A miscalculation of scale

In the first pages of Stephen King's book The Tommyknockers, a woman out walking her dog in rural Maine stubs her toe on an object protruding from the ground, and when she kneels down to see what it is, she sees that it is a curved bit of metal that can't be pried loose.  It seems to extend indefinitely as she digs away the loose soil around it.

It turns out to be [spoiler alert] the upper edge of an enormous spaceship that crash landed on Earth millions of years ago, embedding itself nose-downward, and eventually being buried by geological processes until only a little bit of it was above ground.

Kind of an interesting mental picture, isn't it?  A spaceship collides with Earth, only to be rediscovered by archaeologists or paleontologists (or random people walking their dogs) ages later.  It does, however, bring to mind Neil deGrasse Tyson's comment about the Roswell incident: "A super-intelligent alien species knows how to cross the galaxy, but then they can't even land the damn spaceship?  If they're that incompetent, maybe they should just go home."

I bring all this up because of a discovery in Russia I found about because of a loyal reader.  Some coal miners, working at a mine in the Kuznetsk Basin in Siberia, unearthed a strange object that they claim is an extraterrestrial spacecraft.  Boris Glazkov, who found the object, said, "have to say it wasn't hard to see as it was really distinctive and large.  I've never seen anything like this object, which is obviously not natural, out here in the middle of nowhere before.  It is a real mystery."

The Kuzbassrazrezugol Mining Company, Glazkov's employer, confirmed discovery of the object, saying it was discovered at a depth of forty meters.  And everyone associated with the find is in agreement; what we have here is a crashed flying saucer.

So without further ado, let's take a look:

Pretty strange, eh? You can see why I thought of The Tommyknockers.  Imagine this thing making a fiery plunge through the atmosphere, carrying its panicked alien crew hurtling toward the Earth, then burying itself deep in the ground, killing all that were aboard.

But then the object's discoverers provided a second photograph, one that gave us perhaps a little more information than they intended:

Interesting how big it looks when you have no way of knowing how big it actually is.

And this reminded me of a second book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by the brilliant Douglas Adams.  In particular, I recalled a passage about a pair of alien races, the Vl'Hurg and the G'gugvuntt, that wanted to launch an attack on Earth:

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy... 

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

So the miners who discovered this thing must believe that alien races are really tiny, if that's their spaceship.  Makes you wonder what we've been so afraid of, all this time.  If the aliens show up, waving around their itty-bitty laser pistols, we could just step on 'em.

Or, failing that, hire a small dog.

And of course, there's a completely natural explanation for this thing.  It's what's called a "concretion" -- a symmetrical glob of sedimentary deposits that have become cemented together.   They can look pretty peculiar:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hannes Grobe/AWI, Concretion-PS2119 hg, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But that doesn't mean they're evidence of aliens.

Also, if this was a "flying saucer," wouldn't it be made out of something other than rock?  But maybe this was a Stone Age spaceship.  Maybe instead of laser pistols, the tiny aliens inside brandished clubs and flint knives.

Of course, we could still step on 'em.

So that's our latest non-evidence for aliens out of Siberia.  Kind of a pity, really.  It would have been cool if it had been real.  However, I'd prefer it if such a discovery wasn't followed by what happened in The Tommyknockers.  Without giving away any more of the plot, let me remind you that it's a Stephen King novel.  Suffice it to say that Bad Shit Happens.  So maybe we should all be glad that what the Russian coal miners discovered was just a big round rock.

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Richard Dawkins is a name that often sets people's teeth on edge.  However, the combative evolutionary biologist, whose no-holds-barred approach to young-Earth creationists has given him a well-deserved reputation for being unequivocally devoted to evidence-based science and an almost-as-well-deserved reputation for being hostile to religion in general, has written a number of books that are must-reads for anyone interested in the history of life on Earth -- The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, Climbing Mount Improbable, and (most of all) The Ancestor's Tale.

I recently read a series of essays by Dawkins, collectively called A Devil's Chaplain, and it's well worth checking out, whatever you think of the author's forthrightness.  From the title, I expected a bunch of anti-religious screeds, and I was pleased to see that they were more about science and education, and written in Dawkins's signature lucid, readable style.  They're all good, but a few are sheer brilliance -- his piece, "The Joy of Living Dangerously," about the right way to approach teaching, should be required reading in every teacher-education program in the world, and "The Information Challenge" is an eloquent answer to one of the most persistent claims of creationists and intelligent-design advocates -- that there's no way to "generate new information" in a genome, and thus no way organisms can evolve from less complex forms.

