A botanical mystery

One of the most pernicious tendencies in human thought is our arrogance.  The attitude that we know all there is to know, understand the universe, have it all figured out, has led to more oversights, blunders, and outright idiocy than anything else I can think of.

What's striking is how often our intuition about things turns out to be wrong.  Consider, for example, the following question: of all the species currently alive on Earth, what percent of them are known to science -- identified, observed, collected, or studied?

The best estimate we have, from a 2011 study that appeared in PLoS Biology, blew my mind, and as a 32-year veteran of teaching biology, I was ready for an answer lower than my expectation.  You ready?

Fourteen percent.

The study estimated the total number of species on Earth at 8.7 million, 86% of which are unknown to science.  This is staggering.  We are fooling around with our climate and ecosystems, bulldozing our way through our own living space, and potentially destroying millions of species we didn't even know existed.

To be fair, our ignorance about the organisms we share the planet with is at least in part not our fault.  If, like me, you live in a comfortable home with amenities and no particular need to venture off into the wilderness, it would be easy to think that our familiar surroundings are all there is.  The truth is a little humbling, and far more interesting.  I remember my first trip to Hawaii, back in 2003, when we spent our time on the lovely island of Kauai.  While we were there, we took a boat trip out to the Na Pali Coast, a stunning terrain that has a few narrow sandy beaches, but almost immediately beyond them wrinkles up into mountains that are in places damn near vertical.

Carol and I at Na Pali

The guide on the boat told us something that I found astonishing; large parts of Waimea Canyon and Koke'e Parks, which lie inland from Na Pali, are completely unexplored.  Not only is it too steep for roads to be built, you can't even land a helicopter.  Hiking might be possible, but it's densely forested.  The combination has made the interior of these parks one of the few places in the United States where we can say with fair confidence that no human being has ever stood.

Add to that the fact that even more unexplored than some of the remote terrestrial regions are the deep oceans.  I've heard it said we know more about the terrain of the Moon than we do about the floor of the deep ocean -- I don't know if that's true, but it sure sounds plausible.

I'd like to consider, though, a more positive thought; that our lack of knowledge of other species on Earth means there is a lot out there that we could still potentially learn.  And sometimes that happens through unexpected channels.  In fact, the reason this whole topic comes up is because of an article last week in Atlas Obscura about a British botanist and biological artist named Marianne North (24 October 1830-30 August 1890), who traveled all over the world painting native plants in intricate detail -- and who captured an image of at least one plant nobody could identify.

The painting in question was made in Sarawak, one of two states of Malaysia that are on the island of Borneo.  Sarawak is a bit like Kauai; inhabited at the perimeter, but with an inland of rugged terrain and dense, nearly impenetrable forest.  Well, this kind of thing didn't stop North, who made some exquisite paintings of plants in Sarawak, including this one:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The plant with the blue berries was unidentified -- some botanists thought it might be a member of the tropical genus Psychotria (in the coffee family, Rubiaceae).  But something about that didn't ring true.  None of the 1,582 catalogued species of Psychotria has blue berries -- all the known ones are red or pink -- and the arrangement of the leaves didn't look quite right.  So either (1) this one was an anomaly, (2) North painted the plant inaccurately, or (3) the identification was wrong.

Option (1) was a little far-fetched, but not outside the realm of possibility.  Option (2) struck most knowledgeable people as outright impossible; North was known for her absolute painstaking attention to minute detail.  So botanist and illustrator Tianyi Yu decided (3) had to be correct.  But how to find a single species of plant in an overgrown wilderness on the island of Borneo, which had avoided detection by other scientists for over a century?

Yu had a brainstorm; maybe it hadn't completely flown under the radar.  He decided to spend some time in the herbarium at Kew Gardens.  If you are ever in England, Kew is a must-see; it is home to one of the most amazingly complete collection of plants in the world, and is also stunningly beautiful, especially in spring and summer.  The herbarium contains collections of preserved plants stretching back to its founding in the middle of the nineteenth century, and currently houses over eight million specimens.

So saying it was a needle in a haystack is an understatement.  Yu had one thing going for him; North had been not only a meticulous artist, she was also conscientious about writing down where her paintings had been made.  This one was labeled "Matang Forest, Sarawak," and since the Kew specimens are catalogued not only by species but by location, it significantly narrowed down Yu's search.

