Holy genome, Batman!

A couple of days ago, a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me an email that said, "You think you know genetics, Mr. Smarty Pants?  Get a load of this."

He included a link to a site called Gostica: The Spiritual Path, in particular a post called "The Scientists Are Shocked: First Scientific Proof of God Found."  And in it, we hear that passages from the bible have shown up...

...in the genetic code.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christoph Bock, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, DNA methylation, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I'm not making this up.  I would strongly recommend your taking a look at the actual site, but not while you're drinking anything, because I will not be responsible for coffee sprayed all over your computer screen.

The fun starts, in fact, with the very first phrase of the first sentence: "Linguistic professors at Bob Jones University, long noted for its intellectual rigor..."

Intellectual rigor?  The school that has been nicknamed "The Buckle on the Bible Belt?"  The school whose biology program description states, "One of the benefits of studying biology at BJU is that you’ll get a top-notch science education from a thoroughly Christian perspective.  In addition to strengthening your faith in the reliability of the Bible, this perspective will also help prepare you to understand modern secular interpretations of science and apply a biblical worldview to them."?

The school whose behavior code explicitly forbids its students to wear denim skirts, have "fauxhawks," access an "unfiltered internet," or listen to "Rock, Pop, Country, Jazz, Electronic/ Techno, Rap/Hip Hop or the fusion of any of these genres"?

And in any case, who the hell wears denim skirts anymore?

But I digress.

So the "intellectually rigorous scientists" from Bob Jones University started looking at pieces of DNA, including "transposons and retrotransposons" (Ooh!  Big words!), and this is what they found:

[They] began to attempt to translate the decoded segments that W.I.T. was providing.  The structure was notably and demonstrably human in nature.  The coding language found, which utilized sequences of twenty-eight independent values, fell easily into the incidence range of known alphabets.  Sequences of independent connected values likewise mirrored the structure of word composition in human languages.  The Linguistic and Philology team at Bob Jones began an extensive comparison of the quizzical script found in the “Junk DNA” with the catalog of every recorded human language; hoping to find similar lingual threads so that they could begin to formulate translations of the message laying hidden in the DNA.  Professors were rocked with sheer awe when they found that one existent language, and one language alone, was a direct translatable match for the sequential DNA strands.

And guess what that language was, and what it said? You'll never guess.

The Language in the “Junk DNA”, the DNA that scientists had for years discarded as useless, was indistinguishable from ancient Aramaic.  Even more amazingly, as linguists started to translate the code within the human genome, they found that parts of the script it contained were at times remarkably close in composition to verse found in the Bible.  And at times contained direct biblical quotes. 

On the human gene PYGB, Phosporomylase Glycogen, a non-coding transposon, holds a linguistic sequence that translates as “At first break of day, God formed sky and land.”  This bears a stunning similarity to Gen 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  Gene Bmp3 has a Retrotransposon sequence which translates to the well-known 1 Cor 6:19 “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?  You are not your own.”  This is repeated over and over throughout the entire sequence of human DNA: embedded equivalent genetic code of ancient Aramaic that seems to translate as the word of God to his people.

Righty-o. Where do I start?

The first problem with this is that the "language" of DNA is composed of four letters (nitrogenous bases), A (adenine), G (guanine), C (cytosine), and T (thymine). So if that was the actual language of God, he'd be pretty much limited to saying stuff like "ACT TAG CAT GAG GAG GAG," although to my ears that sounds more like a pronouncement from Bill the Cat than it does like something the Divine Creator might say.  In any case, it's not really possible to spell out English using the DNA alphabet, much less ancient Aramaic.  Even if you make the allowance that maybe the "linguists" were using some kind of correspondence between the letters in Aramaic and the amino acid sequence coded for by a gene, you still only have twenty letters, not 28 as the article claims.

So what the amazingly rigorous researchers at BJU seem good at is making shit up and then lying to the media about it.  But this didn't stop them from shouting their findings from the rooftops:

Matthew Boulder, chief linguist for the project and professor of applied creation sciences at Bob Jones University, issued this statement: “As for the evidence- it is there and it is, to my view, undeniable.  The very word of God, elegantly weaved in and out of our very bodies and souls, as plain as day.  And the beauty of it, that God would lay down the words of truth in our very beings, shows his love and The Miracle.”

"Professor of applied creation science." Which is right up there with "Professor of applied unicornology" in terms of scientific validity.

So to the reader who sent me the link, all I can say is thanks.  I did read the whole thing, and also the internal links that went to the BJU "research," so you can't say I didn't give it my all.  Throughout I was torn between guffawing and slamming my forehead repeatedly against my computer keyboard.  I hope that's the reaction you wanted.  But I do wonder what my own personal DNA spells out.  Maybe a passage from The Origin of Species, you think?

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

Back when I taught Environmental Science, I used to spend at least one period addressing something that I saw as a gigantic hole in students' knowledge of their own world: where the common stuff in their lives came from.  Take an everyday object -- like a sink.  What metals are the faucet, handles, and fittings made of?  Where did those metals come from, and how are they refined?  What about the ceramic of the bowl, the pigments in the enamel on the surface, the flexible plastic of the washers?  All of those substances came from somewhere -- and took a long road to get where they ended up.

