News from overhead

Seems like I've been writing a lot about the skies lately.

My general opinion is that what's going on up there is not only interesting, it's useful in taking my mind off the shitshow that's going on down here.  Be that as it may, in the last few weeks we've seen new discoveries about dark energy, a likely nearby supernova candidate, neutron stars, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life in unlikely places.  The astronomers and astrophysicists have been kept on their toes lately by the number of new discoveries and surprising observations -- in fact, in today's post, we'll take a look at not one, but two more pieces of news from above.

In the first, a team at the European Space Agency was working on mapping stellar positions in the "Gould's Belt," a ring of stars surrounding the Milky Way but tilted at about twenty degrees away from the galactic plane.  And what the team found was that within the Gould's Belt, there is a huge structure (from our perspective here on the Earth, it extends across half the sky) that shows regular up-and-down periodicity -- an enormous wave with a wavelength of about six thousand light years.

What could have created this structure is unknown, but waves are usually created when something gravitationally perturbs the pre-existing structure, so astronomers are trying to find something massive enough to cause a pattern change on this scale.  There don't seem to be any good candidates, so the current guess is that (once again) we may be talking about a clump of dark matter.

Whatever the hell that is.

"But this is very speculative at the moment, and other scenarios are as plausible, as an accretion of gas either from the halo of the Milky Way, stretched by the tidal forces of the galaxy (hence its narrowness)," said study lead author João Alves of the University of Vienna.  "Or maybe this is what spiral arms look like up close.  In summary, we have many ideas that we will be testing with future releases of Gaia data but we don't have a favorite scenario at the moment, and that is pretty exciting."

Another odd feature is the the wave is "damped' -- its amplitude decreases along its length.  This suggests that whatever created the disturbance interacted with the stars in the Belt and then passed on -- much like the waves from a rock dropped into a pond decrease in amplitude as they move outward.  It turns out that the Sun was passing through the belt about thirteen million years ago, but if it caused anything untoward here on Earth, it's left few traces.

"There was no obvious mass extinction event thirteen million years ago, so although we were crossing a sort of minefield back then, it did not leave an obvious mark," Alves said.  "Still, with the advent of more sensitive mass spectrometers, it is likely we will find some sort of mark left on the planet."

The second story is about another upcoming stellar explosion, this one more predictable (although less spectacular) than the Betelgeuse supernova about which I wrote two weeks ago.  The star in question is V Sagittae -- which, actually, is a binary system, a white dwarf (a collapsed stellar core) and a larger main-sequence companion.  Because of the white dwarf's gravitational pull, it is siphoning off matter from the surface of its partner, and the interaction is slowing down their rotation around their barycenter, so they're getting closer -- and will ultimately collide.

When that happens, it will cause a colossal explosion which will -- even at our position, 7,800 light years away -- release so much energy that for a short while, V Sagittae will be the brightest star in the sky.  And because we know a good bit about its rotational period and the rate at which the matter is being pulled from the main-sequence star, the astrophysicists also have a good idea of when this will happen: 2083, give or take a few years in either direction.

V Sagittae [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

So there are people alive today who will see this happen.  Sadly, I'm probably not going to be one of them, because in 2083 I'd be 123 years old.  And even though I fully intend to live forever (so far, so good), I must grudgingly admit that the chances of my making it to 123 aren't that high.

Still, there's always the possibility of some advance in genetic engineering extending our life spans.  I'm not exactly optimistic about the likelihood of this, but hope springs eternal and all that nonsense.  And if I'm not going to get to see Betelgeuse go kablooie, then V Sagittae sounds like a decent second-best.

So that's the news from overhead for today.  It's hard not to be impressed by the strides we're making in figuring out how the universe works.  Even though we've got a lot more questions still to answer -- which, after all, is how science works -- the idea that sitting here, on a little planet around an average star in an average galaxy, we can figure all this out is pretty damned impressive.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is scarily appropriate reading material in today's political climate: Robert Bartholomew and Peter Hassall's wonderful A Colorful History of Popular Delusions.  In this brilliant and engaging book, the authors take a look at the phenomenon of crowd behavior, and how it has led to some of the most irrational behaviors humans are prone to -- fads, mobs, cults, crazes, manias, urban legends, and riots.

Sometimes amusing, sometimes shocking, this book looks at how our evolutionary background as a tribal animal has made us prone all too often to getting caught up in groupthink, where we leave behind logic and reason for the scary territory of making decisions based purely on emotion.  It's unsettling reading, but if you want to understand why humans all too often behave in ways that make the rational ones amongst us want to do repeated headdesks, this book should be on your list.

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

An MRI built for two

Some years ago, I injured my left knee doing martial arts, and a couple of weeks later found myself inside an MRI machine.  The technician, who would be the odds-on favorite for the least personable medical professional I've ever met, started out by telling me "strip down to your underwear" in tones that would have done a drill sergeant proud, then asking me if I had any metal items on my person.

"I don't think so," I said, as I shucked shirt, shoes, socks, and pants.  "Why?"

His eyes narrowed.  "Because when I turn these magnets on, anything made of metal will be ripped from your body, along with any limbs to which they might be attached."

I decided to check a second time for metal items.

