A flood of mythic proportions

Ever heard of the Zanclean Flood?

If not, you definitely should, because it was pretty stupendous.

At some point during the late Miocene Epoch, a combination of tectonic activity and sea level drop brought the level of the Atlantic Ocean below the Gibraltar Sill, the range of (now underwater) mountains that crosses the Strait of Gibraltar, connecting Spain to Morocco.  When that happened, the Mediterranean Sea was cut off from the Atlantic, and received its only influxes of water from rainfall and the input from rivers (including the Rhone, Nile, Po, and Tiber Rivers).

At that point, the evaporation from the hot, dry winds off northern Africa and southern Europe occurred at a greater rate than the influx of water, and the Mediterranean began to dry up.  Eventually it split into two extremely saline parts, separated by another sill across the Straits of Sicily, each of which had a water level way below that of the rest of the Earth's oceans.

Well, in geology nothing is constant but change.  About 5.33 million years ago, tectonic activity, this time coupled with a sea level rise, eventually breached the barrier of the Gibraltar Sill, creating a waterfall.

But this wasn't just a waterfall.  This was a freakin' HUGE waterfall.

Geologist Daniel García-Castellanos, of the Spanish National Research Council, has done a tremendous amount of research into the Zanclean Flood and the events that led up to it, and has estimated that the Gibraltar Sill Waterfall, at its greatest, was a kilometer tall and was pouring two hundred million cubic meters of water into the Mediterranean Basin per second.

For reference, this is a thousand times more water than the Amazon River moves during the rainy season.

Artist's conception of the western Mediterranean just as the Zanclean Flood was beginning [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Paubahi, Etapa4, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So the Mediterranean began to refill, reaching increases in level of ten meters per day.  This kind of water flow created erosion like you can't even imagine, blowing enormous boulders over the Sill and down into what is now the western Mediterranean.  Anything in the water's path was drowned.  The sudden refilling of the basin drastically changed the climate, cooling what had been a blast-furnace of a desert (think Death Valley but much, much bigger).

All things considered, one of the most dramatic geological events ever.

One of the difficulties of studying it, though, is that all of the evidence is currently underwater.  But now García-Castellanos, again working with a team from the Spanish National Research Council, has found what might be the smoking gun for the Zanclean Flood.

Using seismic reflection profiles, García-Castellanos and his team have found massive piles of sediments that were apparently deposited over a very short period of time, right where you'd expect to find the talus pile of the Gibraltar Sill Waterfall.  It's enormous -- as you might expect -- 163 meters thick, 35 kilometers long, and 7 kilometers wide, extending from the Sill down into the depths of the Alborán Sea, the very western bit of the Mediterranean.  "The identified sediments are compatible with a megaflood event refilling the Mediterranean Sea through the Strait of Gibraltar," García-Castellanos said.  "It's an enlarged body deposited in the protected area at the lee side of a submarine volcano."

However, as befits a good scientist, García-Castellanos has invited other geologists and seismologists to examine the data and see if his conclusions are valid.  "Ten years after publishing the first observations that were related with the Zanclean Flood we are still finding new evidence to sustain it, but it is not conclusive," he said.  "All of the evidence that has been summarized in this article may have other possible interpretations and, before convincing the scientific community it will be necessary to have other studies that consider the hypothesis from other angles."

But however it eventually falls out, the refilling of the Mediterranean must have been something to see.  From a safe distance.  The geological processes of the Earth are often unsubtle, and their power makes me feel very, very small, but even looking at it from a geologist's perspective, this one must have been spectacular.

Feeling humbled by the universe is not necessarily a bad thing.  We humans have a way of getting cocky and thinking we're in charge of things.  Looking back in geological history, though, one very quickly realizes our fragility in the face of forces far, far more powerful than anything we've been able to devise -- and that our continued survival on Earth is in no sense guaranteed.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is both intriguing and sobering: Eric Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

The year in the title is the peak of a period of instability and warfare that effectively ended the Bronze Age.  In the end, eight of the major civilizations that had pretty much run Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East -- the Canaanites, Cypriots, Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Minoans, Myceneans, and Hittites -- all collapsed more or less simultaneously.

Cline attributes this to a perfect storm of bad conditions, including famine, drought, plague, conflict within the ruling clans and between nations and their neighbors, and a determination by the people in charge to keep doing things the way they'd always done them despite the changing circumstances.  The result: a period of chaos and strife that destroyed all eight civilizations.  The survivors, in the decades following, rebuilt new nation-states from the ruins of the previous ones, but the old order was gone forever.