It's an engaging read, and I recommend it even if you don't necessarily agree with Dawkins all the time.  He'll challenge your notions of how science works, and best of all -- he'll make you think.

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

Explaining an explosion

One of the most puzzling and fascinating questions in evolutionary biology is what kicked off the Cambrian Explosion.

One striking thing about this event is that it points out how many laypeople have the wrong idea about the progression of evolutionary change.  This view -- perpetuated (unfortunately) by a lot of children's books on prehistoric life -- is that we started out with single-celled organisms, then something like a jellyfish, to something like a worm, to something like a crustacean, and so on and so forth -- until we finally get to humans, who are (of course) the pinnacle and end goal of the whole process.

This is wrong on several counts.

First, evolution is not goal-driven.  It's the law of "whatever works now."  There's no support for the Lamarckian idea of reptiles somehow figuring out that it'd be nice if they could fly, and gradually developing wings.  The evolutionary model shows that when changes occur, they're selected for (or against) by whatever the conditions are at the time.  If those conditions change and what once was an advantage now is a disadvantage, well... sucks to be you.  If the population you belong to has the genetic variation to adapt to the new situation, you might make it as a species.  If not, you'll join the 99% of species on Earth that have vanished entirely.

The second problem that it implies a different length of evolutionary history for each sort of organism -- thus you'll see, sometimes even in otherwise excellent books, sea anemones called "primitive" and octopuses called "advanced."  In fact, sea anemones and octopuses -- and humans -- have precisely the same span of ancestral lineage.  Yes, it's true that in that time, the lineage that led to humans has changed a good bit more; it's also true that we've evolved to be a lot more complex than sea anemones have.  So the words "primitive" and "advanced" have to be used with caution -- because we all trace our ancestry back exactly the same number of years, to a common ancestor some three billion years ago.

Last, and most pertinent to this post, the Cambrian Explosion shows us that the"ladder of creation" view of evolutionary history isn't correct.  The Explosion itself occurred on the order of 541 million years ago, and marks the evolution of most of the major body plans of animals we see today.  So nearly simultaneously, and quite rapidly, the fossil record goes from soft-bodied simple forms to a huge diversity of forms -- early arthropods, proto-vertebrates, mollusks, worms, and echinoderms all appear in a relative flash.

It also generated a few animals we don't see around today -- lineages that left no descendants.  These include Anomalocaris...

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anomalocaris_NT_small.jpg]

... Opabinia...

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com), Opabinia BW2, CC BY 3.0]

... and the aptly-named Hallucigenia.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jose manuel canete, H. sparsa, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The conventional wisdom for years has been that the development of fossilizable parts -- teeth, spikes, armor plates -- came about because of the evolution of carnivory.  Once carnivores are around, there's a significant pressure to evolve structures either for defense or to become a carnivore yourself.

But a paper released last week, from research done at the University of Exeter, has suggested a different cause -- that the roots of the Cambrian Explosion, and thus the biodiversity we see around us today, happened because of plate tectonics.  Plate movements in the early Cambrian resulted in the formation of island arcs, similar to what we see today in Japan and Indonesia, and the resultant volcanic activity dumped so much carbon dioxide into the air that it warmed the planet and boosted phytoplankton growth -- leading to a spike in oxygen and rapid cycling of nutrients that fueled an explosion of animal diversity.

"Many studies have suggested this was linked to a rise in oxygen levels – but without a clear cause for such a rise, or any attempt to quantify it," said Josh Williams, now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Edinburgh, who was the lead author of the paper.  "What is particularly compelling about this research is that not only does the model predict a rise in oxygen to levels estimated to be necessary to support the large, mobile, predatory animal life of the Cambrian, but the model predictions also show strong agreement with existing geochemical evidence."

Of course, such a complex event is very unlikely to have only a single cause, but the Williams et al. research may have found the initial trigger for the rapid diversification.  It's fascinating to think that a little over half a billion years ago, an episode of volcanism might have been the impetus to generating the animal body plans we still see around us today.  As science has shown us so many times, the key to understanding the present lies in the past.

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

Richard Dawkins is a name that often sets people's teeth on edge.  However, the combative evolutionary biologist, whose no-holds-barred approach to young-Earth creationists has given him a well-deserved reputation for being unequivocally devoted to evidence-based science and an almost-as-well-deserved reputation for being hostile to religion in general, has written a number of books that are must-reads for anyone interested in the history of life on Earth -- The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, Climbing Mount Improbable, and (most of all) The Ancestor's Tale.