Along those same lines, there are a lot of questions about those same substances that never occur to us.  Why is the elastic of a rubber band stretchy?  Why is glass transparent?  Why is a polished metal surface reflective, but a polished wooden surface isn't?  Why does the rubber on the soles of your running shoes grip -- but the grip worsens when they're wet, and vanishes entirely when you step on ice?

If you're interested in these and other questions, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for you.  In Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Man-Made World, materials scientist Mark Miodownik takes a close look at the stuff that makes up our everyday lives, and explains why each substance we encounter has the characteristics it has.  So if you've ever wondered why duct tape makes things stick together and WD-40 makes them come apart, you've got to read Miodownik's book.

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

Spice of life

In many places, people argue vehemently about politics, religion, or culture.  In my home place of southern Louisiana, the hill people will die on is whose grandma had the best gumbo recipe.

My mom was 100% Cajun, from a little town near Raceland, Louisiana, south of New Orleans.  Because of that, I grew up with amazing food, both in quality and quantity.  Jambalaya, hush puppies, oyster po'boys, courtbillon, boudin (Cajun sausage), crawfish, fried catfish...

*brief pause to stop drooling*

In Cajun cuisine, the four food groups are onions, pepper, garlic, and grease.  Just about every recipe you pick up begins with, "First, you make a roux."  It's rich, spicy, and intensely flavored, but to say it's "calorie-dense" is a massive understatement.  Fortunately for me, I was born with a fast metabolism, but most Cajun food is not what I'd call diet-friendly.

I learned to cook as a teenager, mostly because I love to eat, and I didn't want when I moved away from home to go from my mom's phenomenal cooking to eating canned ravioli.  So I've become the chief cook in our family, and both our sons also learned to cook as teens, for much the same reasons that I did.  When I talk to my younger son, who lives in Houston, and he tells me he's got a pot of chicken gumbo simmering on the stove, it positively warms my heart.

His grandma's recipe, of course.

I've wondered for a while why Cajun food is so spicy.  And, by extension, why some cuisines are so bland.  My wife is Jewish, and she actually came up with a recipe for Cajun matzoh balls so that I would agree to eat them.  British cooking is notorious in that regard, although I will say that when I was in England I couldn't get enough of fish & chips, preferably washed down with a pint of stout.  On the other hand, the "mushy peas" I had when we were in Durham is an experience I'm not anxious to repeat.  

Even Cajun food, however, doesn't hold a candle to the spiciness you find in southeast Asia.  My first time at a Thai restaurant, I was given the choice of 1 through 5 for spiciness, and I figured, "Hell, I'm Cajun, I'm tough" and went with a 3.

And spent the entire meal guzzling iced tea to put the fire out.  Heaven alone knows how anyone eats a "5" without spontaneously combusting.

I got to visit Malaysia a few years ago, and they have a sauce there called "sambal oelek" which is Malay for "bottle full of lava."  If you are ever fortunate enough to visit there, and it's offered to you, be brave -- but use it in moderation.  (And by "in moderation" I mean "one drop.")

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mark Levisay from Ruckersville, VA, USA, Hot peppers for jelly. Clockwise from bottom left; habaneros, hot Portugal, hot lemon, serrano, poblano, cajun bell & jalapeno, CC BY 2.0]

When I lived in Seattle, I went to a talk by a food scientist about the use of spices in different cultures, and he was of the opinion that the heat of a cuisine is directly proportional to the heat of the climate.  Many spices, he claimed, contain essential oils that are bactericidal, and also might cover up the taste of food that was a little past its expiration date.  So cold climates, like Scandinavia, with less need for spices to prevent and/or mask spoilage, have less spicy cuisines than (for example) India.

It seemed like a reasonable hypothesis, and most of us left the talk thinking, "Huh, who knew?  That's pretty cool."  But a study in Nature last week demonstrated that -- like a good many common-sense notions of how the world works -- it doesn't line up with reality.

Lindell Bromham, Alexander Skeels, Hilde Schneemann, Russell Dinnage, and Xia Hua (of Australian National University) did an exhaustive analysis of cuisines around the world, testing both that hypothesis and also the alternate conjecture that spicy cuisines arise only where the plants that produce those spices grow easily -- and found, surprisingly, that neither model accurately predicts food spiciness.  The authors write:

Spicier food in hot countries has been explained in terms of natural selection on human cultures, with spices with antimicrobial effects considered to be an adaptation to increased risk of foodborne infection.  However, correlations between culture and environment are difficult to interpret, because many cultural traits are inherited together from shared ancestors, neighbouring cultures are exposed to similar conditions, and many cultural and environmental variables show strong covariation.  Here, using a global dataset of 33,750 recipes from 70 cuisines containing 93 different spices, we demonstrate that variation in spice use is not explained by temperature and that spice use cannot be accounted for by diversity of cultures, plants, crops or naturally occurring spices.

The negative results here are as interesting as the conjectures themselves, and leave us with a bit of a puzzle.  The authors found a weak correlation between spice use and wealth -- many spices, even today with commercial farm production, are expensive -- but that doesn't really account for the distribution either, because most areas are a mix of wealthy and poor and all gradations in between, and in a particular region people mostly eat the same kinds of food (although of course there are differences both in quality and quantity of food available to different socioeconomic strata).

