With fronds like these...

One of the most mystifying, and therefore (to me) one of the most fascinating, paleontological finds is the fauna of the Ediacaran Assemblage.

It's intriguing from a number of perspectives.  First, it gives lie to the picture most people have of the evolution of animals, that it was some kind of linear progression.  It's often seen as a climb up the Great Chain of Being, from something like a jellyfish, to something like a worm, to something like a bug, to fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and finally -- at the top, of course -- is the Pinnacle of Evolution: namely, us.

The truth is (predictably) much more interesting.  During the late Precambrian and early Cambrian Periods, in a relatively short amount of time (geologically and paleontologically speaking) all of the ancestors of the major animal groups appeared, as if there was a sudden and drastic push to diversification.  At that point there were proto-arthropods, proto-vertebrates, proto-mollusks, and proto-damn-near-everything-else.

Even more fascinating is that there were a number of animal groups around during that time that are of uncertain affinity to the others, and who apparently left no descendants.  There's the bizarre Anomalocaris, probably related most closely to early arthropods (its name is Greek for "abnormal shrimp"), with two jointed, spike-lined tentacles and a mouth shaped like a pineapple ring.  Opabinia was equipped with no less than five compound eyes and a proboscis like a vacuum-cleaner hose.  Most famous is the aptly-named Hallucigenia ("it creates hallucinations"), a worm-like critter with giant eyes, tube-like legs, and a double row of formidable spines down the back.

All three of these are probably branches of the huge group Protostomia, which are still today the most numerous animals on Earth.  But there are other fossils from the Ediacaran Assemblage that are even more mysterious, and one of the weirdest ones is the group called rangeomorphs.

They were almost certainly animals, although they were sessile (fixed to the seafloor) via stalks, and had weird frond-like structures of uncertain purpose (but which may have been a mechanism either for oxygen extraction or for filter feeding).  So if you were to look at a living one, your initial impression might well be that it was some odd sort of seaweed, and not an animal at all.

A 550-million-year-old fossil of the rangeomorph Charnia masoni, from the Mistaken Point Formation in Newfoundland [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Smith609 at English Wikipedia, Charnia, CC BY 2.5]

If Anomalocaris, Opabinia, and Hallucinogenia are problematic in terms of their evolutionary affinities, the rangeomorphs are complete ciphers.  They have no obvious connections to any living animal group, and in some ways more resemble fungi, although that too is speculation.  They were apparently quite common during the late Precambrian, so the sea bottom would have been covered with their frilly fronds gently waving in the currents -- but at the moment, exactly what they were is a mystery.

And the mystery just deepened considerably with a discovery that was the subject of a paper last week in Current Biology.  The rangeomorphs had another perplexing and unusual feature -- they were connected by thread-like filaments, some of them up to four meters long, that seem to have hooked populations up into a huge network of interlinked individuals.

The purpose of these filaments is unknown, but it could be that the individuals in a network were all clones, and were functioning as a colonial organism a little like modern corals.  What it immediately put me in mind of was groves of aspens, which look like bunches of individual trees but are all linked underground by a network of rhizomes -- some of the colonies cover many acres, and one in Colorado is said to be over eighty thousand years old.  (This calls into question what we mean by the word "organism;" is each of these trees a separate organism?  Is the whole grove a single organism?  If so, and you dug a trench down the middle and cut the rhizomes, have you just created two organisms?  Like many terms in biology, this word only seems simple until you push on it a little.)

In any case, the rangeomorphs apparently had the world's first social network, but what exactly it was used for we can only speculate at.  They were strange animals to say the very least.  These sorts of discoveries always make me wonder what the Earth looked like back then -- given how infrequent fossilization is, and how unlikely it is for a rock to remain undamaged through all those millions of years, the chances are that for every one species we have a reasonably good picture of, there are hundreds that we know nothing at all about.  The Precambrian water-world of the Ediacaran fauna would have looked a very alien place to our eyes, even though the seeds of all of our modern life-forms -- including ourselves -- were there in those oceans.

Some of those seeds, though, failed to leave behind any progeny, and it seems likely that the rangeomorphs were one of those.  Whatever they were, they certainly show no obvious connections to any modern group, animal or otherwise.  To me this only increases their fascination -- and with it, the hope that further discoveries may shed some light on this and other groups whose origins are lost in the depths of time.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new -- science journalist Lydia Denworth's brilliant and insightful book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond.

