Racing against your brain

Being a devoted (if not especially fast) runner, and also ridiculously competitive, I'm always interested in ways to increase my speed and endurance.

It's not, honestly, that I am under any illusion of my becoming a world-class marathoner, or anything.  I'm 58 years old, and don't think there's any way I'd ever have the determination to train intensely enough to be a contender for first place.  But I'd like to see some improvement -- specifically, more improvement than I've seen over the past two years, when I've been stuck averaging around a ten-minute mile while younger and more athletic guys are clocking in with seven-minute miles or better.

Yesterday I found out that some of my problem is probably in my brain, not in my legs.

A study published last week in Nature: Human Behavior called, "Learning One's Genetic Risk Changes Physiology Independent of Actual Genetic Risk," by psychologists Bradley P. Turnwald, J. Parker Goyer, Danielle Z. Boles, Amy Silder, Scott L. Delp, and Alia J. Crum of Stanford University, suggests something astonishing; your performance in a race is more dependent on whether you think you have a variant of a gene that improves stamina than whether you actually have the gene.

The setup was simple.  They tested volunteers to determine which variant of a (real) gene called CREB-1 they had.  One version tends to increase endurance, and the other reduces it, so which variant you have determines how easily you tire.  They then split the entire group four ways; (1) those who have the high-endurance gene and are told they do; (2) those who have the high-endurance gene and are told they have the low-endurance variant; (3) those who have the low-endurance gene and are told they do; and (4) those who have the low-endurance gene and are told they have the high-endurance variant.

The results were unequivocal.  Those who were told they had the low-endurance variant of CREB-1 processed out carbon dioxide less efficiently, tired more quickly, ran more slowly, and gave up sooner than the ones who were told they had the high-endurance variant -- regardless of which variant they had.

Me at the end of a race in Montezuma, New York last year.  It was 95 F and about eight krillion percent humidity, and I definitely was not thinking, "I have excellent endurance and stamina."  My mindset was more, "I hope I can make it across the finish line before I die so at least I won't block the trail for the other runners."

The most amazing thing to me is the carbon dioxide part.  The rest of it I can attribute to attitude -- if I think I'm going to crap out more quickly because of some factor beyond my control, I'm likely to interpret all the stuff runners have to put up with -- the little aches and pains, shortness of breath, sweating, and heart pounding -- as evidence that I'm not going to be competitive no matter what I do.  It's easy to see someone paying unwarranted attention to what happens to all of us when we run, and giving up more quickly, if they figure that it's just their unfortunate genetic makeup causing it.

But the carbon dioxide part is fascinating, because that's not something under any sort of voluntary control.  It's hard to see how you could affect the rate at which carbon dioxide is cleared from the blood by some kind of power-of-positive-thinking phenomenon.  But that seems to be what happened.  "What people haven’t fully appreciated is that that information also puts you into a mindset: 'I’m at high risk or I'm protected,'" study co-author Alia Crum said.  "And that alone can have potent effects on physiology and motivation."

Of course, what I want to know is how.  How could simply thinking that you have good endurance change your physiology drastically enough to result in a measurable increase in speed and stamina?

And more to the point, how can I tap into that?

I've always been pretty dubious about the results of positive self-talk.  I mean, it's probably better than negative self-talk, but I've always thought it was only from the standpoint of making you a generally happier person.  (Not that this is inconsequential, mind you.)  But apparently athleticism has as much to do with mindset as it does with genes, and when elite athletes say that the only way to succeed is to believe you can, there might be something scientific to it after all.

But for me, it falls into the "Now that I know this, what do I do?" department.  I suppose I could try convincing myself that I'm fast and powerful and all the rest, but I have this sneaking suspicion my brain would be saying at the same time, "C'mon, you know that's not true," which would probably spoil the effect.  Or maybe I could have a genetic test for CREB-1 and have my wife lie to me about the results if it turns out I have the low-endurance variant.

Whatever I do, it's probably more important simply to keep training.  But maybe cursing myself when those young bucks zoom past me isn't the best approach -- maybe I should be thinking, "Next time, that'll be me."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Michio Kaku's The Physics of the Impossible.  Kaku takes a look at the science and technology that is usually considered to be in the realm of science fiction -- things like invisibility cloaks, replicators, matter transporters, faster-than-light travel, medical devices like Star Trek's "tricorders" -- and considers whether they're possible given what we know of scientific law, and if so, what it would take to develop them.  In his signature lucid, humorous style, Kaku differentiates between what's merely a matter of figuring out the technology (such as invisibility) and what's probably impossible in a a real and final sense (such as, sadly, faster-than-light travel).  It's a wonderful excursion into the power of the human imagination -- and the power to make at least some of it happen.

