Life out of catastrophe

After yesterday's post about mysterious explosions in distant galaxies, today I want to look at a colossal explosion that happened much, much closer to home -- and may have jump-started life on Earth.

In a paper by Steven Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Florida, presented at a conference last fall in Atlanta, we find out that there's geological evidence that early in Earth's history, there may have been a collision with an enormous object -- by some estimates, the size of the Moon -- that drastically altered the atmosphere.  4.47 billion years ago, only sixty million years after the Earth coalesced from the ring of planetary debris where it originated, it was struck so hard by planetoid that water molecules were ripped apart into oxygen and hydrogen, and superheated metallic debris was flung into the air and generated a torrential rain of molten iron.

Artist's conception of what the collision might have looked like from space

As the atmosphere (and everything else) cooled, the highly reactive oxygen bound to the iron, forming a thick layer of iron (and other metal) oxides that explains their prevalence in the Earth's crust today.  More interesting still is that the collision left behind the hydrogen in the atmosphere.  This created what is called a reducing atmosphere -- a collection of gases with an abundance of free electrons, essentially the opposite of what we have today (an oxidizing atmosphere, where oxygen and other electronegative elements mop up any available electrons, making organic matter and other reduced compounds fall apart).

The reducing atmosphere, Benner says, stuck around for two hundred million years, and it was during this time that the first organic compounds were formed.  This lines up neatly with the famous Miller-Urey experiment, where biochemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey of the University of Chicago showed back in 1952 that in the presence of reducing gases and a source of energy, organic compounds formed readily, including DNA and RNA nitrogenous bases, amino acids, and simple sugars.

Benner believes that the critical one was RNA.  RNA is (as far as we know) unique in that it can not only replicate itself, it's autocatalytic -- it can catalyze its own reactions.  This pull-yourself-up-by-your-shoelaces ability is why a lot of scientists believe that the first genetic material was RNA, not the (currently) more ubiquitous DNA.  And Benner's theory about how the reducing atmosphere was generated explains not only how the building blocks of RNA could have formed, but why the Earth's atmosphere was reducing in the first place.

Benner believes the key is a set of biochemical reactions that involves repeated wetting and drying, along with interaction of the oxygen-free atmosphere with sulfur-containing gases released from volcanic eruptions.  He has demonstrated that in these conditions, formaldehyde -- CH₂O, one of the simplest organic compounds, would form "by the metric ton."  From there, reactions with the sulfur-bearing gases produced hydroxymethanesulfonate, which reacts readily to form glyceraldehyde (a simple sugar) and the four bases of RNA, adenine, cytosine, guanine, and uracil.

Once that happens, the autocatalytic ability of RNA means you're off to the races.  As Richard Dawkins pointed out in his tour-de-force The Blind Watchmaker, if you have two things -- an imperfect replicator, and a selecting mechanism -- you can generate order from disorder in the blink of an eye.  "[M]any experiments have confirmed that once RNA chains begin to grow, they can swap RNA letters and even whole sections with other strands, building complexity, variation, and new chemical functions," said science journalist Robert F. Service, writing for Science magazine.  "[T]he impact scenario implies organic molecules, and possibly RNA and life, could have originated several hundred million years earlier than thought.  That would allow plenty of time for complex cellular life to evolve by the time it shows up in the fossil record at 3.43 billion years ago."

This research not only confirms what Miller and Urey showed in their landmark experiment 67 years ago, but lines up beautifully with what is known from studies by geologists of the earliest rocks.  As for Benner, he's ready to put aside any doubt.  When Ramon Brasser, paleogeologist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, laid out a timeline of the early Earth in his talk at the Atlanta conference, Benner asked him when the atmosphere would have likely dropped below a temperature of 100 C, the boiling point of water.  Brasser indicated a point about fifty million years after the impact with the planetoid.

"That's it, then!" Benner said excitedly, pointing to a spot at about 4.35 billion years ago on the timeline.  "Now we know exactly when RNA emerged. It's there—give or take a few million years."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side.

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore, tells the story of how the element radium -- discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie -- went from being the early 20th century's miracle cure, put in everything from jockstraps to toothpaste, to being recognized as a deadly poison and carcinogen.  At first, it was innocent enough, if scarily unscientific.  The stuff gives off a beautiful greenish glow in the dark; how could that be dangerous?  But then the girls who worked in the factories of Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, which processed most of the radium-laced paints and dyes that were used not only in the crazy commodities I mentioned but in glow-in-the-dark clock and watch dials, started falling ill.  Their hair fell out, their bones ached... and they died.

