A map from the home world

One of the most persistent -- dare I say, canonical -- stories of alien abduction is the tale of Betty and Barney Hill.

The gist of the story is that the Hills, a couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, were driving home from their vacation in September of 1961, and near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire they saw a UFO that seemed to be following them.  After observing it for a while, including through binoculars, they experienced a time-slip -- they found themselves back home without any memory of how they'd gotten there.  The following day, they noticed some oddities -- Barney's new dress shoes were scuffed, the leather strap on his binoculars was broken, neither of their watches worked, and there were several shiny concentric marks on the hood of their car.

They were puzzled, but no explanation seemed forthcoming, so they forgot about it -- until Betty started to have dreams about being aboard a spacecraft.  This eventually led to some hypnosis sessions in which both of them claimed to have suppressed memories of being abducted and examined (our lore about aliens doing, shall we say, rather intimate examination of abducted humans comes largely from Barney's claims under hypnosis).

All of this would be nothing more than your usual Close Encounter story -- lots of wild claims, nothing in the way of hard evidence -- if it weren't for one thing that Betty revealed.  While she was on the spaceship, she said, she was shown a star map that had the aliens' home world and various other star systems with lines between them showing "trade routes."  She attempted to reconstruct a two-dimensional drawing (she said the map she'd been shown was three-dimensional), and here's what she drew:

Now, potentially, this could be interesting.  One of the more eye-opening things I learned when I was a teenager watching the original Cosmos series was that the constellations in our night sky only seem 2-D from our perspective, but there's actually a third dimension -- depth -- that we can't see from Earth.  If you add that third dimension, it becomes obvious that what we call "constellations" are actually random assemblages of stars that only seem near each other from our perspective, but are actually at greatly varying distances from us.  This means that if they were observed from a different vantage point the constellations would look nothing like they do here at home, and in fact, many of the stars that appear to be close together would be widely separated in the sky.  (One of the coolest animations from the series was looking at the stars of the Big Dipper, first from the Earth, then making a huge circle around it -- it doesn't take much of a difference in angle to make it look nothing at all like the Big Dipper.)

So if Betty Hill's recollection of the alien star map was real, then it'd be pretty convincing -- because the aliens presumably would have drawn the stars from the perspective of their home star system, not ours.  This would be mighty hard to fake now, much less 58 years ago.  So the race was on to try and figure out whether the map Betty Hill drew conformed to any known configuration of stars as viewed from somewhere else in the galaxy.

The person whose answer is the most commonly accepted by UFO enthusiasts is Marjorie Fish, who identified the home world of the aliens as Zeta Reticuli (thus kicking off all of the claims that the Annunaki, the "Greys," and various other superintelligent species have come here from that star system).  Starting from that star, Fish said, there are nearby stars that could represent the ones on the Hill map.

Which brings up the problems with the claim.

Recall that the map is the only hard evidence -- if you can call it that -- to come out of the Hill story.  Brian Dunning, of the brilliant blog Skeptoid, is critical of the claim right from the get-go:

Several years [after the alleged abduction], a schoolteacher named Marjorie Fish read a book about the Hills.  She then took beads and strings and converted her living room into a three dimensional version of the galaxy based on the 1969 Gliese Star Catalog.  She then spent several years viewing her galaxy from different angles, trying to find a match for Betty's map, and eventually concluded that Zeta Reticuli was the alien homeworld.  Other UFOlogists have proposed innumerable different interpretations.  Carl Sagan and other astronomers have said that it is not even a good match for Zeta Reticuli, and that Betty's drawing is far too random and imprecise to make any kind of useful interpretation.  With its third dimension removed, Betty's map cannot contain any useful positional information.  Even if she had somehow drawn a perfect 3D map that did exactly align with known star positions, it still wouldn't be evidence of anything other than that such reference material is widely available, in sources like the Gliese Star Catalog.

The problem runs deeper than that, though.  Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recall a piece I did a while back on ley lines -- the idea that there are towns and sacred sites that are aligned because there are "energy currents" beneath the ground that flow in straight lines, and were the why the ancients chose to build on those specific sites.  The trouble is (as my post describes), in any arrangement of random dots, you can find strings of dots that are close to falling in a straight line, just by random chance.  No "energy currents" required.

Here, the difficulty is magnified by the fact that we don't just have a couple of hundred dots (or, in this case, stars), but tens of thousands, and that's just counting the relatively nearby ones.  Also, they're not on a flat surface, as with the ley lines; they're in a three-dimensional grid, which you're allowed to look at from any perspective you want to.

