A black hole's warm glow

Once again I was sent a link by my buddy Andrew Butters, of the wonderful Potato Chip Math, who is not only a great writer but has a keen eye for a cool science article.

The link was to a story in Science Alert, and was titled, "Scientists Created a Black Hole in the Lab, and Then It Started To Glow," by Michelle Starr.  But before I tell you what the gist is, I have to bring up a peevish complaint about the headline (which may not have been Starr's fault; many times the headlines aren't written by the journalist herself, so I'm not jumping to blaming her for it).  The researchers, as you will see, did not "create a black hole;" what they did was create something that models some of the behavior of a black hole.  Which is cool enough, but doesn't have the cachet that black holes have, so Science Alert apparently thought they needed to jazz things up.  The headline is wildly misleading; no massive stars were destroyed in the course of this experiment.

Of course, this is not going to stop people from reading only the headline and then posting hysterical screeds about how those Mad Scientists Are Trying To Destroy Us All and undoubtedly tying in CERN, HAARP, the Illuminati, and Reptilian Aliens From Zeta Reticuli.

You know how it goes.

Anyhow, back to reality.  What the scientists really did was pretty amazing, and may give us some inroads into figuring out one of the biggest puzzles in physics; why theoretical physicists have been unable to reconcile the equations of quantum mechanics and those of relativity.  When they attempt to accommodate gravitational effects on the scale of the very small, the equations "blow up" -- they result in infinities -- usually a sign that something is very wrong about our understanding.

The reason black holes play into this question is that in the extraordinary gravitational field at the event horizon (the "point of no return," where the space is so strongly curved that even light can't escape), there is a quantum effect that becomes important on the macroscopic scale.  It's called Hawking radiation, after Stephen Hawking (who first proposed it), and deserves some closer attention.

 To start with, empty space isn't empty.  There is an inherent energy in space called zero-point energy or vacuum energy, and it is possible for this energy to be "borrowed" to produce particle-antiparticle pairs (such as an electron and a positron).  There's a catch, though; the pairs always recollide (in a minuscule amount of time, the upper limit of which is determined by the uncertainty principle).  So the pairs pop into existence and right out again, creating continuous tiny, extremely short-lived ripples in the fabric of space.  Not enough for anyone even to notice.

Well, unless you're near the event horizon of a black hole.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The huge gravitational field at the event horizon means that vacuum energy is much higher, and pair production happens at a much greater rate.  And because of that boundary, sometimes one member of a pair falls into the event horizon, while the other one doesn't.  At that point, the survivor radiates out into space -- taking a little of the black hole's mass/energy along with it.

That's the Hawking radiation.  What it implies is that black holes don't last forever -- eventually they evaporate, finally exploding in a burst of gamma rays.

The problem has been that the Hawking radiation is impossible to study experimentally; we're (fortunately) not near any black holes, at least so far as we know, and the faint signature of the radiation would be lost in the general white noise of the universe.  But now -- and this is where we get to the current research -- a team led by Lotte Mertens of the University of Amsterdam has developed a model that simulates this behavior, and found that just like the real thing, it emits radiation exactly the way Hawking predicted (this is the "it started to glow" in the headline).

What they did was to lock together a chain of atoms that provided a path for electrons to move, and by fine-tuning the rate at which this happened, they created a simulated event horizon that caused some of the electrons' wave-like behavior to vanish completely.  The result was an increase in thermal radiation that matched the Hawking model precisely.

Why this is significant is that it could provide a way to study the quantum effects of gravity in the lab, something that has been impossible before now.  It's not like we can hop a spacecraft and fly to a black hole (which would be inadvisable anyhow).  So this fascinating experiment might be the first step toward one of the prime goals of physicists -- finding a way to unify the quantum and gravitational models.

So even if they didn't "create a black hole in the lab," the whole thing is still pretty freakin' cool.