But capitalism being what it is, the owners of the company couldn't, or wouldn't, consider the possibility that their precious element was what was causing the problem.  It didn't help that the girls themselves were mostly poor, not to mention the fact that back then, women's voices were routinely ignored in just about every realm.  Eventually it was stopped, and radium only processed by people using significant protective equipment,  but only after the deaths of hundreds of young women.

The story is fascinating and horrifying.  Moore's prose is captivating -- and if you don't feel enraged while you're reading it, you have a heart of stone.

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

Examining the Cow

Today's intriguing mystery comes from the realm of astronomy, with a colossal explosion in a distant galaxy that has scientists scratching their heads with puzzlement.

Nicknamed "the Cow" -- after its official name, AT2018cow -- it was so bright that initially astronomers thought it must be a nearer (and dimmer) phenomenon, possibly a flare-up of a white dwarf star after having engulfed material from a nearby companion star.  But analysis of the red shift of the light coming from the explosion shows that it's 200 million light years away -- so lies in a distant galaxy that at first was thought to be behind it.

This means that it was phenomenally bright.  Its peak luminosity was equivalent to a hundred billion Suns -- a good ten times brighter than the brightest supernova ever observed.

"The Cow" -- initial appearance (left), peak brightness (middle), and waning (right)

The Cow first appeared on June 16, 2018, and literally was not there one day and shining like a beacon the next.  Astronomers say this rules out a supernova, the most common cause of sudden increases in brightness, because supernovae -- contrary to how they're depicted in science fiction movies -- show a more gradual increase in brightness.  More puzzling still, the Cow continued to increase in brightness over a period of three weeks following its appearance.  This meant that there was something continuing to power the explosion after the initial kaboom, but what that something is, no one has been able to figure out.

This is despite intensive study.  "When we saw that, we thought, 'let's get on with it,'" said Daniel Perley, astronomer at Liverpool John Moores University in the United Kingdom.  "We dropped everything in the first two weeks, observing it seven times a night."

Even more curious is that the phenomenon, whatever it is, produced radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, including a strong signal in the ultraviolet and x-ray regions.  But after three weeks, the x-ray emissions started to fluctuate wildly, and the intensity across the entire spectrum started to weaken.  Within six weeks, it was back to being entirely invisible.

One possibility is that it was a supernova surrounded by a thick gas cloud.  The initial brightening after the supernova's first burst of emissions was augmented when the shock wave hit the gas cloud, warming it up and causing it to glow.  The brightening continued as the shock wave plunged through, only diminishing when it reached the outer edges.

But that's only a speculative solution.  Other possibilities include the birth of a black hole or a white dwarf being swallowed by a neutron star.  But none of these align perfectly with the data.  "All of our explanations have problems," said Liliana Rivera Sandoval, astronomer at Texas Tech University.  "It's super weird."

The problem, of course, is these one-off phenomena -- events that occur so rarely that the chance of another one happening in our lifetime is small indeed -- give scientists scanty information at best, and no repeated data set with which to compare the initial measurements.  "I hope there are more Cows," Sandoval said, but the likelihood of that is pretty slim.  So now what we have is one six-week data set, with no way to test any theories against subsequent observations.

"The bright transient AT2018cow has been unlike any other known type of transient," write the research team in a paper published in arXiv last August.  "Its large brightness, rapid rise and decay and initially nearly featureless spectrum are unprecedented and difficult to explain using models for similar burst sources."

Frustrating, but that's the way science is, especially with the realms of science that do not allow for replication, such as astronomy, paleontology, and geology.  All you can do is use what information you have to generate hypotheses about what is going on, and see which one fits best.  After that, nothing much can be done except for waiting and hoping for more data.

So that's this week's puzzle.  A colossal explosion in a distant galaxy that is proving to have no easy explanation.  I don't know about you, but when I read stuff like this, it makes me feel awfully small and insignificant.  Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; there's nothing wrong with a good dose of humility.  But the idea that we have observed a mysterious unexplained phenomenon shining with the light of a hundred billion Suns, from a distance of two hundred million light years, boggles my mind with the sheer scale.

Such a big universe, and so much still to learn.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side.

