Strange attractor

I've always found the concept of the Strong Anthropic Principle wryly amusing.

The idea here is that something (usually a benevolent deity) fine-tuned the universe in just such a way to be hospitable for us -- for having forces perfectly balanced to hold matter together without causing a runaway collapse, for having gravitational pull strong enough to form stars and planets, for having electromagnetic forces of the right magnitude to generate the chemical reactions that ultimately led to organic molecules and life, and so on.

To me, this argument ignores two awkward facts.  First, of course our universe has exactly the right characteristics to generate and support life; if it didn't, we wouldn't be here to consider the question.  (This is called the "Weak Anthropic Principle," for obvious reasons.)  Second, though -- the Strong Anthropic Principle conveniently avoids the fact that a large percentage of the Earth, and damn near 100% of the universe as a whole, is completely and unequivocally hostile to us, and probably to just about any living thing out there.

It's one of those hostile bits that got me thinking about the whole issue today, because astronomers just last week observed a phenomenon called a fast radio burst in our own galaxy -- a mere thirty thousand light years away -- and the thing that produces it is not only bizarre in the extreme, but is something that we're very, very lucky not to be any closer to.

The beast that produces this is called a magnetar, and appears to be a rapidly-spinning neutron star, with a mass of two to three times that of the Sun but compressed into a sphere only about twenty kilometers in diameter.  This means that the surface gravitational attraction is astronomical (*rimshot*).  Any irregularities in the topography would be crushed, giving it a smooth surface with a relief less than that of a brand-new billiard ball.

The most bizarre thing about magnetars, however, is the immense magnetic field that gives them their name.  Your typical magnetar has an average magnetic field flux density of ten billion Teslas -- on the order of a quadrillion times the field strength of the Earth.  This is why they are, to put it mildly, really fucking dangerous.  The article in Astronomy about last week's discovery explained it graphically (if perhaps using slightly more genteel language):

The magnetic field of a magnetar is about a hundred million times stronger than any human-made magnet.  That’s strong enough that a magnetar would horrifically kill you if you got within about 620 miles (1,000 km) of it.  There, its insanely strong magnetic field would pluck electrons from your body’s atoms, essentially dissolving you.

This brought up a question in my mind, though; magnetic fields of any kind are made by moving electrical charges -- so how can a neutron star (made, as one would guess, entirely of neutrons) have any magnetic field at all, much less an insanely strong one?  Turns out I'm not the only one to ask this question, as I found out when I did some digging and stumbled on the Q-and-A page belonging to Cole Miller, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Maryland.  Miller says the reason is that not all of the particles in a neutron star are neutrons.  While the structure as a whole is electrically neutral, about ten percent of the total mass is made up of electrons and protons that are free to move.  Take those charged particles and whirl them around hundreds of times per second, and you have a magnetic field that is not only insanely strong, but really fucking dangerous.

This all comes up because of last week's observation of a thirty-millisecond-long fast radio burst coming from within our galaxy.  All the others that have been detected were in other galaxies, and the distances involved (not to mention how sporadic they are, and how quickly they're over) make them difficult to explain.  But this comparatively nearby one gave us a load of new information -- especially when a second burst came from the same magnetar a few days later.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESO/L. Calçada, Artist’s impression of the magnetar in the extraordinary star cluster Westerlund 1, CC BY 4.0]

As this observation was only made last week, astronomers and astrophysicists are still trying to explain it, including odd features such as its relative faintness.  As compared to bursts from other galaxies this one was a thousand times less luminous.  Why is still a matter of conjecture.  Is it because bursts this weak occur in other galaxies, but from this distance would be undetectable?  Is it because the distant galaxies are much younger (remember, looking out in space is equivalent to looking back in time), so stronger bursts only happen early in a galaxy's evolution?  At this point, we don't know.  As Yvette Cendes, author of the Astronomy article, put it:

It is far too early to draw a firm conclusion about whether this relatively faint FRB-like signal is the first example of a galactic fast radio burst — making it the smoking gun to unlocking the entire FRB mystery.  And there are also still many preliminary questions left to answer.  For example, how often do these fainter bursts happen?  Are they beamed so not all radiation is equally bright in all directions?  Do they fall on a spectrum of FRBs with varying intensities, or are they something entirely new?  And how are the X-ray data connected?

As usual with science, the more we know, the more questions we have.

In any case, here we have a phenomenon that's cool to observe, but that you wouldn't want to be at all close to.  Not only do we have the magnetic field to worry about, but the burst itself is so energetic that anything nearby would get flash-fried.

So "the universe is fine-tuned to be congenial to us" only works if you add, "... except for the 99.9% of it that is actively trying to kill us."  Not that this makes it any less magnificent, but it does make you feel a little... tiny, doesn't it?  Probably a good thing.  Humans do stupid stuff when they start thinking they're the be-all-end-all.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a phenomenal achievement; the breathtaking mission New Horizons that gave us our first close-up views of the distant, frozen world of Pluto.

