Reconsidering Storegga

Ever heard of the Storegga Slide?

It sounds like some bizarre crossover between Scandinavian folk music and a country line dance, but it isn't.  It's an event that took place 8,150 years ago (plus or minus thirty years or so) and is entirely unlike anything we've seen since.

The simplest description is that it was an underwater landslide.  But this thing was bigger than any landslide you've ever heard of.  It took place in the North Atlantic between Iceland and Norway.  For uncertain reasons -- but probably linked to seismic activity along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge -- a 290-kilometer-long piece of continental shelf collapsed, sending an estimated 3,500 cubic kilometers of debris sliding down the continental slope, where it ultimately piled up on the floor of the deep ocean.

What happened next is kind of mind-blowing, but to get how it worked, we have to take a brief digression into biochemistry.

It's thought that the most numerous organisms on Earth are methanogens, a group of bacteria that are kind of everywhere in anaerobic mud (including the sediments of the oceanic abyss).  As you might guess from the name, these bacteria produce methane as a waste product of their metabolism.  If they're living at the bottom of a shallow lake, the methane is in gaseous form and bubbles up when the mud is disturbed, giving it the name "marsh gas." 

But something more interesting happens in the deep ocean.  At the enormous pressures and low temperatures found in the abyss, the methane forms a weird substance called methane clathrate (also known as frozen methane hydrate).  It's a crystalline slush made of a latticework of water and methane.  If you bring it up to the surface -- which, as you'll see, has to be done carefully -- it looks like snow.

But it's flammable.

[Image of methane clathrate is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the United States Geological Service]

So back to the Storegga Slide, wherein an enormous clump of debris went tumbling down the continental slope... and landed in the clathrate-rich mud of the abyssal plain.

Methane clathrate isn't just flammable; it's unstable.  If anything wallops it hard enough, it breaks up the lattice, and the two compounds separate.  The methane turns back into a gas, the water to a liquid. 

Some of you probably have gone scuba diving, and noticed what happens to the air bubbles when you breathe out.  The bubbles rise (duh) but more interestingly, they expand.  The higher you go in the water column, the lower the pressure, and the more the air in the bubble is free to balloon outward.

A lot.  One liter of methane clathrate produces 169 liters of methane gas (at zero degrees Celsius and one atmosphere of pressure).  So when the Storegga Slide crashed into the methane clathrate on the ocean floor, it caused an unknown (but huge) quantity of methane clathrate to fall apart, making it suddenly increase in volume by a factor of 169 -- triggering an explosion that displaced enough water to generate a megatsunami.

This comes up because of a paper last week in the journal Boreas that looked at the effect of the Storegga Slide on nearby land, and found that the tsunami this generated was on the order of thirty meters high.  For comparison purposes, the devastating tsunami generated by the 2011 Japanese earthquake maxed out at a little under ten meters.

The Storegga Slide tsunami was three times higher than that.  It completely inundated what is now northern Scotland.  It's also likely this is what destroyed Doggerland, a broad, marshy land that once connected Great Britain to northern continental Europe.  Doggerland was already in trouble -- at this point, the climate was warming and the seas were rising -- but the Storegga Slide tsunami would have been catastrophic.  Unlike the rugged terrain of Scotland, Doggerland was a featureless flat plain, and the tsunami rolled across it like a bulldozer.  This severed Great Britain from the rest of Europe -- isolating the Mesolithic people there permanently.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Francis Lima, Doggerland3er en, CC BY-SA 4.0]

All this isn't speculation, by the way.  The fact that Doggerland was once dry land (well, dry-ish) was established when a trawler out in the North Sea east of the Wash brought up a barbed antler point that was dated to about ten thousand years ago.  Since that time, lots of other artifacts have been discovered out there on the ocean floor, including prehistoric tools and the bones of mammoths, lions, and other extinct fauna.

And of course, what this makes me think about is how much more methane clathrate there is out there.  "Methane burps" like this one -- although the word "burp" kind of underplays how enormous these are -- release enough methane into the atmosphere to raise the temperature significantly.  In fact, a massive methane clathrate release is thought to be the cause of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum of 55 million years ago, during which the average temperature climbed by between five and eight degrees Celsius, causing widespread extinction and ecosystem disruption.  That "methane burp" at the PETM is thought to have been a hundred times bigger than the Storegga Event.

Ready for the punchline?  The estimates are that the rate we're pumping carbon into the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning is right around the same as the rate that led to the PETM.

So by all means, governmental leaders, continue to ignore the scientists who have been warning you about this for decades.  Business as usual, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

The universe is a dangerous place.  The Storegga Slide and the resultant tsunami happened suddenly and without warning.  Much more commonly, earthquakes and volcanoes can cause tremendous loss of life and property.

