To dye for

The history of dyes is actually way more interesting than it sounds.

People have been coloring cloth (and pottery, and cave walls, and their own bodies) for a very long time, but all colors don't turn out to be equally accessible to the palette.  Red, for example, is fairly easy, especially if you don't care if it's not screaming scarlet and has a slight brownish tint (what we'd call "brick red"), because that's the color of iron oxide, better known as rust.  Iron oxide is plentiful, and I know from messing around with pottery glazes that it's got two properties: (1) mixed with other minerals and/or heated in the absence of oxygen, it can give you a variety of other colors, from black to dark blue to green; and (2) it sticks to everything.  I have brushes I use in the glazing process that I used once or twice to apply an iron-based glaze, and now they're permanently stained red.

Other colors, however, aren't so easy.  Some of the more notoriously difficult ones are true blues and purples; our appending the word "royal" to royal blue and royal purple is an indicator of the fact that back then, only the really rich could afford blue or purple-dyed cloth.  Blue can be achieved using small amounts of cobalt, or finely powdered lapis lazuli, but neither is common and although they have other uses (cobalt in pottery pigments, lapis in paints) neither works well for dyeing cloth.  Lapis, in fact, was used to produce the finest rich blue pigment for oil paints, which got named ultramarine because the mineral was imported from what is now Afghanistan -- a place that was ultramarinus ("beyond the sea") to the people in Italy and France who were using it.

But dyeing cloth was another matter.  One solution was, bizarrely enough, a secretion of a sea snail of the genus Murex.  These snails' hypobranchial glands produce a gunk that when purified produces a rich purple dye that is "color fast" on cloth.

How anyone thought of doing this is an open question.  Maybe they just smeared slime from various animals on cloth until they found one that worked, I dunno.

Be that as it may, the color of the dye was called φοῖνιξ (phoinix) by the ancient Greeks, and the sea traders who cornered the market on producing and selling the dye were called the Φοίνικες (Phoinikhes).  We anglicized the word to Phoenicians -- so Phoenician means, literally, "people of the purple."

The reason all of this colorful stuff comes up is a paper in Science Advances last week that a group of chemists in Portugal have successfully determined the origin of a purple to blue (depending on how it's prepared) watercolor pigment called folium that was used in medieval watercolors.  It is a gorgeous color, but all previous attempts either to replicate it or to determine its source had been unsuccessful.  The difficulty with trying to figure out things like this is that there was no standardized naming system for plants (or anything else) back then, so the name in one place could (and probably did) vary from the name in another place.  Reading manuscripts about natural dyes from that time period, about all we can figure out is "it's made by boiling this plant we found" or "it's made from special snail slime," which doesn't really tell us much in the way of details.

Samples of medieval folium on cloth [Image courtesy of Paula Nabais/NOVA University]

In the case of folium, it was known that it came from a weedy plant of some sort, but there was no certainty about which plant it was or where it grew.  But now some Portuguese chemists have identified the source of folium as the seedpods of a roadside weed in the genus Chrozophora, a little unassuming plant in the Euphorbia family that likes dry, sunny, rocky hillsides, and when you grind up the seedpods, creates a knock-your-socks-off purple dye.  The dye was then applied to cloth, and you took small bits of the cloth and soaked them in water when you were ready to use them to make a natural watercolor paint.

The scientists were able to determine the chemical structure of the dye itself, which is pretty astonishing.  But even finding the plant was a remarkable accomplishment.  "We found it, guided by biologist Adelaide Clemente, in a very beautiful territory in Portugal [called] Granja, near a very beautiful small town Monsaraz -- a magical place, still preserved in time," said study co-author Maria João Melo, in an interview with CNN.  "Nobody in the small village of Granja knew [anything] about this little plant.  It may look like a weed, yet it is so elegant with its silvery stellate hairs that combine so well with the greyish green, and what a story there is behind it."

I'm always impressed with how intrepid our forebears were at using the resources around them to their fullest, but as with the snail slime, I'm mystified as to how some of it came about.  Some of it was probably by happy accident -- I think fermented milk products like yogurt and cheese probably were discovered because of milk that spoiled in just the right way, for example.  But bread has always mystified me.  Who first thought, "Let's take these seeds, and grind 'em up, and add this fungus powder to it with water until it gets all bubbly and smells funny, then stick it in the fire!  That'll be delicious with jam spread on it!"

And here -- grinding up the seedpods of a random weed ended up producing one of the rarest and prettiest dyes ever discovered.  Undoubtedly the brainstorm of some medieval artist or botanist (or both) who happened to get lucky.  Makes you wonder what other plants are out there that could have odd artistic, medicinal, or culinary uses -- especially in places of enormous biodiversity like the Amazonian rainforest, where there are probably as many plant species that have not been identified as there are ones that have been.

