Quick takes

Today I'd like to look at three topics that came up for one reason or another in the last few days.

First, have you ever thought about catnip?  It's peculiar stuff.  A member of the mint family, Nepeta cataria (no, I didn't make up the species name) is a rather un-showy plant with gray-green stems and off-white flowers.  Its strangest characteristic, as I'm sure you know, is that it produces what amounts to kitty drugs.  The chemical nepetalactone is produced in significant quantities by the plant, and is responsible not only for its musky smell but for its apparent psychedelic effects on cats.  Cats who are susceptible to it -- and some, I understand, are not, although every cat I owned was a total catnip junkie -- purr, roll around in it, become playful and frisky, and their eyes dilate.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons AlishaLH, Bee on Catnip Flowers, CC BY 4.0]

Clearly this is an accident; it's hard to imagine a plausible scenario in which the trait of producing this chemical evolved for the express reason of making cats flail around.  There's a presumption that it has a repellent effect on insects, which is certainly true about a lot of the aromatic substances produced by plants, but that's unsubstantiated.

The reason this comes up is that scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Chemical Ecology have decoded the genome of catnip, and they found that the nepetalactone gene apparently evolved more than once.  There are inactive "pseudogenes," stretches of DNA whose function has been lost over time to mutations, nearly identical to the current (functional) nepetalactone gene.  So evidently the gene evolved a second time, probably from another gene for producing chemicals of the class nepetalactone belongs to (the iridioids, which sounds like an alien species on Doctor Who but isn't), and then was advantageous enough that it kind of went into overdrive in catnip.

Apparently whatever its function is, it's important for more than getting kitties high.

So we're not the only species that has a strange psychological reaction to various naturally-produced chemicals in plants.  It's a good thing, though, that there's no such thing as (for example) moosenip, because the idea of a bunch of moose frolicking about and rolling around in your front yard is a little terrifying.


The next story comes from some research released last week by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which made an interesting discovery about a rather odd kind of star.  Called Delta Scuti stars (after the first star identified in this class), they are a pulsating variable that are more common than astronomers thought at first -- there's good evidence that the bright stars Altair and Denebola, in the constellations Aquila and Leo respectively, are also in this class.

What makes these stars so odd is not their fluctuations -- periodic variable stars are actually rather common -- but that some parts of the star move outward and dim, and other parts pull inward and brighten, at the same time.  The whole star, therefore, seems to ripple.  The astrophysicists believe this is because as parts of the star heat up, more of the helium in the outer shell becomes ionized; ionized helium is more opaque to light, so it blocks light trying to escape from the core and balloons outward.  Once it cools, it falls back inward, and since this happens at different times in different places on the surface of the star, there are pulsations in not only the overall brightness of the star, but which parts of the star are bright and which are dim.

A paper in Nature last week showed that their behavior may not be as chaotic as it seemed at first.  Data from TESS has shown that these surface fluctuations have their own kind of periodicity -- some, for example, seem to contract and expand one hemisphere at a time, not at random places on the star.

"Delta Scuti stars have been frustrating targets because of their complicated oscillations, so this is a very exciting discovery," said Sarbani Basu, a professor of astronomy at Yale, who studies asteroseismology but was not involved in the study, in an interview in Science Daily.  "Being able to find simple patterns and identify the modes of oscillation is game changing.  Since this subset of stars allows normal seismic analyses, we will finally be able to characterize them properly."

Last, I was contacted by a reader regarding last week's post about the presence of iridescence in the fossilized feathers of ancient birds, with a question as to whether this discovery might shed any light on the presence of tetrachromacy in birds.  You probably know that (most) humans are trichromats -- we have three different kinds of color-detecting cones in the retina of the eye, sensitive to blue, green, and red wavelengths.  The combination of these three gives us our perception of color.

Mammals, apparently, descend from animals that were tetrachromats -- they had four different cones, and presumably, a more highly refined sense of color detection than humans have.  But in most mammals, such as dogs, there were mutations that knocked out two of the genes responsible -- similar to the loss of the catnip gene described earlier -- leaving behind two functioning cone types, and poorer color discrimination.

Some humans -- almost all are female -- have a fourth working cone, and are true tetrachromats.  This is undoubtedly why when my wife and I are going out, a common comment from her is, "Seriously?  You think that shirt matches those pants?"  Saying my aesthetic sense, especially when it has to do with sartorial matters, is poorly developed is kind of a massive understatement.

Birds -- at least the species that have been tested -- seem to all be tetrachromats, which may be why so much of their display behavior has to do with flashing bright colors around.  The presence of feather iridescence in birds from 52 million years ago may be an indication that they've been able to do this for a very long time.

It must be said, however, that the record holder for number of different kinds of color-sensitive photoreceptor is the mantis shrimp, which (depending on species) has between twelve and sixteen independent kinds of cones.  You have to wonder what the world looks like to them, don't you?