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Broken tools

Since 2016, one of the most persistent puzzles to me has been the unflagging support of evangelical Christians for Donald Trump, a man whose main claim to fame seems to be embodying all Seven Deadly Sins in one individual.

I get why people with far-right ideology support him; that, at least, is consistent.  Trump has the same pro-corporate capitalist, xenophobic, anti-immigration, authoritarian views they do.  But the very religious have continued to idolize the man despite his openly admitting affairs while married, multiple credible allegations of fraud, and so many outright lies that it's impossible even to keep up with them.  They even go so far as to consider him anointed by God -- I heard one person, with no apparent sense of irony, call Trump "Jesus's Right-Hand Man."

When I've inquired (cautiously) into how "Jesus's Right-Hand Man" can be so dramatically and thoroughly flawed, I've heard comments like "God can work with a broken tool."  Which seems to me to be a puzzling stance for a group of people who ostensibly believe that the Bible should be followed to the letter, and anyone who doesn't do so is destined for the fires of hell.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gerbilo, Christianity symbols, CC BY 3.0]

A fascinating study that appeared last week in Politics and Religion may have figured out the answer.  It's not that they think Trump is religious himself; they don't.  In fact, only 37% of the white evangelical Christians in the study said they thought Trump was religious.  (Surprisingly, Biden scored slightly higher.)  Despite this, they overwhelmingly voted for Trump -- because, the study found, Trump repeatedly emphasized that evangelical Christians were a threatened minority, and promised to protect them.

The perception, apparently, was that it didn't matter if Trump was religious, or even moral, himself; his election was "part of God's plan" to bolster up the evangelical community against perceived external threats.  Trump's strategy was to play into that fear -- and it worked.

"This finding suggests that Trump is a unique case when it comes to white evangelical evaluations of the religiosity of elites," said Jack Thompson of the University of Exeter, who authored the study, in an interview with PsyPost.  "Instead of projecting their beliefs onto Trump, and thereby supporting him because of his perceived religiosity, white evangelicals support him despite his lack of religiosity...  The findings concerning the salience of identity threats on conditioning white evangelical beliefs also provide an additional explanation for why evaluations on Trump’s religiosity might not have mattered when it came to their vote choice in 2016.  Namely, because Trump’s invocation of the decline of white Christian America proved effective in activating religious identity threat in a way that led to white evangelicals to coalesce around his candidacy.  In this way, Trump’s ability to articulate white evangelicals’ fears about the declining influence of Christianity likely overrode any lingering concerns about his religiosity."

So "God can work with a broken tool" turns out to be pretty spot on, as does the observation by a friend of mine that "the Religious Right loves Trump because he hates the same people they do."  

The whole thing makes some twisted kind of sense.  If you're convinced that "God has a plan" -- and that, importantly, you know what that plan is -- then it doesn't make a difference who contributes to the working out of that plan.  It could be the most evil human being alive, committing atrocities, and as long as that moves God's plan forward -- well, that's what needs to happen.

Mighty convenient, that.

One has to wonder how this will continue to play out, because there's no doubt that evangelical Christianity is declining.  A study in 2021 found that between 2006 and 2020, the number of self-identified evangelicals in the United States dropped by 37%.  (In the same period, the number of Roman Catholics also dropped by 27%.)  What that suggests is that the fears of decreasing influence are well-founded.  At some point, the mobilization of the remaining evangelicals because of fear will inevitably be overcome by the fact that they're simply too few in numbers to make a difference in national elections.

At least, I hope so.  I'm not religious myself but have no problem with people who are, as long as they stay in their lane and don't attempt to force belief down my throat.  On the other hand, any group who could support a moral degenerate like Donald Trump can't be allowed to swing the direction of our entire nation.

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Roots of the problem

It's natural enough to think that humans are the only organisms that damage their own habitat.  We certainly seem to be doing a damn good job of it.  But there have been other times living things have sown the seeds of their own destruction.

