Jungles in Antarctica

It's hard to imagine Antarctica as anything but a frozen wasteland.  Bitterly cold even in summer, barely any precipitation (if it were warmer, Antarctica would be classified as a desert), much of the continent buried under a sheet of ice hundreds of feet thick.  The central "dry valleys" of Antarctica were used as a proving ground for the Mars rovers -- because it was the place on Earth that's the most like Mars.

It's kind of cool that H. P. Lovecraft, writing early in the twentieth century, recognized that this icy and inhospitable land might not always have been that way.  In one of his best short stories, "At the Mountains of Madness," we find out that the continent was once inhabited.  And by "once," I mean tens of millions of years ago, long before Homo sapiens appeared on the African savanna.  The denizens of the place -- the "Elder Things" -- were bizarre beasts with five-way symmetry and brains far more advanced than ours, and they built colossal edifices (invariably described as "eldritch") which, in the context of the story, are the subject of a scientific investigation.

And being that this is Lovecraft we're talking about, it did not end well.

Even more interesting is his story "The Shadow Out of Time," wherein we find out that the Elder Things amassed the information they have by using their eldritch (of course) technology to switch bodies -- they can flip their consciousness with a member of another sentient species anywhere in time and space, spend a year or two learning about the species and its culture, then flip back and write down what they found out.  And pertinent to the current topic, Lovecraft describes the Elder Things as living in Antarctica a hundred million years ago, at which time the frozen continent was a warm, lush, humid jungle.

Lovecraft's prescience was shown when plate tectonics was discovered, twenty years after the author's death.  Antarctica wasn't always centered at the South Pole, and in fact had drifted in that direction from somewhere far nearer to the equator.  Fossils of temperate-climate organisms were found in abundance, indicating that the climate had shifted dramatically.  And just last week, paleontologists working collaboratively between the University of Washington and the University of Witswatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa) published a paper about an Antarctic fossil archosaur -- a group related to the earliest dinosaurs -- from 250 million years ago.

"A Novel Archosauromorph From Antarctica and an Updated Review of a High-Latitude Vertebrate Assemblage in the Wake of the End-Permian Mass Extinction," by Brandon Peecook and Christian Sidor of the University of Washington and Roger Smith of the University of Witwatersrand, describes a new species and genus of dinosaurs -- Antarctanax shackletoni, touchingly named after Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, which was around in the very early Triassic.  This puts it at the point where dinosaurs were just beginning to diversify following the largest mass extinction in Earth's history, wherein an estimated 95% of species died.

"This new animal was... an early relative of crocodiles and dinosaurs," said Brandon Peecook, lead study author and Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago) researcher.  "On its own, it just looks a little like a lizard, but evolutionarily, it's one of the first members of that big group.  It tells us how dinosaurs and their closest relatives evolved and spread."

The A. shackletoni fossil, from 250 million years ago

What's most interesting about it is how different it is from other archosaurs of the time.  "The more we find out about prehistoric Antarctica, the weirder it is," Peecook said.  "We thought that Antarctic animals would be similar to the ones that were living in southern Africa, since those landmasses were joined back then.  But we're finding that Antarctica's wildlife is surprisingly unique."

As befits the strangeness of the continent itself.  But it's a cool discovery nonetheless.  I find it intriguing to picture what it was like in the distant past -- and the more we find out about it, the more we show the truth of the old adage that "there is nothing as constant as change."  My imagination balks at thinking of Antarctica as a jungle, but we're finding that Lovecraft's imagined picture of the paleoclimate of the frozen continent was spot-on.  I just hope he was wrong about the Elder Things and their pet Shoggoths.  Because those things are freakin' creepy.

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

In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England.  Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting.  He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding.  It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down.  This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

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

Going down with the ship

This past week I've been watching with frank bafflement as Donald Trump and his cronies try to steer their ship back into the harbor of evangelical Christianity, after a month that has been, all things considered, disastrous for this administration.  A government shutdown accomplished nothing but losing a shitload of money, and ended with Trump receiving a big old dent in his "I'm a champion negotiator who always gets what he wants" persona.  His support is dwindling in pretty much any demographic you choose, and one of his staunchest supporters -- Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell -- gave his own party an inadvertent punch in the balls a couple of days ago by admitting publicly that if it were easier for American citizens to vote, more Democrats would win.