So if you needed another good reason to preserve biodiversity, there it is.

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Finding a person who is both an expert in an arcane field like quantum physics, and is also able to write lucidly about it for the interested layperson, is rare indeed.  Such a person is Sean Carroll, whose books From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, and The Big Picture explore such ideas as the Big Bang, the Higgs boson, and what exactly time is -- and why it seems to flow in only one direction.

In his latest book, Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll looks not only at the non-intuitive world of quantum physics, but at the problem at the heart of it -- the "collapse of the wave function," how a reality that is a field of probabilities (experimental data agrees with quantum theory to an astonishing degree on this point) somehow converts to a reality with definitive outcomes when it's observed.  None of the solutions thus proposed, Carroll claims, are really satisfying -- so physicists are left with a dilemma, a theory that has been experimentally verified to a fare-thee-well but still has a giant gaping unexplained hole at its center.

Something Deeply Hidden is an amazing read, and will fascinate you from page 1 until you close the back cover.  It will also repeatedly blow your mind in its description of a universe that doesn't behave at all like what common sense says it should.  And Sean Carroll is exactly the author to navigate these shark-infested waters.  This is a book you don't want to miss.

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

Dry times

Okay, just yesterday I said that I was gonna try to keep it light and stop focusing on dismal developments like pandemics and climate catastrophe.  But a paper released just yesterday in the journal Science has forced my attention away from cheerful topics back into the more serious realm of how our short-sightedness is driving large parts of the planet toward being completely uninhabitable.

The paper, "Large Contribution from Anthropogenic Warming to an Emerging North American Megadrought," by a team led by A. Park Williams of Columbia University, has an alarming enough title, but when you read the paper itself, you find that "alarming" is kind of the understatement of the century.  Here's a sampler:

Severe and persistent 21st-century drought in southwestern North America (SWNA) motivates comparisons to medieval megadroughts and questions about the role of anthropogenic climate change.  We use hydrological modeling and new 1200-year tree-ring reconstructions of summer soil moisture to demonstrate that the 2000–2018 SWNA drought was the second driest 19-year period since 800 CE, exceeded only by a late-1500s megadrought.  The megadrought-like trajectory of 2000–2018 soil moisture was driven by natural variability superimposed on drying due to anthropogenic warming.  Anthropogenic trends in temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation estimated from 31 climate models account for 47% (model interquartiles of 35 to 105%) of the 2000–2018 drought severity, pushing an otherwise moderate drought onto a trajectory comparable to the worst SWNA megadroughts since 800 CE.

There's a lot to unpack here.  First, not only is the southwestern quarter of the United States heading toward a drought worse than any in recorded history, close to 50% of its severity is directly due to human activity.  On top of that is another thing the study uncovered -- that we were misled (as it were) by the fact that the twentieth century was unusually wet, encouraging widespread settlement by humans and huge investments into agriculture in the region.  "The twentieth century gave us an overly optimistic view of how much water is potentially available," said study co-author Benjamin Cook, also of Columbia University, in a press release.  "It goes to show that studies like this are not just about ancient history.  They’re about problems that are already here."

"Earlier studies were largely model projections of the future," added study lead author Williams. "We’re no longer looking at projections, but at where we are now.  We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we’re on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts."

[Image courtesy of Science, Williams et al.]

Drought always brings to mind the struggles faced by farmers confronted with the vagaries of weather, but in this case, the problem is orders of magnitude worse than that.  The press release from Columbia University (linked above) mentioned that Lake Mead and Lake Powell -- two of the largest reservoirs in the southwestern United States -- are already seeing a dramatic drop in the water levels.  These provide a significant proportion of the agricultural and drinking water to a broad swath of the Southwest.  What happens when these and others are functionally dry -- too low to allow for withdrawing water for any purpose?

A combination of short-sightedness, Pollyanna-style optimism, and a stretch of unusually wet years in the twentieth century led to coastal California and sun-belt cities like Phoenix and Tucson being some of the most heavily-settled areas in the United States, and now they're in the situation that if there's a true megadrought -- something far worse and longer-lasting than the piece of it we've already seen -- there could be millions of people without adequate drinking water.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to state that the federal and state governments are simply not equipped to face a disaster on that scale.

I hate to focus on negative shit, I really do, but in this case it's too important to ignore.  I'm back to the James Burke quote I mentioned in the post two days ago -- about how we pay for insurance for other much less likely eventualities without batting an eyelash, but when it comes to insurance against climate collapse, for some reason this is considered ridiculous.  The media hasn't helped, especially disinformation specialists like Fox News who have been hammering on climate change being some kind of evil liberal hoax for at least twenty years.  Now, however, we're paying the price, which will only get steeper the longer we pretend it isn't happening.

