The stellar whirlpool

In today's installment of "The Universe Is A Really Weird Place," we have: a piece of our own galaxy that we didn't even know existed until now.

It's called the "Cepheus Spur" after the constellation Cepheus, in which (from the Earth perspective) the structure seems to reside.  It's a spiral of stars lying above the galactic plane, and at the moment, astronomers don't know how it got there.   "Possibly these are oscillations of the galactic disk resulting from the convulsive evolution of the galaxy," said co-discoverer Michelangelo Pantaleoni González, of the Spanish Astrobiology Center.  "Perhaps they are the echoes of collisions with other galaxies billions of years ago, or maybe it’s something else."

The befuddlement of the experts is indicative that this structure has some seriously odd characteristics.  One of the strangest is that it seems to be mostly composed of type-OB blue supergiant stars, which are amongst the rarest star types known; from observations of the Milky Way, only one star in a million is a type-OB blue supergiant.

That's even taking into account the fact that the ones we know about are visible from a long way off.  They have masses between twenty and fifty times that of the Sun, and luminosities on the order of a hundred thousand times higher.  One familiar example is Rigel, in Orion, which is the brightest star in the constellation despite being 860 light years away.

The constellation Orion, with Rigel at the lower right [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rogelio Bernal Andreo, Orion Head to Toe, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Their rarity isn't just because it's unusual to have such a huge clump of matter form; they're also exceedingly short-lived.  Because of their mass, they burn through their hydrogen fuel quickly, which makes them the hottest stars -- with surface temperatures of between 10,000 and 50,000 K (the Sun's surface is on the order of 5770 K).  It's estimated that a typical type-OB blue supergiant goes from formation to supernova in something between a few hundred thousand and thirty million years; again, by contrast, the Sun is estimated at 4.6 billion years in age, and is only about halfway through its life.

So to have a swirl of these rare and short-lived stars whirling above the plane of the galaxy is a significant puzzle.

"When we discovered the spur, there was no explosive revelation, but something inside me was transformed.  That’s what draws you in and gives meaning to so much effort," said Pantaleoni González.  "We were in front of [astrophysicist] Jesús [Apellániz]’s computer when he began to inspect this density of dots on the map. I ran to make a special diagram to see if it was consistent with the idea that there was a structure there, and it appeared."

The presence of these stars outside of the galactic plane has yet to be explained, and it's still unknown if the Cepheus Spur really is composed primarily of rare type-OB blue supergiants, or if we're overestimating their frequency because they're so luminous.  It could be that there are a lot of other, dimmer stars in the Spur that we're not seeing because of its distance (estimated at an average of 100,000 light years).  In any case, what seems certain is that this discovery will keep the astrophysicists working for a long while -- and illustrates that once again, the universe is full of surprises.

Which is one of the reasons that science is so endlessly fascinating.

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

When people think of mass extinctions, the one that usually comes to mind first is the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction of 66 million years ago, the one that wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a good many species of other types.  It certainly was massive -- current estimates are that it killed between fifty and sixty percent of the species alive at the time -- but it was far from the biggest.

The largest mass extinction ever took place 251 million years ago, and it destroyed over ninety percent of life on Earth, taking out whole taxa and changing the direction of evolution permanently.  But what could cause a disaster on this scale?

In When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, University of Bristol paleontologist Michael Benton describes an event so catastrophic that it beggars the imagination.  Following researchers to outcrops of rock from the time of the extinction, he looks at what was lost -- trilobites, horn corals, sea scorpions, and blastoids (a starfish relative) vanished completely, but no group was without losses.  Even terrestrial vertebrates, who made it through the bottleneck and proceeded to kind of take over, had losses on the order of seventy percent.

He goes through the possible causes for the extinction, along with the evidence for each, along the way painting a terrifying picture of a world that very nearly became uninhabited.  It's a grim but fascinating story, and Benton's expertise and clarity of writing makes it a brilliant read.

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

The child on the road

One of the creepiest urban legends is the tale of the Black-eyed Children.

The whole thing seems to have begun with a Texas man named Brian Bethel, who reported back in 1996 that he had an encounter with what appeared to be a ten-year-old child on the side of a highway near Abilene.  When he stopped to see if the child was okay, or needed a ride or something, the kid came up to Bethel's open window and said, "Please, can you help me?  I'm lost."