So that's three quick takes from the world of science.  And thanks to the reader who suggested a post on tetrachromacy -- it's a fascinating subject, well worth a look.  So keep those cards and letters comin'.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is six years old, but more important today than it was when it was written; Richard Alley's The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future.  Alley tackles the subject of proxy records -- indirect ways we can understand things we weren't around to see, such as the climate thousands of years ago.

The one he focuses on is the characteristics of glacial ice, deposited as snow one winter at a time, leaving behind layers much like the rings in tree trunks.  The chemistry of the ice gives us a clear picture of the global average temperature; the presence (or absence) of contaminants like pollen, windblown dust, volcanic ash, and so on tell us what else might have contributed to the climate at the time.  From that, we can develop a remarkably consistent picture of what the Earth was like, year by year, for the past ten thousand years.

What it tells us as well, though, is a little terrifying; that the climate is not immune to sudden changes.  In recent memory things have been relatively benevolent, at least on a planet-wide view, but that hasn't always been the case.  And the effect of our frantic burning of fossil fuels is leading us toward a climate precipice that there may be no way to turn back from.

The Two-Mile Time Machine should be mandatory reading for the people who are setting our climate policy -- but because that's probably a forlorn hope, it should be mandatory reading for voters.  Because the long-term habitability of the planet is what is at stake here, and we cannot afford to make a mistake.

As Richard Branson put it, "There is no Planet B."

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

Look at that shine!

There's this bird called the cassowary, have you heard of it?

I think a better name for it would be the "Giant Blue-headed Australian Death Turkey."  They're ungainly-looking things, but (1) they're big, and (2) they're fast.  An adult GBADT can be two meters tall and weight 55 kilograms.  Not only that, but if they feel threatened, they don't run or fly away as any normal species of bird would do.  No, this is Australia.  What they do is run toward people, jump up, and kick them with razor-sharp talons, attempting -- sometimes successfully -- to disembowel them.

Think I'm joking?  This is an actual (i.e. un-Photoshopped) photograph of a guy trying to avoid being killed by a furious cassowary.

The reason this comes up is that cassowaries have another strange feature besides being, essentially, emus with daggers strapped to their feet.  Their black feathers have the quality of iridescence -- something you might not notice if it was leaping at you -- but from a safe distance, their feathers have an oily rainbow sheen.

This is more than just simple pigmentation.  The structures in the feathers containing the black pigment are called melanosomes, and they come in a variety of shapes and sizes in different species.  The brightly-colored throat patches ("gorgets") in hummingbirds are the color they are because of melanosomes.

But if the pigment they contain is black, how do hummingbirds display their amazing array of colors, and how do cassowaries gain their sheen?

The reason is a phenomenon called optical interference, and has to do with the multiple clear layers of keratin that separate the layers of melanosomes.  Light passing through those clear layers is refracted, and crosses light waves refracted by other layers -- and because of this, some wavelengths of light undergo destructive interference (they cancel each other out) and others constructive interference (they reinforce each other).  In our local Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, the keratin layers are spaced so the wavelengths that reinforce are ones that our eyes see as being in the red region of the spectrum; other colors get cancelled out.  Thus, the ruby throat of the Ruby-throat.

But change the spacing of the layers, and you change what colors reinforce.  So you can get the Violet-tailed Sylph of Ecuador...

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Joseph C Boone, Violet-tailed Sylph 2 JCB, CC BY-SA 4.0]

... the aptly-named Magnificent Hummingbird of Mexico, Central America, and southern Arizona...

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Don Faulkner, Magnificent Hummingbird (7047734993), CC BY-SA 2.0]

... and over two hundred others, each with its own different spacing of the keratin layers in the feathers, and thus, each with its own array of spectacular, iridescent colors.

What's fascinating about this evolutionarily is that cassowaries and hummingbirds have been separate lineages for a long time.  Their last common ancestor is estimated at eighty million years ago, so predating the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs by a good fourteen million years.  And some birds don't have this kind of iridescence -- their feather colors come from ordinary pigments, not a lot different than different colors of paint.  So how did two widely-separated groups of birds end up landing on the same solution for being colorful?

It's a very striking example of convergent evolution, where different organisms end up becoming superficially similar (usually only on one or two traits) because of similar selective pressures.  And apparently the innovation came about a long time ago in both lineages, as I found out in a paper this week in Science Advances that details information about some fossil feathers from relatives of the cassowary that were around 52 million years ago, during the Eocene Epoch.

In "Cassowary Gloss and a Novel Form of Structural Color in Birds," by Chad Eliason and Julia Clarke of the University of Texas - Austin, we read about an incredibly detailed analysis of feather fossils from the Green River Formation in Wyoming.  Using an electron microscope, the authors were able to measure the spacing of the melanosome layers and keratin layers, and determined that the species the feathers came from -- the lithornithid Calxavis (or Calciavis) grandei -- was black, with a deep iridescence on the wings.

The idea that we could actually find out what color an extinct species was using its fossilized feathers is amazing.  When I look at "artist's reconstructions" of prehistoric animals, I have to remind myself constantly that all the colors are just guesses based on analogies (sometimes incorrect ones) to modern species.  But now we actually have a pretty good idea of what a bird looked like who last flew around fifty-some-odd million years ago, which is kind of mind-boggling.