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore, tells the story of how the element radium -- discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie -- went from being the early 20th century's miracle cure, put in everything from jockstraps to toothpaste, to being recognized as a deadly poison and carcinogen.  At first, it was innocent enough, if scarily unscientific.  The stuff gives off a beautiful greenish glow in the dark; how could that be dangerous?  But then the girls who worked in the factories of Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, which processed most of the radium-laced paints and dyes that were used not only in the crazy commodities I mentioned but in glow-in-the-dark clock and watch dials, started falling ill.  Their hair fell out, their bones ached... and they died.

But capitalism being what it is, the owners of the company couldn't, or wouldn't, consider the possibility that their precious element was what was causing the problem.  It didn't help that the girls themselves were mostly poor, not to mention the fact that back then, women's voices were routinely ignored in just about every realm.  Eventually it was stopped, and radium only processed by people using significant protective equipment,  but only after the deaths of hundreds of young women.

The story is fascinating and horrifying.  Moore's prose is captivating -- and if you don't feel enraged while you're reading it, you have a heart of stone.

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

One ringy-dingy...

It will come as no particular shock to people who know me well that I loathe telephones.

I'm not exactly sure why, other than my general introversion.  I will go to significant lengths not to call people on the phone, preferring alternative methods like sending a letter via Pony Express.  When someone calls me, my reaction to the phone ringing is annoyance.  It's like Pavlov's dog, except instead of salivating when the bell rings, I swear loudly.

So it's unsurprising that I resisted getting a cellphone for years.  I hate having phones at home; the last thing I wanted to do was carry one around with me 24/7.  Having a cellphone with me while I'm relaxing on vacation is about as appealing as bringing along a dentist so while I'm lounging on the beach, he can do a little impromptu root canal.

I had one of those old flip phones for a while, which (for me) had the advantage that it had lousy reception, and only occasionally worked.  I also liked that it looked like the communicators on the original Star Trek, and I was sometimes known to flip it open and say, "Beam me up, Scotty," to whoever was calling.

At least I found it funny.

The problem was, I so seldom used it that I never could remember my voicemail password, and in fact, for a long time, I didn't even know my own phone number.  I recall being at the doctor's office, and they were updating my paperwork, and they asked for my cellphone number.  I said I couldn't remember.  The secretary gave me the slow single-eyebrow-raise, and said, "But you do have a cellphone, sir?"  I said, "Yeah, but I never call it, now do I?  So how would I know what the number is?"

From her expression, it was clear she didn't understand what a battle it was even to get me to carry it.  Remembering my phone number was just a bridge too far.

But a couple of years ago, after much cajoling from my wife and friends, I got an iPhone.  And I will admit that there are times it comes in handy.  I like having the GPS capability, even though I wish I could change the computerized voice that gives the directions to, say, Alan Rickman as Snape:

Me: *takes a wrong turn*
Snape voice:  "Why do I bother trying to tell you anything?  You are either deaf or hopelessly stupid.  So now you're lost.  Don't look to me to get you back on track."

Also, I can do essential things like checking to see how many "likes" I have on my last criticism and/or ridicule of Donald Trump on Twitter, and also how many profanity-laced, spittle-flecked responses I got from the #MAGA crowd.

Simple pleasures.

Anyhow, all this comes up because of an article over at the Financial Post, wherein I learned that my acquiescing to getting an iPhone has another downside:

It's going to inform the Antichrist of my whereabouts in the event of the End Times.

This pronouncement came this week from Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.  "The church does not oppose technological progress," Kirill said in an interview on Russian state television, "but I am concerned that someone can know exactly where you are, know exactly what you are interested in, know exactly what you are afraid of, and that such information could be used for centralized control of the world.  Control from one point is a foreshadowing of the coming of Antichrist, if we talk about the Christian view.  Antichrist is the person who will be at the head of the world wide web that controls the entire human race."

I have to admit that I'm with Kirill in the sense that social media's ability to parse my likes and dislikes and demographics and affiliations from my clicks is a little unsettling.  For example, I'm bombarded by advertisements for running gear and scientific gadgetry -- even on sites I've never gone to before.  Most alarming, though, was a conversation that took place with my wife while I had my iPhone in my pocket, about people who dress their dogs up in costumes, in which I mentioned offhand that we should get an AT-AT costume for our coonhound Lena, that her long skinny legs would be perfect for the part.

I got on my computer when I got home, and the first thing I saw on Facebook was...

... an advertisement for AT-AT suits for dogs.

So apparently the Christmas carol about "he sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake" is not taking about Santa Claus, it's talking about Mark Zuckerberg.