I recently read a series of essays by Dawkins, collectively called A Devil's Chaplain, and it's well worth checking out, whatever you think of the author's forthrightness.  From the title, I expected a bunch of anti-religious screeds, and I was pleased to see that they were more about science and education, and written in Dawkins's signature lucid, readable style.  They're all good, but a few are sheer brilliance -- his piece, "The Joy of Living Dangerously," about the right way to approach teaching, should be required reading in every teacher-education program in the world, and "The Information Challenge" is an eloquent answer to one of the most persistent claims of creationists and intelligent-design advocates -- that there's no way to "generate new information" in a genome, and thus no way organisms can evolve from less complex forms.

It's an engaging read, and I recommend it even if you don't necessarily agree with Dawkins all the time.  He'll challenge your notions of how science works, and best of all -- he'll make you think.

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

Holy chemtrails, Batman!

If there's one thing I've learned from nine years of writing here at Skeptophilia, it's that there is no idea so weird that someone can't alter it so as to make it way weirder.

On Saturday, we looked at the woman in Japan who is convinced that the way to get rid of pesky ghosts is to buy a high-quality air purifier.  This would put ghosts in the same class as indoor air pollutants and that greasy smell left behind when you fry bacon, which is not how I'd like to be remembered by my nearest and dearest.  "Gordon's back!  Turn on the air purifier!" is not what I'd want to hear, if I was a ghost.

But according to a Roman Catholic bishop in Colombia, there's another way to get rid of evil spirits.  Have an airplane fly over and create a "chemtrail"...

... out of holy water.

I'm not making this up, but I kind of wish I was, because I did some repeated headdesks while researching this post while trying to find out if it was actually true or the result of someone trying to trap me (and others) in Poe's Law.  Sadly, it appears that the whole thing is real.  Monsignor Rubén Darío Jaramillo Montoya, bishop of the city of Buenaventura, is distressed by the unpleasant stuff that goes on down in this port city of 340,000 inhabitants.  So far this year there have been 51 murders, says Monsignor Montoya, which is double what occurred during an equal-length time interval last year.  So the only answer is to douse the entire city in holy water, to "take out these demons that are destroying the city's port."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Amazingly enough, the powers-that-be in Buenaventura are all-in on this idea, and plan on spraying the city on July 13 or 14.   "In Buenaventura we have to get rid of the devil to see if we return the tranquility that the city has lost with so many crimes, acts of corruption with so much evil and drug trafficking that invades our port," a church representative told reporters.

There's no doubt that Buenaventura is kind of a mess.  Besides the murders, which are certainly shocking enough, there's the fact that it's a major hub of the drug trade (especially of cocaine) heading north to the United States.  Efforts by the government to clean the place up have been largely ineffective, and a lot of the city is controlled more by the Cali cartel than it is by law enforcement and elected officials.

On the other hand, mass exorcisms to get rid of crime and drug trafficking have been tried before, and the results were fairly unimpressive.  Back in 2015, Mexican "renowned exorcist" Father José Antonio Fortea organized an "Exorcismo Magno" to evict the demons that were behind all the murders and mayhem and drug trade, and as far as I can tell Mexico is still as dangerous as it ever was.  So as far as I can tell, exorcisms aren't that great a solution to crime and drug trafficking, ranking right behind building a wall to stop the Bad Hombres from getting in.

So sadly, loading up holy water in a crop duster isn't likely to do much, either.  I suppose it falls into the "no harm if it amuses you" department, although it must be said these sorts of "thoughts and prayers"-type solutions are problematic in that they give people the impression that you're doing something when you really aren't.

But that's not going to stop Monsignor Montoya and the rest of the Holy Chemtrails Squad from doing their thing the second week of July.  I'm just as glad I won't be there when it happens.  If I got sprayed with holy water, I'd probably spontaneously combust, which would be unpleasant for me, even if it might be entertaining for any onlookers.

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

Richard Dawkins is a name that often sets people's teeth on edge.  However, the combative evolutionary biologist, whose no-holds-barred approach to young-Earth creationists has given him a well-deserved reputation for being unequivocally devoted to evidence-based science and an almost-as-well-deserved reputation for being hostile to religion in general, has written a number of books that are must-reads for anyone interested in the history of life on Earth -- The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, Climbing Mount Improbable, and (most of all) The Ancestor's Tale.