But when Bethel looked closer, he saw that the child's eyes were entirely black.  No white, no iris, just solid, glossy black.  Understandably, he gunned the engine and took off.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Megamoto85, Black eyes by megamoto85 (cropped), CC BY-SA 4.0]

Since then, the legend has grown by accretion, with other people pitching in with their own stories of the Black-eyed Children.  The claim is that if you let one into your car or house, you'll never be seen again, although it's hard to understand how they'd know that, given that the only ones who could verify this are the ones who did let them in.

And they were never seen again.  Right?  Or am I missing some part in the logical chain, here?

The plausibility issues notwithstanding, the idea was creepy enough that I made it the basis of my trilogy of novels called The Boundary Solution -- Lines of Sight, Whistling in the Dark, and Fear No Colors.  I hope I did it justice, because whatever else you can say about it, the concept is scary as hell.

The topic comes up because of a report out of Australia, where something really peculiar is alleged to have happened last weekend.  According to a man named Mitch Kuhne, he was driving on the Hume Highway south of Sydney when he saw what looked like a child on the road.  Here's what Kuhne said:

In the video you’ll see what we seen on our way home from racing what looked to be a child on the middle of the highway!

Instantly called 000 as we couldn’t stop as we had a huge toy hauler we were carrying and would have caused an accident, police said they were putting patrols out immediately, I called the local station after realising the dash cam would have footage and called to see where I could send it to help them so they know what it is we saw and could pinpoint the location.  I was told on the phone by the officer that there is no need to send it as the child had been collected safely and was on its way home, I felt absolutely sick when all this happened I instantly felt so much better when I was told the kid had been collected.

If you want to see the dashcam footage, you can check it out at News.com.au, at the link I posted above.  But here's a still:

There's no doubt that the video is creepy.  The figure moves as the car passes it, and you can see its shadow rotating beneath its feet, indicating it's a solid object (i.e. not a lens flare or some camera glitch).  But this isn't as creepy as the postscript -- because the Australian media covering the story contacted the police, and they denied the entire thing.

They'd searched the area after Kuhne's call, they said, and found nothing.  Furthermore, there'd been no reports of a missing person in the area.

Case closed.

If it weren't for the discrepancy, the story wouldn't be that odd; just a kid wandering where (s)he shouldn't, and getting rescued by the police.  But the police at the Macquarie Fields Police Station are now saying there was no child found, and furthermore, that Kuhne was told that after the search was complete.

"The only reason I posted the video [of the dashcam footage on social media] is because I thought the kid was safe and felt okay posting it," Kuhne said.  "Now to see that they are claiming I was never told this makes me sick."

So it's a weird story, I'll give it that.  There may not be anything to it; it could be that Kuhne made up the part about the police having confirmed they'd found a child.  (I don't mean to impugn the honesty of someone I don't know, but we have to admit that as a possibility.)  If it's the police who are lying, the next obvious question is, "Why?"  What would they have to gain by telling Kuhne the child was safe if they hadn't found any child -- or, conversely, denying the existence of the child to the media if they had found one and gotten him/her home safely?  Either way, there's something about this whole situation that doesn't add up.

Take a look at the video, and let me know what you think in the comments.  Skeptics are saying it isn't a child at all, but a bit of rubbish being blown on the wind, an animal, or a statue (although what a statue was doing in the middle of the road is a question in and of itself).  Other, less skeptical types are saying it was a ghost or an alien.

Or, possibly, a Black-eyed Child.  Gotta watch out for those.  And if that's what it was, it's a good thing Kuhne didn't stop.  Maybe that's what happened to the police -- the ones who picked up the child were never seen again.

I hear that happens sometimes.

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

When people think of mass extinctions, the one that usually comes to mind first is the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction of 66 million years ago, the one that wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a good many species of other types.  It certainly was massive -- current estimates are that it killed between fifty and sixty percent of the species alive at the time -- but it was far from the biggest.

The largest mass extinction ever took place 251 million years ago, and it destroyed over ninety percent of life on Earth, taking out whole taxa and changing the direction of evolution permanently.  But what could cause a disaster on this scale?

In When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, University of Bristol paleontologist Michael Benton describes an event so catastrophic that it beggars the imagination.  Following researchers to outcrops of rock from the time of the extinction, he looks at what was lost -- trilobites, horn corals, sea scorpions, and blastoids (a starfish relative) vanished completely, but no group was without losses.  Even terrestrial vertebrates, who made it through the bottleneck and proceeded to kind of take over, had losses on the order of seventy percent.