Denworth looks at the evolutionary basis of our ability to form bonds of friendship -- comparing our capacity to that of other social primates, such as a group of monkeys in a sanctuary in Puerto Rico and a tribe of baboons in Kenya.  Our need for social bonds other than those of mating and pair-bonding is deep in our brains and in our genes, and the evidence is compelling that the strongest correlate to depression is social isolation.

Friendship examines social bonding not only from the standpoint of observational psychology, but from the perspective of neuroscience.  We have neurochemical systems in place -- mediated predominantly by oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphin -- that are specifically devoted to strengthening those bonds.

Denworth's book is both scientifically fascinating and also reassuringly optimistic -- stressing to the reader that we're built to be cooperative.  Something that we could all do with a reminder of during these fractious times.

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

Changing the thermostat

Everyone knows that the human core body temperature is supposed to be around 98.6 F.  At least, that's what we all learned in seventh grade life science, right?

A more curious question is why 98.6 and not some other temperature.  Other mammals need different core body temperatures, but the range is remarkably narrow -- from elephants (97.7 F) to goats (103.4 F), only a 5.7 degree difference overall, and the vast majority of mammal species are in the vicinity of 98-100 F.

In my biology classes, I usually did nothing more than a hand-waving explanation that "our body temperatures are what they are because that's the temperature where our enzymatic and neurochemical reactions work at their optimal rate," but that's a facile analysis at best -- a bit like saying "bake the cake at 350 F because 350 F is the best temperature at which to bake cakes."  It might be true, but it doesn't tell you anything.

Last month we got a better explanation of what's going on than what I used to give (admittedly a low bar).  A paper in Molecular Cell with the daunting title, "A Conserved Kinase-Based Body-Temperature Sensor Globally Controls Alternative Splicing and Gene Expression," by a huge team led by Tom Haltenhof of Freie Universität Berlin's Department of Biochemistry, gives us a window into why we regulate body temperature -- and why things fall apart so quickly when the temperature isn't what it should be.

The team looked at the effects of temperature change not in mammals but in turtles and crocodiles -- which are themselves poikilothermic (known in common parlance as "cold-blooded") but have a temperature-switching mechanism for sex determination.  In crocodiles, incubation of the eggs at a warmer temperature results in males; in turtles, the pattern is the opposite.  (Some lizards have an even odder pattern, where intermediate temperatures result in males, and either low or high temperatures result in females.)

The question was how this was happening.  Something about the temperature must be changing the chemical signaling that guides embryonic development; but how?

Haltenhof's team found that there is a group of enzymes called CDC-like kinases that are extremely temperature-sensitive.  Kinases in general are a hugely important enzyme family that are responsible for phosphorylation, the main way energy is transferred in living organisms.  So if you affect the reaction rate of a kinase, it results in changes in the transfer of energy -- and can have enormous impacts on the organism.

And the CDC-like kinases, Haltenhof et al. found, were acting directly on the DNA, and changing the rate of gene expression.  In crocodiles and turtles, the type of gene expression affected had to do, unsurprisingly, with embryonic development of the reproductive systems.

So far, interesting only to geneticists and herpetologists (and, presumably, to the crocodiles and turtles themselves).  But where it caught my attention was when it was pointed out that the activity of CDC-like kinases is important not only in reptiles, but in humans -- and that overexpression of one of them, cyclin E, is connected with at least one form of cancer.

So this research seems to have implications not only for embryonic development in crocodiles and turtles, but in explaining why our own body temperatures are so tightly regulated.  The authors write: "[CDC-like kinase] activity is likely to also impact on gene expression in pathological conditions such as hypothermia, septic shock, and fever, or in the slightly warmer tumor microenvironment."  And since in general, the core body temperature drops as a person ages, it also made the authors speculate that this could be the key to at least some age-related malfunctions (and perhaps suggest a way to treat them).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons 24ngagnon, Thermostat science photo, CC BY-SA 4.0]

This also brought to mind another perplexing bit of research that came out in January -- that the average human body temperature is dropping, on the order of 0.03 C per decade.  The standard "98.6 F" was established in 1851 by Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich, who determined this by taking the axillary (armpit) temperature of 25,000 people in Leipzig (and you thought your job was boring).  But a recent study with even more measurements found that currently, the average body temperature is almost a degree cooler than Wunderlich's value.

The speculation in that paper is that the drop in temperature is due to a decrease in the inflammation caused by exposure to infectious agents.  If the 25,000 Leipzig residents were a representative sample from the mid-19th century, 3% would have had an active tuberculosis infection, and that's just one disease.  So the lower average temperature today might have to do with our lower incidence of infections of various kinds.