If those are were Marjorie Fish's constraints, it's actually astonishing that she took years to find a group of stars that matched Betty Hill's map.

We're pattern-finding animals, we humans.  As with pareidolia -- our capacity for seeing faces in inanimate objects like clouds, walls, and grilled-cheese sandwiches -- if there's no pattern there, our brains will often invent one.  Add to that confirmation bias and just plain wishful thinking, and it's not hard to see that the Hill map -- still considered the best evidence for the Hills' story -- is actually not much in the way of evidence at all.

Allow me to emphasize that I'm not saying Betty and Barney Hill weren't abducted.  It's just that -- to end with quote Neil DeGrasse Tyson -- "As a scientist, I need more than 'you saw it...'  If you have an actual object taken from a spacecraft, though, you'll have something of alien manufacture, and anything that has crossed interstellar space to get to Earth is going to be interesting.  So show me an object you've taken from the spaceship, and then we can talk."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and is pure fun: Man Meets Dog by the eminent Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.  In it, he looks at every facet of the human/canine relationship, and -- if you're like me -- you'll more than once burst out laughing and say, "Yeah, my dog does that all the time!"

It must be said that (as the book was originally written in 1949) some of what he says about the origins of dogs has been superseded by better information from genetic analysis that was unavailable in Lorenz's time, but most of the rest of his Doggy Psychological Treatise still stands.  And in any case, you'll learn something about how and why your pooches behave the way they do -- and along the way, a bit about human behavior, too.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The terrible cost of inaction

I try not to be a one-issue voter, but it would be very hard for me to support a candidate for state or federal office who is not explicitly in favor of addressing the causes of anthropogenic climate change.

The jury is still out, of course, as to whether we might already be too late to avoid some of the worst repercussions.  The temperature is climbing at a rate not seen since the globally-catastrophic Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55-some-odd million years ago, and it's possible that the rate of the increase we're seeing now is actually higher.

And yet our politicians sit on their hands.  "The scientists are still uncertain" -- despite the fact that the ones harping on all the doubt are the mouthpieces of the fossil fuel industry, who are scared stiff that there'll be an administration that actually takes climate change seriously.  "It's a natural warm-up" -- despite mountains of evidence that this alteration in the climate is caused by man-made greenhouse gases like carbon and methane.  "It'd cost too much to fix" -- despite the fact that the cost of not doing anything is projected to run into the trillions of dollars.  (More on that in a moment.)  And -- most maddening of all -- "it was cold in January so the world isn't warming" -- which you hear from politicians who evidently failed ninth-grade earth science and never figured out the difference between "weather" and "climate."

We had two more pieces of research recently published that highlight how dire the situation has become.  In the first, a team led by Eric Rignot of the University of California - Irvine showed that the rate of ice loss from Greenland -- which has the world's second-largest on-land ice sheet -- has increased sixfold in the last fifty years.  Between 1980 and 1990, an estimated 51 billion tons of ice melted from the Greenland Ice Sheet; between 2010 and 2018 -- a two-year shorter time span -- 286 billion tons melted.  Of the rise in sea level attributable to Greenland ice melt, over half of it has occurred in the last eight years.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christine Zenino from Chicago, US, Greenland Ice Sheet, CC BY 2.0]

In an interview in the Washington Post, Rignot was unequivocal:

The 1980s marked the transition time when the Earth’s climate started to drift significantly from its natural variability as a result of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases...  The entire periphery of Greenland is affected.  I am particularly concerned about the northern regions, which host the largest amount of potential sea-level rise and are already changing fast. 

In Antarctica, some big sleeping giants in East Antarctica are waking up, in addition to a large part of West Antarctica being significantly affected. None of this is good news.  We ought to prepare ourselves for what is coming up and take action as soon as possible to avoid the most drastic scenarios.

The second study, led by climatologist Dmitry Yumashev of Lancaster University, looked at it from the perspective of the only thing that seems to motivate most politicians -- money.  The authors write:

Arctic feedbacks accelerate climate change through carbon releases from thawing permafrost and higher solar absorption from reductions in the surface albedo, following loss of sea ice and land snow.  Here, we include dynamic emulators of complex physical models in the integrated assessment model PAGE-ICE to explore nonlinear transitions in the Arctic feedbacks and their subsequent impacts on the global climate and economy under the Paris Agreement scenarios.  The permafrost feedback is increasingly positive in warmer climates, while the albedo feedback weakens as the ice and snow melt.  Combined, these two factors lead to significant increases in the mean discounted economic effect of climate change: +4.0% ($24.8 trillion) under the 1.5 °C scenario, +5.5% ($33.8 trillion) under the 2 °C scenario, and +4.8% ($66.9 trillion) under mitigation levels consistent with the current national pledges.