He goes through the possible causes for the extinction, along with the evidence for each, along the way painting a terrifying picture of a world that very nearly became uninhabited.  It's a grim but fascinating story, and Benton's expertise and clarity of writing makes it a brilliant read.

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

Watching the clock

 If I had to pick the scientific law that is the most misunderstood by the general public, it would have to be the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The First Law of Thermodynamics says that the total quantity of energy and mass in a closed system never changes; it's sometimes stated as, "Mass and energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed."  The Second Law states that in a closed system, the total disorder (entropy) always increases.  As my long-ago thermodynamics professor put it, "The First Law says you can't win; the Second Law says you can't break even."

Hell of a way to run a casino, that.

So far, there doesn't seem to be anything particularly non-intuitive about this.  Even from our day-to-day experience, we can surmise that the amount of stuff seems to remain pretty constant, and that if you leave something without maintenance, it tends to break down sooner or later.  But the interesting (and less obvious) side starts to appear when you ask the question, "If the Second Law says that systems tend toward disorder, how can a system become more orderly?  I can fling a deck of cards and make them more disordered, but if I want I can pick them up and re-order them.  Doesn't that break the Second Law?"

It doesn't, of course, but the reason why is quite subtle, and has some pretty devastating implications.  The solution to the question comes from asking how you accomplish re-ordering a deck of cards.  Well, you use your sensory organs and brain to figure out the correct order, and the muscles in your arms and hands (and legs, depending upon how far you flung them in the first place) to put them back in the correct order.  How did you do all that?  By using energy from your food to power the organs in your body.  And to get the energy out of those food molecules -- especially glucose, our primary fuel -- you broke them to bits and jettisoned the pieces after you were done with them.  (When you break down glucose to extract the energy, a process called cellular respiration, the bits left are carbon dioxide and water.  So the carbon dioxide you exhale is actually broken-down sugar.)

Here's the kicker.  If you were to measure the entropy decrease in the deck of cards, it would be less -- way less -- than the entropy increase in the molecules you chopped up to get the energy to put the cards back in order.  Every time you increase the orderliness of a system, it always (1) requires an input of energy, and (2) increases the disorderliness somewhere else.  We are, in fact, little chaos machines, leaving behind a trail of entropy everywhere we go, and the more we try to fix things, the worse the situation gets.

I've heard people arguing that the Second Law disproves evolution because the evolutionary model claims we're in a system that has become more complex over time, which according to the Second Law is impossible.  It's not; and in fact, that statement betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of what the Second Law means.  The only reason why any increase in order occurs -- be it evolution, or embryonic development, or stacking a deck of cards -- is because there's a constant input of energy, and the decrease in entropy is offset by a bigger increase somewhere else.  The Earth's ecosystems have become more complex in the 4.5 billion year history of life because there's been a continuous influx of energy from the Sun.  If that influx were to stop, things would break down.

Fast.

The reason all this comes up is because of a paper this week in Physical Review X that gives another example of trying to make things better, and making them worse in the process.  This one has to do with the accuracy of clocks -- a huge deal to scientists who are studying the rate of reactions, where the time needs to be measured to phenomenal precision, on the scale of nanoseconds or better.  The problem is, we learn from "Measuring the Thermodynamic Cost of Timekeeping," the more accurate the clock is, the higher the entropy produced by its workings.  So, in effect, you can only measure time in a system to the extent you're willing to screw the system up.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Robbert van der Steeg, Eternal clock, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The authors write:

All clocks, in some form or another, use the evolution of nature towards higher entropy states to quantify the passage of time.  Due to the statistical nature of the second law and corresponding entropy flows, fluctuations fundamentally limit the performance of any clock.  This suggests a deep relation between the increase in entropy and the quality of clock ticks...  We show theoretically that the maximum possible accuracy for this classical clock is proportional to the entropy created per tick, similar to the known limit for a weakly coupled quantum clock but with a different proportionality constant.  We measure both the accuracy and the entropy.  Once non-thermal noise is accounted for, we find that there is a linear relation between accuracy and entropy and that the clock operates within an order of magnitude of the theoretical bound.

Study co-author Natalia Ares, of the University of Oxford, summarized their findings succinctly in an article in Science News; "If you want a better clock," she said, "you have to pay for it."

So a little like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the more you try to push things in a positive direction, the more the universe pushes back in the negative direction.  

Apparently, even if all you want to know is what time it is, you still can't break even.