In other words, his strategy for Republican victory is voter disenfranchisement.

All in all, it's been a tough month for the Right, so I suppose it's only natural they'd retreat toward a group who has been doggedly loyal -- the evangelical Christians.  First we had a rather baffling non sequitur from Trump himself, that there were efforts in "many states" to have biblical literacy classes in public schools.  "Starting to make a turn back?" he said on Twitter (of course).  "Great!"

Then we had White House Spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying that God "wanted Donald Trump to become president."  "I think he has done a tremendous job in supporting a lot of the things that people of faith really care about," Sanders said.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

As I said, on the one hand, this is a pretty logical strategy; the ship is foundering, so hitch it to the solidest thing you have handy.  But on a deeper level, it's puzzling that anyone who claims to believe in the basic tenets of Christianity could still support Trump and his policies.  The bible's kind of unequivocal on a few points, you know?  Love thy neighbor as thyself.  Care for the poor and oppressed.  Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Then there's that awkward "judge not, lest ye be judged" part, most poignantly described in Matthew 7:5: "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."

But more peculiar still is that the Religious Right continues to think that Trump is the next best thing to the Second Coming of Christ, despite his being a serial adulterer who lies every time his mouth is open and whose biggest claim to fame is embodying all Seven Deadly Sins in one person.  The pastor of the church Trump at least nominally belongs to said last week, "I assure you, he had the ‘option’ to come to Bible study.  He never ‘opted’ in.  Nor did he ever actually enter the church doors.  Not one time."  So Trump's crowing about bible studies classes in public schools is kind of strange, especially considering that during the campaign in 2015 he said that the bible was his favorite book, but when pressed couldn't remember a single quotation from it.

I mean, hell, I'm an atheist and I'd have been able to come up with something on the fly.  Maybe a verse from Two Corinthians, I dunno.

But Sarah Huckabee Sanders's comment is the one that bugs me the most, because it's obvious that she (and presumably a lot of other evangelicals) don't see what thin ice they're skating on when they start claiming to know the divine will.  How does she know that God wanted Trump to win?  Because he did, obviously.  So I guess God also wanted Obama to win.  Two terms, no less.  Any time you say something's God's will simply because it happened, you're going to have some explaining to do.  Did God intend the Holocaust?  The Stalinist purges?  The massacre of Native Americans by the European colonists?  The Inquisition?  Frankly, I'd be happier with a shrug of the shoulders and the response, "God works in mysterious ways" than I am hearing that God actually intended the horrible deaths of millions of innocent people at the hands of amoral monsters.

So I don't get how even people who buy the main tenets of Christianity can stand there and nod when Sarah Huckabee Sanders says she has a direct pipeline to the divine will.  Or when evangelist Franklin Graham says that he can excuse the 8,100-plus documented, fact-checked lies that Donald Trump has uttered because "the president is trying to do the best that he can under very difficult circumstances."

If I didn't know better, I'd think that the Religious Right was callously and cynically supporting the Trump presidency because it achieves their ends -- pro-life legislation, eliminating equal rights for LGBTQ people, and ensuring the hegemony of white Christians -- and honestly don't give a rat's ass whether the president himself is Christian, or even moral.

I know it's presumptuous of me to try to parse the motives of a group whose beliefs I don't accept, but the whole thing still strikes me as baffling.  I keep wondering when the Religious Right will finally say, "Enough with this guy already," but at this point, I don't think it's going to happen.  I can't help but think that this strategy is going to backfire badly, and sooner rather than later.  People are at some point going to wise up and start asking how they can support this administration and still claim to be the moral arbiters of the United States, notwithstanding any kind of mealy-mouthed "God can work with a broken tool" nonsense.

The evangelicals, I think, are in the unenviable position of having hitched their rowboat to the Titanic.

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

In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England.  Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting.  He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding.  It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down.  This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

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

Alien ranch sale

If you think you've got problems, at least you're not trying to get rid of a huge Arizona ranch at a $1.5 million loss because you're sick and tired of being attacked by aliens.