After reassuring myself I was unlikely to get my leg torn off because I had forgotten I was wearing a toe ring, or something, I got up on a stretcher, and he cinched my leg down with straps.  Then he said, "Would you like to listen to music?"

Surprised at this unexpected gentle touch, I said, "Sure."

"What style?"

"Something soothing.  Classical, maybe."  So he gave me some headphones, tuned the radio to a classical station, and the dulcet tones of Mozart floated across me.

Then, he turned the machine on, and it went, and I quote:

BANG BANG BANG CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH *whirrrrrr* BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG etc.

It was deafening.  The nearest thing I can compare it to is being inside a jackhammer.  It lasted a half-hour, during which time I heard not a single note of Mozart.  Hell, I doubt I'd have heard it if he'd tuned in to the Rage Against the Machine station and turned the volume up to eleven.

The upshot of it was that I had a torn meniscus, and ended up having surgery on it, and after a long and frustrating recovery period I'm now mostly back to normal.

But the MRI process still strikes me as one of those odd experiences that are entirely painless and still extremely unpleasant.  I'm not claustrophobic, but loud noises freak me out, especially when I'm wearing nothing but my boxers and have one leg tied down with straps and am being watched intently by someone who makes the T-1000 from Terminator 2 seem huggable.  I mean, call me hyper-sensitive, but there you are.

So it was rather a surprise when I found out courtesy of the journal Science that the latest thing is...

... an MRI scanner built to accommodate two people.

My first thought was that hospitals were trying to double their profits by processing through patients in pairs, and that I might be there getting my leg scanned while old Mrs. Hasenpfeffer was being checked for slipped discs in her neck.  But no, it turns out it's actually for a good -- and interesting -- reason, entirely unconnected with money and efficiency.

They want to see how people's brains react when they interact with each other.

Among other things, the scientists had people talk to each other, make sustained eye contact, and even tap each other on the lips, all the while watching what was happening in each of their brains and even on their faces.  This is certainly a step up from previous solo MRI studies having to do with emotional reactions; when the person is in the tube by him/herself, any kind of interpersonal interaction -- such as might be induced by looking at a photo or video clip -- is bound to be incomplete and inaccurate.

Still, I can't help but think that the circumstance of being locked into a tube, nose to nose with someone, for an hour or more is bound to create data artifacts on its own.  I mean, look at the thing:

One of the hardest things for me at the men's retreat I attended in November, and about which I wrote a while back, was an exercise where we made sustained eye contact at close quarters -- so you're basically standing there, staring into a stranger's eyes, from only six inches or so away.  I'm not exactly an unfriendly person, per se, but locking gazes with a person I'd only met hours earlier was profoundly uncomfortable.

And we weren't even cinched down to a table with a rigid collar around our necks, with a noise like a demolition team echoing in our skulls.

So as much as I'm for the advancement of neuroscience, I am not volunteering for any of these studies.  I wish the researchers the best of luck, but... nope.

Especially since I wouldn't only be anxious about whether I'd removed all my metal items, I'd have to worry whether my partner had, too.  Although I do wonder what would show up on my brain MRI if I was inside a narrow tube and was suddenly smacked in the face by a detached arm.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is simultaneously one of the most dismal books I've ever read, and one of the funniest; Tom Phillips's wonderful Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up.

I picked up a copy of it at the wonderful book store The Strand when I was in Manhattan last week, and finished it in three days flat (and I'm not a fast reader).  To illustrate why, here's a quick passage that'll give you a flavor of it:

Humans see patterns in the world, we can communicate this to other humans and we have the capacity to imagine futures that don't yet exist: how if we just changed this thing, then that thing would happen, and the world would be a slightly better place. 

The only trouble is... well, we're not terribly good at any of those things.  Any honest assessment of humanity's previous performance on those fronts reads like a particularly brutal annual review from a boss who hates you.  We imagine patterns where they don't exist.  Our communication skills are, uh, sometimes lacking.  And we have an extraordinarily poor track record of failing to realize that changing this thing will also lead to the other thing, and that even worse thing, and oh God no now this thing is happening how do we stop it.

Phillips's clear-eyed look at our own unfortunate history is kept from sinking under its own weight by a sparkling wit, calling our foibles into humorous focus but simultaneously sounding the call that "Okay, guys, it's time to pay attention."  Stupidity, they say, consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; Phillips's wonderful book points out how crucial that realization is -- and how we need to get up off our asses and, for god's sake, do something.

And you -- and everyone else -- should start by reading this book.

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

Unearthing the time capsule

It's said that there's no cloud without a silver lining, but sometimes the silver lining just adds to the whole situation's poignancy.

That was my response to the new show (opening in May) at the British Museum called Arctic: Culture and Climate.  The exhibit will contain priceless archaeological finds from the Canadian and Siberian Arctic, including a nine-thousand-year-old woven birch basket, a necklace made of mammoth ivory, a variety of objects carved from walrus teeth, bone needles, headbands, a spirit mask, clothing made of reindeer fur, a bag crafted from salmon skin, and a fantastic array of other artifacts, some of which date back to thirty thousand years ago.

The problem, of course, is why this beautiful exhibit is even possible -- the melting of the Arctic permafrost because of anthropogenic climate change.