So that's our somewhat depressing science for the day.  Entropy always wins, no matter what you do.  Maybe I can use this as an excuse for not doing housework.  Hey, if I make things more orderly here, all it does is mess things up elsewhere, so what's the point?

Nah, never mind.  My wife'll never buy it.

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

When people think of mass extinctions, the one that usually comes to mind first is the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction of 66 million years ago, the one that wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a good many species of other types.  It certainly was massive -- current estimates are that it killed between fifty and sixty percent of the species alive at the time -- but it was far from the biggest.

The largest mass extinction ever took place 251 million years ago, and it destroyed over ninety percent of life on Earth, taking out whole taxa and changing the direction of evolution permanently.  But what could cause a disaster on this scale?

In When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, University of Bristol paleontologist Michael Benton describes an event so catastrophic that it beggars the imagination.  Following researchers to outcrops of rock from the time of the extinction, he looks at what was lost -- trilobites, horn corals, sea scorpions, and blastoids (a starfish relative) vanished completely, but no group was without losses.  Even terrestrial vertebrates, who made it through the bottleneck and proceeded to kind of take over, had losses on the order of seventy percent.

He goes through the possible causes for the extinction, along with the evidence for each, along the way painting a terrifying picture of a world that very nearly became uninhabited.  It's a grim but fascinating story, and Benton's expertise and clarity of writing makes it a brilliant read.

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

Twinkle, twinkle, little antistar

It's a big mystery why anything exists.

I'm not just being philosophical, here.  According to the current most widely-accepted cosmological model, when the Big Bang occurred, matter and antimatter would have formed in equal quantities.  As anyone who has watched Star Trek knows, when matter and antimatter come into contact, they mutually annihilate and all of the mass therein is converted to a huge amount energy in the form of gamma rays, the exact quantity of which is determined by Einstein's law of E = mc^2.

So if we started out with equal amounts of matter and antimatter, why didn't it all eventually go kablooie, leaving a universe filled with nothing but gamma rays?  Why was there any matter left over?

The answer is: we don't know.  Some cosmologists and astrophysicists think that there may have been a slight asymmetry in favor of matter, driven by random quantum fluctuations early on, so while most of the matter and antimatter were destroyed by collisions, there was a little bit of matter left, and that's what's around today.  (And "a little bit" is honestly not an exaggeration; the vast majority of the universe is completely empty.  An average cubic meter of space is very unlikely to have much more than an atom or two in it.)

One question this sometimes brings up is whether the stars and galaxies we see in the night sky are matter; if, perhaps, some entire galaxies are made of antimatter, and there really are equal amounts of the two.  After all, antimatter is predicted to act exactly like matter except that its fundamental particles have the opposite charges -- its protons are negative, its electrons positive, and so forth.  So a planet entirely formed of antimatter would look (from a safe distance) exactly like an ordinary planet.

And just to throw this out there, an antiplanet wouldn't have copies of all of us except for having the opposite personalities, for example some people who are good guys being evil and/or having beards, as outlined in the highly scientific Lost in Space episode "The Antimatter Man:"

Nor would there be a creepy bridge between the two universes, covered with fog and backed by eerie music:

Which is a shame, because I always kinda liked that episode.

Considerations of evil Major Don West with a beard notwithstanding, here are two arguments why most physicists believe that the stars we see, even the most distant, are made of ordinary matter.  The first is that there is no known process that would have sorted out the matter from the antimatter early in the universe's life, leaving isolated clumps of each to form their respective stars and galaxies.  Secondly, if there were antistars and antigalaxies, then there'd be an interface between them and the nearest clump of ordinary stars and galaxies, and at that interface matter and antimatter would be constantly meeting and mutually annihilating.  This would produce a hell of a gamma ray source -- and we haven't seen anything out there that looks like a matter/antimatter interface (although I will return to this topic in a moment with an interesting caveat).

A paper last year found that the key to understanding why matter prevailed might lie in the mysterious "ghost particles" called neutrinos.  There are three kinds of neutrinos -- electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos -- and one curious property they have is that they oscillate, meaning they can convert from one type to another.  The rate at which they do this is predicted from current theories, and it's thought that antineutrinos do exactly the same thing at exactly the same rate.

