Goldilocks next door

Springboarding off yesterday's post, about how easy it is to form organic compounds abiotically, today we have: our nearest neighbor might be a decent candidate for the search for extraterrestrial life.

At only 4.24 light years away, Proxima Centauri is the closest star to our own Sun.  It's captured the imagination ever since it was discovered how close it is; if you'll recall, the intrepid Robinson family of Lost in Space was heading toward Alpha Centauri, the brightest star in this triple-star system, which is a little father away (4.37 light years) but still more or less right next door, as these things go.

It was discovered in 2016 that Proxima Centauri has a planet in orbit around it -- and more exciting still, it's only a little larger than Earth (1.17 times Earth's mass, to be precise), and is in the star's "Goldilocks zone," where water can exist in liquid form.  The discovery of this exoplanet (Proxima Centauri b) was followed in 2020 by the discovery of Proxima Centauri c, thought to be a "mini-Neptune" at seven times Earth's mass, so probably not habitable by life as we know it.

And now, a paper in Nature has presented research indicating that Proxima Centauri has a third exoplanet -- somewhere between a quarter and three-quarters of the Earth's mass, and right in the middle of the Goldilocks zone as well.

"It is fascinating to know that our Sun’s nearest stellar neighbor is the host to three small planets," said Elisa Quintana, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who co-authored the paper.  "Their proximity make this a prime system for further study, to understand their nature and how they likely formed."

The newly-discovered planet was detected by observing shifts in the light spectrum emitted by the star as the planet's gravitational field interacted with it -- shifts in wavelength as little as 10 ^-5 ångströms, or one ten-thousandth the diameter of a hydrogen atom.  The device that accomplished this is the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO -- because you can't have an astronomical device without a clever acronym) at the European Southern Observatory in Cerro Paranal, Chile.  

"It’s showing that the nearest star probably has a very rich planetary system," said co-author Guillem Anglada-Escudé, of the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona.  "It always has a little bit of mystique, being the closest one."

What this brings home to me is how incredibly common planets in the Goldilocks zone must be.  It's estimated that around two percent of spectral class F, G, and K stars -- the ones most like the Sun -- have planets in the habitable zone.  If this estimate is accurate -- and if anything, most astrophysicists think it's on the conservative side -- that means there's five hundred million habitable planets in the Milky Way alone.

Of course, "habitable" comes with several caveats.  Average temperature and proximity to the host star isn't the only thing that determines if a place is actually habitable.  Remember, for example, that Venus is technically in the Goldilocks zone, but because of its atmospheric composition it has a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead, and an atmosphere made mostly of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid.  Being at the right distance to theoretically have liquid water doesn't mean it actually does.  Besides atmospheric composition, other things that could interfere with a planet having a clement climate are the eccentricity of the orbit (high eccentricity would result in wild temperature fluctuations between summer and winter), the planet being tidally locked (the same side always facing the star), and how stable the star itself is.  Some stars are prone to stellar storms that make the ones our Sun has seem like gentle breezes, and would irradiate the surface of any planets orbiting them in such a way as to damage or destroy anything unlucky enough to be exposed.

But still -- come back to the "life as we know it" part.  Yeah, a tidally-locked planet that gets fried by stellar storms would be uninhabitable for us, but perhaps there are life forms that evolved to avoid the dangers.  As I pointed out yesterday, the oxygen we depend on is actually a highly reactive toxin -- we use it to make our cellular respiration reactions highly efficient, but it's also destructive to tissues unless you have ways to mitigate the damage.  (Recall that burning is just rapid oxidation.)  My hunch -- and it is just a hunch -- is that just as we find life even in the most inhospitable places on Earth, it'll be pretty ubiquitous out in space.

After all, remember what we learned from Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park:

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

People made fun of Donald Rumsfeld for his statement that there are "known unknowns" -- things we know we don't know -- but a far larger number of "unknown unknowns," which are all the things we aren't even aware that we don't know.

While he certainly could have phrased it a little more clearly, and understand that I'm not in any way defending Donald Rumsfeld's other actions and statements, he certainly was right in this case.  It's profoundly humbling to find out how much we don't know, even about subjects about which we consider ourselves experts.  One of the most important things we need to do is to keep in mind not only that we might have things wrong, and that additional evidence may completely overturn what we thought we knew -- and more, that there are some things so far out of our ken that we may not even know they exist.

These ideas -- the perimeter of human knowledge, and the importance of being able to learn, relearn, change directions, and accept new information -- are the topic of psychologist Adam Grant's book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know.  In it, he explores not only how we are all riding around with blinders on, but how to take steps toward removing them, starting with not surrounding yourself with an echo chamber of like-minded people who might not even recognize that they have things wrong.  We should hold our own beliefs up to the light of scrutiny.  As Grant puts it, we should approach issues like scientists looking for the truth, not like a campaigning politician trying to convince an audience.