"As the Arctic is melting, the permafrost, the frozen ground, is melting as well," said exhibit curator, archaeologist Jago Cooper.  "The things that people were living with in that landscape, which are incredibly well preserved in that frozen ground, are coming out as the ground is melting...  Archaeologists have to find the objects before they disappear on the surface of the earth because they are exposed to the elements.  It’s like the Library of Alexandria being on fire… You’re plucking out these books which are coming out, and yes, it’s a remarkable window into life, all coming out of the ground in one go...  This is a treasure trove, but its story is tragic."

The fact is, the Arctic is the region of the Earth where the climate is changing the fastest; current estimates are that within eighty years, summers in the northern Arctic will be entirely ice and permafrost-free.  Entire communities are disappearing as frozen-solid soil capable of holding up house foundations turns into marsh.  The only place on Earth I can think of that is changing this drastically and this fast is the coast of my home state of Louisiana, where communities on the fringe of coastal marsh, such as Isle de Jean Charles, are being swallowed up as sea levels rise.  But since both the Arctic and coastal Louisiana are occupied by poor and/or marginalized people mostly belonging to ethnic minorities, there has been little if any attention paid to the devastation climate change is wreaking.

The effects on the Arctic are multiple and widespread.  The 2019 Arctic "report card" from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was not so much sobering as outright terrifying.  Its findings include:

• 2019 was the Arctic's second-warmest year ever recorded.  (The warmest was 2016.)  July 2019 was the warmest month since records started in 1850.
• Cold-water fish populations are shrinking and retreating north, disrupting the food chain and affecting populations of Arctic predators such as seals, walruses, and polar bears.
• The amount of ice melted from the Greenland Ice Sheet in 2019 tied for highest volume ever lost (with 2012).
• The ice at the very north is itself destabilizing.  Only one percent of the marine ice in the Arctic Ocean is over four years old, so the "permanent Arctic ice sheet" is a thing of the past.
• The loss of ice cover in the summer is causing a feedback loop as darker/more absorptive open ocean retains more of the summer's heat and ramps temperatures up further.  The summers for the past ten years have broken record after record for high temperatures and speed of warm-up.

Horrifying news.  But most countries seem to take the stance of "oh, well, it doesn't affect us," and continue to sit on their hands.  It immediately put me in mind of the old comic strip, one that has shown up in many contexts, from Nazi aggression before World War II to Wall Street speculation to the spread of terrorism, but which seems tragically apt here:

Sometimes I get tired of shouting "WILL YOU PEOPLE PLEASE WAKE UP AND FOR FUCK'S SAKE DO SOMETHING?"  Heaven knows I've hit on this topic enough times here at Skeptophilia, my readers must be getting sick of my ringing the changes over and over.  But given that there are still climate change deniers out there, and people are paying more attention to noted climatologists like Meat Loaf than the actual scientists, we can't afford to let fatigue silence us.

The problem is, the scientific papers and even the heartbreaking exhibits like the one opening soon at the British Museum are almost entirely reaching people who already know that anthropogenic climate change is happening, and simultaneously are unable to change policy.  I can virtually guarantee the politicians aren't reading science journals (in the case of Donald Trump, I seriously doubt he's ever read anything longer than the label on a soup can).  So it's a case where there are two hermetically-sealed groups -- the science community and informed laypeople, who know what's happening but are unable to change it, and the elected leaders, who are able to change it but are either uniformed or else willfully participating in the disinformation campaign.

So I'll keep blogging, and other concerned people will continue working toward getting the truth out there, but until we change things at the ballot box, my guess is that to paraphrase Douglas Adams, nothing will continue to happen.

My only hope is that by the time we are able to act, it won't already be past the tipping point.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is simultaneously one of the most dismal books I've ever read, and one of the funniest; Tom Phillips's wonderful Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up.

I picked up a copy of it at the wonderful book store The Strand when I was in Manhattan last week, and finished it in three days flat (and I'm not a fast reader).  To illustrate why, here's a quick passage that'll give you a flavor of it:

Humans see patterns in the world, we can communicate this to other humans and we have the capacity to imagine futures that don't yet exist: how if we just changed this thing, then that thing would happen, and the world would be a slightly better place. 

The only trouble is... well, we're not terribly good at any of those things.  Any honest assessment of humanity's previous performance on those fronts reads like a particularly brutal annual review from a boss who hates you.  We imagine patterns where they don't exist.  Our communication skills are, uh, sometimes lacking.  And we have an extraordinarily poor track record of failing to realize that changing this thing will also lead to the other thing, and that even worse thing, and oh God no now this thing is happening how do we stop it.

Phillips's clear-eyed look at our own unfortunate history is kept from sinking under its own weight by a sparkling wit, calling our foibles into humorous focus but simultaneously sounding the call that "Okay, guys, it's time to pay attention."  Stupidity, they say, consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; Phillips's wonderful book points out how crucial that realization is -- and how we need to get up off our asses and, for god's sake, do something.

And you -- and everyone else -- should start by reading this book.

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

Lying down with dogs

We love our dogs, but there are times when we look straight into their big brown eyes and say, "You are the reason we can't have nice things."