The experiment described in the paper took place in Japan, and found that there is an unexpected asymmetry between neutrinos and antineutrinos.  Beams of muon neutrinos and muon antineutrinos were sent on a six-hundred-kilometer journey across Japan, and upon arriving at a detector, were analyzed to see how many had converted to one of the other two "flavors."  The surprising result was that the neutrinos had oscillated a lot more than predicted, and the antineutrinos a lot less -- something called a "CP (charge-parity) violation" that shows antimatter doesn't, in fact, behave exactly like matter.  This asymmetry could lie at the heart of why the balance tipped in favor of matter.

But now a new analysis of data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has thrown another monkey wrench into the works.  The study was undertaken because of a recent puzzling detection by an instrument on the International Space Station of nuclei of antihelium, which (if current models are correct) should be so rare in the vicinity of ordinary matter that they'd be entirely undetectable.  But what if the arguments against antistars and antigalaxies I described earlier aren't true, and there are such odd things out there?  Antistars would be undergoing fusion just like the Sun does, and producing antihelium (and other heavier antielements), which then would be shed from the surface just like our Sun sheds helium.  And some of it might arrive here, only to fall into one of our detectors.

But what about the whole gamma-rays-at-the-interface thing?  Turns out, the study in question, the subject of a paper last week in the journal Physical Review D, found that there are some suspicious gamma-ray sources out there.

Fourteen of them, in fact.

These gamma-ray sources are producing photons with an energy that's hard to explain from known sources of gamma rays -- pulsars and black holes, for example.  In fact, the energy of these gamma rays is perfectly consistent with the source being ordinary matter coming into contact with an antistar.

Curiouser and curiouser.

It doesn't eliminate the problem of why the universe is biased toward matter; even if these are antistars, their frequency in the universe suggests that only one in every 400,000 stars is an antistar.  So we still have the imbalance to explain.

But it's a strange and fascinating finding.  Astrophysicists are currently re-analyzing the data from every angle they can think of to try and account for the odd gamma-ray sources in any way other than it being evidence of antistars, so it may be that the whole thing will fizzle.  But for now, it's a tantalizing discovery.  It brings to mind the famous quote from J. B. S. Haldane -- "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it's queerer than we can imagine."

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

When people think of mass extinctions, the one that usually comes to mind first is the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction of 66 million years ago, the one that wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a good many species of other types.  It certainly was massive -- current estimates are that it killed between fifty and sixty percent of the species alive at the time -- but it was far from the biggest.

The largest mass extinction ever took place 251 million years ago, and it destroyed over ninety percent of life on Earth, taking out whole taxa and changing the direction of evolution permanently.  But what could cause a disaster on this scale?

In When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, University of Bristol paleontologist Michael Benton describes an event so catastrophic that it beggars the imagination.  Following researchers to outcrops of rock from the time of the extinction, he looks at what was lost -- trilobites, horn corals, sea scorpions, and blastoids (a starfish relative) vanished completely, but no group was without losses.  Even terrestrial vertebrates, who made it through the bottleneck and proceeded to kind of take over, had losses on the order of seventy percent.

He goes through the possible causes for the extinction, along with the evidence for each, along the way painting a terrifying picture of a world that very nearly became uninhabited.  It's a grim but fascinating story, and Benton's expertise and clarity of writing makes it a brilliant read.

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

Unreal estate

Thanks to a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I found out yesterday that those of you who would like a nice place to retire can now buy property...

... on Mars.

I'm not joking, although the people who set up the site may well be.  Here's the idea:

Own an acre of land in our Solar System’s 4th planet; package includes the deed, a map with location of your land, and a Mars info eBook.

Which sounds like it's completely aboveboard, given that it comes with an official deed and an informational booklet and all.

Home, sweet home.  [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

They go on to give us more details:

Buying land on Mars sounds like a plot line in some futuristic sci-fi flick about billionaires.  In truth, it's a modern-day possibility for thousandaires.  Buy Planet Mars gives astrophiles the chance to buy one acre of land on the Red Planet.  Much like the purchase of a star, Martian Land Packages include a map charting your acre's location, an owner's deed, a NASA report on Mars exploration, and a photo eBook.  These packages are issued digitally, meaning they're available for download immediately after purchase.

Yes, thousandaires, as long as they have more money than sense.  An acre of land on Mars costs $35, which sounds pretty cheap, until you realize that (1) you're never going to go there, and (2) even after you purchase it, you don't really own land on Mars, because (3) the person selling the property on Mars doesn't technically own what he's selling.