One good example is the Great Oxidation Event -- sometimes, justifiably, nicknamed the "Oxygen Holocaust."  It occurred just over two billion years ago, and hinges on one rather surprising fact; oxygen is a highly reactive, toxic gas.

There's good evidence that aerobic respiration -- the set of biochemical reactions that allows us to burn the glucose in our food, and which provides us with the vast majority of the energy we use -- evolved first as a mechanism for detoxifying oxygen, and only afterward got co-opted into being an energy pathway.  The problem was that prior to the Great Oxidation Event, all of the organisms had been anaerobes, which are capable of releasing energy without oxygen.  To the vast majority of anaerobes, oxygen is a deadly poison.  That's why when there was a sudden, massive injection of oxygen into the Earth's atmosphere a couple of billions of years ago, the result was that just about every living thing on Earth died.

The tipping point came with the evolution of yet another energetic pathway: photosynthesis.  Photosynthesis was a tremendous innovation, as it allowed organisms to harness light energy instead of chemical energy, but it had one significant downside.  The first part of the reaction chain of photosynthesis breaks up water molecules and releases oxygen.  So when the first photosynthesizers evolved -- probably something like modern cyanobacteria -- oxygen gas began to pour into the oceans and atmosphere.

Something like 99% of life on Earth died.

The survivors fell into three groups: (1) the handful of organisms that had some early form of aerobic respiration as a detoxification pathway; (2) anaerobes that had a way of hiding from the oxygen, like today's methanogens that live in anaerobic mud; and (3) the photosynthesizers themselves.

From the organisms that survived that catastrophic bottleneck came every living thing we currently see around us.

So we're far from being the only organisms that cause ecological problems.  The reason the topic comes up, in fact, is because of another example I'd never heard of until I bumped into a paper in the Geological Society of North America Bulletin last week; the Devonian mass extinctions, which are one of the "Big Five" extinction events that have struck the Earth.  This particular series of cataclysms wiped out an estimated seventy percent of marine species, but it may have been triggered by the evolution of something that seems innocuous, even benevolent.

Tree roots.

Plants had only colonized the land during the previous period, the Silurian, enabled to do so by yet another innovation; the evolution of vascular tissue.  The internal plumbing vascular plants have (the xylem and phloem you probably remember from your biology classes) allow plants to move water farther and faster, so they were no longer so tied to living in ponds and lakes.  Plus, vascular tissue in many plants doubles as support tissue, so this facilitated growing taller (a significant advantage when you're competing with your near neighbors for light).

But if you're taller, you're also more likely to topple when it's windy.  So then there's selection for who's got the best support system.  The winners: plants with roots.

Devonian Forest by Eduard Riou (ca. 1872) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Like vascular tissue, roots are multi-purpose.  They not only provide support and anchoring, they're good at creating lots of absorptive surface area for water and nutrients.  (Some roots are also evolved to store starch -- carrots come to mind -- but that's an innovation that seems to have come much later.)  So now we have a competition between plants for who's got the best supports, and who can access nutrients from the soils the fastest.

Roots very quickly became good at twisting their way into rocks.  You've undoubtedly seen it; tree roots clinging to, and breaking up, rocks, asphalt, cement, pretty much any barrier they can get a foothold into.  When that happened, suddenly there's an erosive force breaking up bedrock and transporting nutrients (especially phosphorus) into plant tissue.  Phosphorus began to leach out of the rock into the soil, and when the plants died all the phosphorus in the tissue was released into rivers, streams, and lakes.

The result was a massive influx of nutrients into bodies of water.

Have you ever seen what happens when chemical fertilizers get into a pond?  It fosters algal blooms, and when the algae dies and decomposes, the oxygen levels plummet and the entire pond dies.

That's what happened during the late Devonian Period -- but planet-wide.

The huge reef-building rugose and tabulate corals and stromatoporid sponges were wiped out en masse.  Other groups, such as trilobites and brachiopods, which depended on the reefs for habitat and food, got knocked back hard as well.