It's a book that challenges us to move past our stance of "clearly I'm right about this" to the more reasoned approach of "let me see if the evidence supports this."  In this era of media spin, fake news, and propaganda, it's a critical message -- and Think Again should be on everyone's to-read list.

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

The recipe for life

Back in my teaching days, I was all too aware of how hard it was to generate any kind of enthusiasm for the details of biology in a bunch of teenagers.  But there were a few guaranteed oh-wow moments -- and one that I always introduced by saying, "If this doesn't blow your mind, you're not paying attention."

What I was referring to was the Miller-Urey experiment.  This phenomenal piece of research was an attempt to see if it was possible to create organic compounds abiotically -- with clear implications for the origins of life.  Back in the early twentieth century, when people started to consider seriously the possibility that life started on Earth without the intervention of a deity, the obvious question was, "How?"  So they created apparatus to take collections of inorganic compounds surmised to be abundant on the early Earth, subject them to various energy sources, and waited to see what happened.

What happened was that they basically created smog and dirty water.  No organic compounds.  In 1922, Soviet biochemist Alexander Oparin suggested that the problem might be that they were starting with the assumption that the Earth's atmosphere hadn't changed much -- and looking at (then) new information about the atmosphere of Jupiter, he suggested that perhaps, the early Earth's atmosphere had no free oxygen.  In chemistry terms, it was a reducing atmosphere.  Oxygen, after all, is a highly reactive substance, good at tearing apart organic molecules.  (There's decent evidence that the pathways of aerobic cellular respiration originally evolved as a way of detoxifying oxygen, and only secondarily gained a use at increasing the efficiency of releasing the energy in food molecules.)

It wasn't until thirty years later that anyone tested Oparin's hunch.  Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, of the University of Chicago, created an apparatus made of sealed, interconnected glass globes, and filled them with their best guess at the gases present in the atmosphere of the early Earth -- carbon monoxide, methane, hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, water vapor, various nitrogen oxides, hydrogen cyanide (HCN), and so on.  No free (diatomic) oxygen.  They then introduced an energy source -- essentially, artificial lightning -- and sat back to wait.

No one expected fast results.  After all, the Earth had millions of years to generate enough organic compounds to (presumably) self-assemble into the earliest cells.  No one was more shocked than Miller and Urey when they came in the next day to find that the water in their apparatus had turned blood red.  Three days later, it was black, like crude oil.  At that point, they couldn't contain their curiosity, and opened it up to see what was there.

All twenty amino acids, plus several amino acids not typically found in living things on Earth.  Simple sugars.  Fatty acids.  Glycerol.  DNA and RNA nucleotides.  Basically, all the building blocks it takes to make a living organism.

In three days.

A scale model of the Miller-Urey apparatus, made for me by my son, who is a professional scientific glassblower

This glop, now nicknamed the "primordial soup," is thought to have filled the early oceans.  Imagine it -- you're standing on the shore of the Precambrian sea (wearing a breathing apparatus, of course).  On land is absolutely nothing alive -- a continent full of nothing but rock and sand.  In front of you is an ocean that appears to be composed of thick, dark oil.

It'd be hard to convince yourself this was actually Earth.

Since then, scientists have re-run the experiment hundreds of times, checking to see if perhaps Miller and Urey had just happened by luck on the exact right recipe, but it turns out this experiment is remarkably insensitive to initial conditions.  As long as you have three things -- (1) the right inorganic building blocks, (2) a source of energy, and (3) no free oxygen -- you can make as much of this rather unappealing soup as you want.

So, it turns out, generating biochemicals is a piece of cake.  And a piece of research at Friedrich Schiller University and the Max Planck Institute have shown that it's even easier than that -- the reactions that create amino acids can happen out in space.

"Water plays an important role in the conventional way in which peptides are created," said Serge Krasnokutski, who co-authored the paper.  "Our quantum chemical calculations have now shown that the amino acid glycine can be formed through a chemical precursor – called an amino ketene – combining with a water molecule.  Put simply: in this case, water must be added for the first reaction step, and water must be removed for the second...  [So] instead of taking the chemical detour in which amino acids are formed, we wanted to find out whether amino ketene molecules could not be formed instead and combine directly to form peptides.  And we did this under the conditions that prevail in cosmic molecular clouds, that is to say on dust particles in a vacuum, where the corresponding chemicals are present in abundance: carbon, ammonia, and carbon monoxide."

The more we look into this, the simpler it seems to be to generate the chemicals of life -- further elucidating how the first organisms formed on Earth, and (even more excitingly) suggesting that life might be common in the cosmos.  In fact, it may not even take an Earth-like planet to be a home for life; as long as a planet is in the "Goldilocks zone" (the distance from its parent star where water can exist in liquid form), getting from there to an organic-compound-rich environment may not be much of a hurdle.

That's still a long way from intelligent life, of course; chances are, the planets with extraterrestrial life mostly have much simpler organisms.  But how exciting is that?  Setting foot on a planet covered with life -- none of which has any common ancestry with terrestrial organisms.

I can think of very little that would be more thrilling than that.