But it's a little terrifying to see that what we're doing to our home right now is equivalent to some of the most violent ecological shifts in the geologic record.

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

I'm in awe of people who are true masters of their craft.  My son is a professional glassblower, making precision scientific equipment, and watching him do what he does has always seemed to me to be a little like watching a magic show.  On a (much) lower level of skill, I'm an amateur potter, and have a great time exploring different kinds of clays, pigments, stains, and glazes used in making functional pottery.

What amazes me, though, is that crafts like these aren't new.  Glassblowing, pottery-making, blacksmithing, and other such endeavors date back to long before we knew anything about the underlying chemistry and physics; the techniques were developed by a long history of trial and error.

This is the subject of Anna Ploszajski's new book Handmade: A Scientist's Search for Meaning Through Making, in which she visits some of the finest craftspeople in the world -- and looks at what each is doing through the lenses of history and science.  It's a fascinating inquiry into the drive to create, and how we've learned to manipulate the materials around us into tools, technology, and fine art.

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

Quantumsquatch

A couple of days ago, I posted a piece claiming that quantum physics (specifically, string theory) proved the existence of the Lovecraftian octopoid god Cthulhu.  Or vice versa, it's a little difficult to tell.  This prompted a loyal reader of Skeptophilia to send me a link to a site along with the message, "Cthulhu isn't the only thing that's going all 'quantum' these days!"  And as proof, he sent me a link he'd run into over at Cryptomundo called...

... "The Quantum Bigfoot Theory."

I wish I were making this up.  Yes, folks, we have a second contender for the most ridiculous claim involving quantum physics.  One Ron Morehead, "an accomplished author with much field experience with the Bigfoot phenomenon," has taken cryptozoology and the whole quantum-vibration nonsense and put it in a blender, and poured out something truly breathtaking.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gnashes30, Pikes peak highway big foot, CC BY-SA 3.0]

He starts out by suggesting that the way us regular old biologists study living creatures may not be the way to approach Bigfoot:

Researchers knock on trees, sound-blast screams and yells, or whoop all over the hillside trying to get the attention of a Bigfoot.  Professional trackers experience track-ways left by these creatures that abruptly end, highly trained dogs will not pick up the scent, or if they do they usually don’t come back.  If what you’re doing doesn’t get the results you want, change what you’re doing…it’s that simple.  Folks who claim to be researchers discount those surreal accounts that don’t fall into their preset paradigm.  Is it time to reach beyond Newtonian rules of classical mechanics, and delve into a science that was established almost 100 years ago by Einstein, Born, Heisenberg and Schrödinger?

Well, there's a reason not to, and that's that the subject of study is Bigfoot, and not Submicroscopicfoot.  Quantum theory explains phenomena that generally are relevant in the world of the very (very) small.  Quantum probabilistic effects get "washed out" on ordinary scales of time and size, just as you can discuss the air pressure inside a balloon without worrying very much about the motion of one specific gas molecule.

So right off, he illustrates that he hasn't the vaguest clue what quantum physics actually is.  But he doesn't let that stop him:

(T)he world of quantum physics has been locked in mathematics.  It’s accepted worldwide by physicists.  We don’t see it, but it’s ever present in our lives.  We get that feeling that something is wrong, the phone rings and Aunt Marybell Sue was in a car wreck.  You have a déjà vu …this has happened before.  Without knowing it, could psychics actually be relating to folks from a quantum level?

Quantum physics is a little weird, but that does not mean "if it's weird, it must be because of quantum physics."  And if Aunt Marybell Sue gets in car wrecks often enough that people are experiencing déjà vu about it, maybe it's time to take away her driver's license.

The real coup de grâce, though, comes at the end of the article. Morehead states:

Is there a race of giants that have inherited the ability to move into the macro-world with quantum physics?...  The remains of giants have been found on earth before.  Most of us know about Greek mythology regarding aliens copulating with human women who then gave birth to a half god-half human, e.g., Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, Hercules, and so on.  They supposedly had great powers and supernatural abilities.  And most of us know of the biblical accounts of the same type of cross-breeding.  If we are to believe there is a core of truth to these stories, could Bigfoot be a diluted remnant of these and have inherited some of their quantum abilities?

It's funny, I've read a great deal of mythology, and I don't recall anything about Zeus being the product of an alien having sex with a human.  You'd think that'd kind of stand out in my memory.  But if we're making shit up, may as well go big or go home, right?

The most inadvertently funny thing about the whole article, though, is when Morehead states that there is no need to defer to posers like Brian Greene and Neil de Grasse Tyson on matters of physics:

You don’t have to be a physicist to understand enough about quantum physics to realize it could very well be our answer to the understanding of how Bigfoot might operate.

