A linguistic labyrinth

It's funny the rabbit holes fiction writers get dragged down sometimes.

This latest one occurred because of two things that happened kind of at the same time.  First, in my work-in-progress, a fall-of-civilization novel called In the Midst of Lions that in the current national and global situation is seeming to cut a little close to the bone, one of the characters is a linguist who saw what was coming and wrote a conlang -- a constructed (invented) language -- so he could communicate with people he trusted without it being decipherable by enemies.

So of course, to make it authentic, I've had to write the language, following in the footsteps of the Star Trek folks with Klingon and J. R. R. Tolkien with Quenya and Sindarin (two of the languages of the Elves).  My MA is in linguistics (yes, I know, I spent my career teaching biology; it's a long story) so I know a good bit about language structure, and I wanted to make the language different enough from the familiar Indo-European languages to seem (1) an authentic language, not just a word-for-word substitution, and (2) something a smart linguist would think up.  Unfortunately, my specialty is Indo-European languages, specifically Scandinavian languages.  (My wife gives me grief about having studied Old Norse.  My response is that if the Vikings ever take over the shipping industry, I'm gonna have the last laugh.)

A sample of Quenya script, with the English transliteration.  It translates to, "Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees!"  [Image is in the Public Domain]

So I started out with a pair of blinders on.  There are a lot of rules specific to Indo-European languages that we tend to take for granted, which was exactly what I didn't want to do with my conlang.  But in order to identify those, you have to somehow lift yourself out of your own linguistic box -- which is awfully hard to do.

The second thing, though, was a nice kick in the rear that came from a question on Quora that asked, "What is the hardest language to learn to speak fluently?"  By "hardest" most people assumed "for speakers of English," which went right to what I was interested in -- finding out what would seem odd/counterintuitive (and therefore difficult) for English speakers.

Well, this is what led me directly into the research labyrinth, literally for hours.

One respondent answered that the hardest ones would be the Northwest Caucasian languages of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia -- a group made up of Abaza, Abkhaz, Adyghe, Kabardian, and Ubykh -- the last-mentioned of which became extinct in 1992 when the last native speaker died of old age.  These languages form an isolate family, related to each other but of uncertain (but undoubtedly distant) relationship to other languages.

So naturally, I had to find out what's weird about them.  Here's what I learned.

Let's start out with the fact that they only have two vowels, but as many as 84 consonants depending on exactly how finely you want to break them up based on the articulation.  They use SOV (subject-object-verb) word order, plopping the verb at the end of the sentence, but that's hardly unique; Latin does that, giving rise to the old quip that by the time a Roman got to the verb in his sentence, his listeners had forgotten who all he was talking about.

But in the parlance of the infomercial, "Wait, there's more!"  The Northwest Caucasian languages use agglutination -- gluing together various bits and pieces to make a more specific word -- but only for verbs.  In these languages, a verb is actually a cluster of parts called morphemes that tell you not only what the core verb is, but the place, time, manner of action, whether it's positive or negative, and even the subject's and object's person.

Then, there's the fact that they're ergative-absolutive languages.  When I hit this, I thought, "Okay, I used to know what this meant," and had to look it up.  It has to do with how the subject and object of a sentence are used.  In English (a nominative-accusative language), the subject has the same form regardless of what kind of verb follows it; likewise, the object always is the same.  So the subject of an intransitive verb like "to walk" is the same as the subject for a transitive verb like "to watch."  (We'd say, "she walked" and "she watched [someone or something];" in both cases, you use the form "she.")  The object form of "he" is always "him," regardless of any other considerations in the sentence.

Not so in the Northwest Caucasian languages, and other ergative-absolutive languages, such as Tibetan, Basque, and Mayan.  In these languages, the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive one have the same form; the subject of a transitive verb is the one with the different form.  (If English was an ergative-absolutive language, we might say "He watched her," but then it'd be "her walked.")

So there are lots of things that seem normal, obvious even, which in fact are simply arbitrary rules that we've learned are universal to English, but which are hardly universal to other languages.  It always puts me in mind of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is that the language you speak shapes your cognitive processes.  In other words, that speakers of languages differently structured from English literally perceive the world a different way because the form of the languages force different conceptualizations of what they see.

I've gone on long enough about all this, and I haven't even scratched the surface.  There are tonal languages like Thai, where the pitch and pitch change of a syllable alter its meaning.  There are languages like Finnish and Japanese where vowel length -- literally, how long you say the vowel for -- changes the meaning of the word it's in.  There are inflected languages like Greek, where the ending of a word tells you how it's being used in the sentence (e.g., in the phrases "the cat walked," "she pet the cat," "it's the cat's bowl," "give the food to the cat," and "the dog is with the cat," the word "cat" would in each case have a different suffix).