You have to wonder what other characteristics Calxavis shared with its modern cousins.  Unfortunately, we still know next to nothing about the behavior of long-extinct animals, so more than likely we'll never have anything more than guesses about how it acted when it was alive.

Who knows, maybe it even rushed at prehistoric predators and tried to rip them apart with its talons.  I mean, the Giant Blue-headed Australian Death Turkey's bad attitude has to come from somewhere.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that should be a must-read for everyone -- not only for the New Yorkers suggested by the title.  Unusual, though, in that this one isn't our usual non-fiction selection.  New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is novel that takes a chilling look at what New York City might look like 120 years from now if climate change is left unchecked.

Its predictions are not alarmism.  Robinson made them using the latest climate models, which (if anything) have proven to be conservative.  She then fits into that setting -- a city where the streets are Venice-like canals, where the subways are underground rivers, where low-lying areas have disappeared completely under the rising tides of the Atlantic Ocean -- a society that is trying its best to cope.

New York 2140 isn't just a gripping read, it's a frighteningly clear-eyed vision of where we're heading.  Read it, and find out why The Guardian called it "a towering novel about a genuinely grave threat to civilisation."

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

Canine teenagers

I love my dogs to pieces, but sometimes they drive me up a tree.

Especially our three-year-old pittie, Guinness.  He's sweet, cuddly, affectionate, playful... and willful, stubborn, mischievous, and frequently a complete pain in the ass.

The issue usually is that we're not giving him our undivided attention 24/7/365.  If you can imagine.  Monsters that we are, there are times when we don't want to play fetch with him or pet him, or when we might have other things we need to do.  When this happens, he usually finds some way of getting a rise out of us, like picking up a shoe and walking off with it, swiping something from the coffee table, or dragging a piece of firewood out of the wood cradle next to the stove.  If just taking it doesn't work, he proceeds to chew up whatever he stole, which is not a big deal if it's an empty cardboard box, but is a somewhat bigger deal if it's the TV remote.

Our usual strategy is to give him lots of one-on-one fun time in the afternoon, with the hope that he'll be so tired he'll stay out of trouble during the evening.  This works maybe fifty percent of the time.  When it doesn't, we fall back on the dubious strategy of chasing him around the house yelling, "DAMMIT GUINNESS GIVE THAT BACK."  Which, of course, means that he won -- we're giving him attention, and even better, playing with him, which is clearly how he interprets our running and flailing our arms.  "You are such a bad dog" usually elicits nothing more than a tail wag, because he knows how to game the system, and that's much better than being a Good Boy.

"I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille."

Well, because of a paper this week in Biology Letters of the Royal Society, I found out there's a good reason why Guinness acts the way he does.

He's a teenager.

In "Teenage Dogs?  Evidence for Adolescent-Phase Conflict Behaviour and an Association Between Attachment to Humans and Pubertal Timing in the Domestic Dog," animal behaviorists Lucy Asher (University of Newcastle), Gary England and Naomi Harvey (Nottingham University), and Rebecca Sommerville (University of Edinburgh) tell us that adolescent dogs go through a lot of the same sorts of annoying stuff that adolescent humans do -- oppositional behavior, selective hearing, and outright defiance, especially of the owner/parents.

The authors write:

...[W]hen dogs reached puberty, they were less likely to follow commands given by their carer, but not by others.  The socially-specific nature of this behaviour in dogs (reduced obedience for their carer only) suggests this behaviour reflects more than just generalized hormonal, brain and reward pathway changes that happen during adolescence.  In parts of this study, the ‘other’ person was a guide dog trainer who may have been more capable of getting a dog to perform a command; however, the results are consistent with parts of the study when the ‘other’ person was an experimenter without the experience of dog training.  We also find the reduction in obedience to the carer and not an ‘other’ person to be specific to the dog's developmental stage and more pronounced in dogs with insecure attachments, which is not easily explained by differences in dog training ability between the carer and other.

I find this fascinating, because it completely parallels my memory of parenting my sons when they were teenagers.  Both of them went through the eye-rolling, good-lord-my-parents-are-stupid phase of development, but while they were in that, we still got consistent stellar reports about their behavior at school.  "They're so sweet and cooperative," their teachers said, over and over.  "Always the first ones to volunteer to help out."

After verifying that yes, we were actually talking about the same teenage boys, Carol and I would just shake our heads and comment that it was better they take their adolescent angst out on us than on their teachers, who heaven knows have enough of that stuff to deal with.  Even if that meant that our request to load the dishwasher was treated as if it were equivalent to turning them into galley slaves and forcing them to row to Scotland.

But it's amazing that dogs go through the same phase.  Makes you wonder what other sorts of parallels they are.  And it gives me some hope that Guinness will grow out of his frustrating, attention-seeking behavior.  Although it must be said that three years old is definitely out of puppyhood, and we're still waiting for improvement.