Of course, given that neither of our dogs are known for their excessive brain power, they usually respond by wagging cheerfully.

Sometimes I think our dogs are not so much pets as a pair of home demolition experts.  Both of them track mud everywhere, a problem made worse by Guinness's love of swimming in our pond.

There's also the issue that when he chases his tennis ball -- his all-time favorite occupation, one that he is capable of doing for hours on end -- he performs his catches with all the grace and subtlety of a baseball player sliding into home.  The result is that he has torn our back lawn into a wasteland of rutted dirt, which in early spring when the snow melts turns into a giant mud puddle.  We've been renovating our walk-out basement, and while considering what flooring to put in, I suggested that we simply spread an enormous plastic tarp on the floor and call it good.

Carol felt that this didn't set the right aesthetic for our home, and I suppose she's right,  but it would certainly be easier to keep clean.

And it'd be nice if tracking dirt everywhere was all they did.  Guinness (code name: El Destructo) has a great love of chewing stuff, and despite having approximately 1,485 chew toys, he is constantly finding stuff to tear up that isn't technically his.  So far, we've lost shoes, slippers, books, paintbrushes, pieces of unopened mail, a set of iPod headphones, and so many cardboard boxes that I've lost count.  He's also an accomplished counter surfer, and just a couple of weeks ago he snagged a half-pound of expensive French brie, something we still haven't quite forgiven him for.

I guess I didn't realize that when we picked him out at the shelter, we were on the Bad Doggie Aisle.  That'll teach me not to read the signs more carefully.

Anyhow, when we ask our dogs, "So, what good are you two, anyway?", they don't generally have any answer unless you count cheerful wagging.  But maybe they will now -- because two papers, one in the Journal of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology and the other in PLOS-One, have shown that dogs actually do have a positive contribution to make (above and beyond companionship), especially to the health of children.

In the first, "Early Exposure to Cats, Dogs and Farm Animals and the Risk of Childhood Asthma and Allergy," by a team led by Vincent Ojwang of Tampere University (Finland), we find that children living with dogs and/or cats when they're very young have a statistically significant lower chance of allergies, asthma, and eczema than children who don't.  The mechanism is poorly understood -- it may have something to do with early exposure to dirt and pet dander desensitizing children to harmless antigens -- but the effect was clear.  The sample size was nearly four thousand, so it's not an inconsequential result.  (Interestingly, the correlation with farm animals was uncertain, perhaps because farm animals aren't in the home and exposure to them is not only more limited, it's more likely to occur in the open air where concentrations of dust and dander are lower.)

The second, "Exposure to Household Pet Cats and Dogs in Childhood and Risk of Subsequent Diagnosis of Schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorder," by a team led by Robert Yolken of Johns Hopkins, found that (even when you control for other factors), a child who lived with a pet dog for a significant amount of time before age thirteen was 24% less likely to be diagnosed later with schizophrenia.  (There was no similar correlation with cat ownership; the reason is unclear.)

As with the allergy/asthma study, the mechanism behind this correlation is uncertain.  "Serious psychiatric disorders have been associated with alterations in the immune system linked to environmental exposures in early life, and since household pets are often among the first things with which children have close contact, it was logical for us to explore the possibilities of a connection between the two," Yolken said in an interview with Science Daily.  "Previous studies have identified early life exposures to pet cats and dogs as environmental factors that may alter the immune system through various means, including allergic responses, contact with zoonotic bacteria and viruses, changes in a home's microbiome, and pet-induced stress reduction effects on human brain chemistry...  [Some researchers] suspect that this immune modulation may alter the risk of developing psychiatric disorders to which a person is genetically or otherwise predisposed."

So I suppose I must grudgingly admit that our dogs actually might serve some purpose other than getting hair all over the sofa, barking at the UPS guy, and chasing away terrifying intruders like chipmunks.  Maybe we should credit their dirt-spreading capacity with the fact that our sons are both completely healthy and allergy-free.  At this point, though, since Carol and I are both clearly adults, they can lay off changing our home's microbiome.  I'll accept the risk of developing an allergy if I don't have to put up with Lena lying down next to me after having rolled in a rancid squirrel carcass.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is simultaneously one of the most dismal books I've ever read, and one of the funniest; Tom Phillips's wonderful Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up.

I picked up a copy of it at the wonderful book store The Strand when I was in Manhattan last week, and finished it in three days flat (and I'm not a fast reader).  To illustrate why, here's a quick passage that'll give you a flavor of it:

Humans see patterns in the world, we can communicate this to other humans and we have the capacity to imagine futures that don't yet exist: how if we just changed this thing, then that thing would happen, and the world would be a slightly better place. 

The only trouble is... well, we're not terribly good at any of those things.  Any honest assessment of humanity's previous performance on those fronts reads like a particularly brutal annual review from a boss who hates you.  We imagine patterns where they don't exist.  Our communication skills are, uh, sometimes lacking.  And we have an extraordinarily poor track record of failing to realize that changing this thing will also lead to the other thing, and that even worse thing, and oh God no now this thing is happening how do we stop it.