Catch that?  Under the best case scenario, the economic cost by 2100 is projected at almost twenty-five trillion dollars.  That's "trillion," with a "t."  And the current Paris Agreement pledges don't even meet that.  If all the signatories meet their pledged targets for carbon emission, the cost is projected to be well over twice that.

Oh, and the United States, one of the top carbon emitters in the world, withdrew from the Paris Agreement in June of 2017 under an explicit directive from Donald Trump, using the excuse that the mandated targets would be "too expensive" and "economically disastrous for the United States."

You want to see economic disaster, Mr. Trump?  You ain't seen nothing yet.  Wait till rising sea levels start inundating coastal cities, requiring massive relocation.  And from the Rignot et al. study referenced above, the wait may not even be that long.

"It’s disheartening that we have this in front of us," Yumashev said in an interview with The Guardian.  "We have the technology and policy instruments to limit the warming but we are not moving fast enough."

Disheartening?  I'd call it "alarming," myself.

I know I've rung the changes on this topic many times, but I feel duty-bound to keep bringing it up because our leaders are still not doing anything.  There's been some lip-service to addressing climate change, but the propaganda machine that is bound and determined to label any recommendations for mitigation as left-wing ultra-green economically unfeasible claptrap has worked all too well.  So don't expect this to be the last time you hear about it here -- and, hopefully, elsewhere.  We'll keep yelling until the politicians wake up or get voted out of office.

It's too important an issue to do otherwise.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and is pure fun: Man Meets Dog by the eminent Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.  In it, he looks at every facet of the human/canine relationship, and -- if you're like me -- you'll more than once burst out laughing and say, "Yeah, my dog does that all the time!"

It must be said that (as the book was originally written in 1949) some of what he says about the origins of dogs has been superseded by better information from genetic analysis that was unavailable in Lorenz's time, but most of the rest of his Doggy Psychological Treatise still stands.  And in any case, you'll learn something about how and why your pooches behave the way they do -- and along the way, a bit about human behavior, too.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Bleach treatment

As I've commented more than once, every time I think I've plumbed the absolute nadir of human stupidity, I turn out to be wrong.

I found out about my most recent underestimate of idiocy thanks to a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link from Wonkette about a newly-formed church that has, as part of their doctrine, a recommendation to drink bleach.

It's called the "Genesis II Church," and is based in Washington State, where founder and... um... minister?  reverend?  head chemist?  Borgia-wannabee? Tom Merry promoted his religion via Facebook with the following:

I am thrilled to help bring effective alternative healing to the Pacific Northwest! Everyone knows someone sent home to die by their doctor because mainstream medicine can't do anything more for them. Bishop Mark Grenon will be leading the seminar and introducing attendees to Chlorine Dioxide Therapy, otherwise known as MMS; sharing the history of the discovery and development of MMS and its protocols by Jim Humble; and giving testimonies of health recovery wonders from around the world that are nothing short of miraculous.  Donation for registration is $450 per person; $800 for couples; and $400 for returning seminar students. And includes:
1. Membership Certificates.
2. 1 year membership.
3. Package of Sacraments (MMS, Activator, MMS 2, DMSO, Spray bottle, capsules, etc...)
4. Membership Id card. (Following the Seminar you must email us your photo and we will then make and mail your ID card to you, this is included in the Seminar Donation)
5. Light lunch for Sat. and Sun. Snacks & Coffee break also.
6. Genesis II Church Seminar pamphlet.
7. Link for all the Protocol Videos, PDF of Jims and Mark's ebooks, etc.
8. Free sign up to our Video course online, where you can study all the material and take the exam and become a G2 Church Health Minister.  You will have the knowledge to help heal many people of this world's terrible dis-eases.  Only now will you need to go and gain the experience. Go forth and heal!!!

"MMS" stands for "Miracle Mineral Solution," and for those of you not well-versed in chemistry, chlorine dioxide is the active ingredient in Clorox, and is also used to chlorinate swimming pools and bleach wood pulp.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons W. Oelen, Chlorine dioxide gas and solution, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So yes, the Wonkette headline was entirely accurate: they're trying to cure what ails you by getting you to pay $450 for the opportunity to drink bleach.  But hey, they're bringing snacks, so what the hell, right?