At least that's the claim of John Edmonds, whose land in Buckeye, Arizona, about an hour and a half from Phoenix, has (he says) been the site of a huge amount of extraterrestrial activity.  He and his wife foiled an attempted kidnapping, and over the twenty years they've been there, he's killed eighteen "Grays."

With a samurai sword.

I'm torn between thinking this is idiotic and completely badass.  I mean, if I knew I was under siege by hostile aliens, I'd probably arm myself with more than a sword.  Especially if I lived in Arizona, where everyone over the age of two is packing heat.  And you'd also think the aliens would be armed, wouldn't you?  Laser pistols are a lot more accurate, long-range, than samurai swords, unless you're a Stormtrooper, in which case it probably doesn't matter either way.

What's oddest about the samurai sword thing is that the guy says he owns an AK-47, which he used to defend his family when the aliens tried to abduct his wife.  She barely escaped -- "it came down like a cone of light," Edmonds says, "and she began to rise up in to the cone...  So I grabbed my AK-47 with a double banana clip in it, went outside, and opened up."  So apparently if your spouse is being levitated into the air by a tractor beam, the solution is to fire a gun in some random direction.

So why he doesn't use the AK-47 to defend himself against the aliens rather than a sword, I don't know.  You may also be wondering why, if he's killed all those aliens, where the bodies are.  I know I was.  If I killed an alien (in self-defense, of course; in the interest of interstellar amity, if they Come In Peace, I'm more than happy to have them here), I'd definitely keep the body as evidence that I wasn't just a raving loon.  Edmonds says that the bodies vanish, which sounds awfully convenient.  He does have a photo in the video showing what he claims is alien blood from one of his kills, which makes me wonder why if the bodies disappear, the blood doesn't as well.

One of those extraterrestrial biological mysteries, I guess.  But Edmonds goes on to say that you have to "cut off the head, and disconnect the antennae, or they instantly 'phone home' -- even with a razor-sharp sword, it's nearly impossible to decapitate them in one swing."

As far as why the aliens are targeting him, he says it's because his ranch is so large that it gives the aliens room to "open up portals... that are large enough for triangular crafts, wings, or orb-like shapes to pass through."

"These objects leave the space around the ranch, and other objects pass through the portals in the other direction," Edmonds adds.

Despite his success at fighting off the invaders, Edmonds hasn't come away unscathed.  He says the Grays gave him scars (which you can see on the video I linked above), not to mention "symptoms like radiation poisoning."  More troubling, though, is his claim that the previous owners "simply disappeared -- all their stuff was still in the house, leading to speculation that they were in fact abducted by extraterrestrials."  So I guess it's understandable that he's fed up, although it does bring up the question of who sold him the ranch.  He and his wife are selling, and are asking five million dollars for it -- a million and a half less than what he says it's valued at.

If I had the money, I'd definitely buy it.  For one thing, I love Arizona and have always wanted to live in the desert.  Especially now, when we're sitting here in upstate New York in the middle of the "polar vortex," and the current wind chill is -25 F.  For another, I would love to have first-hand evidence of extraterrestrial life.  I'd appreciate it if they wouldn't abduct my wife, though, because I kind of am attached to her, you know?

But hey, if they Come In Peace, they're welcome.  I wouldn't even object if they wanted to take over the government.  Couldn't be worse than what we currently have.

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

In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England.  Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting.  He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding.  It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down.  This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

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

Miraculous mathematics

I've blogged before about "miraculous thinking" -- the idea that an unlikely occurrence somehow has to be a miracle simply based on its improbability.  But yesterday I ran into a post on the wonderful site RationalWiki that showed, mathematically, why this is a silly stance.

Called "Littlewood's Law of Miracles," after British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood, the man who first codified it in this way, it goes something like this:

• Let's say that a "miracle" is defined as something that has a likelihood of occurring of one in a million.
• We are awake, aware, and engaged on the average about eight hours a day.
• An event of some kind occurs about once a second.  During the eight hours we are awake, aware, and engaged, this works out to 28,800 events per day, or just shy of a million events in an average month.  (864,000, to be precise.)
• The likelihood of observing a one-in-a-million event in a given month is therefore 1-(999,999/1,000,000)^1,000,000 , or about 0.63.  In other words, we have better than 50/50 odds of observing a miracle next month!