Anyhow, I'm not all that worried about the Antichrist.  First, I'm an atheist, so I kind of doubt he exists in the first place.  Second, if I'm wrong and the Antichrist exists, it's not like I'd be that hard to find even if I didn't have an iPhone.  I'm kind of hiding in plain sight, you know?

Third, I'm not really sure why he'd want to find me anyhow.  I don't think I'd be that useful to an evil entity intent on taking over the world, unless for some reason the evil entity had a burning desire to learn about the Krebs Cycle.

So there's our news from the fringe for today.  Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I gotta go check my Twitter app for the latest likes and hate-tweets.  Antichrist or no Antichrist, I gotta keep up with my public.

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Carl Zimmer has been a science writer for a long time, and his contributions -- mostly on the topic of evolution -- have been featured in National Geographic, Discover, and The New York Times, not to mention appearances on Fresh Air, This American Life, and Radiolab.  He's the author of this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation, which is about the connections between genetics, behavior, and human evolution -- She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potentials of Heredity.

Zimmer's lucid, eloquent style makes this book accessible to the layperson, and he not only looks at the science of genetics but its impact on society -- such as our current infatuation with personal DNA tests such as the ones offered by 23 & Me and Ancestry.  It's a brilliant read, and one in which you'll learn not only about our deep connection to our ancestry, but where humanity might be headed.

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

Why the short face?

Given my background in genetics, it's mildly amusing to me that there are people who think humans are somehow qualitatively different than all other animals.

Or it would be, if it weren't for the fact that many of these people are trying to drive their views into science curricula.

We had one more nail in the coffin of the idea that humans can claim to be a separate type of creature from every other species of animal just last week, when a paper was published in Science showing that the genetic error that causes Robinow syndrome -- a rare disorder in which affected individuals show stunting of growth, bowed legs, large, widely-spaced eyes, flat, rounded faces, vertebral malformation, and shortened lifespan -- is the same as the genetic error that causes nearly identical symptoms in bulldogs and Boston terriers.

The brachycephalic (short-faced) dog breeds are notorious for having health problems.  English bulldogs have an average lifespan of only eleven years, and are plagued with issues like skin problems and heart abnormalities.  My beloved rescue dog Grendel, who died last year of kidney failure at age eleven, was not only brachycephalic but the same basic shape as a fireplug, so I'm afraid he inherited his sadly truncated lifespan from his flat-faced ancestors.

A team of geneticists at the University of California-Davis published a paper called, "Whole Genome Variant Association Across 100 Dogs Identifies a Frameshift Mutation in DISHEVELLED 2 Which Contributes to Robinow-like Syndrome in Bulldogs and Related Screw Tail Dog Breeds," where we learn that errors in DISHEVELLED2 (DVL2), a homeotic (developmental) gene found in all mammalian species studied, show essentially the same effects whether they occurs in dogs or humans.

Team member Sara Konopelski discovered that DVL2 is essential for a developmental pathway that influences the growth of the fetal skeleton and nervous system.  From there, the researchers looked at individuals (both human and canine) who have malfunctions in this gene.  Mutations in DVL2 -- common in dogs, rare in humans -- create a roadblock in that pathway, and trigger a set of distinct changes in body structure.

The interesting thing is that this mutation is considered deleterious in humans (and is, honestly, deleterious in dogs as well), but because of artificial selection, we now have breeds in which 100% have DVL2 errors.  The authors write:

Some dog breeds are characterized by extreme morphological differences from their ancestor, the wolf.  One group of three breeds (Bulldog, French Bulldog and Boston Terrier) is characterized by a wide head, short muzzle, widely spaced eyes, small size and abnormalities of the vertebral bones of the back and tail.  These breeds are referred to as the screw tail breeds since the characteristic that is unique and easy to see in these breeds is their shortened and kinked tails.  These breeds have become increasingly popular as pet dogs, although they have health issues associated with their morphology.  We analyzed the genome sequences of 100 dogs, including 10 screw tail dogs, and identified all the genetic differences between those dogs.  We then compared these differences to identify changes in the DNA sequences associated with screw tail.  The mutation and the affected gene identified are very similar to the types of mutations that have been shown to be responsible for a rare human disorder with similar clinical abnormalities, called Robinow syndrome.  We demonstrate that the dog mutation makes an altered protein that affects an important cell-cell communication system crucial for tissue development.