Maybe it's partly his breed.  One of my friends who is a dog lover came over shortly after we got him (he's a shelter rescue, the best kind of dog to get).  She was greeted enthusiastically by him, and she said, "Oh, a pittie mix!  I love those.  How old is he?"

"A little over a year," I said.

"You do know that pitties only grow a brain when they're four years old, right?"

That was two years ago, and I'm not seeing much sign of it.  Maybe it's a sudden thing, you know?  Maybe next March, when he's three-years-and-eleven-months old, he'll get this shocked look on his face as his skull fills up with actual brain tissue, and immediately he'll start acting like a Good Boy, and perhaps even apologize for all of the household items he's chewed up.

Look, it could happen, okay?  Don't burst my bubble.  At least not until I find my left shoe.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that should be a must-read for everyone -- not only for the New Yorkers suggested by the title.  Unusual, though, in that this one isn't our usual non-fiction selection.  New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is novel that takes a chilling look at what New York City might look like 120 years from now if climate change is left unchecked.

Its predictions are not alarmism.  Robinson made them using the latest climate models, which (if anything) have proven to be conservative.  She then fits into that setting -- a city where the streets are Venice-like canals, where the subways are underground rivers, where low-lying areas have disappeared completely under the rising tides of the Atlantic Ocean -- a society that is trying its best to cope.

New York 2140 isn't just a gripping read, it's a frighteningly clear-eyed vision of where we're heading.  Read it, and find out why The Guardian called it "a towering novel about a genuinely grave threat to civilisation."

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

Finding the right search parameters

I was making dinner last week, and the recipe called for soy sauce.  I knew we had a bottle of it -- and I was pretty sure it was somewhere in the door shelves of the fridge, amongst the various salad dressings, jellies, jams, sauces, and marinades we'd collected.  But I could not find the damn thing, and was becoming increasingly frustrated.

So instead of a quick scan -- usually sufficient to find what I'm looking for -- I decided on a one-at-a-time, bottle-by-bottle search, and as you've probably already guessed, I found the soy sauce in under thirty seconds.  I realized immediately what the problem was; in my mind I pictured it as having a red cap, and our bottle had a green cap.

You'd think that wouldn't make a difference, given that everything else about it was exactly like what I was picturing, up to and including being full of soy sauce and having a big label on the front that said, "SOY SAUCE."  But one piece of the search parameter was off, and that made me scan right past it, not once but several times.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons GanMed64, Soy Sauce selection (6362318717), CC BY 2.0]

This is far from the first time this sort of thing has happened to me, and it amazes me how subtle the error can be and still derail my efforts.  It doesn't have to be anything nearly as egregious as in the hilarious anecdote Dave Barry writes about when his mother, groceries in a cart and two small children in tow, spent an hour trying to find her car in the store parking lot.  She looked so pathetic that several kind shoppers pitched in to try to help her.  "It's a black Chevrolet," she said, over and over.  It was only after the search had gone on for a ridiculous length of time, up and down the parking lot lanes, that she remembered that the previous week they'd traded in their old car for a new one, and told the helpers, "Wait!  I just realized, it's not a black Chevrolet, it's a yellow Ford!"

The helpers apparently were not amused, and his mom spent the rest of her life trying to live down the embarrassment.

So we can be confounded by our brain's preconceived notions of what we're looking for, from the subtle to the (should be) obvious.  And some researchers at Johns Hopkins University have found that finding the right search parameters even extends to characteristics we can't see.

This puzzling result came out of a series of experiments that were the subject of a paper this week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.  The team, led by cognitive neuroscientist Li Guo, timed how long it took test subjects to isolate a target object from clutter, and they found that knowing characteristics of the object that aren't apparent to the eye -- like hardness or fragility -- significantly improved the speed with which subjects could find the object in question.  The authors write:

Our interactions with the world are guided by our understanding of objects’ physical properties.  When packing groceries, we place fragile items on top of more durable ones and position sharp corners so they will not puncture the bags.  However, physical properties are not always readily observable, and we often must rely on our knowledge of attributes such as weight, hardness, and slipperiness to guide our actions on familiar objects.  Here, we asked whether our knowledge of physical properties not only shapes our actions but also guides our attention to the visual world.  In a series of four visual search experiments, participants viewed arrays of everyday objects and were tasked with locating a specified object.  The target was sometimes differentiated from the distractors based on its hardness, while a host of other visual and semantic attributes were controlled.  We found that observers implicitly used the hardness distinction to locate the target more quickly, even though none reported being aware that hardness was relevant.  This benefit arose from fixating fewer distractors overall and spending less time interrogating each distractor when the target was distinguished by hardness.  Progressively more stringent stimulus controls showed that surface properties and curvature cues to hardness were not necessary for the benefit.  Our findings show that observers implicitly recruit their knowledge of objects’ physical properties to guide how they attend to and engage with visual scenes.

