The strangest star in the galaxy

Ever heard of Eta Carinae?

If there was a contest for the weirdest known astronomical object in the Milky Way, Eta Carinae would certainly be in the top ten.  It's a binary star system in the constellation Carina, one member of which is a luminous blue variable, unusual in and of itself, but its behavior in the last hundred or so years (as seen from Earth; Eta Carinae is 7,500 light years away, so of course the actual events we're seeing took place 7,500 years ago) has been nothing short of bizarre.  It's estimated to have started out enormous, at about two hundred solar masses, but in a combination of explosions peaking in the 1843 "Great Eruption" it lost thirty solar masses' worth of material, which has been blown outward at 670 kilometers per second to form the odd Homunculus Nebula.

After the Great Eruption, during which it briefly rose to a magnitude of -0.8, making it the second-brightest star in the night sky, it faded below naked eye visibility, largely due to the ejected dust cloud that surrounded it.  But in the twentieth century it began to brighten again, and by 1940 was again visible to the naked eye -- and then its brightness mysteriously doubled again between 1998 and 1999.

Which is even more mind-blowing when you find out that the actual luminosity of the combined Eta Carinae binary is more than five million times greater than that of the Sun.

This all comes up because the Hubble Space Telescope has just sent astronomers the clearest images of Eta Carinae and the Homunculus Nebula they've yet had, and what they're learning is kind of mind-blowing.  Here's one of the best images:

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the NASA Hubble Space Telescope]

There are a lot of features of these photographs that surprised researchers.  "We've discovered a large amount of warm gas that was ejected in the Great Eruption but hasn't yet collided with the other material surrounding Eta Carinae," said astronomer Nathan Smith of the University of Arizona, lead investigator of the study.  "Most of the emission is located where we expected to find an empty cavity.  This extra material is fast, and it 'ups the ante' in terms of the total energy of an already powerful stellar blast....  We had used Hubble for decades to study Eta Carinae in visible and infrared light, and we thought we had a pretty full account of its ejected debris.  But this new ultraviolet-light image looks astonishingly different, revealing gas we did not see in either visible-light or infrared images.  We're excited by the prospect that this type of ultraviolet magnesium emission may also expose previously hidden gas in other types of objects that eject material, such as protostars or other dying stars; and only Hubble can take these kinds of pictures."

One of the most curious things -- one which had not been observed before -- are the streaks clearly visible in the photograph.  These are beams of ultraviolet light radiating from the stars at the center striking and exciting visible light emission from the dust cloud, creating an effect sort of like sunbeams through clouds.

Keep in mind, though, how big this thing is.  The larger of the two stars in the system, Eta Carinae A, has a diameter about equal to the orbit of Jupiter.  So where you're sitting right now, if our Sun was replaced by Eta Carinae A, you would be inside the star.

The question most people have after learning about this behemoth is, "when will it explode?"  And not just an explosion like the Great Eruption, which was impressive enough, but a real explosion -- a supernova.  It's almost certain to end its life that way, and when it does, it's going to be (to put it in scientific terms) freakin' unreal.  Even at 7.500 light years away, it has the potential to be the brightest supernova we have any record of.  It will almost certainly outshine the Moon, meaning that in places where it's visible (mostly in the Southern Hemisphere) for a time you won't have a true dark night.

But when?  It's imminent -- in astronomical terms.  That means "probably some time in the next hundred thousand years."  It might have already happened -- meaning the light from the supernova is currently streaming toward us.  It might not happen for thousands of years.

But it's considered the most likely star to go supernova in our near region of the galaxy, so there's always hoping.

(Nota bene:  we're in no danger at this distance.  There will be gamma rays from the explosion that will reach Earth, but they'll be pretty attenuated by the time they get here, and the vast majority of them will be blocked by our atmosphere.  So no worries that your friends and family might be at risk of turning into the Incredible Hulk, or anything.)