Which evidently is not apparent to the 210 people who have paid actual money for this unreal estate.  The seller's Groupon page has a lot of positive testimonials, such as the following:

• When you can't afford land in California, might as well invest in the future!
• It's fun, thought provoking, unique and a great conversation peace [sic] I have never owned property, how could I pass it up?
• Fun gift, who knows what it could be in the future?

Worthless!  Yay!  Isn't that fun?

Okay, I know I'm coming across as a sarcastic, grumpy, humorless, sour-tempered curmudgeon here.  Which is hardly fair, because I am not humorless.  As far as the others, well, okay, maybe.  For example, my wife contends that I've been a curmudgeon since infancy.  I can't quite dodge the "sarcastic" thing, either, given that it's in the tagline of this blog.

But in my own defense, I'm not immune to pointless stuff sometimes.  After all, I'm the guy who was fully in favor of everyone purchasing alien abduction insurance.  (After posting that one, an anonymous reader of Skeptophilia purchased alien abduction insurance for me, and made my dog the beneficiary.)

So maybe I should be encouraging people to buy property on Mars.  You never know, maybe one day we'll have manned missions to Mars, and you could go visit your homestead.  Although this didn't work out so well for Matt Damon in The Martian.  As I recall, it became uncomfortably breezy.  He ended up having to do some impromptu self-surgery with a staple gun.  And he learned that Mars is really not the place if your lifelong dream is growing potatoes.

Anyhow.  If you've got an extra $35 that you can't think of doing something more productive with, which in my opinion would include using it to start a campfire, you can buy an acre of land on Mars.  If you do, make sure to post here and let me know the details.  I'm especially curious about the deed, because you have to wonder under whose jurisdiction it's being issued.

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

When people think of mass extinctions, the one that usually comes to mind first is the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction of 66 million years ago, the one that wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a good many species of other types.  It certainly was massive -- current estimates are that it killed between fifty and sixty percent of the species alive at the time -- but it was far from the biggest.

The largest mass extinction ever took place 251 million years ago, and it destroyed over ninety percent of life on Earth, taking out whole taxa and changing the direction of evolution permanently.  But what could cause a disaster on this scale?

In When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, University of Bristol paleontologist Michael Benton describes an event so catastrophic that it beggars the imagination.  Following researchers to outcrops of rock from the time of the extinction, he looks at what was lost -- trilobites, horn corals, sea scorpions, and blastoids (a starfish relative) vanished completely, but no group was without losses.  Even terrestrial vertebrates, who made it through the bottleneck and proceeded to kind of take over, had losses on the order of seventy percent.

He goes through the possible causes for the extinction, along with the evidence for each, along the way painting a terrifying picture of a world that very nearly became uninhabited.  It's a grim but fascinating story, and Benton's expertise and clarity of writing makes it a brilliant read.

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

Getting to the essence

One of the fastest-growing areas of alternative medicine is "essential oils."

Essential oils are at least something real; it's one step better than homeopathy, for example, which is charging money for water and/or sugar pills from which all biologically active compounds have been removed by serial dilution.  These oils are concentrated extracts of plants containing aromatic compounds, which the plants themselves make for a variety of reasons, including discouraging insects from eating the leaves, attracting pollinators, or encouraging animals to eat the fruits and disperse the seeds.

The claim is that these oils have positive health effects of all sorts, but when you start looking deeper, you find that a lot of times, what the essential oil companies have to say is pretty vague.  Here's one typical example, and a few representative quotes from the website:

• What are essential oils good for?  Since long ago, people have used essential oils and plant parts to improve their lives.  We’ve continued to explore their benefits today, finding that essential oils can be integrated into daily life for a plethora of purposes.
• What makes essential oils effective?...  The variety of essential oils allows you to naturally and effectively address your specific concerns.  With so many essential oils available, you can tailor them to your specific wants and needs rather than be forced to settle for a generic solution.  This makes essential oils a popular choice for those looking for the best natural solutions in the modern era.  The verstaility [sic] of essential oils is part of what has made them so popular in recent years.  People love that they can use essential oils for a variety of tasks, without having to buy multiple products.
• How do you use essential oils effectively?  Rest assured that you don’t have to be an expert to enjoy the wide array of benefits that essential oils offer.  All you really need is a basic understanding of how to apply essential oils safely and simply as part of your daily routine.