What I find most curious about the results of this experiment is if the characteristic you're given can't be seen, how does it help your brain to locate the object you're searching for?  "What makes the finding particularly striking from a vision science standpoint is that simply knowing the latent physical properties of objects is enough to help guide your attention to them," said study senior author Jason Fischer.  "It's surprising because nearly all prior research in this area has focused on a host of visual properties that can facilitate search, but we find that what you know about objects can be as important as what you actually see...  To me what this says is that in the back of our minds, we are always evaluating the physical content of a scene to decide what to do next.  Our mental intuitive physics engines are constantly at work to guide not only how we interact with things in our environment, but how we distribute our attention among them as well."

So it may be that we're approaching our search from a set theory perspective; searching through "the set of all things in my living room" is more efficient if I can eliminate "the subset of things in my living room that are rigid, heavy, stand upright," etc., so eventually my brain can whittle it down to "the couch throw-pillow my dog dragged behind the recliner."

It's still puzzling to me how our brains actually accomplish this, because it means some kind of interaction is occurring between our visual interpretive systems and our non-visual memories (of such things as texture, durability, and so on).  It'd be interesting to have people perform this task while in a fMRI machine -- and see how their brain firing pattern differs while performing this task as compared to performing a task that simply requires memory retrieval.

So that's our latest look at the fascinating world of cognitive neuroscience.  It doesn't explain, however, the weird phenomenon that happens to me while I'm doing home repair projects, wherein I spend 5% of the time doing actual home repair and 95% stomping around swearing and looking for the tool that was just in my damn hand five seconds ago.  That one's a mystery.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that should be a must-read for everyone -- not only for the New Yorkers suggested by the title.  Unusual, though, in that this one isn't our usual non-fiction selection.  New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is novel that takes a chilling look at what New York City might look like 120 years from now if climate change is left unchecked.

Its predictions are not alarmism.  Robinson made them using the latest climate models, which (if anything) have proven to be conservative.  She then fits into that setting -- a city where the streets are Venice-like canals, where the subways are underground rivers, where low-lying areas have disappeared completely under the rising tides of the Atlantic Ocean -- a society that is trying its best to cope.

New York 2140 isn't just a gripping read, it's a frighteningly clear-eyed vision of where we're heading.  Read it, and find out why The Guardian called it "a towering novel about a genuinely grave threat to civilisation."

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

The persistence of memory

One of the many amazing things about the brain is its ability to form connections between associated events.

These links can have amazing staying power.  The smell of old books will forever remind me of my grandmother's attic, which was my bedroom for a year when I was about ten years old.  Dan Fogelberg's songs always bring back painful memories of my ex-wife (a shame to have that association, because I actually like Dan Fogelberg).  The pretty little flowers called "sweet williams" call to mind the small plot of garden I had in my parents' back yard -- they were the first flowers I had real success with, and I still remember the pure, unalloyed joy of watching them flower for the first time.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jim Evans, Sweet William -- Dianthus barbatus, CC BY-SA 4.0]

That we form these kinds of associations is common knowledge; how we do it is another matter entirely.  But some new research at Columbia University's Zuckerman Mind-Brain Behavior Institute has shed some light on this innate and ubiquitous capacity of the human mind.

In "Hippocampal Network Reorganization Underlies the Formation of a Temporal Association Memory," by Mohsen S. Ahmed et al., which appeared a couple of weeks ago in the journal Neuron, we find out that memories are as persistent as they are not because of a change in the neural firing pattern -- but because they actually cause a reorganization of synaptic connections in the hippocampus, a part of the brain long known to be crucial in memory consolidation.

The researchers taught mice to associate a neutral sound with a short, startling puff of air.  They were quick to learn to link the two; which, after all, was no different than Pavlov's dog connecting a bell with being fed dinner.  Because the two events being linked in the brain occurred with a significant separation in time, the researchers didn't think it could be that the parts of the hippocampus responsible for storing the memory of each were engaging in some kind of continuing cross-talk.  "We expected to see repetitive, continuous neural activity that persisted during the fifteen-second gap, an indication of the hippocampus at work linking the auditory tone and the air puff," said Stefano Fusi, professor of neuroscience at Columbia's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and co-author of the study, in an interview with Science Daily.  "But when we began to analyze the data, we saw no such activity...  We were happy to see that the brain doesn't maintain ongoing activity over all these seconds because, metabolically, that's not the most efficient way to store information.  The brain seems to have a more efficient way to build this bridge, which we suspect may involve changing the strength of the synapses."

Understanding the way memories of different events become linked in the brain isn't just of academic interest, explaining the kinds of ordinary associations I described from my own life; it could be of real help in treating people with severe anxiety and/or post-traumatic stress syndrome, where traumatic events are linked to common stimuli (such as survivors of wartime who are triggered to panic by loud noises).  "While our study does not explicitly model the clinical syndromes of either of these disorders, it can be immensely informative," said study lead author Mohsin Ahmed.  "For example, it can help us to model some aspects of what may be happening in the brain when patients experience a fearful association between two events that would, to someone else, not elicit fright or panic."