So that's our cool scientific research of the day.  Makes me kind of glad we're in a relatively quiet part of the Milky Way.  Eta Carinae, and the surrounding Carina Nebula (of which the Homunculus is just a small part), is a pretty rough neighborhood.  But if it decides to grace us with some celestial fireworks, it'll be nice to see -- from a safe distance.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun for anyone who (like me) appreciates both plants and an occasional nice cocktail -- The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart.  Most of the things we drink (both alcohol-containing and not) come from plants, and Stewart takes a look at some of the plants that have provided us with bar staples -- from the obvious, like grapes (wine), barley (beer), and agave (tequila), to the obscure, like gentian (angostura bitters) and hyssop (Bénédictine).

It's not a scientific tome, more a bit of light reading for anyone who wants to know more about what they're imbibing.  So learn a little about what's behind the bar -- and along the way, a little history and botany as well.

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

Mermaid evolution

In further evidence that we're all part of a computer simulation being run by aliens, but the aliens have gotten tired of even trying to make things plausible and now are just fucking with us, we have: racists arguing that Ariel from The Little Mermaid should be white because real mermaids have light skin.

I know I say "I wish I was making this up" a lot, but merciful heavens above, I really wish I was making this one up.  Sadly, this is the truth.  When it was announced that African American actress Halle Bailey was going to be playing Ariel in the upcoming live-action version, racists throughout the United States took a break from sharpening the tips of their pointy white hats to have a complete meltdown.

In fact, I had a brief encounter with one of them on Twitter a couple of days ago.  She had posted this:

I'm sick of political correctness.  Making Ariel black is ridiculous.  The real Ariel was white and had red hair.

I responded:

Perhaps we should review the definition of real.

She responded with admirable articulateness:

Fuck you asshole.

I followed up with a gif that I have had increasing use for lately:

She responded:

FUCK YOU.

So I guess she told me.

Of course, she's not the only one who feels this way, which I found out when I ran into an article in Indy100 describing how the racists were using science to explain why Ariel should be white.

In case you don't believe me, how about this example of brilliant, peer-reviewed research on real mermaids:

My opinion on why mermaids are white is that they live so deep underwater that sunlight hardly reaches them, thus the lack of melanin.  It doesn't matter what ocean they're from cos they could've been migrating seasonally like fishes.  But maybe im thinking too much.

No, trust me, "thinking too much" is the last thing you'd ever be accused of.

Then there was this sterling piece of logic:

For those saying mermaids don't exist and Ariel being black is not impossible, you know what does exist?  Science. 

Mermaids are part fish.

Fishes live in the sea.

There is no sunlight under the sea.

Therefore, mermaids wouldn't evolve pigmented skin to protect against it!!!

Mermaid evolution.  And no sunlight under the sea.  So everything that lives in the sea is white.

Because science.

Then there was this:

Ariel can't even be black because of science behind it because of her and her ancestors living in water and so they are never exposed to strong sun rays.  the stupidity behind this... 

Which got this response, put better than I possibly could have:

bitch there is literally a singing crab in the movie & u worried about scientific accuracy.  stfu.

For sheer disconnect with reality, however, you can't beat this one:

My children were raised with Ariel.  She's an icon in the eyes of many children & adults of today.  To change her race is absurd.  That would be like someone making a movie about Opra [sic] Winfrey, and hiring a white girl to play Opra.  Opra is an icon.  We wouldn't want to change her.

Besides being an icon, Oprah Winfrey is, unlike Ariel the Mermaid, a real person.  For fuck's sake.

The news isn't all bad, though.  The most touching response to all the howling racists came from Twitter user Morgan Jarrett, @msmorganjarrett:

As a white-skinned redhead, I have very strong feelings about #TheLittleMermaid.  Ariel changed my ginger world.  The mean "jokes" ended.  I became envied for my hair.

And you know what?  I want little black girls to experience that same feeling with new Ariel.

 Beautiful.  Now there's how people should be responding.