It's impossible not to compare the events Cline describes with what is going on in the modern world -- making me think more than once while reading this book that it was half history, half cautionary tale.  There is no reason to believe that sort of collapse couldn't happen again.

After all, the ruling class of all eight ancient civilizations also thought they were invulnerable.

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

One ring to track them all

I'm notoriously un-tech-savvy.  Or, to put it more accurately, my techspertise is very narrow and focused.  I've learned a few things really well -- such as how to format and edit posts here at Blogspot -- and a handful of other computer applications, but outside of those (and especially if anything malfunctions), I immediately flounder.

I have my genealogy software pretty well figured out (fortunately, because my genealogical database has 130,000 names in it, so I better know how to manage it).  I'm relatively good with my primary word processing software, Pages, and am marginally capable with MS Word, although I have to say that my experience with formatting documents in Word has been less than an enjoyable experience.  It seems to be designed to turn simple requests into major havoc, such as the time at work when I messed around with a document for two hours to figure out why it had no Page 103, but went from 102 directly to 104.  Repaginating the entire document generated such results as the page numbers going to 102 then starting over at 1, stopping at 102 and leaving the rest of the pages with no number, and deleting the page numbers entirely.  None of these is what I had explicitly asked the computer to do.

I finally took a blank sheet of paper, hand-wrote "103" in the upper right-hand corner, and stuck it into the printed manuscript.  To my knowledge, no one has yet noticed.

In any case, all of this leaves me rather in awe of people who are tech-adepts -- especially those who can not only learn to use the stuff adroitly, but dream new devices up.

Such as the gizmo featured in Science Daily that was the subject of a paper last month in Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.  It describes a new device called AuraRing, developed at the University of Washington, that coupled with a wristband is able to keep track of the position of the finger that's wearing the ring.

"We're thinking about the next generation of computing platforms," said co-lead author Eric Whitmire, who completed this research as a doctoral student at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.  "We wanted a tool that captures the fine-grain manipulation we do with our fingers -- not just a gesture or where your finger's pointed, but something that can track your finger completely."

The AuraRing is capable of detecting movements such as taps, flicks, and pinches -- similar to the kinds of movements we now use on touch screens.  Another possibility is using it to monitor handwriting and turn it into typed text (although I have to wonder what it'd do with my indecipherable scrawl -- it's a smart device, but I seriously doubt it's that smart).

"We can also easily detect taps, flicks or even a small pinch versus a big pinch," AuraRing co-developer Farshid Salemi Parizi said.  "This gives you added interaction space.  For example, if you write 'hello,' you could use a flick or a pinch to send that data.  Or on a Mario-like game, a pinch could make the character jump, but a flick could make them super jump...  It's all about super powers.  You would still have all the capabilities that today's smartwatches have to offer, but when you want the additional benefits, you just put on your ring."

The whole thing reminds me of the amazing musical gloves developed a few years ago by musician and innovator Imogen Heap.  She's a phenomenal artist in general, but has pioneered the use of technology in enhancing performance -- not just using auto-tune to straighten out poorly-sung notes, but actually incorporating the technology as part of the instrumentation.

If you've never seen her using her gloves, take twenty minutes and watch this.  It's pretty amazing.

So that's the latest in smart technology that I'm probably not smart enough to use.  But I still find it fascinating.  One more step toward full-body emulation on a computer, complete with a body suit that will not only pick up your movements, but transfer virtual sensations to your skin.

Techno-nitwit though I am, I would be at the head of the line volunteering to try that out.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is both intriguing and sobering: Eric Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

The year in the title is the peak of a period of instability and warfare that effectively ended the Bronze Age.  In the end, eight of the major civilizations that had pretty much run Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East -- the Canaanites, Cypriots, Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Minoans, Myceneans, and Hittites -- all collapsed more or less simultaneously.

Cline attributes this to a perfect storm of bad conditions, including famine, drought, plague, conflict within the ruling clans and between nations and their neighbors, and a determination by the people in charge to keep doing things the way they'd always done them despite the changing circumstances.  The result: a period of chaos and strife that destroyed all eight civilizations.  The survivors, in the decades following, rebuilt new nation-states from the ruins of the previous ones, but the old order was gone forever.

It's impossible not to compare the events Cline describes with what is going on in the modern world -- making me think more than once while reading this book that it was half history, half cautionary tale.  There is no reason to believe that sort of collapse couldn't happen again.

After all, the ruling class of all eight ancient civilizations also thought they were invulnerable.

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

How plants see the world

The final project in my AP Biology class was to design a piece of original research, carry out an experiment, and report on the results.  I was amazed at the creative ideas students came up with, and the elegance of their methods for finding an answer -- methods that were limited by considerations of budget, space, and time.