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

Viral assassins

In yesterday's post, we looked at viral remnants in our own DNA and their possible role in long-term memory formation.  Today, we'll consider the possibility of using viruses in a different way -- to fight bacterial infections.

As I mentioned yesterday, labeling a virus as "alive" is highly debatable.  They certainly don't seem to respond, at least not in the way a living thing ordinarily does -- moving toward or away from a stimulus.  They're so un-life-like that they can actually be crystallized in a test tube, which makes them more like strange, self-replicating chemicals than they are like organisms.

Which is what makes the research that was published in Cell this week even more astonishing.  In "A Host-Produced Quorum-Sensing Autoinducer Controls a Phage Lysis-Lysogeny Decision," by Justin E. Silpe and Bonnie L. Bassler, we learn about a type of bacteriophage (bacteria-killing virus) that seems to be able to sense its prey, and launch an attack when the colony is at its most vulnerable.

Model of a typical bacteriophage [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Adenosine, PhageExterior, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The prey bacteria is Vibrio cholerae, and it's certainly a deserving target.  It causes cholera, which makes water reabsorption in the intestine run backwards -- the host begins to dump water and blood solutes into the intestine, resulting in diarrhea so severe that an adult can dehydrate and die within twelve hours.  With quick treatment, the survival rate is quite good; without it, over half of infected people die, usually within two days of the onset of symptoms.

The virus that Silpe and Bassler were studying, VP882, can wipe out entire colonies of Vibrio cholerae by detecting a set of molecules responsible for quorum sensing, which is how colonial bacteria are able to respond to their environment differently depending of how many are nearby.  When the number of quorum-sensing molecules is low, the virus and the bacteria coexist peacefully.  When it reaches a certain threshold -- meaning there are lots of bacteria there -- the virus suddenly becomes virulent, attacks the bacteria, and wipes out the entire colony.

Other microbiologists have been quick to see the implications.  If VP882 is capable of killing a colony of cholera bacteria swiftly and efficiently, it could potentially be useful as a therapy.  And if it works for killing Vibrio cholerae, why couldn't it work for attacking other kinds of bacteria?  "If you have a lung infection, you might not be able to diagnose what bacteria [are] responsible in time and choose the right phage," said Mark Mimee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  "To get around that, people use cocktails of different phages.  But manufacturing cocktails and adhering to drug regulations is too expensive...  [But] a single recombinant phage—yeah, that would be really interesting."

In other words, create a single viral assassin that could take out any sort of bacteria you wanted.  Silpe and Bassler were able to get VP882 to respond to signals from other bacterial species, including E. coli and Salmonella, but it remains to be seen if you could engineer one kind of phage that could take on any species of bacteria.

It remains to be seen if this would be a good idea.  In a normal, healthy human body, there are right around the same number of human cells and bacterial cells -- on the order of thirty trillion.  Having a normal intestinal and skin "flora" is critical for good health.  It's been shown that in order to treat intractable cases of ulcerative colitis and infection with Clostridium difficile (another bad guy of the bacterial world), there is a good chance that a fecal transplant will help.

Yes, that's exactly what it sounds like.  I'll leave the details of the procedure to your imagination out of respect for my more delicate readers, but suffice it to say that it results in replacing the sick person's intestinal flora with that of a healthy person -- and has a remarkably high cure rate.

So my question is -- apropos of the viral research by Silpe and Bassler -- if you are given a dose of phage intended to treat (for example) strep throat, what's to stop the phage from wiping out all the other bacteria they come into contact with?  I know the chemical signals differ -- that's how they modulated the kill switch for the virus with the three species of bacteria they worked with -- but it seems like there's a huge possibility for this to go very, very badly.  Yes, the therapy would have to be tested exhaustively and approved by the FDA, but the whole thing is a little worrisome, whatever its promise.

In any case, this highlights how little we understand the unseen microscopic world we're immersed in.  Viruses may not be the unresponsive little blobs we thought they were.  And as for VP882 -- it will be fascinating to see where this goes, and if we might have another weapon in our medical arsenal -- a virus that attacks bacteria.