Phillips's clear-eyed look at our own unfortunate history is kept from sinking under its own weight by a sparkling wit, calling our foibles into humorous focus but simultaneously sounding the call that "Okay, guys, it's time to pay attention."  Stupidity, they say, consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; Phillips's wonderful book points out how crucial that realization is -- and how we need to get up off our asses and, for god's sake, do something.

And you -- and everyone else -- should start by reading this book.

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

In the dark

You've all heard of dark matter, the strange stuff that comprises 85% of the total matter in the universe and about a quarter of its overall mass-energy, and the nature of which -- although its presence has been shown in a variety of ways -- we're no nearer to understanding than we were when investigations of galactic rotation rates demonstrated its existence to astronomer Vera Rubin in 1978 (as I mentioned in yesterday's post).

Less well-known, and even more mysterious, is dark energy.  It's a little unfortunate the monikers of these two strange phenomena sound so similar, because dark energy is entirely different from dark matter (both obtained the sobriquet "dark" mainly because they've resisted all methods for direct detection, so we still have not a damn clue what they are).  Dark energy is a peculiar (hypothesized) form of energy that permeates all of space, and is responsible for the observation that the rate of expansion of the universe is accelerating.  Dark energy, whatever it is, acts on matter as if something were pushing it, working opposite to the pull of gravity that otherwise would cause the expansion to reverse eventually, ending the universe in a "Big Crunch."

Oh, and whatever it is, looks like it's common.  Measurements based on the expansion rate of the universe put estimates in the range of 68% of the total mass-energy of the universe.  So that places ordinary matter and energy -- the kind we are made of and interact with on a daily basis -- at a mere 7% of the stuff in the universe.

Kind of humbling, isn't it?  If the data are correct, 93% of the mass-energy of the universe is made up of stuff we can't detect and don't understand.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Design Alex Mittelmann, Coldcreation, Lambda-Cold Dark Matter, Accelerated Expansion of the Universe, Big Bang-Inflation, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Well, maybe.  According to a press release two days ago from Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea), scientists at the Center for Galaxy Evolution and Research are suggesting that the foundational assumption that led to the "discovery" of dark energy may simply be wrong.

I'm no astrophysicist, so I won't try to summarize the press release, but simply quote the salient paragraphs:

The most direct and strongest evidence for the accelerating universe with dark energy is provided by the distance measurements using type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) for the galaxies at high redshift.  This result is based on the assumption that the corrected luminosity of SN Ia through the empirical standardization would not evolve with redshift.

New observations and analysis made by a team of astronomers at Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea), together with their collaborators at Lyon University and KASI, show, however, that this key assumption is most likely in error.  The team has performed very high-quality (signal-to-noise ratio ~175) spectroscopic observations to cover most of the reported nearby early-type host galaxies of SN Ia, from which they obtained the most direct and reliable measurements of population ages for these host galaxies.  They find a significant correlation between SN luminosity and stellar population age at a 99.5% confidence level.  As such, this is the most direct and stringent test ever made for the luminosity evolution of SN Ia.  Since SN progenitors in host galaxies are getting younger with redshift (look-back time), this result inevitably indicates a serious systematic bias with redshift in SN cosmology.  Taken at face values, the luminosity evolution of SN is significant enough to question the very existence of dark energy.  When the luminosity evolution of SN is properly taken into account, the team found that the evidence for the existence of dark energy simply goes away.

I don't know about you, but I read this with my mouth hanging open.  The idea that 68% of the mass-energy density of the universe could disappear if you alter the assumptions came as a bit of a shock.

It probably shouldn't have, of course, because this sort of thing has happened before.  There was phlogiston (the mysterious substance inherent in combustible matter) and the luminiferous aether (the mysterious substance through which light propagates in the vacuum of space), both of which turned out to be not so much mysterious as nonexistent.  Both of these vanished when the baseline assumptions changed -- in the first case, when a good theory of chemical energy was developed, and in the second when Einstein showed that light didn't act like an ordinary wave.

And honestly, even if I'm shocked by the way the dark energy scenario is playing out, I've been half expecting something like this to happen.  A physicist friend of mine was chatting with me one day about dark matter and dark energy (as one does), and she said that just like the aether stuck around until Einstein came and blew away the need for it by changing the perspective, the same would happen with the strange and undetectable dark matter and dark energy.

"We're just waiting for this century's Einstein," she said.

But it seems like it might not even require something as groundbreaking as a Theory of Relativity, here, at least in the case of dark energy.  All it might take is reevaluating the data on supernova luminosity to remove the need for the hypothesis.

Also would explain why we haven't detected it.

But this, like any scientific claim, is bound to be challenged, especially consider that it's nixing 68% of the universe in one fell swoop.  So keep your eyes on the physics journals -- I'm sure you haven't heard the last of this.

And you can count on the new research casting some light on the darkness -- whatever the ultimate outcome.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is simultaneously one of the most dismal books I've ever read, and one of the funniest; Tom Phillips's wonderful Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up.

I picked up a copy of it at the wonderful book store The Strand when I was in Manhattan last week, and finished it in three days flat (and I'm not a fast reader).  To illustrate why, here's a quick passage that'll give you a flavor of it:

Humans see patterns in the world, we can communicate this to other humans and we have the capacity to imagine futures that don't yet exist: how if we just changed this thing, then that thing would happen, and the world would be a slightly better place. 