One of the best ones I recall came out of a discussion in class when we were studying botany.  I was telling the students about statoliths, small, dense particles in the cells of plants near the tips of roots and stems, that sink to the bottom of the cell and tell the plant what direction is up.  This detection of the pull of gravity allows for gravitropism, in which the roots grow downward and the stems upward, even in the absence of light.

This sense gets taken away in zero-g conditions, as on the International Space Station.  Experiments there have shown that without an apparent pull of gravity, seeds will sprout and the roots and stems grow in whatever direction the seed is oriented -- even if that means the roots will grow upward and the stems downward.

A student asked, "What would happen if you increased the pull of gravity?  In a spaceship floating in the atmosphere of Jupiter, for example?"

I had no idea, and I told him so.  Good question, but to my knowledge it hadn't ever been tested.

So when the end of the year came, that student decided to find out.

Since a trip to Jupiter was kind of out of the question, he designed an apparatus to simulate higher-gravity conditions.  He got an old ceiling fan motor and some lengths of PVC pipe, and built himself an electronic whirligig.  He then grew sunflower seeds in two-liter soda bottles hanging on the ends of the vanes -- attached the bottles and then spun the hell out of them.  Knowing the rotational speed of the whirligig and the radius of the vanes, he could calculate the centripetal force being exerted on the bottles, and thus the increase in apparent gravitational pull.

And when he opened up the bottles, he found something extraordinary.  The higher the average gravitational pull the seedlings experienced, the shorter they were, and the thicker the stems.  Up to the limit of his whirligig's speed, it was a nearly linear relationship -- higher pull = shorter, stouter seedlings.

So somehow, plants can not only detect the direction of the pull of gravity, but its strength.

We're just starting to understand how plants sense the world, and what sorts of responses they are capable of.  A paper last week in Current Biology, describing research conducted at the University of Helsinki, unlocked a piece of what might have been going on with my student's spinning sunflowers.  The research team, led by botanist Juan Alonso-Serra, found that birch trees whose branches are weighted -- simulating a higher-mass crown -- increase the rate of the radial growth of their trunks in order to better support the higher weight.  Better still, they found that the gene called ELIMÄKI (EKI) is critical to this response; plants with a defective EKI locus were not able to do this growth-rate compensation, and eventually collapsed.

The authors write:

Our results highlight a regulatory circuit by which weight in tree trunks mechanically stimulates cambial growth.  The ELIMÄKI locus participates in this circuit, as shown by its requirement at various levels, from weight-induced growth response to the proper control of gene expression related to touch-induced mechanosensing.  The circuit facilitates the local acquisition of the biomechanical characteristics of xylem in the correct spatiotemporal manner, which systemically leads to a correct vertical proprioception response.  It remains to be studied how weight- and development-derived forces are sensed and transduced into radial growth, but our results indicate a critical role for a degree of lateral stem movement.  Similarly, it remains to be studied whether the ELIMÄKI locus contributes directly to the sensing of the proprioceptive signal or whether it is only part of its response.  Our results provide a mechanism through which the critical height:diameter ratio implied by the mechanical theory of tree evolution can be achieved.

Which is pretty amazing.  My long-ago student's research was prescient -- and now we have a possible genetic mechanism by which this response is modulated.  (Note, however, that Alonso-Serra's team still had no model for how plants are sensing the higher weight.)

Plants are aware of their surroundings in ways that are only now being understood.  One of the more mysterious responses, for which I have still heard no particularly convincing explanations, is crown shyness -- the tendency in some tree species to avoid coming near the branches of other trees, leaving "lanes" of open sky when viewed from below.

A grove of the Malaysian dipterocarp Dryobalanops aromatica, showing crown shyness [Image is in the Public Domain]

Why the usual approach -- growing taller and broader than your neighbor, so as to have better access to light (and as a side benefit, discouraging competition from the individuals around you) -- doesn't apply here, I don't know.  Two possible explanations are that having your branches not touch your neighbors' results in less chance of mechanical damage from the wind, and also provides less of a pathway for herbivores to get to you from nearby trees.

But it's hard for me to see how such minor benefits would result in such a striking response, which apparently has evolved more than once in only distantly-related species.

Also not fully understood is the phenomenon of photoperiodism, the way many plants time when to flower based on the relative lengths of the day and night.  There are a few suggestive experiments that the critical thing is the length of the night rather than the day -- breaking up the dark period by even a short flash of light disrupts the response, whereas a short dark period in the middle of the day has no effect.  Light in the red region of the spectrum has the strongest ability to disrupt this response, probably because a protein involved in the response (phytochrome) has its highest sensitivity to red light.  Some plants are extraordinarily sensitive, responding to changes in the day/night length of only a few minutes.