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One of the best books I've read recently is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.  I wouldn't say it's cheerful, however.  But what Weisman does is to look at what would happen if the human race was to disappear -- how long it would take for our creations to break down, for nature to reassert itself, for the damage we've done to be healed.

The book is full of eye-openers.  First, his prediction is that within 24 hours of the power going out, the New York Subways would fill with water -- once the pumps go out, they'd become underwater caves.  Not long thereafter, the water would eat away at the underpinnings of the roads, and roads would start caving in, before long returning Manhattan to what it was before the Europeans arrived, a swampy island crisscrossed by rivers.  Farms, including the huge industrial farms of the Midwest, would be equally quick; cultivated varieties of wheat and corn would, Weisman says, last only three or four years before being replaced by hardier species, and the land would gradually return to nature (albeit changed by the introduction of highly competitive exotic species that were introduced by us, accidentally or deliberately).

Other places, however, would not rebound quickly.  Or ever.  Nuclear reactor sites would become uninhabitable for enough time that they might as well be considered a permanent loss.  Sites contaminated by heavy metals and non-biodegradable poisons (like dioxins) also would be, although with these there's the possibility of organisms evolving to tolerate, or even break down, the toxins.  (No such hope with radioactivity, unfortunately.)

But despite the dark parts it's a good read, and puts into perspective the effect we've had on the Earth -- and makes even more urgent the case that we need to put the brakes on environmental damage before something really does take our species out for good.

The memory virus

Nota bene -- Yesterday, I posed a "divergent-thinking" puzzle for my readers, to wit:

A man leaves home, makes three left turns, and as he is arriving back home he sees two masked men waiting for him.  Who are the masked men?

The answer is at the end of this post -- fair warning if you're still working on it!

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It's virus season, which thus far I've been able to avoid participating in, but my students are hacking and snorting and coughing and I figure it's only a matter of time.  Viruses are odd beasts; they're obligate intracellular parasites, doing their evil work by hijacking your cellular machinery and using it to make more viruses.  Furthermore, they lack virtually all of the structures that cells have, including cell membranes, cytoplasm, and organelles.  They really are more like self-replicating chemicals than they are like living things.

Simian Polyoma Virus 40 [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Phoebus87 at English Wikipedia, Symian virus, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What is even stranger about viruses is that while some of the more familiar ones -- colds, flu, measles -- invade the host, make him/her sick, and eventually (with luck) are cleared from the body -- some of them leave behind remnants that can make their presence known later.  This behavior is what makes the herpes family of viruses so insidious -- if you've been infected once, you are infected for life, and the latent viruses hidden in your cells can cause another eruption of symptoms, sometimes decades later.

Even weirder is when those latent viral remnants cause havoc in a completely different way than the original infection did.  There's a piece of a virus left in the DNA of many of us called HERV-W (human endogenous retrovirus W) which, if activated, can trigger multiple sclerosis or schizophrenia.  Another one, Coxsackie virus, has an apparent connection to type-1 diabetes and Sjögren's syndrome.  Thus far, all of the viral infections, whether or not they're latent, are damaging to the host.  So it was quite a shock to me to read a piece of recent research that there's a viral remnant that not only is beneficial, but is critical for intercellular communication -- and individuals without it have trouble forming long-term memories!

In two separate papers published in the journal Cell -- "The Neuronal Gene Arc Encodes a Repurposed Retrotransposon Gag Protein that Mediates Intercellular RNA Transfer" and "Retrovirus-like Gag Protein Arc1 Binds RNA and Traffics across Synaptic Boutons," each by a large team of neurobiologists and geneticists -- we learn about the proteins Arc and Gag, which were put into our cells by retroviruses (probably) hundreds of millions of years ago, and which generate virus-like particles that transfer from one brain cell to another.  This process seems to mediate memory formation, as mice that have the Arc/Gag gene knocked out are unable to retain long-term memories -- and may even be unable to form them in the first place.

As Sara Reardon explained it, writing in Nature:

Shepherd and Budnik [lead researchers in the two studies] think that the vesicles containing Arc play a part in helping neurons to form and break connections over time as an animal’s nervous system develops or adapts to a new environment or memory.  Although the fly and mouse versions of Arc are similar, they seem to have evolved from two distinct retroviruses that entered the species’ genomes at different times.  "There must be something really fundamental about it," Budnik says, for it to appear in both mice and flies... 

The human genome contains around 100 Gag-like genes that could encode proteins that form capsids.  It’s possible that this new form of communication between cells is more common than we thought, Shepherd says.  "We think it’s just the beginning."