All, the authors claim, because of a nifty innovation in the structure of land plants.

It's tempting to think that the environment is stable; we look around us and think things have always been this way, and will always be this way.  What more of us need to understand is that while the global ecosystem is resilient up to a point, there is always a tipping point.  The scary part is we can pass that point suddenly, without even realizing it.  Then before we're even aware of what's happened, the last chance to turn things around is gone.

The difference between what happened during the Great Oxidation Event and the Devonian Mass Extinctions, and what's happening now, is that back then there was no conscious awareness on the part of the organisms who created the problem and those that were affected.  Now, we have (or should have) the awareness to see what is happening, and enough knowledge to make some smart decisions and halt the self-destructive path we're on.

Let's hope that it's not too late.

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Waves, demons, and sunk costs

I find it utterly baffling how hard it is for people to look at something that didn't work out like they expected and say, "Well, I guess I was wrong, then."

I mean, on one level, I get it.  I'm no fonder of being wrong than the next guy.  Finding out you're mistaken, especially about something important, can be devastating.  And admitting you're wrong can be nothing short of humiliating.  But even so -- when the facts demand it, we don't really have a choice, do we?

To judge by a great many people, apparently we do, and that choice is "hang on like grim death to what we already believed, and summarily dismiss any evidence to the contrary."

Take, for example, last week's election here in the United States.  Many of us, on both sides of the aisle, were expecting a "red wave" -- that the Republicans would score resounding wins, and end up with decisive majorities in the House, Senate, and gubernatorial races.  Didn't quite work out that way.  The Democratic majority in the Senate looks like it'll be up by at least one, possibly two; at the time of this writing, the control of the House of Representatives has yet to be decided, but any majority (either way) is going to be razor-thin.

My reason for bringing this up in the context of "being wrong" is not the pollsters, nor mere voting citizens like myself.  I have nowhere near the expertise in political science to expect my prognostications about elections would carry any weight at all, and polls have been wrong as often as they're right.  No, what I'm looking at here are the people who predicted the "red wave" would happen -- because God had told them so personally.

Let's start with pastor George Pearsons, who told an interviewer on The Victory Channel that he knew the election wouldn't be "stolen" because he'd gotten the information directly from the Big Guy himself:

This afternoon I'm in the kitchen, and I'm fixing something to eat, and Terry and I are talking about the election, and the different things that are happening.  And for a moment I got quiet, and I heard the voice of the Lord.  And you know what he said?  He said, 'I got this.'...  Father, we thank you.  We have worked together between heaven and Earth.  Two years, praying, standing, believing,  We are, as believers, emboldened, empowered, and standing on our authority in the word of God.  This election will not be stolen.  Corruption, you bow your knee, your name to the name of Jesus [??? sic], and Father we thank you that we've seen in two years, Jesus himself has rolled up his sleeves, and he has worked, and his people have worked with him, in every shape, form, and manner.  So Lord, we thank you that this deal is over.  It's up.  And now we hear your voice: 'I got this.'  And we praise you and honor you for the victory this night for the United States of America.

As the results started coming in, though, the tune changed.  My Pillow guy Mike Lindell, also speaking on The Victory Channel, said he saw it coming, despite what God himself had said to Reverend Pearsons, and that had been announced on the same channel, only hours earlier:

Well, it's kind of what I expected.  They're stealing everything.  Just in Herschel Walker's race alone, over two hundred thousand votes have been injected into his opponent to get to this runoff stage.  They stole the governor's race with Mastriano in Pennsylvania, we've seen an early injection of ninety thousand votes in the computers, and Kari Lake, they're trying to steal her race, too.

Needless to say, there was no "injection" of votes, and the races weren't "stolen."  Walker's in a runoff but is trailing Raphael Warnock, and Mastriano lost fair and square.  But saying that is a bridge too far for people like Lindell.

