The oddest star in the galaxy

I'll start today with a quote (often misquoted) from William Shakespeare -- more specifically, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5:

Horatio:

O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

Hamlet:

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. 

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Horatio and Hamlet, of course, are talking about ghosts and the supernatural, but it could equally well be applied to science.  It's tempting sometimes, when reading about new scientific discoveries, for the layperson to say, "This can't possibly be true, it's too weird."  But there are far too many truly bizarre theories that have been rigorously verified over and over -- quantum mechanics and the General Theory of Relativity jump to mind immediately -- to rule anything out based upon our common-sense ideas about how the universe works.

That was my reaction while reading an article sent by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia about an astronomical object I'd never heard of -- Przybylski's Star, named after its discoverer, Polish-born Australian astronomer Antoni Przybylski -- a star 355 light years from Earth, in the constellation of Centaurus, which is weird in so many ways that it kind of boggles the mind.

Przybylski's Star is classified as a Type Ap star.  Type A stars are young, compact, and very hot; the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius, is in this class.

The "p" stands for "peculiar."

Przybylski's Star rotates slowly.  I mean, really slowly.  Compared to the Sun, which rotates about once every 27 days, Przybylski's Star rotates once every two hundred years.  But the strangest thing about it is its composition, which is so anomalous that its discoverer initially thought that his measurements were crazily off.

"No star should look like that," Przybylski said.

You probably know that most ordinary stars are primarily composed of hydrogen, and of the bit that's not hydrogen, most of it is helium.  Hydrogen is the fuel for the fusion in the core of the star, and helium is the product formed by that fusion.  Late in their life, many stars undergo core collapse, in which the temperatures heat up enough to fuse helium into heavier elements like carbon and oxygen.  Most of the rest of the elements on the periodic table are generated in supernovas and in neutron stars, a topic I dealt with in detail in a post I did last year.

My point here is that if you look at the emission spectra of your average star, the spectral lines you see should mostly be the familiar ones from hydrogen and helium, with minuscule traces of the spectra of other elements.  The heaviest element that should be reasonably abundant, even in the burned-out cores of stars, is iron -- it represents the turnaround point on the curve of binding energy, the point where fusion into heavier elements starts taking more energy than it releases.

So elements that are low in abundance pretty much everywhere, such as the aptly-named rare earth elements (known to chemists as the lanthanides), should be so uncommon as to be effectively undetectable.  Short-lived radioactive elements like thorium and radium shouldn't be there at all, because they don't form in the core of your ordinary star, and therefore any traces present had to have formed prior to the star in question's formation -- almost always, enough time that they should have long since decayed away.

The composition of Przybylski's Star, on the other hand, is so skewed toward heavy elements that it elicits more in the way of frustrated shrugs than it does in viable models that could account for it.  It's ridiculously high in lanthanides like cerium, dysprosium, europium, and gadolinium -- not elements you hear about on a daily basis.  There's more praseodymium in the spectrum of its upper atmosphere than there is iron.  Even stranger is the presence of very short-lived radioactive elements such as actinium, americium, and plutonium.

So where did they come from?

"What we’d like to know... is how the heavy elements observed here have come about," said astronomy blogger Paul Gilster.  "A neutron star is one solution, a companion object whose outflow of particles could create heavy elements in Przybylski’s Star, and keep them replenished.  The solution seems to work theoretically, but no neutron star is found anywhere near the star."

"[T]hat star doesn’t just have weird abundance patterns; it has apparently impossible abundance patterns," said Pennsylvania State University astrophysicist Jason Wright, in his wonderful blog AstroWright.  "In 2008 Gopka et al. reported the identification of short-lived actinides in the spectrum.  This means radioactive elements with half-lives on the order of thousands of years (or in the case of actinium, decades) are in the atmosphere...  The only way that could be true is if these products of nuclear reactions are being replenished on that timescale, which means… what exactly?  What sorts of nuclear reactions could be going on near the surface of this star?"