Or, you can spend $800 for the couples rate, and at least have the romantic perk of dying together.

I know people can fall for some silly pseudoscientific claims at times, and even more when those claims are attached to spiritual trappings, and even more when you throw in some fear-talk about "terrible dis-eases."  But for cryin' in the sink, you wouldn't think you'd have to explicitly say, "Oh, but don't drink bleach."  What's next?  Spelling out the reasons why you should keep your feet out of bear traps?  Not grab high-voltage wires?  Not pour weapons-grade plutonium on your head?

The Genesis II Facebook page has, as of this writing, been taken down, but Robyn Pennacchia, who wrote the Wonkette piece, said amongst other things it had a video of one of their people forcing a screaming, malaria-stricken baby in Uganda to drink "MMS."  As a selling point.

Besides malaria, the Genesis II people claim that drinking chlorine dioxide solution will also cure HIV, autism, acne, diabetes, and cancer (all kinds), as well as "counteracting the negative effects of x-rays and vaccinations."  So yes, we've now roped in yet another idiotic claim, the anti-vaxx thing, as well as scaring people about getting medically-necessary x-rays as part of diagnosing what is really wrong with them.

I'm finding it hard to believe that these people aren't being prosecuted for making false medical claims, but to be fair, I don't know the details of which laws would apply.  The makers of a lot of "alt-med" curealls avoid being sued by writing -- usually in very small print -- "this product is not intended to cure, treat, diagnose, or heal any human ailment" somewhere on the bottle, but here, it's hard to see how what they wrote can be construed as anything other than literal medical advice.

But the Facebook page is down, which is a start.  I mean, I'm a believer in caveat emptor and all that kind of thing, and that the Darwin Award Principle means that idiotic behavior improves the quality of the gene pool for the rest of us, but this is just flat-out indefensible.  And it doesn't make a damn bit of difference whether they're calling it a "religion;" what they're claiming, and to judge by the video from Uganda actually doing to people, is causing significant harm.

So somehow, someone needs to step in and stop these people.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and is pure fun: Man Meets Dog by the eminent Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.  In it, he looks at every facet of the human/canine relationship, and -- if you're like me -- you'll more than once burst out laughing and say, "Yeah, my dog does that all the time!"

It must be said that (as the book was originally written in 1949) some of what he says about the origins of dogs has been superseded by better information from genetic analysis that was unavailable in Lorenz's time, but most of the rest of his Doggy Psychological Treatise still stands.  And in any case, you'll learn something about how and why your pooches behave the way they do -- and along the way, a bit about human behavior, too.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Going against the flow

Two of the most extensively-tested laws of physics are the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics -- and in the nearly two centuries since they were first formulated, there has not been a single exception found.

The First Law is the less shocking one.  It's sometimes called the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy, and says simply that in a closed system, the total amount of matter and energy does not change.  You can turn one into the other, or change its form, but the total quantity doesn't vary.  Unsurprising, and in fact can seem a little circular given that this is how a closed system is defined in the first place.

The Second Law is where things get interesting.  It can be formulated a variety of ways, but the simplest is that in a closed system, the amount of entropy (disorder) always increases.  If entropy is being decreased somewhere (the system is becoming more orderly) it always requires (1) an input of energy, and (2) that somewhere else entropy is increasing, and that increase is larger than the localized decrease.  An example is the human body.  When you go from a single fertilized egg cell to an adult, your overall entropy decreases significantly.  But in the process, you are taking the food molecules you eat and (1) extracting their energy, and (2) increasing their entropy monumentally by chopping them up into little pieces and strewing the pieces about.  So you're able to locally decrease your own entropy, but you leave behind a trail of chaos wherever you go.

Or, as my thermodynamics professor in college put it, a lot of years ago: the First Law says you can't win; the Second Law says you can't break even.  Explaining why the United States Patent Office's official policy is that any application that claims to have a working model of a perpetual motion machine goes directly into the trash without being read any further.

The Carnot Heat Engine [Image is in the Public Domain]

All of this is by way of background for a paper that appeared last week in Science, called, "Heat Flowing From Cold to Hot Without External Intervention by Using a 'Thermal Inductor," by Andreas Schilling, Xiaofu Zhang, and Olaf Bossen of the University of Zurich.  Because in this paper, the three physicists have demonstrated the passage of heat energy from a colder object to a warmer one, without any external energy input -- something first shown as impossible by French physicist Sadi Carnot in 1824.

