Damage control

The human psyche is a fragile thing.

I was going to start that sentence with, "At the risk of being called a snowflake...", but then I decided I don't give a flying rat's ass if anyone does call me a snowflake.  Or "woke."  "Snowflake" has become some kind of jerk code for "someone who cares deeply how others feel," and "woke" for "awareness that others' experience and perceptions are as valid as my own, even if I don't share them," and on that basis I'm happy to accept the appellation of Woke Snowflake.

The fact is, all of us, even Un-Woke Non-Snowflakes, can be hurt.  It's all too easy.  Whether we react to that hurt by crying, retreating, laughing it off, or getting angry, the fact remains that none of us are impervious to what others say and think.  It's why dealing with bullying is so critical, and the correct response is not to tell the victim "toughen up, develop a thicker skin, grow some balls," or whatever, all things I was told repeatedly when I was a child.  Unsurprisingly, none of that sage advice had the slightest effect, other than letting the bullies know that no one was going to do a damn thing about it.  It's amazing the number of people who don't recognize this for what it is, which is a game of "blame the victim."

For what it's worth, the correct response is for someone with appropriate authority to tell the bully, "This stops, and it stops now.  I will be watching you."

It's why when I was asked a while back what were the three most important words you could say to someone other than "I love you," my response was, "You are safe."  I never felt safe when I was a kid.  And if you don't think that leaves a mark on someone that persists into adulthood, you are sadly mistaken.

It's why I was sickened by the revelation this week that British actor Kit Connor, best known for playing the character of Nick Nelson on the lovely coming-of-age series Heartstopper, was being harassed online by "fans" who accused him of "queerbaiting" -- pretending to be queer (or being cagey about it) in order to benefit from the cachet of being associated with the LGBTQ community without committing himself outright.  Connor ignored the accusations for a while, but they became so strident that he got onto Twitter on Halloween and posted:

The number of ways this is fucked up leaves me not knowing where to begin.  Apparently part of the firestorm started with photographs of him holding hands with actress Maia Reficco, which adds a whole nasty gloss of "bi people in straight-presenting relationships aren't actually queer" to a situation that is already ugly enough.  I find this infuriating (for obvious reasons); we bisexual people are under no obligation to meet some kind of queerness litmus test set by someone -- anyone -- else.

The deeper problem here, of course, is that nobody should ever push someone to come out before they're ready.  Ever.  This sort of thing happens all too often with actors and musicians, and not just about sexual orientation but about everything.  Fans become desperate to peer into their lives, as if somehow enjoying their skill, talent, and hard work when they perform justifies forgetting that they are real humans who need privacy and have the right to reveal about their personal lives exactly what, when, and how much they choose.  At the far end of this horrible scale is the phenomenon of paparazzi, parasites who are fed by fans' insatiable appetite for lurid details, accurate or not.

The worst part in this particular case is that the lion's share of the accusations of queerbaiting Connor faced came from people who are LGBTQ themselves.  People who should fucking well know better.  People who themselves have undoubtedly faced harassment and discrimination and unfair social pressures, and now have apparently forgotten all that and turned on someone whose only crimes were (1) playing a bisexual character in a television show, and (2) wanting to come out by his own choice and at his own time.

How dare you force someone into this situation.

I can only hope that Kit's trenchant "I think some of you missed the point of the show" drove the message home with these people.  I also hope that the harm done to Kit himself, and potentially to his relationships (whatever those are), doesn't leave a lasting mark.  To the fandom's credit, there was a huge groundswell of people supporting him unconditionally and decrying what had happened, and with luck, that did enough damage control to lessen the pain he endured.

So for heaven's sake, people, start thinking before you speak, and realize that words can do incalculable harm.  Keep in mind that humans are fragile creatures who deserve careful handling.  Always err on the side of compassion.

And if you can't do all that, then at least have the common decency to keep your damn mouth shut.

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Exploding the birth-order myth

How often have you heard a friend mention an odd characteristic of a mutual acquaintance, and follow it up with a statement like, "Well, he's a middle child," leaving you both nodding knowingly as if that explained it?

Conscientious, strong-willed eldest children.  Lost, rebellious middles.  Immature, demanding youngests.  Then there's my situation -- the spoiled, tightly-wound only children, who were doted upon by their parents and had their every whim met immediately.

I know that wasn't really true in my case; far from being overprotected, my youth was more a case of free-range parenting of a child who was damn close to feral.  After school, and all summer long, my parents' style could be summed up as "Be back by dinner and try not to break any bones.  Either yours or anyone else's."  So I knew that at least from a sample size of one, there was something wrong with the birth-order-determines-personality model.