But exactly how they're accomplishing all of this is only partially understood.

So if we're just beginning to figure out how our own senses work, we've barely scratched the surface with the sensory apparatus of plants.  What's certain is they're not the mostly-inert little lumps we once thought, passively absorbing sunlight, otherwise unaware of their surroundings.  Plants are capable of sophisticated sensing and response -- whether to day/night length, the proximity of neighbors, weights on the branches -- or being spun around in a cobbled-together electric whirligig.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is both intriguing and sobering: Eric Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

The year in the title is the peak of a period of instability and warfare that effectively ended the Bronze Age.  In the end, eight of the major civilizations that had pretty much run Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East -- the Canaanites, Cypriots, Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Minoans, Myceneans, and Hittites -- all collapsed more or less simultaneously.

Cline attributes this to a perfect storm of bad conditions, including famine, drought, plague, conflict within the ruling clans and between nations and their neighbors, and a determination by the people in charge to keep doing things the way they'd always done them despite the changing circumstances.  The result: a period of chaos and strife that destroyed all eight civilizations.  The survivors, in the decades following, rebuilt new nation-states from the ruins of the previous ones, but the old order was gone forever.

It's impossible not to compare the events Cline describes with what is going on in the modern world -- making me think more than once while reading this book that it was half history, half cautionary tale.  There is no reason to believe that sort of collapse couldn't happen again.

After all, the ruling class of all eight ancient civilizations also thought they were invulnerable.

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

Mathematical stumbles

In the first part of my teaching career, I taught mainly physics and math, before switching to biology (which I then taught for the rest of my 32 years).  During my time as a physics and math teacher, I was fascinated by the number of students who didn't seem to be able to think numerically.  Some of them were quite skilled at equation manipulation, and so got good grades on quizzes.  The trouble started when they punched something into their calculator wrong, and got an answer that was wildly off -- and then didn't recognize that anything was amiss.

Probably the most extreme example of this was a girl in my physics class.  While we were studying electrostatics, there was a problem set up that was intended to lead you in the end to a value for the mass of an electron.  Well, she entered the numbers wrong, or divided when she was supposed to multiply, or some other simplistic careless error -- and got an answer of 86 kilograms.

She called me over, because when she checked her answer against the accepted value, it wasn't the same.  (Really not the same.  The mass of an electron is about 9 x 10^-31 kilograms -- a decimal point, followed by thirty zeroes, ending with a nine.)

"I must have done something wrong," she said.

I laughed and said, "Yeah, that's kind of heavy for an electron."

She gave me a baffled look and said, "It is?"

I thought she was kidding, but it became obvious quickly that she wasn't.  She knew 86 kilograms wasn't the number in the reference tables, but she honestly had no idea how far off she was.

"86 kilograms is almost two hundred pounds," I said.

She went, "Oh."

I saw this kind of thing over and over, and the problem became worse when you threw scientific notation into the mix, which I suspect was part of the problem with my student.  It was all too common for students to believe that whatever came out of the calculator must be right -- many of them seemed to have no ability to give an order-of-magnitude check of their answers to see if they even made sense given the parameters of the problem they were trying to solve.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's easy for those of us who are mathematically adept to be feeling a little smug right now.  But what is interesting is that if you change the context of the question, all of us start having similar troubles -- even expert mathematicians.

A group of psychologists at the Université de Genève set up two different sorts of (very simple) math problems, one of which requires you to think in sets, the other in linear axes.  Here's an example of each:

• Set thinking:  Jim has fourteen pieces of fruit in his shopping basket, a combination of apples and pears.  John has two fewer pears than Jim, but the same number of apples.  How many total pieces of fruit does John have?
• Axes thinking:  When Jane stands on a tall ladder, she can reach a spot fourteen feet high on the side of a house.  Jane is the same height as her twin sister Jill.  If Jill stood on the same ladder, but on a step two feet lower down, how high could she reach?

Both of these problems have the same parameters.  There are pieces of information missing (in the first, the number each of apples and pears Jim has; in the second, Jane's height and the height of the step she's standing on).  In each case, though, the missing information is unnecessary for solving the problem, and in each the solution method is (the same) simple subtraction -- 14 - 2 = 12.

What is extraordinary is that when asked to solve the problems, with an option to answer "no solution because there is insufficient information," people solved the axes problems correctly 82% of the time, and the sets problems only 47% of the time!