In Alan Stern and David Grinspoon's Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, you follow the lives of the men and women who made this achievement possible, flying nearly five billion kilometers to something that can only be called pinpoint accuracy, then zinging by its target at fifty thousand kilometers per hour while sending back 6.25 gigabytes of data and images to NASA.

The spacecraft still isn't done -- it's currently soaring outward into the Oort Cloud, the vast, diffuse cloud of comets and asteroids that surrounds our Solar System.  What it will see out there and send back to us here on Earth can only be imagined.

The story of how this was accomplished makes for fascinating reading.   If you are interested in astronomy, it's a must-read.

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

There's a word for that

I've always had a fascination for words, ever since I was little.  My becoming a writer was hardly in question from the start.  And when I found out that because of the rather byzantine rules governing teacher certification at the time, I could earn my permanent certification in biology with a master's degree in linguistics, I jumped into it with wild abandon.  (Okay, I know that's kind of strange; and for those of you who are therefore worried about my qualifications to teach science classes, allow me to point out that I also have enough graduate credit hours to equal a master's degree in biology, although I never went through the degree program itself.  My progress through higher education, if viewed from above, would have looked like a pinball game.)

In any case, I've been a logophile for as long as I can remember, and as a result, my kids grew up in a household where incessant wordplay was the order of the day.  Witness the version of "Itsy Bitsy Spider" I used to sing to my boys when they were little:

The minuscule arachnid, a spigot he traversed
Precipitation fell, the arachnid was immersed
Solar radiation
Caused evaporation
So the minuscule arachnid recommenced perambulation.

Okay, not only do I love words, I might be a little odd.  My kids developed a good vocabulary probably as much as a defense mechanism as for any other reason.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

All of this is just by way of saying that I am always interested in research regarding how words are used.  Recently, a friend sent me a link about a set of data collected by some Dutch linguists regarding word recognition in several languages (including English) -- and when they looked at gender differences, an interesting pattern emerged.

What they did was to give a test to see if the correct definitions were known for various unfamiliar words, and then sorted them by gender.  It's a huge sample size -- there were over 500,000 respondents to the online quiz.  And they found that which words the respondents got wrong was more interesting than the ones they got right.

From the data, they looked at the words that showed the greatest recognition disparity between the genders.  The top twelve words that men got wrong more frequently than women were:

• taffeta
• tresses
• bottlebrush (the plant, not the kitchen implement, which is kind of self-explanatory)
• flouncy
• mascarpone
• decoupage
• progesterone
• wisteria
• taupe
• flouncing
• peony
• bodice

Then, there were the ones women got wrong more frequently than men:

• codec
• solenoid
• golem
• mach
• humvee
• claymore
• scimitar
• kevlar
• paladin
• bolshevism
• biped
• dreadnought

There are a lot of things that are fascinating about these lists.  The female-skewed words are largely about clothes, flowers, and cooking; the male-skewed words about machines and weapons.  (Although I have to say that I have a hard time imagining that anyone, male or female, wouldn't recognize the definition of "tresses" and "scimitar.")

It's easy to read too much into this, of course.  Even the two words with the biggest gender-based differences (taffeta and codec) were still correctly identified by 43 and 48% of the male and female respondents, respectively.  (Although I will admit that one of the "male" words -- codec -- is the only one on either list that I wouldn't have been able to make a decent guess at.  It means "a device that compresses data to allow faster transmission," and I honestly don't think I've ever heard it used.  However, that probably has more to do with my complete technological ineptitude than it does my gender.)

It does point out, however, that however much progress we have made as a society in creating equal opportunities for the sexes, we still have a significant skew in how we teach and use language, and in the emphasis we place on different sorts of knowledge.

I was also interested in another bit of this study, which is the words that almost no one knew.  Their surveys found that the least-known nouns in the study were the following twenty words.  See how many of these you know:

• genipap
• futhorc
• witenagemot
• gossypol
• chaulmoogra
• brummagem
• alsike
• chersonese
• cacomistle
• yogh
• smaragd
• duvetyn
• pyknic
• fylfot
• yataghan
• dasyure
• simoom
• stibnite
• kalian
• didapper

As you might expect, I didn't do so well with these.   There are three I knew because they are biology-related (chaulmoogra, cacomistle, and dasyure); one I got because of my obsession with the weather (simoom); one I got because my dad was a rockhound (stibnite); and one I got because of my degree in linguistics (futhorc -- see, the MA did come in handy!).   The rest I didn't even have a guess about.   (I did look up "genipap" because it sounds like some kind of STD, and it turns out to be "a tropical American tree with edible orange fruit and useful timber.")

I'm not entirely sure what all this tells us, other than what we started with, which is that words are interesting.  At least I think so, and I'm pleased to say that my kids still do, too. My younger, who is now 29, was chatting with me on the phone recently, and I asked him how he was settling into the new apartment he moved into a few weeks ago.