All the explanations I've seen require so many ad-hoc assumptions that they're complete non-starters.  One possibility astrophysicists have floated is that the replenishment is because it was massively enriched by a nearby supernova, and not just with familiar heavy elements like gold and uranium, but with superheavy elements that thus far, we've only seen produced in high-energy particle accelerators -- elements like flerovium (atomic number 114) and oganesson (atomic number 118).  These elements are so unstable that they have half-lives measured in fractions of a second, but it's theorized that certain isotopes might exist in an island of stability, where they have much longer lives, long enough to build up in a star's atmosphere and then decay into the lighter, but still rare, elements seen in Przybylski's Star.

There are a couple of problems with this idea, the first being that every attempt to find where the island of stability lies hasn't succeeded.  Physicists thought that flerovium might have the "magic number" of protons and neutrons to make it more stable, but a paper just last month seems to dash that hope.

The second, and worse, problem is that there's no supernova remnant anywhere near Przybylski's Star.

Which brings me to the wildest speculation about the weird abundances of heavy elements.  You'll never guess who's responsible.

Go ahead, guess.

There is a serious suggestion out there -- and by "serious," I mean made by professional, highly-respected astrophysicists, not cranks, wackos, or bloggers.  (Irony intended.)  The idea here is that an advanced technological civilization might have struck on the solution for nuclear waste of dumping it into the nearest star.  This explanation, bizarre as it sounds, would explain not only why the elements are there, but why they're way more concentrated in the upper atmosphere of the star than in the core.

"Here on Earth, he notes, people sometimes propose to dispose of our nuclear waste by throwing it into the Sun,” Wright writes.  “Seven years before Superman thought of the idea, Whitmire & Wright (not me, I was only 3 in 1980) proposed that alien civilizations might use their stars as depositories for their fissile waste.  They even pointed out that the most likely stars we would find such pollution in would be… [type] A stars!  (And not just any A stars, late A stars, which is what Przybylski’s Star is).  In fact, back in 1966, Sagan and Shklovskii in their book Intelligent Life in the Universe proposed aliens might 'salt' their stars with obviously artificial elements to attract attention."

A curious side note is that I've met (Daniel) Whitmire, of Whitmire & Wright -- he was a professor in the physics department of the University of Louisiana when I was an undergraduate, and I took a couple of classes with him (including Astronomy).  He was known for his outside-of-the-box ideas, including that a Jupiter-sized planet beyond the orbit of Pluto was responsible for disturbing the Oort Cloud as it passed through every hundred million years or so (being so far out, it would have a super-long rate of revolution).  This would cause comets, asteroids, and other debris to rain in on the inner Solar System, resulting in a higher rate of impacts with the Earth -- and explaining the odd cyclic nature of mass extinctions.

So I'm not all that surprised about Whitmire's suggestion, although it bears mention that he was talking about the concept in the purely theoretical sense; the weird spectrum of Przybylski's Star was discovered after Whitmire & Wright's paper on the topic.

Curiouser and curiouser.

So we're left with a mystery.  The "it's aliens" explanation is hardly going to be accepted by the scientific establishment without a hell of a lot more evidence, and thus far, there is none.  The peculiar abundance of heavy elements in this very odd star remains unaccounted-for by any science we currently understand.

I'll end with another quote, this one from eminent biologist J. B. S. Haldane: "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine."

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 Many of us were riveted to the screen last week watching the successful landing of the Mars Rover Perseverance, and it brought to mind the potential for sending a human team to investigate the Red Planet.  The obstacles to overcome are huge; the four-odd-year voyage there and back, requiring a means for producing food, and purifying air and water, that has to be damn near failsafe.

Consider what befell the unfortunate astronaut Mark Watney in the book and movie The Martian, and you'll get an idea of what the crew could face.

Physicist and writer Kate Greene was among a group of people who agreed to participate in a simulation of the experience, not of getting to Mars but of being there.  In a geodesic dome on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, Greene and her crewmates stayed for four months in isolation -- dealing with all the problems Martian visitors would run into, not only the aforementioned problems with food, water, and air, but the isolation.  (Let's just say that over that time she got to know the other people in the simulation really well.)

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth, Greene recounts her experience in the simulation, and tells us what the first manned mission to Mars might really be like.  It makes for wonderful reading -- especially for people like me, who are just fine staying here in comfort on Earth, but are really curious about the experience of living on another world.

If you're an astronomy buff, or just like a great book about someone's real and extraordinary experiences, pick up a copy of Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars.  You won't regret it.