Consider, for example, the impact of Donald Trump's firing the pandemic response team because he didn't want to spend money on something that hadn't happened yet.

So we need to sound the alarm.  Loudly.  Studies like this one should be on the desk of every lawmaker in the United States.  Yeah, some of them are likely to ignore it -- I don't think a two-by-four to the head would wake up someone as catastrophically dense as James "Snowball" Inhofe, for example -- but the tide has to turn.

Because if you think things are bad now, my sense is you ain't seen nothin' yet.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is brand new -- only published three weeks ago.  Neil Shubin, who became famous for his wonderful book on human evolution Your Inner Fish, has a fantastic new book out -- Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA.

Shubin's lucid prose makes for fascinating reading, as he takes you down the four-billion-year path from the first simple cells to the biodiversity of the modern Earth, wrapping in not only what we've discovered from the fossil record but the most recent innovations in DNA analysis that demonstrate our common ancestry with every other life form on the planet.  It's a wonderful survey of our current state of knowledge of evolutionary science, and will engage both scientist and layperson alike.  Get Shubin's latest -- and fasten your seatbelts for a wild ride through time.

Attack of the sex goblins

Because I'm tired of doing what we've done here lately, viz. looking at horrible scary things that could wipe out the human race if we don't for pity's sake do something, today I'd like to consider:

Sex goblins.

I mean, maybe they want to wipe out the human race, too, but all things considered, it sounds like a more pleasant way to go than coronavirus, climate change, a supernova, or a death asteroid.

The ball got rolling in this case because of an article sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia that started me thinking about why paranormal creatures always seem to show up amongst people who already believe in them.

Odd, isn't it?  And I'm not talking about cryptids, per se -- creatures that, if they exist, might be expected to have a native range just like any other animal.  I'm talking about real supernatural entities -- and I use the word "real" with some trepidation -- like the Jinn (who, strangely enough, are never seen outside of the Middle East), Trolls (more or less limited to Scandinavia), and the Tokoloshe (ditto South Africa).

It's a funny thing.  I mean, if they really are powerful, and can appear wherever they want to, I would think that on the whole it would be more effective for some of these creatures to show up in front of complete non-believers.  Like, at a meeting of the U. S. Senate, or something.   Can you imagine? Especially if it was the Tokoloshe, a grotesque being that is supposed to run around naked, and to have an enormous penis and only one buttock.

I don't know about you, but I would love to see the look on Mitch McConnell's face.

But it never happens that way.  The big, dramatic appearances are always around people who already are convinced such things exist.  Usually while they're alone.

I wonder why that is.

In any case, the article was about an incident at a school in Zimbabwe a while back, wherein Headmaster Peter Moyo was accused of terrorizing his students with goblins that were under his command.  Why Mr. Moyo would do such a thing isn't clear, and the specific accusations are peculiar, to say the least:

Villagers in Dongamuzi area under Chief Gumede in Lupane are demanding the transfer of Ekuphakameni Secondary School headmaster Mr Peter Moyo, whom they accuse of owning goblins that have been terrorising pupils and teaching staff at the school. Last term lessons at the school were disrupted for almost two weeks after teachers abandoned the school following several nights of sexual abuse by the alleged goblins... 

Female teachers at the school claimed that during the night they would dream making love to someone and woke up the next morning with signs that they would have actually had sex during the night. 

Some male teachers also claimed that they woke up every morning wearing female panties whose origin they did not know. 

Villagers have called for the transfer of the school head whom they say was fingered during a recent cleansing ceremony held at the school.

My first reaction is that given the nature of the accusations, they could have chosen their wording better than to say that Mr. Moyo was "fingered" at the cleansing ceremony.

Be that as it may, the ceremony appears to have helped:

A cleansing ceremony dubbed Wafawafa, was held at the school on 5 March this year by the International Healers’ Association, during which the villagers say Mr Moyo was exposed after an assortment of paraphernalia associated with witchcraft was recovered from his bedroom. 

A village head from the area, Mr Emmanuel Chasokela Maseko, said normalcy had returned to the school since the cleansing ceremony was held but insisted that Mr Moyo should be transferred from the school as he was a risk to the community.

So... Mr. Moyo was exposed, was he?  Okay, that's it; you need to repeat the journalism class in "Avoiding Double Entendres."

But anyway, what strikes me about all of this is that (1) the appearance of panties and the "signs of having had sex" could both be accounted for by the people in question actually having had sex, and then not wanting to admit it; and (2) the goblins seem like a convenient way to get rid of the headmaster, especially if he knew about the nighttime shenanigans and was trying to put a stop to them.  Only a supposition, but this seems more likely to me than there being a real Pack of Sex Goblins under Mr. Moyo's command.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Armandeo64, Goblin by armandeo64, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But since the authorities obviously believe in goblins who visit at night to have their wicked way with you, it appears that poor Mr. Moyo is out of a job.

