd stop simply oozing about the place and do something useful, like telling me her chocolate fudge recipe, which I've tried unsuccessfully for years to reproduce.

But I need to wrap this up, because I have to go see what Lena's barking at.  Maybe it's another stick that is attempting to launch a vicious attack on her.  You know how it goes.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one -- Mary Roach's Spook.  Roach is combines humor with serious scientific investigation, and has looked into such subjects as sex (Bonk), death (Stiff), war (Grunt), and food (Gulp).  (She's also fond of hilarious one-word titles.)

In Spook, Roach looks at claims of the afterlife, and her investigation takes her from a reincarnation research facility in India to a University of Virginia study on near-death experiences to a British school for mediums.  Along the way she considers the evidence for and against -- and her ponderings make for absolutely delightful reading.

Wheat, chaff, and alien abductions

My question today is one that haunts many skeptics -- the question of how one would know if a bizarre claim was actually true, especially in the absence of evidence.

The hardest-nosed of us would probably object to the premises of the question; if there is no evidence, they would say, then there is no basis on which to make a judgment in the first place.  While I agree with that general attitude -- and have applied it myself on numerous occasions -- it always leaves me with the worry that I'll miss something, and just through the weakness of the evidence and my preconceived notions I won't see the grain of wheat in amongst the chaff.

I riffed on this whole idea in my novel Signal to Noise (and if you'll allow me a moment of shameless self-promotion, it is available at Amazon from the link on the right side of the page).  In the story, a skeptical wildlife biologist, who had decided that all woo-woo claims are bullshit, is confronted with something bizarre going on in the mountains of central Oregon -- and has to overcome his preconceived notions even to admit that it might be real.  In the story, it doesn't help that the news is delivered to him with no hard evidence whatsoever, by a total stranger who just "has a feeling that something is wrong."  (I won't tell you any more about it; you'll just have to read it yourself.   And at the risk of appearing immodest, I think it's a pretty damn good story.)

The reason I bring all of this up is a website called Little Sticky Legs: Alien Abductee Portraits, owned by Steven Hirsch.  On this website, which you should definitely take a look at, there are photographs of a number of people who claim that they were abducted by, or at least contacted by, aliens, and their first-hand accounts (and in some cases drawings) of their experiences.  I thought this was an unusually good example of the phenomenon I've described above, for a variety of reasons.

First, the accounts are weird, rambling, and disjointed, and many of them seem to have only a loose attachment to reality.  Second, the photos don't help; whether Hirsch deliberately set out to make his subjects look sketchy is a matter of conjecture, but my sense is that he was playing fair and this is the way these people actually look.  Some of them, not to put too fine a point on it, are a little scary.  And third, of course, the content of the accounts is fairly contrary to what most scientists think is realistic.  All of these things combined seem to put them squarely into the category of most of the subjects of this blog; bizarre, possibly delusional, nonsense.

But reading the earnest narratives of these supposed contactees left me feeling a little uneasy.  Part of it was a sense that if their stories aren't true, then these people are either lying or else are the victims of hallucinations that could qualify as psychotic breaks.  And although I am rather free about poking fun at people who generate strange ideas, I draw the line at including as targets people who have genuine mental illnesses.

My unease, however, had another source, and one that haunts me every time I see something like this; what if one of these stories is actually true?

A person who had been abducted, but was left with no physical trace of the experience, might well describe it in just these terms.  If the victim was someone who wasn't highly educated, there's no reason to expect that (s)he would remember the details, or explain them afterwards, in the way a trained scientist would.  The general vagueness and lack of clarity is, in fact, exactly what you'd expect if an ordinary person experienced something shockingly outside their worldview.