The only trouble is... well, we're not terribly good at any of those things.  Any honest assessment of humanity's previous performance on those fronts reads like a particularly brutal annual review from a boss who hates you.  We imagine patterns where they don't exist.  Our communication skills are, uh, sometimes lacking.  And we have an extraordinarily poor track record of failing to realize that changing this thing will also lead to the other thing, and that even worse thing, and oh God no now this thing is happening how do we stop it.

Phillips's clear-eyed look at our own unfortunate history is kept from sinking under its own weight by a sparkling wit, calling our foibles into humorous focus but simultaneously sounding the call that "Okay, guys, it's time to pay attention."  Stupidity, they say, consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; Phillips's wonderful book points out how crucial that realization is -- and how we need to get up off our asses and, for god's sake, do something.

And you -- and everyone else -- should start by reading this book.

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

Stretching the boundaries

Be honest, can you tell me anything about the following people?

• Annie Jump Cannon
• Jocelyn Bell Burnell
• Henrietta Swan Leavitt
• Willamina Fleming
• Maria Mitchell
• Ruby Payne-Scott
• Nancy Roman
• Vera Rubin

Okay, what about the following?

• Nikolaus Copernicus
• Johannes Kepler
• Neil DeGrasse Tyson
• Stephen Hawking
• William Herschel
• Christiaan Huygens
• Carl Sagan
• Edwin Hubble

My guess is that the typical reader recognized six or seven people on the second list, and could probably have named a major contribution for at least five of them.  I'd also wager that the average recognition for the first list is one or two -- and that most people couldn't tell you what the accomplishments were for the ones they did recognize.

Okay, I admit, it's pretty obvious what I'm driving at, here.  I'm not known for my subtlety.  And lest you think I'm deliberately comparing some chosen-to-be-minor female astronomers with a list of male Big Names, here are the major contributions for the women on the first list.

Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941) is responsible for the current stellar classification system, in which stars are categorized by their spectral output and temperature -- an achievement that was critical for our understanding of stellar evolution.  So when you're watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and Commander Data says, "It is a typical M-class star" -- yeah, that was Annie Jump Cannon's invention.  Oh, and did I mention that she wasn't just female in a time when women were virtually prohibited from becoming scientists, but she was almost completely deaf?  Remember that when you think about the obstacles you have to overcome to reach your goals and dreams.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell (b. 1943) is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who was responsible for the discovery and explanation of pulsars in 1967.  Her claim that they were rapidly-rotating neutron stars was at first dismissed -- some scientists even derided the data itself, calling her discovery of the flashing star "LGM" (Little Green Men) -- and she wasn't included in the 1974 Nobel Prize awarded to scientists involved in the research that confirmed her hypothesis.  (Her other awards, though, are too numerous to list here, and she showed her typical graciousness in accepting her exclusion from the Nobel, but it pissed off a slew of influential people and opened a lot of eyes about the struggles of women in science.)

Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921) was an American astronomer who discovered a seemingly trivial fact -- that the bright/dark periodicity of a type of variable star, Cepheid variables, is directly proportional to its intrinsic brightness.  She very quickly realized that this meant Cepheids could be used as "standard candles" -- a light source with a known actual brightness -- to allow astronomers to figure out how far away stars are.  This understanding was half of the solution to the question of the age of the universe, which added to red shift proved that the universe is expanding, and ultimately led to the Big Bang theory.

Willamina Fleming (1857-1911) was a Scottish astronomer who discovered (literally) thousands of astronomical objects, including the now-famous Horsehead Nebula.  She was one of the founding members of the "Harvard Computers," a group of women who took on the task of doing mathematical calculations using data from the Harvard Observatory -- after Fleming noted that the work their male counterparts had been doing could have been bettered by her housekeeper.

Maria Mitchell (1818-1889) was an American astronomer whose accomplishments were so many and varied that I could go on for pages just about her.  She was the first female professor of astronomy at an American college (Vassar), the first female editor of a column in Scientific American, was director of Vassar's observatory for twenty years, came up with the first good explanation for sunspots, pioneered investigations into stellar composition, and discovered (among other things) a comet before it was visible to the naked eye.  She was an incredibly inspiring teacher -- twenty-five of her students went on to be listed in Who's Who.  "I cannot expect to make astronomers," she once said to her class, "but I do expect that you will invigorate your minds by the effort at healthy modes of thinking.  When we are chafed and fretted by small cares, a look at the stars will show us the littleness of our own interests."

Ruby Payne-Scott (1912-1981) was an Australian scientist who became the first female radioastronomer, who was responsible for linking the appearance of sunspots with radio bursts from the Sun and was also instrumental in developing radar for detecting enemy planes during World War II.  She was not only an astronomer but a gifted physicist and electrical engineer, and made use of all three in her research -- but opportunities for women in science were so limited that in 1963 she resigned as an astronomer and became a secondary school teacher.  But she never ceased fighting for women's voices in science, and in 2008 the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization began the Payne-Scott Award in her honor to support women in science, especially those returning to the research world after taking time for maternity leave.