So unsurprisingly, our kinship with the rest of Kingdom Animalia can be demonstrated not only by the overlap between the genomes themselves -- after all, you share 84% of your DNA with your dog -- but the fact that changes in the code affect different species the same way.  This is a little hard to explain if you don't buy common ancestry.  But hell, if you haven't accepted common ancestry for a plethora of other reasons, it's probably a forlorn hope that this would convince you.

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Carl Zimmer has been a science writer for a long time, and his contributions -- mostly on the topic of evolution -- have been featured in National Geographic, Discover, and The New York Times, not to mention appearances on Fresh Air, This American Life, and Radiolab.  He's the author of this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation, which is about the connections between genetics, behavior, and human evolution -- She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potentials of Heredity.

Zimmer's lucid, eloquent style makes this book accessible to the layperson, and he not only looks at the science of genetics but its impact on society -- such as our current infatuation with personal DNA tests such as the ones offered by 23 & Me and Ancestry.  It's a brilliant read, and one in which you'll learn not only about our deep connection to our ancestry, but where humanity might be headed.

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

Turning bigotry into law

I'm going to make a categorical statement: if you approve of discrimination toward, or actual violence against, a person based on something completely outside of their control, you have lost all claim to the moral high ground.

This comes up because of a quote from Mat Staver, evangelical spokesperson and president of the Liberty Counsel, that the landmark anti-lynching bill currently being considered in Congress should be amended to eliminate the mention of LGBTQ people as targets.

"The old saying is once that camel gets the nose in the tent, you can’t stop them from coming the rest of the way in," Staver wrote in a statement.  "And this would be the first time that you would have in federal law mentioning gender identity and sexual orientation, as part of this anti-lynching bill... They’ve been unsuccessful over the many years in the past… but this is a way to slip it in under a so-called anti-lynching bill, and to then to sort of circle the wagon and then go for the juggler [sic] at some time in the future."

The Liberty Counsel is notorious for pushing specifically anti-LGBTQ legislation, and in fact is labeled as an "extremist group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.  If you think that Staver's comment was a one-off, consider some of the other vitriol that's come out of the same organization:

Homosexual conduct can result in significant damage to those involved who engage in such conduct. There is no evidence that a person is born homosexual. And there is evidence that people can change. Our culture is being pressured with demands that our homes welcome, our daycares embrace, our schools indoctrinate, our businesses promote, and our laws reward this harmful sexual behavior. – Liberty Counsel website, “Resources on the Family,” 2015. 

Every individual engaged in the homosexual lifestyle, who has adopted a homosexual identity, they know intuitively that what they are doing is immoral, unnatural, and self-destructive. Yet they thirst for that affirmation because they've tied their whole identity up in this sexual perversion. —Matt Barber, “Faith and Freedom Radio,” September 2013. 

We are facing the survival of western values, western civilization. ... One of the most significant threats to our freedom is in the area of sexual anarchy with the agenda of the homosexual movement, the so-called LGBT movement. It does several things, first of all it undermines family and the very first building block of our society, but secondly, it’s a zero sum game as well and it’s a direct assault on our religious freedom and freedom of speech. —Mat Staver, October 2011, Values Voter Summit

And so on.

Beyond the simple cruel inhumanity of these people, what they are saying is at its basis entirely false.  A study published in The Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences all the way back in 2006 has unequivocally shown that sexual orientation -- and gender in general -- is in no way a "choice."  The researchers write:

[T]here are two lines of evidence that homosexuality is influenced by polymorphic genes: (i) twin studies indicate that there are both genetic and environmental factors that contribute to the expression of the homosexual phenotype (Pillard & Bailey 1998; Bailey et al. 1999; Dawood et al. 2000), and (ii) male homosexuality appears to be inherited more frequently from the matriline (Pillard et al. 1981, 1982; Pattatucci 1998; Camperio-Ciani et al. 2004), suggesting the existence of polymorphic, heritable maternal effects and/or polymorphic X-linked genes influencing male homosexuality.

In another study released in November of last year, analysis of a huge sample size of men and women found stronger evidence still:

In a large study of more than 490,000 men and women in the United States, United Kingdom and Sweden, researchers discovered four genetic variants that occur more often in people who indicated on questionnaires that they had had same-sex sexual partners.  Andrea Ganna, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard reported the results October 19 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics.  Two of the variants were specific to men’s sexual partner choice. The other two influence sex partner choice for both men and women.