Of course, this is some fairly goofy math, and makes some silly assumptions (one discrete event every second, for example, seems like a lot).  But Littlewood does make a wonderful point; given that we're only defining post hoc the unlikeliness of an event that has already occurred, we can declare anything we want to be a miracle just based on how surprised we are that it happened.  And, after all, if you want to throw statistics around, the likelihood of any event happening that has already happened is 100%.

So, like the Hallmark cards say, Miracles Do Happen.  In fact, they're pretty much unavoidable.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Miracle of St. Ignatius (1617) [Image is in the Public Domain]

You hear this sort of thing all the time, though, don't you?  A quick perusal of sites like Miracle Stories will give you dozens of examples of people who survived automobile accidents without a scratch, made recoveries from life-threatening conditions, were just "in the right place at the right time," and so on.  And it's natural to sit up and take notice when these things happen; this is a built-in perceptual error called dart-thrower's bias.  This fallacy is named after a thought experiment of being in a pub while there's a darts game going on across the room, and simply asking the question: when do you notice the game?  When there's a bullseye, of course.  The rest is just background noise.  And when you think about it, it's very reasonable that we have this bias.  After all, what has the greater evolutionary cost -- noticing the outliers when they're irrelevant, or not noticing the outliers when they are relevant?  It's relatively obvious that if the unusual occurrence is a rustle in the grass, it's far better to pay attention to it when it's the wind than not to pay attention to it when it's a lion.

And of course, on the Miracle Stories webpage, no mention is made of all of the thousands of people who didn't seem to merit a miracle, and who died in the car crash, didn't recover from the illness, or were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  That sort of thing just forms the unfortunate and tragic background noise to our existence -- and it is inevitable that it doesn't register with us in the same way.

So, we should expect miracles, and we are hardwired to pay more attention to them than we do to the 999,999 other run-of-the-mill occurrences that happen in a month.  How do we escape from this perceptual error, then?

Well, the simple answer is that in some senses, we can't.  It's understandable to be surprised by an anomalous event or an unusual pattern.  (Think, for example, how astonished you'd be if you flipped a coin and got ten heads in a row.  You'd probably think, "Wow, what's the likelihood?" -- but any other pattern of heads and tails, say, H-T-T-H-H-H-T-H-T-T -- has exactly the same probability of occurring.  It's just that the first looks like a meaningful pattern, and the second one doesn't.)  The solution, of course, is the same as the solution for just about everything; don't turn off your brain.  It's okay to think, at first, "That was absolutely amazing!  How can that be?", as long as afterwards we think, "Well, there are thousands of events going on around me right now that are of equally low probability, so honestly, it's not so weird after all."

All of this, by the way, is not meant to diminish your wonder at the complexity of the universe, just to direct that wonder at the right thing.  The universe is beautiful, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.  It is also, fortunately, understandable when viewed through the lens of science.  And I think that's pretty cool -- even if no miracles occur today.

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

In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England.  Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting.  He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding.  It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down.  This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

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

Warming up for disaster

In today's installment of Ruminations About Science That Should Scare The Piss Out Of You, we have: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

This event, that occurred about 55 million years ago, is the peak of a slow climb in average global temperature that began around the time of the Cretaceous Extinction (the one the knocked out the dinosaurs), and ended with the Earth's temperature a good seven degrees warmer than they started (and an estimated eight degrees warmer than it is now).

The result was catastrophic, especially for some life forms that aren't exactly charismatic megafauna -- the foraminifera.  These are protists, related to amoebas, that are part of the "zooplankton" -- small, free-floating organisms that form a lot of the underpinning of the oceanic food web.  During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, over a third of them went extinct, with predictable results for the rest of the life in the oceans.  The thought is that the extinction wasn't just because of the heat, but because the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused oceanic acidification, a drop in the pH of ocean water that would have caused any organisms with shells made of calcium carbonate -- like many foraminifera -- simply to dissolve.

What kicked off the warming is uncertain, and at first it was relatively slow.  But new research out of Pennsylvania State University, published last week in Nature - Geoscience, suggests that once it began, it triggered some positive feedback cycles that intensified the effect.  "What we found in records were signatures of carbon transport that indicated there were massive erosion regimes occurring on land," co-author Shelby Lyons said.  "Carbon was locked on land and during the PETM it was moved and reburied.  We were interested in seeing how much carbon dioxide that could release...  We found evidence for a feedback that occurs with rapid warming that can release even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."