So I have some work to do to make my conlang something that would be believable to a linguist.  Or, in the context of the story, something an actual linguist would invent.  Of course, being that it's only one small piece of the story, in the end I'll probably use something like a dozen phrases total from the language, so it'll be a lot of work with very little useful result.

But hey, if J. R. R. Tolkien did it, who am I to criticize?

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is brand new, and is as elegiac as it is inspiring -- David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future.

Attenborough is a familiar name, face, and (especially) voice to those of us who love nature documentaries.  Through series such as Our Planet, Life on Earth, and Planet Earth, he has brought into our homes the beauty of nature -- and its desperate fragility.

At 93, Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet is a fitting coda to his lifelong quest to spark wonder in our minds at the beauty that surrounds us, but at the same time wake us up to the perils of what we're doing to it.  His message isn't all doom and gloom; despite it all, he remains hopeful, and firm in his conviction that we can reverse our course and save what's left of the biodiversity of the Earth.  It's a poignant and evocative work -- something everyone who has been inspired by Attenborough for decades should put on their reading list.

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

Life at the center

Appeal to Authority is simultaneously one of the simplest, and one of the trickiest, of the fallacies.

The simple part is that one shouldn't rely on someone else's word for a claim, without some demonstration of evidence in support.  Just saying "Neil de Grasse Tyson said so" isn't sufficient proof for a conjecture.

On the other hand, there are times when relying on authority makes sense.  If I claimed that Neil de Grasse Tyson was wrong in the realm of astronomy, the likelihood of my being wrong myself is nearly 100%.   Expertise is worth something, and Tyson's Ph.D. in astrophysics certainly gives his statements in that field considerable gravitas.

The problem is that when confronted with a confident-sounding authority, people turn their own brains off.   And the situation becomes even murkier when experts in one field start making pronouncements in a different one.

Take, for example, Robert Lanza, a medical researcher whose work in stem cells and regenerative medicine has led to groundbreaking advances in the treatment of hitherto incurable diseases.  His contributions to medical science are undeniably profound, and I would consider his opinion in the field of stem cell research about as close to unimpeachable as you could get.  But Lanza hasn't been content to stay within his area of specialization, and has ventured forth into the fringe areas of metaphysics -- joining people like Fritjof Capra in their quest to show that quantum physics has something to say about consciousness, souls, and life after death.

Let's start with Lanza's idea of a "biocentric universe," which is defined thusly:

Biocentrism states that life and biology are central to being, reality, and the cosmos— life creates the universe rather than the other way around.  It asserts that current theories of the physical world do not work, and can never be made to work, until they fully account for life and consciousness.  While physics is considered fundamental to the study of the universe, and chemistry fundamental to the study of life, biocentrism claims that scientists will need to place biology before the other sciences to produce a theory of everything.

Which puts me in mind of Wolfgang Pauli's famous quote, "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."  Biocentrism isn't really a scientific theory, in that it makes no predictions, and therefore de facto isn't falsifiable.  And Lanza's reception on this topic has been chilly at best.  Physicist Lawrence Krauss said, "It may represent interesting philosophy, but it doesn't look, at first glance, as if it will change anything about science."  Physicist and science writer David Lindley agrees, calling biocentrism "a vague, inarticulate metaphor."

And if you needed further evidence of its lack of scientific rigor, I must also point out that Deepak Chopra loves biocentrism.  "(Lanza's) theory of biocentrism is consistent with the most ancient wisdom traditions of the world which says that consciousness conceives, governs, and becomes a physical world," Chopra writes.  "It is the ground of our Being in which both subjective and objective reality come into existence."

As a scientist, you know you're in trouble if you get support from Deepak Chopra.

And there's a further problem with venturing outside of your field of expertise.  If you make unsupported claims, then others will take your claims (with your name appended to them, of course) and send them even further out into the ether.  Which is what happened recently over at the site Learning Mind, where Lanza's ideas were said to prove that the soul exists, and death is an illusion:

(Lanza's) theory implies that death simply does not exist.  It is an illusion which arises in the minds of people. It exists because people identify themselves with their body.  They believe that the body is going to perish, sooner or later, thinking their consciousness will disappear too. 

In fact, consciousness exists outside of constraints of time and space.  It is able to be anywhere: in the human body and outside of it.  That fits well with the basic postulates of quantum mechanics science, according to which a certain particle can be present anywhere and an event can happen according to several, sometimes countless, ways.  