So that's our excursion into the regional nature of supernatural entities.  It's a pity, really.  I'd love it if a Frost Giant showed up up at one of Donald Trump's pandemic press briefings/free Re-Elect Donald Trump campaign commercials.  Can you imagine?  Especially if the Frost Giant took it upon himself to smack the absolute shit out of Trump every time he lies.

That might make them actually worth watching.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is brand new -- only published three weeks ago.  Neil Shubin, who became famous for his wonderful book on human evolution Your Inner Fish, has a fantastic new book out -- Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA.

Shubin's lucid prose makes for fascinating reading, as he takes you down the four-billion-year path from the first simple cells to the biodiversity of the modern Earth, wrapping in not only what we've discovered from the fossil record but the most recent innovations in DNA analysis that demonstrate our common ancestry with every other life form on the planet.  It's a wonderful survey of our current state of knowledge of evolutionary science, and will engage both scientist and layperson alike.  Get Shubin's latest -- and fasten your seatbelts for a wild ride through time.

Five-part wake-up call

I am not superstitious -- something that regular readers of Skeptophilia would hardly need pointed out -- but sometimes I think the universe is trying to send me a message.

I got on Facebook yesterday morning, and found that a friend of mine had posted, "I can't wait until the pandemic is over, so we can go back to doing absolutely nothing about climate change."  I gave that a rueful chuckle, and then decided to buckle down and get to work finding a topic for today's post.  I headed over to the Reddit page /r/science, often a good place to start when trying to find links to recent academic papers, and within five minutes found no less than five references that apply directly to climate change.

Let's start with the less alarming ones first -- and as you'll see, even the less alarming ones are pretty damn terrifying.

First, we have a press release over at EurekAlert, the science news site of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which looked at an event in the Earth's distant past.  At the boundary between the Ordovician and Silurian Periods, about 444 million years ago, there was a massive die-off that ranks among the "Big Five" extinction events.  It's not one that most people know about, however -- not only was it a long time ago, it's eclipsed by the more famous Permian-Triassic Extinction (that by some estimates eradicated 95% of all the species on Earth) and the Cretaceous Extinction, that wrote Finis: Exeunt on the Age of the Dinosaurs.

The Ordovician/Silurian Extinction has been a bit of a mystery.  Not only are good geological strata from that long ago uncommon, it was unclear from what geologists did have what it all meant.  There was pretty good evidence of rapid seesawing between hot temperatures and massive glaciation, but what kicked it off?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gérald Tapp, Icebergs, CC BY-SA 3.0]

We now have at least a partial answer to that.  The cause seems to have been worldwide oceanic anoxia.  At that point, all life was marine; so when the ocean's oxygen level crashed, it was catastrophic.  From the chemistry of the sedimentary rocks of the period, it looks as if a huge volume of marine water had essentially no dissolved oxygen.

"Thanks to this model, we can confidently say a long and profound global anoxic event is linked to the second pulse of mass extinction in the Late Ordovician," said study co-author Erik Sperling of Stanford University.  "For most ocean life, the Hirnantian-Rhuddanian boundary [between the end of the Ordovician and the beginning of the Silurian] was indeed a really bad time to be alive."

If the relevance of this study to our situation today isn't apparent, the press release wallops you over the head with it:

Beyond deepening understandings of ancient mass extinction events, the findings have relevance for today: Global climate change is contributing to declining oxygen levels in the open ocean and coastal waters, a process that likely spells doom for a variety of species.

Then there's the press release from McGill University about another extinction event, the one that happened at the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic Periods, 201 million years ago.  This one was also a bit of a mystery, but now the researchers have a smoking gun.  Guess what it is?

Changes in the atmosphere.

Here, massive volcanic eruptions (okay, "massive" isn't sufficient; "fucking huge" comes close) occurred as the Central Atlantic Rift Zone opened up, which was eventually to push apart Europe and Africa from North and South America, creating the Atlantic Ocean.  But this research indicates that the initial eruption happened over only five hundred years, and spewed out 100,000 cubic kilometers of lava.

That's a cubical block, one kilometer on each edge, but 100,000 of them.

Like I said.  Fucking huge.

What the problem was, other than for anything in the way of the lava flows, was the carbon emissions.  Not only does lava itself usually contain dissolved carbon dioxide that is released upon eruption, there's all the carbon generated by the lava burning up plants and other organic material.  The amount of carbon pumped into the atmosphere by this event was said by the press release to "be equivalent to the [predicted] total produced by all human activity during the 21st century."