The strength and persistence of memories can be a lifelong reminder of something joyful, or of something tragic, shocking, angering, or outright painful.  This experiment represents the first step on the road to understanding how our brain forms one memory and links it to another, and -- possibly -- gives us a direction to pursue in searching for how to disconnect that link, and allow people with severe anxiety and PTSD to live more normal lives.

And anything we can do to alleviate that suffering is a most laudable goal.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that should be a must-read for everyone -- not only for the New Yorkers suggested by the title.  Unusual, though, in that this one isn't our usual non-fiction selection.  New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is novel that takes a chilling look at what New York City might look like 120 years from now if climate change is left unchecked.

Its predictions are not alarmism.  Robinson made them using the latest climate models, which (if anything) have proven to be conservative.  She then fits into that setting -- a city where the streets are Venice-like canals, where the subways are underground rivers, where low-lying areas have disappeared completely under the rising tides of the Atlantic Ocean -- a society that is trying its best to cope.

New York 2140 isn't just a gripping read, it's a frighteningly clear-eyed vision of where we're heading.  Read it, and find out why The Guardian called it "a towering novel about a genuinely grave threat to civilisation."

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

Stairway to heaven

One of the things I love about writing daily here at Skeptophilia is that my long-time readers are constantly on the lookout for good topics.  One of my regular contributors, not to mention a dear friend, is the inimitable novelist K. D. McCrite, best known for her charming cozy mysteries and her fall-out-of-your-chair-funny young adult series The Confessions of April Grace.  K. D. and I were chatting a couple of days ago, and she asked me if I had ever heard of the phenomenon of stairs in the forest.

I told her I hadn't.

"Oh, yes," K. D. told me.  "Apparently it's a big thing.  You're out there in the woods, far away from everything, and you happen unexpectedly upon a set of stairs that goes nowhere.  No building, nothing nearby."

"What's it supposed to be?" I asked.  "I mean, besides a random set of stairs."

She told me that the aficionados claimed it was some kind of portal to another dimension.  "Supposedly it's connected with hikers going missing and other such spooky stuff."  She then sent me a couple of videos about the phenomenon.

If you want to take a look for yourself, the videos are here and here, and are worth watching just for the creepy photographs.  The general upshot of the videos is "there's this thing we've found in the woods and we don't know why it's there, so alien abductions and time slips and general scary shit."

Whatever the origin of the staircases, it's always a little spooky to find something in the woods you weren't expecting.  I still remember the inexplicable thrill of fear I felt when my wife and I were on a late October hike in our nearby national forest a few years ago, and I found something odd -- a Mardi Gras mask, in perfect condition, sitting on a log.  It looked like it'd just been placed there; it was in pristine condition, and wasn't even damp.  It was a cool, cloudy day, and we hadn't seen a single other person out there, which made it doubly bizarre.

So I said, "Hey, Carol," and put the mask on.

Carol looked at me for a moment, and then said, "You know, if you were a character in one of your own novels, you'd be about to die right now."

Anyhow, I didn't die, or even get possessed by an evil spirit or anything.  So I brought it home, and hung it on the wall in my office.

The next morning when I came in, the mask was in the middle of the floor.

After doing a double take, and then getting my heart rate back to normal, I ascertained that the strap had come loose.  So I put the strap back on, rehung it, and it's been there quietly ever since then.

Probably just waiting for an unguarded moment to jump on me and glue itself to my face and take over my soul.  You know how haunted masks are.

But I digress.

The staircase-in-the-woods thing is certainly atmospheric and creepy, although K. D. and I are in agreement that if we saw one, we'd immediately climb up to the top.  This would be inadvisable, according to one witness:

This is... probably the weirdest story I have.  Now, I don't know if this is true in every SAR [search-and-rescue] unit, but in mine, it's sort of an unspoken, regular thing we run into.  You can try asking about it with other SAR officers, but even if they know what you're talking about, they probably won't say anything about it.  We've been told not to talk about it by our superiors, and at this point we've all gotten so used to it that it doesn't even seem weird anymore.  On just about every case where we're really far into the wilderness, I'm talking 30 or 40 miles, at some point we'll find a staircase in the middle of the woods.  It's almost like if you took the stairs in your house, cut them out, and put them in the forest.  I asked about it the first time I saw some, and the other officer just told me not to worry about it, that it was normal.  Everyone I asked said the same thing.  I wanted to go check them out, but I was told, very emphatically, that I should never go near any of them.  I just sort of ignore them now when I run into them because it happens so frequently.

People who come across these lone staircases frequently feel "an unaccountable sensation of dread," and folks who have climbed them have come back down to find that several hours have passed, when it only felt like a few minutes.

That's... if they're ever seen again.