And he found it.  A sprig of it was collected in 1973 and sent back to Kew, but was unidentified.  Yu studied both the specimen and North's painting, and concluded that it was a member of the genus Chassalia -- also in Rubiaceae, so the guess of Psychotria hadn't been that far off.

Further analysis by botanists confirmed Yu's surmise.  As the person who identified it as a previously-unrecorded species, Yu was given the honor of naming it.

And last year, it went down in the taxonomic records as Chassalia northi, in recognition of Marianne North's contributions to the field of botany.

So out there on the island of Borneo is a little shrub with white flowers and blue berries that we now have a name for because of a nineteenth-century adventurer/scientist/artist, a happenstance collection from 1973, and a diligent modern botanist determined to put the pieces together.  Just showing that we can still pick away at the sphere of our own ignorance -- but only if we are first willing to admit that there is a lot we still don't know about the world we live in.

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Beat generation

Yesterday I ran into a piece of research out of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology that was published this week in Drug and Alcohol Review, entitled, "Who Uses Digital Drugs?  An International Survey of 'Binaural Beat' Consumers."  I was curious about it -- I'd heard about binaural beats and their potential psychological effects a while back -- so I read the paper.

I was hoping for some analysis of whether they worked, but it turns out that the research was limited to exactly what the title offered; a summary of who is using them and why.  Turns out that that 72% of users were trying to relax or fall asleep, 35% were trying to change their mood, and 12% were trying for a psychedelic experience.  There was some attempt to look into their use as a "gateway drug," but it turned out that according to the researchers, "most of the people who were looking for a psychedelic experience already consumed ingestible drugs."

So that got me into looking at the bigger question of whether or not they could deliver the effects they promised.  I came across a website called "Binaural Beats: A Meditation Shortcut" that looked promising, and better still, it explained what "binaural beats" are.  The idea, apparently, is that you listen to two sounds simultaneously, which differ slightly in frequency (the example given was a 114 hertz tone in the left ear and a 124 hertz tone in the right).  This will result in your hearing a "beat frequency" or "binaural beat," whose frequency is equal to the difference between the two (in this case, 10 hertz).

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Ansgar Hellwig, Beating Frequency, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So far, nothing too strange, and a phenomenon that would be familiar to anyone who has tried to tune the strings of a guitar.  But what this site, and others like it, claim is that the induced beat frequency will change the frequency of your brain waves, and cause... well, all sorts of things.

The site says that it will bring on a "meditative state:"

When you listen to sounds of a certain frequency, your brain waves will synchronize with that frequency.  You entrain every time you hear a musical beat that has you bobbing your head or tapping your foot. 

By listening to MP3s or CDs that produce brainwave entrainment, you can induce a desired brainwave pattern quickly and reliably.  Binaural beats is one of the most popular methods to utilize the phenomenon of brainwave entrainment...

Using binaural beats provides an easy shortcut.  All you have to do is put on a set of headphones or earbuds, relax, and listen.  For many people, this brings their brains into the same state as deep meditation quickly.

Which was interesting enough, so I started poking around at what else they were claiming this phenomenon did.  I found out quickly that meditative states aren't the only things that binaural beats allegedly can induce.  If you hit the right binaural beat frequency, supposedly you can:

lucid dream
boost your memory
get past creative blocks
(safely) simulate the mental effects of drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, and ecstasy
lose weight and increase your metabolic rate
jumpstart your physical and mental energy levels
have a "mind-blowingly intense hands-free orgasm"

So naturally, I had to investigate all this.  I skipped the first three, given that (1) I already sleep poorly and have weird dreams, and have no particular desire to make this any worse, (2) I'm too impatient to conduct a long enough experiment to see if my memory improves, and (3) I do pretty well in the creativity department already.

The fourth one, on the other hand, was intriguing.  I thought it might be interesting to see if I felt high and/or stoned after listening to some tones going "wah-wah-wah" in my ears, so I gave it a shot.

If a sample size of one means anything, I can report back... nothing.  I didn't feel any loopier after listening to drug-simulating binaural beats for fifteen minutes than I did before.  So I went on to the "jumpstart your energy levels" one (I really don't need to lose weight), and once again... nada.

Then -- purely in the interest of scientific research, of course -- I had to try the last one.