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

People made fun of Donald Rumsfeld for his statement that there are "known unknowns" -- things we know we don't know -- but a far larger number of "unknown unknowns," which are all the things we aren't even aware that we don't know.

While he certainly could have phrased it a little more clearly, and understand that I'm not in any way defending Donald Rumsfeld's other actions and statements, he certainly was right in this case.  It's profoundly humbling to find out how much we don't know, even about subjects about which we consider ourselves experts.  One of the most important things we need to do is to keep in mind not only that we might have things wrong, and that additional evidence may completely overturn what we thought we knew -- and more, that there are some things so far out of our ken that we may not even know they exist.

These ideas -- the perimeter of human knowledge, and the importance of being able to learn, relearn, change directions, and accept new information -- are the topic of psychologist Adam Grant's book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know.  In it, he explores not only how we are all riding around with blinders on, but how to take steps toward removing them, starting with not surrounding yourself with an echo chamber of like-minded people who might not even recognize that they have things wrong.  We should hold our own beliefs up to the light of scrutiny.  As Grant puts it, we should approach issues like scientists looking for the truth, not like a campaigning politician trying to convince an audience.

It's a book that challenges us to move past our stance of "clearly I'm right about this" to the more reasoned approach of "let me see if the evidence supports this."  In this era of media spin, fake news, and propaganda, it's a critical message -- and Think Again should be on everyone's to-read list.

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

Rehabilitating our cousins

The Neanderthals have gotten an undeservedly bad reputation.

"Neanderthal" has become an insult for someone perceived as dumb, crude, vulgar, lacking in any sort of refinement.  This perception wasn't helped any by Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequels, where the "Clan" (the Neanderthals) are primitive, ugly, brutal people (personified by the violent and cruel Broud), contrasted to the beautiful, heroic, sophisticated Cro Magnons (such as virile, handsome, blue-eyed Jondalar, who is portrayed basically as a prehistoric Liam Hemsworth, only sexier).  The truth is way more complex than that; they certainly weren't unintelligent, and in fact, the most recent Neanderthals had an average brain size larger than a modern human's.  (I'm aware that brain size doesn't necessarily correlate with higher intelligence, but the depiction of them as tiny-brained primitives is almost certainly false.)

They had culture; the Mousterian tool complex, with its beautifully fluted stone arrowhead points, was Neanderthal in origin.  They were builders, weavers, jewelry-makers, and knew the use of medicinal plants.  There's evidence that they made music -- the Divje Babe flute, from 43,000 years ago, was made by Neanderthals from a bear femur, was probably made by Neanderthals.  The structure of the Neanderthal hyoid bone, and the presence of the FoxP2 gene, strongly suggests that they had the capacity for language, although cognitive scientist Philip Lieberman suggests that their mouth morphology would have made it difficult or impossible to articulate nasal sounds and the phonemes /a/, /i/, /u/, /ɔ/, /g/, and /k/, so any language they had probably wasn't as rich phonetically as ours are.  (Although that, too, is an overgeneralization; as I pointed out in a post only a month ago, the phonemic inventory of modern languages varies all over the place, with some only having a dozen or so distinct sounds.)

Another thing that people tend to get wrong is that the Neanderthals were displaced by modern Homo sapiens, and eventually driven to extinction, because we were smarter, faster, and more sophisticated.  Which is not only false, it carries that hint of self-congratulation that should be an immediate tipoff that there's more to it.  It's undeniable that our Neanderthal cousins did diminish and eventually disappear something on the order of forty thousand years ago, but what caused it is uncertain at best.  Other hypotheses regarding why they declined are climatic shifts, disease, and loss of food sources... and, most interestingly, that they interbred with, and were eventually subsumed by, modern humans.  Genetic analysis shows that a great many of us -- including most people of European ancestry -- contain genetic markers indicating Neanderthal ancestry.  Current estimates are that western Europeans have the highest percentage of Neanderthal DNA (at around four percent), while some groups, most notably sub-Saharan Africans, have almost none.

My own DNA apparently has 284 distinct Neanderthal markers, putting me in the sixtieth percentile.  So at least I'm above average in something.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Neanderthal-Museum, Mettmann, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis-Mr. N, CC BY-SA 4.0]

What brings this up is some new research indicating that the overlap between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans may have lasted longer than we thought, and completely upends the picture of hordes of highly-advanced humans (led, of course, by Liam Hemsworth) sweeping over and destroying the primitive knuckle-dragging Neanderthal cave-dwellers.  Archaeologists working in the cave complex Grotte Mandrin, in the Rhône Valley of France, came upon a child's tooth and some stone tools (both of a distinctly modern sort), that date from 54,000 years ago -- a good twelve thousand years earlier than previous estimates.

"It wasn't an overnight takeover by modern humans," said Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum of London, who co-authored the paper.  "Sometimes Neanderthals had the advantage, sometimes modern humans had the advantage, so it was more finely balanced...  We have this ebb and flow.  The modern humans appear briefly, then there's a gap where maybe the climate just finished them off and then the Neanderthals come back again..  [W]e don't know the full story yet.  But with more data and with more DNA, more discoveries, we will get closer to the truth about what really happened at the end of the Neanderthal era."