But it makes me wonder what effect that's having on the CDC-like kinases from the first study.  Because during our evolutionary history, the 1850s condition of harboring infections was much more the norm than our current clean, germ-free-ness.  So while losing our collection of nasty bacteria might be overall a good thing, it might have caused a drop in temperature that could affect other reactions -- ones we're only beginning to understand.

That's yet to be established, of course.  But what it does highlight is how important the body's thermostat is.  Only a four-degree drop in core body temperature is a sufficient level of hypothermia to severely endanger a person's survival; likewise, a six-degree increase would be a life-threatening fever that (if survived) could result in brain damage.  We are only beginning to understand how our temperature is regulated, and why the effects of losing that regulation are so drastic.  But what this new research shows is that our body temperature might have far more ramifications for our health than we ever imagined -- and could be the key to understanding, and perhaps treating, diseases that have up till now defied medical science.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new -- science journalist Lydia Denworth's brilliant and insightful book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond.

Denworth looks at the evolutionary basis of our ability to form bonds of friendship -- comparing our capacity to that of other social primates, such as a group of monkeys in a sanctuary in Puerto Rico and a tribe of baboons in Kenya.  Our need for social bonds other than those of mating and pair-bonding is deep in our brains and in our genes, and the evidence is compelling that the strongest correlate to depression is social isolation.

Friendship examines social bonding not only from the standpoint of observational psychology, but from the perspective of neuroscience.  We have neurochemical systems in place -- mediated predominantly by oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphin -- that are specifically devoted to strengthening those bonds.

Denworth's book is both scientifically fascinating and also reassuringly optimistic -- stressing to the reader that we're built to be cooperative.  Something that we could all do with a reminder of during these fractious times.

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

The closet's a fine and private place

Yesterday I got a DM on Twitter that left me scratching my head a little.

Here's the body of it, verbatim:

I don't mean to be offensive, but why do you make such a big deal of being bisexual?  What your preferences are and who you like to go to bed with are nobody's business.  But because you and other people like you want to push it in everybody's faces, you make it our business whether we want it to be or not. 

Then you complain when people are rude or discriminate, which they wouldn't have done if you didn't put it all on the front page in all caps. 

Think about keeping your private matters private out of courtesy to everyone else who would rather not hear about it.

So there's a lot to unpack here in only three paragraphs.

First, in my experience, when someone starts with "I don't mean to be offensive, but..." they're about to say something offensive.  (Analogous rules apply with phrases like "I don't mean to sound racist, but..." or "I don't mean to sound homophobic, but...".)  But leaving that much aside, there are still a few things that jump out at me.

First, I really didn't think I was "making a big deal out of being bisexual."  It's in my profile, okay. (Nota bene: it's not in all caps.)  I retweet LGBTQ awareness stuff when I see it -- maybe once or twice a day, if that.  Last week I got in a quick, lighthearted exchange with a friend about actor Tom Ellis's role in the series Lucifer, and I said that if the real Lucifer is as gorgeous as Tom Ellis, it really doesn't give me much incentive not to sin.

And that's kind of it.

Mostly what I get involved in on Twitter are discussions with other fiction writers, and (unfortunately) posts about politics.  So it's not like I'm waving a rainbow flag in front of people's faces.

Which brings up the question of why it would be a problem even if I was.  The subtler bit of subtext here is that the writer thinks it's fine for me to be queer as long as no one else knows.  The message is that she's only comfortable when she can pretend that people like me don't exist.  Because the assumption in our culture is you're straight unless you say otherwise, it's not that she thinks all identification by sexual orientation should be a closely-guarded secret; she's perfectly fine assuming that everyone is 100% straight, and therefore engages in the behavior associated with sexually-active 100% straight people.

But my even mentioning that there are folks who don't fall into that category is apparently a problem.  Or, more specifically, it's a problem that I'm one of them and I'm not ashamed of it.  Well, let me say this as explicitly as I can, and as politely as I can manage: that's how I lived for forty-some-odd years, after I realized I was bi when I was fifteen years old and suddenly found myself goggle-eyed over a handsome friend who took his shirt off on a hot day.  That's forty years of shame, coupled with a desperation that nobody must find out about that part of me, that the only way to live was to pretend to be someone I wasn't.