Even seeing other exceptions here and there never left me confident enough to contradict the prevailing wisdom.  After all, the plural of anecdote is not data.  But now a pair of studies has conclusively disproven the connection between birth order and... anything.

In the first, a trio of psychologists at the University of Leipzig analyzed personality assessments for a huge sample size (they had data for over 20,000 individuals), looking for how they scored on what are called the "Big Five" features of personality -- extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and imagination.  They found no correlation whatsoever between birth order and any of those. In their words:

[W]e consistently found no birth-order effects on extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, or imagination.  On the basis of the high statistical power and the consistent results across samples and analytical designs, we must conclude that birth order does not have a lasting effect on broad personality traits outside of the intellectual domain.

A similar, but much larger study done at the University of Illinois -- this one of 377,000 high school students -- also found no correlation whatsoever:

We would have to say that, to the extent that these effect sizes are accurate estimates of the true effect, birth order does not seem to be an important consideration for understanding either the development of personality traits or the development of intelligence in the between-family context.  One needs only to look at the “confounds,” such as parental socio-economic status and gender, for factors that warrant much more attention given the magnitude of their effects relative to the effects of birth order.

So if there really is nothing to the birth-order effect, why is it such a persistent myth?  I think there are two things going on, here.  One is that during childhood, older children differ in maturity from their younger siblings because... well, they're older.  Of course a fifteen-year-old is going to be more conscientious and articulate than his seven-year-old brother.  There'd be something seriously wrong if he weren't.  So we tend to see any differences that exist between siblings and interpret them in light of the model we already had, thus reinforcing the model itself -- even if it's wrong.

Because that's the second problem -- our old arch-nemesis confirmation bias.  Once we think we know what's going on, our confidence in it becomes unshakable.  I have to wonder how many people are reading this post, and thinking, "Yes, but for my own kids, the birth-order effect works.  So I still believe it."  It's a natural enough human tendency.

On the other hand, I think you have to admit that your own personal family's characteristics really aren't going to call into question a scholarly analysis of 377,000 people.

So that's pretty much that.  No more blaming your appreciation of fart jokes on being an immature youngest child.  And my friends and family will have to cast around for a different explanation for why I'm as neurotic as I am.  There probably is an explanation, but my being an only child isn't it.

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The dynamic Earth

The highlight of my trip to Iceland this past August was seeing the newly-erupting volcano of Fagradalsfjall, southwest of the capital city of Reykjavík.

Fagradalsfjall is Icelandic for "mountain of the beautiful valley."  I'm not sure I'd use the word "beautiful," which to me carries connotations of "benevolent."  When we were there, you could feel the eruption before you heard or saw it; the entire floor of the valley was vibrating, a subsonic rumble that I felt in my gut.  Then you hear the roar, a guttural, low-pitched thunderous booming.  Then you smell it -- the characteristic sulfurous, rotten-egg smell of an active volcano.  Then you crest the top of a low hill, and see it for the first time.

We were close enough that we could feel the warmth radiated from the lava.  Much closer, and the combination of the heat and the sulfur gases would have been overwhelming.  Orange-hot plumes of molten rock exploded out of the fissure and splattered onto the sides of the cinder cone, almost instantly turning to shattered, jagged chunks of black basalt as it cooled and hardened.

It was one of the most spectacular things I've ever witnessed.  In the presence of this kind of power, you truly feel tiny and very, very fragile. 

We were really extraordinarily lucky to see what we did; we were there on the 15th of August, and -- for reasons unknown -- the eruption abruptly ceased on the 21st.  Fagradalsfjall is still very much an active volcano, though.  Just last week it started up again, and this cycle looks like it may actually be even more dramatic.

What brings all this up is a paper last week in Nature about some research out of the University of California - Santa Barbara that analyzed the lava from Fagradalsfjall and found that it ran counter to the conventional model of how volcanoes erupt.  The previous understanding was that magma chambers fill gradually, and undergo mixing from convection and the physical shaking from earthquakes; then, when the eruption happens, the chamber drains.  This would result in a relatively uniform chemistry of the rock produced from the beginning of the eruption to the end.

That's not what geologists saw with Fagradalsfjall.