"Fine," he said.  "Although a lot of my stuff is still in boxen."

Only someone in my family would think "ox-oxen, box-boxen."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a phenomenal achievement; the breathtaking mission New Horizons that gave us our first close-up views of the distant, frozen world of Pluto.

In Alan Stern and David Grinspoon's Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, you follow the lives of the men and women who made this achievement possible, flying nearly five billion kilometers to something that can only be called pinpoint accuracy, then zinging by its target at fifty thousand kilometers per hour while sending back 6.25 gigabytes of data and images to NASA.

The spacecraft still isn't done -- it's currently soaring outward into the Oort Cloud, the vast, diffuse cloud of comets and asteroids that surrounds our Solar System.  What it will see out there and send back to us here on Earth can only be imagined.

The story of how this was accomplished makes for fascinating reading.   If you are interested in astronomy, it's a must-read.

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

The return of the senses

The news has been pretty uniformly dismal lately.

I don't even have to list all the ways.  We've all been inundated by the headlines, not to mention how these developments have changed our lives, and it's becoming increasingly clear those changes aren't going away soon.  It's easy to get discouraged, to decide that everything is bleak and hopeless.

So today, I want to look at a new development that should make you feel at least a little better about what humanity can accomplish -- in this case, for people who have been through the devastating experience of losing a limb.

A high school friend of mine was involved in a terrible accident on his family farm and ended up losing both of his arms from the elbow down.  He was fitted with prosthetic arms, and after recovering managed amazingly well -- his courage and fortitude through this ordeal was something that inspired our entire school, and still inspires me to this day.  But his prostheses were no real replacements for lower arms and hands, and there was (and is) a lot he could not do.

Those limitations might soon be a thing of the past.

A collaboration between Chalmers University of Technology, Sahlgrenska University Hospital, the University of Gothenburg, and Integrum AB (a Swedish medical technology firm), the Medical University of Vienna, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has produced prosthetic arms for three amputees in Sweden that interface directly with the user's nerves, muscles, and skeletons.  Not only does this mean that the patient has much improved fine motor control over the prosthetic hand, but the nerve connection runs both ways, not only delivering output to control what the hand does, but relaying input received by the hand back to the brain.

Put simply: this prosthesis has a sense of touch.

"Our study shows that a prosthetic hand, attached to the bone and controlled by electrodes implanted in nerves and muscles, can operate much more precisely than conventional prosthetic hands," said Max Ortiz Catalan, who headed the research and was lead author on the paper describing it that appeared last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, in an interview with Science Daily.  "We further improved the use of the prosthesis by integrating tactile sensory feedback that the patients use to mediate how hard to grab or squeeze an object.  Over time, the ability of the patients to discern smaller changes in the intensity of sensations has improved."

The new prostheses, as amazing as they are, are just the first step.  "Currently, the sensors are not the obstacle for restoring sensation," said Ortiz Catalan.  "The challenge is creating neural interfaces that can seamlessly transmit large amounts of artificially collected information to the nervous system, in a way that the user can experience sensations naturally and effortlessly."

It's kind of amazing how fluid the human brain can be.  Neuroscientist David Eagleman, in his brilliant talk "Can We Create New Senses for Humans?", describes our sensory organs as being like the peripherals in a computer system -- and explains how quickly the brain can learn to obtain the same information from a different peripheral.  Some of his examples:

• blind people using echolocation -- clicks -- to create a "soundscape" and navigate their surroundings
• in a separate experiment, the blind using a head-mounted camera connected by an electrical lead to a flat, horseshoe-shaped piece of metal resting on the tongue -- the camera translates what it "sees" into a pattern of tiny voltage changes in the piece of metal, which the brain converts to rudimentary visual images
• the hearing impaired using a vibrating vest hooked up to a microphone to learn to "hear" through the vibrations on their skin

For me, the most stunning thing about these examples is that the brain learns to reinterpret the signals coming from the "peripheral" -- in the first example, sounds activate the visual cortex; in the second, touch stimuli activate the visual cortex; in the third, touch stimuli activate the auditory cortex.  All neural signals are the same; the brain simply decides how to interpret them.  You literally are seeing with your ears, seeing with your tongue, or hearing with your skin.

Here, though, the peripheral really is a peripheral, i.e., a machine.  You're not co-opting one of your pre-existing senses for a different purpose; you're hooking in an external apparatus to your brain, receiving input from an array of computerized sensors.  You may have been reminded, as I was, of Luke Skywalker:

It's a phenomenal improvement over previous prostheses, that were moved by muscle contractions in the arm it was attached to; here, the prosthesis is not only mind-controlled, it sends information back to the brain about what it's touching, giving the wearer back at least the beginnings of a sense of touch.