The authors write:

The cooling of boiling water all the way down to freezing, by thermally connecting it to a thermal bath held at ambient temperature without external intervention, would be quite unexpected.  We describe the equivalent of a “thermal inductor,” composed of a Peltier element and an electric inductance, which can drive the temperature difference between two bodies to change sign by imposing inertia on the heat flowing between them, and enable continuing heat transfer from the chilling body to its warmer counterpart without the need of an external driving force.

When I read this, I sat up, squinted at my computer screen, and uttered an expression of surprise that I will leave to your imagination.  In my AP Biology class, I always described the Laws of Thermodynamics as two of the most unshakeable laws of science -- two rules that are never, ever broken.  The idea that three scientists in Switzerland had taken a simple Peltier element -- a type of heat pump often found in refrigerators -- and made it run without expending any energy was earthshattering.

But before you dust off your plans for a perpetual motion machine, read the next lines in the paper:

We demonstrate its operation in an experiment and show that the process can pass through a series of quasi-equilibrium states while fully complying with the second law of thermodynamics.  This thermal inductor extends the analogy between electrical and thermal circuits and could serve, with further progress in thermoelectric materials, to cool hot materials well below ambient temperature without external energy supplies or moving parts.

I'm not going to claim I fully understand how this all works, and how despite the system's bizarre behavior it still obeys the Second Law, but apparently the key point is that despite the heat energy flowing the "wrong way," the system still gains entropy overall.

Which, I must say, was a bit of a relief.

It's still a pretty fantastic discovery.  "With this very simple technology, large amounts of hot solid, liquid or gaseous materials could be cooled to well below room temperature without any energy consumption," study co-author Andreas Schilling said, in a press release from Phys.org. "Theoretically, this experimental device could turn boiling water to ice, without using any energy."

So don't believe any of the hype that I'm already seeing on dubiously-accurate websites, to the effect that "An Exception Has Been Discovered to the Laws of Thermodynamics!  Physicists Dismayed!  Textbooks Will Have to be Rewritten!"  It's a curiosity, sure, and pretty cool, and sounds like it will have a good many applications, but you shouldn't discount everything you learned in physics class quite yet.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and is pure fun: Man Meets Dog by the eminent Austrian zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz.  In it, he looks at every facet of the human/canine relationship, and -- if you're like me -- you'll more than once burst out laughing and say, "Yeah, my dog does that all the time!"

It must be said that (as the book was originally written in 1949) some of what he says about the origins of dogs has been superseded by better information from genetic analysis that was unavailable in Lorenz's time, but most of the rest of his Doggy Psychological Treatise still stands.  And in any case, you'll learn something about how and why your pooches behave the way they do -- and along the way, a bit about human behavior, too.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Whoozagooboy?

It will come as no surprise to long-time readers of Skeptophilia that I am a dog person, given how often they come up in my posts.

Dogs, in general, like me way better than people do.  Years ago I went over to a friend's house for the first time, and she warned me about her neurotic, high-strung dog who -- direct quote -- "you should just ignore because otherwise she freaks out."  Within fifteen minutes, said high-strung dog was lying next to me on the couch, head in my lap, snoring.

My own dogs, Guinness and Lena, are a bit of an odd pair themselves.  Guinness is a pit bull/husky mix who is sweet and cuddly sometimes, and at other times seventy pounds of spring-loaded bounce. 

"I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille."

Lena, on the other hand, is a redbone/bluetick coonhound cross who is beautiful, laid-back, and has the IQ of a PopTart.  We had a good laugh at her yesterday because we called to the dogs out of our second-floor window, Guinness immediately looked up, saw us, and started wagging, whereas Lena spent the next fifteen minutes looking behind trees and bushes, wondering where Mommy and Daddy were hiding.

She never did find us.  Mommy and Daddy are pretty damn intrepid.

"Hi!  I love you!  You look familiar!  Who are you, again?"

So it's no wonder that I'm fascinated with dog behavior, and also the history of the human/dog association.  Which is why I was really excited to read about some research done jointly by Historic Environment Scotland and the National Museum of Scotland to reconstruct an ancestral dog from a 4.500 year old skull found in the Orkney Islands.