So, in essence *rimshot* -- oils are good because they've been used by people for a long time, they're all-natural, and they smell nice.  We know this because... um... reasons.  Each one is useful for something different, because they're so versatile.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Stephanie (strph) from Oklahoma City, USA, Teatreeoil, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The problem is, there's little scientific support for the claim that they'll accomplish anything but making you smell nice.  The site HealthLine has a page on essential oils, and you can tell they really really want to say how great they are, but can't quite find a way to do so without lying outright.  Over and over, they say things like this:

• It’s thought that certain application methods can improve absorption, such as applying with heat or to different areas of the body.  However, research in this area is lacking.
• [S]ome people claim that essential oils can exert a physical effect on your body.  However, this has yet to be confirmed in studies.
• Despite their widespread use, little is known about the ability of essential oils to treat certain health conditions.
• [D]ue to the scents of the compounds, it’s hard to conduct blinded studies and rule out biases.  Thus, many reviews on the stress- and anxiety-relieving effects of essential oils have been inconclusive.

Even so, HealthLine has a list of particular oils and what they can be used for -- which is more than a little disingenuous.

The problem is, we now know that beyond essential oils probably not doing anything positive for your health -- they can also be dangerous.

A study that came out a couple of weeks ago in the journal Epilepsy Research looked at a group of seizure sufferers in India, and found something staggering.  Here's a quote from The Academic Times that summarizes what they discovered:

[P]atients at four South Indian hospitals who had a seizure were evaluated for the use of camphor and eucalyptus essential oils.  Analyzing 350 seizure cases that spanned a four-year period, researchers found that 15.7%, or the seizures of 55 of the patients, may have been induced by the inhalation, ingestion, or topical use of essential oils.

Now, if you're gonna shout at me that this is correlation, not causation -- that the oil use may have been present in the patients, but not caused the seizures -- check out the next bit:

The patients were asked to stop their exposure to these essential oils and the products that contained them.  The researchers then followed up with the patients for a period of 1-3 years to monitor any recurrence of seizures.  All of the non-epileptic patients had been treated with anti-seizure medication, but for only two to four weeks following their first seizure, and none of them had a recurrence of seizures in the entire 1-3 year monitoring period after stopping their exposure to essential oils.  And 94% of the epileptic patients also remained seizure-free during the follow-up period.

Not proof, but certainly mighty suggestive.

A couple of years ago the journal Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine published an article describing a comprehensive overview of essential oils and their connection to seizures.  The results: some essential oils have potential uses as anticonvulsants, but a much longer list have been associated with causing seizures.  Which, if you know any chemistry, is exactly what you'd expect; each essential oil contains a different set of compounds, so each one is going to interact with your body differently, and carry with it its own set of potential benefits and risks.  

But that's not what the people selling essential oils tell you.  Their claim is that they're all beneficial, then wave their hands around when you ask them how they know this.  (This is called the package-deal fallacy, and is exactly the same mistake a lot of anti-GMO people make; they say "GMO = bad" without acknowledging that since clearly all genes don't do the same thing, implanting said genes in other organisms isn't going to have the same effect for each, good or bad.)

And one other thing: if an alternative health practice is getting the suspicious side-eye from Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine -- which I'd expect to be biased toward stuff like this -- it's worth listening to.

So if you're using essential oils, it might be prudent to stop.  Or at least investigate what, if anything, scientists know about the specific essential oil you like to use.  The vast majority of evidence is that other than smelling nice, they're probably not doing much for you, and there is an increasing body of data suggesting that some of them have a real potential for dangerous side-effects.

I'll just end with a quote from the inimitable Tim Minchin, who in his brilliant monologue/poem "Storm," says, "There's a name for alternative medicine that works.  It's called... medicine."

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

When people think of mass extinctions, the one that usually comes to mind first is the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction of 66 million years ago, the one that wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a good many species of other types.  It certainly was massive -- current estimates are that it killed between fifty and sixty percent of the species alive at the time -- but it was far from the biggest.

The largest mass extinction ever took place 251 million years ago, and it destroyed over ninety percent of life on Earth, taking out whole taxa and changing the direction of evolution permanently.  But what could cause a disaster on this scale?

In When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, University of Bristol paleontologist Michael Benton describes an event so catastrophic that it beggars the imagination.  Following researchers to outcrops of rock from the time of the extinction, he looks at what was lost -- trilobites, horn corals, sea scorpions, and blastoids (a starfish relative) vanished completely, but no group was without losses.  Even terrestrial vertebrates, who made it through the bottleneck and proceeded to kind of take over, had losses on the order of seventy percent.