"Right now, patients in Sweden are participating in the clinical validation of this new prosthetic technology for arm amputation," said Ortiz Catalan.  "We expect this system to become available outside Sweden within a couple of years, and we are also making considerable progress with a similar technology for leg prostheses, which we plan to implant in a first patient later this year."

So the news these days isn't all bad, even if you have to dig a bit to find the heartening parts.  Regardless of what's happening now, I remain an optimist about human compassion and human potential.  I'm reminded of the final lines of the beautiful poem "Desiderata" by Max Ehrmann: "With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.  Be cheerful.  Strive to be happy."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a phenomenal achievement; the breathtaking mission New Horizons that gave us our first close-up views of the distant, frozen world of Pluto.

In Alan Stern and David Grinspoon's Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, you follow the lives of the men and women who made this achievement possible, flying nearly five billion kilometers to something that can only be called pinpoint accuracy, then zinging by its target at fifty thousand kilometers per hour while sending back 6.25 gigabytes of data and images to NASA.

The spacecraft still isn't done -- it's currently soaring outward into the Oort Cloud, the vast, diffuse cloud of comets and asteroids that surrounds our Solar System.  What it will see out there and send back to us here on Earth can only be imagined.

The story of how this was accomplished makes for fascinating reading.   If you are interested in astronomy, it's a must-read.

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

The stories the bones tell

The field of forensic anthropology has made amazing strides in the past decades.  Fifty years ago, about all we could count on was identification of gender and suspected ethnic origin, and an estimate of age at death.  Now we are able to use data from bones to reconstruct much of the person's life history.

And sometimes, that history is pretty unpleasant.

One of the first cases in which the entire arsenal of sophisticated analytical techniques was used was "Ötzi," the "Ice Man" of the Alps whose body had been hidden underneath the edge of a glacier in the Italian/Austrian Alps for over five thousand years.  What we now know about Ötzi and his origins is kind of mind-blowing.  From pollen grains found in his clothing, we know he died in early summer, but his last meal contains "einkorn" wheat and sloes, both of which are harvested in the fall -- leading to the conclusion that his people knew how to preserve food over the winter.  He had no less than 61 tattoos, all geometrical and presumably symbolic, perhaps representing magical rituals.  (Or maybe, like me, he had ink just because he thought it was cool.)  He had a copper knife and particles of copper residue in his hair, suggesting he or someone he lived very near was involved in copper smelting.  From an isotopic analysis of his tooth enamel, we even know a bit of his life history -- he appears to have spent his childhood near the present town of Feldthurns, Italy, but at some point in his youth went to a valley fifty kilometers farther north.

Things took a grim turn, however, when the forensic anthropologists started looking into how he died.  Initially it was suspected he'd died in a fall down the hillside, as he had cracked ribs and surface bruises -- possibly resulting in his being knocked unconscious and dying of exposure.  But the truth seems a good bit harsher.  Ötzi has an arrowhead lodged in his upper chest, near the upper lobe of his left lung.  This wasn't an old injury; his shirt had a tear at the same place as the entry wound.  The conclusion from the placement and apparent trajectory of the arrow is that it would have severed arteries in his left pectoral muscle, leading to his death from blood loss.

We humans have been doing bad things to each other for a very, very long time.

If you needed further proof of this, consider the paper in Current Biology that came out two days ago, sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, and the reason I've gone into this rather morbid subject today.  In "Origin and Health Status of First-Generation Africans from Early Colonial Mexico," by a team led by Rodrigo Barquera of the Department of Archaeogenetics of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, we hear about three sixteenth-century skeletons recently found in Mexico that tell a horrific tale of abduction, slavery, and abuse.

The three individuals are clearly of African origin, based not only on skeletal morphology but on tooth-filing patterns that are characteristic of the Fang people of Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, and Gabon.  Not only that, but one of them had a characteristically African strain of hepatitis B, and another had remnants of the bacteria species (Treponema pallidum ssp. pertinue) that causes the horrific tropical disease yaws (if you choose to investigate further into this disease, do not look at the photographs unless you have a strong stomach -- you have been warned), which is most common in west and central Africa.  In fact, the current presence of yaws in Latin America is almost certainly the result of its having been brought in by the African slave trade.

It only gets worse when you read about the evidence of abuse these skeletons show.  The authors write:

Osteological analyses of the three individuals reveal evidence suggesting a life experience of conflict and hardship.  Individual ML8 SL 150 (SJN001) was found with five buck shots and two healing needles (used in traditional medicine) in the thoracic cavity, as well as gunshot wounds.  Both SJN001 and SJN003 (ML8 SLU9B 296) presented porotic hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia, two pathological changes associated with a skeletal response to nutritionally inadequate diets, anemia, parasitic infectious diseases, and blood loss.  Individual ML8 San José 214 (SJN002) displayed several skeletal changes associated with intense labor and heavy manual activity, including enthesopathies on the clavicle and scapulae as well as osteophytic lipping on the joint surfaces with some additional joint contour deformation at the sternoclavicular joint of the clavicle.  Additionally, he suffered from a poorly aligned complete fracture in the right fibula and tibia, resulting in associated joint changes of the knee, including osteochondritis dissecans of the distal femoral surface with joint contour deformation and associated osteophytic lipping of the articular surface margin.  Furthermore, this individual displayed osteoarthrosis of the lumbar vertebrae in addition to signs of deficient oral health and cut marks on the frontal bone.