Now?  I have the 100% support of my wonderful wife, friends, and family.  My public coming-out last year spurred at least two people I know of to proudly claim their own identity (something that makes me choke up a little every time I think about it).

So re-enter that closet?  Not just no, but fuck no.

Because you know what?  Now that I'm out, I like being bi.  It gives me twice as many opportunities to openly appreciate the beauty of the human body.  It hasn't damaged my relationship with my wife; if anything, it's strengthened it.  So if you expect me to sink back down into shame and self-loathing because you're uncomfortable with the fact that I'm not uncomfortable...

... it's your problem.  Deal with it.

So anyway.  That was how my day started yesterday, and I decided instead of getting angry, to respond publicly.  Maybe it'll open a few eyes, and if not that, at least it might shut a few mouths.

Because I'll be damned if I'm expected to pretend Tom Ellis isn't drop-dead beautiful.  Yowza.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new -- science journalist Lydia Denworth's brilliant and insightful book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond.

Denworth looks at the evolutionary basis of our ability to form bonds of friendship -- comparing our capacity to that of other social primates, such as a group of monkeys in a sanctuary in Puerto Rico and a tribe of baboons in Kenya.  Our need for social bonds other than those of mating and pair-bonding is deep in our brains and in our genes, and the evidence is compelling that the strongest correlate to depression is social isolation.

Friendship examines social bonding not only from the standpoint of observational psychology, but from the perspective of neuroscience.  We have neurochemical systems in place -- mediated predominantly by oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphin -- that are specifically devoted to strengthening those bonds.

Denworth's book is both scientifically fascinating and also reassuringly optimistic -- stressing to the reader that we're built to be cooperative.  Something that we could all do with a reminder of during these fractious times.

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

Cracking the infinity codes

Okay, I know I'm no genius, but I think I can place myself with confidence in the "above average intelligence" category.

A few things, however, defeat me.  A lot of physics rests on mathematics that I frankly do not comprehend, despite my B.S. in physics and minor in math.  When I look at academic papers from physics journals, and am confronted with such arcane beasts as tensors and cross products and weak isospin, I become tense, my eyes cross, and I become all weak and spinn-y.  (I usually require at least one glass of scotch to recover completely.)

Likewise, the deeper waters of philosophy drown me entirely.  I read the first paragraph of a friend's Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy, and said, in a rather thin voice, "That's... nice," and decided forthwith that I should henceforth confine myself to the epistemological and metaphysical questions raised by The Cat in the Hat.

With the exception of the aforementioned, however, I can usually hold my own fairly well in most intellectual pursuits.  So it is seldom that I look at a sample of writing, study it from various angles, think about it, and then still come up completely empty-handed.  Which is what I did when I looked at a website called Infinity Codes that a friend sent me, along with the message, "Curious to see what you'll think of this" followed by an ominous winky-face emoji.

What I thought, after forty-five minutes' increasingly perplexed study, was (to borrow a line from the screamingly funny Latin-language sketch by the inimitable Eddie Izzard), "Quod... the fuck?"  And lest you think that I'm just being lazy -- or, perhaps, that my brain isn't as all-that-and-a-bag-of-potato-chips as I claim it is -- here's a sample, so you can make your own assessment:

PURPOSE and INTENT

-- Finding the spiral thread --

Split into 4 sets of templates the Infinity Codes have been designed to assist re-establishing our connection to the cycles of the cosmos and the earth (macrocosm and microcosm).  The codes are arranged in a fractal sequence in order to reveal the spiral thread of interconnected-ness between us, nature and the universe...

Their purpose is to liberate and inform us with the knowledge of geometric patterns, fractal harmonics and organic ratios of the 13D reality in which we live.  Each graphic has ancient wisdom encoded within it that our ancestors knew and based their systems of time and space measurement upon. 

Living in a non-linear matrix of time and space, which they understood primarily through observing the movements of the 7 visible ‘spheres’ (5 planets + sun + moon), our ancestors were far beyond us in their development.  This enabled them to perceive the fractal design of the tree of life, and our place in it - via the 28 = (4x7), the 365 = (13x28) +1, and 365.242 (1 year).  This created a fractal matrix of the alchemy of the organic + geometric, that could then be aligned to zodiacal + celestial, in an eternal map of the cosmos.

And that's just from the freakin' introduction.