So to all the racists who have your knickers in a twist: fine, don't go see the movie.  I don't think Disney's going to miss you.  Go back to your little white caves with your little white friends, confident that the entire universe should be arranged so as to comfort your prejudices.  File under "political correctness" any movement in the United States toward acknowledging the people in the world -- which, by the bye, make up well over 50% of the Earth's population -- who have darker skin than you do.

But know this.  Your numbers are dwindling.  Most of us are just fine with people who don't look like us, talk like us, or dress like us.

And that includes mermaids.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to me: sleep.

I say this not only because I like to sleep, but for two other reasons; being a chronic insomniac, I usually don't get enough sleep, and being an aficionado of neuroscience, I've always been fascinated by the role of sleep and dreaming in mental health.  And for the most up-to-date analysis of what we know about this ubiquitous activity -- found in just about every animal studied -- go no further than Matthew Walker's brilliant book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Walker, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California - Berkeley, tells us about what we've found out, and what we still have to learn, about the sleep cycle, and (more alarmingly) the toll that sleep deprivation is taking on our culture.  It's an eye-opening read (pun intended) -- and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of our brain and behavior.

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

Mirror, mirror

The idea of there being a mirror universe has been a staple of science fiction for as long as I can remember.  Many people think immediately of evil Spock with a beard, but my first contact with the idea was when I was seven and first saw the episode of Lost in Space called "The Anti-Matter Man."  The two universes were connected by a creepy, surreal, fog-covered bridge:

The characters from our universe had duplicates in the other -- evil, of course, with an evil, amoral John Robinson, a trash-talking Robot, and a version of Major Don West who looked like he was an escapee from an institute for the criminally insane.

Oh, and the evil Major West had a beard.  Of course.

It was definitely one of their more atmospheric and effective episodes.  Not that there was that much competition in that regard, considering that the previous episode, "Castles in Space," featured a cringe-worthy pseudo-Mexican bounty hunter (complete with a sombrero) who is searching for a runaway princess Dr. Smith had set free from a block of ice by covering it with an electric blanket, and said bounty hunter (did I mention he had silver skin?) gets the Robot drunk by pouring tequila onto his circuit boards.

For the record, I didn't make any of that up.

This whole thing comes up because there are some physicists who are trying to demonstrate the existence of a mirror universe -- an unseen parallel reality coexisting with our own -- and that this might explain the mysterious "dark matter" that seems to permeate all of space, but which no one's been able to detect other than by its gravitational signature.

A team led by physicist Leah Broussard has designed an experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratories to see if she can find evidence of a mirror reality, looking for neutrons that have been transformed into particles with the opposite parity.  In a paper in arXiv, the authors write:

The theory of mirror matter predicts a hidden sector made up of a copy of the Standard Model particles and interactions but with opposite parity.  If mirror matter interacts with ordinary matter, there could be experimentally accessible implications in the form of neutral particle oscillations.  Direct searches for neutron oscillations into mirror neutrons in a controlled magnetic field have previously been performed using ultracold neutrons in storage/disappearance measurements, with some inconclusive results consistent with characteristic oscillation time of τ∼10~s.  Here we describe a proposed disappearance and regeneration experiment in which the neutron oscillates to and from a mirror neutron state.

What Broussard is doing is to fire a beam of electrons past a powerful magnet and into a wall.  If her idea is correct, the collision will cause some of the electrons to transform into their mirror versions, and appear on the other side of the wall.

She got her idea from a peculiarity that has been observed in neutron decay -- that in a beam such as the one Broussard is using, neutrons have an average life that is ten seconds longer than if they're simply at rest in a laboratory.  There's no Standard-Model explanation of why this should be; all neutrons should behave in exactly the same way.  But Broussard says that this discrepancy is exactly what you'd expect if some of the neutrons in the beam are being transformed into their mirror versions -- and then become invisible to ordinary detectors.

Even Broussard admits that the idea is kind of far-fetched, but given that every other effort to elucidate the nature of dark matter -- or even establish its existence beyond its gravitational effects -- has met with zero success, it's worth looking at.