"All of us involved in the study were highly touched by the whole story about these three persons, everything that they went through," study lead author Barquera said.  "Knowing that they were first-generation enslaved Africans brings a new perspective on the whole subject because you know they were abducted.  You're seeing all these maltreatment signatures on the bones that came with this abduction, what they suffered for the rest of their lives."

And "the rest of their lives" turned out to be short.  All three of the individuals died in their early or mid-twenties.  Whether they died of disease, malnutrition, murder, or the cumulative abuse they'd suffered isn't known, because they show signs consistent with all possible combinations of the above.

All of it brings home once again the accuracy of Thomas Hobbes's words in his book Leviathan, wherein he characterizes the lives of our ancestors as having been "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."  It's true that a lot of the poorness and nastiness was circumstantial, and due to bad diet and the prevalence of (then-untreatable) diseases.

But a frightening piece of the "nasty, brutish, and short" part was due to the horrible mistreatment of humans by other humans, often for no better reason than territory, power, rivalries, and tribalism.  I wish I could tell you we've grown beyond all that.  I mean, there's been progress; I wouldn't trade my life here in the 21st century for what Ötzi or the owners of the Mexican skeletons endured.  But that insularity, suspicion, and tribalism is deep within our cultural genes, needing little more than a moment's adversity to bring it to the surface.

Bringing to mind another quote, this one from the Latin playwright Plautus -- Homo lupus homini est (man is a wolf to men).

Which, in my opinion, is slanderous toward the wolves.  They may be fierce, but I've yet to see a wolf enslave another wolf.  On the whole, their society seems a great deal more peaceable than ours is.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an important read for any of you who, like me, (1) like running, cycling, and weight lifting, and (2) have had repeated injuries.

Christie Aschwanden's new book Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery goes through all the recommendations -- good and bad, sensible and bizarre -- that world-class athletes have made to help us less-elite types recover from the injuries we incur.  As you might expect, some of them work, and some of them are worse than useless -- and Aschwanden will help you to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The fun part of this is that Aschwanden not only looked at the serious scientific research, she tried some of these "cures" on herself.  You'll find out the results, described in detail brought to life by her lucid writing, and maybe it'll help you find some good ways of handling your own aches and pains -- and avoid the ones that are worthless.

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

Looking for a biosignature

From Gordon's Obsession #1 (paleontology) yesterday, today we're moving on to Gordon's Obsession #2: outer space and extraterrestrial life.

No, unfortunately, I'm not about to announce we've located the Andorian home world.  Maybe next time.

We're returning to this favorite topic of mine because of a paper this week in Astrophysical Journal Letters by a team led by Lisa Kaltenegger, of the Carl Sagan Institute of Cornell University, right in my part of the world in upstate New York.  Kaltenegger et al. describe models they've developed to refine how we look for Earth-like exoplanets -- by trying to figure out what our own world would have looked like from the depths of space during its entire geological history.

In "High-Resolution Transmission Spectra of Earth Through Geological Time," Kaltenegger's team recognizes the phenomenon we've discussed here before -- that seeing farther out into space means seeing further back into time.  An intelligent, technological alien species as little as 150 light years away wouldn't have any way of knowing that the Earth hosted a complex civilization with its own sophisticated scientific and technological capabilities, because they'd be seeing us as we were 150 years ago -- before the invention of long-distance radio-wave communication.  To them, the Earth would be a small rocky planet that was entirely silent, and apparently, devoid of life.

So are we making the same mistake with the exoplanets we're seeing?  And is there a way to get beyond that, and find "biosignatures" -- detectable traces of life on a far-distant world?

The key, says Kaltenegger, is in the world's atmosphere.  As the light from its host star passes through the thin envelope of gases surrounding the planet, the light is altered; each kind of gas has a specific set of frequencies it can absorb, and those are selectively removed from the stellar light, creating a dark-line or absorption spectrum.  This gives a fingerprint of what gases are there -- and, potentially, tells us what's going on down on the planet's surface, including whether or not there's anything alive.

The data they're using comes primarily from two sources -- the orbiting James Webb Space Telescope, and the Extremely Large Telescope out in the Atacama Desert of Chile.

I don't know about you, but the name of the latter always makes me laugh.  I'm picturing the scientists coming up with a name for the observatory after it was complete:

Scientist #1:  So, what are we gonna name our telescope?
Scientist #2:  How about naming it after Edwin Hubble?
Scientist #1:  No, that one's already taken.
Scientist #2:  Well, what's this thing's most outstanding feature?
Scientist #1:  It's extremely large.
*pause*
Scientist #1 and #2, together:  Heyyyyyy......!