Human history (and prehistory) are a lot more complex than you'd think on first glance, and it bears keeping in mind that usually when we build up a picture of something that happened in the past, we're working on (very) incomplete data filled in with guesses and surmises.  If a time machine is ever invented, and we can go back and look for ourselves, I think we'd be astonished at how much we missed -- or got flat wrong.

It reminds me of the famous quote by H. L. Mencken -- "For every problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple... and wrong."

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

People made fun of Donald Rumsfeld for his statement that there are "known unknowns" -- things we know we don't know -- but a far larger number of "unknown unknowns," which are all the things we aren't even aware that we don't know.

While he certainly could have phrased it a little more clearly, and understand that I'm not in any way defending Donald Rumsfeld's other actions and statements, he certainly was right in this case.  It's profoundly humbling to find out how much we don't know, even about subjects about which we consider ourselves experts.  One of the most important things we need to do is to keep in mind not only that we might have things wrong, and that additional evidence may completely overturn what we thought we knew -- and more, that there are some things so far out of our ken that we may not even know they exist.

These ideas -- the perimeter of human knowledge, and the importance of being able to learn, relearn, change directions, and accept new information -- are the topic of psychologist Adam Grant's book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know.  In it, he explores not only how we are all riding around with blinders on, but how to take steps toward removing them, starting with not surrounding yourself with an echo chamber of like-minded people who might not even recognize that they have things wrong.  We should hold our own beliefs up to the light of scrutiny.  As Grant puts it, we should approach issues like scientists looking for the truth, not like a campaigning politician trying to convince an audience.

It's a book that challenges us to move past our stance of "clearly I'm right about this" to the more reasoned approach of "let me see if the evidence supports this."  In this era of media spin, fake news, and propaganda, it's a critical message -- and Think Again should be on everyone's to-read list.

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

Artifishal

In the wonderful Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Tapestry," Captain Picard's life is in danger because an accident damaged his artificial heart.  He'd received the biomechanical prosthesis decades earlier, because his original heart was irreparably damaged in a fight he got in when he was a young, cocky student at Starfleet Academy.  The inimitable Q offers Picard a choice -- to go back in time and change the circumstances that led to the fight -- meaning he'd have his own original heart, and the accident wouldn't lead to his death.  But, as such stories usually go, Picard finds out that rectifying one mistake doesn't necessarily lead to his life having a better trajectory -- and that perhaps a shorter, richer life, facing risks head-on, is better than one that lasts longer because of always playing it safe.

The replacement of the human heart by a machine, or by a biological and mechanical composite, is still in its earliest stages, and even a heart transplant from a compatible donor is iffy (although admittedly better than the alternative).  A study in 2013 found that the survival rate for heart recipients past twenty years post-surgery was about 26%, although that number has been rising steadily as the tissue matching protocols and the management of complications improve.  The hitch for heart recipients, of course, is that they have to wait for a matched donor to die; and not only that, to die in such a way that the heart itself isn't too damaged to transplant.

But what if someone who needed a heart could have one grown from the person's own cells?

That's where a fascinating bit of research out of the University of Harvard is pointing.  In a paper published in Science this week, a team led by Keel Yong Lee showed proof-of concept -- by creating an artificial fish made of human heart stem cells.

The "biohybrid" was made by creating a finely-grooved, two-sided scaffolding on which were laid cardiac cells.  The cells aligned themselves with the grooves, growing into a pair of parallel sheets.  Grafted onto this was an autonomous pacing node -- a little like the heart's pacemaker -- which stimulated rhythmic contractions on opposite sides, allowing the "fish" to swim.  Best of all, as the cells matured, the fish got better and better at swimming, eventually reaching speeds and maneuverability comparable to a zebrafish, the species the biohybrid was modeled on.

"Our ultimate goal is to build an artificial heart to replace a malformed heart in a child," said Kit Parker, who was senior author of the paper, in a press release.  "Most of the work in building heart tissue or hearts, including some work we have done, is focused on replicating the anatomical features or replicating the simple beating of the heart in the engineered tissues.  But here, we are drawing design inspiration from the biophysics of the heart, which is harder to do.  Now, rather than using heart imaging as a blueprint, we are identifying the key biophysical principles that make the heart work, using them as design criteria, and replicating them in a system, a living, swimming fish, where it is much easier to see if we are successful."

We are nearing the point where faulty organs in our bodies can simply be replaced by biomechanical devices, not so far away from Jean-Luc Picard's heart.  This would obviate the nerve-wracking trauma of waiting an indefinite amount of time for a donor, and also the potential for tissue compatibility issues, as the organ would be built out of your own cells.