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

Pharaonic forensics

I'm fascinated with history, and have always been especially interested in times and places for which we have few records and, therefore, not much way of knowing what really went on.

I'm not sure if this is because I'm a fiction writer and rely a lot on imaginary realms of the mind to fill in the gaps, or if I just have a perverse enjoyment of setting myself up with impossible tasks.  My favorite time and place to read about is western Europe during the Dark Ages, in the centuries after the fall-ish of Rome.  I phrase it that way because just as Rome wasn't built in a day, neither did it fall in a day, as if the Hordes of Barbarians went through the gates and the Romans basically just dropped their swords and said, "Okay, fuck it, we give up."  In fact, the aforementioned hordes weren't themselves a single unit; starting in the fourth century C.E., various tribes and sub-tribes of Celts, Goths, Huns, Scythians, et al. kind of chipped away at the empire until there wasn't much left of it.  The Western Roman Empire collapsed first, but the Eastern persisted for a while longer, devolving into chaos more than once -- nearly falling apart entirely during the mid-sixth-century Plague of Justinian, that wiped out a quarter of Europe's population and seems to have exceeded the both the fourteenth-century Black Death and the twentieth-century Spanish flu for sheer number of victims.  (I dealt with that topic, and what may have caused it, a couple of years ago, if you want to read about what historians call "the worst century in history.")

Another time and place I find intriguing is the early years of ancient Egypt, once again because so little is known for sure about it.  Our knowledge of the Old Kingdom, First Intermediate Period, and Middle Kingdom -- up until around the sixteenth century B.C.E. -- is hampered not only because it was a long time ago and a lot of the records haven't survived, but because what records were kept weren't all that accurate.  Just as with a lot of other theocratic cultures, the scribes of early pharaonic Egypt were as invested in depicting the rulers as gods as they were with writing down an accurate account of what happened.  The result was a mishmash of actual history, divine genealogies, miracle stories, and whitewashing that makes teasing the truth from the fiction damn near impossible.

Not that I blame the scribes, mind you.  Keeping monarchs in good humor is a full-time job, and often doesn't end well.  I've recently been re-reading the Shakespearean history plays, and he, like the scribes, knew which side his bread was buttered on.  Shakespeare was writing during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James 1, and if you take a look at works like Richard II, Henry IV (parts 1 and 2), Henry V, Henry VI (parts 1, 2, and 3), Richard III, and especially Henry VIII, you'll pretty quickly notice that any ancestors of the monarchs he was writing for are depicted as good guys, while ones who weren't -- like the villainous King Richard III of the play -- are the opposite.  I love the history plays, and that sort of treatment makes for great theater, but honestly, "history" is kind of the last thing they actually are.

So all of this is a long-winded way of leading up to a paper I stumbled upon yesterday in Frontiers of Medicine entitled, "Computed Tomography Study of the Mummy of King Seqenenre Taa II: New Insights Into His Violent Death," by renowned scholars of ancient Egypt Sahir Saleem (of Cairo University) and Zahi Hawass (former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities).  Pharaoh Seqenenre Taa II was the second-to-last pharaoh of the Seventeenth Dynasty, and ruled over part of Egypt during the chaotic Second Intermediate Period, when much of Egypt was controlled by a race of "warrior kings" from what is now Israel, Jordan, and southern Lebanon called the Hyksos.

The constant fighting, along with a long run of weak, short-lived rulers, makes the Second Intermediate Period hard to parse, because records from that time are even more sparse than they were from the preceding dynasties.  We know that the pharaoh in question, Seqenenre Taa II, was killed in battle with the Hyksos, and after a short reign by his elder son, Kamose, his younger son Ahmose I took over, overcame and drove out the Hyksos, and became the first pharaoh of both the Eighteenth Dynasty and the New Kingdom, which saw the peak of pharaonic power.

Fortunately for us history buffs, the Egyptians did leave behind one thing that helps us to figure out what was going on back then -- mummified bodies of their leaders.  And despite the chaotic conditions of the Seventeenth Dynasty, Seqenenre Taa II's body has survived for almost 3,600 years, and now Saleem and Hawass have done a CT scan to see if they can figure out more about him.