But I digress.

Kaltenegger's team is looking for the presence of highly-reactive gases -- oxygen being the most obvious example -- that wouldn't be in an atmosphere unless something was continually pumping it out.  While there could be a non-biological way to inject large quantities of oxygen into an atmosphere, the better likelihood is some analogue to photosynthesis.

In other words, life.

The nice thing about this approach is that the presence of oxygen would have been detectable here on Earth over a billion years ago -- thus, potentially detectable by technological aliens from up to a billion light years away.  That's quite a window.  "Even though extrapolations from our findings suggest that one out of five stars hosts a planet which could be like Earth, it would be extremely surprising if all of them were at our Earth’s evolutionary stage," Kaltenegger said.  "So taking Earth’s history into account to me is critical to characterize other Earth-like planets."

What the team did is predict what the absorption spectra of the Sun's light would look like after passing through the Earth's atmosphere during the various periods of our prehistory -- the anoxic period (prior to the evolution of photosynthesis), the time during which aerobic life was present but uncommon, the transition to the land & evolution of plants, and so on, up through the Industrial Revolution, when (as James Burke put it in After the Warming) "instead of the atmosphere doing things to us, we started doing things to it."

The technique is not without its difficulties, however, most notably that the absorption spectrum of one of the biologically-produced reactive gases they studied -- methane -- is awfully close to that of water.  So teasing apart what's the signature of a ubiquitous compound, and what's the actual fingerprint of life, may not be simple.

What's certain is that we've only scratched the surface of what's out there.  At present there are a few more than 4,000 exoplanets identified, a lot of which are gas-rich Jovian planets that are likely not to have a solid surface.  (The reason for this is that the two main techniques for locating exoplanets, stellar occlusion and detection of a "wobble" in the star's position, work much better if the planet in question is large, biasing us against detecting small rocky worlds like our own.)  But if Kaltenegger is right that twenty percent of stars have Earth-sized planets, that's a lot of potential homes for alien life.

I don't know about you, but to me, that's tremendously exciting.  Even if we can't detect Vulcans and Klingons and Andorians yet, we might just be able to see if there's life at all out there.

And I'd be satisfied with that.  Just knowing we're not all alone in the cosmos would be reassuring, even if we don't know what that alien life is like, or whether they might be looking back at us through their own telescopes.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an important read for any of you who, like me, (1) like running, cycling, and weight lifting, and (2) have had repeated injuries.

Christie Aschwanden's new book Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery goes through all the recommendations -- good and bad, sensible and bizarre -- that world-class athletes have made to help us less-elite types recover from the injuries we incur.  As you might expect, some of them work, and some of them are worse than useless -- and Aschwanden will help you to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The fun part of this is that Aschwanden not only looked at the serious scientific research, she tried some of these "cures" on herself.  You'll find out the results, described in detail brought to life by her lucid writing, and maybe it'll help you find some good ways of handling your own aches and pains -- and avoid the ones that are worthless.

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

Monster mash-up

Today we're going to turn our attention once more to the distant past, for three stories about three very strange extinct animals.

The first one springboards off Monday's post, about the spectacular Kem Kem fossil beds in Morocco, that gives us a snapshot of "the most dangerous place in the history of planet Earth," according to Nizar Ibrahim of the University of Detroit, who led the team that investigated the site.

What we already knew was impressive enough, with scads of gigantic predators with Big Nasty Pointy Teeth coming at you from all directions, including overhead.  But a paper this week in Nature added another dimension to one of the Kem Kem species -- Spinosaurus, a thirteen-meter-long, eighteen-ton dinosaur with a giant sail running down its back and a row of evil-looking conical six-centimeter-long teeth.

Thus far, it sounds like another lumbering predator of the kind made famous by Jurassic Park, but now Nizar Ibrahim is lead author on another study, called "Tail-Propelled Aquatic Locomotion in a Theropod Dinosaur," we find out something that makes it even more terrifying:

This thing was aquatic.

So we're talking about a water-dwelling predator that makes great white sharks look like goldfish.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mariomassone, Spinosaurus white background 2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The authors write:

This dinosaur has a tail with an unexpected and unique shape that consists of extremely tall neural spines and elongate chevrons, which forms a large, flexible fin-like organ capable of extensive lateral excursion.  Using a robotic flapping apparatus to measure undulatory forces in physical models of different tail shapes, we show that the tail shape of Spinosaurus produces greater thrust and efficiency in water than the tail shapes of terrestrial dinosaurs and that these measures of performance are more comparable to those of extant aquatic vertebrates that use vertically expanded tails to generate forward propulsion while swimming.  These results are consistent with the suite of adaptations for an aquatic lifestyle and piscivorous diet that have previously been documented for Spinosaurus.  Although developed to a lesser degree, aquatic adaptations are also found in other members of the spinosaurid clade, which had a near-global distribution and a stratigraphic range of more than 50 million years, pointing to a substantial invasion of aquatic environments by dinosaurs.