So it'll be interesting to see what turns up.  I can't help but hope that she gets positive results, because it's about time we finally get something concrete about dark matter.  Besides, the idea of there being a mirror universe is pretty cool.  Even if that means we might have to watch out for evil Major West with a beard.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to me: sleep.

I say this not only because I like to sleep, but for two other reasons; being a chronic insomniac, I usually don't get enough sleep, and being an aficionado of neuroscience, I've always been fascinated by the role of sleep and dreaming in mental health.  And for the most up-to-date analysis of what we know about this ubiquitous activity -- found in just about every animal studied -- go no further than Matthew Walker's brilliant book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Walker, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California - Berkeley, tells us about what we've found out, and what we still have to learn, about the sleep cycle, and (more alarmingly) the toll that sleep deprivation is taking on our culture.  It's an eye-opening read (pun intended) -- and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of our brain and behavior.

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

Altering the message

It's always a little startling when something is discovered that ends up explaining... well, damn near everything.

If I exaggerate, it's not by much.  I'm referring to epigenetics, which is the modification of DNA or RNA by chemical changes that don't alter the gene sequence itself.  Usually this is accomplished by adding various "markers" to the strand that then change how it is expressed.  These alterations are at least sometimes inheritable; in 2008, a group of geneticists at Cold Spring Harbor came up with the definition of epigenetics as a "stably heritable phenotype resulting from changes in a chromosome without alterations in the DNA sequence," and that's pretty much the one that still is used today.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It has led to some pretty startling discoveries.  In a paper in Nature in 2014, geneticist Moshe Szyl showed evidence that mice that were taught (using mild electric shocks) to fear an odor gave birth to offspring that feared the odor as well -- and that heightened fear response lasted for two further generations.  Szyl found that a particular olfactory gene was "demethylated" by the conditioning -- had a marker called a methyl group removed -- and this enhanced the mice's ability to detect the odor, and modified their response to it.  This led to some serious speculation that the children and grandchildren of people who had been through atrocities like the Holocaust might inherit similar enhancements, leading to significant changes in behavior.

If you think this sounds Lamarckian, you're not wrong.  It turns out there is a way to inherit acquired characteristics.  It doesn't work the way Lamarck thought it did, but there was a grain of truth in what the man said.

This comes up because of a paper in Science this week describing evidence that epigenetic marking influences everything from embryonic development to cancer susceptibility to memory formation.  In fact, one such modification -- called m6a -- can do all three depending on which RNA strand it's acting on.  The last one is the most interesting to me; a team led by Chuan He of the University of Chicago found that if you knocked out an enzyme that reads m6a in mice, they have memory defects but are otherwise normal.  They then injected a virus carrying the normal reader gene into the mice -- and the defects went away.

This sounds to me like the basis of as much of a revolution as Mendel's discovery of the gene itself, and the discovery of DNA's structure and function by Rosalind Franklin, Marshall Nirenberg, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins.  The idea that a relatively small alteration to our DNA could create inheritable changes without altering the base sequence runs so contrary to both Mendelian inheritance and the "Central Dogma of Molecular Biology" that it looks like it'll force significant revisions to every bit of genetics we thought we understood.

My guess is that they're only beginning to test the depth of this discovery.  "We just need … a lot more knowledge about these things,” He said.  "We need to stay open-minded. The field is still very young."

So maybe I need to change my declaration in yesterday's post that "the twentieth century was [past tense] the century of the gene."  If my intuition is right, we might be on the brink of a whole new chapter -- hell, a whole new textbook -- in our understanding of how genes work.  All of which reiterates something I've believed for years -- that if you're interested in science, you'll never run out of new discoveries to be amazed at.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to me: sleep.