"This is what we see at Mount Kilauea, in Hawaii," said Matthew Jackson, who co-authored the study.  "You'll have eruptions that go on for years, and there will be minor changes over time.  But in Iceland, there was more than a factor of 1,000 higher rates of change for key chemical indicators.  In a month, the Fagradalsfjall eruption showed more compositional variability than the Kilauea eruptions showed in decades.  The total range of chemical compositions that were sampled at this eruption over the course of the first month span the entire range that has ever erupted in southwest Iceland in the last 10,000 years."

Why this happened is uncertain.  It could be that Fagradalsfjall is being fed by blobs of liquid magma rising from much deeper in the mantle, where the chemistry is different; those much hotter blobs then rose to the surface without a lot of mixing, resulting in a dramatic alteration of the rock being produced over the course of the eruption.  This adds a significant complication to interpreting records of past eruptions, not only in Iceland, but with other volcanoes.

"So when I go out to sample an old lava flow, or when I read or write papers in the future," Jackson said, "it'll always be on my mind: This might not be the complete story of the eruption."

It's fascinating that as far as science has come, we still have a lot to work out -- not only out in the far depths of space (as yesterday's post about MoND described) but right beneath our feet on our own home world.  As eminent astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson put it, "You can’t be a scientist if you’re uncomfortable with ignorance, because scientists live at the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.  This is very different from the way journalists portray us.  So many articles begin, "Scientists now have to go back to the drawing board."  It’s as though we’re sitting in our offices, feet up on our desks—masters of the universe—and suddenly say, "Oops, somebody discovered something!"  No.  We’re always at the drawing board.  If you’re not at the drawing board, you’re not making discoveries."

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Newton modified

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, astrophysicist Vera Rubin discovered something odd about the rates at which stars were revolving around their home galaxies; the stars in the outer reaches of the galaxy were orbiting as quickly as the ones nearer to the center.

Called the "flat rotation curve problem," this observation flies in the face of an astronomical principle that's been known since the seventeenth century, which is Kepler's Third Law.  Kepler's Third Law states that for bodies orbiting the same center of gravity, the square of the orbital period (time taken for the object to make a single orbit) is proportional to the cube of the average distance between the object and the center of gravity.  Put more simply, the farther out an orbiting object is, the slower it should be moving.  This law holds beautifully for the planets, asteroids, and comets in the Solar System.

Unfortunately, when Rubin looked at galactic rotation rates, she found that Kepler's Third Law appeared not to hold.  What it looked like was that there was a great deal more mass in the galaxy than could be seen, and that mass was spread out in some kind of invisible halo surrounding it.  That additional mass would account for the flatness of the rotation curves.

It was forthwith nicknamed dark matter.

The calculations of Rubin and others showed that the amount of dark matter was not insignificant.  Current estimates place it at around 27% of the total mass of the universe.  Only 5% is baryonic (ordinary) matter, so the matter we can't see outweighs ordinary matter by over a factor of five.  (The other 68% is the even weirder and more elusive dark energy, about which we know next to nothing.)

The problem is, every experiment designed to directly detect dark matter has resulted in zero success.  Whatever it is, it seems not to interact with ordinary matter at all other than via its gravitational pull.  These repeated failures drew rueful comparisons between dark matter and the luminiferous aether, the mysterious substance through which light waves were alleged to propagate.  The aether was proposed back in the nineteenth century because it was hard to imagine how light waves moved through a vacuum unless it had a medium -- what, exactly, was waving?  The existence of aether was conclusively disproven by the elegant Michelson-Morley experiment, which showed that unlike any other kind of wave, the speed of light waves seemed to be invariant regardless of the direction of motion of the observer.  It remained for Albert Einstein to explain how that could possibly be -- and to figure out all the strange and counterintuitive outcomes of this phenomenon, with his Special and General Theories of Relativity.

More than one modern physicist has surmised that dark matter might similarly be the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of how gravity works -- and that we are just waiting for this century's Einstein to turn physics on its head by pointing out what we've missed.

Enter Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom.

Milgrom is the inventor of MoND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics), a model which -- like the Theories of Relativity -- proposes that the explanation for the anomalous observations is not that there's some unseen and undetectable substance causing the effect, but that our understanding of how physics works is incomplete.  In particular, Milgrom says, there needs to be a modification to the equations of motion at very small accelerations, such as the ones experienced by stars orbiting in the outer reaches of galaxies.

With those modifications, the orbital rates make perfect sense.  No dark matter needed.