So this gives new meaning to the tagline from Jaws, "Don't go into the water."

Then from Madagascar we have a well-preserved fossil from the weird -- and poorly-known -- group called gondwanatheres.  These were mammals, mostly confined to the Southern Hemisphere (unsurprising given the name, if you know your prehistoric geography), and despite a superficial similarity to a capybara, aren't closely related to any current mammalian group.

[Artist's reconstruction of the gondwanathere Vintana sertichi [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura email:nobu.tamura@yahoo.com http://spinops.blogspot.com/, Vintana NT small, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The most recent find is from the species Adalatherium hui, which is a Greek/Malagasy mishmash meaning, basically, "crazy beast."  The species predated the Cretaceous Extinction -- so it coexisted with the last of the non-avian dinosaurs -- and had a number of bizarre features, such as a hole in the top of the snout.  The oddity of its features may have to do with isolation in an island environment, allowing the evolution of the species to run in a different direction from its mainland relatives.  "Island environments promote evolutionary trajectories among mammals and other vertebrates that contrast with those on continents, and which result in demonstrable anatomical, physiological and behavioural differences," write the authors, a team led by David Krause of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.  "These differences have previously been ascribed to markedly distinct selection regimes that involve factors such as limited resources, reduced interspecific competition and a paucity of predators and parasites."

So here's a reconstruction of Adalatherium.  The badger-like coloration is artistic license, of course, based on the inference from its skeleton that it made its living by digging:

[Image courtesy of Andrey Atuchin]

The gondwanatheres seem to be closely related to another weird extinct mammalian group, the multituberculates, about which I wrote a year ago.  Both vanished, for reasons unknown, in the Miocene Epoch, on the order of fifteen million years ago.

The latest piece of research is about the strangest, most alien-looking animal ever, Tullimonstrum (the "Tully Monster," named after Francis Tully, who discovered the first fossils of the species).  If you think I'm being hyperbolic, here's what the Tully Monster looked like:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons PaleoEquii, Tullimonstrum, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The thing was so peculiar that paleontologists couldn't even decide if it was an invertebrate or a proto-vertebrate; the evidence seemed to favor the latter, and a 2016 study concluded it was an ancestral vertebrate related to lampreys and hagfish based upon its eye structure, fins, and teeth.  But now, new research that included detailed analysis of the eyes using a particle accelerator to determine the elemental makeup of the remnants in the fossil has thrown a wrench into that explanation.  In an article in LiveScience, paleontologist Chris Rogers of the University College-Cork tells us that the ratio of zinc to copper in the animal's eyes is much more like an invertebrate than a vertebrate -- but before we rewrite all the textbooks on Precambrian animals, the distribution of copper wasn't much like an invertebrate, either.  "We... found that Tully's eyes contain different type of copper to that found in vertebrate eyes," Rogers writes.  "But the copper also wasn't identical to that in the invertebrates we studied.  So while our work adds weight to the idea that Tully is not a vertebrate, it doesn't clearly identify it as an invertebrate either."

So we're back to the "what the hell is it?" stage of things.

Anyhow, that's our excursion into the past for today.  As I've pointed out before, the inherently fragmentary nature of the fossil record means that our picture of what life was like back then is going to be incomplete at best.  But slowly, painstakingly, researchers are refining our view of the animal life of eons long gone -- and what they're showing us is strange indeed.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an important read for any of you who, like me, (1) like running, cycling, and weight lifting, and (2) have had repeated injuries.

Christie Aschwanden's new book Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery goes through all the recommendations -- good and bad, sensible and bizarre -- that world-class athletes have made to help us less-elite types recover from the injuries we incur.  As you might expect, some of them work, and some of them are worse than useless -- and Aschwanden will help you to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The fun part of this is that Aschwanden not only looked at the serious scientific research, she tried some of these "cures" on herself.  You'll find out the results, described in detail brought to life by her lucid writing, and maybe it'll help you find some good ways of handling your own aches and pains -- and avoid the ones that are worthless.

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

Perchance to dream

New from the "They Made A Movie Out of This and It Didn't End Well," we have: some researchers at MIT who are trying to figure out how to hack into, and control, your dreams.

The world of dreams is so strange and vivid that the idea of selecting or controlling dream content has been the subject of fiction for a very long time.  Ursula LeGuin's brilliant novel The Lathe of Heaven is about the intersection between dreaming and reality -- and about a disturbed young man's discovery that the content of his dreams is altering everyone's reality.

The problem is, because everyone changes simultaneously, so do their memories -- meaning the only one who realizes what's going on is the young man himself.  And when he convinces his psychologist that he's telling the truth, the psychologist decides to use that ability for his own malign purposes.

Introducing a frightening ethical issue into the whole thing.