The end result is another unsatisfying example of "we don't really know why, but it seems to be complicated."  I've heard it suggested that once a cuisine is established with a particular repertoire of spices, babies learn to tolerate those flavors because some of the essential oils are passed along to the infant in breast milk.  (The obvious example is garlic -- people who eat a lot of garlic will find that their sweat eventually smells of it, although at that point it might be more obvious to their friends and family than it is to them.)  Even if that's true, it might explain the persistence of particular sets of spices in a culture, but doesn't explain why they got there in the first place.

All of which is fascinating, not only because I'm a foodie but because of my background in science.  It's always good to look at your assumptions about the world, because something that "seems right" is likely to go unquestioned in your mind.  It's why we have the scientific method; it's a way of rigorously testing claims, so that our biases in either direction can be analyzed in the clear light of data and inductive reasoning.

Anyhow, now I'm hungry.  Maybe I'll fix some scrambled eggs for breakfast, but only if I'm not out of hot sauce.  There is no point to scrambled eggs without hot sauce.  Although I think I'll pass on the sambal oelek.  Even I have my limits.

Oh, and it's my grandma.  My grandma clearly had the best gumbo recipe.  Thanks for asking.

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

Back when I taught Environmental Science, I used to spend at least one period addressing something that I saw as a gigantic hole in students' knowledge of their own world: where the common stuff in their lives came from.  Take an everyday object -- like a sink.  What metals are the faucet, handles, and fittings made of?  Where did those metals come from, and how are they refined?  What about the ceramic of the bowl, the pigments in the enamel on the surface, the flexible plastic of the washers?  All of those substances came from somewhere -- and took a long road to get where they ended up.

Along those same lines, there are a lot of questions about those same substances that never occur to us.  Why is the elastic of a rubber band stretchy?  Why is glass transparent?  Why is a polished metal surface reflective, but a polished wooden surface isn't?  Why does the rubber on the soles of your running shoes grip -- but the grip worsens when they're wet, and vanishes entirely when you step on ice?

If you're interested in these and other questions, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for you.  In Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Man-Made World, materials scientist Mark Miodownik takes a close look at the stuff that makes up our everyday lives, and explains why each substance we encounter has the characteristics it has.  So if you've ever wondered why duct tape makes things stick together and WD-40 makes them come apart, you've got to read Miodownik's book.

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

The heart has its reasons

Valentine's Day was a couple of days ago, and over a nice dinner I fixed for my sweetheart, we were talking about the perplexing question of why she had fallen for me in the first place, much less stayed with me for twenty years.

I'm not trying to be self-deprecating here, nor fishing for compliments.  I'm not the easiest person to be around.  I'm kind of a walking morass of anxiety and neurosis most of the time.  I mean, I think I'm interesting enough, but you have to wonder how it makes up for the other stuff.  And the initial attraction is also a bit of a puzzle, because to put it bluntly, my continuous social anxiety has the effect of making me a gigantic awkward dork.

To say I'm romance-challenged is kind of an understatement.  I've never understood the ease with which so many seem to navigate the whole dating and hookup scene.  You'd think that, being bisexual, I'd have had twice the opportunity to get dates, but all my life I have seemed to be completely unable to tell when someone is attracted to me.  The only way I'd be able to tell if someone of either gender was flirting with me is if they were holding up a large sign saying, "HEY.  STUPID.  I AM CURRENTLY FLIRTING WITH YOU."

And possibly not even then.  

I do mean well most of the time, but I could write a textbook about social awkwardness.  Not just in romantic situations, either.  I had a Zoom call a couple of weeks ago that started out as follows:

Me: Hi, how are you today?

Other person:  I'm fine, how are you?

Me:  I'm doing okay, how are you?

Other person: ....

Me: *vows to become a Trappist monk and never speak to anyone again*

So smooth, I'm not.  The fact that I'm married to a truly lovely person is mostly due to the fact that Carol fell for me pretty much on first sight -- mystifying though that is to me -- and spent the next few months talking quietly and moving slowly, as one would with a timid and easily-startled woodland animal, until she finally convinced me it was safe to eat out of her hand.

And here I am, twenty years later, completely cognizant of how incredibly lucky I am.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Johntex, Valentinesdaytree, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The topic comes up not only because of Valentine's Day but because of some research out of the University of California - Santa Barbara that I read about in a paper in Personality and Social Psychology Review last Friday (the timing of which was undoubtedly deliberate).  In "Couple Simulation: A Novel Approach for Evaluating Models of Human Mate Choice," psychologist Daniel Conroy-Beam looked at the complex question of why people choose the partners they do.  He developed a computer simulation for the process of "playing the field" by taking the characteristics of dozens of real-life couples, setting them up in the simulation to interact with each other as singles, and used various models of choice-reasoning to see if they would re-assemble into the pairs that had come about in reality.

There are, Conroy-Beam reasoned, a few possible drivers for mate choice in the real world.  Presented with a variety of options, it could be that people at first pair up with someone because for a lot of people, some mate is better than no mate, then "trade up" if someone better comes along.  It could be driven by physical attraction, with the best-looking people pairing with the best-looking of their preferred gender, and on down the scale.  It could be some sort of subconscious cost-benefit analysis -- that was Conroy-Beam's conjecture -- where each person takes the "limited resources" of their investment into a relationship, and evaluates it based upon where the biggest payoff would come with the least drawbacks.  (E.g., a person might trade off shared interests if the attraction was that the other person was really amazing in bed.)