Now, please don't misunderstand me.  I'm not, in any sense, committing to a belief in alien abductions in general, much less to any specific one of the stories on Hirsch's website.  My hunch is that none of these stories is true, and that whatever these individuals is describing has another source than actual experience.  But it is only a hunch, and an honest skeptic would have to admit that there is no more evidence that these claims are false than there is that they are true.  My only point here is that if one of them was telling the truth, this is much the form I would expect it to take... which means that it behooves all of us, and especially the skeptics, not to discount odd claims without further investigation.  Skeptics tend to rail against the superstitious for jumping to supernatural explanations for completely natural phenomena; we should be equally careful not to jump to prosaic explanations when an odd one might be correct.

The best thing, of course, is to withhold judgment completely until the facts are in, but that is pretty solidly counter to human nature, and is probably unrealistic as a general approach.  And given the ephemeral nature of some of these claims, the facts may never come in at all.  All we can do is keep thinking, keep watching and listening and investigating... and not be afraid to push the envelope of our own understanding when the time comes.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one -- Mary Roach's Spook.  Roach is combines humor with serious scientific investigation, and has looked into such subjects as sex (Bonk), death (Stiff), war (Grunt), and food (Gulp).  (She's also fond of hilarious one-word titles.)

In Spook, Roach looks at claims of the afterlife, and her investigation takes her from a reincarnation research facility in India to a University of Virginia study on near-death experiences to a British school for mediums.  Along the way she considers the evidence for and against -- and her ponderings make for absolutely delightful reading.

The worst century in history

I've always loved a mystery, and for that reason, the European "Dark Ages" have fascinated me for as long as I can recall.

But the moniker itself is off-puttingly self-congratulatory, isn't it?  It's not like Roman rule was that pleasant for your average slob to live under, after all.  Be that as it may, after the conquests of the Roman Empire started to fall apart in the 4th century C.E. from a combination of invasion, misrule, and downright lunacy, things went seriously downhill.  Life was pretty rough until the 8th and 9th centuries, when some measure of order returned as damn near all of Europe coalesced around the Roman Catholic Church, ushering in the Middle Ages.  And what we know about the period in between is... not a hell of a lot.  Accounts are scattered, vague, and full of conflation with mythology and legend.  The few that were written by contemporaries, rather than long after the fact -- such as Gregory of Tours's History of the Franks -- contain as much hagiography as they do history.

St. Gregory and King Chilperic I, from Grandes Chroniques de France de Charles V (14th century) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Which is why I was thrilled to read a paper that appeared last week in Antiquity about a study of the "worst decade to be alive" -- 536-546 C. E.

The research, which combines the skimpy evidence we have from accounts written at the time with hard scientific data from analysis of ice cores, paints a grim picture.  Writings from the year 536 describe a mysterious "fog" that lasted for eighteen months, generating widespread crop failure and what one Irish cleric called "three years without bread."  From the ice core analysis, medieval historian Michael McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski identified what they believe to be the culprit: a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland that dropped the global temperature an average of two degrees Celsius in a matter of months.

This was followed by another eruption in 540, and the following year, the single worst plague on record -- the so-called "Plague of Justinian," which killed between a third and a half of the inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire, and resulted in so many corpses that people loaded them on ships and dumped them in the Mediterranean.  The disease responsible isn't known for certain, but is believed to be Yersinia pestis -- the same bacterium that caused the Black Death, almost exactly eight hundred years later.  But to give you an idea of the scale, there's reason to believe the Plague of Justinian dwarfed both the 14th century Black Death and the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 -- usually the two examples that come to mind when people think of devastating pandemics.  The death toll is estimated at sixty million.

There probably was a connection between the cold and the plague, too, although not the obvious one that famine triggers disease susceptibility.  Many scholars think that the lack of food, and cold temperatures following a period that had generally been warm, forced mice and rats into homes and on board ships -- not only in close proximity to humans, but in their means of travel.  The fleas they carried, which are vectors for the plague, went with them, and the disease decimated Europe and beyond.

The effects of the eruption, however, were felt all over the Earth.  Tree ring analysis from North America shows 540 and the years following to have been unusually cold, with short-to-nonexistent growing seasons.  Volcanic dust is found in those layers of ice cores everywhere they exist.  Famines occurred in Asia and Central America.

All in all, a crappy time to be around.