*cue scary music*

Now, as you might expect, I think there's a prosaic explanation here, or more likely, several of them.  The more pristine-looking ones, such as the one in the photograph above, could be observation platforms.  I've seen this sort of thing in a lot of places, especially areas known for their wildlife viewing.  The more dilapidated ones are probably the remnants of wood-frame houses with stone stairs, left behind when the wooden parts rotted away.  (Hiking with my brother-in-law in rural Massachusetts, we've come across a good many old house foundations -- one of which was the inspiration for my creepy story "The Cellar Hole.")  Some of the ones pictured in the video looked like they were simply steps that had been built into a steep hillside, and so not "going nowhere" at all.  Others appeared to be what was left of bridges or overpasses that had caved in.  Some could well be there because someone thought it'd be fun to create a mystery in the woods, like the little footbridge over nothing out in a flat open field near where my son used to live in Palmyra, New York.

That doesn't mean that if I came across one, I wouldn't be a little weirded out, especially now that I've been primed to think about Scary Stuff when I see one.  I still am pretty sure I'd climb it, because when might I have another opportunity to be abducted by aliens?

But sadly, I've never seen anything like this, despite the fact that when I was in my twenties and thirties, I spent damn near every summer back-country camping in the Cascades and Olympics.  The weirdest thing I saw out there was a random boardwalk in the middle of nowhere across a place called Ahlstrom's Prairie, where you're hiking through dense Douglas fir forest and suddenly come out into an open field bisected by a wooden boardwalk.  The effect is startling, a sudden reminder of humanity in a place out in the wilderness where you can spend a week and not see a single other person.

Of course, there's a reason for the boardwalk in Ahlstrom's Prairie: Ahlstrom, who built the thing and lived in a cabin nearby in the early part of the 20th century.  And the Parks Service that keeps it in good shape.  But it's an atmospheric place, and on my many hikes down it on the way to the mouth of the Ozette River, I always found it to be a little spooky, especially on a foggy day (pretty common in western Washington).

So I'm not going to jump to any paranormal explanations for the staircases in the woods, at least not till I experience a time slip myself.  But my thanks to my pal K. D. for suggesting the topic, which (despite all my inquiries into the supernatural over the past ten years) I'd never even heard of.

But I should wrap this up, because that mask hanging on my wall is whispering to me again, and I am compelled to do its bidding.  You know how it goes.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that should be a must-read for everyone -- not only for the New Yorkers suggested by the title.  Unusual, though, in that this one isn't our usual non-fiction selection.  New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is novel that takes a chilling look at what New York City might look like 120 years from now if climate change is left unchecked.

Its predictions are not alarmism.  Robinson made them using the latest climate models, which (if anything) have proven to be conservative.  She then fits into that setting -- a city where the streets are Venice-like canals, where the subways are underground rivers, where low-lying areas have disappeared completely under the rising tides of the Atlantic Ocean -- a society that is trying its best to cope.

New York 2140 isn't just a gripping read, it's a frighteningly clear-eyed vision of where we're heading.  Read it, and find out why The Guardian called it "a towering novel about a genuinely grave threat to civilisation."

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

Oobleck and stupidity

In his 1980 essay "The Cult of Ignorance," scientist, novelist, and polymath Isaac Asimov wrote, "The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through [American] political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

Asimov's words are, if anything, truer today than they were forty years ago when he wrote them.  It's an attitude I have a hard time comprehending.  My opinion has always been that of course I want our leaders to be more intelligent than I am; I know I'm not nearly smart enough to be the president.  But we've gone beyond the acceptance of ignorance Asimov pointed out into the realm of celebrating abject stupidity -- and, all too frequently, electing it to public office.  We've entered a terrifying time of living in the Upside Down, where individuals who can't put together a single sensible, grammatically-correct sentence, who engage in playground taunts that would sound immature coming out of the mouth of a third-grader, are lauded as "plain-spoken" and "willing to say what's on their mind."

Of course, as Stephen Colbert pointed out, "My drunk uncle says what's on his mind, and I don't want him to be president, either."

The American attitude toward intellectuals jumped out at me just a couple of days ago because of a charming piece of research into the behavior of "oobleck" -- the bizarre cornstarch/water mixture most of us got to play with as children.  Oobleck is a dilatant fluid, one in which the viscosity increases in proportion to the amount of shear strain.  Put more simply, if you hit it, it acts like a solid; if you press it gently, it acts like a liquid.  It is one of a group of weird substances called non-Newtonian fluids, which alter in viscosity dependent on stress, and include materials that are thixotropic (the fluid thins when it's stressed, like yogurt and ketchup) and ones that are rheopectic (the fluid thickens when it's stressed, like printer ink).  (Nota bene: it sounds like dilatant and rheopectic fluids are the same thing, but there's a technical difference in that rheopectic fluids continue to increase in viscosity the more they're shaken, while with dilatant fluids it's kind of an either/or thing.  But that's a minor point.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Baminnick, Cornstarch Experiment Materials, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In any case, the research I referenced above came out last week in Science Advances, and had to do with the old party trick of filling a shallow basin with oobleck and having people run across it barefoot.  Because of oobleck's dilatant nature, the faster you run, the harder the soles of your feet strike the surface -- so its viscosity and resistance increase, and you can run on the surface of something that's technically a liquid.