If you go to "What is the context?" -- a question I was certainly asking by this point -- you read the following:

Living in the end times (Solstice Sun aligned with the Galactic Center), beginning of the 21st century (7:7:7), Age of Aquarius geometrically speaking, yet in reality (organically speaking) the Age of Aquarius starts circa 2600ad, information Age, cyber era… calculated from the peak moment of 2012, Dec 21st, Winter solstice!

Well, what strikes me about this is the part about the Sun being lined up with the Galactic Center at the beginning of the 21st century.  Which is true, but can someone explain to me how two points could not be lined up?  I mean, didn't Euclid have something to say about this?  If somehow the Sun and the Galactic Center didn't fall on a straight line, that would be a little odder, don't you think?

And then, we have mystifying illustrations like the following:

Which are pretty, I suppose, but what the hell do they mean?

But if you really want to make your head spin, though, go to the page called "Cosmic Formulas," wherein we get to see the mathematical basis for all of it.  I think.  I mean, as far as I can tell, and applying my reasonably decent background in mathematics, it looks like he's just multiplying random numbers together, adding them to other random numbers, and saying, "So cosmic, right?  Of course right."

I finally gave up after about an hour of messing about on the site.  What finally induced me to quit was when I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the monitor screen, and I realized that my expression looked like that on the face of my dog when I try to explain complex and difficult concepts to him, like why he shouldn't dump the garbage and eat the plastic wrapper that the cheese came in.  He tips his head to one side, his brow furrows, and he gets this really... intent look in his eyes.  You can tell that he wants to understand, he's trying his hardest, but it's just not going to happen.

That's the way I looked after an hour of trying to decipher the Infinity Codes.

Maybe you'll be able to make more of it. If so, please enlighten me. I'm perfectly willing to admit when I'm out of my depth, as I was with my friend's dissertation, and acknowledge the better understanding that someone else might bring to bear on a subject.  On the other hand, I strongly suspect that here, there's nothing actually there to understand, and that we all might be left (like Eddie Izzard) saying, "Quod the fuck?"

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new -- science journalist Lydia Denworth's brilliant and insightful book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond.

Denworth looks at the evolutionary basis of our ability to form bonds of friendship -- comparing our capacity to that of other social primates, such as a group of monkeys in a sanctuary in Puerto Rico and a tribe of baboons in Kenya.  Our need for social bonds other than those of mating and pair-bonding is deep in our brains and in our genes, and the evidence is compelling that the strongest correlate to depression is social isolation.

Friendship examines social bonding not only from the standpoint of observational psychology, but from the perspective of neuroscience.  We have neurochemical systems in place -- mediated predominantly by oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphin -- that are specifically devoted to strengthening those bonds.

Denworth's book is both scientifically fascinating and also reassuringly optimistic -- stressing to the reader that we're built to be cooperative.  Something that we could all do with a reminder of during these fractious times.

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

A pandemic of conspiracies

I have to admit that COVID-19 has me a little skittish.

I know all the reassuring bits -- that most people who contract it have few or no symptoms, that the mortality rate is only 2% (contrast that with 70% mortality rate for a monster like Ebola-Zaire), that the flu is worse and we don't panic about that every year.

But.  I've read The Stand and watched Outbreak, and the similarities are alarming, not in the symptoms or severity, but in how the government is handling it.  Outright incompetence, coupled with attempts to muzzle the news media, along with reassurances that are almost certainly false ("a vaccine will be widely available soon").  There was a cluster of cases in Kirkland, Washington -- where I lived for ten years -- and just this morning there was the confirmation of a case...

... in Manhattan.

So at the moment I'm oscillating between "guarded" and "freaking right the fuck out."

At least I keep telling myself to go back to the facts -- what the CDC has discovered about the virus, recommendations for avoiding getting sick, maps of actual cases.  Which is more than I can say for a few other people.

Situations like this always seem to be prime breeding ground for conspiracy theories.  My explanation for this is that people are happier believing that there's a cause for Bad Stuff Happening even if the cause itself is kind of horrifying than they are believing that bad things just happen because they happen.  Global evil is, for some reason, more comforting than simple chaos.

But still.  There are some people who should, in Will Rogers's words, never miss a good opportunity to shut up.

Top of that list is New Zealand-based evangelical Christian preacher Brian Tamaki, of the Destiny Church of Auckland, who said this weekend that COVID-19 wasn't actually a virus, it was an airborne demon, and that therefore True Believers were immune.

"Satan has control of atmospheres unless you're a born-again, Jesus-loving, Bible-believing, Holy Ghost-filled, tithe-paying believer," Tamaki said, with special emphasis on the "tithe-paying" part.