Even more surprising were the results when the same problems were given to expert mathematicians.  They got 95% of the axis problems correct -- but only 76% of the sets problems!

I found these results astonishing -- almost a quarter of the mathematicians thought that the information in the "apples and pears" problem above, and others like it, was insufficient to answer the question.

"We see that the way a mathematical problem is formulated has a real impact on performance, including that of experts, and it follows that we can't reason in a totally abstract manner," said Emmanuel Sander, one of the researchers in the study.

"One out of four times, the experts thought there was no solution to the problem even though it was of primary school level," said Hippolyte Gros, another of the authors of the paper, which appeared in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.  "And we even showed that the participants who found the solution to the set problems were still influenced by their set-based outlook, because they were slower to solve these problems than the axis problems...  We have to detach ourselves from our non-mathematical intuition by working with students in non-intuitive contexts."

What this shows is that the inability to think numerically -- what researchers term innumeracy -- isn't as simple as just a stumbling block in quantitative understanding.  Presumably expert mathematicians aren't innumerate (one would hope not, anyway), but there's still something going awry with their cognitive processing in the realm of sets that does not cause problems with their thinking about linear axes.  So it's not a mental math issue -- the mental math necessary for both problems is identical -- it's that somehow, the brain doesn't categorize the two different contexts as having an underlying similarity.

Which I find fascinating.  I'd love to have the same experiment run while the participants are hooked to an fMRI machine, and see if the regions of the brain activated in sets problems are different from the parts in axes problems.  I'd bet cold hard cash they are.

However, it still probably wouldn't answer what was amiss with the student who had the 86 kilogram electron.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is both intriguing and sobering: Eric Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

The year in the title is the peak of a period of instability and warfare that effectively ended the Bronze Age.  In the end, eight of the major civilizations that had pretty much run Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East -- the Canaanites, Cypriots, Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Minoans, Myceneans, and Hittites -- all collapsed more or less simultaneously.

Cline attributes this to a perfect storm of bad conditions, including famine, drought, plague, conflict within the ruling clans and between nations and their neighbors, and a determination by the people in charge to keep doing things the way they'd always done them despite the changing circumstances.  The result: a period of chaos and strife that destroyed all eight civilizations.  The survivors, in the decades following, rebuilt new nation-states from the ruins of the previous ones, but the old order was gone forever.

It's impossible not to compare the events Cline describes with what is going on in the modern world -- making me think more than once while reading this book that it was half history, half cautionary tale.  There is no reason to believe that sort of collapse couldn't happen again.

After all, the ruling class of all eight ancient civilizations also thought they were invulnerable.

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

A twist in the fabric

I hope y'all will indulge me one more astronomical post, because just this week in the journal Science there was a very cool paper about an observational verification of the phenomenon of frame-dragging.

The whole thing depends on the the concept of "the fabric of space-time," something that got ripped so often on Star Trek that you'd swear the universe was made of cheap pantyhose.  To be fair, the idea isn't easy to wrap your brain around, something that becomes obvious when you hear some laypeople talking about the Big Bang.

I mean, I try to be tolerant, but if I hear one more person say, "It's a stupid idea -- that nothing exploded and became everything," I swear, I'm going to hurl a heavy object at 'em.

The problem hinges on trying to draw an analogy between the Big Bang (or in general, the expansion of the Universe) with a conventional explosion, where something blows up and spreads out into space that was already there.  With the Big Bang, it was space itself that was stretching -- if the idea of cosmic inflation turns out to be correct, at first it was at a rate that I can't even begin to comprehend -- so the matter in the Universe moved, and is still moving, not because something was physically pushing on it (as in the explosion of a stick of dynamite), but because the space it was embedded in was expanding.

(For what it's worth -- no, at this point we don't understand why this happened, what initiated it, or why the rate changed so suddenly after the "inflationary era" was over.  There is a lot still to figure out about this.  But one thing that's nearly certain is that it did happen, and the evidence still left behind of the Big Bang is incontrovertible.)

In any case, it's useful to change the comparison.  The Big Bang, and the expansion that followed, is much less like a conventional explosion than it is like blowing up a balloon.  Astronomer Edwin Hubble realized this when he first observed red shift, and found that everywhere he looked in the universe, objects seemed to be flying away from us -- the farther away, the faster they were moving.  It looked very much like we were the center of the Universe, the middle of the explosion, as if you were at the very point where a bomb exploded and were watching the bits and pieces rush away from you.