The hints from the records of the time that Seqenenre Taa II died in battle are almost certainly correct.  He had multiple injuries, including wounds that appear to have been made with an axe, a dagger, a club, and a spear.  (It's grimly amusing that several times in the paper, during the description of each injury, the authors say "this blow was probably fatal," as if the poor man got killed over and over.)  Most interesting, injury to his wrists suggests his hands had been tied behind his back -- and that he probably was captured in battle, possibly injured at the time, and afterward executed.

Pharaoh Seqenenre Taa II's skull, CT scan by Saleem & Hawass

"This suggests that Seqenenre was really on the front line with his soldiers risking his life to liberate Egypt," said study lead author Dr. Sahar Saleem, in a press release.  "In a normal execution on a bound prisoner, it could be assumed that only one assailant strikes, possibly from different angles but not with different weapons.  Seqenenre's death was rather a ceremonial execution."

Which is gruesome but fascinating, and illustrates that parts of history that have seemed like closed books may one day be understood using cutting-edge techniques from science.  And a bit of luck; the information about the unfortunate pharaoh only is available to us because his mummified body survived for three and a half millennia.  But it does mean that we haven't uncovered everything there is to study about cryptic and chaotic chapters in our history -- and that with diligence, ages that have appeared dark might eventually be illuminated.

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

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!]

Perseverance

In the episode of Doctor Who called "The Ark in Space," the Fourth Doctor says, "Homo sapiens.  What an inventive, invincible species.  It's only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk.  Puny, defenseless bipeds.  They've survived flood, famine and plague.  They've survived cosmic wars and holocausts.  And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life.  Ready to outsit eternity.  They're indomitable."

I immediately thought of that quote yesterday afternoon as I watched NASA's Mars Rover Perseverance make a textbook-perfect landing on the surface of Mars.  It traveled a total of about 480 million kilometers, and despite being launched from a moving target at a different moving target, landed right where the scientists and technicians wanted it to.

To put that into perspective, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and found that launching an object from Earth and hitting anywhere on Mars -- much less exactly the spot you wanted -- is analogous to aiming for, and hitting, an object the size of a pinhead from three hundred kilometers away.

The first image sent back by Perseverance.  Don't be concerned by the distortion and the blur; this was taken with the landing camera, used by the onboard computer to target the landing site.  Subsequent images will be a great deal clearer.  [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

Everywhere we've looked lately we've seen bad news.  The pandemic.  Here in the United States, the economy, the nasty partisan divisiveness, the lying and sniping and blaming amongst people who are desperate not to be held responsible for what they've said and done.  Just this week, the horrible cold wave and winter storm that hit as far south as Texas, leaving people without electricity and water, the casualties of which have yet to be tallied.

We're a species capable of awful things.  What we do to each other based upon race, religion, sexual orientation, political beliefs, and gender is mind-boggling.  If there's a deity up there keeping score, humanity will have a lot to answer for.

And yet.

We are also capable of incredible beauty, kindness, courage, compassion, love... and perseverance.  We are as surprising in the loftiness of our spirit as we sometimes are in the depth of our selfishness.  We're complex, full of contradictions and paradoxes, but can reach soaring highs, achieve things that almost beggar belief.

There were cheers and applause and high-fives when the announcement came that Perseverance had made a safe landing and was already sending back images from Mars's surface, and sitting here in my office, I was cheering along with them.  It illustrated once again how when we band together to accomplish something worthwhile, the sky is -- literally, in this case -- the limit.

I know that to people who aren't astronomy buffs, the Mars Rover Mission is probably no big deal, and might elicit a shrug and the question, "Why did they put all that money and time into this?"  Perseverance, and other endeavors like it, are important not only for the advancement of science, but are symbolic of what we can achieve.  It represents hope, it represents the potential for good in humanity, for reaching toward something beyond our petty concerns -- which often gets lost in all the bad news and dismal accounts of how we've fallen short.

So I hope you will watch as the images start to roll in, photographs of a landscape on another planet, and you will catch a little of the wonder of this moment.  Let it remind you that despite everything you read and hear, we're a pretty amazing species.  I'll end with another quote, this one from a poem that is justly famous -- "Desiderata" by Max Ehrmann.  I've read it many times, and even so it never fails to bring me to tears.  Here's how it ends, which seems a fitting way to wrap up this post:

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.  Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.  And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.  With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.  Be cheerful.  Strive to be happy.

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

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!]

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!]