This Neolithic pooch was one of 24 dog skulls found at Cuween Hill, a burial site dating from about 2,500 B.C.E.  Archaeologists have surmised that this sort of thing generally means that the animal in question was some sort of totem; other tombs in the Orkneys have had similar deposits, one of the bones of sea eagles, the other of red deer.

"Perhaps the people who lived in the [Cuween Hill] area at the time saw themselves as 'the dog people'," said Alison Sheridan, principal archaeological research curator in the department of Scottish history and archaeology at the National Museum.  Whether or not that's true, these people, she said, clearly had a "special association" with their dogs.

"When you look at a Neolithic dog, it somehow communicates human relationships, and I can relate to that," said Steve Farrar, interpretation manager at Historic Environment Scotland.  "I can empathize with the people whose ingenuity made Orkney such an enormously important place.  When this dog was around, northwest Europe looked to Orkney."

So without further ado, here's a photograph of the reconstruction:

I think we can all agree that this is definitely the face of a Good Boy.  [Image courtesy of Santiago Arribas/Historic Environment Scotland]

So the dog/human relationship has been around for a long, long time.  Doesn't surprise me, really, given how easily they find their way into our hearts.  But I'm going to have to wind this up, because Guinness wants to play ball, and y'know, priorities.

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Monday's post, about the institutionalized sexism in scientific research, prompted me to decide that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Evelyn Fox Keller's brilliant biography of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism.

McClintock worked for years to prove her claim that bits of genetic material that she called transposons or transposable elements could move around in the genome, with the result of switching on or switching off genes.  Her research was largely ignored, mostly because of the attitudes toward female scientists back in the 1940s and 1950s, the decades during which she discovered transposition.  Her male colleagues laughingly labeled her claim "jumping genes" and forthwith forgot all about it.

Undeterred, McClintock kept at it, finally amassing such a mountain of evidence that she couldn't be ignored.  Other scientists, some willingly and some begrudgingly, replicated her experiments, and support finally fell in line behind her.  She was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine -- and remains to this day the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel in that category.

Her biography is simultaneously infuriating and uplifting, but in the end, the uplift wins -- her work demonstrates the power of perseverance and the delightful outcome of the protagonist winning in the end.  Keller's look at McClintock's life and personal struggles, and ultimate triumph, is a must-read for anyone interested in science -- or the role that sexism has played in scientific research.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Death... with big, nasty, pointy teeth

Today I'm going to write about a piece of research that isn't controversial, or deeply thought-provoking, or politically relevant, but because it's just plain awesome.

It's from the realm of paleontology, and is about a gigantic carnivore, which is part of its appeal.  Have you noticed how the little-kid fascination with dinosaurs usually revolves around carnivorous ones like Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus rex?  They're seldom as impressed by herbivores like Pachycephalosaurus, which also has the disadvantage of meaning "thick-headed lizard," so it's kind of unimpressive right from the get-go.  Velociraptor, though?  "Swift hunter?"  Now that's cool.  You can bet that those wicked pack-hunters would never have put up with being given a humiliating name.  I bet if the paleontologists had decided to name them Brocchodentidorkosaurus ("buck-toothed dorky lizard"), the raptors would have eaten them for lunch, and that's even considering the fact that they've been extinct for seventy million years.

The dinosaurs, not the paleontologists.

But I digress.

The subject of today's post is a mammal called Simbakubwa kutokaafrika, which means "humongous lion from Africa" in Swahili (speaking of impressive names), even though it wasn't a lion at all.  It was a hyaenodont, a predatory group of mammals that are in Order Creodonta, a group only distantly related to modern Order Carnivora (i.e., cats, dogs, bears, weasels, seals, and a few other families).  The creodonts are an interesting group, at least to evolutionary biologists, because there's still a major argument going on regarding how to assemble their family tree.  Some paleontologists believe they're monophyletic -- all descended from a single common ancestor -- while others say they're polyphyletic, with different groups of creodonts coming from different ancestors that were further apart on the mammalian clade.

Whichever it is, they've now been shown through detailed skeletal analysis to have a closer connection to the bizarre pangolins than they do to today's carnivores -- yet another example of how common sense can lead to the wrong answer.

Reconstruction of a hyaenodont by Heinrich Harder [Image is in the Public Domain]

In any case, Simbakubwa was discovered recently by Duke University paleontologist Matt Borths, who was going through some fossils in the back rooms of the Nairobi National Museum when he found something that made him sit up and take notice:

The remains of a carnivorous mammal that was an estimated 1.2 meters tall at the shoulder, 2.4 meters from tip to tail, weighed an estimated five hundred kilograms, had canine teeth the size of bananas, and had three sets of incisors, two of which were big, nasty, and pointy.