Which, in one sentence, sums up the entire woo-woo worldview.  "Don't expect us even to expend the effort of reading the fucking Wikipedia page on quantum physics.  We'll just throw around some terms that are sort of science-y or something, and call it good."

And we won't even go into Morehead's further speculations that Bigfoot might be the descendant of Lucifer and the Nephilim.

So there you have it.  An even dumber claim than Quantum-thulhu.  If there's any crazier woo-woo quantum absurdity out there, like using quantum physics to explain why Tarot cards work, I don't want to know about it.  There's only so much facepalming one person can endure.

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

Astronomer Michio Kaku has a new book out, and he's tackled a doozy of a topic.

One of the thorniest problems in physics over the last hundred years, one which has stymied some of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced, is the quest for finding a Grand Unified Theory.  There are four fundamental forces in nature that we know about; the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity.  The first three can now be modeled by a single set of equations -- called the electroweak theory -- but gravity has staunchly resisted incorporation.

The problem is, the other three forces can be explained by quantum effects, while gravity seems to have little to no effect on the realm of the very small -- and likewise, quantum effects have virtually no impact on the large scales where gravity rules.  Trying to combine the two results in self-contradictions and impossibilities, and even models that seem to eliminate some of the problems -- such as the highly-publicized string theory -- face their own sent of deep issues, such as generating so many possible solutions that an experimental test is practically impossible.

Kaku's new book, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything describes the history and current status of this seemingly intractable problem, and does so with his characteristic flair and humor.  If you're interesting in finding out about the cutting edge of physic lies, in terms that an intelligent layperson can understand, you'll really enjoy Kaku's book -- and come away with a deeper appreciation for how weird the universe actually is.

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

Okay, now I'm scared

There are three reasons I don't tend to put much stock in conspiracy theories.

The first is that humans are seriously bad at keeping their mouths shut.  In fact, I wrote just a couple of months ago about a guy who developed a mathematical model that found the likelihood of a conspiracy staying secret varies inversely with the number of people who are involved in it.  So the idea of a grand global conspiracy that thousands of Illuminati operatives know about, but none of the rest of us do, is almost certainly nonsense.

The second is the more practical aspect.  A lot of conspiracies -- chemtrails, for example -- lack credence because what they're claiming is happening is next to impossible.  Okay, you could probably put some kind of nasty chemical in jet fuel so it gets spewed out in the exhaust contrail, but the fact remains that even so, it'd be an extremely stupid and inefficient way to poison people.  Likewise, the idea that the COVID-19 vaccine was being used as a delivery mechanism to inject people with 5G-capable microchips is indicative of the fact that whoever believes this understands neither microchips nor vaccines.

A third reason is specific to surveillance technology, which is a big part of a lot of alleged conspiracies.  Tracking even a fraction of the population of the world would generate so much data that it would be damn near impossible to analyze.  The idea that some evil agency is monitoring my every move, for example, is actually a little comical:

Evil conspirator #1: What's he doing now?

Evil conspirator #2:  Same as he was doing two hours ago.  He's eating potato chips and watching Doctor Who.

Evil conspirator #1:  The tracking device showed activity a few minutes ago, though.

Evil conspirator #2:  I think he got up to let his dog out.

So watching me 24/7 not only wouldn't generate anything sketchy, it would be the most boring and pointless job ever, sort of like monitoring Donald Trump to see how often he says something that's true.

But a recent development did raise my eyebrows.  A paper this week in Nature Communications describes a new invention -- a digital fiber that can store files and sense our physical activity and vital signs, and that's thin and flexible enough to be woven into cloth.

"Fibers still do what they've always done," said Yoel Fink of MIT, who was the senior author of the paper.  So my research has been to try to see if we can bring the world of devices and the world of function [together] to define a new path for fibers and align them with high-tech devices...  We think of the surface of our bodies as valued real estate, and we may be able to make better use of that real estate.  There's a lot of information that your body is communicating that we don't actually have the means to listen to or intercept.  That inaccessible data includes information about our health and physical activity.  To intercept that, sensing functions can be integrated into fabric."

Okay, that got my attention, but maybe not for the reason you think.  I still don't believe that it is practical to monitor large numbers of people continuously, and most of the enormous quantity of data generated would be useless in any case.  What concerns me here is something more specific -- and that's the potential use of tech like this to monitor people and inform marketers, insurance companies, and so on of our health and physical activities, without our knowledge or permission.

It's already bad enough.  I'm perfectly aware that my phone is listening to me, but (like I said) since my life is kind of boring anyhow, it can listen to its little electronic heart's content.  I will say that I've been startled at times by this, though -- last year around Halloween my wife and I were in the car and were laughing about people dressing their dogs up in costume, and I suggested that we get a Star Wars AT-AT costume for our hound, Lena.  With her long legs, it would be just about perfect.