Lanza believes that multiple universes can exist simultaneously.  These universes contain multiple ways for possible scenarios to occur.  In one universe, the body can be dead.  And in another it continues to exist, absorbing consciousness which migrated into this universe.  This means that a dead person while traveling through the same tunnel ends up not in hell or in heaven, but in a similar world he or she once inhabited, but this time alive.  And so on, infinitely.

Which amounts to taking an untestable claim, whose merits are best left to the philosophers to discuss, and running right off a cliff with it.

As I've said more than once: quantum mechanics isn't some kind of fluffy, hand-waving speculation.  It is hard, evidence-based science.  The mathematical model that is the underpinning of this description of the universe is complex and difficult for the layperson to understand, but it is highly specific.  It describes the behavior of particles and waves, on the submicroscopic scale, making predictions that have been experimentally supported time after time.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

And that's all it does.   Quantum effects such as superposition, indeterminacy, and entanglement have extremely limited effects on the macroscopic world.  Particle physics has nothing to say about the existence of the soul, the afterlife, or any other religious or philosophical claim.  And even the "Many Worlds" hypothesis, which was seriously put forth as a way to explain the collapse of the wave function, has largely been shelved by everyone but the science fiction writers because its claims are completely untestable.

To return to my original point, Appeal to Authority is one of those fallacies that seem simpler than they actually turn out to be.  I have no doubt that Robert Lanza is a genius in the field of regenerative medicine, and I wouldn't hesitate to trust what he says in that realm.  But his pronouncements in the field of physics appear to me to be unfalsifiable speculation -- i.e., not scientific statements.  As such, biocentrism is no better than "intelligent design."  What Adam Lee, of Daylight Atheism, said about intelligent design could be applied equally well to biocentrism:

(A) hypothesis must make predictions that can be compared to the real world and determined to be either true or false, and there must be some imaginable evidence that could disprove it.  If an idea makes no predictions, makes predictions that cannot be unambiguously interpreted as either success or failure, or makes predictions that cannot be checked out even in principle, then it is not science.

But as such, I'm sure biocentrism is going to be as popular amongst the woo-woos as ID is amongst the fervently religious.  For them, "unfalsifiable" means "you can't prove we're wrong."

"Therefore we're right. q.e.d. and ha ha ha."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is brand new, and is as elegiac as it is inspiring -- David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future.

Attenborough is a familiar name, face, and (especially) voice to those of us who love nature documentaries.  Through series such as Our Planet, Life on Earth, and Planet Earth, he has brought into our homes the beauty of nature -- and its desperate fragility.

At 93, Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet is a fitting coda to his lifelong quest to spark wonder in our minds at the beauty that surrounds us, but at the same time wake us up to the perils of what we're doing to it.  His message isn't all doom and gloom; despite it all, he remains hopeful, and firm in his conviction that we can reverse our course and save what's left of the biodiversity of the Earth.  It's a poignant and evocative work -- something everyone who has been inspired by Attenborough for decades should put on their reading list.

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

Out in the ozone

If you were going to try to pick out the all-time stupidest practice from the alt-med crowd, you'd have a lot of contenders for the top prize.  You have your homeopathic water.  You have your "quantum downloadable medicines."  You have your health benefits of breathing air that bees have flown around in.  You  have your recommendations to take all your clothes off and expose your butthole to direct sunlight.

None of which, for the record, did I make up.

But I think I've found the odds-on favorite, thanks to a loyal reader of Skeptophilia who alerted me to the practice.  Today we look at:

Treating COVID-19 infections using "rectal insufflation of ozone."

If you're sitting there thinking, as I was, "Okay, that can't possibly mean what it sounds like," then yes -- it means exactly what it sounds like.  (Actually, what I said was, "You have got to be fucking kidding me.")  Doctors (I'm using the term loosely here) are trying to treat COVID and other illnesses by sticking a plastic tube up your ass and pumping your rectum full of ozone.

I read this entire article with an expression like this on my face:

Okay, brief pause to (1) give you time to stop laughing and/or retching, and (2) review a little bit of high school chemistry.

Ozone is O3 (ordinary oxygen is O2).  Elemental oxygen is, unsurprisingly, a strong oxidizer, meaning it is really good at pulling electrons away from other molecules.  In the case of organic molecules, this usually makes them fall apart.  Fire, after all, is just the energy released by rapid oxidation.