I recently read a series of essays by Dawkins, collectively called A Devil's Chaplain, and it's well worth checking out, whatever you think of the author's forthrightness.  From the title, I expected a bunch of anti-religious screeds, and I was pleased to see that they were more about science and education, and written in Dawkins's signature lucid, readable style.  They're all good, but a few are sheer brilliance -- his piece, "The Joy of Living Dangerously," about the right way to approach teaching, should be required reading in every teacher-education program in the world, and "The Information Challenge" is an eloquent answer to one of the most persistent claims of creationists and intelligent-design advocates -- that there's no way to "generate new information" in a genome, and thus no way organisms can evolve from less complex forms.

It's an engaging read, and I recommend it even if you don't necessarily agree with Dawkins all the time.  He'll challenge your notions of how science works, and best of all -- he'll make you think.

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

Who ya gonna call? DustBuster!

While I've always wanted to have a direct experience of something supernatural, I have to admit that a lot of the options aren't that attractive.  I'd love to be contacted by an alien, but being abducted and having the traditional examination of my body via various orifices doesn't sound like much fun.  Some of the interactions people have had with various cryptids haven't ended all that well, and a few have resulted in one or more people being strewn in tiny bits over a large geographical area.  And while establishing the veracity of psychic communication would be cool, I'm not really all that keen on there being honest-to-goodness telepaths.

I'm pretty sure that what goes on in my mind on a daily basis isn't all that different from what goes on in others' minds, but even so, I really would prefer not to have my every thought potentially becoming public knowledge.

Then there's ghosts.  No one would be happier than me to find out that there's an afterlife, and I'd love to have the opportunity to have another chat with my paternal grandma, not least because I'd like to ask her about her wonderful chocolate fudge recipe, that I've tried unsuccessfully for years to recreate.  I have questions for various other ancestors, too, not to mention curiosity about historical figures.

But there's the inevitable downside, which is that if there are ghosts, and they choose to take up dwelling in your house, there isn't much you can do about it other than a full-on exorcism, which seems like overkill to me, kind of like using a flamethrower to kill a housefly.  So it was a bit of a relief to find out that a Japanese woman has discovered that if you're visited by a troublesome spirit, and want to get rid of it, all you have to do is...

... turn on an air purifier.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

I'm not making this up, and the woman who made the claim (known only as "Shinuko") seems fairly earnest about it herself.  Shinuko says:

When I first moved into the apartment I’m living in now, there were a lot of strange happenings that really freaked me out.  But then I got a (Sharp) Plasmacluster air purifier, and it all completely stopped.  I did some research on ghosts, and I found out that ghosts are kind of like plasma.  Isn’t it amazing that air purifiers can not only clean the air but also exorcise ghosts?

"Amazing" isn't the first word that came to my head when I read this, but that's just me.  The Sharp Plasmacluster is indeed an air purifier, which allegedly works as follows:

Ions are dispersed into the air.  Positive and negative ions are created using water vapor in the air.  Ions actively attach to and break down pollutants.  The ions neutralize their charge by pulling apart airborne pollutants, thereby reducing the pollutants in the air.  [Afterwards] the ions return to the air as invisible water vapor.

Amongst the things this is supposed to take care of (according to the website) are bacteria, mold spores, viruses, and molecules causing bad odors.

The website mentions nothing about ghosts, and you have to wonder how that would work anyhow.  If the Plasmacluster's ions stick to things, wouldn't that create a static charge?  As far as I can tell this would result in the ghost stuck to your ceiling in the fashion of a balloon you've rubbed against your shirt, which seems kind of counterproductive.  Not only would that mean the ghost would still be hanging around (literally, in this case), it'd probably be really pissed off.

I know I'd feel that way if I were a ghost and suddenly found myself stuck next to the dining room chandelier.

My own doubts aside, there were a lot of members of the Twitterverse who were fully in support of Shinuko's idea.  Here are a few of their responses:

• Yesterday my bedroom light turned on and off on its own and I couldn’t sleep by myself. Maybe I’ll buy a Plasmacluster.
• Even in ancient times, it was popular to purify places with salt and alcohol, and sometimes they had an anti-bacterial function, too.  In today’s Reiwa period we can use high-tech gadgets to exorcise and purify instead!
• Maybe the air was stagnant. When you move into a building that isn’t new, sometimes, even if there wasn’t an accident or something, traces of the person who lived there before can remain in the form of spirits and souls.