I found two places that supposedly had orgasm-inducing binaural beats.  Listening to the first one was about as arousing as listening to a washing machine on spin cycle.  So I thought, "Maybe my sex frequency isn't attuned to that one, or something."  So I clicked on the second one, and I found out that on this recording, the binaural beat frequency was overlain with the sounds of a couple in the throes of noisy, and apparently extremely pleasurable, sex.  (And no, I'm not going to provide a link.  You'll have to track that one down yourself.)

So it was not exactly a well-controlled experiment.  Of course, I didn't listen for all that long, because otherwise my wife would have come into my office to see what the hell I was doing in here.   ("Research, honey!  Empirical research!  Really!")

In any case, my own investigation of binaural beats was kind of a bust.  So I decided to see if there'd been any good studies done of the effect, and I found a site that had what seemed to me to be fair and unbiased summaries of the research.  And the general conclusion is...

... it doesn't seem to work.  Most of the effects recorded were small and very temporary, and the consensus is that your expectations going into the experience have a major effect on what you'll get from it.  If you think it's going to relax you, then you relax.  If you think it's going to energize you, then you're energized.  If you think you're going to have a spectacular orgasm...

... well, you get the idea.  Although I have to add that throwing in the sex noises was hardly fair.

I suppose the whole thing is harmless enough.  I've done a bit of meditating over the years -- never consistently enough to make it a practice, but enough to get the flavor of it -- and found it to be great for calming the mind and centering the body.  So whatever you're after, if "binaural beats" helps you to get there faster and deeper (as it were), cool.

As for the rest of it -- have fun experimenting, but if you're approaching it skeptically, keep in mind that the results might be less than "mind-blowingly intense."

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Moodscrolling

I think one of the reason I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter is that my feed sounds way too much like my brain.

I do a lot of what I call "hamster-wheeling."  Just sitting there -- or, worse, lying in bed at night trying to sleep -- I get a running litany of disconnected thoughts that leap about my cerebral cortex like a kangaroo on crack.  Think about that, and look at this selection of tweets that I pulled from the first few scroll-downs of my feed this morning, and which I swear I'm not making up:

• I'm putting everyone on notice that I'm not taking any shit today.
• Wow, I've got bad gas.  My apologies to my coworkers.
• I'm on vacation why am I up at 6 AM scrolling on Twitter
• In England in the 1880s, "pants" was considered a dirty word.
• I wonder how Weeping Angels reproduce.  Do they fuck?  I'd fuck a Weeping Angel, even though I'd probably regret it.
• Super serious question.  Does anyone still eat grilled cheese sandwiches?
• A stranger at the gym just told me I should dye my beard because it's got gray in it.  WTF?
• Doo-dah, doo-dah, all the live-long day

The only tweets I didn't consider including were purely political ones and people hawking their own books, which admittedly make up a good percentage of the total.  But if you take those out, what's left is, in a word, bizarre.  In three words, it's really fucking bizarre.

Me, I find my hamster-wheeling thoughts annoying and pointless; I can't imagine that anyone else would want to hear them.  For criminy's sake, even I don't want to hear them.

So why the hell do I stay on Twitter?

I think part of it is insufficient motivation to do what it would take to delete my account, but part of it is that despite the weird, random content, I still find myself spending time just about every day scrolling through it. 

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons MatthewKeys, Twitter's San Francisco Headquarters, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I've noticed that my tendency to waste time on social media is inversely proportional to my mood.  When I'm in a good mood, I can always find more interesting things to do; when I'm low, I tend to sit and scan through Twitter and Facebook, sort of waiting for something to happen that will lift me up, get me interested, or at least distract me.

Moodscrolling, is the way I think of it.

I'm apparently not the only one.  A team at Fudan University (China) found that social media use and depression and anxiety were strongly correlated -- and that both had increased dramatically since the pandemic started.  It seems to be an unpleasant positive feedback loop; the worse things get and the more isolated we are, the more depressed and anxious we get (understandably), and the more we seek out contact on social media.  Which, because of its weird content, often outright nastiness, and partisan rancor (you should see some of the political tweets I decided not to post), makes us feel worse, and round and round it goes.  Breaking the cycle by forcing yourself to stand up and walk away from the computer is hard when you're already feeling down; especially so now that it's all available on our phones, so the option of consuming social media is seldom farther away than our own pockets.