Put simply, oxygen is toxic.  We depend on it to "burn" the glucose molecules from which we get our energy, but there's good evidence that the evolution of aerobic respiration started as a detoxification pathway.  When the first photosynthetic organisms evolved (probably cyanobacteria), the oxygen they gave off as a waste product resulted in the oxidation (i.e. death) of most of the living things on Earth, at that point all single-celled microorganisms.  The ones that survived did so because they either were able to (1) avoid the oxygen altogether (these evolved into today's anaerobic bacteria), or (2) detoxify the oxygen by handing it the electrons it wanted, in most circumstances inducing it to bind to hydrogen ions and stabilize as water molecules.  This latter pathway releases a lot of energy, and the ancestors of aerobes -- in other words, most life forms on Earth -- survived because they evolved a way to hook this energy release to powering their own metabolic processes.

So oxygen is dangerous stuff, and we've just learned to live with it.  But where all this is leading is: ozone is a stronger oxidizer than elemental oxygen.  In fact, five times stronger.  It's twice as strong an oxidizer as chlorine gas, which is dissolved into pool water because it's so good at killing pathogenic microorganisms.

This is the stuff they're recommending blowing up your ass.

The "research" that the article linked above cites has the following to say, apropos of using this technique to treat COVID:

The coronavirus envelope is rich in cysteine, and viral activity depends on the conservation of these residues.  Cysteine contains a thiol or sulfhydryl group (–SH); many viruses, including coronaviruses, require these reduced sulfhydryl groups for cell entry and fusion.  Sulfhydryl groups are susceptible to oxidation, and therefore to the oxidizing effect of ozone. Peroxides created by ozone administration oxidize cysteines and show long-term antiviral effects that can further reduce viral load.  Once their capsid is removed, virions cannot survive or replicate, and the creation of dysfunctional viruses due to the action of ozone offers unique therapeutic possibilities.

Well, you could oxidize the virus's capsid by setting it on fire, too, but doing that to the viruses in someone's lungs could present a bit of an issue.

Of course, this was the thing about Donald Trump's much-quoted comments about using ultraviolet light exposure or intravenous bleach to kill coronavirus.  Sure, bleach and ultraviolet light can both destroy the virus, but something that kills the pathogens and simultaneously kills you is a little counterproductive, don't you think?

It's always the problem with showing that anything -- be it an antiviral or any other medication -- that works just fine in vitro will have the same effect, and no deleterious side effects, in vivo.  You not only have to demonstrate that the drug accomplishes what you want it to do, but (1) can efficiently get to the part of the body where it's needed, and (2) doesn't destroy healthy tissue along the way.

Rectal insufflation of ozone kind of fails on both counts, doesn't it?  Okay, it probably kills coronavirus, but they're mostly in your lungs, not your rectum, and it's highly damaging to the rest of you.

Having oxidation damage to the delicate lining of your lower gastrointestinal tract would not be fun.  Having that on top of a COVID-19 infection would be a level of misery I can only imagine.

So there we are.  What is probably the stupidest alt-med therapy I've ever heard of.  Of course, I hesitate even to say that, because the alt-med folks seem to look upon this as some sort of challenge.  Every time I think, "Okay, this is it, it can't get any more idiotic than this," they up and exceed their previous record.

As the quote attributed to Einstein so aptly put it: "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is brand new, and is as elegiac as it is inspiring -- David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future.

Attenborough is a familiar name, face, and (especially) voice to those of us who love nature documentaries.  Through series such as Our Planet, Life on Earth, and Planet Earth, he has brought into our homes the beauty of nature -- and its desperate fragility.

At 93, Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet is a fitting coda to his lifelong quest to spark wonder in our minds at the beauty that surrounds us, but at the same time wake us up to the perils of what we're doing to it.  His message isn't all doom and gloom; despite it all, he remains hopeful, and firm in his conviction that we can reverse our course and save what's left of the biodiversity of the Earth.  It's a poignant and evocative work -- something everyone who has been inspired by Attenborough for decades should put on their reading list.

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

Eye of the storm

Ever heard of Wolf-Rayet stars?  They deserve more notice than they get, as one of the most violently energetic phenomena in the universe.  The fact that the name is not in common parlance -- when even the most scientifically-uninterested layperson has heard of supernovae and quasars and black holes -- is probably due to a combination of (1) their rarity, and (2) the fact that the ones that are visible to the naked eye are pretty unimpressive-looking at first glance.  Gamma Velorum and Theta Muscae, both of which are in the Southern Hemisphere and never visible where I live in upstate New York, are Wolf-Rayet stars that look completely ordinary until you check out their light spectra and find out that there's something really extraordinary going on.