"You're the only one that can walk through atmospheres and have literally a protection, the PS-91 protection policy."  PS-91, by the way, isn't a medication.  It's code for Psalm 91, wherein we read, "Surely he will save you from the fowler's snare or the deadly pestilence."

Because that worked out so well for people during the Black Death.

Tamaki, though, was hardly the only one who's been saying that coronavirus wasn't an ordinary epidemic.  The announcement by the World Health Organization that COVID-19 is now officially a pandemic was followed nearly immediately by Donald Trump announcing at a rally that the outbreak is a "hoax" by the Democrats to discredit him.  How the Democrats created a virus in China and then spread it all over the world is a matter of conjecture, but the MAGA-crowd isn't exactly known for their critical thinking skills, so there was an immediate outcry against those evil Democrats trying to damage Dear Leader.  Then when someone pointed out that it was odd, if the epidemic was caused by the Democrats trying to gain political advantage, the first states to have confirmed cases were strongly liberal-leaning -- California, Oregon, Washington, and New York.

"No," the MAGAs responded.  "The Democrats did that on purpose!  They're making themselves sick so they can blame it on Donald Trump!"

Because that's how evil we liberals are.  Mwa ha ha ha *cough, hack, sneeze* ha ha ha ha ha.

But no one has a better conspiracy theory (and by "better" I mean "completely batshit insane") than the one my wife found a couple of days ago.  Because a summary wouldn't nearly do it justice, here it is in all its glory:

"Digitized RNA activated by 5G waves."  "Remote assassination."  "Smart dust from chemtrails."  "ID2020."  "Weaponized technology from the Space Force."

And, of course, rejecting vaccines.

Look, I know it's scary.  I know it's natural to try to find reasons for things, because once you see the reasons, you can control the fear.

But that is no excuse for making shit up.

Let's all just calm down, take as many precautions as we can (including, most importantly, wash your damn hands).  Panicking and inventing crazy fairy tales and conspiracy theories doesn't solve anything or help anyone.  There's no reason to overreact.

Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I'm off to put on my hazmat suit and enter my underground bunker for the next three months.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new -- science journalist Lydia Denworth's brilliant and insightful book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond.

Denworth looks at the evolutionary basis of our ability to form bonds of friendship -- comparing our capacity to that of other social primates, such as a group of monkeys in a sanctuary in Puerto Rico and a tribe of baboons in Kenya.  Our need for social bonds other than those of mating and pair-bonding is deep in our brains and in our genes, and the evidence is compelling that the strongest correlate to depression is social isolation.

Friendship examines social bonding not only from the standpoint of observational psychology, but from the perspective of neuroscience.  We have neurochemical systems in place -- mediated predominantly by oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphin -- that are specifically devoted to strengthening those bonds.

Denworth's book is both scientifically fascinating and also reassuringly optimistic -- stressing to the reader that we're built to be cooperative.  Something that we could all do with a reminder of during these fractious times.

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

Proteins in space

There's always a danger, when you want to believe something really really really badly, that you'll jump to belief on the basis of questionable evidence.

It's called confirmation bias, and it plagues us all, skeptic and non-skeptic alike.  It's why I've always tried to be more critical of claims that line up with what I want to be true -- because I'm more likely to accept such arguments unquestioningly.

Well, I try to.  It was kind of hard to do when I read a paper by Malcolm McGeoch ((PLEX Corporation), Sergei Dikler (Bruker Scientific), and Julie McGeoch (Harvard Univeristy) that appeared in arXiv last Friday, with the unprepossessing name, "Hemolithin: A Meteoric Protein Containing Iron and Lithium," which you'd think would only be of interest to biochemistry nerds, but had me leaping about making excited little squeaking noises.

Maybe you've already figured out why from the title, but if not, here's the salient bit:

This paper characterizes the first protein to be discovered in a meteorite. Amino acid polymers previously observed in Acfer 086 and Allende meteorites have been further characterized in Acfer 086 via high precision MALDI mass spectrometry to reveal a principal unified structure of molecular weight 2320 Daltons that involves chains of glycine and hydroxy-glycine residues terminated by iron atoms, with additional oxygen and lithium atoms...  Analysis of the complete spectrum of isotopes associated with each molecular fragment shows 2H enhancements above terrestrial averaging 25,700 parts per thousand (sigma = 3,500, n=15), confirming extra-terrestrial origin and hence the existence of this molecule within the asteroid parent body of the CV3 meteorite class.  The molecule is tipped by an iron-oxygen-iron grouping that in other terrestrial contexts has been proposed to be capable of absorbing photons and splitting water into hydroxyl and hydrogen moieties...