We're still a ways out, though.  The Lee et al. research demonstrates that it's possible to build functional, coordinated contractile tissue -- the first step in generating a working heart -- and, as we've seen so many times before, it's often an amazingly short time between showing that something is theoretically possible and its becoming a reality.

So once again, Star Trek has shown itself to be prescient.  I hope this keeps happening -- communicators (the ones in the original series even looked like flip-phones), voice-activated software, translation programs, and videoconferincing all appeared on Star Trek long before they became household items.  Now, I wish the scientists would get to work on transporters, replicators, and the holodeck.  Because those would be all kinds of cool, especially the holodeck, although I'd stand a significant chance of finding a program I liked better than reality and disappearing permanently.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week combines cutting-edge astrophysics and cosmology with razor-sharp social commentary, challenging our knowledge of science and the edifice of scientific research itself: Chanda Prescod-Weinsten's The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.

Prescod-Weinsten is a groundbreaker; she's a theoretical cosmologist, and the first Black woman to achieve a tenure-track position in the field (at the University of New Hampshire).  Her book -- indeed, her whole career -- is born from a deep love of the mysteries of the night sky, but along the way she has had to get past roadblocks that were set in front of her based only on her gender and race.  The Disordered Cosmos is both a tribute to the science she loves and a challenge to the establishment to do better -- to face head on the centuries-long horrible waste of talent and energy of anyone not a straight White male.

It's a powerful book, and should be on the to-read list for anyone interested in astronomy or the human side of science, or (hopefully) both.  And watch for Prescod-Weinsten's name in the science news.  Her powerful voice is one we'll be hearing a lot more from.

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

Cat's Eyes

This is a piece I wrote a few years ago, based on something that happened to a friend of mine (and scared the absolute bejeezus out of her).  It's more a short vignette than a story, but hopefully it'll give you a nice shudder up your spine.


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

Cat's Eyes

Cori turned the corner onto Waltham Street and stopped for a moment, looking up the steep hill to where there was a sprinkling of lights—the college, her dorm, and bed.  It had been a long, exhausting, but exhilarating evening.  Dinner with five friends at Borley’s, which had the best burgers in Colville, and then an evening spent swing dancing.  The dance didn’t end until midnight, and when the doors of the Colville Community Center opened to spill out light and laughing, talking people into the night, Cori said her goodbyes and declined offers of a ride.  She was hot and sweaty and the night air was cool and inviting, and she’d always liked walking.

She followed Waltham for three blocks, and then turned onto Marsh Street.  Marsh skirted Catanic Creek, tumbling and bubbling downhill in its rocky course, but her feet carried her the opposite way, up a punishingly steep hill lined with old shop fronts.

She stopped for a moment in front of Ballechin’s Used Books.  Its windows were dark, but she pressed her nose against the glass.  Old books were a passion, and her choice of English Literature as a major was in part driven by a yearning to be surrounded by them.  Leather bindings held magic.  The crackling, yellowed pages spoke to her of years past and people long dead; and that dusty, old-book smell wasn’t quite like any other smell in the world.  This bookstore had tens of thousands of titles, and in the light from the streetlight, Cori could just barely make out the metal shelves receding backwards into the shadowy interior.

She turned away with a sigh.  A trip to Ballechin’s would have to wait until she had more money, and also, of course, until it was open.

She had walked another block when she saw, in the harsh yellow glare, a figure approaching her, coming down Marsh Street on the same side of the road.  Cori was a confident walker, but like most women, she was never free from the lurking worry of being the victim of violence.  Her heart gave a quick gallop, but then she saw with relief that the person approaching her wasn’t male.  One thing checked off the fear inventory.  She seemed smaller than Cori was—a second thing checked off.  Last, she was walking with the hesitant, shuffling gait of the elderly—fear inventory completed, signed, and filed away.  Cori shivered as the last of the panic left her body.

As the woman approached, she saw that she was dressed in a dark, full-length coat, and was wearing a scarf tied over her head.  This seemed odd, for a mild night in September, but older people frequently felt the cold more keenly than the young, and as the distance between them shortened, Cori smiled at the memory of her own grandmother, who surreptitiously turned up the thermostat whenever she came to visit and she thought no one was looking.

Thirty feet, twenty, ten.  The woman’s face was in deep shadow, but Cori saw she was smaller even than she’d thought at first, barely five feet tall, and hunched over.  Cori felt a sudden desire to see the woman’s face.

Why?  She was probably just some poor old crazy cat woman, out walking to the 7-Eleven to get some canned food for her twenty-eight cats.  The image, which she had thought at first was funny, suddenly struck her as terrifying, and she realized suddenly that she didn't want to see her face.  She didn't want to see it at all…

They passed close, almost brushing elbows.  Cori would have had to step into the street to be any farther away from her.  And as they passed, the woman looked up at Cori, and Cori found that she had to turn toward her.  Her head moved as if it were being pulled by a string.  Unwillingly, Cori looked down at the woman, and for a moment, their eyes met.

The woman had cat’s eyes.