The first thing that becomes apparent is that they are hot.  I mean, even by stellar standards.  Wolf-Rayet stars have a surface temperature between 30,000 K and an almost unimaginable 210,000 K.  (By comparison, the Sun's surface is about 5,700 K.)  These temperatures fuel an enormously strong stellar wind, which blows away almost all of the lightweight hydrogen in the outer layers, and also ionizes most of what is left -- predominantly oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon.  They're at the head of the list of potential gamma-ray bursters -- stars that undergo sudden collapse followed by a colossal explosion, resulting in a blast of gamma rays collimated into narrow beams along the star's rotational axis.  So having a Wolf-Rayet star's rotational axis pointed toward your planet would be like staring down the barrel of a loaded gun.

They're also beautiful.  At least from a distance.  The reason all this comes up is because of a paper last week in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society about one that's been called "a stellar peacock" -- the star Apep, in the constellation Norma.  This Wolf-Rayet star has blown carbon-laden dust from its surface, which its high rotational speed swept into a pinwheel.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESO/Callingham et al, The triple star system 2XMM J160050.7–514245 (Apep), CC BY 4.0]

The name Apep comes from Egyptian mythology -- Apep was the monstrous serpent who was the enemy of the god Ra.  Astronomer Joseph Callingham, one of the first to study Apep, thought the name was apt -- in his words it was "a star embattled within a dragon's coils."

All poetic license aside, the violent imagery is spot-on.  Wolf-Rayet stars eventually self-destruct, becoming black holes, but not until basically destroying anything unfortunate enough to be nearby.  So the bright spot at the center of Apep is the eye of a cosmic-scale storm.

Last week's paper, by a team led by University of Sydney student Yinuo Han, uses observational data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile to understand what is creating the spiral plumes.  The detail is phenomenal; in an interview with Science Daily, Han said, "The magnification required to produce the imagery was like seeing a chickpea on a table fifty kilometers away."

"[Wolf-Rayet stars] are ticking time bombs," said study co-author Peter Tuthill.  "As well as exhibiting all the usual extreme behavior of Wolf-Rayets, Apep's main star looks to be rapidly rotating.  This means it could have all the ingredients to detonate a long gamma-ray burst when it goes supernova."

It's hard to say anything about this group of stars without lapsing into superlatives.  "The speeds of the stellar winds produced are just mind-blowing," Han said.  "They are spinning off the stars at about twelve million kilometers an hour.  That's one percent the speed of light."

Fortunately for us, Apep is a safe 6,600 light years away, so it poses no danger to us.  If one was a lot nearer -- within 25 or so light years' distance -- it would be catastrophic.  The radiation bombardment could strip away the ozone layer, leaving the Earth's surface subject to massive irradiation.  There's decent evidence that some of the Earth's mass extinctions may have been caused by nearby supernovae (not necessarily Wolf-Rayets).  But to put your mind at ease, there aren't any supernovae candidates of any sort within what is rather terrifyingly called "the kill zone."

So that's a look at one of the most dangerous and beautiful phenomena in the universe.  I'm glad we're getting to see it, and find out a little bit about what makes it tick.

From a safe distance.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is brand new, and is as elegiac as it is inspiring -- David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future.

Attenborough is a familiar name, face, and (especially) voice to those of us who love nature documentaries.  Through series such as Our Planet, Life on Earth, and Planet Earth, he has brought into our homes the beauty of nature -- and its desperate fragility.

At 93, Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet is a fitting coda to his lifelong quest to spark wonder in our minds at the beauty that surrounds us, but at the same time wake us up to the perils of what we're doing to it.  His message isn't all doom and gloom; despite it all, he remains hopeful, and firm in his conviction that we can reverse our course and save what's left of the biodiversity of the Earth.  It's a poignant and evocative work -- something everyone who has been inspired by Attenborough for decades should put on their reading list.

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

The stellar forges

I remember when I first ran into the rather mind-blowing concept that the familiar elements we have here on Earth -- oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, silicon, and so on -- hadn't always existed.

The discovery that one element can transmute into another and that elements (under the right circumstances) can be created -- the dream of the ancient alchemists -- ran completely contrary to the prior understanding that atoms are unchanging.  (In fact, even the name atom comes from the Greek ἄτομος, meaning "cannot be cut.")

But when Henri Becquerel and the Curies discovered radioactivity, and realized that there were naturally occurring elements that could change into different ones, it overturned the model of atoms and elements being eternal.  This, of course, opened up the question of where they'd come from originally, a question that only became more important to answer when it was discovered that the universe was 73% hydrogen and 25% helium -- the remaining 2% accounts for everything else.

The answer is that most of the elements are synthesized in the cores of stars, which act as stellar forges to produce every element on the table with the exception of hydrogen.  Carl Sagan's famous statement that we are made of starstuff is nothing less than the unvarnished truth.  (One of the most poignant statements he made in his series Cosmos was, "Our ancestors worshiped the stars, and they were far from foolish.  We are right to revere the Sun and the stars -- for we are their children.")