Things didn't rebound for almost a hundred years.  Archaeologist Christopher Loveluck, of the University of Nottingham, found traces of dust containing significant amounts of lead in ice strata from the year 640, which he believes were due to a resurgence in silver smelting for coinage.  (I suppose if there's a hundred years during which your three main occupations are (1) not starving, (2) not freezing, and (3) not dying of a horrible disease, then making silver coins is kind of not on your radar.)  And the tree rings and ice cores bear out his contention that this indicates better conditions; although there were a couple of other volcanic eruptions we can see in the glacial records, none were as big as the one in 536.  The silver smelting, Loveluck says, "... shows the rise of the merchant class for the first time."  Things, finally, were improving.

What's coolest about this study -- despite its gruesome subject -- is how hard science is being brought to bear on understanding of history.  We no longer have to throw our hands up in despair if we're interested in a time period from which there were few written records.  The Earth has recorded its own history in the trees and the glaciers, there for us to read -- in this case, telling us the tale of the worst century the human race has ever lived through.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one -- Mary Roach's Spook.  Roach is combines humor with serious scientific investigation, and has looked into such subjects as sex (Bonk), death (Stiff), war (Grunt), and food (Gulp).  (She's also fond of hilarious one-word titles.)

In Spook, Roach looks at claims of the afterlife, and her investigation takes her from a reincarnation research facility in India to a University of Virginia study on near-death experiences to a British school for mediums.  Along the way she considers the evidence for and against -- and her ponderings make for absolutely delightful reading.

The creature from Nova Scotia

My friend and fellow author and blogger, Andrew Butters (who writes over at Potato Chip Math), sent me a link this morning that positively warmed my heart.

It's about obscure microorganisms that live in dirt in Nova Scotia.  Okay, I know that's an odd thing to have your heart warmed by, but look, this is cool.  The microorganisms are called hemimastigotes, and they've been known for a while, but this new find allowed scientists to do a detailed genetic analysis -- and what they found is astonishing.

Hemimastigotes don't belong in any of the six kingdoms currently accepted by taxonomists -- Archaea (a strange group of sort-of bacteria), Eubacteria (all the other bacteria), Protista (single celled eukaryotes like Amoeba and Paramecium), Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia.

They're most similar, at least superficially, to primitive animals, but their DNA shows that the evolutionary distance between hemimastigotes and animals is greater than the evolutionary distance between you and bread mold.  So calling them "animals" is completely unsupportable, unless you want to call mushrooms animals, too.  The last common ancestor between hemimastigotes and anything else on Earth is over a billion years ago.

So hemimastigotes give new meaning to the word outgroup.

Without further ado, here's an electron-microscopic photograph of a hemimastigote, Hemimastix kukwesjijk:

[Image courtesy of Yana Eglit]

If you're curious about the beast's odd moniker, the species name, "kukwesjijk" means "little hairy ogre" in Mi'kmaq, the language spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of Nova Scotia, where the discovery was made.

The study, done by Gordon Lax, Yana Eglit, Laura Eme, Erin M. Bertrand, Andrew J. Roger, and Alistair G. B. Simpson, appeared in Nature last week, and is nothing short of jaw-dropping.  These strange creatures (the hemimastigotes, not Lax et al.) have little harpoons called extrusomes that they used to skewer single-celled prey, flagella that pull the hapless microorganism toward its mouth, and then they suck out the cytoplasm.

Which is pretty hard-core.

The scientists have raised a colony of hemimastigotes in their lab, so they have more to study -- I must reiterate how incredibly rare they are, having been seen only a handful of times since their discovery in the late 19th century.  "It's "extremely exciting that it's still possible to discover something so different from all known life on Earth," Eglit told reporters for the CBC.   "It really shows how much more there is out there."

Indeed.  That's why I love science; there's always more to learn, always new realms to explore, and it has this funny way of coming up behind you and astonishing you just when you thought you had everything figured out.

Now, y'all'll  have to excuse me, because I need to go rewrite my notes for the taxonomy unit in my AP Biology class.