Her lined face was heavily made up, and around her eyes was eye shadow and liner, drawing the shape of her eyes into an almond, feline slant.  The irises were dark, so dark that they looked all pupil.  She looked straight into Cori’s eyes, unblinking, and with an expression of such malignity that it was almost non-human.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Lovecats99, Cat's eye in dark, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Cori gasped, and with an effort continued her forward motion, taking another stumbling step and nearly colliding with the lamp post.  The gaze broke, and Cori’s head snapped around forward.  She continued her walk uphill with a jittering, uneven gait, her heart hammering in her chest.

That woman just stole my soul.

The thought came to her so suddenly that it seemed to come from outside her, in a voice not hers.  Her breath was coming in whistly gasps, and she kept herself from looking back only by main force of will.

She wouldn't follow her.  Cori knew that for certain.  The woman had what she wanted.  She'd got Cori's soul, and now she was taking it away.

The old woman had no use for her body.

She couldn’t help herself.  She slowed her step, turned to look.  Part of her felt terrified that she’d turn, and the old woman would be right there behind her, staring up at her with those baleful cat’s eyes.

But she wasn’t.  She had evidently continued her walk downhill, and her stooped back, swathed in its dark coat, was all she could see in the distance.

Cori’s foot struck a steel grate in the sidewalk with a loud thunk.

And the old woman stopped, then slowly turned.  From fifty feet away, Cori could feel the intensity of those eyes, staring right at her.  That was when Cori’s nerve broke, and she began to run uphill, her breath coming in tight, desperate whimpers.  She only halted when there was a stitch in her side so painful that she couldn’t continue.

She fell, gasping, against the front wall of another old, dilapidated store, and for a few minutes she stood there, breathing hard, trying to massage her side to get the spasm to loosen up.  She turned and looked through the window of the store front, and saw, sitting in the window, the face of a porcelain doll.  She’d noticed this store before—it sold antique dolls to collectors.  The doll in the window was dressed in vintage clothes, and had dark, curly hair.  Its expressionless face stared at Cori blankly.

Cori lifted her eyes, and caught sight of her own reflection in the window, lit by the glare from the street lights.

She was a doll.  A lifelike, beautiful doll, wavy blond hair in a stylish cut around her face, her skin perfect and blemish-free, every feature carved so as to be indistinguishable from the real thing.  She raised a hand to her face, touched her cheek, watched her mouth pull back into a horrified grimace, and then looked into her own eyes.

Her own blank, empty eyes.

She turned away from the window, and looked down the hill toward the corner of Marsh and Waltham, but the woman had already vanished from sight.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week combines cutting-edge astrophysics and cosmology with razor-sharp social commentary, challenging our knowledge of science and the edifice of scientific research itself: Chanda Prescod-Weinsten's The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.

Prescod-Weinsten is a groundbreaker; she's a theoretical cosmologist, and the first Black woman to achieve a tenure-track position in the field (at the University of New Hampshire).  Her book -- indeed, her whole career -- is born from a deep love of the mysteries of the night sky, but along the way she has had to get past roadblocks that were set in front of her based only on her gender and race.  The Disordered Cosmos is both a tribute to the science she loves and a challenge to the establishment to do better -- to face head on the centuries-long horrible waste of talent and energy of anyone not a straight White male.

It's a powerful book, and should be on the to-read list for anyone interested in astronomy or the human side of science, or (hopefully) both.  And watch for Prescod-Weinsten's name in the science news.  Her powerful voice is one we'll be hearing a lot more from.

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

Hypocrites on parade

It's a long-standing tactic in politics to accuse the other side of what you're doing yourself, but sometimes this kind of hypocrisy seems to come so easily that you have to wonder if they're even aware of it.  What brings this up is Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, who tweeted a couple of days ago, "The Left wants to destroy the nuclear family in America."

Even by the usual standards, this is a loony claim.  I know a great many people who are on the left end of the political spectrum and are straight, happily married, and have children.  You'd think that a quick look around would be enough to convince everyone that what he's saying is complete bullshit.  Plus, apropos of the hypocrisy angle -- Cawthorn's own "nuclear family" lasted eight months, ending with divorce, prompting North Carolina congressional candidate Scott Huffman to say, "My nuclear family was established in 2004 and is 18 years strong. Yours lasted 8 months.  You need to shut the frack up."  Liberal commentator Jeff Tiedrich, never without a razor-edged response to this kind of nonsense, tweeted back at him, "Bro.  Your marriage lasted 21 Scaramuccis."

And can I just say, for the record, that what goes on in the bedroom of two consenting adults is (1) no one's business but theirs, and (2) has exactly zero effect on anyone else's relationship?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gage Skidmore, Madison Cawthorn crop, CC BY-SA 2.0]

But following another principle of politics -- that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it -- the radical right has been screeching for ages about how the Democrats want to destroy traditional marriage.  Worse; supposedly they want everyone to be gay, or something.  Don't believe me?  Just a couple of years ago, Tomi Lahren, who lost her grip on reality so long ago that at this point she couldn't see reality through a powerful telescope, said, "You can be proud of about anything days, so long as it’s not straight, white, male, or God forbid, conservative... It's open season on straight white men."  And followed it up with a demand for a "Straight Pride Parade."