I say this not only because I like to sleep, but for two other reasons; being a chronic insomniac, I usually don't get enough sleep, and being an aficionado of neuroscience, I've always been fascinated by the role of sleep and dreaming in mental health.  And for the most up-to-date analysis of what we know about this ubiquitous activity -- found in just about every animal studied -- go no further than Matthew Walker's brilliant book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Walker, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California - Berkeley, tells us about what we've found out, and what we still have to learn, about the sleep cycle, and (more alarmingly) the toll that sleep deprivation is taking on our culture.  It's an eye-opening read (pun intended) -- and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of our brain and behavior.

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

Uncanniness in the brain

When The Polar Express hit the theaters in 2004, it had a rather unexpected effect on some young movie-goers.

The train conductor, who (like several other characters) was voiced by Tom Hanks and was supposed to be viewed in a positive light, freaked a lot of kids right the hell out.  It was difficult for them to say exactly why.  He was "creepy" and "sinister" and "scary" -- even though nothing he explicitly did was any of those things.

The best guess we have about why people had this reaction is a phenomenon first described in the 1970s by Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori.  Called the uncanny valley, Mori's discovery came out of studies of people's responses to human-like robots (studies that were later repeated with CGI figures like the conductor in Express).  What Mori (and others) found was that faces intended to represent humans but in fact very dissimilar to an actual human face -- think, for example, of Dora the Explorer -- are perceived positively.  Take Dora's face and make it more human-like, and the positive response continues to rise -- for a while.  When you get close to a real human face, people's reactions take a sudden nosedive.  Eventually, of course, when you arrive at an actual face, it's again perceived positively.

That dip in the middle, with faces that are almost human but not quite human enough, is what Mori called "the uncanny valley."

The explanation many psychologists give is that a face being very human-like but having something non-human about the expression can be a sign of psychopathy -- the emotionless, "mask-like" demeanor of true psychopaths has been well documented.  (This probably also explains the antipathy many people have to clowns.)  In the case of the unfortunate train conductor, in 2004 CGI was well-enough developed to give him almost human facial features, expressions, and movements, but still just a half a bubble off from those of a real human face, and that was enough to land him squarely in the uncanny valley -- and to seriously freak out a lot of young movie-goers.

This all comes up because of a study that appeared this week in The Journal of Neuroscience, by Fabian Grabenhorst (Cambridge University) and Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten (University of Aachen), called "Neural Mechanisms for Accepting and Rejecting Artificial Social Partners in the Uncanny Valley."  And what the researchers have done is to identify the neural underpinning of our perception of the uncanny valley -- and to narrow it down to one spot in the brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is part of our facial-recognition module.  Confronted with a face that shows something amiss, the VMPFC then triggers a reaction in the amygdala, the brain's center of fear, anxiety, perception of danger, and avoidance.

The authors write:

Using functional MRI, we investigated neural activity when subjects evaluated artificial agents and made decisions about them.  Across two experimental tasks, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) encoded an explicit representation of subjects' UV reactions.  Specifically, VMPFC signaled the subjective likability of artificial agents as a nonlinear function of human-likeness, with selective low likability for highly humanlike agents.  In exploratory across-subject analyses, these effects explained individual differences in psychophysical evaluations and preference choices...  A distinct amygdala signal predicted rejection of artificial agents.  Our data suggest that human reactions toward artificial agents are governed by a neural mechanism that generates a selective, nonlinear valuation in response to a specific feature combination (human-likeness in nonhuman agents).  Thus, a basic principle known from sensory coding—neural feature selectivity from linear-nonlinear transformation—may also underlie human responses to artificial social partners.

The coolest part of this is that what once was simply a qualitative observation of human behavior can now be shown to have an observable and quantifiable neurological cause.

"It is useful to understand where this repulsive effect may be generated and take into account that part of the future users might dislike very humanlike robots," said Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten, who co-authored the study, in an interview in Inverse.  "To me that underlines that there is no ‘one robot that fits all users’ because some users might actually like robots that give other people goosebumps or chills."