When I got to this sentence, I said, and I quote, "What?"  The amount of carbon released by human activity in the 21st century is predicted to be equal to the amount generated by a 100,000 cubic kilometer lava flow, only five times faster?

At this point, I said some other stuff, which I won't include because I've already said "fucking" twice in this post.

Now, on to the ones that apply directly to our situation here and now.

First, a study out of the University of Sydney of estuaries, the points where freshwater rivers run into oceans.  These are biologically productive areas, homes to not only abundant sea life but fisheries industries that support coastal economies.  What this study found is that the water in estuaries is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world's oceans -- which could be catastrophic.  In the words of the press release:

The researchers say that changes in estuarine temperature, acidity and salinity are likely to reduce the global profitability of aquaculture and wild fisheries.  Global aquaculture is worth $US243.5 billion a year and wild fisheries, much of which occurs in estuaries, is worth $US152 billion.  More than 55 million people globally rely on these industries for income.

Be aware, too, that this temperature increase is not a prediction.  It's already happened.  "This is evidence that climate change has arrived in Australia; it is not a projection based on modelling, but empirical data from more than a decade of investigation," said Elliot Scanes, who co-authored the paper, which appeared this week in Nature Communications.  "This increase in temperature is an order of magnitude faster than predicted by global ocean and atmospheric models."

Last, there are two studies, both in the journal Nature.  One focused on projections of biodiversity loss in Africa and predicted that the crash was set to happen a lot sooner in the tropics than initially thought, and that the losses would be significantly impacting economies in the 2030s.   Like, ten years from now.  And it's not as if we here in the Frozen North will be spared; the same models predicted this devastation to spread to temperate ecosystems by 2050.  The final study modeled the economic impact of the current target of keeping the global average temperature increase between 1.5 and 2 C over the next eighty years.  I'd like to quote directly from this one, because paraphrasing just wouldn't have the same impact:

Results show that following the current emissions reduction efforts, the whole world would experience a washout of benefit, amounting to almost 126.68–616.12 trillion dollars until 2100 compared to 1.5 °C or well below 2 °C commensurate action.  If countries are even unable to implement their current NDCs, the whole world would lose more benefit, almost 149.78–791.98 trillion dollars until 2100.

The authors of this study call keeping the warming threshold below 1.5 C "a matter of simple self-preservation."

Five studies, all basically with the same message: when this happened in the past, the consequences were horrifying; it's happening now; and we damn well better get up off our asses and do something about it.  Not that this is likely with Emperor Donald the Demented in charge, not to mention his corporate-boot-licking yes-men and women in Congress.

The most frustrating thing for me about all of this is that we've known about all this for ages.  Thirty years ago, Irish science historian James Burke released his amazing two-part documentary After the Warming, which was prescient in so many ways that it beggars belief.  But these lines always have stood out to me:   "Where they [are getting] it really wrong is the argument over whether the greenhouse effect is happening [now]... which is irrelevant.  The question is what to do about the fact that scientific opinion thought that it would strike sooner or later.  Still, for some people, that wasn't good enough reason to spend money preparing for the eventuality, even though they paid to insure their lives, their homes, and their national defense against much less likely events."

So it's an open question if we'll do anything now, given our abysmal track record of taking the information we already have and acting on it.  I'm hoping that the information campaigns to bring this to the attention of the public, both by humble bloggers like myself and the scientific experts who know the most, are waking people up, even if only a few at a time.

My only fear is that a few at a time won't be enough to stave off catastrophe.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is brand new -- only published three weeks ago.  Neil Shubin, who became famous for his wonderful book on human evolution Your Inner Fish, has a fantastic new book out -- Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA.

Shubin's lucid prose makes for fascinating reading, as he takes you down the four-billion-year path from the first simple cells to the biodiversity of the modern Earth, wrapping in not only what we've discovered from the fossil record but the most recent innovations in DNA analysis that demonstrate our common ancestry with every other life form on the planet.  It's a wonderful survey of our current state of knowledge of evolutionary science, and will engage both scientist and layperson alike.  Get Shubin's latest -- and fasten your seatbelts for a wild ride through time.

Cosmic dynamite

This seems to be a month for astronomical superlatives.  Two weeks ago I posted here at Skeptophilia about the discovery of the three most luminous quasars ever seen, and just last week a paper hit in Nature Astronomy showing that a supernova seen back in 2016 was the brightest and most powerful ever recorded, outshining the nearest competitor by a factor of ten.

In "An Extremely Energetic Supernova from a Very Massive Star in a Dense Medium" -- given scientists' usual efforts not to overplay their discoveries, the very title indicates how remarkable this is -- a team led by Matt Nicholl of the University of Birmingham describes a massive explosion of a star in a yet-unnamed galaxy four billion light years from us that released energy on the order of 10^52 ergs -- that's a 1 followed by fifty-two zeroes -- which is ten times higher than the previous record-holder.