That, my friends, is one serious carnivore.  That's a carnivore that could have turned your average African lion into an African lion meatloaf.

Simbakubwa is estimated to have lived around 23 million years ago, placing it in the early Miocene, but the creodonts as a group were apex carnivores for a lot longer than that.  They originated in the Paleocene (the epoch that began with the K-T extinction, 66 million years ago), and made it to the mid-Miocene (14 million years ago).  Modern(ish) true carnivores (i.e. Order Carnivora) first showed up 42 million years ago (the mid-Eocene epoch), and only reached Africa around 22 million years ago -- right around the time Simbakubwa was lumbering around the place.  So no wonder the true carnivores only began to diversify in Africa after the hyaenodonts were safely out of the way, eight million years later.

All of this highlights two things -- first, what amazing discoveries might be lurking on dusty museum shelves, forgotten and unstudied; and second, that we honestly don't know very much about what critters were out there in prehistoric times.  The conditions required for generating a fossil are thought to be mighty uncommon -- most animals don't leave any traces at all, only a few years after they die, so it's likely that the vast majority of the living things that have ever existed aren't represented in today's fossil record.

So the number of species we know about are far outnumbered by the ones we don't know about.  Meaning that as bizarre, fascinating, and wonderful as are the prehistoric animals we've classified, if we were to time-travel back to whatever epoch you choose, we'd find ones more bizarre still.  And that's even including a banana-fanged predator the size of a polar bear.

All of which puts me in mind of the last sentence of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, which seems a fitting way to end:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

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

Monday's post, about the institutionalized sexism in scientific research, prompted me to decide that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Evelyn Fox Keller's brilliant biography of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism.

McClintock worked for years to prove her claim that bits of genetic material that she called transposons or transposable elements could move around in the genome, with the result of switching on or switching off genes.  Her research was largely ignored, mostly because of the attitudes toward female scientists back in the 1940s and 1950s, the decades during which she discovered transposition.  Her male colleagues laughingly labeled her claim "jumping genes" and forthwith forgot all about it.

Undeterred, McClintock kept at it, finally amassing such a mountain of evidence that she couldn't be ignored.  Other scientists, some willingly and some begrudgingly, replicated her experiments, and support finally fell in line behind her.  She was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine -- and remains to this day the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel in that category.

Her biography is simultaneously infuriating and uplifting, but in the end, the uplift wins -- her work demonstrates the power of perseverance and the delightful outcome of the protagonist winning in the end.  Keller's look at McClintock's life and personal struggles, and ultimate triumph, is a must-read for anyone interested in science -- or the role that sexism has played in scientific research.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

New life

New from the "Don't You People Even Watch Science Fiction Movies?" department, we have: bioengineers at Cornell University recently created a DNA-based material that has three of the main characteristics of life -- metabolism, self-assembly, and organization.

Oh, and they pitted different versions of the material against each other, and triggered two more: competition and evolution.

The research was published last week in Science: Robotics, in a paper called, "Dynamic DNA Material With Emergent Locomotion Behavior Powered by Artificial Metabolism," authored by a team led by Cornell bioengineer Shogo Hamada.  Working with substances they call DASH (DNA-based Assembly and Synthesis of Hierarchical) materials, they ended up creating something so close to a living thing that even the most ardent life-is-unique-and-unquantifiable proponents are sitting up and taking notice.

What they did is start with 55-nucleotide pair DNA fragments, which were then injected into a machine that provided raw materials (free nucleotides) and a source of energy.  The DNA fragments began to extend, adding new bases to the front end while slowly losing them from the back end, so the entire fragment crept along.  The addition process was faster than the degradation, so eventually there were fragments a few millimeters long -- corresponding to tens of thousands of base pairs.

"The designs are still primitive, but they showed a new route to create dynamic machines from biomolecules. We are at a first step of building lifelike robots by artificial metabolism," said Shogo Hamada, who led the research.  "Even from a simple design, we were able to create sophisticated behaviors like racing. Artificial metabolism could open a new frontier in robotics."