This prompted a queer friend of mine to respond, "Tomi, we have Straight Pride Parades every fucking day.  It's called 'traffic.'"

The problem is, the people who are falling for this kind of idiocy rarely ever get to see any kind of reasoned response to it.  The news media learned decades ago that polarization gets viewers, and forthwith ceased to care if what they said was fair, or even true.  So Donald Trump can claim that the Democrats are trying to make Christianity illegal and that they want to close all Christian churches, followed by his son Eric saying to cheering crowds that Trump "singlehandedly saved Christianity in America," and it's reported -- without rebuttal -- on Fox News and OAN.

As an aside, if there's one thing in the past ten years that I still don't even begin to understand, it's how someone like Donald Trump -- a thrice-married serial adulterer who has a mile-long list of pending lawsuits involving allegations of shady deals and non-payment of money owed -- has somehow rebranded himself as a devout Christian.  From my perspective, Trump's most outstanding achievement is embodying all Seven Deadly Sins in one individual.

All of this is why, when people ask me what we could do to diminish the partisan rancor that's tearing apart the United States, my answer is always "reinstate the Fairness Doctrine."  The FCC's Fairness Doctrine required all holders of broadcast licenses to (1) present controversial issues, and (2) to do so in a way that reflected both sides of the issue fairly.  The revocation of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 was largely because of pressure by the right, then in a powerful position because of Ronald Reagan, and it paved the way for firebrand political commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to present their views as if they were the only ones worth listening to -- and tarring the other side as inveterate liars. 

As I've pointed out before, once you can get people to stop looking at the facts, and believe only one source of information, you can convince them of damn near anything.

Wouldn't it be refreshing if the news media on both sides of the political aisle were required to present the facts, and if opinions are involved, to represent all viewpoints fairly?  People like Madison Cawthorn and Tomi Lahren would get shut down instantaneously.  I've heard People Of A Particular Age pining for the days of media pioneers like Walter Cronkite -- what was brilliant about Cronkite was that you honestly couldn't tell what his own political beliefs were.  He presented the news, without spin, and let the viewers make up their own minds.

It's not that I think this would make everyone agree, and turn the whole country into One Big Happy Family.  There are issues, some of them divisive, that will result in people coming to different answers, and defending those answers vigorously.  All of that is okay.  You don't have to agree with me politically; but you do have to (1) listen, and (2) respect the truth.  It's why I have nothing but admiration for former Representative Joe Walsh of Illinois.  Walsh is a staunch conservative, and I suspect that if we sat down and discussed issues, there'd be a lot we'd disagree about.  But he has high integrity, and has unhesitatingly called out the GOP for their willingness to lie for political gain, and their unquestioning obeisance to Trump and his cronies.  He also is willing to discuss issues with liberals -- again, not necessarily to come to an agreement, but to understand that both sides are usually acting from honorable motives, and both sides want the best for the United States as a whole.  As he said himself, "I'll never shy away.  We gotta have the hard conversations."  (If you're on Twitter, you should follow him, regardless of your political views.  Take a look at his feed and you'll see why.)

And this is exactly what we all should be doing.  Look, I'm not saying the liberals are guiltless of this sort of thing; no politics is without the temptation to lie and cheat to gain and retain power.  At the same time, I have my biases, as we all do, and I'm not going to apologize for having beliefs and defending them.  But we've reached a point where the hypocrites are going unchallenged, and worse still, the media are presenting their hypocrisy as the unvarnished truth.

And if we want to keep a functioning democracy, this needs to stop.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week combines cutting-edge astrophysics and cosmology with razor-sharp social commentary, challenging our knowledge of science and the edifice of scientific research itself: Chanda Prescod-Weinsten's The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.

Prescod-Weinsten is a groundbreaker; she's a theoretical cosmologist, and the first Black woman to achieve a tenure-track position in the field (at the University of New Hampshire).  Her book -- indeed, her whole career -- is born from a deep love of the mysteries of the night sky, but along the way she has had to get past roadblocks that were set in front of her based only on her gender and race.  The Disordered Cosmos is both a tribute to the science she loves and a challenge to the establishment to do better -- to face head on the centuries-long horrible waste of talent and energy of anyone not a straight White male.

It's a powerful book, and should be on the to-read list for anyone interested in astronomy or the human side of science, or (hopefully) both.  And watch for Prescod-Weinsten's name in the science news.  Her powerful voice is one we'll be hearing a lot more from.

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

Gut feelings

I used to teach a semester-long introduction to neuroscience course.  It was a popular class; let's face it, the human brain and sensory systems are fascinating.  But the problem was, not only is the topic complex, our knowledge of how our minds work is still in its earliest stages.  One of my mentors, Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, said to me that if she were a graduate student today trying to figure out what part of biology to study, she'd pick neuroscience in a heartbeat.  "With neuroscience, we're about where we were with genetics a hundred years ago -- we know what structures are involved, we know a little bit about how they work -- but the underlying mechanisms are still largely a mystery."