Since the first discovery that elements can be created and destroyed, we've come to understand pretty well what the origin of each is.  Here's a fascinating twist on the periodic table, showing the origin of each of the elements:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Cmglee, Nucleosynthesis periodic table, CC BY-SA 3.0]

We're inextricably linked to the rest of the universe by our common chemistry.

Not only are the atomic building blocks the same, but we're finding that the molecules they form are remarkably consistent everywhere we look.  The fundamental constituents of organic matter, for example, seem to be abundant in the cosmos.  That surmise got a huge boost with a paper last week in the Astrophysical Journal that describes research into the constituents of dust clouds forming around massive young stars -- dust clouds that eventually will coalesce to form planets.  In those clouds, the researchers found the spectral fingerprints of massive quantities of water, ammonia, methane, hydrogen cyanide, carbon disulfide, and acetylene -- some of the raw materials that given an energy source will spontaneously generate such pivotal molecules as amino acids, simple sugars, and the purine and pyrimidine bases of DNA and RNA.

"We’re seeing many more molecular signatures than were ever seen before at these wavelengths,” said Andrew Barr, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate at Leiden University, in a press release from NASA.  "It turns out that these stars are like chemical factories churning out molecules important for life as we know it and we just needed the right kind of observations to see them."

My son and I were just talking about how mind-bogglingly huge the universe is -- the latest estimate is that there are one billion trillion stars in the observable universe (that's 1 followed by 21 zeroes).  If even a tiny fraction of those have life, that is still an enormous amount of cosmic biodiversity.  And it seems like every time we look at one of the variables in the famous Drake equation, the attempt by astronomer Frank Drake to break down the likelihood of intelligent life in the universe by looking at the probability of each of the necessary steps to produce it, we have to revise our estimates upward.  Exoplanet systems are apparently the rule, not the exception.  Organic chemistry, as last week's paper showed, is kind of ubiquitous out there.  We've known since the Miller-Urey experiment about the easy self-assembly of complex biological molecules given raw materials and an energy source.

It looks like we're getting closer and closer to the message of another quote by Carl Sagan, this one from his brilliant novel Contact: "If we're the only ones in the universe, it seems like an awful waste of space."

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is brand new, and is as elegiac as it is inspiring -- David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future.

Attenborough is a familiar name, face, and (especially) voice to those of us who love nature documentaries.  Through series such as Our Planet, Life on Earth, and Planet Earth, he has brought into our homes the beauty of nature -- and its desperate fragility.

At 93, Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet is a fitting coda to his lifelong quest to spark wonder in our minds at the beauty that surrounds us, but at the same time wake us up to the perils of what we're doing to it.  His message isn't all doom and gloom; despite it all, he remains hopeful, and firm in his conviction that we can reverse our course and save what's left of the biodiversity of the Earth.  It's a poignant and evocative work -- something everyone who has been inspired by Attenborough for decades should put on their reading list.

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

Elephant shrews, babblers, and stilt mice

Because I'm tired of doomscrolling on Twitter and getting more and more discouraged about what's going on in the United States right now, today we're going to focus on: cool zoological discoveries.

In the last few weeks, there have been three papers that look at some amazing research on various animal species.  Let's start with the one in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society that described two new species of the rodent group with the amusing name "stilt mice" -- African mice with extra-long feet they stand upright on (a little like kangaroos).  If this isn't weird enough, they are also aquatic.

It's been a difficult group to study.  One of the stilt mice was known from a single specimen collected in Ethiopia 93 years ago, and had not been seen since.  This new study didn't find any more of that species -- scientists surmise that it was already on the brink of extinction when the specimen was collected -- but found what are probably its closest cousins.

"It's underappreciated how little is known about the biodiversity of small mammals, especially in tropical parts of the world," said Tom Giarla, professor of biology at Siena College in New York and lead author of the study.  "We're not discovering a whole lot of new lions, tigers, and bears, but there's an incredible potential for discovery of new species of small mammals because they're tough to find.  And they're sort of underappreciated animals -- they're really cool when you start to learn about their ecology.  These are semi-aquatic mice, so they're not just your average, everyday rodents."

[Image courtesy of Velizar Simeonovski, Field Museum]

Study co-author Julian Kerbis Peterhans, researcher at the Field Museum, agrees.  "These mice are long-footed, kind of like a kangaroo.  They sit up on their haunches, and they wade through shallow streams with their whiskers on the water's surface detecting movements, like sonar.  They have unusually large brains in order to process this sensory information from their whiskers when they hunt. They're cute, too.  When I caught my first one some thirty years ago, it was the most beautiful African mouse I'd ever seen, it had water repellent fur that's very thick and lush and warm and cozy.  They're incredibly soft, and they have this remarkable snow-white belly."