Besides this evidence, the idea that being LGBTQ is a choice is ridiculous on two other grounds.  First, if someone chooses to be (for example) gay, wouldn't that imply that straight people are choosing that, too?  I defy you to find a single straight person who hit puberty and then sat there thinking, "Let's see, men?  Women?  Hmm, how shall I choose?"

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

But second, who in their right mind would choose being LGBTQ when there are assholes like Mat Staver and Matt Barber explicitly calling for discrimination against non-hetero individuals, and tacitly approving of violence against them?  LGBTQ individual have higher rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide, and are likely to be shunned by their families once they've come out.  In some societies -- like many places in the Middle East -- being discovered as LGBTQ means you're likely to be targeted for murder (if you're not arrested by the state for "immoral behavior" and executed in the public square, something that happens routinely in Iran and Saudi Arabia).

The one happy note in all this is that evangelical Christianity of the kind espoused by Staver and Barber is declining both in numbers and in influence.  Some have attributed this to their tying themselves irrevocably to Donald Trump -- witness Jerry Falwell Jr.'s recent statement that he "can't imagine President Trump doing anything that is not good for the country" -- a move that I think of as hitching their rowboat to the Titanic.  But it goes beyond that.  As Dr. Ken Fong, Baptist pastor and professor emeritus at Fuller Theological Seminary, put it in an interview in Forbes,  "White evangelical leaders were in bed with conservative politics long before Trump became President—notably the late Rev. Jerry Falwell and The Moral Majority.  However, the fact that so many of them and their followers not only helped elect Trump in 2016 but continue to be his most unflinching fans has exposed their moral hypocrisy for all to see."

Not only their hypocrisy, but their innate cruelty.  I can only hope that more and more people are seeing people like Staver for who they are -- vicious, narrow-minded bigots who want their own prejudices enshrined in law.  And that their followers one by one fall away, once they realize that their leaders' message is founded on nothing but hate.

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

Carl Zimmer has been a science writer for a long time, and his contributions -- mostly on the topic of evolution -- have been featured in National Geographic, Discover, and The New York Times, not to mention appearances on Fresh Air, This American Life, and Radiolab.  He's the author of this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation, which is about the connections between genetics, behavior, and human evolution -- She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potentials of Heredity.

Zimmer's lucid, eloquent style makes this book accessible to the layperson, and he not only looks at the science of genetics but its impact on society -- such as our current infatuation with personal DNA tests such as the ones offered by 23 & Me and Ancestry.  It's a brilliant read, and one in which you'll learn not only about our deep connection to our ancestry, but where humanity might be headed.

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

Talking to your clothes

There's no woo-woo belief that is so silly that someone can't tinker with it and make it a whole lot sillier.

So, let's start with psychometry, the idea that people leave "psychic traces" on objects that they handle.  Supposedly, these traces are especially strong if the object was handled by someone in an elevated emotional state.  And the idea is that for psychically-sensitive people (whatever that means), those traces can be detected.

Okay, so not so different than the other kinds of psychic woo-woo -- clairvoyance, telepathy, precognitive dreams, and so forth.  But thanks to one of my sharp-eyed Critical Thinking students, we have the story of a woman named Roxanne Usleman, whose hobby is going to thrift stores so she can handle clothing and find out about the people who owned them.

Usleman is featured in a video wherein she goes to Marmalade Vintage Clothing Store and leads the shop owner around making commentary.  Here is how she describes what she does:

[Clothes] communicate completely different than we do on the Earth, kind of a different language. I work, like, as a translator, basically, as the information comes through I translate it into an Earth form, a three dimension form, where mortal beings can understand it... When I was woke up in the middle of the night, the clothes are, like, speaking, and they have a history about them, a need to communicate something that happened.

My own clothes don't seem to communicate anything much to me, except for occasionally the important messages "WASH ME" and "Do you really think that shirt matches these pants?  Seriously?" and "Don't you know how to use an iron?"  But maybe I just don't speak the "language."  Be that as it may, Usleman then goes on to feel up various pieces of clothing, and finds a dress about which she says the following:

Whoever had owned this before, when she had passed away this dress was near her when she had passed away. So there's something she needs to talk about, it's as if the end of her life did not end in a positive way. It was very sudden. Whoever had gotten the dress after, and wore it, immediately gave it away because they didn't want the energy in it.

The shopkeeper then chimes in:

That is true. I don't know who is the owner, but somebody bought this as a gift for my sister. And she didn't ever wear it, she didn't want it, so she gave it to me.

And Usleman is just tickled pink about this, and squeaks, and says, "Ooh, so we have a verification!"