This puts me in mind of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation.  He never struck me as creepy -- although to be fair, he was being played by an actual human, so he could only go so far in appearing as an artificial life form using makeup and mannerisms.  It must be said that I did have a bit more of a shuddery reaction to Data's daughter Lal in the episode "The Offspring," probably because the actress who played her (Hallie Todd) was so insanely good at making her movements and expressions jerky and machine-like.  (I have to admit to bawling at the end of the episode, though.  You'd have to have a heart of stone not to.)

So we've taken a further step in elucidating the neurological basis of some of our most basic responses.  All of which goes back to what my friend Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, said to me years ago: "If I was going into science now, I would go into neurophysiology.  We're at the same point in our understanding of the brain now that we were in our understanding of the gene in 1910 -- we knew genes existed, we had some guesses about how they worked and their connection to macroscopic features, and that was about all.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to me: sleep.

I say this not only because I like to sleep, but for two other reasons; being a chronic insomniac, I usually don't get enough sleep, and being an aficionado of neuroscience, I've always been fascinated by the role of sleep and dreaming in mental health.  And for the most up-to-date analysis of what we know about this ubiquitous activity -- found in just about every animal studied -- go no further than Matthew Walker's brilliant book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Walker, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California - Berkeley, tells us about what we've found out, and what we still have to learn, about the sleep cycle, and (more alarmingly) the toll that sleep deprivation is taking on our culture.  It's an eye-opening read (pun intended) -- and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of our brain and behavior.

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

Weirdness maps

Seems like everyone you meet has a tale of some weird experience or another.

Ghosts, cryptids, time slips, UFOs, precognitive dreams -- taken as a group, they're terribly common.  If you don't believe me, just ask your friends at work or school, "Who here has had an experience that you were completely unable to explain?"  I can pretty much guarantee you'll have five or six volunteers, who will then tell you their story in painstaking detail.

Well, some folks based in Seattle have decided to create a database of all of the bizarre accounts they can find, in an attempt to keep track of "weirdnesses — dreams, ‘coincidences’, strange encounters, etc. — on a personal level."  They go on to explain, "We’ve long wanted to do something that acts sort of like ‘Google Trends’ (which tracks sudden spikes on google search queries) for the collective unconscious.  This map is an extension of that, because we’re trying to see if there are strange places or experiences that are actually quite common but go unnoticed because everyone is afraid to talk about this weird stuff happening to them."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rolf Dietrich Brecher from Germany, Strange wheel (36242991846), CC BY-SA 2.0]

The project is called Liminal Earth, and is open to submissions from anyone.  They categorize the stories (and map pins) into some broad categories, as follows.  (And just to say up front: this is copied directly from their website, so the subcategories are not me being a smartass, which to be fair happens fairly often):

• Dark Forces: Lanyard Zombies, Drones, Corporate Death Zones, Cupcake Shops, Etc.
• Time Distortions: Travelers, Timehunters, “Déjà Vu”, “Losing Time,” Etc
• Mythologies: Pre-Shamanic Deer Cults, Radical Gnostic Animism, Etc.
• Cryptoids [sic]: Bigfoot, Lycanthropes, Trolls, Ogres, Etc.
• Thin Places: Ley Lines, Magic Fountains, Plant Sigils, Portals, Etc.
• Straight Up Ghosts: Creepy vibes, Poltergeists, EVPs, Stone Tape Theories, Class III Apparitions
• High Weirdness: Fortean Phenomena, Floating Toblerone, Things That Just Don’t Make Sense
• Classic UFO: Close Encounters, Sightings, etc.
• Strange Animals: Bearing Gifts, Unusual Encounters, Fecal Divination, etc.
• Visions: Dreams, Visions, Mystical Experiences, etc.

Okay, this brings up a few questions.