Then there was the person who said that if you're troubled by ghosts, you don't need to shell out five hundred bucks for a Plasmacluster, all you need is... a bottle of Febreze:

Apparently a horror game company kept hearing mysterious sounds in their office.  They stopped after they aired out the office and used Febreze.  Changing the air is really important.

Just for the record, bolstering a crazy claim with an even crazier claim is not really all that successful as a strategy for convincing people.  If someone says they've rid their house of evil spirits using magic ash wand, it's probably not going to be helpful if you mention that you had once achieved the same results using a plastic spork.

But if you think an air purifier might help you with your ghost problem, I encourage you to have at it.  If you end up with my grandma stuck to your ceiling, give me a call.  Maybe I can get her to tell me her fudge recipe before she figures out how to get herself loose.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side; Jared Diamond's riveting book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  Starting with societies that sowed the seeds of their own destruction -- such as the Easter Islanders, whose denuding of the landscape led to island-wide ecological collapse -- he focuses the lens on the United States and western Europe, whose rampant resource use, apparent disregard for curbing pollution, and choice of short-term expediency over long-term wisdom seem to be pushing us in the direction of disaster.

It's not a cheerful book, but it's a very necessary one, and is even more pertinent now than when it was written in 2005.  Diamond highlights the problems we face, and warns of that threshold we're approaching toward catastrophe -- a threshold that is so subtle that we may well not notice it until it's too late to reverse course.

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

Puppy dog eyes

Conversation between Carol and me a few days ago:

Me:  Honey, I think Guinness is sad. 

Carol:  Sad?  What does he have to be sad about?  He spends his whole day sleeping, playing, and eating. 

Me:  I dunno.  But just look at him.

Carol:  That's not sad, he just wants something. 

Me:  See?  He needs something.  That's what's making him sad. 

Carol:  He's just manipulating you. 

Me:  Is not. 

Carol:  Is too.  That dog has you wrapped around his little paw. 

Me:  [to Guinness]  I'm sorry, buddy.  I guess Mommy just doesn't love you as much as I do. 

Guinness:  *heavy sigh* 

Carol:  *eyeroll*

Turns out, much as I hate to admit it, a piece of research that came out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last week suggests that Carol is probably correct.  In "Evolution of Facial Muscle Anatomy in Dogs," by Juliane Kaminski, Bridget M. Waller, Rui Diogo, Adam Hartstone-Rose, and Anne M. Burrows, we learn that since domestication, dogs have experienced significant evolution of one specific set of muscles, as compared to wolves.  The authors write:

Domestication shaped wolves into dogs and transformed both their behavior and their anatomy. Here we show that, in only 33,000 years, domestication transformed the facial muscle anatomy of dogs specifically for facial communication with humans.  Based on dissections of dog and wolf heads, we show that the levator anguli oculi medialis, a muscle responsible for raising the inner eyebrow intensely, is uniformly present in dogs but not in wolves.  Behavioral data, collected from dogs and wolves, show that dogs produce the eyebrow movement significantly more often and with higher intensity than wolves do, with highest-intensity movements produced exclusively by dogs.  Interestingly, this movement increases paedomorphism [retention of juvenile-appearing characteristics] and resembles an expression that humans produce when sad, so its production in dogs may trigger a nurturing response in humans.  We hypothesize that dogs with expressive eyebrows had a selection advantage and that “puppy dog eyes” are the result of selection based on humans’ preferences.

It's not really manipulation, though, unless you call our nurturing reaction toward little children manipulation; we're evolutionarily programmed to nurture our offspring for obvious reasons.  What's interesting is that the nurturing instinct -- our reaction to round faces with large eyes and comparatively small noses, ears, and chins -- has been more or less accidentally transferred to other animals, which is why we ooh and aah over puppies, kittens, bear cubs, and so on.

What's interesting in my case -- and Carol's, too, actually, although she might hesitate to admit it -- is that we have a much stronger positive reaction to puppies than we do to children.  When family friends came over with their six-month-old baby a year ago, and asked me if I wanted to hold the baby, my reaction was:  "Um... sure."  *takes baby*  "Um... hi, baby.  You're cute.  Wow, what a cute baby."  *quickly hands baby back to the parents*

If it'd been a puppy, though?  I'd have been on the floor rolling around with the puppy and completely ignoring our friends, except insofar as to consider how I might successfully steal the puppy without their noticing.  I can't pass a dog on the street without asking the owner if it's okay if I say hi.  And dogs, for their part, seem to take to me immediately.