Which is pretty astonishing.  The idea that some viruses might have beneficial effects on the host is weird enough; the idea that they could facilitate something as basic as memory storage is mind-blowing.  As such, they'd be a major driver for evolution -- given that organisms that have strong memory capacity are clearly at an advantage over ones that don't.

So before you curse the viruses this winter, be a little thankful for Arc and Gag and any other genetic parasites we might have that help us to function.  It may be small consolation if you are currently fighting a cold, but keep in mind that without viruses, you might not be keep anything in mind at all.

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The answer to the puzzle: The two masked men are the catcher and the umpire.

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One of the best books I've read recently is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.  I wouldn't say it's cheerful, however.  But what Weisman does is to look at what would happen if the human race was to disappear -- how long it would take for our creations to break down, for nature to reassert itself, for the damage we've done to be healed.

The book is full of eye-openers.  First, his prediction is that within 24 hours of the power going out, the New York Subways would fill with water -- once the pumps go out, they'd become underwater caves.  Not long thereafter, the water would eat away at the underpinnings of the roads, and roads would start caving in, before long returning Manhattan to what it was before the Europeans arrived, a swampy island crisscrossed by rivers.  Farms, including the huge industrial farms of the Midwest, would be equally quick; cultivated varieties of wheat and corn would, Weisman says, last only three or four years before being replaced by hardier species, and the land would gradually return to nature (albeit changed by the introduction of highly competitive exotic species that were introduced by us, accidentally or deliberately).

Other places, however, would not rebound quickly.  Or ever.  Nuclear reactor sites would become uninhabitable for enough time that they might as well be considered a permanent loss.  Sites contaminated by heavy metals and non-biodegradable poisons (like dioxins) also would be, although with these there's the possibility of organisms evolving to tolerate, or even break down, the toxins.  (No such hope with radioactivity, unfortunately.)

But despite the dark parts it's a good read, and puts into perspective the effect we've had on the Earth -- and makes even more urgent the case that we need to put the brakes on environmental damage before something really does take our species out for good.

Squelching the obvious

The origin of creativity is an ongoing source of fascination and puzzlement to me.

I say this in part because I'm frequently asked, "Where do you get the ideas for your books?" and the answer, "Beats the hell outta me" seems kind of inadequate.  Sometimes I can identify at least some sort of point of origin -- for example, my work-in-progress, The Harmonic Labyrinth, was inspired by a combination of dream my wife had and a piece of music by Johann Sebastian Bach -- but the details of the characters and plot come from who-knows-where.  They just seem to appear, unbidden, in my mind, and I have to write them down to keep my skull from exploding.

But a new piece of research, published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has suggested that creativity may have as much to do with suppressing ordinary ideas as it does with generating unusual ones.  Scientists at the University of London have shown that the production of alpha waves in the right temporal lobe of the brain is associated with inhibiting obvious/habitual connections -- and that this may allow more creative ones to form.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons LaurMG, Glass creativity finalrevis, CC BY-SA 3.0]

As an example, think about the classic divergent thinking question, "How many uses can you think of for a paper clip?"  Ordinary adults can usually come up with ten or fifteen, maybe twenty if you really push it.  People classified as divergent thinkers can come up with far more -- up to two hundred -- and the most interesting thing is that amongst kindergartners, 98% of them fall into this range.  Most of them do this by disregarding the basic assumptions of the question.  For example, could the paper clip be thirty meters tall and made of Silly Putty?  Most adults never get this far because they're locked into the ordinary interpretations.  In other words: if you accept the walls of the box as a given, you can't think outside it.

Interestingly, divergent thinking decreases steadily from childhood into adulthood.  Some of it is undoubtedly brain wiring, but a good share of it is how we teach kids, that of the many answers to a question, one of them is the one the teacher wants ("correct") and the others are going to be frowned upon ("incorrect").  Now, clearly, there are some cases where this is a valid approach; there's not much to back up a kid who wants equal respect for his claim that 2 + 2 = 13.  But what about things like interpretation of the motives of a character in a book?  Analyzing the causes of a historical event?  Or better still, finding solutions to problems such as how to build a better mousetrap?  Here, the narrow thinkers run out of steam very quickly.