Then I got home, got on my computer, looked at Facebook, and the first thing I saw was an advertisement for -- I shit you not -- AT-AT costumes for dogs.

I know that my online activity is generating targeted ads for me all the time -- you wouldn't believe how many ads I see for running gear and writing software like Grammarly -- but the dog costume thing definitely gave me the sense of being watched by Big Brother.

So I don't see the evil global conspirators as being the potential problem, here; I'm more suspicious of the evil greedy capitalists.  If our activities are being watched via the clothes we wear, there'll be no way to hide anything from becoming an opportunity for targeted marketing, not to mention our health information no longer being private -- HIPAA be damned.

I guess the solution is to be naked all the time.  Where I live, that'd work in the summer, but being naked in the winter in upstate New York is just asking to freeze off body parts you may actually have a use for.  Plus, the neighbors might object.  In default of that, it seems to be only a matter of time that the intimate details of your life and activities might be monitored by your t-shirt.

With or without your permission.

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

Astronomer Michio Kaku has a new book out, and he's tackled a doozy of a topic.

One of the thorniest problems in physics over the last hundred years, one which has stymied some of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced, is the quest for finding a Grand Unified Theory.  There are four fundamental forces in nature that we know about; the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity.  The first three can now be modeled by a single set of equations -- called the electroweak theory -- but gravity has staunchly resisted incorporation.

The problem is, the other three forces can be explained by quantum effects, while gravity seems to have little to no effect on the realm of the very small -- and likewise, quantum effects have virtually no impact on the large scales where gravity rules.  Trying to combine the two results in self-contradictions and impossibilities, and even models that seem to eliminate some of the problems -- such as the highly-publicized string theory -- face their own sent of deep issues, such as generating so many possible solutions that an experimental test is practically impossible.

Kaku's new book, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything describes the history and current status of this seemingly intractable problem, and does so with his characteristic flair and humor.  If you're interesting in finding out about the cutting edge of physic lies, in terms that an intelligent layperson can understand, you'll really enjoy Kaku's book -- and come away with a deeper appreciation for how weird the universe actually is.

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

Quantum-thluhu

Because the universe has a peculiar sense of humor sometimes, my comment to a friend yesterday that it'd been a good long while since I'd run into a purely insane claim was followed up nearly instantaneously by a different friend sending me a link to an article called "The Dimensionality of Cthulhu."

Yes, Cthulhu, as in the octopoid monster-god in the mythos of H. P. Lovecraft.  The link led to a blog entitled "Lovecraftian Science: Scientific Investigations Into the Cthulhu Mythos."  When saw the title, I thought at first that this was just an example of a scientist having a little bit of fun, rather in the same vein as the hysterically funny fake scientific papers in The Journal of Irreproducible Results, or the way legitimate historians will play around with (and argue over) analysis of the timeline and backstory of The Lord of the Rings.  But upon reading the entire entry, and several other posts besides, at the cost of countless brain cells in my prefrontal cortex which cried out piteously as they dissolved into the amorphous, bubbling nether-slime of the darkest eldritch reaches of time and space, I have come to the conclusion that this dude is actually serious.

[Image is courtesy of the artist, Dominique Signoret, and is licensed under the Creative Commons BenduKiwi, Cthulhu and R'lyeh, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Consider, for example, the following passage:

Based on... references made by HPL, Cthulhu and its spawn are not from our space-time continuum.  This explains how these entities can function beyond the confines of our physical laws, such as its fluid movement and apparent plasma-like structure.  Indeed, further study of Cthulhu and its spawn may provide the evidence needed to support the M-theory.

Yes, M-theory, that impossibly abstruse mathematical construct that attempts to unify all consistent string theoretical models of quantum gravity.  The introduction to the Wikipedia article on the topic, which despite my bachelor's degree in physics represents the limit of my understanding of the subject, says the following:

Investigations of the mathematical structure of M-theory have spawned a number of important theoretical results in physics and mathematics.  More speculatively, M-theory may provide a framework for developing a unified theory of all of the fundamental forces of nature.

"Spawned."  Sounds like a Cthulhu reference already.  So there you are, then.  Seems like q.e.d. to me.

The author of the article apparently agrees.  He goes on to say:

M-theory describes a reality of vibrating strings, point particles, two-dimensional membranes, three-dimensional blobs and other multi-dimensional objects we can not perceive (Hawking and Mlodinow; 2010).  In fact, M-theory allows for many different internal spaces – as many as 10500 different universes, each one with their own particular set of laws of nature.  Is Cthulhu and its spawn from one of these universes?  Did this entity find a means of exuding itself into our universe, bringing with it R’lyeh, with some of its native laws of nature seeping into our universe?