Analysis via iron and lithium isotope satellites in mass spectrometry reveals a novel protein motif with iron atoms closing out the ends of anti-parallel peptide chains composed of glycine.  Very high 2H content indicates proto-solar disc or molecular cloud origin. FeO3Fe groups at each end are of a type that could split H2O upon absorption of photons.  The existence of a unique chain length suggests that there could be a functionality conferring a replication advantage.

 They found a protein in a meteorite.  An extraterrestrial protein.  An extraterrestrial protein that appears to be able to perform photolysis -- the fracturing of water using the energy from light.

Like, the first step in photosynthesis in plants.

That was the point when my jaw hit the floor.

One of the barriers to estimating the likelihood of extraterrestrial life is that we don't know how common it is for planets to have conditions supporting a biochemistry.  I say "a" biochemistry because there's no particular necessity that extraterrestrial life have the same chemistry we do.  It's long been speculated, for example, that there could be a biochemistry based upon silicon, which (like carbon) has four valence electrons and is capable of bonding into chains, sheets, and rings.  Like many of us, I first ran into this idea with the episode of Star Trek called "The Devil in the Dark" -- where the intrepid space travelers of the U. S. S. Enterprise were confronted with a life form that used silicon instead of carbon as a biochemical scaffolding, and hydrofluoric acid instead of water as a solvent and carrier -- and so initially, it didn't look alive at all, more like some kind of extremely caustic rock.

Here, though, we don't even need to go as way out as silicon-based life.  Here we have a protein based on amino acids found right here on Earth -- glycine and hydroxyglycine -- coupled with attachment to metal ions, much like many terrestrial proteins (hemoglobin being the obvious example).  If the conditions for biochemical reactions to produce such a protein can be achieved in a proto-solar disc or molecular cloud -- as McGeoch et al. claim -- then carbon-based biochemistry, and probably life, might be a lot more common in the universe than we thought.

On the other hand...

The really far-fetched I-Want-To-Believe streak in me has to wonder if the mysterious protein they found isn't an indication that complex biochemicals can form easily and under a great variety of conditions, but an indication of life.

Like, this protein was produced by a living thing, somewhere out there.

I find it extremely suggestive that the meteoric protein looks like it has the same ability as the photosystem-II array in chloroplasts -- using light to break apart water.  In plants this frees electrons that then are used to store chemical energy as ATP and ultimately synthesize glucose, and therefore underpin virtually every energy-demanding reaction in every life form on Earth.  If I had to pick the one reaction that was the most central to the survival of every terrestrial life form, that'd be it.

The discovery of such a protein in a meteorite is somewhere in that rarified environment just past "mind-blowing."

I'm trying to control myself, here.  I know it's easy to leap to the conclusion that this is evidence of extraterrestrial life, or at the very least, that life is all over the place out there in space.  At the moment, we just have a single bit of protein in a single meteorite.

But it's an alien protein.  One that has a function that, even in the careful diction of the scientists who discovered it, would give it a replication advantage.

Okay, I need to stop writing now, because I feel another bout of jumping around making excited squeaking noises coming on.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is brand new -- science journalist Lydia Denworth's brilliant and insightful book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond.

Denworth looks at the evolutionary basis of our ability to form bonds of friendship -- comparing our capacity to that of other social primates, such as a group of monkeys in a sanctuary in Puerto Rico and a tribe of baboons in Kenya.  Our need for social bonds other than those of mating and pair-bonding is deep in our brains and in our genes, and the evidence is compelling that the strongest correlate to depression is social isolation.

Friendship examines social bonding not only from the standpoint of observational psychology, but from the perspective of neuroscience.  We have neurochemical systems in place -- mediated predominantly by oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphin -- that are specifically devoted to strengthening those bonds.

Denworth's book is both scientifically fascinating and also reassuringly optimistic -- stressing to the reader that we're built to be cooperative.  Something that we could all do with a reminder of during these fractious times.

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

The second biggest bang

There are times in science where -- if you're going to describe something accurately -- you rapidly become lost in superlatives.