Once he set the characteristics of his virtual bachelors and bachelorettes, he threw them together and had them interact, each simulation using a different model of criteria for who would pair with whom, and recorded what happened.  Out of all the possibilities he tested, Conroy-Beam's own model, that pair-bonding was used to achieve the most favorable cost-benefit ratio, succeeded the best.

"It's thinking about mate choice in terms of investment of limited resources," he said, in an interview with Science Daily.  "So you've only got so much time and so much money and so much energy that you can dedicate to potential partners.  And so your question as the person who's looking for a partner is 'who deserves most of these limited resources?'...  There are a number of differences between RAM [Conroy-Beam's Resource Allocation Model] and the other models.  The other models treat attraction like an on/off switch, but RAM allows for gradients of attraction.  It also incorporates reciprocity: the more a potential mate pursues you, the more you pursue them in return."

What's interesting that even Conroy-Beam's Resource Allocation Model only correctly paired the actual real-life couples 45% of the time.  So that still leaves over half of the couples in the real world whose reason for pairing up left the computer model shrugging and saying, "Who the hell knows?"

All of which illustrates something that shouldn't really be a surprise; the psychology of emotional connectedness is complex.  Why people pair up, and then stay together (or not), is often not easy to parse.  Not only is there the initial attraction to account for, but how the relationship changes as the people in it inevitably change themselves over the years; what started out as an intense bond might weaken if one or both changes in their emotional needs and priorities, or (more happily) the bond could strengthen over time into a true lifelong commitment.

So we're back to the whole subject of love and mate choice, both in general and in my own case in particular, as being a mystery.  I suppose I shouldn't question it, but just revel in how lucky I am.  I'll end with a quote from French philosopher Blaise Pascal, which seems fitting: "Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point."

"The heart has its reasons, about which reason knows nothing."

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

Back when I taught Environmental Science, I used to spend at least one period addressing something that I saw as a gigantic hole in students' knowledge of their own world: where the common stuff in their lives came from.  Take an everyday object -- like a sink.  What metals are the faucet, handles, and fittings made of?  Where did those metals come from, and how are they refined?  What about the ceramic of the bowl, the pigments in the enamel on the surface, the flexible plastic of the washers?  All of those substances came from somewhere -- and took a long road to get where they ended up.

Along those same lines, there are a lot of questions about those same substances that never occur to us.  Why is the elastic of a rubber band stretchy?  Why is glass transparent?  Why is a polished metal surface reflective, but a polished wooden surface isn't?  Why does the rubber on the soles of your running shoes grip -- but the grip worsens when they're wet, and vanishes entirely when you step on ice?

If you're interested in these and other questions, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for you.  In Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Man-Made World, materials scientist Mark Miodownik takes a close look at the stuff that makes up our everyday lives, and explains why each substance we encounter has the characteristics it has.  So if you've ever wondered why duct tape makes things stick together and WD-40 makes them come apart, you've got to read Miodownik's book.

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

I contain multitudes

One of the things that even folks conversant in the evolutionary model sometimes don't know is the extent to which we are composite organisms.

On the gross level (and I mean that in both senses of the word), there is the sheer number of cells in us that are not human.  The adult human body has about 10 trillion human cells, and (depending on who you talk to) between 1 and 3 times more bacterial cells -- intestinal flora, bacteria hitching a ride on our skin, in our mouths, in our respiratory mucosa.  Most of these are commensals at the very worst -- neither harmful nor helpful -- but a significant number are in a mutualistic arrangement with us, which is one of several reasons why the overuse of antibiotics is a bad idea.

Then there are the little invaders we can't live without -- namely the mitochondria, those tiny organelles that every high school biology student knows are the "powerhouses of the cell."  What fewer people know is that they are actually separate organisms, descended from aerobic prokaryotes that colonized our cells 2.5 billion years ago (give or take a day or two).  They have their own DNA, and reproduce inside our cells by binary fission the same way they did when they were free-living proto-bacteria.

Mitochondria [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of microscopist/photographer Louisa Howard]

And that's not all.  If you're a plant (I'm assuming you're not, but you never know), you have three separate ancestral lines -- your ordinary plant cells, the mitochondria, and the chloroplasts, which are also little single-celled invaders that now plants can't live without.  But even that's not the most extreme example.  The microorganism Mixotricha paradoxa is a composite being made up of five completely separate ancestral genomes that have fused together into one organism.

But back to humans, if you're not already so skeeved out that you've stopped reading.  Because it's even more complicated than what I've already told you, as you'll learn from geneticists Cedric Feschotte, Edward Chuong and Nels Elde of the University of Utah in a paper in which we find out that even our nuclear DNA isn't entirely human.  10% of our 30,000-odd genes and three-billion-odd base pairs...

... came from viruses.

We usually think of viruses as little parasites, some of which are killers like COVID-19, rabies, and ebola fever, but also include nuisances like colds, flu, warts and chickenpox.  Turns out, though, that they're more than that.  Some of them -- the retroviruses (HIV being the best-known example) -- are capable of inserting genetic material into the host's DNA, thus altering what the host does.  Certainly, sometimes this is bad; both AIDS and feline leukemia are outcomes of this process.  But now Feschotte, Chuong, and Elde have shown that some of our viral hangers-on have had their genes repurposed to work in our benefit.

These stowaway bits of DNA are called endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), and some of them seem to be associated with cancer.  Others have been implicated in multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia.  But what the researchers found is that not all of them are deleterious; the gene that allows us to digest starch, and (even more importantly) the gene that triggers the fusion of the developing embryo to the placenta, seem to have viral origins.