Yes.  He actually cited Stephen Hawking in order to explain why R'lyeh is such a crazy-ass place.

He concludes with a teaser:

From a theoretical standpoint such inter-dimensional travel to other universes may be feasible but the limitation to this is the amount of energy needed to accomplish this.  While this is a huge obstacle to us, maybe Cthulhu and its spawn can harvest the energy from antimatter and travel to other universes – and one of those universes may be ours.  But such travel to other universes with different physical laws of nature may pose some limitations onto these inter-universal travelers.  It is these potential limitations on entities from outside of our space-time continuum we will be discussing in the next article.

So there may be a way to stop these monsters!  Hallelujah!  Alert Henry Armitage!  Wilbur Whateley is going down!

Ahem.  Yeah.  What's funniest about all of this is that Lovecraft himself was a staunch rationalist.  He used to reply to the fans who wrote to him, asking for directions to Dunwich or Innsmouth, "Those places do not exist.  I know that for certain.  You see, I made them up."  This didn't stop people from looking, of course, and it spawned (there's that word again) theories that he was covering up his knowledge to protect himself from retribution by the Abominable Mi-Go, or whatever.  (In fact, I riffed on that very idea in my short story "She Sells Seashells," which, should you choose to read it, I feel duty-bound to point out is fiction as well.)

And apparently there are people who are sold enough on his worldview that they'd like to use it to prove string theory.  Or vice-versa, I'm not sure.  Which is also kind of peculiar, because besides Lovecraft's fictional universe being a pretty bleak place, he was also a raving racist, a feature that pops out with cringeworthy regularity in his stories.  (So while I count him amongst the inspirations for my own writing, I can't really in good conscience read about half of what he wrote.)

Anyhow.  That's our excursion into the Deep Places for today, and I'm off to get some coffee and then to fight my way through the Insanely Gibbering Hordes that populate the Loathsome Monolith-Crowned Citadel where I shall Reside in Nuclear Chaos Until The End Of Time.

Respectively, "my dogs," "my office," and "fucking around on social media."

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

Astronomer Michio Kaku has a new book out, and he's tackled a doozy of a topic.

One of the thorniest problems in physics over the last hundred years, one which has stymied some of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced, is the quest for finding a Grand Unified Theory.  There are four fundamental forces in nature that we know about; the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity.  The first three can now be modeled by a single set of equations -- called the electroweak theory -- but gravity has staunchly resisted incorporation.

The problem is, the other three forces can be explained by quantum effects, while gravity seems to have little to no effect on the realm of the very small -- and likewise, quantum effects have virtually no impact on the large scales where gravity rules.  Trying to combine the two results in self-contradictions and impossibilities, and even models that seem to eliminate some of the problems -- such as the highly-publicized string theory -- face their own sent of deep issues, such as generating so many possible solutions that an experimental test is practically impossible.

Kaku's new book, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything describes the history and current status of this seemingly intractable problem, and does so with his characteristic flair and humor.  If you're interesting in finding out about the cutting edge of physic lies, in terms that an intelligent layperson can understand, you'll really enjoy Kaku's book -- and come away with a deeper appreciation for how weird the universe actually is.

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

The climatic teeter-totter

I remember how blown away I was when I first saw British science historian James Burke's documentary After the Warming, shortly after its release in 1991.  Its intent was ambitious, to say the least; to trace the effects of climate on humanity, from prehistory up to and beyond the point where (in Burke's words) "the climate stopped doing things to us, and we started doing things to it."

What struck me most is something that at this point is much more widely known; that the periodic warming and cooling had dramatic effects on sea level.  Up during warm periods, down during cold ones, enough to open and close land passages from one place to the other.  The most famous is the "Bering Land Bridge" between what are now Siberia and Alaska, but similar pathways existed across what are now the English Channel and the Gulf of Carpentaria (between Australia and New Guinea).

It shouldn't have been surprising, science geek that I am, but I'd honestly never thought that much about it.  The idea that climatic shifts affected history in such a profound way was an eye-opener.  Take, for example, the Little Ice Age, that started in the mid-fourteenth century and continued into the eighteenth, which had dramatic effects on the climate of northern Europe.  Prior to this, it'd been warm enough that shipping lanes to places like Iceland, Greenland, and Svalbard were open all year long; very quickly, they became impassible ice in the winter, and plagued by devastating storms in the summer.  All of this shut down what had been a thriving avenue for commerce and colonization.  The Icelanders survived okay; but the Greenlanders weren't so lucky.  All of the Viking era Greenland settlements were frozen out by 1400.