So the more carbon dioxide was dumped into the atmosphere, the more processes were initiated that dumped carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  The result: the melting of every ice sheet and glacier on the planet, and sea levels four hundred meters higher than they are now.

Meaning that here in upstate New York, I'd have beachfront property.

Coastline loss on Assateague Island, Maryland/Virginia [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the National Park Service]

The pertinence of this research to today's fossil-fuel-happy society is obvious.  We're sending carbon into the atmosphere that has been sequestered underground for 250 million years, triggering warming at a phenomenal rate.  It's not that there haven't been thermal ups and downs for all of Earth's history; but the speed with which this is happening is unprecedented.

Oh, and I didn't tell you the scariest part.  The research from Penn State found that once that maximum had been reached, 55 million years ago, it took a hundred thousand years for the planet to recover.  "One lesson we can learn from this research is that carbon is not stored very well on land when the climate gets wet and hot," study co-author Katherine Freeman said.  "Today, we're pushing the system out of equilibrium and it's not going to snap back, even when we start reducing carbon dioxide emissions."

Of course, I doubt this is going to have any effect, given that the current administration here in the United States is bound and determined to ignore scientific research and hard evidence in favor of hand-waving wishful thinking and short-term expediency.  You'd think that terrifying people into recognizing the peril for the long-term habitability of the Earth would impel them to act, for their children's and grandchildren's sakes if not for people here and now.

But no.  I guess being in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry has that effect.

So that's today's research about the past that has scarier-than-hell ramifications for the present.  Me, I'm going to keep writing about this stuff in the hope that someone influential is listening.  Because if not, I'm afraid we're in for a very hot time.

 **********************************

In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England.  Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting.  He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding.  It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down.  This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

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

Pearls of wisdom

I swear, sometimes it seems like the universe is listening.  And laughing at me.

You may recall from Saturday's post, about people thinking that drinking distilled water can cure and/or kill you, that a few days previous I'd wondered what happened to all the alt-med woo-woos, that it seemed like we hadn't heard anything from them in a long while.  Then a loyal reader sent me the distilled water link, and I found out I was wrong.

But apparently pointing out that the quacks hadn't quacked in a long time has now opened the floodgates.  Because a different loyal reader sent me another link yesterday, this one worse than the distilled water one.

This site claims that there's a "herbal remedy" that -- and I promise I'm not making this up -- can be stuck into a woman's vagina to "detox the imprints left behind by her ex-boyfriend."

The product, which is called "Goddess Vaginal Detox Pearls," is a little lump of various herbs wrapped in a piece of cloth that supposedly can reduce menstrual cramps, increase libido, kill parasites, and "detox your ex."  The head of the company that sells these things, Vanessa White, explains that every time a woman has sex, the man leaves an imprint on her "yoni, womb, and uterus area."

The "pearls," she says, have a "vibrational energy" that can somehow sync up with the bad vibes left behind by your former lover and pull those out.  "I remove (insert person’s name) from my womb area during this cleanse," is what you're supposed to say, instead of what seems more reasonable to me, which is, "I wish like hell I had a higher IQ."

Oh, and you're supposed to leave the thing up there.  For days.

So, okay.  I have a few reactions to all of this, as follows:

• If having sex leaves a mark on your uterus, you're doing it wrong.
• The only "imprints" I can think of left behind from consensual sex are the possibilities of pregnancy and STDs, and I don't see the "Goddess Pearls" doing anything about those one way or the other.
• Sticking random, non-sterile objects into your various bodily orifices seems like a good way to end up with toxic shock syndrome.  I know I'm male, so my perspective on this might be a little off, but I think I'd prefer still having the vibrational energy frequencies of previous lovers hanging around than I would dying in horrible agony of TSS.
• If you have parasites in your vagina, you may want to see a doctor.
• "Ewwwww."