That was my reaction to a paper this week in Astrophysical Journal titled, "Discovery of a Giant Radio Fossil in the Ophiuchus Galaxy Cluster," by a team led by Simona Giacintucci of the Naval Research Laboratory.  Here's what the researchers had to say about it:

The Ophiuchus galaxy cluster exhibits a curious concave gas density discontinuity at the edge of its cool core...  Using low-frequency (72-240 MHz) radio data from MWA GLEAM and GMRT, we found that the X-ray structure is, in fact, a giant cavity in the X-ray gas filled with diffuse radio emission with an extraordinarily steep radio spectrum.  It thus appears to be a very aged fossil of the most powerful AGN [active galactic nucleus] outburst seen in any galaxy cluster (pV∼5×10^61 erg for this cavity).  There is no apparent diametrically opposite counterpart either in X-ray or in the radio.  It may have aged out of the observable radio band because of the cluster asymmetry.  At present, the central AGN exhibits only a weak radio source, so it should have been much more powerful in the past to have produced such a bubble.  The AGN is currently starved of accreting cool gas because the gas density peak is displaced by core sloshing.  The sloshing itself could have been set off by this extraordinary explosion if it had occurred in an asymmetric gas core.  This dinosaur may be an early example of a new class of sources to be uncovered by low-frequency surveys of galaxy clusters.

To say that this explosion was huge doesn't even begin to describe it.  The energy output of this outburst puts it in second place ever -- the only event we know of that was more energetic than this was the Big Bang itself.

Its size isn't the only odd thing about it.  "We've seen outbursts in the centers of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive," said Melanie Johnston-Hollitt of Curtin University's International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, in an interview at Phys.Org.  "And we don't know why it's so big.  But it happened very slowly—like an explosion in slow motion that took place over hundreds of millions of years."

However slow it was, the explosion blew a hole in the sphere of superhot plasma surrounding the massive black hole at the center of the galaxy.  Study lead author Simona Giacintucci compares it to the pressure from the eruption of Mount Saint Helens blowing off the entire top of the mountain, leaving a crater behind.  "The difference," she said, "is that you could fit fifteen Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster's hot gas."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rogelio Bernal Andreo, Rho Ophiuchus Widefield, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Johnston-Hollitt, who directs the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia, said that despite the enormity of the relic explosion, it was only recently observed because of a drastic improvement in astronomers' ability to observe the skies in the very-low-frequency end of the spectrum.  "It's a bit like archaeology," she said.  "We've been given the tools to dig deeper with low frequency radio telescopes so we should be able to find more outbursts like this now."

So there might be other colossal explosion remnants out there just waiting to be found.

What it brings up for me, non-researcher that I am, is to wonder what on earth could have caused a detonation on this scale.  To my knowledge, the explanation is still uncertain, and in fact can't be accounted for by any known natural process.  The lack of a mechanism and the size of the outburst led scientists at first to doubt the measurements were correct.  "People were skeptical because of the size of outburst," Johnston-Hollitt said.  "But it really is that."

And improvements to the Murchison Widefield Array is improving its sensitivity by a factor of ten, which means we're only seeing the beginning of discoveries like this, and who knows what else.  "The Universe is a weird place," Johnston-Hollitt said.

Indeed it is.  Awe-inspiring to the point of bowling over your brain, at times.  Look around you at your house, town, and region, your friends, family, and pets, even the bigger concerns of politics and global conflict -- and realize that on the grand scheme of things, we are minuscule, hardly even a blip on the surface of cosmic space-time.  Humbling and a little scary, isn't it?

But the human brain isn't built to conceptualize such enormities, and it's best not to dwell on it.  On the whole, it's probably better to have another cup of coffee and think about something else for a while.

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One of my favorite people is the indefatigable British science historian James Burke.  First gaining fame from his immensely entertaining book and television series Connections, in which he showed the links between various historical events that (seen as a whole) play out like a centuries-long game of telephone, he went on to wow his fans with The Day the Universe Changed and a terrifyingly prescient analysis of where global climate change was headed, filmed in 1989, called After the Warming.

One of my favorites of his is the brilliant book The Pinball Effect.  It's dedicated to the role of chaos in scientific discovery, and shows the interconnections between twenty different threads of inquiry.  He's posted page-number links at various points in his book that you can jump to, where the different threads cross -- so if you like, you can read this as a scientific Choose Your Own Adventure, leaping from one point in the web to another, in the process truly gaining a sense of how interconnected and complex the history of science has been.

However you choose to approach it -- in a straight line, or following a pinball course through the book -- it's a fantastic read.  So pick up a copy of this week's Skeptophilia book of the week.  You won't be able to put it down.

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