"We think we’ve only scratched the surface here on the regulatory potential of ERVs," Feschotte said.

All of which is pretty amazing.  And it definitely gives one pause when you stop to think of how we define the word "organism."  Am I a single organism?  Well, not really.  Besides my regular human cells, I've got trillions of prokaryotic hangers-on and trillions of mitochondria, each with their separate bacterially-derived genome; and 10% of what I think of as "my DNA" came from viruses, at least some of which has then been modified into genes that I depend on to survive.  So humans -- and all living things -- are looking more and more like composite colonies of symbiotic life forms, representing a web of interrelationships that is so complex that it's mind-boggling.

Remember the Trill from Star Trek:Deep Space Nine?  A lot of us were kind of creeped out to find out that Jadzia Dax's personality and intelligence didn't come from her humanoid brain, but from a weird, crustacean-like symbiotic life form that was wired into her nervous system.  Turns out that once again, Star Trek hit close to the target of the reality we've now uncovered with science -- only the reality is even more bizarre than the fiction.

So step aside, Star Trek aliens.  I'm too busy being blown away by how weird and cool the life here on Earth turns out to be.

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

Back when I taught Environmental Science, I used to spend at least one period addressing something that I saw as a gigantic hole in students' knowledge of their own world: where the common stuff in their lives came from.  Take an everyday object -- like a sink.  What metals are the faucet, handles, and fittings made of?  Where did those metals come from, and how are they refined?  What about the ceramic of the bowl, the pigments in the enamel on the surface, the flexible plastic of the washers?  All of those substances came from somewhere -- and took a long road to get where they ended up.

Along those same lines, there are a lot of questions about those same substances that never occur to us.  Why is the elastic of a rubber band stretchy?  Why is glass transparent?  Why is a polished metal surface reflective, but a polished wooden surface isn't?  Why does the rubber on the soles of your running shoes grip -- but the grip worsens when they're wet, and vanishes entirely when you step on ice?

If you're interested in these and other questions, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is for you.  In Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Man-Made World, materials scientist Mark Miodownik takes a close look at the stuff that makes up our everyday lives, and explains why each substance we encounter has the characteristics it has.  So if you've ever wondered why duct tape makes things stick together and WD-40 makes them come apart, you've got to read Miodownik's book.

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

Requiem for a dead planet

If I had to pick my favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the clear winner would be "The Inner Light."  Some classic episodes like "Darmok," "Frames of Mind," "Remember Me," "Time's Arrow," "The Chase," and "Best of Both Worlds" would be up there in the top ten, but "The Inner Light" not only has a beautiful story, but a deep, heartwrenching bittersweetness, made even more poignant by a tour-de-force performance by Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

If you've not seen it, the plot revolves around the Enterprise encountering a huge space station of some kind, of apparent antiquity, and in the course of examining it, it zaps Captain Picard and renders him unconscious.  What his crew doesn't know is that it's dropped him into a dream where he's not a spaceship captain but an ordinary guy named Kamin, who has a wife and children and a job as a scientist trying to figure out what to do about the effect of his planet's sun, which has increased in intensity and is threatening devastating drought and famine.

As Kamin, he lives for forty years, watching his children grow up, living through the grief of his wife's death and the death of a dear friend, and ultimately grows old without ever finding a solution to his planet's dire circumstances.  All the while, the real Captain Picard is being subjected to ongoing interventions by Dr. Crusher to determine what's keeping him unconscious, and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to bring him out of it.  In the end, which makes me ugly cry every damn time I watch it, Kamin lives to watch the launch of an archive of his race's combined knowledge, realizing that the sun's increase in intensity is leading up to a nova that will destroy the planet, and that their civilization is doomed.  It is, in fact, the same archive that the Enterprise happened upon, and which captured Picard's consciousness, so that someone at least would understand what the civilization was like before it was wiped out tens of thousands of years earlier.

"Live now," Kamin says.  "Make now always the most precious time.  Now will never come again."

And with that, Picard awakens, to find he has accumulated four decades of memories in the space of about a half-hour, an experience that leaves a permanent mark not only on his mind, but his heart.

*brief pause to stop bawling into my handkerchief*

I was immediately reminded of "The Inner Light" by a paper this week in Nature Astronomy, called, "Alkali Metals in White Dwarf Atmospheres as Tracers of Ancient Planetary Crusts."  This study, led by astrophysicist Mark Hollands of the University of Warwick, did spectroscopic analysis of the light from four white dwarf stars, which are the remnants of stellar cores left behind when Sun-like stars go nova as their hydrogen fuel runs out at the end of their lives.  In the process, they vaporize any planets that were in orbit around them, and the dust and debris from those planets accretes into the white dwarf's atmosphere, where it's detectable by its specific spectral lines.

In other words: the four white dwarfs in the study had rocky, Earth-like planets at some point in their past.

"In one case, we are looking at planet formation around a star that was formed in the Galactic halo, 11-12.5 billion years ago, hence it must be one of the oldest planetary systems known so far," said study co-author Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay, in an interview in Science Daily.  "Another of these systems formed around a short-lived star that was initially more than four times the mass of the Sun, a record-breaking discovery delivering important constraints on how fast planets can form around their host stars."