It's not that I think it's all bad.  If it was, I would delete my account.  I've met some very nice people in Twitter communities I've joined -- fellow fiction writers and Doctor Who fans are two that come to mind.  Facebook, on the other hand, lets me stay in touch with dear friends whom I seldom get to see.  But there's no doubt that if you did a cost-benefit analysis -- the amount of time I spend on social media as compared to the positive stuff I get from it -- it would show numbers that are seriously in the red.

Walking away, though, takes willpower, and that's exactly what depressed and anxious people tend to lack.  The study I linked above, though, makes me more certain that's what I need to do.  The random, disjointed thoughts my own brain comes up with are enough; I don't need to see everyone else's.

Although I have to admit that the guy who posted about the Weeping Angels asks a good question.  Not only are they made of stone, they all appear to be female.  And if you watch Doctor Who, there certainly seems to be a lot of them.  For the record, though, I am not in the least interested in having sex with one, even if it turns out they're somehow capable of it.  Those things are seriously creepy.

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Relics of the distant past

Today we'll stay in an archaeological vein, mostly because a couple of loyal readers of Skeptophilia read yesterday's post and responded with links of their own and messages which basically boil down to, "Yes, but have you seen this?"

The first one comes to us from the ever-entertaining site Mysterious Universe, but unlike their usual fare of Bigfoots and UFOs, this one is about legitimate scientific research.  Not that you could tell from the title, which is "Yorkshire's Atlantis May Have Finally Been Found."  To be fair, the appellation of "Atlantis" isn't the fault of the author, Paul Seaburn; apparently this site, Ravenser Odd, has been called that before.  But unlike Atlantis, Ravenser Odd is a real place.  It was a port city on the estuary of the River Humber, attested thoroughly in records of the time until in 1362 there was a storm that breached the sand-based seawall and swamped it completely, and the once thriving town -- like its mythological namesake -- sank beneath the waves.

The shape of the long, narrow seawall is what gave the place its name, all the way back in Viking times, some four hundred years earlier; Ravenser Odd is a mangled version of hrafns eyr, which means "raven's eye" in Old Norse.  In its time it was a busy place.  It was one of the most thriving ports in the region, and a record from 1299 describes it as containing a central marketplace, wharves, warehouses, a court, a prison, a chapel, two mills, a tannery, an annual fair, and over a thousand residences.  The coastal region near the original submerged town retained the name, and in fact it's mentioned twice in Shakespeare, where he calls it "Ravenspurgh" (Richard II, act 2, scene 1, line 298, and Henry IV Part 1, act 1, scene 3, line 245).

Despite multiple attestations in the records, no one was able to find where the original Ravenser Odd had stood -- until now.

An amateur archaeologist named Philip Mathison, who is something of an expert on Ravenser Odd, stumbled upon an 1892 document on eBay that mentioned "submarine remains" at Spurn, a tidal island north of the mouth of the Humber -- and gave directions on how to find them.  Mathison went out in a boat with an echo sounder, and found what looked like a human-made rock wall, exactly where the document had said it would be.

"People had assumed it was way out to sea, as the shape of the peninsula now is very different to how it was in the thirteenth century," Mathison said.  "This document showed a stone ledge to the east of Spurn which I believe could be the walls of a dock or quay... The ridge was most likely rock armor to protect the port, as it was under threat from erosion way before it was abandoned.  The bulk of the town's buildings were on a shingle bank called The Old Den, to the west side of Spurn, and some brickwork from them has been found in the past.  The town curved around like a fish hook and the wharves were at the other end... But it needs a proper dive to find out."

Seems like Mathison is going to get his wish -- two archaeologists from the University of Hull have already purchased scanning equipment and obtained funding for other supplies for an expedition this summer, when the weather in the North Sea improves.

Also with a Viking connection is a study done at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst that seems to upend a long-held theory about why the Norse settlements of Greenland died out in the late fourteenth century.  Previous models had attributed the collapse to the onset of the Little Ice Age, a worldwide drop in global average temperature that (among other things) caused the Greenland sea access to freeze up year round and made it an even more miserable place to live than it already is.  But the new study -- using two organic molecules as markers that are known to indicate, respectively, temperature and water availability -- showed that during the period of the collapse, the temperature didn't drop much, but it became significantly drier.