Because of course it couldn't be that the sister didn't like it because it's a butt-ugly dress. No, it has to be the "energies."

Then Usleman says that last night she got a communiqué from a "Laura" and she wanders around the shop to find something that "Laura" owned.  And she finds yet another butt-ugly item, this time a bracelet shaped like a snake with red eyes, and says that this was once owned by "Laura."  Metal, Usleman explains, holds the "energy" of the first person who owned it even better than cloth does.  "Whoever buys this bracelet," Usleman says, "it will be unimaginable, the power.  It will bring them a lot of luck."

Fur, on the other hand, is more difficult, because "the animal is so strong in the fur that it's difficult to connect to the human."  Because of this, you don't pick a fur, the fur picks you.  If it's the wrong person for the fur, "the fur repels them, they'll pass right by it, they may not even see it."

I wonder what these clothes are saying?  Probably, "Frills are way more important than comfort."  [Image is in the Public Domain]

What gets me about this, more than Usleman's dog-and-pony show (because that is pretty clearly all about publicity, and ultimately, money) is why anyone with an IQ that exceeds today's high temperature in Labrador would fall for it.  It's not, as the student who found it pointed out, like the clothing is going to speak up and say, "Um, excuse me.  Actually the woman who owned me was named Muriel, and she's still alive, and donated me to this shop because I am truly hideous."  Psychometry, especially of this sort, falls outside of the realm of the even potentially verifiable, given that clothing in second-hand shops doesn't usually come with a printed ownership history attached.

You really should, however, watch the video, which is under three minutes long.  Usleman's delivery is somewhere between hilarious and grating; she has a Valley-Girl-style flip upwards at the end of each sentence, as if she was asking a question when she's not?  Every single time?  You know?  She also uses the word "like" a lot, which definitely adds to the overall effect.  Nevertheless, after doing a little research, I found out that she's apparently a hugely popular psychic, with a thriving business doing psychic readings.  On the flip side, however, she was one of the psychics whose predictions were analyzed by astro/geophysicist and pseudoscience debunker Stuart Robbins, and he found, unsurprisingly, that "these 'professionals' are NOT capable of telling the future any better than you or I, and some of them are in fact far worse."

Yet people still give her money for her "psychic abilities."  Which, frankly, baffles me.

So, that's today's contribution from the world of woo-woo.  I'd like to give a shout-out to the student who sent me Usleman's video; this young lady has a truly fine skeptical mind, of the kind that is a pleasure to teach.  As for me, it's time to go get ready for work, or at least that's what my clothes are communicating with me.  Right now they're saying, "Hey!  You!  You can't just sit around in your bathrobe all day, messing about on the computer!  Get your lazy ass in gear!  But please take a shower before you put us on, okay?  Yeah.  Thanks."

Damn snarky clothes.  Maybe I'll switch to wearing fur, if I can find one that wants me.

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Carl Zimmer has been a science writer for a long time, and his contributions -- mostly on the topic of evolution -- have been featured in National Geographic, Discover, and The New York Times, not to mention appearances on Fresh Air, This American Life, and Radiolab.  He's the author of this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation, which is about the connections between genetics, behavior, and human evolution -- She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potentials of Heredity.

Zimmer's lucid, eloquent style makes this book accessible to the layperson, and he not only looks at the science of genetics but its impact on society -- such as our current infatuation with personal DNA tests such as the ones offered by 23 & Me and Ancestry.  It's a brilliant read, and one in which you'll learn not only about our deep connection to our ancestry, but where humanity might be headed.

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

Science shorts

Today, I want to look at some awesome shorts that were too good to pass up.

No, not that kind.

In the last couple of days I found three recent bits of research that are just plain cool, and I couldn't resist sharing them with you.

First, we have a new discovery out of China showing that flowering plants were around a great deal earlier than we'd thought -- the early Jurassic Period, 174 million years ago.  This pushes back the earliest evidence of flowering plants by a good fifty million years!

Called Nanjinganthus dendrostyla, this little flower grew during a time when we'd thought there was nothing much around, botanically speaking, but gymnosperms (relatives of today's spruces, firs, and pines), ferns, and other more primitive plants.  But a fantastically well-preserved group of fossils has shown that they shared the space with some of the earliest angiosperms, or flowering plants.

One of the Nanjinganthus dendrostyla fossils 

After careful microscopic analysis of the flower, the researchers put it together like this:

So cool, even if it's not something you'd necessarily want as the centerpiece of your garden.