The truth, Hubble realized, was more subtle, but also way more interesting.  The fabric of space itself was stretching.  Picture a deflated balloon covered with dots.  You're a tiny person standing on one of the dots.  The balloon inflates -- and all the other dots appear to be rushing away from you.  But the weird thing is that it doesn't matter which dot you're standing on.  You could be on any dot, and still all the others would appear to be moving away, because the surface itself is expanding.  So an alien in a distant galaxy would also think everything was moving away from him, and he and Hubble would both be right.

There is no center of the Universe.  Or everywhere is the center.

Which amounts to the same thing.

So it's much more accurate, if you're trying to picture the whole thing, to think of space as being some kind of "stuff" capable of being deformed or stretched.

Which leads us to this week's mind-blowing discovery in astronomy.

One of the stranger predictions of the General Theory of Relativity -- and there's a lot of competition in that regard -- is that a massive spinning object would drag space-time along with it, twisting it out of shape in a phenomenon called Lense-Thirring frame dragging after the Austrian physicists who predicted it based on Einstein's theories, Josef Lense and Hans Thirring.  The problem is, like most of the phenomena associated with Relativity, the Lense-Thirring effect would only be observed in extreme conditions -- in this case a very high-mass object spinning really fast.

To give you an idea of what kind of extremes I'm talking about, here: with the Earth's mass and spin, the Lense-Thirring effect would cause an angular shift of about one degree every 100,000 years.

Not exactly something that jumps out at you.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/H. Kim et al., Celestial spiral with a twist, CC BY 4.0]

Now some scientists led by Vivek Venkatraman Krishnan of the Max Planck Institute have found a remarkable pair of stellar remnants that provide the perfect laboratory for observing frame-dragging -- a white dwarf/pulsar pair that go by the euphonious name PSR J1141-6545.  This is an ideal pairing to study because both the white dwarf and the pulsar are spinning, the white dwarf about once a minute and the pulsar 2.5 times per second.  Because the pulsar emits a lighthouse-like beam of electromagnetic radiation, this rotation makes it flicker on and off, and Conservation of Angular Momentum makes the flicker rate extremely constant -- in fact, the rotational period has been calculated to an accuracy of ten decimal places.

But the whirling of its companion star results in frame-dragging, so the pulsar's beam has developed a tilt as it got pulled through twisted space-time.  (Imagine a flexible object bending as it's dragged through water, and you have an idea of how to picture this.)  And careful observation of the pulsar's wobble has shown that the amount of tilt...

... is exactly what is predicted from the General Theory of Relativity.

So Einstein wins again.  Pretty impressive for a guy who once said to a friend struggling in a math class, "Do not worry too much about your difficulties in mathematics.  I can assure you that mine are still greater."

So that's our mindblowing science of the day.  Spinning stars, twisting space-time, and tilted pulsars.  I don't know how anyone can read about this stuff and not be both fascinated at how weird our universe is, and astonished that we've progressed to the point where we can understand at least a bit of it.  Here, several hundred quadrillion kilometers away, we've detected minuscule tilts in a whirling stellar remnant, and used it to support a theory that describes how matter and energy work throughout the Universe.

If that's not an impressive accomplishment, I don't know what is.

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

The brilliant, iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman was a larger-than-life character -- an intuitive and deep-thinking scientist, a prankster with an adolescent sense of humor, a world traveler, a wild-child with a reputation for womanizing.  His contributions to physics are too many to list, and he also made a name for himself as a suspect in the 1950s "Red Scare" despite his work the previous decade on the Manhattan Project.  In 1986 -- two years before his death at the age of 69 -- he was still shaking the world, demonstrating to the inquiry into the Challenger disaster that the whole thing could have happened because of an o-ring that shattered from cold winter temperatures.

James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman gives a deep look at the man and the scientist, neither glossing over his faults nor denying his brilliance.  It's an excellent companion to Feynman's own autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?  It's a wonderful retrospective of a fascinating person -- someone who truly lived his own words, "Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter.  Explore the world.  Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

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

Hotspot

Today's topic in Skeptophilia isn't controversial so much as it is amazing.  And shows us once again what a weird, endlessly fascinating universe we live in.

First, though, a bit of a science lesson.

A great many processes in the natural world happen because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  The Second Law can be framed in a variety of ways, two of which are: (1) heat always tends to flow from a hotter object to a colder one; and (2) in a closed system, entropy -- disorder -- always increases.  (Why those are two ways of representing the same underlying physical law is subtle, and beyond the scope of this post.)