Apparently, the key is not only to generate new solutions, but to convince your brain somehow to look past the obvious ones, to question your own assumptions about the perimeter of the problem.  "If we need to generate alternative uses of a glass," said lead researcher Catherine DiBernardi Luft, "first we must inhibit our past experience which leads us to think of a glass as a container.  Our study’s novelty is to demonstrate that right temporal alpha oscillations is a key neural mechanism for overriding these obvious associations.  In order to understand the processes underlying the production of novel and adequate ideas, we need to break down its constituent processes, dissecting creativity as much as possible at first, and then analyzing them in context, before putting them back together to understand the process as a whole."

I know from my own experience as a writer, it does take some level of assumption-suppression to work my way out of a corner.  When I have "writers' block" -- and I put it in quotes because I don't honestly believe such a thing exists, although writers (like everyone) do get temporarily stymied at times -- the thing to do is to work on a different story, or better yet, do something else entirely.  Go for a run, practice the piano, play ball with my dog.  The alternate activity acts to suppress my focus on the "obvious solutions" (which aren't working), and more often than not, the way out pops into my brain, sometimes with such alarming suddenness that it seems to come from somewhere outside of me.

So what Luft et al. have done is shown the neural mechanism that underlies this process of blocking habitual, ordinary responses, allowing you to get out of your own way.  What this still doesn't answer, however, is why some people are so much better at it than others.  In my Critical Thinking classes, we do periodic divergent-thinking puzzles, which I think of as being mental calisthenics.  Some students take to them right away, and others find the exercise incredibly frustrating -- and it seems to have little to do with how well they do on other school tasks.  I'll end with one of the puzzles that half of my students figured out in seconds, and the other half never did.  I'll post the answer tomorrow!

A man left home, took three left turns, and as he was arriving back home, he saw two masked men waiting for him.  Who are the masked men?

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One of the best books I've read recently is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.  I wouldn't say it's cheerful, however.  But what Weisman does is to look at what would happen if the human race was to disappear -- how long it would take for our creations to break down, for nature to reassert itself, for the damage we've done to be healed.

The book is full of eye-openers.  First, his prediction is that within 24 hours of the power going out, the New York Subways would fill with water -- once the pumps go out, they'd become underwater caves.  Not long thereafter, the water would eat away at the underpinnings of the roads, and roads would start caving in, before long returning Manhattan to what it was before the Europeans arrived, a swampy island crisscrossed by rivers.  Farms, including the huge industrial farms of the Midwest, would be equally quick; cultivated varieties of wheat and corn would, Weisman says, last only three or four years before being replaced by hardier species, and the land would gradually return to nature (albeit changed by the introduction of highly competitive exotic species that were introduced by us, accidentally or deliberately).

Other places, however, would not rebound quickly.  Or ever.  Nuclear reactor sites would become uninhabitable for enough time that they might as well be considered a permanent loss.  Sites contaminated by heavy metals and non-biodegradable poisons (like dioxins) also would be, although with these there's the possibility of organisms evolving to tolerate, or even break down, the toxins.  (No such hope with radioactivity, unfortunately.)

But despite the dark parts it's a good read, and puts into perspective the effect we've had on the Earth -- and makes even more urgent the case that we need to put the brakes on environmental damage before something really does take our species out for good.

A new view of the "eye lizard"

I am forever astonished at the level of detail we can infer from fossils that are hundreds of millions of years old.

The most recent example of this came from analysis of a fossil of Stenopterygius, an ichthyosaur that lived during the Jurassic Period (this particular fossil has been dated to about 180 million years ago).  We usually think of fossils as preserving bones and teeth, and occasionally impressions of scales or skin or feathers -- but this one was so finely preserved that researchers have been able to make some shrewd inferences about color, metabolism, and the structure of soft tissues.

Artist's conception of Stenopterygius [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com), Stenopterygius BW, CC BY-SA 3.0]

We've known for a long time that ichthyosaurs are bizarre animals.  They were streamlined predators that look remarkably like dolphins, although they are only distantly related (making the two groups a great example of convergent evolution).  A number of them had an even stranger feature, which is the largest eye-diameter-to-body-size ratio of any animal known -- the well-named Ophthalmosaurus (Greek for "eye lizard") was six meters long and had eyes the size of basketballs.

Stenopterygius was a bit smaller, with an average adult size of four meters.  But up until recently, all we've been able to do is speculate on what it might have looked like, and how it behaved.  A discovery in Germany, described in a paper in Nature called "Soft-Tissue Evidence for Homeothermy and Crypsis in a Jurassic Ichthyosaur" and authored by no fewer than 23 scientists, has given us incredibly detailed information on these oddball dinosaurs.