A couple of days afterward, when it became clear that there had been no "red wave," the christofascists were scrambling around trying to figure out why the divine guidance had turned out to be flat wrong.  No way could they just say, "Maybe God didn't speak to us after all," or "Perhaps hitching our boat to Donald Trump wasn't such a great idea," or (worst of all) "It's time to do some reflection and rethink whether our message of exclusion, ugliness, and hate is in line with Jesus's actual words."  Instead, they cast around for what could possibly have made the election go sideways, and landed on the obvious answer:

It was the demons.

Pastor Shane Vaughn said that of course what God told him wasn't wrong, and of course he wasn't delusional when he claimed to hear God speaking in the first place.  It was just those damn demons:

That's why there was no red wave.  Abortion.  Abortion changed everything.  And even though all the polls showed the economy was the main issue, abortion is a religious issue.  And religion creates more passion than anything in the world...  And there's a religion of demons that loves abortion.  That religion of pro-abortion showed up.  It was bigger than anybody understood because of the passion those demonic powers create in their church of heathens that love to kill babies.  Now that's why there was no red wave.  Abortion.  Had it not been for the abortion issue, I promise you, the whole country would be red today.  What happened in Pennsylvania -- anybody who could vote for that monster, Uncle Fester, proves to me the power of demonic activity in the world today.  That's the only way you could vote for that man.  That's it.  Those demons did show up, and those demons do have power over this Earth.

So if the supernatural voice you supposedly heard telling you something turns out to be wrong, you have to invent a supernatural enemy to explain what happened?

I understand the sunk-cost fallacy; that once you've put a tremendous amount of personal and emotional energy into supporting something or someone, it's a huge effort to reverse course.  But seriously; isn't it time for some reassessment, here?

It puts me in mind of a couple of quotes, the first from Susan B. Anthony: "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."  And even more to the point, from theologian and writer Timothy Keller: "If your god never disagrees with you, you might just be worshiping an idealized version of yourself."

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Fine-toothed comb

Sometimes I need to tell y'all about a new discovery not because it's weird or controversial, but simply because it's cool.

I owe my awareness of this one from my twin brudda from anudda mudda, Andrew Butters of the brilliant blog Potato Chip Math (which you should all subscribe to immediately).  Andrew is not only smart and a great writer and funnier than hell, he also knows my capacity for geeking out over anything related to languages, so when he found this, he sent it on to me instantaneously.

It's about the discovery of an ancient ivory comb near Tel Lachish, Israel.  It was a cool enough artifact, dating from about 1,700 B.C.E., but its coolness factor increased by a factor of a thousand when it was discovered that it was inscribed with seventeen tiny letters.

[Image courtesy of Dafna Gazit, Israeli Antiquities Authority]

The inscription is in Canaanite, and says: "ytš ḥṭ ḏ lqml śʿ[r w]zqt," which translates roughly to, "may this tusk root out lice of the hair and the beard."  If you're wondering what happened to all the vowels, they're missing because written Canaanite was an abjad -- a writing system wherein vowels are left out unless they occur first in a word.  (Modern abjads include Hebrew and Arabic, both of which are in the same family as Canaanite.  If you're curious about abjads and other writing systems, I did a post about that topic back in January.)

There are a lot of things that are cool about this.  First, it's mildly amusing that one of the earliest inscriptions ever found has to do with getting rid of lice.  Be that as it may, the (much) more awesome piece is that this is the earliest known inscription in the alphabet that would eventually morph into not only Arabic and Hebrew, but Cyrillic (used in several Slavic languages), Greek, and eventually, English.

"This is the first sentence ever found in the Canaanite language in Israel," said archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  "There are Canaanites in Ugarit in Syria, but they write in a different script, not the alphabet that is used still today…  The comb inscription is direct evidence for the use of the alphabet in daily activities some 3,700 years ago.  This is a landmark in the history of the human ability to write."