The galaxy is a dwarf elliptical galaxy, and seems to be similar in structure to the Magellanic Clouds, the two dwarf galaxies near the Milky Way.  This supernova (SN2016aps) is something else again, outshining its entire host galaxy by a large margin.  "SN2016aps is spectacular in several ways," said Edo Berger, Harvard University astronomy professor and co-author on the paper, in a press release.  "Not only is it brighter than any other supernova we’ve ever seen, but it has several properties and features that make it rare in comparison to other explosions of stars in the universe...  The intense energy output of this supernova pointed to an incredibly massive star progenitor.  At birth, this star was at least a hundred times the mass of our Sun."

SN2016aps [Image from the Panoramic Survey Telescopes and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS)]

The reason that the star suffered such a colossal explosion seems to go back to events that preceded the final blast.  It's likely that the star itself was formed from the merger of two less massive stars, an event that caused a huge release of a shell of hydrogen gas from the combined star's surface.  When the core of the star(s) went supernova, the material blasted from the core collided with the shell of hydrogen, touching off an energetic shock wave of a size that beggars belief.

"Spectroscopic observations during the followup study revealed a restless history for the progenitor star,” said study lead author Matt Nicholl.  "We determined that in the final years before it exploded, the star shed a massive shell of gas as it violently pulsated.  The collision of the explosion debris with this massive shell led to the incredible brightness of the supernova.  It essentially added fuel to the fire."

The fact that this supernova is four billion light years away should be reassuring; not only is that a "far piece from here" (as my grandma used to describe anything more than about five miles away), but this means the explosion occurred four billion years ago.  The fact that there has never been anything seen on this magnitude from nearer to us (and therefore, that happened more recently) may mean not only that such events are extremely rare, but that they were more likely in the early universe than they are now.

Which is a relief.  As spectacular as this would be, seeing it from close range would be inadvisable.  Fans of the original Star Trek might remember the episode "All Our Yesterdays," wherein an entire planet's population jumped into the past to escape their host star's impending supernova, and the intrepid members of the Enterprise's away team get trapped in different pasts (of course), almost get killed and/or permanently stuck there (of course), and all get away with seconds to spare (of course).  The final moments -- the star blowing up, and the Enterprise hauling ass to get away -- is pretty dramatic, but underplays the actual magnitude of such an event.  Warp drive notwithstanding, being this close to a supernova would be a good way to get yourself vaporized.

Anyhow, that's our astronomical superlative of the week.  If April keeps going this way, you have to wonder what's next.  Me, I hope that it's a light show from Comet ATLAS, although sadly that's looking less and less likely.  Other than that?  We'll just have to keep our eyes on the skies.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is brand new -- only published three weeks ago.  Neil Shubin, who became famous for his wonderful book on human evolution Your Inner Fish, has a fantastic new book out -- Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA.

Shubin's lucid prose makes for fascinating reading, as he takes you down the four-billion-year path from the first simple cells to the biodiversity of the modern Earth, wrapping in not only what we've discovered from the fossil record but the most recent innovations in DNA analysis that demonstrate our common ancestry with every other life form on the planet.  It's a wonderful survey of our current state of knowledge of evolutionary science, and will engage both scientist and layperson alike.  Get Shubin's latest -- and fasten your seatbelts for a wild ride through time.

By any other name...

Scientists have an undeserved reputation for being dry and humorless.

If you doubt the "undeserved" part, consider scientific names.  Because by convention scientific names usually have Greek or Latin roots, they sound pretty sophisticated and fancy -- until you translate them.  The adorable black-footed ferret of the American Rockies is Mustela nigripes, which translates to... "black-footed ferret."  The western diamondback rattlesnake, Crotalus atrox?  Greek for "scary noisemaker."  The name of the mammalian order containing shrews and moles, Eulipotyphla, is kind of insulting.  It means "really fat and blind."  But they only get sillier from there.  How about Eucritta melanolimnetes, a species of amphibian from the Carboniferous Period?  The name means "the real Creature from the Black Lagoon."

And the order of mammals that includes rabbits, Order Lagomorpha?  Translated from Greek, "Lagomorpha" literally means "shaped like a bunny."

The gift of naming a newly-discovered species goes to the discoverer, and if they choose they can name it in honor of someone (it's considered bad form to name it after yourself).  Lots of biologists name species after their teachers or mentors, but the field is wide open.  Entomologists Kelly Miller and Quentin Wheeler named a species of slime-mold beetle after former Vice President Dick Cheney -- whether Agathidium cheneyi was an honor or an insult is open to interpretation.  Some paleontologists working in Madagascar liked to listen to music while they worked, and became convinced that whenever they played Dire Straits, they found lots of new fossils.  Thus, there's a species of Cretaceous dinosaur named Masiakasaurus knopfleri.  A genus of carabid beetles, Agra, has a species named Agra schwartzeneggeri -- Terry Erwin, the entomologist responsible for that one, found a number of other Agra species, and thus we have Agra vation, Agra phobia, and Agra cadabra.