It's popped up over and over again.  Star Trek: The Next Generation dealt with the necessity of dreams, and what might happen if we're deprived of REM sleep, in the episode "Night Terrors" -- which has the scene which in my opinion is the single scariest moment in the whole series, when Dr. Crusher is wandering through the makeshift morgue trying to figure out why an entire starship's crew died violent deaths at each other's hands, and she turns around -- and the corpses, still shrouded in their sheets, are all sitting up.

Not to be outdone, The X Files did an episode about controlling dreams -- and how that could be used to alter someone's personality and intentions -- in the episode "Amor Fati," wherein the evil Cigarette-Smoking Man has Fox Mulder so sunk in a realistic dream that Dana Scully has to enter the dream to rescue him by convincing him it's all an illusion.

Perhaps most famously, the movie Inception looks at the possibility of hacking into someone's dreams and placing a subconscious suggestion in the dreamer's mind -- without, of course, his own permission.  This is a lot closer to what the MIT scientists are doing (more on that in a moment), leading to ethical issues that are a bit more likely than the ones in Lathe to stare us in the face.

So this obsession with dreams has come up again and again in fiction, and no wonder.  The content of dreams is wild, and for most of us, uncontrollable.  There's the estimated one percent of us who regularly lucid dream -- they're aware during dreams that they're dreaming, and can learn to control the content -- but most of us, myself included, can't do that.

But now, some researchers at MIT are trying to change all of that.

In the MIT "Dream Lab," scientists have developed a device call Dormio -- it's a form-fitted glove that detects when you're slipping into sleep, and injects an audio cue to insert some image or another into your dream state.  In one trial, the word was "tiger" -- and an impressive number of the test subjects reported that their dreams involved tigers.

Of course, this is just the first step toward broadening our reach into the dream world.  "People don’t know that a third of their life is a third where they could change or structure or better themselves," said Dream Lab researcher Adam Horowitz.  "Whether you’re talking about memory augmentation or creativity augmentation or improving mood the next day or improving test performance, there’s all these things you can do at night that are practically important."

Another Dream Lab researcher, Judith Amores, is trying a different route into the dreaming subconscious -- through the sense of smell.  Long known to have intimate ties into memory, the sense of smell might be a way to jump into the dream world without using an audio cue (which for light sleepers, might simply wake them up).  "The sense of smell is particularly interesting because it’s directly connected to the memory and the emotional parts of the brain — the amygdala and the hippocampus," Amores said.  "And that’s a very interesting gateway to access well-being."

All of it opens up a vast array of possibilities not only for research, but for psychological healing.  A dream-based approach to treating PTSD, for example, has very real potential.  Since one of the functions of REM sleep seems to be memory consolidation, there could also be applications to improving learning capacity and retention of information.  But beyond that, there's just the capacity for it to be pure fun.

"It’s such an exhilarating feeling to lucid dream," Tore Nielsen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal, said in an MIT blog post.  "You can try flying, singing, having sex — it’s better than VR."

On one hand, I'm not sure we need something else that allows people to hide from reality.  On the other, if I had a device I could wear that allowed me to control my dreams, I'd do it every night.

Think of the fun you could have with self-controlled no-repercussions full-body-sensurround fantasies every night.  I think a lot of us might not want to wake up.

Which brings up a whole other set of problems.

In any case, the researchers in the Dream Lab and other similar projects are looking at this as a way to connect to unused potential, not as a way of controlling people, which is the right approach.  "This is less like, 'I’m going to map something so I control it,' and more like, 'I’m going to give you a looking glass, and you do with that what you will,'" Horowitz said.  "I have very little interest in creating tools that take people further from themselves.  That’s definitely not the hope."

Or, as Ruben Naiman of the University of Arizona's Center for Integrative Medicine put it, "The thing with hacking dreams is that it’s based on a presumption that the subconscious is unintelligent, that it doesn’t have a life.  The unconscious, it’s another kind of intelligence.  We can learn from it. We can be in dialogue with it rather than dominate it, rather than ‘tap in’ and try to steer it in directions we want."

So all of this is pretty exciting, and I still wouldn't hesitate to volunteer to try out whatever they come up with.  But if I put that glove on and end up getting the audio clue, "Corpses in a morgue sitting up," I am right the fuck outta there.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an important read for any of you who, like me, (1) like running, cycling, and weight lifting, and (2) have had repeated injuries.

Christie Aschwanden's new book Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery goes through all the recommendations -- good and bad, sensible and bizarre -- that world-class athletes have made to help us less-elite types recover from the injuries we incur.  As you might expect, some of them work, and some of them are worse than useless -- and Aschwanden will help you to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The fun part of this is that Aschwanden not only looked at the serious scientific research, she tried some of these "cures" on herself.  You'll find out the results, described in detail brought to life by her lucid writing, and maybe it'll help you find some good ways of handling your own aches and pains -- and avoid the ones that are worthless.

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