It turns out that there's a simple way to defeat this ability; all you have to do is rotate the basin.  The twisting motion means that when your foot strikes the surface, there's not only a vertical stress from the impact, there's horizontal shear from the basin turning under you, and that perpendicular shear reduces the viscosity and gets rid of the dilatant effect.  In other words, try running in oobleck on a rotating basin, and you'll sink.

I thought this was a pretty fun piece of research about a substance's very odd behavior, and noted with approval that it had been posted on social media...

... until I started reading the comments.

Here is a sampler.  Spelling and grammar are as written, because I don't want to run out of sics.

• This is what the scientist's are doing?  Taking taxpayer money and playing with goop.
• I read bullshit like this and I'm supposed to take "climate science" seriously?
• The usual libtard jerking off on the public dime.
• Youd think they had more important things to do, like inventing the next "pandemic."
• This is typicle waste of money.  They wonder why no one has faith in education when this is the kind of thing they spend time on than call it science.
• Check out where this happened.  A universtiy.  Color me surprised.

*brief pause to scream obscenities and kick a wall*

Okay, let me point out a few things, now that I've gotten that (mostly) out of my system.

First, just because the experiment was performed using something associated with kids' parties, they think it has no other applications?  What this shows is that they didn't even bother to read the paper itself, because the authors say the following:

The ability of OSP [orthogonal superimposed perturbations, the application of a rotational shear to flowing fluids] to de-solidify plugs formed under extension and fast compression has potential industrial applications where it is important to increase the flow rate or control the viscosity or unclog a pipe.  These applications range from high-throughput processing of dense suspensions such as cement and concrete to avoid jamming in narrow pipes and three-dimensional printing.

Stop for a moment and consider how many examples you can come up with of thick fluids flowing through pipes.  You think coming up with a simple, inexpensive way to stop those pipes from clogging is "the usual libtard jerking off?"

Second, there is a huge value to pure research.  I dealt with this here at Skeptophilia a very long time ago in a post that was spurred by the same kind of cretinous anti-intellectual commentary as this one was.  It looked at how pure research (which the uninformed call "just messing around") gave us, amongst many other things, antibiotics, x-rays, Teflon, and our understanding of anaphylactic shock and how genes produce proteins.  Just because you (not you personally) can't see the utility of a piece of research doesn't mean the scientists can't see it.

Third, why do these people think everything has to have utility in the first place?  Science used to be rightly revered for its capacity to expand the mind, to open our eyes to the wonder of the universe, to understand a small piece of it a little more clearly.  The subtext of the commentary from the yahoos I quoted above seems to be, "I'm fine being stupid and you have no right to try to fix that, or even to be smarter than I am."  This is, essentially, being arrogant about stupidity. as if being an absolute moron was a virtue, as if they were proud (and fortunate) that their brains had never been contaminated by any of that useless book-learnin'.

I honestly don't know how we've gotten here.  The popular attitude toward science and the intellect has become a race to the bottom.  A race we seem to be winning, given that we have a senator who thinks that a snowball disproves climate change, a representative who thinks we shouldn't be limiting our production of carbon dioxide because it's necessary for plant growth, and a president who makes so many ludicrous and ignorant statements daily that they're hard to keep up with.

A lot of it probably has its origins in the misguided egalitarianism that Asimov pointed out.  No, my ignorance is not as good as your knowledge.  All opinions are not equal.  My fifteen minutes of online "research" is not equivalent to the ten years of intensive study you spent to become an actual scientist.

Now, I'm not saying ignorance is necessarily shameful.  We're all ignorant about some things.  But we shouldn't be proud of it, either, and -- more to the point -- we should all be trying to remedy it.  Science remains our best way of doing that, and that means actual science, done by actual trained scientists who know how to evaluate data and who know when a hypothesis is supported and when it isn't, not the latest bizarre claim by some self-styled expert who happens to have a computer, a microphone, a YouTube channel, and a vastly inflated sense of the validity of his own opinions.

But once you've decided that ignorance is desirable, you've crossed a line into outright stupidity.  Ignorance is inevitable; stupidity is a choice.  Or, as it was put by my dad -- who wasn't well educated, but was one of the wisest, smartest people I've ever met, and who worked like hell to learn and to fill in those gaps in his knowledge left behind from his impoverished childhood -- "Ignorance is only skin deep; stupidity goes all the way to the bone."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that should be a must-read for everyone -- not only for the New Yorkers suggested by the title.  Unusual, though, in that this one isn't our usual non-fiction selection.  New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is novel that takes a chilling look at what New York City might look like 120 years from now if climate change is left unchecked.

Its predictions are not alarmism.  Robinson made them using the latest climate models, which (if anything) have proven to be conservative.  She then fits into that setting -- a city where the streets are Venice-like canals, where the subways are underground rivers, where low-lying areas have disappeared completely under the rising tides of the Atlantic Ocean -- a society that is trying its best to cope.

New York 2140 isn't just a gripping read, it's a frighteningly clear-eyed vision of where we're heading.  Read it, and find out why The Guardian called it "a towering novel about a genuinely grave threat to civilisation."

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