It's why so often, when a student would ask me a question, my response started out with "Well, it's complicated."  Even simple questions to ask -- for example, "how does our sense of smell work?" -- get into deep water fast.  And in many cases, the answer is simply that we don't have it completely figured out yet.

One realm of neuroscience where this lack of knowledge is particularly troubling is the treating of mental disorders.  The ones I'm most familiar with, because of suffering from them myself -- depression and anxiety -- can be remarkably difficult to treat effectively.  My psychiatric NP, trying to find a medication that would blunt the edge of my depression, said that there's no good way to predict ahead of time which medication will be effective and side-effect-free -- you just have to try them, monitor the situation, mess with the dosage if necessary, and hope for the best.  I had weird side effects from the first three meds I tried -- Celexa killed my sex drive completely; Lamictal gave me the worst acid reflux I've ever experienced; and (worst of all) Zoloft, which is a wonder-drug for some people, made me feel like I was in the middle of a psychological electric storm, with severe agitation, anxiety, sleeplessness, and suicidal ideation.

They got me off Zoloft fast.

We've finally landed on Welbutrin, which is moderately effective -- it evens out the worst days, and doesn't give me any side effects that I've noticed.  So it's better than nothing, but still, far from a miracle cure.

One of the problems with treating depression is that we really don't know what causes it.  It's known to have some tendency to run in families; my mother was chronically depressed, and several other family members have fought varying degrees of mental illness.  This would suggest a genetic component, and that has been supported by research.  Back in 2005, a research review by Douglas Levinson found that there was a small positive correlation between depression and differences in one of the serotonin transporter promoter regions in the DNA, which are involved in the production and transport of one of the most important mood-altering neurotransmitters.  But there are plenty of people in the study who had depressive symptoms and didn't show the gene alteration, and vice versa.

A paper in 2017 by Niamh Mullins and Cathryn Lewis, of Kings College London, was more hopeful; the researchers found several genes that seemed to track fairly well with major depressive disorder within families, but it bears mention that Mullins and Lewis themselves pointed out that genetics can't be the whole picture -- the most recent estimates, from twin studies, are that depression has a heritability of 37%, suggesting that there are multiple genes at work, along with risk factors introduced with what a person went through as a child.

It's complicated.

The latest twist, which was just published last week in Science, is that there may be a contribution to mood disorders from our gut microbiome.  The role of bacteria (beneficial and harmful) in our overall health is often overlooked; but keep in mind that there are more bacterial cells in and on your body than there are human cells, and a great many of them have unknown health effects.  A study in Finland found a significant correlation between development of depression and the presence in the gut of the bacteria Morganella.

Morganella [Image artificially colorized]

Apparently, Morganella is a gram-negative bacterium that has a role in inflammation.  Chronic inflammation has already been implicated in a number of disorders -- not just obvious ones like ulcers and acid reflux, but heart disease, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, some forms of cancer, and (possibly) Alzheimer's disease.  The inflammation isn't necessarily caused by the same thing in each case, but an increasing body of research suggests that treating the inflammatory response is key to treating the symptoms of some of the most awful diseases humans get.

So, apparently, add depression to the list.  The researchers are up front that this is only a tentative finding; correlation doesn't equal causation, after all.  And even if there was good evidence that Morganella was causing at least some cases of depression, it remains very much to be seen how you'd treat it.  There are (thus far) very few drugs that target only a single pathogen, so the danger is that in trying to eliminate Morganella, you'd simultaneously destroy the healthy part of your gut microbiome -- with highly unpleasant results.

At least this adds another link in the chain.  Diseases as complex as mood disorders are unlikely to succumb to a single treatment strategy.  But as we edge closer to understanding how our own brains work, perhaps we can get a handle on why sometimes they don't -- and perhaps, one day find an approach to treatment that isn't as scattershot and stumble-prone as the one we currently use.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week combines cutting-edge astrophysics and cosmology with razor-sharp social commentary, challenging our knowledge of science and the edifice of scientific research itself: Chanda Prescod-Weinsten's The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.

Prescod-Weinsten is a groundbreaker; she's a theoretical cosmologist, and the first Black woman to achieve a tenure-track position in the field (at the University of New Hampshire).  Her book -- indeed, her whole career -- is born from a deep love of the mysteries of the night sky, but along the way she has had to get past roadblocks that were set in front of her based only on her gender and race.  The Disordered Cosmos is both a tribute to the science she loves and a challenge to the establishment to do better -- to face head on the centuries-long horrible waste of talent and energy of anyone not a straight White male.

It's a powerful book, and should be on the to-read list for anyone interested in astronomy or the human side of science, or (hopefully) both.  And watch for Prescod-Weinsten's name in the science news.  Her powerful voice is one we'll be hearing a lot more from.

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