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If you are one of those people who thinks that science books are dry and boring, I'll give you a recommendation that will put that misconception to rest within the first few pages: Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements.

Kean undertook to explain, from a human perspective, that most iconic of all images from the realm of chemistry -- the Periodic Table, the organized chart of elements from the simplest (hydrogen, atomic number 1) to largest and most complex (oganesson, atomic number 118).  Kean's sparkling prose shows us the personalities behind the science, including the notoriously cranky Dmitri Mendeleev; tragic, brilliant Henry Moseley, a victim of World War I; and shy, self-effacing Glenn T. Seaborg, one of only two individuals to have an element named after them while they were still alive.

It's a fun read, even if you're not a science geek -- maybe especially if you're not a science geek.  Because it allows you to peer behind the curtain, and see that the scientists are just like the rest of us, with rivalries, jealousies, odd and misplaced loyalty, and all the rest of the faults the human race is subject to.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Involuntary conversions

New from the "They Needed A Grant To Figure This Out?" department, we have: a study showing that LGBTQ individuals who have undergone "conversion therapy" or other attempts to change their sexual orientation have a higher incidence of depression.

Whodathunkit, ya know?  Amazing what happens when you take a person and tell them in no uncertain terms that a part of their personality over which they have zero control is bad and they have to fix it, and woe be unto them if they don't.

A study done at the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University tracked the outcomes for LGBTQ students, comparing ones who had experienced attempts to alter their sexual orientation with ones who hadn't.  The results were unequivocal.  Students who had been through "conversion therapy" or some equivalent had:

• over twice the likelihood of a suicide attempt;
• over twice the likelihood of depression (if the student had experienced these attempts both by parents and also external agencies, that number rose to triple the likelihood);
• lower socioeconomic status five years after leaving college;
• lower educational attainment;
• and lower average weekly wages.

Honestly, I get why the study was done.  If you have hard data behind an argument, it's a lot more difficult to refute it.  But here's the problem; the people who are arguing for conversion therapy are not, by and large, arguing from a standpoint of evidence.  The vast majority are basing their stance on religion, or the simple fact that thinking about gay sex makes them feel squinky.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Benson Kua, Rainbow flag breeze, CC BY-SA 2.0]

As far as the first one goes, people need to wrap their brains around the fact that their religion tells them what they are supposed to do, not what I am supposed to do.  As my mom used to put it, my rights end where your nose begins.  As long as what you are doing is in no way harming me -- such as what gender(s) you are attracted to -- I should have no right whatsoever to dictate your actions.

As far as the second, my response is: grow up and get over it.  I detest cooked carrots, to the point that I can barely stand to look at someone eating them.  (It is just about the only food I really dislike.  As my dad once quipped, my favorite two kinds of food are "plenty" and "often.")  But if I started telling people they couldn't eat cooked carrots because I can't stand the thought of it, my guess is that they would (quite rightly) tell me to go to hell.

Same thing here.  Maybe you find same-gender relationships disgusting.  Then don't have one.  Which is what I do when someone offers me carrots.

What's more, don't spend your time thinking about it.  Is it just me, or do these rabid evangelical types ever think about anything else?  Seems odd to me that people who claim to be so completely repulsed by the thought of a same-sex relationship talk about them to the exclusion of every other topic, with the possible exception of "Trump is the messiah," and if you don't do whatever Trump wants, you will be on the receiving end of a divine smite.

So this is in truth a huge problem, and I don't want anyone to interpret my first paragraph as dismissive.  I began that way because I have such a difficult time imagining how it's not so self-evident that it would appear obvious to everyone in the world.  If you have a child, and you set out to systematically destroy a fundamental part of their being, it's going to do horrific damage, and in the end, very likely be unsuccessful.  You might convince these poor young people not to seek out a relationship, which is bad enough; it's dooming them to a future in which they're alone, in which to fall in love is seen as succumbing to evil.  But you're not going to change their sexual orientation, because that's hardwired into our brains.