This brings up a few considerations, one of which has to do with the number of Earth-like planets out there.  (Nota bene: by "Earth-like" I'm not referring to temperature and surface conditions, but simply that they're relatively small, with a rocky crust and a metallic core.  Whether they have Earth-like conditions is another consideration entirely, which has to do with the host star's intrinsic luminosity and the distance at which the planet revolves around it.)  In the famous Drake equation, which is a way to come up with an estimate of the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe, one of the big unknowns until recently was how many stars hosted Earth-like planets; in the last ten years, we've come to understand that the answer seems to be "most of them."  Planets are the rule, not the exception, and as we've become better and better at detecting exoplanets, we find them pretty much everywhere we look.

When I read the Hollands et al. paper, I immediately began wondering what the planets around the white dwarfs had been like before they got flash-fried as their suns went nova.  Did they harbor life?  It's possible, although considering that these started out as larger stars than our Sun, they had shorter lives and therefore less time for life to form, much less to develop into a complex and intelligent civilization.  And, of course, at this point there's no way to tell.  Any living thing on one of those planets is long since vaporized along with most of the planet it resided on, lost forever to the ongoing evolution of the cosmos.

If that's not gloomy enough, it bears mention that this is the Earth's ultimate fate, as well.  It's not anything to worry about (not that worry would help in any case) -- this eventuality is billions of years in the future.  But once the Sun exhausts its supply of hydrogen, it will balloon out into a red giant, engulfing the inner three planets and possibly Mars as well, then blow off its outer atmosphere (that explosion is the "nova" part), leaving its exposed core as a white dwarf, slowly cooling as it radiates its heat out into space.

Whether by that time we'll have decided to send our collective knowledge out into space as an interstellar archive, I don't know.  In a way, we already have, albeit on a smaller scale than Kamin's people did; Voyager 2 carries the famous "golden record" that contains information about humanity, our scientific knowledge, and recordings of human voices, languages, and music, there to be decoded by any technological civilization that stumbles upon it.  (It's a little mind-boggling to realize that in the 43 years since Voyager 2 was launched, it has traveled about 20,000,000,000 kilometers, so is well outside the perimeter of the Solar System; and that sounds impressive until you realize that's only 16.6 light hours away, and the nearest star is 4.3 light years from us.)

So anyhow, those are my elegiac thoughts on this February morning.  Dead planets, dying stars, and the remnants of lost civilizations.  Sorry to be a downer.  If all this makes you feel low, watch "The Inner Light" and have yourself a good cry.  It'll make you feel better.

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

Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert established her reputation as a cutting-edge observer of the human global impact in her wonderful book The Sixth Extinction (which was a Skeptophilia Book of the Week a while back).  This week's book recommendation is her latest, which looks forward to where humanity might be going.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future is an analysis of what Kolbert calls "our ten-thousand-year-long exercise in defying nature," something that immediately made me think of another book I've recommended -- the amazing The Control of Nature by John McPhee, the message of which was generally "when humans pit themselves against nature, nature always wins."  Kolbert takes a more nuanced view, and considers some of the efforts scientists are making to reverse the damage we've done, from conservation of severely endangered species to dealing with anthropogenic climate change.

It's a book that's always engaging and occasionally alarming, but overall, deeply optimistic about humanity's potential for making good choices.  Whether we turn that potential into reality is largely a function of educating ourselves regarding the precarious position into which we've placed ourselves -- and Kolbert's latest book is an excellent place to start.

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

The strangest flower on Earth

Anyone know what the world's largest flower is?

Chances are, some of you know that honor goes to the bizarre Indonesian species Rafflesia arnoldi, which produces flowers that can get to be 120 centimeters across.  Not only are they huge, they are (1) really weird-looking, and (2) smell like rotting meat in order to attract the flies that pollinate them.

Rafflesia arnoldi  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons ma_suska, Rafflesia sumatra, CC BY 2.0]

The first time I saw a photograph of this plant, I was immediately reminded of the Lost in Space episode "Attack of the Monster Plants," which was a real favorite of mine when I was a kid, not only because who wouldn't love a show about monster plants, but because Judy Robinson was in peril during this episode and to say I was madly in love with Judy Robinson is rather an understatement.

Be that as it may, the reality of Rafflesia is almost as weird as Judy's spaceship-fuel-eating alien plants.  The flower is enormous but the rest of the plant is minuscule, only a thin ribbon of translucent tissue that punctures the roots of vines of the rainforest genus Tetrastigma, getting all its nutrients from the host plant rather than from photosynthesis.  The only time any part of the plant is above ground is when it's flowering.  After that, the flowers wither, the fruits containing thousands of nearly microscopic seeds that are thought to be dispersed when tree shrews eat the fruit and poop out the seeds somewhere else.  But the plant's rarity, and the fact that during most of its life cycle you could walk right by it (or more likely, over it) without knowing, not that much is known for sure.

Another thing that's surprising about the family (Rafflesiaceae) is that its nearest relatives are euphorbias -- which include a huge range of plants united by having tiny, insignificant flowers and milky toxic sap and looking absolutely nothing like Rafflesia.  A number of euphorbs look superficially like cacti, with reduced or absent leaves and sharp spines, but the milky sap and inconspicuous flowers would clue you in to the fact that the similarities are due to convergent evolution.  The most familiar euphorb is the poinsettia -- the bright red, pink, or cream-colored parts are not actually petals but modified leaves.  (The flowers themselves are the little b-b sized bits at the center.)