The authors write:

Ichthyosaurs are extinct marine reptiles that display a notable external similarity to modern toothed whales.  Here we show that this resemblance is more than skin deep.  We apply a multidisciplinary experimental approach to characterize the cellular and molecular composition of integumental tissues in an exceptionally preserved specimen of the Early Jurassic ichthyosaur Stenopterygius.  Our analyses recovered still-flexible remnants of the original scaleless skin, which comprises morphologically distinct epidermal and dermal layers.  These are underlain by insulating blubber that would have augmented streamlining, buoyancy and homeothermy.  Additionally, we identify endogenous proteinaceous and lipid constituents, together with keratinocytes and branched melanophores that contain eumelanin pigment.  Distributional variation of melanophores across the body suggests countershading, possibly enhanced by physiological adjustments of colour to enable photoprotection, concealment and/or thermoregulation.  Convergence of ichthyosaurs with extant marine amniotes thus extends to the ultrastructural and molecular levels, reflecting the omnipresent constraints of their shared adaptation to pelagic life.

So from a 180-million-year-old fossil, we now know that Stenopterygius (1) was a homeotherm (colloquially called "warm-blooded"), (2) had a blubber layer much like modern dolphins and whales, and (3) were countershaded -- dark on top and light underneath, to aid camouflage -- similar to dozens of species of modern fish.

This level of preservation is extremely unusual.  "Both the contour of the body and the remains of internal organs are clearly visible," said paleontologist Johan Lindgren of the University of Lund, who co-authored the paper.  "Surprisingly, the fossil is so well preserved that it is possible to observe individual cell layers inside the skin."

"This is the first direct chemical evidence of warm blood in an ichthyosaur, because a subcutaneous fat layer is a characteristic of warm-blooded animals," said Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University, also a co-author.  "Ichthyosaurs are interesting because they have many features in common with dolphins, but they are not related at all to these mammals that inhabit the sea.  But the enigma does not stop there...  They have many characteristics in common with living marine reptiles, such as sea turtles; but we know from the fossil record that they gave live birth to their young...  This study reveals some of those biological mysteries."

Which is pretty astonishing.  I've always had a fascination for the prehistoric world, and have spent more time than I like to admit wondering what it might have been like to live in the Jurassic world.  This research gives us one more piece of information -- about a fierce prehistoric predator that shared some amazing similarities to creatures that still swim in our oceans.

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One of the best books I've read recently is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.  I wouldn't say it's cheerful, however.  But what Weisman does is to look at what would happen if the human race was to disappear -- how long it would take for our creations to break down, for nature to reassert itself, for the damage we've done to be healed.

The book is full of eye-openers.  First, his prediction is that within 24 hours of the power going out, the New York Subways would fill with water -- once the pumps go out, they'd become underwater caves.  Not long thereafter, the water would eat away at the underpinnings of the roads, and roads would start caving in, before long returning Manhattan to what it was before the Europeans arrived, a swampy island crisscrossed by rivers.  Farms, including the huge industrial farms of the Midwest, would be equally quick; cultivated varieties of wheat and corn would, Weisman says, last only three or four years before being replaced by hardier species, and the land would gradually return to nature (albeit changed by the introduction of highly competitive exotic species that were introduced by us, accidentally or deliberately).

Other places, however, would not rebound quickly.  Or ever.  Nuclear reactor sites would become uninhabitable for enough time that they might as well be considered a permanent loss.  Sites contaminated by heavy metals and non-biodegradable poisons (like dioxins) also would be, although with these there's the possibility of organisms evolving to tolerate, or even break down, the toxins.  (No such hope with radioactivity, unfortunately.)

But despite the dark parts it's a good read, and puts into perspective the effect we've had on the Earth -- and makes even more urgent the case that we need to put the brakes on environmental damage before something really does take our species out for good.

Arr, matey

Yesterday, we had an elderly gentleman in Spain who is building a spaceship to go to a planet that doesn't exist, and he should have known it doesn't exist because he's the one who made it up.  Today, we have: a woman in Ireland who married the ghost of a pirate, but now she's unhappy with him and wants a divorce.

The woman's name is Amanda Teague, and she lives in Drogheda, County Louth.  Teague gave up on romance -- at least the flesh-and-blood kind -- last year, and decided she might have better luck in the spirit world.  So she fell in love with the ghost of a Haitian pirate who was executed three hundred years ago, and married him this past January.