No one asks a heterosexual when they "chose to be straight."  Why should the situation be any different for LGBTQ individuals?

In short, conversion therapy is child abuse, and it inflicts permanent harm.  How it is not illegal, I have no idea.

But maybe this study will bolster the case that it should be.

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If you are one of those people who thinks that science books are dry and boring, I'll give you a recommendation that will put that misconception to rest within the first few pages: Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements.

Kean undertook to explain, from a human perspective, that most iconic of all images from the realm of chemistry -- the Periodic Table, the organized chart of elements from the simplest (hydrogen, atomic number 1) to largest and most complex (oganesson, atomic number 118).  Kean's sparkling prose shows us the personalities behind the science, including the notoriously cranky Dmitri Mendeleev; tragic, brilliant Henry Moseley, a victim of World War I; and shy, self-effacing Glenn T. Seaborg, one of only two individuals to have an element named after them while they were still alive.

It's a fun read, even if you're not a science geek -- maybe especially if you're not a science geek.  Because it allows you to peer behind the curtain, and see that the scientists are just like the rest of us, with rivalries, jealousies, odd and misplaced loyalty, and all the rest of the faults the human race is subject to.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Lights over Ireland

Heard about the Irish UFO?

I'd resisted posting about this one, because every single time I run into an article that says "TOTALLY UNEXPLAINABLE EXTRATERRESTRIAL OBJECT SIGHTED," it turns out not only to be explainable but 100% terrestrial.

This one, however, has me curious.  According to a report in The Drive, this incident has two things that made my ears perk up; it was simultaneously sighted, and reported, by several people, including three commercial airline pilots; and according to witnesses, not only was it going ridiculously fast (one of the pilots said it was at least Mach 2), it changed direction several times.

That last bit is the most important.  One of the most common things labeled as a UFO are meteors, but as far as I understand them, they move in a straight line because (1) Newton's First Law is strictly enforced in most jurisdictions, and (2) they're a bitch to steer.  So if the reports are correct that it changed direction, not once but several times, this raises the report to the level of "pretty interesting."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Stefan-Wp, UFO-Meersburg, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Quoting Tyler Rogoway and Joseph Trevithick, writers of the above-linked article:

Publicly available audio of conversations between the passenger planes and Shannon Flight Information Region air traffic controllers offer more detail about what happened. At 6:47 AM local time [on November 9], a British Airways 787, using the callsign Speedbird 94, radioed in to ask if there were any military exercises going on in the area, which there were not. 

"There is nothing showing on either primary or secondary [radar]," Shannon controllers told Speedbird 94. “O.K. It was moving so fast,” the British Airways pilot responded. 

She further explained that the object had appeared as a "very bright light" and had flown along the left side of their 787 before it "rapidly veered to the north" and then "disappeared at very high speed." There is no indication of concerns about a possible collision.

The Irish authorities are investigating, but it remains to be seen what there is to investigate, given that all we have is the recording of what the pilots said they saw.

As regular readers know, I've been pretty skeptical of eyewitness accounts.  Not only is the human sensory-integrative system notoriously inaccurate, so is our memory.  But here we have at least three trained pilots -- who had seen phenomena like meteors many times, and knew what they looked like -- reporting the same strange, maneuverable object simultaneously.

Astronomer Michio Kaku famously said -- and got himself in trouble with the scientific establishment for saying it -- "Ninety-nine percent of all UFO sightings can be explained as hoaxes or purely natural, and in many cases terrestrial, phenomena.  But that still leaves one percent that haven't been explained.  And I think those are worth a serious investigation."

Which I have to agree with.  And unless there's more to this story that we're being told (for example, Irish authorities denied conducting military exercises in the area where the sightings occurred, but it's entirely possible they could be hiding the truth for some reason), this falls squarely in Kaku's investigation-worthy one percent.  I'm definitely not ready to jump to "it was a visit by intelligent aliens from another world," but I'm at this point eager to hear what the experts think actually did happen in the skies of Ireland six days ago.

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