The idea was such a poignant one to me -- thinking about what it would be like to be one of the last settlers left alive, knowing you were stranded -- that it inspired me to write a poem called "Greenland Colony 1375," which is not only one of the very few poems I've ever written, but is the only piece of writing I've ever won a prize for -- second place in the 1999 Writers' Journal national poetry contest, an honor that still kid of blows me away when I think about it.

The reason all this comes up is a new study that appeared this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science suggesting that major impacts on the human species have been happening for a lot longer than even Burke's documentary covered.  A climatic teeter-totter called the "Wake Circulation" caused a back-and-forth swing of wet and dry from the east to the west part of the African continent, much as the monsoons do on a yearly basis.

But this oscillation has a period of 100,000 years.

That's enough time for an entire ecosystem to form.  Then when the climate changes, what were great adaptations for that habitat suddenly aren't any more, and either you move or you die.  But one other possibility is to live in an ecotone -- the transitional area between two climatic regions.  Since the rainfall didn't disappear from the continent as a whole, just shifted from one side to the other, the ecotone regions didn't move much.  The organisms that made it through the climate shifts tended to be ones that lived in ecotones.

Guess where humanity evolved?

"This alternation between dry and wet periods appeared to have governed the dispersion and evolution of vegetation as well as mammals in eastern and western Africa," said Stefanie Kaboth-Bahr of the University of Potsdam, who led the study.  "The resultant environmental patchwork was likely to have been a critical component of human evolution and early demography as well."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, Serengeti-African-Elephants, CC BY-SA 3.0]

"We see the archaeological signatures of early members of our species all across Africa," said Eleanor Scerri, of the Max Planck Institute, who co-authored the study.  "Innovations come and go and are often re-invented, suggesting that our deep population history saw a constant saw-tooth like pattern of local population growth and collapse.  Ecotonal regions may have provided areas for longer term population continuity, ensuring that the larger human population kept going, even if local populations often went extinct."

So we may owe our success -- and possibly even our existence -- to our evolving in an ecological borderland, and surviving while other, more specialized, species became extinct when their biome's climate shifted.  

All of this, of course, makes me wonder what the long-term outcome of our current idiotic, la-la-la-la-not-listening climate policy will be.  Will our long-standing flexibility save us -- or will we be, like the tragic last settlers in Greenland, done in by our own short-sightedness?

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

Astronomer Michio Kaku has a new book out, and he's tackled a doozy of a topic.

One of the thorniest problems in physics over the last hundred years, one which has stymied some of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced, is the quest for finding a Grand Unified Theory.  There are four fundamental forces in nature that we know about; the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity.  The first three can now be modeled by a single set of equations -- called the electroweak theory -- but gravity has staunchly resisted incorporation.

The problem is, the other three forces can be explained by quantum effects, while gravity seems to have little to no effect on the realm of the very small -- and likewise, quantum effects have virtually no impact on the large scales where gravity rules.  Trying to combine the two results in self-contradictions and impossibilities, and even models that seem to eliminate some of the problems -- such as the highly-publicized string theory -- face their own sent of deep issues, such as generating so many possible solutions that an experimental test is practically impossible.

Kaku's new book, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything describes the history and current status of this seemingly intractable problem, and does so with his characteristic flair and humor.  If you're interesting in finding out about the cutting edge of physic lies, in terms that an intelligent layperson can understand, you'll really enjoy Kaku's book -- and come away with a deeper appreciation for how weird the universe actually is.

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

The cosmic spiderweb

I've posted here before about dark matter, the mysterious substance which -- if current models are even close to correct -- makes up 27% of the matter/energy density of the universe.  Even more mysterious is dark energy, which is thought to be responsible for the acceleration of the universe's expansion; that's another 68% percent.

Yes, the implication is what it sounds like.  Ordinary matter -- like you, me, the Earth, all the planets and stars and galaxies -- accounts for a measly 5% of the matter/energy in the universe.

Most frustrating of all is how little we know for sure about dark matter and dark energy.  To date, every experiment to detect a particle of either one has failed.  In fact, we don't even know if either one is made of particles.  (If not, what it might be made of is an open question.)  Some scientists have compared it to the luminiferous aether, which according to nineteenth century physicists was the substance through which light waves allegedly propagated.  Every wave they knew about traveled in some sort of medium; water waves, sound waves in the air, vibrations in a fiddle string.  That light might travel in a vacuum -- that it might not need a medium -- was incomprehensible.

In the words of one of my college physics professors: "If light waves don't need a medium, then what, exactly, is waving?"

It took Einstein to come up with the answer to this, and in the process proved that the luminiferous aether didn't exist.  The result revolutionized physics.  I've heard physicists say that dark matter and dark energy are this century's aether -- artifacts of measurement created by a fundamental piece of our model being misunderstood, missing, or flat-out wrong.