The pirate's name was Jack Sparrow.  Because of course it was.

"It is the perfect kind of relationship for me," Teague told reporters.  "There are a lot of people out there who don’t know about spiritual relationships, but it could be right for them --  I want to get the message out there."

In 2018 she wrote a book about her experience being married to a ghost.  It's called A Life You Will Remember, and is available on Amazon, where it has gotten two reviews, one five-star and one one-star.  The one-star one called it "bad fanfiction you can't put down."

She didn't just jump into the relationship without careful consideration.  "I told him I wasn’t really cool with having casual sex with a spirit and I wanted us to make a proper commitment to each other," she told reporters.  "I wanted the big traditional wedding with the white dress. It was very important to me."

So that's what they did.

The happy, um, couple

But less that a year later, the marriage was on the rocks.  The relationship wasn't successful, Teague-Sparrow says, and she wants to get a divorce.  "So I feel it’s time to let everyone know that my marriage is over," she said, in an interview in the Irish Post.  "I will explain all in due course but for now all I want to say is be VERY careful when dabbling in spirituality, it’s not something to mess with."

The article in the Irish Post seems to take Jack's side of things.  "The split is another blow for Jack," writes Gerard Donaghy, "after he was purportedly executed for thieving on the high seas in the 1700s."

You'd think he'd be over that by now, given that it happened three-hundred-odd years ago, although I'd expect being hanged is a trauma that would kind of stick with you.

What is unclear is how she'll get him to sign the divorce papers.  Or maybe they won't have to go through the official hassle, because the wedding was performed by a shaman in a boat off the coast of Ireland, so it's not certain what, if anything, Irish law would have to say about it.  Chances are they could go their separate ways and no one would blink an eye, since nobody seems to be able to see Jack except for Teague-Sparrow herself.

Anyhow, that's our dip in the deep end for today.  I wish her luck with being single again, and I hope Jack can find a nice location to haunt, perhaps accompanied by a lady ghost, since a relationship with a live human didn't work out so well.  So thanks to the loyal reader who sent me the link.  I didn't really need anything to lower my opinion of the human race further, but I know you meant well.

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One of the best books I've read recently is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.  I wouldn't say it's cheerful, however.  But what Weisman does is to look at what would happen if the human race was to disappear -- how long it would take for our creations to break down, for nature to reassert itself, for the damage we've done to be healed.

The book is full of eye-openers.  First, his prediction is that within 24 hours of the power going out, the New York Subways would fill with water -- once the pumps go out, they'd become underwater caves.  Not long thereafter, the water would eat away at the underpinnings of the roads, and roads would start caving in, before long returning Manhattan to what it was before the Europeans arrived, a swampy island crisscrossed by rivers.  Farms, including the huge industrial farms of the Midwest, would be equally quick; cultivated varieties of wheat and corn would, Weisman says, last only three or four years before being replaced by hardier species, and the land would gradually return to nature (albeit changed by the introduction of highly competitive exotic species that were introduced by us, accidentally or deliberately).

Other places, however, would not rebound quickly.  Or ever.  Nuclear reactor sites would become uninhabitable for enough time that they might as well be considered a permanent loss.  Sites contaminated by heavy metals and non-biodegradable poisons (like dioxins) also would be, although with these there's the possibility of organisms evolving to tolerate, or even break down, the toxins.  (No such hope with radioactivity, unfortunately.)

But despite the dark parts it's a good read, and puts into perspective the effect we've had on the Earth -- and makes even more urgent the case that we need to put the brakes on environmental damage before something really does take our species out for good.

I'm a rocket man

As a fiction writer, I have to admit that my characters often feel very real to me.  I've said more than once that I feel like I'm getting to know characters more than I am inventing them, and there have been times that a story has taken off in an entirely new and unexpected direction because some character has seemed to grab the keyboard out of my hands and written him/herself a different part.

Despite that, I'm well aware that I'm indulging in a bit of whimsy.  I may not know what the source of creativity is -- for myself or for anyone else -- but that's a far cry from my thinking that Tyler Vaughan, the reluctant hero and cryptid-chaser from Signal to Noise, is really out there looking for Bigfoot in the Oregon Cascades.

That's a distinction that seems to have escaped Lucio Ballasteros, an 87-year-old writer from Ourense, Spain.  Ballasteros wrote a series of science fiction novels about a planet called "10/7" where a race "like humans but more highly developed" lives.  And he was so enamored of the idea that now Ballasteros has...