An amusing postscript is that the next oldest inscriptions ever found in Canaanite were on a 3,500 year old lead tablet found near Mount Ebal in Israel, and said, "Cursed, cursed, cursed—cursed by the God YHW.  You will die cursed.  Cursed you will surely die.  Cursed by YHW—cursed, cursed, cursed."

So that's cheerful.  I probably don't need to mention that "YHW" is a transcription of the Hebrew name for God, usually rendered either "Yahweh" or "Jehovah" in English.  It's a little humbling that the oldest surviving written texts we know of had to do with (1) ill-wishing an enemy, and (2) getting rid of parasites.

Although if you'll look around you at the behavior of people now, you'll probably be struck by the fact that not all that much has changed.

So that's our cool discovery of the day, and thanks to Andrew for bringing it to my attention.  Interesting that the letters I'm typing right at this moment have a history that stretches back over three millennia, back to inscriptions like this one.

I just hope what I'm writing these days is more edifying than "Use this comb to remove lice" and 'You will die cursed."

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Mental poison

Here in the United States, we just went through another election.  There are still several races left unsettled, but the outcome seems to be that neither side got the drubbing the other side wanted, and we're still going to be stuck on the gridlock-inducing razor's edge for another couple of years at least.

For me the most frustrating part of politics is watching how people form their opinions.  Ever since the repeal of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine back in 1987, media has devolved into a morass of partisan rhetoric.  Long gone are the days of the honorable Walter Cronkite, who was so dedicated to honesty and balance that to this day I don't know what party he himself belonged to.  No longer can we simply turn on the news and expect to hear the news.  Politically-motivated spin, not to mention careful selection (and omission) of certain news items, guarantees that if you get on your favorite media channel, you'll hear only stories that support what you already believed.

Whether or not those beliefs actually are true.

To take one particularly ridiculous example, consider commentator Joe Rogan's claim that "woke schools" are providing litter boxes for elementary school students who "identify as cats."  Rogan later admitted that he lied, and a thorough investigation showed that the story is entirely false -- but not before New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduc used it as a talking point against schools' attempts to honor transgender students' identities.

"I wish I was making this up," Bolduc said, with unintentional irony, to audiences who by and large swallowed the whole story hook, line, and sinker.  (Hearteningly, Bolduc lost his race on Tuesday to Democratic incumbent Maggie Hassan, by a ten percent margin.)

The media has gotten to where it controls, rather than just reporting on, political issues.  The whole system has been turned on its head -- with disastrous consequences.

If you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at this study that appeared in the journal Memory last month.  In "Partisan Bias in False Memories for Misinformation About the 2021 U.S. Capitol Riot," researchers Dustin Calvillo, Justin Harris, and Whitney Hawkins of California State University - San Marcos describe something alarming; eighty percent of a group of over 220 volunteers "recalled" at least one false memory about the January 6, 2021 riot.  Further, the false memories Democrats recalled were almost always pro-Democrat, and the false memories Republicans recalled were almost always pro-Republican.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sagearbor, Donkey and elephant - democrat blue and republican red - polygon rough, CC BY-SA 4.0]

"The main takeaway from this study is that different people can have very different memories of the same event," Calvillo said, in an interview in PsyPost.  "People tend to remember details of events that paint themselves and their social groups in a positive light.  Accuracy of memory is important to learn from previous events.  This partisan bias hinders that learning...  Understanding factors related to false memories of real-world political events is an important step in reducing false beliefs that complicate finding solutions to public policy problems.  If people do not remember an event similarly, consensus on defining the problem becomes difficult."

Achieving consensus, though, doesn't just depend on fighting confirmation bias -- our tendency to accept slim or questionable evidence if it supports what we already believed (a fault we are all prone to, at least to some degree).  It depends critically on fighting deliberately skewed media.  Somehow we have got to get a handle on the forces that have turned public media into a non-stop conduit of partial truths, conscious omissions of the facts, and outright lies.  Until we reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, or something like it, there will be no way to halt the stream of poison that is widening the divide between Right and Left in this country -- and no way to be certain that when you turn on the news, what you're hearing is the truth.