Worse still, you should read some of the comments left by reviewers.  Wait, cancel that; many of these reviews came with photographs, and despite being a biologist and relatively inured to gross stuff, I think I'm going to need some therapy to get over looking at them.  As I read along, my expression got closer and closer to this:

Women who have used these things have had burning pain, various sorts of discharge that I would prefer not even thinking about, and -- in at least two cases -- have lost pieces of their vaginal lining.

If that doesn't make you stay in a protective crouch for the rest of the day, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.  And that's even considering that, as aforementioned, I'm male.

But of course, there's the usual "this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any medical condition" disclaimer, which apparently is meant to mean, "We can ask you to do any idiotic thing we want in the name of health and still get off scot-free.  We could ask you to stick cow shit up your nose.  We could ask you to stand on your head outside, stark naked, in the middle of January, and sing the National Anthem.  We could ask you to stare straight into the Sun to absorb its healing rays directly into your retinas.  And the reason we can do this is because: many of you would do it without question.  And afterwards, claim that the quantum vibrations of your auras were much improved or some fucking thing.  And then look around for the next 'cure' we're peddling."

So, yeah: if I haven't made the point clearly enough, (1) do not stick random stuff into your orifices unless you're sure they're sterile and won't burn your insides so bad your tissue starts sloughing off.  (2) Having consensual sex does not leave an imprint on your internal body parts.  And for cryin' in the sink, (3) please exercise a little critical thinking before you buy the latest thing from the alt-med gurus.

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

In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England.  Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting.  He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding.  It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down.  This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

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

Cool clear water

I was thinking a couple of days ago that it'd been a while since I dealt with a new crazy alt-med cure, and that maybe the woo-woos had run out of ideas.

Optimism, sometimes, is a losing proposition.

As it so often happens, I found out how wrong I was at the hands of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  She sent me a link with the text, "I guess this is kind of homeopathic Nirvana, isn't it?  As dilute as you can possibly get."  And the link took me to a site that claims that all human diseases can be cured...

... by drinking distilled water.

Distilled water, as I probably don't need to mention, is water that has been put through the process of steam distillation to remove any trace impurities.  It's useful in sensitive medical and scientific applications where even small amounts of dissolved minerals might interfere with the results.

What these people are claiming, though, is that ordinary tap water isn't... watery enough, or something.  Here are a couple of quotes from the site, so you can get the flavor of it:

When one drinks impure, dirty water, the body acts as a filter, trapping a percentage of the solids suspended in the water.  A filter eventually becomes clogged and useless – fit only to be thrown away. The human body might well face the same fate. 

But the basic point – that only distilled water avoids mineral buildups in the body – is an inarguable one.  The deposits, which build up in a teakettle from repeated use, are traces of minerals left behind as the water evaporates.  Distilled water leaves no such traces – in a teakettle or in the human body.  It is true that in most hospitals distilled water is used for newborn infants; distilled water is prescribed for heart patients in many cardiac wards.  And it is true that kidney stones and other mineral-like buildups in the body are much more common in the areas where the drinking water has high levels in inorganic minerals – and distilled water has none of those at all.

Thinking that minerals build up in the body the same way boiler scale forms on a teakettle is patently ridiculous.  The minerals collect on a teakettle because you've boiled the water away; you would only be at risk for similar buildup if someone boiled your blood plasma, which would be problematic in other respects.  Your kidneys are perfectly capable of coping with tiny fluctuations in mineral content in your food and drink, which is fortunate, because you get a great deal more in the way of minerals from the vegetables you eat than from your water.  According to a study in 2004, average tap water in the US provided greater than one percent of the recommended daily intake for only four minerals -- copper, calcium, magnesium, and sodium.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

And as far as minerals in water causing kidney stones, a 1997 study suggests that calcium and magnesium enriched "mineral water" actually reduces the incidence of kidney stones in individuals who are prone to them.

Then we have this:

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of drinking distilled water for cleansing the blood stream, for reducing arthritic pain and lowering blood pressure.  It has also been known to reduce cholesterol and triglycerides. In fact, the only effect on the body is health. 

There are rules of thumb on how much water to drink.  The rule of thumb on a normal day is one half your body weight in ounces per day.  If you are sweating and exerting yourself you should drink more, not less.  We have a tendency to grab pop, coffee, Kool-Aid and juices, but we need to get back to the habit of grabbing distilled water.