Nancy Roman (1925-2018) was an American astronomer who was one of the first female executives at NASA, and who has been nicknamed the "Mother of Hubble" for her instrumental role in developing the Hubble Space Telescope.  She did pioneering work in the calculation of stellar velocities -- all this despite having been actively discouraged from pursuing a science career, most notably by a high school counselor when she suggested she'd like to take algebra instead of Latin.  The counselor sneered, "What kind of lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?"  Well, this lady would, and went on to be the recipient of four honorary doctorates (as well as the one she earned), received an Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal from NASA and a fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was the recipient of many other awards.

Vera Rubin (1928-2016) was an American astronomer whose observation of anomalies in galactic rotation rates led to what might be the weirdest discovery in physics in the last hundred years -- "dark matter."  Her work, according to the New York Times, "usher[ed] in a Copernican-style change in astronomy," and the Carnegie Institute said after her death that the United States had "lost a national treasure."

Honestly, it's Rubin who got me thinking about all of this gender inequity, because I found out that last month the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope was renamed the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, and when I posted on social media how awesome this was, I had several people respond, "Okay, cool, but who is she?"  We like to pride ourselves on how far we've come in terms of equity, but man, we have a long way to go.  Famous straight white male scientists become household names; equally prestigious scientists who are women, LGBTQ, or people of color often become poorly-recognized footnotes.

Don't you think it's time for this to change?

The amazing Vera Rubin in 2009 [Image is in the Public Domain]

I know this is a battle we won't win overnight, but the dominance of straight white males in science has resulted in the stifling of so incredibly much talent, hope, and skill that we ought to all be working toward greater access and opportunity regardless of our own gender, skin color, or sexual orientation.  My little exercise in considering some female astronomers probably won't count for that much, but I'm hoping that it might open a few eyes, invert a few stereotypes, and stretch a few boundaries -- and whatever motion we can have in that direction is nothing but positive.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is simultaneously one of the most dismal books I've ever read, and one of the funniest; Tom Phillips's wonderful Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up.

I picked up a copy of it at the wonderful book store The Strand when I was in Manhattan last week, and finished it in three days flat (and I'm not a fast reader).  To illustrate why, here's a quick passage that'll give you a flavor of it:

Humans see patterns in the world, we can communicate this to other humans and we have the capacity to imagine futures that don't yet exist: how if we just changed this thing, then that thing would happen, and the world would be a slightly better place. 

The only trouble is... well, we're not terribly good at any of those things.  Any honest assessment of humanity's previous performance on those fronts reads like a particularly brutal annual review from a boss who hates you.  We imagine patterns where they don't exist.  Our communication skills are, uh, sometimes lacking.  And we have an extraordinarily poor track record of failing to realize that changing this thing will also lead to the other thing, and that even worse thing, and oh God no now this thing is happening how do we stop it.

Phillips's clear-eyed look at our own unfortunate history is kept from sinking under its own weight by a sparkling wit, calling our foibles into humorous focus but simultaneously sounding the call that "Okay, guys, it's time to pay attention."  Stupidity, they say, consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; Phillips's wonderful book points out how crucial that realization is -- and how we need to get up off our asses and, for god's sake, do something.

And you -- and everyone else -- should start by reading this book.

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

The weather report

Anyone who paid attention in ninth grade Earth Science class knows that climate and weather are not the same thing.

This, of course, means that we should be scrutinizing the high school transcripts of Donald Trump and the majority of his administration, because without fail you can count on a sneering comment about there being no such thing as anthropogenic climate change every time it snows in Buffalo.

The difference isn't even that hard to understand.  Climate is what you expect to get, weather is what you actually get.  Put more scientifically, climate is the overall averages and trends in a geographical region, and weather is the conditions that occur in a place at a particular time.  So a hot day no more proves the reality of climate change than a cold day disproves it; it's the changes of the average conditions over time that demonstrate to anyone with an IQ larger than their shoe size that something is going drastically wrong with the global climate, and that our penchant for burning fossil fuels is largely the cause.

Well, we might have to amend that last paragraph.  Because a paper that came out last week in Nature has shown pretty conclusively that you can detect the fingerprint of climate change in the weather -- if you look at a large enough sampling on a particular day.

In "Climate Change Now Detectable from Any Single Day of Weather at Global Scale," climatologists Sebastian Sippel, Nicolai Meinshausen, Erich M. Fischer, Enikő Székely, and Reto Knutti, of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science of ETH Zürich decided to look at the assumptions implicit in Donald Trump's incessant tweeting every time there's a hard frost that climate change doesn't exist, and see if it really is possible to see the effects of climate change on a small scale.

And terrifyingly, it turns out that it is.

The authors write:

For generations, climate scientists have educated the public that ‘weather is not climate’, and climate change has been framed as the change in the distribution of weather that slowly emerges from large variability over decades.  However, weather when considered globally is now in uncharted territory.  Here we show that on the basis of a single day of globally observed temperature and moisture, we detect the fingerprint of externally driven climate change, and conclude that Earth as a whole is warming.  Our detection approach invokes statistical learning and climate model simulations to encapsulate the relationship between spatial patterns of daily temperature and humidity, and key climate change metrics such as annual global mean temperature or Earth’s energy imbalance.  Observations are projected onto this relationship to detect climate change.  The fingerprint of climate change is detected from any single day in the observed global record since early 2012, and since 1999 on the basis of a year of data.  Detection is robust even when ignoring the long-term global warming trend.  This complements traditional climate change detection, but also opens broader perspectives for the communication of regional weather events, modifying the climate change narrative: while changes in weather locally are emerging over decades, global climate change is now detected instantaneously.