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Spark of lies

Let me just say for the record that if you're making a claim, your case is not strengthened by lying about the evidence.

The topic comes up because of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link along with a message ending with the words "HUGE FACEPALM," and I have to say that is, if anything, an underreaction.

The story starts with a piece of (legitimate, and actually fascinating) research that appeared in Nature a few years ago.  It used the technique of fluorescence tagging to establish that rapid movement of zinc ions at the moment of fertilization is one of the mechanisms that prevents polyspermy -- the fusion of an egg with two sperm cells, which would result in a wildly wrong number of chromosomes and (very) early embryonic death.

Well, a woman named Kenya Sinclair, writing for Catholic Online, found this research -- I was going to say "read it," but that seems doubtful -- and is claiming that this "zinc spark," as the researchers called it, represents the moment the soul enters the embryo.  Thus proving that an immortal soul is conferred at the moment of conception.

Don't believe me?  Here is a verbatim quote:

Catholics have long believed life begins at the moment of conception, which is why in vitro fertilization and the use of contraceptives are considered immoral.  Now, with the discovery of the spark of life, science just may have proven the Church has been right all along...

Researchers discovered the moment a human soul enters an egg, which gives pro-life groups an even greater edge in the battle between embryonic life and death. The precise moment is celebrated with a zap of energy released around the newly fertilized egg.

Teresa Woodruff, one of the study's senior authors and professor in obstetrics and gynecology at the university, delivered a press release in which she stated, "to see the zinc radiate out in a burst from each human egg was breathtaking."

Of course it is breathtaking - she saw the moment a soul entered the newly fertilized egg!

Though scientists are unable to explain why the egg releases zinc, which then binds to small molecules with a flash, the faithful recognize this must be the moment God allows a miracle to occur.

This then spawned a YouTube video (because of course it did) that has garnered over forty thousand views, and comments like the following:

• This gives the idea that the Shroud of Turin somewhat resembles this kind of event, where a burst of light brings someone into life.
• Glory to Lord and Savior Jesus for all eternity Thank you Lord, THANK YOU!!!
• For me if soul exist then also god exist
• In vitro fertilizaton [sic] is playing God, and should be illegal, and fertilized eggs SHOULD NOT BE DESTROYED, they are killing human beings!  Life begins at conception no matter what athiest [sic] scientists say!
• I am a Christian but I'm confused on this.  If the flash of light has something to do with God and the souls entering the body, why does it happen in animals?  I've been told that animals don't have souls... is that wrong idk?

IDK either, honestly, but mostly what IDK is how people who post this stuff remember not to put their underwear on backwards.

The whole thing put me in mind of the map that was circulating in the months after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, and was claimed to show the spread of horrible toxic nuclear contamination from the breached nuclear reactor:

I mean, look at that!  Glowing purple at the center, with evil red and orange tendrils reaching out like some kind of malign entity all the way across the Pacific!

There are just a couple of problems with this.  First, if you'll look at the scale on the right, you'll see that the colors represent something measured in centimeters.  I don't know about you, but I've hardly ever seen radioactivity measured in units of distance.  ("Smithers!  We've got to get out of here!  If this reactor melts down, it will release over five and a half furlongs of gamma rays!")

In fact, this is a map showing the maximum wave heights from the tsunami.  But that didn't stop people from using this image to claim that NOAA and other government agencies were hiding the information on deadly contamination of the ocean in a particularly nefarious and secretive way, namely by creating a bright, color-coded map and releasing it on their official website.

Look, I get that we all have our pet theories and strongly-held beliefs, and we'd love it to pieces if we found hard evidence supporting them.  But taking scientific research and mischaracterizing it to make it look like you have that evidence is, to put it bluntly, lying.

And the fact that you're successfully hoodwinking the gullible and ignorant is not something to brag about.

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