The significance of the discovery goes beyond its age.  There are some other features that bear mention, as is described over at the blog In Defense of Plants (linked above):

Another surprising feature is the presence of an inferior ovary that, by its very definition, sits below the sepals and petals.  It has long been hypothesized that early angiosperms would exhibit superior ovaries so this discovery means that we must rethink our expectations of how flowers evolved.  For instance, it suggests we may not be able to make broad inferences on the past based on what we see in extant angiosperm lineages.  It could also suggest that the origin of flowering plants was not a single event but rather a series of individual occurrences.  It could also be the case that the origin of flowering plants occurred much earlier than the Jurassic and that Nanjinganthus represents one of many derived forms.  Only further study and more fossils can help us answer such questions.

The second story comes from zoology, and it concerns eyeless cave fish -- fish whose ancestors were trapped in dark caves, and evolved to lose their visual sense.  There's a fundamental misunderstanding that a lot of people have about these species, usually centering around the Lamarckian view that the fish lost their eyes "because they didn't need them any more."  The actual truth of the matter seems to be that if you're in perpetual darkness, using a lot of your energy to produce and maintain a structure as complex and delicate as the eye would be a waste, and diverting those resources to other, more useful purposes is a significant advantage.  It's a subtle point, but an important one.

In any case, this current research turns on two questions -- how cave fish navigate their habitat, and why they have asymmetrical faces -- a curiosity that they share with blind cave crickets.

It turns out that the two questions are related.  The convex side of the fish's skull contains more neuromasts, organs that are not only tactile sensors but give fish information about vibrations and water speed and direction.  All fish have these, but blind fish rely on them to create a mental map of their habitat.  Researchers found that most of the fish have skulls that bend slightly to the left, meaning they're getting tactile input mostly from the right.  And just as you expect, the fish whose skull bends to the left keep their right side in close contact to the walls, and tend to move counterclockwise around their habitat -- and the right-bending fish move the opposite way!

The whole thing brings to mind an article that appeared many years ago in the inimitable science spoof The Journal of Irreproducible Results, describing a little mammal called the Sidehill Gouger that has two short legs on one side and two long legs on the other, so it can stand upright on hillsides.  Thus, like our cave fish, some Sidehill Gougers always travel clockwise, and others counterclockwise.  The article goes into the genetics of the trait, describing how the offspring of a right and a left-handed Gouger produces some of each, but heterozygous individuals end up with diagonally opposite short legs.

They're called "Rockers."

I doubt there's any analog in the cave fish, but it's interesting and more than a little ironic that a piece from JIR actually ended up within hailing distance of reality.


The last story puts to rest the idea that scientists don't know how to have fun.  A couple of mechanical engineers from Boston University, Alexandros Oratis and James Bird, published some research this week in Physical Review Letters describing the physics of shooting a rubber band -- and how to optimize your strategy so it goes straight and doesn't smack your thumb on the way out.

After filming rubber band shooting with an ultra-high-speed camera, what Oratis and Bird found was that when it comes to tension, less is more.  When the rubber band is released, the release of tension in the band zooms forward, and the back end of the band follows, but at a slower speed.  When the tension release reaches your thumb, it allows your thumb to snap forward, dodging the band as it passes.  If you pull too hard, the speed of the tension release is higher, and it's simply too fast for your thumb to duck out of the way.  The result: you give yourself a nice stinging smack.

Wider rubber bands also work better, and for a similar reason; they have a higher tension, so when that's released, your thumb jerks forward more quickly.

Me, I wonder how many times Oratis and Bird popped each other with rubber bands while doing this research.


So there you have it.  Rubber band war strategy, lopsided cave fish, and extremely early flowers.  All of which illustrate what I've claimed all along: science is fun.

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

Carl Zimmer has been a science writer for a long time, and his contributions -- mostly on the topic of evolution -- have been featured in National Geographic, Discover, and The New York Times, not to mention appearances on Fresh Air, This American Life, and Radiolab.  He's the author of this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation, which is about the connections between genetics, behavior, and human evolution -- She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potentials of Heredity.

Zimmer's lucid, eloquent style makes this book accessible to the layperson, and he not only looks at the science of genetics but its impact on society -- such as our current infatuation with personal DNA tests such as the ones offered by 23 & Me and Ancestry.  It's a brilliant read, and one in which you'll learn not only about our deep connection to our ancestry, but where humanity might be headed.

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