Be that as it may, if dark matter is an error, it's a pretty persistent one.  We haven't been able to detect it other than by its gravitational signature, but that signature is a bold flourish.  The discovery of it, by astronomer Vera Rubin and others, came about because measurements of the spin rate of galaxies indicated there had to be some extra mass holding them together; at the measured rotation rates, they should fly apart.  That extra mass turned out to be huge.  The best estimates were that there had to be over five times as much of this invisible matter as there was ordinary matter -- and that estimate held for every galaxy studied, so it wasn't a local phenomenon.

A paper last week in The Astrophysical Journal adds a new layer to dark matter not being local.  Astrophysicists Sungwook Hong, Donghui Jeong, Ho Seong Hwang, and Juhan Kim, of Pennsylvania State University, have created the most detailed map yet of the dark matter in the universe, using the known motion of seventeen thousand galaxies.  Strangest of all is that whatever this weird, invisible -- but extremely common -- substance is, it's not distributed uniformly.

Not only are there lumps of it within galaxies, holding them together, there are long filaments of dark matter between them -- threading the galaxies together like dewdrops clinging to an enormous spiderweb.

Another feature that makes the spiderweb analogy even more apt is that there are huge voids, nearly devoid of... just about everything, including dark matter.  One of them, the Boötes Void, is 330 million light years across.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons El C at English Wikipedia., Boovoid, CC BY-SA 2.5]

To put that number in some perspective, if you took the Sun and the rest of the Solar System and put it in the middle of the Boötes Void, the night sky would be completely dark.  No stars at all.  In fact, it wouldn't have been until the 1960s that we would have had telescopes powerful enough to see the nearest galaxies; until that time, we would have thought the Sun was the only star in the entire universe.

So whatever dark matter is, we're gradually closing in on it.  We know how it affects ordinary matter gravitationally, and now we have a map of how it's distributed in the universe.  Maybe soon we'll have an idea of what it actually is.

Of course, then we still have dark energy to tackle, and there's over twice as much of that stuff as there is dark matter.  So, as is usual in science, we're not going to run out of mysteries to investigate any time soon.

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

Astronomer Michio Kaku has a new book out, and he's tackled a doozy of a topic.

One of the thorniest problems in physics over the last hundred years, one which has stymied some of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced, is the quest for finding a Grand Unified Theory.  There are four fundamental forces in nature that we know about; the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity.  The first three can now be modeled by a single set of equations -- called the electroweak theory -- but gravity has staunchly resisted incorporation.

The problem is, the other three forces can be explained by quantum effects, while gravity seems to have little to no effect on the realm of the very small -- and likewise, quantum effects have virtually no impact on the large scales where gravity rules.  Trying to combine the two results in self-contradictions and impossibilities, and even models that seem to eliminate some of the problems -- such as the highly-publicized string theory -- face their own sent of deep issues, such as generating so many possible solutions that an experimental test is practically impossible.

Kaku's new book, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything describes the history and current status of this seemingly intractable problem, and does so with his characteristic flair and humor.  If you're interesting in finding out about the cutting edge of physic lies, in terms that an intelligent layperson can understand, you'll really enjoy Kaku's book -- and come away with a deeper appreciation for how weird the universe actually is.

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

Wishing wells and chicken curses

Combatting magical thinking can be an uphill battle, sometimes.

Even as a diehard skeptic, I get where it comes from.  It can sometimes be an amazingly short trip from "I wish the world worked this way" to believing the world does work that way.  Besides wishful thinking, superstitions can sometimes arise from correlation/causation errors; the classic example is going to watch your favorite sports team while wearing a particular shirt, and your team wins, so you decide the shirt's a lucky charm and proceed to wear it to subsequent games.

This reminds me of one of my college philosophy teachers, who recounted to us something that happened the previous evening.  There'd been a big thunderstorm, and the power went out, and his three-year-old daughter got scared and said, "Daddy, make the lights come back on!"

So he stood up and said, in a thunderous voice, "LET THERE BE... LIGHT."

And the power came back on.

His daughter really respected him after that.  But I bet she started getting suspicious the next time there was a power outage, and his magical ability suddenly didn't work so well any more.

Once a superstitious belief is in place, it can be remarkably hard to eradicate.  You'd think that, like my professor's daughter, once you had some experience disconfirming your belief, you'd go, "Oh, okay, I guess my lucky shirt doesn't work after all."  But we've got a number of things going against us.  Confirmation bias -- we tend to give more weight to evidence that supports what we already believed to be true.  The sunk-cost fallacy -- when we've already put a lot of energy and time into supporting a claim, we're very reluctant to admit we were wrong and it was all a waste.