The harsh winters were one thing, but when the rain stopped falling even in the warmest months of summer, that was the kiss of death for the crops and domesticated animals at the Norse settlements, and ultimately, the Norse themselves.  

For the last story, we return to the British Isles, where a geophysical survey near the town of Aberlemno uncovered a 1.7-meter-long stone carved with designs identified with the Picts, the mysterious people who inhabited northern and eastern Scotland before the Dál Riada Scots moved in and kind of took over in the tenth century.  There aren't many Pictish records around; they were Celtic, but appear to have spoken a Brythonic language related to Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, not a Goidelic language like Gaelic, Irish, and Manx.

The discovery was made quite by accident.  While moving some surveying equipment, they noticed some anomalies that seemed to indicate the buried foundation of a settlement.  They dug into the soil, and hit a rock. "I just brushed my hand, and there was a symbol," said Zack Hinckley, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen.  "And we had a freakout... there were genuine tears."

The Pictish stone from Aberlemno, Scotland

The difficulty is that given the paucity of Pictish records, little is known of the script, and it's currently unknown whether these were written language, or simply decorative symbols.  The stone has been removed to an archaeological conservation lab in Edinburgh for further study.

So there you are.  The world of archaeology has been hopping lately.  It's always amazing to me that despite the extensive research that's been done, with state-of-the-art mapping and surveying tools, that there are still plenty of astonishing artifacts out there to find.

Some of them, apparently, right underneath our feet.

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Grave matters

Today we take a trip into the past with three new discoveries from the world of archaeology, sent my way by my eagle-eyed friend and fellow writer, Gil Miller.

The first one has to do with ancient fashion.  Have you ever wondered how our distant ancestors dressed?  Whether it was crudely stitched-together rags, as the peasantry are often depicted?  Leopard-skin affairs, like the Flintstones?  Or nothing but a brass jockstrap, like this guy?

Turns out it wasn't so different from what you and I are wearing.  (I'm assuming you're not naked except for a brass jockstrap.  If you are, I won't judge, but I also don't want to know about it.)  An analysis of the clothing worn by a 3,200 year old mummy recovered from China's Tarim Basin was wearing tightly-woven, intricately-made trousers, built to be durable and allow maneuverability -- a little like today's blue jeans.

The pants worn by "Turfan Man" [Image from M. Wagner et al./Archaeological Research in Asia, 2022]

The cloth is a tight twill weave -- something that was assumed to be invented much later -- and had a triangular crotch piece that seems to be designed to avoid unfortunate compression of the male naughty bits while riding horseback.  The decoration, including an interlocking "T" pattern on the bands around the knees, is very similar to patterns found used on pottery in the area, and as far away as Kazakhstan and Siberia.

From ancient Chinese fashion items, we travel halfway around the world for something a little more gruesome -- a burial in the Lambayeque region of Peru that seems to contain the skeleton of a surgeon, along with his surgical tools.

The burial has been dated to the Middle Period of the Sican Culture, which would have been somewhere between 900 and 1050 C. E., and was recovered from a mausoleum temple at the rich archaeological site of Las Ventanas.  The man was obviously of high standing; he was wearing a golden mask pigmented with cinnabar, a bronze pectoral, and a garment containing copper plates.  But most interesting was the bundle of tools he was buried with -- awls, needles, and several sizes and shapes of knives.  This, the researchers say, identifies him as a surgeon.

It's hard for me to fathom, but surgery was done fairly regularly back then -- up to and including brain surgery (called trepanning).  There was no such thing as general anesthesia, so it was done under local anesthesia at best, probably supplemented with any kind of sedative or painkilling drugs they had available.  Still, it was a horrible prospect.  But what is most astonishing is that a great many of the patients, even the ones who had holes drilled into their skulls, survived.  There have been many cases of skeletons found that show signs of surgery where the surgical cuts healed completely.

But still, the ordeal these poor folks went through is horrifying to think about, so let's move on to the third and final article, that comes to us from England.  An archaeologist named Ken Dark has led a team of researchers in studying 65 grave sites in the counties of Somerset and Cornwall that date back to a time of history I've always had a particular fascination for -- the Western European "Dark Ages," between the collapse of the Roman Empire as a centralized power in the fourth and fifth centuries C. E. and the reconsolidation of Europe under such leaders as Charlemagne and Alfred the Great, four hundred years later.