So what this shows is that to figure out evolutionary relationships, you can't rely on what things look like.  As odd as it is, the spiky candelabra spurge (Euphorbia ingens) is a cousin of the bizarre Rafflesia.

If all that isn't weird enough, consider a study that just came out a couple of weeks ago in Current Biology that looked at another member of Rafflesiaceae, the genus Sapria.  (They're very similar to Rafflesia, differing only in a few not-very-significant botanical details.)  This study did an extensive analysis of the genetics of Sapria, and found something bizarre; during its descent from its euphorbia-like ancestors, Sapria (and presumably the rest of the family Rafflesiaceae) has not only lost just about all of its physical structure, but half of its genome -- including the entire array of genes that produce chloroplasts.  Stranger still, in the process it has picked up genetic material from its host, something called horizontal transfer.

So this puts paid to the incorrect notion a lot of people have that evolution always makes things bigger, stronger, smarter, and more complex.  Evolution is the law of whatever works at the time, and if what works is to jettison half the DNA along with chloroplasts, leaves, and true roots, that can happen.  And if you think about it, it makes sense; if you're a plant that spends nearly its entire life underground, why waste resources making structures like leaves and chloroplasts, not to mention all the proteins and pigments that go into making them work?  The oddest thing about the genetics, though, is that a lot of the genes that Sapria has picked up from its hosts don't seem to do anything; they appear to be "non-coding regions" of DNA that don't have any obvious function.  "There's something weird and different going on in this species," said Tim Sackton of Harvard University, who co-authored the paper, in an interview with Science News.  "Maybe these organisms that stretch the boundaries of existence tell us something about how far the rules can be bent before they can be broken."

Rafflesia and its relatives are certainly some of the strangest members of the plant kingdom, so much so that you have to wonder what other peculiarities are going to be uncovered by further analysis.  I just hope we don't find out that it eats rocket fuel and creates evil duplicates of people, because Judy Robinson barely escaped with her life, and that is not okay.

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

Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert established her reputation as a cutting-edge observer of the human global impact in her wonderful book The Sixth Extinction (which was a Skeptophilia Book of the Week a while back).  This week's book recommendation is her latest, which looks forward to where humanity might be going.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future is an analysis of what Kolbert calls "our ten-thousand-year-long exercise in defying nature," something that immediately made me think of another book I've recommended -- the amazing The Control of Nature by John McPhee, the message of which was generally "when humans pit themselves against nature, nature always wins."  Kolbert takes a more nuanced view, and considers some of the efforts scientists are making to reverse the damage we've done, from conservation of severely endangered species to dealing with anthropogenic climate change.

It's a book that's always engaging and occasionally alarming, but overall, deeply optimistic about humanity's potential for making good choices.  Whether we turn that potential into reality is largely a function of educating ourselves regarding the precarious position into which we've placed ourselves -- and Kolbert's latest book is an excellent place to start.

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

The haunting of Hinton Ampner

On her mom's side, my wife is descended from English nobility, a fact of which she reminds me periodically when I get uppity.  Her great-great grandfather, one William R. Hylton, was born in Jamaica to a family of British sugar planters, and the line (if you extend it back far enough) includes not only the Mad Baron Hylton (about whom I should write another time) but a woman named "Benedicta de Shelving," a member of the Norman gentry named "Marmaduke de Thweng," and best of all, an illegitimate daughter of King Edward IV.

One of her ancestors on the maternal side of her Hylton lineage is a Rachel (Ricketts) Johnson, who would have been (if I'm counting correctly) the aforementioned William R. Hylton's great-great grandmother.  I found out quite by accident that Rachel is related to the central figures in one of Britain's creepiest ghost stories -- the tale of the haunting of Hinton Ampner, a mansion in Hampshire.

Hinton Ampner was built in the 1620s, during the reign of James I, by one Sir Thomas Stewkeley.  Sir Thomas's great-grandson Hugh had no male heirs; his daughter, Mary, married Edward Stawell, a nobly-descended young man who was also apparently a little loose on the morals side.  Despite this, Stawell was appointed as Sir Hugh's heir.

After his father-in-law's death, Stawell apparently decided that he could get away with whatever he wanted, and he invited his wife's beautiful young sister, Honoria, to come live with them at Hinton Ampner.  Mary Stawell died shortly afterwards -- an eventuality that many of their neighbors found convenient -- and he lived there with Honoria (carrying on, sources say, in "a scandalous manner") until her death in 1754.  Stawell himself died the following year, and some claimed that the couple's demise was "divine retribution" for their having done away with an illegitimate child born to the union -- perhaps more than one.

Be that as it may, the house was purchased and then rented out to William Henry Ricketts (cousin to Carol's forebear Rachel (Ricketts) Johnson) and his wife, Mary (Jervis) Ricketts.  William was frequently away for long periods of time -- as I mentioned earlier, he and his family had ties to Jamaica, and voyages across the Atlantic were dangerous and drawn-out affairs -- but Mary was a no-nonsense, down-to-earth type who was quite up to the task of running a household (including their three children and a bevy of servants) by herself.

Whether she was up to dealing with ghosts remains to be seen.