The second paper appeared in the journal Biotropica, and is a study of a bird called the Sulawesi babbler (Pellorneum celebense) that lives on a number of islands in eastern Indonesia.  What the researchers found was that the babblers were undergoing rapid evolution on the smaller islands in its range -- the birds on smaller islands had a greater amount of sexual dimorphism (physical difference between the sexes) than birds on larger islands.  In particular, the size difference was measurably greater on the small islands of Kabaena, Muna, and Buton.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons A.S.Kono, Pelanduk sulawesi 1, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What the zoologists think is going on is that on smaller islands, with limited resources, having high sexual dimorphism helps to decrease competition if the resources are partitioned.  Partitioning is seen in a lot of groups of related species -- the wood warblers of my home state of New York are a good example, where you might have six or seven species of small, forest-dwelling, insect-eating birds in the same quarter of an acre of woods.  The way they've "solved" the problem of high competition -- and I put "solved" in quotation marks, because of course the birds didn't figure it out -- is that they each occupy different bits of the habitat.  Blackburnian warblers are usually high up in the treetops, yellow-rumped warblers in the low understory, black-throated-blue warblers in the middle parts of trees, and so on.

It's a remarkably efficient way of decreasing interspecific competition.

But this is one of only a handful of cases I know of where the resources are partitioned between different sexes of the same species.  (The others I'm aware of are some tropical hummingbirds, where the bill shapes of males and females are adapted to fit different species of flowers, and the extinct huia, a bird from New Zealand for whom the male and female bill shape were so different you might well think they're different species.)

The third paper is about the rediscovery of an animal that hasn't been seen for fifty years -- a species of elephant shrew from Somalia.  Elephant shrews are neither shrews nor (obviously) elephants.  They have a superficial similarity to shrews, but genetic analysis has shown that they are actually more closely related to elephants than they are to shrews.  (Another indicator that appearance has little relevance to genetic closeness.)  They're in their own order, Macroscelidia.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Galen B. Rathbun, Petrosaltator rozeti-Zootaxa, CC BY 3.0]

In any case, the Somali sengi (Elephantulus revoilii) was known from thirty-nine different specimens in museums, but hadn't been seen in the wild in fifty years -- until now.  A colony of them was discovered in the country of Djibouti, the exact location of which is being kept secret.

The rediscovery, and the genetic information scientists are gleaning from these animals, looks like it's going to force a re-analysis of the taxonomy of the group, with the Somali sengi ended up in its own, new genus (Galegeeska).  The research is ongoing, and we'll undoubtedly be finding out more about these strange little animals of the east African desert.

So that's our news from the zoological world for today.  All in all, a much happier topic than a lot of others I could have chosen.  Better to focus, at least for a while, on the wonderful and multifarious critters out there in the world -- many of which we have just begun to understand.

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

One of my favorite TED talks is by the neurophysiologist David Eagleman, who combines two things that don't always show up together; intelligence and scientific insight, and the ability to explain complex ideas in a way that a layperson can understand and appreciate.

His first book, Incognito, was a wonderful introduction to the workings of the human brain, and in my opinion is one of the best books out there on the subject.  So I was thrilled to see he had a new book out -- and this one is the Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week.

In Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain, Eagleman looks at the brain in a new way; not as a static bunch of parts that work together to power your mind and your body, but as a dynamic network that is constantly shifting to maximize its efficiency.  What you probably learned in high school biology -- that your brain never regenerates lost neurons -- is misleading.  It may be true that you don't grow any new neural cells, but you're always adding new connections and new pathways.

Understanding how this happens is the key to figuring out how we learn.

In his usual fascinating fashion, Eagleman lays out the frontiers of neuroscience, giving you a glimpse of what's going on inside your skull as you read his book -- which is not only amusingly self-referential, but is kind of mind-blowing.  I can't recommend his book highly enough.

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

Lunacy fatigue

Lately, I've felt like I'm living in some kind of computer simulation run by aliens, only the aliens have gotten bored and/or stoned and now they're just fucking with us.

The obvious example is the increasingly unhinged stream of rants from Donald Trump, each of which seems to be designed to carry the message, "You think I sounded insane before?  Just wait till you hear this."  One example will suffice, because I suspect you don't want to read a bunch of Trump quotes, and I certainly don't want to dig them up and have to read them myself.  But this one, cheerfully delivered on the White House lawn and addressed to seniors ("Some of my favorite people," he said) would win some kind of award for bizarre pronouncements.  A direct quote: "You're not vulnerable, but they like to say the vulnerable, but you're the least vulnerable — but for this one thing you are vulnerable."