The fragments then began to compete against each other in terms of speed and growth rate, something that has never been seen before in an artificially-created DNA-based material.  "Everything from its ability to move and compete, all those processes are self-contained," said study co-author Dan Luo.  "There’s no external interference.  Life began billions of years from perhaps just a few kinds of molecules.  This might be the same...  [T]he use of DNA gives the whole system a self-evolutionary possibility.  This is huge."

The researchers are currently trying to design ways to have the DNA fragments move toward sources of light, warmth, or sources of nutrients, and away from dangers, not to mention ways to speed up the process to create new generations within seconds.  "We are introducing a brand-new, lifelike material concept powered by its very own artificial metabolism," Luo said.  "We are not making something that’s alive, but we are creating materials that are much more lifelike than have ever been seen before."

Hamada added, "Ultimately, the system may lead to lifelike self-reproducing machines."

Okay, now, just hang on a moment.

I'm not really buying Luo's comment that they're "not making something that's alive," because we don't really have a good working definition of life to start with.  Viruses, commonly referred to as "alive," have no metabolism, are not made of cells, do not respond, and outside of the host do not use energy.  Honestly, they're more like self-replicating chemicals than they are living things.  Then there's the life characteristic "has a limited life span," which doesn't seem to apply to some plants (such as the essentially immortal bristlecone pines) and cancer cell lines (such as the famous HeLa cells).  There's a lot of speculation on whether life even has to be carbon-based -- speculation that's been around for a long time (remember the original Star Trek episode "The Devil in the Dark," about a silicon-based life form that has hydrofluoric acid instead of water as the solvent in its blood?).

So don't tell me the new Cornell DASH-material isn't alive because it's missing a couple of characteristics of life from the canonical list.  The number of naturally-occurring exceptions is long enough.

And I'm right up there with the folks who think this is amazingly cool -- my background is in evolutionary genetics, after all -- but for cryin' in the sink, doesn't this concern anyone?  Especially if you design DASH-materials that avoid danger and seek out sources of nutrients?  Because I can think of one really great source of nutrients they'd probably be attracted to:

They're called "us."

And the problem is, we don't set up a good immune response to DNA fragments.  Up till now, this has been a good thing; we take in DNA fragments in our food every time we eat.  If you eat a carrot, you're swallowing carrot DNA.  If you eat a steak, you're swallowing cow DNA.  If you eat Slim Jims, you're swallowing...

... well, the DNA of some kind of organism.  I think.  Who the hell knows what those things are made of, anyhow?

But my point is, you have one shot at breaking these foreign DNA strands down into their component nucleotides, and that's using the nuclease enzymes in your small intestine.  If they get past that...

Cf. my earlier comment about the new artificial DNA fragments learning how to "avoid danger."

Okay, maybe I'm being alarmist, here.  But -- and I mean this with all due affection -- humans have a really good track record of fucking things up royally, sometimes out of the best of intentions.  So I'm not sure that creating a self-replicating, competitive life form that can evolve to become more efficient at seeking out sources of nutrients is really all that great an idea.

But that's not gonna stop 'em.

Oh, and did I mention that I live ten miles from Cornell University?  At least I'll be amongst the first people to get devoured, and won't have to sit around wondering when the DASH-monsters will arrive.

But I'm gonna try not to worry about it.  After all, we've got enough other things to worry about, such as climate change, the threat of war, and whether today'll be the day Donald Trump decides to open the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse.

Maybe that's what Michele Bachmann meant by saying Trump was "highly biblical."

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

Monday's post, about the institutionalized sexism in scientific research, prompted me to decide that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Evelyn Fox Keller's brilliant biography of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism.

McClintock worked for years to prove her claim that bits of genetic material that she called transposons or transposable elements could move around in the genome, with the result of switching on or switching off genes.  Her research was largely ignored, mostly because of the attitudes toward female scientists back in the 1940s and 1950s, the decades during which she discovered transposition.  Her male colleagues laughingly labeled her claim "jumping genes" and forthwith forgot all about it.

Undeterred, McClintock kept at it, finally amassing such a mountain of evidence that she couldn't be ignored.  Other scientists, some willingly and some begrudgingly, replicated her experiments, and support finally fell in line behind her.  She was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine -- and remains to this day the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel in that category.

Her biography is simultaneously infuriating and uplifting, but in the end, the uplift wins -- her work demonstrates the power of perseverance and the delightful outcome of the protagonist winning in the end.  Keller's look at McClintock's life and personal struggles, and ultimate triumph, is a must-read for anyone interested in science -- or the role that sexism has played in scientific research.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]