You can even name species after fictional characters.  Thus we have a fuzzy mite named Polemistus chewbacca, an Australian moth with marks that resemble a second head named Erechthias beeblebroxi, an Ordovician trilobite named Han solo, a sponge-like fungus from Malaysia named -- I shit you not -- Spongiforma squarepantsii, a cave-dwelling insect from Spain named Gollumjapyx smeagol, and -- my favorite -- a fish from the fjords of New Zealand named Fiordichthys slartibartfasti.

If you get why that last one is fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious, congratulations; you're as big a nerd as I am.

Some are just outright silly.  Consider the Australian wasp discovered by entomologist Arnold Menke in 1977.  He was so delighted at the find that he gave it the scientific name Aha ha.

And I would be remiss in not mentioning a genus of small mollusks named Bittium.  When a genus of even smaller mollusks was discovered, they named it... you guessed it... Ittibittium.

The reason all this silliness comes up is a discovery that was the subject of a paper last week in PLOS-ONE.  Paleontologists working in Brazil found a fossil of a new species of tanystropheid, a group of Triassic dinosaurs with such bizarrely elongated necks that scientists are still trying to figure out how they walked without doing a face-plant.  (One possible answer is that they were aquatic, but that's not certain.)

Tanystropheus longobardicus, which is itself sort of a goofy name. It means "long, bent thing with a long beard." I have to wonder how many controlled substances the scientists had partaken of before they came up with that one. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura email:nobu.tamura@yahoo.com http://spinops.blogspot.com/, Tanystropheus NT small, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Anyhow, the new species was christened Elessaurus gondwanoccidens.  The species name isn't so interesting -- it means "from western Gondwana," after one of the supercontinents around during the Triassic Period -- but the genus name is clever.  It plays on the usual -saurus (Greek for "lizard") ending of many genera of dinosaurs, but was actually named for Elessar -- one of the many monikers of King Aragorn II from The Lord of the Rings.  Elessar, which means "elf-stone" in J. R. R. Tolkien's wonderful conlang Quenya, was the title Aragorn took after Sauron got his clocks cleaned by Frodo et al. and the former Strider became the King of Gondor.

So that's a look at the deadly serious, dry-as-dust subject of biological taxonomy.  And I haven't even gotten into the off-color ones, which is a whole subject in and of itself.  Suffice it to say that orchid is Greek for "testicle," and there's a mushroom with the scientific name Phallus impudicus ("shameless penis").  I'll leave you to research the rest of that topic on your own.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is brand new -- only published three weeks ago.  Neil Shubin, who became famous for his wonderful book on human evolution Your Inner Fish, has a fantastic new book out -- Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA.

Shubin's lucid prose makes for fascinating reading, as he takes you down the four-billion-year path from the first simple cells to the biodiversity of the modern Earth, wrapping in not only what we've discovered from the fossil record but the most recent innovations in DNA analysis that demonstrate our common ancestry with every other life form on the planet.  It's a wonderful survey of our current state of knowledge of evolutionary science, and will engage both scientist and layperson alike.  Get Shubin's latest -- and fasten your seatbelts for a wild ride through time.

Lights in the Ozarks

I was chatting with a good friend and long-time reader of Skeptophilia about the difficulties of finding topics to write about six days a week, and right off the bat she came up with one I'd never heard of.

She's another novelist, so I probably shouldn't have been surprised that she had heard about local legends in the Ozarks, near her home in northwestern Arkansas.  Her name is K. D. McCrite -- she's a versatile and creative writer, writing children's books, romances, and cozy mysteries, but also (under her pen name Ava Norwood) writes domestic thrillers that'd knock your socks off.

"Have you ever heard of the Joplin Spook Lights?" K. D. asked.

Well, it sounded a bit like a minor league baseball team, but I told her I hadn't.

"It's actually not in Joplin that it happens," she told me.  "It's across the border into Oklahoma, near Quapaw.  But lots of people have seen them.  Lights floating in the sky.  They were reported long before there were any cars and airplanes, so whatever they are, they don't seem to be that."

I was intrigued, of course, and she did a little digging and found some references for me.  It's a pretty peculiar phenomenon, whatever it is.

It was allegedly first noticed by Native Americans during the Trail of Tears, but just about every time something like this comes up you hear that the "Native Americans had legends" corroborating it, so I'm not inclined to give that a lot of credence.  But after that, things get pretty weird, and way harder to dismiss out of hand.