1. What is it with the lanyards?  The "about us" section talks about "lanyard'd ogres," so weird creatures with lanyards must be a thing.  Maybe the zombies with lanyards are reanimated dead coaches, or something, but I'm kind of at a loss as to why an ogre would need a lanyard.
2. What's a "Corporate Death Zone?"  I mean, it would make a fucking awesome name for a metal band, but other than that?  My personal opinion is that most corporate jobs would fall into the "shoot me now" category, but I suspect there's more to it than that.
3. Why is there a subcategory for "Floating Toblerone" and a second subcategory for "Things That Just Don't Make Sense?"  I would think the first would fall directly into the second.
4. I've heard a bit about "Stone Tape Theories," which is the idea that rocks pick up psychic traces of events that happen around them, which can then be played back in the fashion of a cassette tape, although considerably clumsier.  But since the majority of rocks have been around for millions of years, you'd think that most of what would be recorded would be kind of... pointless.  "It sure is boring, being a rock," is mostly what I'd think you'd hear, if you could figure out a way to play it back.
5. "Cupcake Shops?"
6. I was going to ask about "Fecal Divination," but then I decided that I didn't want to know.

I'm not sure what all of this is supposed to accomplish, because (as I've commented many times) the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data," but I suppose it's a start at least to attempt some kind of catalog of people's odd experiences.  The difficulty is twofold; first (as we've also seen many times) the human perceptual/interpretive apparatus is pretty inaccurate and easily fooled, and second, this sort of thing is just begging hoaxers to clog up the works with made-up stories.  (Although it must be said that I've never understood hoaxers.  I suppose the "five minutes of fame" thing probably explains some of them, but since growing out of a tall-tale-telling stage as a child, I've never understood the draw of inventing far-fetched stories and claiming they're true.)

Be that as it may, I invite you to submit your own experiences to Liminal Earth if you're so inclined.  I can't say I've ever had anything happen to me that seems inexplicable, so I don't honestly have anything to contribute myself.  Except maybe that my home village used to have a cupcake shop that was wonderful, and they suddenly went out of business.  And I would definitely like an explanation for that one, because those cupcakes were awesome.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to me: sleep.

I say this not only because I like to sleep, but for two other reasons; being a chronic insomniac, I usually don't get enough sleep, and being an aficionado of neuroscience, I've always been fascinated by the role of sleep and dreaming in mental health.  And for the most up-to-date analysis of what we know about this ubiquitous activity -- found in just about every animal studied -- go no further than Matthew Walker's brilliant book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Walker, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California - Berkeley, tells us about what we've found out, and what we still have to learn, about the sleep cycle, and (more alarmingly) the toll that sleep deprivation is taking on our culture.  It's an eye-opening read (pun intended) -- and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of our brain and behavior.

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

Squatching down south

Lately there's been a surge of Bigfoot sightings in North Carolina.

These sorts of things are fuel to the cryptozoologists' fire.  Why else, they argue, would you see clusters of sightings, if it wasn't because the animals themselves were present in an area?  I'm inclined to suspect some sort of tame version of group hysteria -- when one person in your neighborhood claims that a large, hairy proto-hominid has been hanging around in their back yard, you're more likely to attribute anything weird -- noises at night, a dumped-over trash can, the silhouette of a black bear -- as falling into the "I saw it too!" department.

Be that as it may, I'm all about evidence, so let's see what we've got.

First, we have Vicky Cook of Shelby, North Carolina, near the city of Charlotte, who claims to have seen a Bigfoot in broad daylight.

Apparently, Cook has been trying to attract Bigfoot for quite some time, to the extent that she puts out bait for them.  "They love peanut brittle, chocolate, and peanut butter sandwiches," Cook says.

So far, her strategy hasn't turned up much but a grainy trail-cam photograph that could be damn near anything.  She has said, however, that the Bigfoots come through quite regularly.  "They just walk through leaving a big mess sometimes," Cook said.  "Broken trees scattered everywhere.  Footprints.  They come into my back yard at night as well.  But never bother anything."

I'm not sure how "broken trees scattered everywhere" jibes with "never bothering anything," but that's just me.