In any case, the Second Law is the driver behind weather.  Just about all weather happens because of heat energy redistribution -- the Sun warms the ground, which heats the air.  Hot air tends to rise, so it does, drawing in air from the sides and creating a low pressure center (and wind).  As the warm air rises, it cools (heat flowing away from the warmer blob of air), making water vapor condense -- which is why low pressure tends to mean precipitation.  Condensation releases heat energy, which also wants to flow toward where it's cooler, cooling the blob of air (which is also cooling because it's rising and expanding).  When the air cools enough, it sinks, forming a high pressure center -- and on and on.  (Circular air movement of this type -- what are called convection cells -- can be local or global in reach.  Honestly, a hurricane is just a giant low-pressure convector.  A heat pump, in essence.  Just a fast and powerful one.)

Okay, so that's the general idea, and to any physicists who read this, I'm sorry for the oversimplifications (but if I've made any outright errors, let me know so I can fix them; there's enough nonsense out there based in misunderstandings of the Second Law that the last thing I want is to add to it).  Any time you have uneven heating, there's going to be a flow of heat energy from one place to the other, whether through convection, conduction, or radiation.

But if you think we get some violent effects from this process here on Earth, wait till you hear about KELT-9b.

KELT-9b is an exoplanet about 670 light years from Earth.  But it has some characteristics that would put it at the top of the list of "weirdest planets ever discovered."  Here are a few:

• It's three times the mass of Jupiter, the largest planet in our Solar System.
• It's moving at a fantastic speed, orbiting its star in only a day and a half.
• It's tidally locked -- the same side of the planet is always facing the star, meaning there's a permanently light side and a permanently dark side.
• It's the hottest exoplanet yet discovered -- the light side has a mean temperature of 4,300 C, which is hotter than some stars.

So the conditions on this planet are pretty extreme.  But as I found out in a paper by Megan Mansfield of the University of Chicago et al. that appeared in this week's Astrophysical Journal Letters, even knowing all that didn't stop it from harboring a few more surprises.

Artist's conception of KELT-9b [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Tidally-locked planets are likely to have some of the most extraordinary weather in the universe, again because of effects of the Second Law.  Here on Earth, with a planet that rotates once a day, the land surface has an opportunity to heat up and cool down regularly, giving the heat redistribution effects of the Second Law less to work with.  On KELT-9b, though, the same side of the planet gets cooked constantly, so not only is it really freakin' hot, there's way more of a temperature differential between the light side and the dark side than you'd ever get in our Solar System (even Mercury doesn't have that great a difference).

So there must be a phenomenal amount of convection taking place, with the atmosphere on the light side convecting toward the dark side like no hurricane we've ever seen.  But that's where Mansfield et al. realized something was amiss.  Because to account for the temperature distribution they were seeing on KELT-9b, there would have to be wind...

... moving at 150,000 miles per hour.

That seemed physically impossible, so there had to be some other process moving heat around besides simple convection.  The researchers found out what it is -- the heat energy on the light side is sufficient to tear apart hydrogen molecules.

At Earth temperatures, hydrogen exists as a diatomic molecule (H2).  But at KELT-9b's temperatures, the energy tears the molecules into monoatomic hydrogen, storing that as potential energy that is then rereleased when the atoms come back together on the dark side.  So once again we're talking the Second Law -- heat flowing toward the cooler object -- but the carrier of that heat energy isn't just warm air or warm water, but molecules that have been physically torn to shreds.

So, fascinating as it is, KELT-9b would not be the place for Captain Picard to take his away team.  But observed from a distance, it must be spectacular -- glowing blue-white from its own heat, whirling around its host star so fast its year is one and a half of our days, one side in perpetual darkness.  All of which goes to show how prescient William Shakespeare was when he wrote, "There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

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The brilliant, iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman was a larger-than-life character -- an intuitive and deep-thinking scientist, a prankster with an adolescent sense of humor, a world traveler, a wild-child with a reputation for womanizing.  His contributions to physics are too many to list, and he also made a name for himself as a suspect in the 1950s "Red Scare" despite his work the previous decade on the Manhattan Project.  In 1986 -- two years before his death at the age of 69 -- he was still shaking the world, demonstrating to the inquiry into the Challenger disaster that the whole thing could have happened because of an o-ring that shattered from cold winter temperatures.

James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman gives a deep look at the man and the scientist, neither glossing over his faults nor denying his brilliance.  It's an excellent companion to Feynman's own autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?  It's a wonderful retrospective of a fascinating person -- someone who truly lived his own words, "Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter.  Explore the world.  Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

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

An epidemic of lunacy

Humans are odd creatures sometimes.

We have a regrettable tendency to abandon reason entirely when we're confronted with scary circumstances.  I suppose it's understandable enough; we're emotional as well as logical, and when we're frightened the emotional parts of our brain tend to swamp the more rational bits.