The Whirlpool Galaxy [Image licensed under the Creative Commons NASA/ESA/JPL/Hubble Heritage Team & C. Violette, M51 (2), CC BY-SA 4.0]

As with relativity -- and any other time someone has claimed to overturn a long-established paradigm -- MoND hasn't achieved anywhere near universal acclaim.  The Wikipedia article on it (linked above) states, gloomily, "no satisfactory cosmological model has been constructed from the hypothesis."  And it does lack the blindingly bright insight of Einstein's models, where taking the "problem of the seeming invariance of the speed of light" and turning it into the "axiom of the actual invariance of the speed of light" triggered a shift in our understanding that has since passed every empirical test ever designed.  Compared to Einstein's model, MoND almost seems like "Newton + an add-on," with no particularly good explanation as to why high accelerations obey Newton's laws but low ones don't.  (Of course, there's a parallel here to Einstein, as well -- at low speeds, Newton's laws are accurate, while at near-light speeds, Einsteinian effects take over.  So maybe Milgrom is on to something after all.)

After all, it's not like the other option -- dark matter -- has much going for it experimentally.

And MoND just got a significant leg up with an observation of the behavior of star clusters that was the subject of a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society last week.  In open star clusters, as new stars ignite it produces an outward push that can blow away material (including other stars), creating two "tidal tails" that precede and trail the cluster as it moves through space.  According to Newtonian dynamics (with or without dark matter), the two tails should have about the same mass.

"According to Newton's laws of gravity, it's a matter of chance in which of the tails a lost star ends up," explains Dr. Jan Pflamm-Altenburg of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn.  "So both tails should contain about the same number of stars.  However, in our work we were able to prove for the first time that this is not true: In the clusters we studied, the front tail always contains significantly more stars nearby to the cluster than the rear tail."

This peculiar observation fits the predictions of MoND much better than it does the predictions of the Newtonian model.

"The results [of simulations using MoND] correspond surprisingly well with the observations," said Ingo Thies, co-author of last week's paper.  "However, we had to resort to relatively simple computational methods to do this.  We currently lack the mathematical tools for more detailed analyses of modified Newtonian dynamics."

So the matter is very far from settled.  What's certain is that, similar to the physicists' situation in the late nineteenth century with regards to the behavior of light, there's something significant we're missing.  Whether that's some odd form of matter that doesn't interact with anything except via gravity, or because we've got the equations for the laws of motion wrong, remains to be seen.

And of course, after that, we still have dark energy to explain.  I think the physicists are going to be busy over the next few decades, don't you?

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Gold standard

I have a great fondness for a glass of fine red wine or single malt scotch, but I have to admit something up front; to say I have an "undiscerning palate" is a considerable understatement.

I basically have two taste buds: "thumbs up" and "thumbs down."  I know what I like, but that's about where it stops.  On the other end of the spectrum from me are "supertasters" -- people who have a much greater acuity for the sense of taste than the rest of us slobs -- and they are in high demand working for food and drink manufacturers as taste testers, because they can pick up subtleties in flavor that bypass most people.  They're the ones we have to thank for what you read on the labels in wine stores ("This vintage has a subtle nose of asphalt and boiled cabbage; the flavor contains notes of wet dog, garlic, and sour cream, with a delicate hint of chocolate at the finish").

I make fun, but I swear I once saw a sauvignon blanc described as tasting like "cat piss on a gooseberry bush."  I had to try it.  

It was actually rather nice.  "Thumbs up."

What's always struck me about all this is how subjective it seems.  So much of it is, both literally and figuratively, a matter of taste.  This is why I thought it was fascinating that a new study has found a way to quantify the presence of congeners -- the chemicals other than alcohol introduced by the fermentation and aging processes -- which are the source of most of the flavor in wines, beers, and spirits.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Pjt56, Glencairn Glass-pjt, CC BY-SA 4.0]

A paper in ACS Applied Nanomaterials, led by Jennifer Gracie of the University of Glasgow, describes a simple test for flavor in whisky using less than a penny's worth of soluble gold ions.  It turns out that the aging process for whiskies involves storing them in charred oak barrels, and this introduces congeners that react strongly with gold, producing a striking red or purple color.  The deeper the color, the more congeners are present -- and the more flavorful the whisky.