In 1881, a publication came out called The Ozark Spook Light claiming it had been seen repeatedly by locals.  It's a ball of light that hovers over the road, and that it "sways from side to side, like a lantern being carried by some invisible force."  It apparently can be seen on most any dark night, seems impervious to wind and rain, and has even been studied by the Army Corps of Engineers -- still leaving us without an explanation.

Initially I thought it might be ball lightning, but on further research it doesn't seem to fit with the descriptions.  Ball lightning -- itself a verified but unexplained phenomenon -- has several common characteristics, which include sizzling discharge when it nears a metal object, and a (usually loud) explosive finish.

The Joplin Spook Lights, on the other hand, are silent.  They don't seem to be electrical in nature, although that's speculation.  Some have linked the phenomenon to the New Madrid Fault -- one of the only potentially dangerous faults in the middle of the continent -- which in 1811 and 1812 suffered a series of earthquakes that changed the course of the Mississippi River, and which if they occurred today, would have flattened every town within a hundred mile radius.  But that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because the New Madrid Fault is on the other side of the state, over five hundred kilometers away.

If the New Madrid Fault is causing lights in the sky in Quapaw, Oklahoma, the skies over the town of New Madrid itself should look like Fourth of July fireworks show.

But whatever they are, the Spook Lights are a completely local phenomenon.  K. D. put me in touch with a friend of hers who lives near where they're regularly seen, and in fact, has seen them herself, as had her husband.  Here's what she had to say:

I’ve seen it a handful of times over the years.  My first husband saw it up close and personal when he was a teenager.  He said it was a common pastime to hang out there.  I believe it must have been more active and brighter then, which would have been late forties, early fifties, if I’m figuring the time right.

He said he sat on the hood of his car and read a comic book from the light it projected.  It would come up close and sometimes bounce on the top of the cars in front of him.  He said it would split into two, three, four lights, and some were different colors.  Not bright but subtly different shades.  I imagined it like a pale prism.  I don’t know if that’s what it was.  I think he did say it would sometimes be a pale red.

My own experiences were less exciting but they did give me chills a time or two.  I have seen it divide and bounce in the tree tops.  It has seemed to diminish in size and brightness over the years.  I haven’t heard of anyone seeing it in years but maybe people have lost interest.  Too much else to do these days.  The last time I was there was around 2000, 2001.  My husband and I went down with some friends, but that time we didn’t see it at all.

Pretty creepy stuff.  I don't know that if I'd been there and seen spectral lights bouncing off the hoods of cars, I would have been calm enough to sit there and read a comic book.  Although I'm a skeptic and a scientist, I'm also a great big coward, and I suspect if I were on a lonely country road at night and saw weird lights in the sky, I'd either faint or else wet my pants.

Possibly both.

Be that as it may, the lights are still seen today (although perhaps less frequently, as K. D.'s friend mentioned).  In 2016, three friends went investigating, and caught the Spook Lights on film (they call them the "Hornet Spook Lights," after the nearby town of Hornet, Missouri, six miles southwest of Joplin, but it's the same local phenomenon by a different name).  The video they took is strangely convincing -- if you're as impatient as I am, though, you might want to advance it to 9:30 and skip all the introductory conversation.  But the people filming it point out other flashes as distant billboard lights or car headlights, and what they say are the Spook Lights are definitely something different.  My feeling after watching the video is that whatever the three guys captured on video, it wasn't some kind of elaborate hoax.

In any case, the Spook Lights remain unexplained.  Apparently they're one of the best-documented "lights in the sky" in the world, which makes me wonder why I hadn't run across it till now.  I'd still put money on there being a natural explanation, but despite investigation, no one -- including the Army Corps of Engineers -- has been able to figure out what it might be.

So thanks to K. D. and her friend for putting me onto this.  It's certainly a curious phenomenon.  I think maybe next time I'm in the Ozarks (I go there every year for my publisher's annual authors' retreat), I might just head up to Quapaw and see what I can see.  I'll have my camera at the ready, and will certainly report anything I see here.

I'll also have a change of underwear at the ready.  You can't be too careful.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is brand new -- only published three weeks ago.  Neil Shubin, who became famous for his wonderful book on human evolution Your Inner Fish, has a fantastic new book out -- Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA.

Shubin's lucid prose makes for fascinating reading, as he takes you down the four-billion-year path from the first simple cells to the biodiversity of the modern Earth, wrapping in not only what we've discovered from the fossil record but the most recent innovations in DNA analysis that demonstrate our common ancestry with every other life form on the planet.  It's a wonderful survey of our current state of knowledge of evolutionary science, and will engage both scientist and layperson alike.  Get Shubin's latest -- and fasten your seatbelts for a wild ride through time.