Still, it'd be nice if we could control that tendency, because it would help to reduce our likelihood of falling for weird counterfactual explanations at the times that it's the most critical for us to keep our  heads screwed on straight.

Take, for example, the most recent Scary Circumstance, namely, the outbreak of Wuhan coronavirus that so far has killed just over a hundred people, sickened thousands, and (by some estimates) left over a hundred thousand people at risk of exposure.

Coronaviruses [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the CDC]

Worrisome stuff, isn't it?  The potential for a pandemic is there, and the unknowns about the virus still outnumber the knows -- the rate at which it's passed on (what the epidemiologists refer to as "R0"), whether it's mutating as it spreads, what the mortality rate is, whether it's contagious while an individual is still asymptomatic.  But as I alluded to earlier, "frightening unknown virus" does not equate to "I think I'll make bizarre shit up."

Let's start with something I've now seen four times on social media, although I couldn't find a good link to the origin of the claim.  This particular flavor of nonsense is that the coronavirus outbreak is particularly dangerous to a specific subset of humanity...

... people who have been vaccinated for other diseases.

It will come as no surprise that the people who are spreading this foolishness are the anti-vaxxers.  How exactly a vaccine for (say) mumps would make you more likely to contract coronavirus they never explain.  The reason for that, of course, is that there is no explanation, because the claim itself is idiotic.  The anti-vaxxers are simply looking for another horrible thing to blame on vaccines, and the Big Bad Guys pushing vaccination -- doctors and "Big Pharma."  And since there is no actual evidence vaccines are dangerous, and ample evidence they reduce your risk of a number of deadly diseases to near zero, if you're going to claim otherwise you pretty much have to spin your argument from whole cloth.

That feeling when you're so ignorant about vaccines you end up reinventing them by mistake.  [Screencap from Twitter]

Then, there's the even more insidious approach of the insane conspiracy theory group QAnon, who have a two-part claim: (1) that Bill Gates patented the Wuhan coronavirus in 2015 and is using it to kill off the weak in some sort of bizarre eugenics experiment; and (2) that all you have to do to cure a coronavirus infection is to drink bleach.

As far as the first part, I don't know what to say except "are you fucking kidding me right now?"  The second part, though, has been around for a while -- the bleach solution ("Miracle Mineral Solution," which contains chlorine dioxide, a highly toxic compound) has been touted as a cure-all for all sorts of viral and bacterial infections.  And the claim is correct in a sense; if you have a coronavirus infection and you drink Miracle Mineral Solution, you won't be sick any more.

You'll be dead.

Lastly, from the "How Do People This Stupid Exist?" department, we have the folks who apparently think that coronavirus has something to do with Corona beer, other than the fact that "corona" appears in both names.

Corona, I hasten to point out (probably unnecessarily), is the Latin word for "crown."  The virus got that name because it's covered with spiky projections that look a little bit crown-like; the beer was given that name because its manufacturers wanted people to think it was the King of Beers (another incorrect claim, as the King of Beers is clearly Guinness).  But the similarity between the names has evidently led some people to think that there is more to it than that, and Google searches for "beer virus" have gone through the roof.

What exactly people think the connection is, I have no idea.  My hopeful side tells me that maybe people are just wanting to find out if anyone really is silly enough to think that the beer contains the virus.  But my gut tells me that it's more likely there really are people who believe the beer is transmitting the virus, or the beer cures the virus, or possibly both at the same time.

Who the hell knows?

Anyhow -- until such time as a coronavirus vaccine is developed, the best way to avoid catching or passing on infection is to do what you (hopefully) are doing already during flu season -- wash your hands frequently, cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze, and if you're sick yourself, stay home.  Other than that, try to resist the temptation to let your emotions carry you away.  Epidemics are bad enough without loopy speculation getting in the way.

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

The brilliant, iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman was a larger-than-life character -- an intuitive and deep-thinking scientist, a prankster with an adolescent sense of humor, a world traveler, a wild-child with a reputation for womanizing.  His contributions to physics are too many to list, and he also made a name for himself as a suspect in the 1950s "Red Scare" despite his work the previous decade on the Manhattan Project.  In 1986 -- two years before his death at the age of 69 -- he was still shaking the world, demonstrating to the inquiry into the Challenger disaster that the whole thing could have happened because of an o-ring that shattered from cold winter temperatures.

James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman gives a deep look at the man and the scientist, neither glossing over his faults nor denying his brilliance.  It's an excellent companion to Feynman's own autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?  It's a wonderful retrospective of a fascinating person -- someone who truly lived his own words, "Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter.  Explore the world.  Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

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