The authors write:

The maturation of spirit in wooden casks is key to the production of whisky, a hugely popular and valuable product, with the transfer and reaction of molecules from the wooden cask with the alcoholic spirit imparting color and flavor.  However, time in the cask adds significant cost to the final product, requiring expensive barrels and decades of careful storage.  Thus, many producers are concerned with what “age” means in terms of the chemistry and flavor profiles of whisky.  We demonstrate here a colorimetric test for spirit “agedness” based on the formation of gold nanoparticles (NPs) by whisky.  Gold salts were reduced by barrel-aged spirit and produce colored gold NPs with distinct optical properties...  We conclude that age is not just a number, that the chemical fingerprint of key flavor compounds is a useful marker for determining whisky “age”, and that our simple reduction assay could assist in defining the aged character of a whisky and become a useful future tool on the warehouse floor.

Which is pretty cool.  Better than relying on people like me, whose approach to drinking a nice glass of scotch is not to analyze it, but to pour a second round.  I guess there's nothing wrong with knowing what you like -- even if you can't really put your finger on why you like it.

That's why we non-supertasters rely on studies like this one to provide a gold standard to make up for our own lack of perceptivity.

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Odd number

A regular reader of Skeptophilia had an interesting response to a recent post wherein I considered the strong and weak versions of the Anthropic Principle -- the idea that the universe has its physical constants, and thus its overall conditions, fine-tuned to be conducive to the development and sustenance of life.  The Strong Anthropic Principle considers that fine-tuning to be the deliberate dialing of the knobs by a creator of some sort; the Weak Anthropic Principle more takes the angle that of course the constants in our universe are set that way, because if they hadn't been, we wouldn't be here to comment upon it.  The weak version, which has always made considerable sense to me, looks upon the particular values of the physical constants as either being (1) a happy accident, or (2) constrained by some mechanism we have yet to understand (in other words, there's a scientific reason why they are what they are, and they'd be the same in all possible universes, but we haven't yet figured out what that reason is).

The reader picked up on my citing the fine structure constant as an example of one of those perhaps-arbitrary physical constants, and wrote:

Interesting you should choose the fine structure constant as an example, because that's the one that has even the physicists perplexed as to why it has the value it does.  There doesn't seem to be any a priori reason it is equal to 1/137, and it shows up in all sorts of seemingly unrelated realms of physics.  Maybe God is trying to tell us something?  If so, it very much remains to be seen what he's trying to tell us, but it's a curious number to say the least.

See if you can find what Richard Feynman and Wolfgang Pauli had to say about it, if you want a chuckle, albeit a rueful one.

He's not exaggerating that the fine structure constant comes up all over the place.  The usual definition is it is a measure of the strength with which charged particles interact with electromagnetic fields.  The formula for it connects four other physical constants -- the charge of an electron, Planck's constant, the speed of light, and the electric permittivity of a vacuum.  But this is where things start getting odd; because unlike all the other constants in physics, the fine structure constant is dimensionless -- it has no units.  No matter what system of units you're using for the four constituents, everything cancels out and you get a unit-free constant -- 1/137.  (Actually, 1/137.035999206, but 1/137 is a decent approximation.)  You can throw in the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight, and as long as you are consistent and have all the other distances in furlongs and all the other times in fortnights, it doesn't matter.  It always comes out 1/137.

The fine structure constant also shows up in some mystifyingly disparate applications.  It's in the formulae used to determine the size of electron orbits in atoms.  It is used to explain the odd splitting of spectral lines in the emission spectrum of elements, due to electrons with opposite spins interacting slightly differently with the orbitals they sit in.  It shows up in calculations of optical conductivity of solids.  It's used to figure out the probability of an atom absorbing or emitting a photon.  It relates the speed of motion of an electron as it orbits the nucleus to the speed of light.

Spectral line splitting in deuterium, one of the first phenomena explained by the fine structure constant [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Johnwalton, Fabry Perot Etalon Rings Fringes, CC BY 3.0]

It pops up so frequently, in fact, that people involved in the search for extraterrestrial life have suggested that if we want to send a low-information-content, compact message out into space that will communicate to any intelligent species that we have reached the age of technology, all we need to do is send a message that says "1/137."

That's how ubiquitous it is.

It's a lucky thing, too -- to go back to the Anthropic Principle arguments -- that it has the value it does.  If it were only a few percent larger, electrons would be so strongly bound by their nuclei that they wouldn't be able to interact with each other to form molecules; a few percent smaller, and they'd be bound so weakly atoms wouldn't form at all, and the whole universe would be a sea of loose elementary particles.

Weirdest of all, the current understanding of the fine structure constant is that it was much higher at the enormous energies immediately after the Big Bang, but then began to drop as the universe expanded and cooled.  It decreased to 1/137 -- and then stopped there.

Why did it stop at that value, and not keep sliding all the way down to zero?

No one knows.