The "darkness" of the so-called Dark Ages isn't so much that it was lawless and anarchic (although some parts of it in some places probably were), but simply because we know next to nothing about it for sure.  There are virtually no contemporaneous records; about all we have, the best-known being Gildas's sixth-century De Excidio et Conquesto Britanniae, are accounts that contain legend mixed up with history so thoroughly it's impossible to tell which is which.  I bring up Gildas deliberately, because his is the only record of King Arthur written anywhere close to the time he (allegedly) lived, and the graves that Dark and his team are studying date from right around that pivotal time when Christianized Romano-Celtic Britain was being attacked and overrun by the pagan Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

The burial practices of noble sixth-century Britons stands in stark contrast from Anglo-Saxon burials from the same period; the Britons, it's believed, scorned the ostentation and ornate decorations of pagan funerals, and by comparison even high-status individuals were buried without much pomp.  What sets these graves apart from those of commoners is that they were set apart from other graves, had a fenced enclosure, and were covered with a tumulus of stones that the early Celts called a ferta, which was a sign of high standing.

"The enclosed grave tradition comes straight out of late Roman burial practices," Dark said.  "And that's a good reason why we have them in Britain, but not in Ireland -- because Britain was part of the Roman empire, and Ireland wasn't...  We've got a load of burials that are all the same, and a tiny minority of those burials are marked out as being of higher status than the others.  When there are no other possible candidates, that seems to me to be a pretty good argument for these being the ‘lost' royal burials."

So that's today's news from the past -- ancient blue jeans, primitive surgery, and Dark Age noble burials.  Sorry for starting your day on a grave note.  But it's always fascinating to see not only how things have changed, but how similar our distant ancestors were to ourselves.  If we were to time travel back there, I'm sure there'd be a lot of surprises, but we might be more shocked at how much like us they were back then.  To borrow a line from Robert Burns, a person's a person for a' that and a' that.

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A terrestrial heartbeat

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Louisiana, I took a class called Introduction to Astronomy from a fellow named Daniel Whitmire.  Dr. Whitmire made a name for himself, along with a colleague named John Matese (whom I later took a class in Quantum Mechanics from), with something that's been nicknamed the "Planet X" hypothesis.  This isn't some crazy, Nibiru-is-headed-toward-Earth claim; Whitmire and Matese were looking at an apparent periodicity in mass extinctions, which they suggested could be the effects of a massive planet far beyond the orbit of Pluto, perhaps with an eccentric orbit, which every so often passes through a dense part of the Oort Cloud and sends comets and other debris hurtling in toward the inner Solar System.

Since the time I first heard about it (in around 1980), the Planet X hypothesis has lost currency.  There's been no evidence whatsoever of a massive planet outside the orbit of Pluto, and in any case, further study has indicated that the extinctions (1) don't really show that strong a periodicity, and (2) have been pretty well explained from phenomena other than collisions (other than, obviously, the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction).

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

I found out last week, though, that Whitmire and Matese may have been on to something after all.

A curious paper that recently appeared in Geoscience Frontiers suggests that focusing solely on the extinctions may have hidden an underlying periodicity.  In "A Pulse of the Earth: A 27.5-Myr [million year] underlying cycle in coordinated geological events over the last 260 Myr," Michael Rampino and Yuhong Zhu (of New York University) and Ken Caldeira (of the Carnegie Institution for Science) did some detailed statistical analysis (the mathematics of which is beyond me) on 89 different major geological events on Earth -- marine and non-marine extinctions, major ocean-anoxic events, continental flood-basalt eruptions, sea-level fluctuations, global pulses of intraplate magmatism -- and found that there are striking, 27.5 million year peaks that have yet to be explained.