The haunting, if such it was, started out slowly.  Mr. and Mrs. Ricketts both heard noises at night, prompting them on more than one occasion to awaken the servants for a thorough search of the house, which turned up nothing.  Then the nurse to the Ricketts's infant son saw a "man in drab clothes" walk into "the Yellow Room" -- Mary Ricketts's own bedroom.

Once again a search found no one.

Events accelerated.  Servants saw not only the apparition of the drab-clothed man, but a woman in a silk dress. "Dismal moans" were heard at night, and doors opened and quietly shut by themselves.  Mary Ricketts, at first scornful of the claims of the servants, began to experience them herself -- especially when the disturbances intensified while her husband was away in Jamaica in 1769.  She was terrified one night to hear heavy, plodding footsteps near her bed, and in the days following began to make inquiries in the neighborhood regarding the history of the house.  She found only one curious story -- an elderly man who said that a long-time friend of his, who was a carpenter, had been summoned to the house while old Sir Hugh Stewkeley was still alive to pull up some of the floorboards in the dining room.  The carpenter saw Stewkeley and his son-in-law, the depraved Edward Stawell, place something in the space underneath.  The carpenter was ordered to replace the floorboards -- and not to tell a soul what he'd seen, on pain of death.  (A threat the carpenter either didn't believe, or didn't break until Stewkeley and Stawell were both dead themselves.)

Oddly, Mary Ricketts didn't have the floorboards pried up to determine the truth of the claim.  She was apparently reluctant to ascribe the occurrences to ghosts.  But even she began to have second thoughts when the haunting continued to worsen.  A strange murmuring could be heard in several rooms in the house, which sometimes resolved itself into intelligible words. Not only did Mary hear it, but so did her brother, the famous British Navy officer Captain John Jervis, who wrote about it in his journal (a document that still exists today in a museum in London).  They also heard a tremendous "rushing sound," like a great wind, that would "fall with infinite velocity and force" upon a room, without a breath of air stirring.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Mary wrote about the entire story herself in a narrative that was given for publication to The Gentleman's Magazine by her descendants in 1872.  Throughout the tale, Mary strikes you as sane, calm, and collected, always looking for rational explanations, and not immediately leaping to the conclusion that ghosts were to blame.  One passage reads as follows:

Thoroughly convinced there were persons in the lobby before I opened the door, I asked her [Mary's servant Elizabeth Godin] if she saw no one there.  On her replying in the negative, I went out to her, examined the window that was shut, looked under the couch, the only furniture of concealment there; the chimney board was fastened, and when removed all was clear behind it.  She found the door into the lobby shut, as it was every night.  After this examination, I stood in the middle of the room, pondering with astonishment, when suddenly the door that opens into the little recess leading to the yellow apartment sounded as if played to and fro by a person standing behind it.  This was more than I could bear unmoved.  I ran into the nursery and rang the bell there that goes into the men's apartment.

I think if it'd been me, "not unmoved" would have been putting it mildly.  I think I would have fallen more into the "pissing my pants and then having a stroke" category.

Eventually, however, even Mary's stalwart patience was tried to the limit.  During his stay, her brother -- who is certainly a credible witness if anyone is -- heard groans, banging, dragging footsteps, and (on one occasion) a gunshot.  None of the noises seemed to have a corporeal source.  Jervis pressed his sister to leave the mansion, which she did in 1771.  Its owners were understandably unable to find anyone else who would rent the place, and shortly afterwards Hinton Ampner was demolished.

Okay, I know, you can't put much weight into anecdote, but this story to me has some characteristics that have the ring of truth.  I think it's the open-endedness of it that is the most persuasive, and the most creepy as well.  A lot of ghost stories have predictable endings -- the haunting ends when a skeleton is unearthed and reburied in hallowed ground, when the guilty party is arrested for a murder, when well-deserved revenge is taken against a killer.  Here, we have two seemingly reliable people recounting experiences that have no easy wrap-up.  In the end, Mary Ricketts and her family moved away, John Jervis went on to win the Battle of St. Vincent, and the haunted house itself was torn down.

So I find this a pretty cool story, even though I wouldn't call myself a true believer by any stretch.  Cool, too, that we have a family connection to the main characters; in fact, Captain John Jervis had no children of his own and chose as his heir Mary's son Edward Jervis Ricketts, who spent his childhood in Hinton Ampner, and who would be Carol's third cousin several times removed.  But whether it's true or not, and whether the explanation is supernatural or entirely rational, I still think it's a good tale to add a few extra chills to a chilly gray day in midwinter.

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

Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert established her reputation as a cutting-edge observer of the human global impact in her wonderful book The Sixth Extinction (which was a Skeptophilia Book of the Week a while back).  This week's book recommendation is her latest, which looks forward to where humanity might be going.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future is an analysis of what Kolbert calls "our ten-thousand-year-long exercise in defying nature," something that immediately made me think of another book I've recommended -- the amazing The Control of Nature by John McPhee, the message of which was generally "when humans pit themselves against nature, nature always wins."  Kolbert takes a more nuanced view, and considers some of the efforts scientists are making to reverse the damage we've done, from conservation of severely endangered species to dealing with anthropogenic climate change.

It's a book that's always engaging and occasionally alarming, but overall, deeply optimistic about humanity's potential for making good choices.  Whether we turn that potential into reality is largely a function of educating ourselves regarding the precarious position into which we've placed ourselves -- and Kolbert's latest book is an excellent place to start.

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