Kids, though?  Not so much.  Probably a lot of it is that they sense my awkwardness, but for whatever cause, dogs generally like me way more than people do.

So I guess Carol has a point about Guinness's sad look.  He's probably not really sad, he just knows when he uses it, he'll get what he wants.  Now,  y'all'll have to excuse me, because I need to go... um... outside for...  a reason.  Yes, I have a tennis ball in my hand.  That's just a coincidence.   Maybe I'll have some use for it later.  You never know when a tennis ball might come in handy.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side; Jared Diamond's riveting book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  Starting with societies that sowed the seeds of their own destruction -- such as the Easter Islanders, whose denuding of the landscape led to island-wide ecological collapse -- he focuses the lens on the United States and western Europe, whose rampant resource use, apparent disregard for curbing pollution, and choice of short-term expediency over long-term wisdom seem to be pushing us in the direction of disaster.

It's not a cheerful book, but it's a very necessary one, and is even more pertinent now than when it was written in 2005.  Diamond highlights the problems we face, and warns of that threshold we're approaching toward catastrophe -- a threshold that is so subtle that we may well not notice it until it's too late to reverse course.

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

Dark arrow

The more we find out about how the universe works, the weirder it gets.

We've come a long way from Isaac Newton's vision of a mechanistic "clockwork cosmos" -- where everything is governed by a handful of simple mathematical laws, and where if you knew the mass, velocity, and acceleration of every particle in the universe, you could backtrack that knowledge and find out everything that had happened in the past, or extrapolate it and figure out everything that will happen in the future.  The one-two punch of relativity and quantum mechanics put paid to that idea; because of phenomena like nonlocality, entanglement, quantum indeterminacy, and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, it turns out that this isn't even theoretically possible.

But the weirdness doesn't end there, and every time it looks like we're getting closer to a Theory of Everything, after which all that'll be left is filling in the details, we find something else that doesn't fit with what we know, that requires us to modify our understanding.  The latest is the discovery of dark matter and dark energy, which together far outweigh the mass of the entire universe's collection of ordinary matter and energy by a significant margin.  We don't know what either of those are, how (or if) they interact with ordinary matter other than gravitationally, and what abstruse laws of physics might govern their properties.  In other words, we know virtually nothing about them at all.  All we see is the gravitational pull they exert on the matter around them, like a shadow somehow cast by an otherwise-invisible figure standing near you.

Astrophysicists recently got another piece of the puzzle, and the discovery was presented at last week's annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.  After analysis of a stream of stars in our own galaxy, astronomer Ana Bonaca of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics found evidence that its movement had been altered by a "close encounter with a massive and dense perturber" -- meaning that a clump of dark matter swept through it, creating a slingshot effect that altered the stars' trajectories and flung them out of the stream.

The most amazing part is the size and speed of this dark arrow that shot its way through our galaxy.  According to Bonaca's data, the dark matter blob was equivalent to five million solar masses, and was traveling at 800,000 kilometers per hour.  No wonder it disrupted things.  But despite this, Bonaca calls this clump "slow-moving" -- which seems ridiculous until you recall that light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second.  So as fast as Bonaca's stream disrupter was moving, it was still only traveling at 1/1350 of the speed of light.

"Only."

Bonaca admits that there could have been other causes than dark matter, but still thinks that her explanation is the most plausible.  "Any massive and dense object orbiting in the halo could be the perturber," she said, "so a wandering supermassive black hole is definitely a possibility... The most plausible explanation for the gap-and-spur structure is an encounter with a dark matter substructure, like those predicted to populate galactic halos."

[Image is the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA/JPL]

If true, this indicates a few interesting things -- the first of which is that dark matter interacts with itself strongly enough to form clumps.  What those interactions consist of is completely unknown.  But the coolest thing is how these disruptions in stellar streams could be used as a dark matter telescope -- helping us to "see" what is invisible in every other respect.  most excitingly, these features demonstrate that cold stellar streams are extremely fine-tuned detectors, sensitive at a level that was only hoped for beforehand," Bonaca and her co-authors, David Hogg, Adrian Price-Whelan, and Charlie Conroy, write in a pre-print of their paper.  "In addition to GD-1 [the stellar stream they studied], there are over forty known streams in the Milky Way halo.  In the era of Gaia, we now have both the incentive and the resources to study them all in detail.  With the full network of streams we could learn not only about individual halo substructures, but about the population as a whole."