What jumped out at me is that the analysis isn't just some vague, it-looks-like-it-might-be-a-pattern.  The software they used found that the periodicity has a 96% confidence -- i.e. there's only a 4% chance that it's just noise that happens to look like a rhythm.  This means that they're on to something.  What, exactly, they're on to remains to be seen; the natural inclination is to look for some kind of tectonic process that for some reason is on a really slow cycle, but they did note one other curious possibility:

On the other hand, the main period of about 30 Myr is close to the Solar System’s ~ 32 ± 3 Myr vertical oscillation about the mid-plane of the Galaxy.  In the Galactic plane region, increased cosmic-ray flux might lead to significant climatic changes, whereas encounters with concentrations of disk-dark matter might trigger comet showers from the Oort Cloud, as well as thermal and geophysical disturbances in the inner Earth.  We note that a 26 to 37 Myr cycle has been reported in the ages of terrestrial impact craters, using various statistical techniques and sets of crater ages potentially connecting the terrestrial and extraterrestrial cycles.

Of course, figuring out the mechanism that causes the pattern comes after establishing that the pattern itself is real.  As I pointed out in my post on the Ganzfeld Experiment a couple of weeks ago, developing a model to explain a phenomenon has to wait until you've shown that there's a phenomenon there to explain.

But a 96% confidence level is enough to indicate that there's some underlying mechanism at work here that's worth further study.  Something, apparently, is causing a strange, regular pulse of catastrophes.  (To put your minds at ease -- I know this was one of the first things I wondered -- the last peak the analysis found occurred 12.1 million years ago, so we've got another fifteen-odd million years to go before the next one.  That is, if we don't manufacture a cataclysm ourselves first.)

For now, all we have is an odd, unexplained pattern in geological upheavals.  It will be fascinating to see what refinements are put on the analysis -- and whether the scientists can find out what's actually going on.  Until then, we're left with a mystery -- a 27.5 million year terrestrial heartbeat.

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Effect-before-cause

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said (apropos of UFO sightings), "The human brain and perceptual systems are rife with ways of getting it wrong."

It might be humbling, but it's nothing short of the plain truth, and doesn't just apply to seeing alien spaceships.  Especially in perfectly ordinary situations, we like to think that what we're hearing and seeing is an accurate reflection of what's actually out there, but the fact is we not only miss entirely a significant fraction of what we're experiencing, we misinterpret a good chunk of the rest.

Think you're immune?  Watch the following two-minute video, and see if you can figure out who killed Lord Smythe.

I don't know about you, but I didn't do so well.

It turns out that we don't just miss things that are there, we sometimes see things that aren't there.  Take, for example, the research that appeared last week in the journal Psychological Science, that suggests we make guesses about what we're going to see, and if those guesses don't line up with what actually happens, we "see" what we thought we were going to see rather than reality.

The experiment was simple enough.  It uses a short video of three squares (call them A, B, and C, from left to right).  Square A starts to move quickly to the right, and "collides" with B, which starts to move.  As you track it across the screen, it looks like B is going to collide with C, and repeat what happened in the previous collision.

The problem is, square C starts to move not only before B hits it, but before B itself starts moving.  In other words, there is no way a collision with B could have been what triggered C to start moving.  But when test subjects were asked what order the squares started moving, just about everyone said A, then B, then C.  Our expectation of cause-and-effect are so strong that even on multiple viewings, test subjects still didn't see C begin to move before B.

"We have a strong assumption that we know, through direct perception, the order in which events happen around us," said study co-author Christos Bechlivanidis, of University College London.  "The order of events in the world is the order of our perceptions.  The visual signal of the glass shattering follows the signal of the glass hitting the ground, and that is taken as irrefutable evidence that this is indeed how the events occurred.  Our research points to the opposite direction, namely, that it is causal perceptions or expectations that tell us in what order things happen.  If I believe that the impact is necessary for the glass to break, I perceive the shattering after the impact, even if due to some crazy coincidence, the events followed a different order.  In other words, it appears that, especially in short timescales, it is causation that tells us the time."

As I and many others have pointed out about previous research into what is now known as "inattentional blindness," this is yet another nail in the coffin of eyewitness testimony as the gold standard of evidence in the court of law.  We still rely on "I saw it with my own eyes!" as the touchstone for the truth, even though experiment after experiment has shown how unreliable our sensory-perceptive systems are.  Add to that how plastic our memories are, and it's a travesty that people's fates are decided by juries based upon eyewitness accounts of what happened, sometimes in the distant past.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eric Chan from Palo Alto, United States, Mock trial closing, CC BY 2.0]

To end with another quote by NdGT -- "There's no such thing as good eyewitness testimony and bad eyewitness testimony.  It's all bad."

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