Okay, how much water, now?  The phrase "one half your body weight in ounces per day" can be interpreted two different ways.  For example, I weigh 160 pounds, so if I drank half my body weight every day, that'd be 80 pounds, that's 9.6 gallons of water.  (The recommendation, by the way, is about a half-gallon for a typical adult.)   It's possible, though, that what it means is the number from half my body weight, but in ounces -- so 80 ounces of water.  This is closer to the mark but still seems like a lot to me.  And, of course, you'd get a different answer if you calculated my weight in kilograms, slugs, pennyweights, grains, carats, or solar masses.

If that's not enough, try this:

Now as to the argument that distilled water leaches out minerals.  This is true, and this is exactly what we want it to do.  The minerals it leaches out are of the unusable, ionic form and we want these to leave the body rather than be deposited and cause disease.  Distilled water does not leach out significant amounts of biologically available minerals because these are quickly taken up by the body on an as needed basis.  If they are present in excess then they are filtered through the kidneys and this is exactly what needs to happen with all things which are in excess in the circulation.  Distilled water cleanses the body through promoting healthy kidney function.

Um... no.  You do not want to leach minerals from your body, whether or not they're in "ionic form."  (And some of 'em damn well better be in ionic form.  Such as sodium.  The alternative is elemental sodium, which is a soft, malleable metal that explodes when it touches water.  So consuming non-ionic sodium would be about as advisable as boiling your blood plasma.)  As far as leaching minerals away being good, that's also a nope.  Getting rid of sodium too fast can put you in hyponatremic shock, which can cause dizziness, disorientation, nausea, and severe headaches.  And leaching calcium from your body is what causes, for instance, osteoporosis.

Also not recommended.

And let me reiterate how little in the way of minerals we're talking about, here.  A 2002 study that surveyed the municipal water of a hundred cities in the United States found that Baton Rouge, Louisiana -- the city that was in first place for quantity of minerals -- had a total of a little over eighty parts per million for all the minerals measured combined.

In scientific terms, that's called "ain't much."  And for the other cities, it was all down from there.

Worse still, the "distilled water is wonderful" link she sent me is not one isolated site.  I did a quick search and found dozens of sites touting the health benefits of drinking distilled water, including curing arthritis, chronic headaches, high blood pressure, and (of course) cancer.

After all, what would be the use of a quack cure if it didn't cure cancer?

Oh, and if this isn't sufficient, I also found sites claiming that drinking distilled water would kill you because it leaches out all the minerals in your cells.  Thus proving a sort of Newton's Third Law of Idiocy, that every moronic idea has an equal and opposite moronic idea.

(Incidentally, if you don't believe me -- being a layperson at all -- check out what they say at the site Drinking Water Resources -- neatly debunks both the claims that distilled water is wonderful and that it's deadly.)

So the loyal reader who sent me the link is right; these people are out-homeopathing the homeopaths.  We've gone from serially diluting a chemical past Avogadro's limit to suggesting we drink water that has everything removed from it but the water ahead of time.  At least it's cheaper than most homeopathic "remedies;" last I checked, a gallon of distilled water at my local grocery store was about a buck and a half.

Of course, it's sold in plastic bottles, which I'm sure has to be relevant somehow.

In any case, don't bother with the distilled water.  Plain old tap water is just fine.  Don't count on it to provide your daily mineral needs, though.  The usual advice -- eat well, exercise, don't smoke, don't drink alcohol to excess -- is still the best thing around for optimizing your health.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a brilliant look at two opposing worldviews; Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet.  Mann sees today's ecologists, environmental scientists, and even your average concerned citizens as falling into two broad classes -- wizards (who think that whatever ecological problems we face, human ingenuity will prevail over them) and prophets (who think that our present course is unsustainable, and if we don't change our ways we're doomed).

Mann looks at a representative member from each of the camps.  He selected Norman Borlaug, Nobel laureate and driving force behind the Green Revolution, to be the front man for the Wizards, and William Vogt, who was a strong voice for population control and conversation, as his prototypical Prophet.  He takes a close and personal look at each of their lives, and along the way outlines the thorny problems that gave rise to this disagreement -- problems we're going to have to solve regardless which worldview is correct.

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