So this has definitely given the astrophysicists something to chew on.  I still have the feeling that dark matter will turn out to be this century's "luminiferous ether," the hypothesized substance through which light supposedly propagates -- and which was conclusively shown not to exist when Einstein published his paper on the Special Theory of Relativity.  But that's only a hunch, and I'm certainly not an expert.  We'll have to wait to see what the scientists come up with, and whatever that is, I can guarantee it's gonna be interesting.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side; Jared Diamond's riveting book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  Starting with societies that sowed the seeds of their own destruction -- such as the Easter Islanders, whose denuding of the landscape led to island-wide ecological collapse -- he focuses the lens on the United States and western Europe, whose rampant resource use, apparent disregard for curbing pollution, and choice of short-term expediency over long-term wisdom seem to be pushing us in the direction of disaster.

It's not a cheerful book, but it's a very necessary one, and is even more pertinent now than when it was written in 2005.  Diamond highlights the problems we face, and warns of that threshold we're approaching toward catastrophe -- a threshold that is so subtle that we may well not notice it until it's too late to reverse course.

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

Titans of the ocean

As far as scary critters go, you'd have to look hard to find one scarier than the elasmosaurs.

If you've never seen an artist's reconstruction of one of these beasts, picture something like the body of a sea turtle, with an incredibly long neck and snake-like head, with lots of big, nasty, pointy teeth.  The largest ones reached a length of twelve meters, and a weight of several tons.  The conventional wisdom is that they "mostly ate crustaceans and mollusks," but my feeling is that if they encountered a swimmer, the result would be something like what happened in the movie Jaws, only worse.

Artist's reconstruction of Thalassomedon haningtoni, a late Cretaceous elasmosaur [Image licensed under the Creative Commons DiBgd, Thalassomedon haningtoni, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Fortunately for us, they are one of the groups that ran afoul of the Chicxulub Meteorite Impact 66 million years ago, and they all became extinct, unless you believe in the Loch Ness Monster, which would definitely be an elasmosaur if it actually existed.

This comes up because last week, paleontologists announced that they have unearthed a nearly-complete fossil of the largest-known elasmosaur, Aristonectes, which when alive would have been thirteen meters long and weighed twelve tons.  The fossil was found on Seymour Island in 1989, but was only excavated now because Seymour Island is at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, and is windswept, cold, hostile, and hard to get to even during the brief Antarctic summer.  The research team, led by José O’Gorman, a paleontologist with the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) who is based at the Museum of La Plata near Buenos Aires, has finished the excavation and submitted their results to the journal Cretaceous Research.

What to me is most fascinating about this specimen -- besides its sheer size, which is eye-opening enough -- is that it dates to only thirty thousand years before the K-T Extinction, which (palenontologically speaking) is barely any time at all.  So these big guys were thriving (and diversifying) right up to the moment the big crash occurred -- further evidence that the meteorite was the trigger to the entire extinction event.

O'Gorman says that the work to recover the specimen was grueling.  It began in 2012, proceeding at a snail's pace because the site was only accessible a couple of weeks a year, in late January and early February, and sometimes not even then if there was an unexpected storm. "The weather is one of the problems," O'Gorman said.  "The weather controls all.  Maybe one day you can work, and the next day you cannot because you have a snowstorm."

But their painstaking labor has finally paid off, and given us a picture of a truly awesome critter who was swimming around the oceans right on the verge of one of the "Big Five" extinction events.  Like I said, as a swimmer and scuba diver, I'm just as happy they're not around any more, but getting a glimpse of one of the largest aquatic predators the Earth has ever produced is enough to leave me in awe.
 
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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side; Jared Diamond's riveting book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  Starting with societies that sowed the seeds of their own destruction -- such as the Easter Islanders, whose denuding of the landscape led to island-wide ecological collapse -- he focuses the lens on the United States and western Europe, whose rampant resource use, apparent disregard for curbing pollution, and choice of short-term expediency over long-term wisdom seem to be pushing us in the direction of disaster.

It's not a cheerful book, but it's a very necessary one, and is even more pertinent now than when it was written in 2005.  Diamond highlights the problems we face, and warns of that threshold we're approaching toward catastrophe -- a threshold that is so subtle that we may well not notice it until it's too late to reverse course.

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