So Trump's method of "look out of the window and check what the weather's like today" turns out to prove exactly the opposite of what he'd like everyone to believe.

I am simultaneously appalled and fascinated by the fact that there are still people who doubt anthropogenic climate change.  To start with, there is a universal consensus amongst the climatologists (i.e., the people who know what the hell they're talking about) that man-made global warming is a reality.  Note, by the way, that the scientists have always erred on the cautious side; back when I started my teaching career in the 1980s, the truthful stance was that there was suspicion that anthropogenic climate change was happening, but very few scientists were willing to state it with certainty.

Now?  There's hardly a dissenting voice, with the exception of the "scientists" at the Heartland Institute, who coincidentally get their paychecks from the petroleum industry.

Hmm, I wonder why they're still arguing against it?  Funny thing, that.

But even more persuasive than the scientists -- after all, we're not known as a species for trusting the experts when the experts are saying something inconvenient -- there's the evidence of our own eyes.  In my own home of upstate New York, stop by our local coffee shop any morning you like and ask one of the old-timers if winters now are as bad as what they remember as a child.  One and all, they'll tell you about snowstorms and blizzards and so on, the last serious one of which happened back in 1993.  Yeah, we've had snowfalls since then -- this is the Northeast, after all -- but if you look back through the meteorological records from the early to mid 20th century, there is no question that we've trended toward milder winters.

Then there are the summertime droughts and heat waves, the most extreme of which is happening right now in Australia.  Large parts of Australia are currently burning to a crisp in the worst and most widespread series of wildfires in human history.  Whole towns are being evacuated, and in some places the only safety people have found is piling their family members, pets, and belongings onto boats and waiting out the fires offshore.  The latest estimates are that 12.3 million acres have been charred in the last few months, and that half a billion wild animals have died.  Given the threatened status of a great many of Australia's endemic species, the fact is that we might be witnessing in a few months the simultaneous extinction of dozens of endangered plants and animals.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

But Trump and his administration, and their media mouthpieces at Fox News, have continued to feed people the lie that everything's okay, that we can continue polluting and burning gasoline and coal without any repercussions whatsoever.  Deregulate everything has become the battle cry.  Industry, they say, will regulate itself, no need to worry.

Because that worked out so well in the 1950s and 1960s, when the air in big cities was barely breathable, and there was so much industrial waste in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio that it caught fire not once but thirteen times.

The scientists, and concerned laypeople like myself, have been screaming "Will you people please wake up and do something!" for years now, to seemingly little effect.  "Everything's fine" is a comforting lie, especially since rejecting it means putting a crimp in our generally lavish lifestyles.

The problem is, the natural world has a nasty way of having the last word.  We often forget that there is no reason whatsoever that we couldn't completely wipe ourselves out, either through accident or neglect or outright willful fuckery, or some combination thereof.  For my kids' sake I hope we as a species get pulled up short in the very near future and come together to work toward a solution, because my sense is that time is short.  There comes a point when an avalanche has started and no power on Earth can stop it.  I just hope we're not there yet.

But such a point definitely exists, whether it's behind us or ahead of us.  And that by itself should scare the absolute shit out of every citizen of this Earth.

Maybe you still find yourself shrugging and saying, "Meh."  If so, you should shut off Fox News (permanently) and read a scientific paper or two.  Start with the Sippel et al. study I linked above.

If that doesn't convince you, I don't know what would.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is simultaneously one of the most dismal books I've ever read, and one of the funniest; Tom Phillips's wonderful Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up.

I picked up a copy of it at the wonderful book store The Strand when I was in Manhattan last week, and finished it in three days flat (and I'm not a fast reader).  To illustrate why, here's a quick passage that'll give you a flavor of it:

Humans see patterns in the world, we can communicate this to other humans and we have the capacity to imagine futures that don't yet exist: how if we just changed this thing, then that thing would happen, and the world would be a slightly better place. 

The only trouble is... well, we're not terribly good at any of those things.  Any honest assessment of humanity's previous performance on those fronts reads like a particularly brutal annual review from a boss who hates you.  We imagine patterns where they don't exist.  Our communication skills are, uh, sometimes lacking.  And we have an extraordinarily poor track record of failing to realize that changing this thing will also lead to the other thing, and that even worse thing, and oh God no now this thing is happening how do we stop it.

Phillips's clear-eyed look at our own unfortunate history is kept from sinking under its own weight by a sparkling wit, calling our foibles into humorous focus but simultaneously sounding the call that "Okay, guys, it's time to pay attention."  Stupidity, they say, consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; Phillips's wonderful book points out how crucial that realization is -- and how we need to get up off our asses and, for god's sake, do something.

And you -- and everyone else -- should start by reading this book.

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