... built a spaceship to go to the planet himself.

Ballasteros's spaceship, in progress

The spaceship, built of aluminum and methacrylate, has cost Ballasteros over 100,000 Euros (about $114,000) of his own money to construct, so he's nothing if not determined.  Also, the guy is 87, which makes it doubly impressive, because he's doing the building himself.  Me, I hope that when I'm 87 I have that kind of energy, although I also hope that I'll use it for something other than building a spaceship to fly to a planet that technically doesn't exist.

Ballasteros says you can find out a lot more about the project over at his site Despertar ("Wake Up"), although I'm afraid much of it was lost on me because my Spanish is kind of limited to "sí," "no," "gracias," and "una cerveza, por favor."  But I did find a translatable page about Ballasteros at the news site El Ideal Gallego, which was helpful, even though Google Translate does leave much to be desired.

Be that as it may, I found out that Ballasteros said that the construction is finished "except for some engines," which seems like kind of an important part.  He sounds a little unsure of whether he's ready to take off even if the engines are installed, however.  In order to go to 10/7, "Humanity would have to evolve psychically and spiritually."  And I have to admit, he's got a point.  I'm not sure our current state of affairs would be anything to brag to an advanced extraterrestrial civilization about.

He also said that the whole thing was going to be powered by several 280-watt solar panels.  Well, I did a little bit of figuring, using Ballasteros's estimate of the mass of his spaceship at 1,180 kilograms.  I assumed that "several" solar panels was five, which would mean the maximum power output is 1,400 watts.  (For comparison purposes. this is about the same power draw as twenty ordinary incandescent light bulbs.)  The escape velocity on the surface of the Earth is 11,186 m/s, so for a 1,180 kilogram spaceship, this would require the expenditure of 73,800,000,000 joules of energy.

Which his engines would have expended after 53,000,000 seconds or so, which is about a year and a half, assuming that 100% of the energy is used for the purposes of thrust.

I hope he's not in a hurry.

Oh, and if you're wondering why the planet is called "10/7," Ballasteros is happy to explain.  "The planet 10/7 is the planet God-Man, in which I projected myself when I was young and have lived," he says.  "It is attributed to the rebellion of the angels; God could have punished them temporarily on the planet 10/7, where 10 represents the unity of God and 7 represents the seven dimensions of the human being."

Right!  Sure!  What?

So I'm not optimistic about Ballasteros's chances of a smooth liftoff and safe arrival at 10/7.  But other than that, I suppose this falls into the "no harm if it amuses you" column.  And all in all, he seems happier messing about with his spaceship than I am, sitting here wondering whether Donald Trump is going to open the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse before Congress can get off their asses and impeach him, or if he's simply going to sit around tweeting dick jokes about people he doesn't like as a way of showing everyone how presidential he is.

Which, honestly, makes me tempted to ask Ballasteros if he has room for a passenger.

*************************

One of the best books I've read recently is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.  I wouldn't say it's cheerful, however.  But what Weisman does is to look at what would happen if the human race was to disappear -- how long it would take for our creations to break down, for nature to reassert itself, for the damage we've done to be healed.

The book is full of eye-openers.  First, his prediction is that within 24 hours of the power going out, the New York Subways would fill with water -- once the pumps go out, they'd become underwater caves.  Not long thereafter, the water would eat away at the underpinnings of the roads, and roads would start caving in, before long returning Manhattan to what it was before the Europeans arrived, a swampy island crisscrossed by rivers.  Farms, including the huge industrial farms of the Midwest, would be equally quick; cultivated varieties of wheat and corn would, Weisman says, last only three or four years before being replaced by hardier species, and the land would gradually return to nature (albeit changed by the introduction of highly competitive exotic species that were introduced by us, accidentally or deliberately).

Other places, however, would not rebound quickly.  Or ever.  Nuclear reactor sites would become uninhabitable for enough time that they might as well be considered a permanent loss.  Sites contaminated by heavy metals and non-biodegradable poisons (like dioxins) also would be, although with these there's the possibility of organisms evolving to tolerate, or even break down, the toxins.  (No such hope with radioactivity, unfortunately.)

But despite the dark parts it's a good read, and puts into perspective the effect we've had on the Earth -- and makes even more urgent the case that we need to put the brakes on environmental damage before something really does take our species out for good.