He goes through the possible causes for the extinction, along with the evidence for each, along the way painting a terrifying picture of a world that very nearly became uninhabited.  It's a grim but fascinating story, and Benton's expertise and clarity of writing makes it a brilliant read.

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

Cats and quakes

I ran across two stories yesterday that fall squarely into the "You People Do Realize You Have Bigger Problems To Worry About, Right?" department.

In the first, we have a senior Saudi cleric who has issued a fatwa on people taking selfies with cats.  Well, not just with cats.  Also with wolves.  But since cat selfies are way more common than wolf selfies (more's the pity), I can see why he specifically mentioned the cats.

The subject came up because of a question asked at a talk that Sheikh Saleh Bin Fawzan Al-Fawzan was giving, in which someone asked about a "new trend of taking pictures with cats which has been spreading among people who want to be like westerners."  Al-Fazwan was aghast.

"What?" he asked.  "What do you mean, pictures with cats?"

Because that's evidently an ambiguous phrase, or something.  Maybe it has subtleties in Arabic I don't know about.

So the questioner clarified, and after he got over his outrage, Al-Fazwan gave his declaration.  "Taking pictures is prohibited," he said.  "The cats don't matter here."

Which is kind of odd, given that he was being filmed at the time.  But rationality has never been these people's strong suit.

"Taking pictures is prohibited if not for a necessity," Al-Fazwan went on to say.  "Not with cats, not with dogs, not with wolves, not with anything."

Wipe that smirk off your face, young lady.  Allah does not approve of you and Mr. Whiskers.

So alrighty, then.  Now that we've got that settled, let's turn to another thing a prominent Muslim cleric is worrying about, which is: gay sex.

Of course, gay sex seems to be on these people's minds a lot, and also on the minds of their siblings-under-the-skin the Christian evangelicals.  But this time, the cleric in question, Mallam Abass Mahmud of Ghana, has said that the practice is not only prohibited because it's naughty in Allah's sight (although it certainly is that as well), but because it causes...

... earthquakes.

"Allah gets annoyed when males engage in sexual encounter," Mahmud said in an interview, then went on to add, "Such disgusting encounter causes earthquakes."

As an example, he says that this is why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.  Although as I recall from my reading of Genesis chapter 19, it wasn't an earthquake in that case, but having "fire and brimstone rained down upon them... so that the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace."  But I guess since gays are apparently the most powerful force of nature known, there's no reason why they couldn't also cause a volcanic eruption or something.

On the other hand, if two guys having sex is causing the ground to shake, they must really be enjoying themselves.  I don't know whether to feel scared or jealous.

What crosses my mind with all of this is that there are a few more urgent concerns in the Muslim world than worrying about cat selfies and guys making love.  Human rights, tribalism, poverty, wealth inequity, corruption, terrorism, radical insurgencies, drought.  To name a few.  You have to wonder if focusing their followers on nonsense is simply a way of keeping the hoi polloi from realizing what a horror much of the Middle East has become under the leadership of people like this.

And given the reactions they got -- which, as far as I can tell, were mostly nodding in agreement -- it appears to be working.  So if you go to Saudi Arabia or Ghana, just remember: no kitty selfies or gay sex.  Or, Allah forfend, you and your gay lover having sex then celebrating by taking a photograph of the two of you with your cat.  That'd probably just cause the Earth to explode or fall into the Sun or something.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: Arik Kershenbaum's The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves.  Kershenbaum tackles a question that has fascinated me for quite some time; is evolution constrained?  By which I mean, are the patterns you see in most animals on Earth -- aerobic cellular respiration, bilateral symmetry, a central information processing system/brain, sensory organs sensitive to light, sound, and chemicals, and sexual reproduction -- such strong evolutionary drivers that they are likely to be found in alien organisms?

Kershenbaum, who is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, looks at how our environment (and the changes thereof over geological history) shaped our physiology, and which of those features would likely appear in species on different alien worlds.  In this fantastically entertaining book, he considers what we know about animals on Earth -- including some extremely odd ones -- and uses that to speculate about what we might find when we finally do make contact (or, at the very least, detect signs of life on an exoplanet using our earthbound telescopes).

It's a wonderfully fun read, and if you're fascinated with the idea that we might not be alone in the universe but still think of aliens as the Star Trek-style humans with body paint, rubber noses, and funny accents, this book is for you.  You'll never look at the night sky the same way again.

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