As my reader pointed out, even luminaries like Richard Feynman were deeply perplexed by this number.  In his book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Feynman wrote:

There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e – the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455.  (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place.  It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.)

Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms?  Nobody knows.  It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by humans.  You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed His pencil."  We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out – without putting it in secretly!

Wolfgang Pauli was even more direct:

When I die my first question to the Devil will be: What is the meaning of the fine structure constant?

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Cosmic storms

Because we clearly don't have enough to worry about, a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society A describes apparent solar storm events captured in tree ring data that, if they happened today, would simultaneously fry every electronic device on Earth.

Those of you who are history buffs may think I'm talking about the 1859 Carrington Event, that caused auroras as near the equator as the Caribbean and triggered sparking, fires, and general failure in the telegraph system.  But no: the repeated Miyake Events -- which occurred six times in the last ten thousand years, most recently in 993 C.E. -- are estimated to have been a hundred times more powerful than Carrington, and worse still, scientists have no clear idea what caused them.

The evidence comes from carbon-14 deposition rates.  Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope of carbon that is produced at a relatively steady rate by bombardment of upper-atmosphere carbon dioxide by cosmic rays.  That C-14 is then incorporated into plant tissue via photosynthesis.  So tree ring C-14 content is a good indicator of the rate of radiation bombardment -- and the team, led by astrophysicist Benjamin Pope of the University of Queensland, have been analyzing six crazily high spikes of C-14 in tree rings, called "Miyake Events" after the scientist who first identified them.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the United States Air Force]

Identifying the events is not the same as discovering their underlying cause, and the Miyake Events have the researchers stumped, at least for now.  Solar storms tend to coincide with the eleven-year sunspot cycle, but the Miyake Events show no periodicity lining up with sunspots (or anything else, for that matter).  There has even been speculation that they may not be of solar origin at all, but come from some source outside the Solar System -- perhaps a gamma-ray burster or Wolf-Rayet star -- but there are no known candidates that are anywhere near close enough to be responsible, especially given that the phenomenon (whatever it is) has occurred six times in the past ten thousand years.

So the Miyake Events may be real, honest-to-goodness cosmic storms.  Not, I hasten to add, the nonsense from the abysmal 1960s series Lost in Space, wherein Will Robinson and Doctor Smith and the Robot would be amusing themselves, then suddenly the Robot would start flailing about and yelling "Danger!  Danger!  Cosmic storm imminent!"  Then some wind would happen and blow over cardboard props and styrofoam rocks, and Will and Doctor Smith would pretend they were being flung about helplessly.  In the midst of all this there would be a cosmic noise ("BWOYOYOYOYOYOY") and an alien would appear out of nowhere.  These aliens included a space pirate (complete with an electronic parrot on his shoulder), a bunch of alien hillbillies (their spaceship looked like an old shack with a front porch), a motorcycle gang, a group of hippies, some space teenagers, and in one episode I swear I am not making up, Brünhilde, wearing a feathered helmet and astride a cosmic horse (which unfortunately appeared to be made of plastic).  She then proceeded to yo-to-ho about the place until eventually Thor showed up, after which things got kind of ridiculous.

But I digress.

Anyhow, back to the real cosmic storms.  The weirdest thing about the current research is the discovery that these were not sudden, one-and-done events like Carrington, which only lasted a few hours.  "At least two, maybe three of these events... took longer than a year, which is surprising because that's not going to happen if it's a solar flare," Pope said, in an interview with ABC Science.  "We thought we were going to have a big slam dunk where we could prove that [Miyake events were caused by] the Sun...  This is the most comprehensive study ever made of these events and the big result is a big shrug; we don't know what's going on...  There's a kind of extreme astrophysical phenomenon that we don't understand and it actually could be a threat to us."

So that's cheerful.

What's the scariest about an event like this is that even though it wouldn't directly cause any harm to us, it could cause a simultaneous collapse of the entire electrical infrastructure, and that the damage would take weeks or months even to begin to fix.  Can you imagine?  Not only no internet, but no GPS, no cellphones, maybe even no electrical grid.  Air travel would be impossible without the radar and navigational systems that it relies on.  For the first time since electricity became widespread, the world would suddenly go dark -- not only figuratively, but literally.

Research into what caused the Miyake Events is ongoing.  Even if they can figure out what caused them, though, it's hard to see what, if anything, we could do about it.  Chances are they'd occur without warning -- everything toodling along normally, then suddenly, wham.

Probably best not to worry about it.

Have a nice day.

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