Another, and weirder, reason superstitions can get cemented into place is the peculiar (but substantiated) nocebo effect.  As you might guess, the nocebo effect is kind of an anti-placebo effect; nocebo is Latin for "I will harm" (placebo means "I will please").  When somebody believes that some magical action will cause them injury, they can sometimes sustain real harm -- apparently the expectation of harm manifests as actual, measurable symptoms.  (This has sometimes been used to explain cases where "voodoo curses" have resulted in the targets becoming ill.)

The reason this comes up is because of two recent discoveries of artifacts for delivering curses in ancient Greece.  The ancient Greeks were a fascinating mix of science and superstition -- but, as I mentioned above, that seems to be part of the human condition.  When we think of them, it's usually either in the context of all the scientific inquiries and deep thought by people like Aristarchus, Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Aristotle, or because they had gods and sub-gods and sub-sub-gods in charge of damn near everything.  

This latter tendency probably explains the 2,500 year old tablets that were recovered from a well in Athens, each one containing a detailed curse targeting a specific person.  The people who wrote each one didn't sign them; apparently, cursing someone and then signing it, "cordially yours, Kenokephalos" was considered a stupid move that was just asking for retribution.

The tablets, which were made of lead, were found by a team led by Jutta Stroszeck, director of the Kerameikos excavation on behalf of the German Archaeological Institute in Athens.  They were found in a well supplying a bath-house near the Dipylon -- the city gate near the classical Athenian Academy.

One of the curse tablets discovered by Stroszeck et al.

Apparently throwing the curses into the well started happening because the previous technique was to put them in the coffins of recently-deceased persons, with the intent that the dead guy's spirit would bring the curse-tablet down to the Underworld and say to Hades, "Hey, bro, get a load of this," and Hades would obligingly smite the recipient.  But around that time Athens tried to put the kibosh on people practicing the Black Arts, and made it illegal to put curses in coffins, so the would-be hexers started to throw them into wells instead.

You have to wonder if any ill effects their targets suffered upon drinking the well water came not from the curse, but from lead poisoning.

The second discovery, which was described in the journal Hesperia last week, is even more gruesome; the remains of a dead chicken that had been chopped up, its beak tied shut, then put in a clay vessel pierced with a nail.  It also contained a coin, presumably to pay whatever evil spirit found the cursed Chicken-o-Gram for carrying out the intent of the spell, which was probably to render the target unable to talk.  The paper describes a similar spell launched against one Libanos, a fourth-century C. E. Greek orator:

To his despair, Libanos had lost the ability to speak before an audience.  He could neither read nor write; he was plagued by severe headaches, bodily pain, and gout.  Libanos's condition improved upon the discovery and removal of a mutilated, dismembered chameleon, which had been hidden in his classroom -- a place where he spent much time.  The animal's head was bent between its hind legs, one of its front limbs cut off, and the other was stuffed into its mouth.

The weird mutilations and twisted pose had an obvious aim; to visit upon Libanos painful symptoms and an inability to speak.  What I suspect, though, is that the problems he had were purely natural in origin, and the discovery and removal of the curse acted as a placebo -- he thought, "Okay, now I should get better!", and did.

Why exactly the nocebo and placebo effects work isn't known; it may have to do with the production or inhibition (respectively) of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which are known to have long-term bad effects if levels stay high.  But honestly, that's just a guess.

Although I still think it's more likely than damage delivered directly by cursed chickens.

In any case, the discoveries are fascinating, and illustrate that the magical thinking we're still fighting today has a long genealogy.  Wouldn't it be nice if logical and science came as readily?

You have to wonder what the human race would have accomplished by now if we had an inborn tendency toward evidence-based thinking rather than believing in evil curses and wishing wells.

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

Astronomer Michio Kaku has a new book out, and he's tackled a doozy of a topic.

One of the thorniest problems in physics over the last hundred years, one which has stymied some of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced, is the quest for finding a Grand Unified Theory.  There are four fundamental forces in nature that we know about; the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity.  The first three can now be modeled by a single set of equations -- called the electroweak theory -- but gravity has staunchly resisted incorporation.

The problem is, the other three forces can be explained by quantum effects, while gravity seems to have little to no effect on the realm of the very small -- and likewise, quantum effects have virtually no impact on the large scales where gravity rules.  Trying to combine the two results in self-contradictions and impossibilities, and even models that seem to eliminate some of the problems -- such as the highly-publicized string theory -- face their own sent of deep issues, such as generating so many possible solutions that an experimental test is practically impossible.

Kaku's new book, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything describes the history and current status of this seemingly intractable problem, and does so with his characteristic flair and humor.  If you're interesting in finding out about the cutting edge of physic lies, in terms that an intelligent layperson can understand, you'll really enjoy Kaku's book -- and come away with a deeper appreciation for how weird the universe actually is.

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