Sure!  Right!  What?

2020 has been one "hold my beer" incident after another.  I don't know about you, but I'm finding it increasingly hard to remember what it was like before things went loopy -- to be able to go out to a restaurant without a second thought and to a grocery store without a mask, to have enough letters in the alphabet to cover all the hurricanes, and to have Supreme Court nominees who were neither drunk frat boys nor homophobic right-wing religious fanatics.

But that old world has vanished.  I hope it's not forever, and that Election Day will turn us back toward sanity, because a lot of us are suffering from what I can only call Lunacy Fatigue.  We've been bombarded by crazy events to the point that our reaction has become a kind of despairing ennui.

Which explains my reaction to a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, about self-proclaimed "prophetess" and virulent Trump supporter Kat Kerr.  Kerr has been here before, most recently because of her attempt to turn aside a hurricane with prayer.  When it didn't work, and the storm slammed the Bahamas, she responded by cheerfully coming up with a reason that God hates the Bahamas.  Other claims from Kerr, which I swear I am not making up, were that when Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, "aborted babies had a party in heaven," and that her prediction of the 2018 elections "turning the map red" wasn't actually false because "a lot of the Democrats who were elected are secretly Republicans."

So it's not like we should expect anything rational from her.  She didn't disappoint in that regard, when two days ago she said that God had dispatched a thousand "special-ops angels" to make sure Trump won re-election.  Here's the exact quote, because any summary I could write would blunt the edge of the complete batshit insanity:

I can just tell you this from heaven. Trump is going to win.  We in America are the land of the brave, the free, and the filled with God.  And I can tell you that whole event was filled with the presence of God. And yes, there were 1,000 angels waiting.  You know who these angels were?  I could see them sitting all up in the upper stands and everything, in the seats, and they were white—they just glow with the glory of God.  But they actually were wearing red, white, and blue robes.

And the Holy Spirit said, "These angels are special ops angels that were sent from Heaven back in 2016 to fight on behalf of America, on our president, on his administration, God’s plans that he has for this country."  And they were there to be sent out again right now.  And we all did that.  It was very powerful to see them.  They shoot past us like beams of light, and they were very powerful beings.

Yeah, okay, Kat.  Maybe it's time to stop doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.

But it's not really newsworthy that a kook made a loony claim.  That is, after all, what kooks do.  What struck me reading it was how... pedestrian it sounded.  "Special-ops angels dressed in red, white, and blue, shooting past like beams of light?"  *yawn*  I wish I could say it was the weirdest thing that's happened this month, but it's not even the weirdest thing that's happened this week.  (My vote in that regard is that the thing the pundits are talking about most from Tuesday's vice presidential debate is the fly that was sitting on Mike Pence's head for two minutes.)

I've gotten to where I don't even want to look at the news, not because I'm afraid there'll be something upsetting -- that's nearly a given -- but because I'm tired of feeling like I'm trapped in a David Lynch film, where strange things are happening for no apparent reason and everyone's walking around with stunned expressions (what you can see of them behind their masks) wondering what the next random, pointless, chaotic plot twist will be.

I know it's dangerous for the sane people to get inured, because that's when the crazies cinch down control.  And it's not going to stop me from voting.  I'm just feeling a little dazed at the moment.  Maybe that's what happens when you're attacked by special-ops angels, I dunno.

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

One of my favorite TED talks is by the neurophysiologist David Eagleman, who combines two things that don't always show up together; intelligence and scientific insight, and the ability to explain complex ideas in a way that a layperson can understand and appreciate.

His first book, Incognito, was a wonderful introduction to the workings of the human brain, and in my opinion is one of the best books out there on the subject.  So I was thrilled to see he had a new book out -- and this one is the Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week.

In Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain, Eagleman looks at the brain in a new way; not as a static bunch of parts that work together to power your mind and your body, but as a dynamic network that is constantly shifting to maximize its efficiency.  What you probably learned in high school biology -- that your brain never regenerates lost neurons -- is misleading.  It may be true that you don't grow any new neural cells, but you're always adding new connections and new pathways.

Understanding how this happens is the key to figuring out how we learn.

In his usual fascinating fashion, Eagleman lays out the frontiers of neuroscience, giving you a glimpse of what's going on inside your skull as you read his book -- which is not only amusingly self-referential, but is kind of mind-blowing.  I can't recommend his book highly enough.

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