She also doesn't seem surprised that the photo isn't very good.  "If I was to get a clear shot of a Bigfoot standing in the open ... guess how that would go?" Cook says.

I'm not exactly sure what she's getting at.  I think it would go pretty well, myself.  I've often wondered, in these days where everyone has their phone at all times and they go around snapping photographs of everything, why all the Bigfoot pics look like they were taken using the camera's "AutoBlur" function.

Then, there, the report of a "large, bipedal animal covered with hair," from McDowell County, in the western part of North Carolina.  The sighting was from John Bruner, who (like Cook) has been looking for Bigfoot for quite some time.  He takes a different approach, however; instead of attracting them with food, he scatters glow sticks around.  This "piques the curiosity" of the Bigfoots, he says.

Well, he claims that it worked, because he was out hunting for his quarry at night and saw one of the glow sticks start to move.  He gave chase, and got close enough to see it -- it turned and looked at him, then took off too fast for him to follow.

"Its face was solid black, no hair on it," Bruner said.  "The hair looked shaggy all over.  I was able to see details of the creature … like the face, and the hair was matted and stringy.  The eyes were farther apart than human eyes."

Some sightings a couple of months ago in Davie County, however, turned out to cluster around one area for a reason.  Multiple people called in to the authorities to report a Bigfoot with glowing red eyes.  Some of the folks who phoned were hysterical with fear.  Thinking this was enough to warrant at least a cursory look, the Davie County Sheriff's Department sent in their Animal Control Unit, and found...

... this.

Turns out the property owner thought it'd be fun to put up a Bigfoot statue, given how many times he's allegedly been sighted prowling around the area (Bigfoot, not the owner), which of course resulted in more sightings.  This prompted the authorities to put out a request:

This handsome fellow stands on Pine Ridge Rd. in Mocksville.  If you are traveling this road at night, please be advised that the eyes appear to glow.  If you see this phenomenon, you do not need to call animal control to report seeing Bigfoot, Sasquatch or any other large creature.  Thank you. 

Any media outlets with questions about this matter, please contact animal control directly at (336)751-0227.  Do not tie up 911 lines.

So that explains those sightings, at least.

Anyhow, apparently North Carolina is zooming up in the ranks, coming in right after the Pacific Northwest/northern California sightings that got the whole thing going.  Who knew?  I guess the western part of North Carolina is pretty solid forested mountains, just like the Cascades and Olympics, so if the Big Guy likes that kind of terrain, it'd be understandable that he lives there.

The other spot that's been hopping lately, however, is Florida, which has the southern relative of Bigfoot, the "Skunk Ape."  Or maybe they're just elderly Bigfoots who decided to move to Florida when they retired.  They tend to hang out in the Everglades, which seems weird to me, because (as beautiful as the Everglades are) they are home to mosquitoes big enough to carry off your poodle.  If I was a Florida Bigfoot, I think I'd prefer a condo in Sarasota over mucking around in hip-deep mud, trying not to get exsanguinated by flocks of giant bloodsucking bugs, and avoiding cottonmouths and alligators.

But that's just me.

Anyhow, if any of my southeastern readers knows of other sightings, I'd love to hear about it.  And maybe now that I'm retired, I can go looking myself.  Perhaps I should head on down there in January, when up here, it's so cold that you can go out well-wrapped and still freeze off important body parts.  I'll make sure to bring along glow sticks and peanut brittle.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to me: sleep.

I say this not only because I like to sleep, but for two other reasons; being a chronic insomniac, I usually don't get enough sleep, and being an aficionado of neuroscience, I've always been fascinated by the role of sleep and dreaming in mental health.  And for the most up-to-date analysis of what we know about this ubiquitous activity -- found in just about every animal studied -- go no further than Matthew Walker's brilliant book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Walker, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California - Berkeley, tells us about what we've found out, and what we still have to learn, about the sleep cycle, and (more alarmingly) the toll that sleep deprivation is taking on our culture.  It's an eye-opening read (pun intended) -- and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of our brain and behavior.

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