Folie à deux

One of the long-standing unanswered questions in medical science is the role of the mind in physical health.

A well-known example is the placebo effect, the reduction or elimination of symptoms in an ill person from taking a "medicine" with no active ingredients.  Less known, but also well documented, is the nocebo effect, where someone believes they will come to harm, often from supernatural means -- as in voodoo curses -- and then actually does.  (Placebo and nocebo come from Latin, and mean "I will please" and "I will harm," respectively.)

The mechanism by which this could occur is poorly understood at best.  We do know that in situations of high emotional or mental stress, the body produces hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, which can have long-term deleterious effects (thus the connection between stress and inflammatory diseases), but it seems like there must be more to it than that.

And that's not even as complicated as it gets.  Consider, for example, folie à deux -- also called shared psychosis -- when two people experience the same strange delusions.  How this happens and the mechanism by which it works are unknown, and the results can be nothing short of bizarre.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of its creator, Chitrapa]

The best example I've ever heard of folie à deux is the case of June and Jennifer Gibbons.  The two were identical twins, born in 1963 in Yemen to British subjects originally from Barbados.  By 1974 the girls, their parents, and three other (completely normal) siblings were living in Haverfordwest, Wales, where their father worked as a Royal Air Force technician and their mother was a homemaker.

The twins started exhibiting odd behavior as toddlers.  They rarely spoke except to each other, and their conversations were conducted in a largely invented language based in part on a sped-up version of Bajan Creole.  (Siblings inventing their own private language isn't that uncommon, and is called idioglossia; but here, the twins seemed entirely unwilling to speak in English, nor to anyone but each other.)

The parents, and the girls' teachers, tried everything they could think of to break this strange link.  Sending them to separate boarding schools completely backfired; both girls became catatonic, refusing to eat or move until they were reunited.  The one way they would let anyone else know what was happening in their minds was through writing.  Given a gift of diaries when they were sixteen years old, they began writing elaborate stories -- but filled with violence and disturbing imagery.

In 1981, following a string of petty crimes they were accused of, the twins were committed to Broadmoor Hospital, where they were eventually to spend twelve years.  And this is where things took an even more peculiar turn, because they told the staff at Broadmoor that the only way one of them would live a normal life is if the other died.  It didn't matter which; to break the spell required one of them to die, after which the other would go on to speak, act, and live normally.

In 1993, they were transferred to Caswell Clinic in Bridgend, Wales, and upon arrival, Jennifer was found to be unresponsive.  She was admitted to the hospital where she lingered, comatose, for a week, but finally died due to what an autopsy found to be acute myocarditis (inflammation of the heart).  Strangest of all, there were no drugs, poisons, or infectious agents in her system that could be found to explain the illness, and the inquest ended with a finding of "ultimate cause of death unknown."

A week after her sister's death, June told a therapist, "I'm free at last, liberated, and at last Jennifer has given up her life for me," and described the moment of Jennifer's death as hitting her "like a tsunami."  She was monitored by psychiatric services for several years, but eventually was discharged, because -- exactly as the sisters had predicted -- the survivor had begun living an entirely normal life.  By 2008 June had a flat near her parents in a small village in western Wales, and was working and socializing like any ordinary person would.

What on earth could have caused this bizarre situation?

The simple answer is "we have no idea."  There is nothing in what is known of the Gibbons family's background that could account for it; judging by statements from the twins' siblings, they seem to have been a completely ordinary working-class family.  Strangest of all is the circumstances that severed the connection between Jennifer and June.  Did Jennifer Gibbons actually "will herself to die" to free her sister, or was there something more sinister going on?  What was the nature of the link between them -- and how can we account for the medical and psychological manifestations of it?

Once again, there are no clear answers.  We're left with more questions -- particularly, how the mind creates the world of perception we live in, and how it can go so drastically wrong for certain unfortunate people.  The treatment of psychiatric illness is certainly far better than it was even forty years ago, when the Gibbons twins started their decade of life in Broadmoor, but we're still largely in the dark about how the mind works -- and how it can so profoundly affect the body in which it resides.

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Cups and scrolls

I recently finished the outstanding novel The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, which tells the story of the events of The Iliad, focusing on the doomed love affair between Achilles and Patroclus (it's told from Patroclus's point of view).  The best novelizations of history and historical fiction -- other examples that come to mind are Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God, Sigrid Undset's Kristen Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken, and Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven -- don't just tell a story but actually transport you back into a different time and place.  They succeed at portraying the underlying humanity we share with all people, however far back you go, while communicating the fascinating otherness we experience when immersed in a different culture.

It's this same curiosity about other times and places that explains why I'm fascinated with archaeology.  The idea of seeing, or even touching, an item that was handled by people hundreds or thousands of years ago is an absolute thrill.  This is why I was so excited to read two wonderful pieces of research sent my way by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.

The first one is why I started this post with The Song of Achilles, because it's a study of an artifact called Nestor's Cup, a 2,800 ceramic vessel with the inscription, "I am Nestor's Cup, good to drink from.  Whoever drinks this cup empty, straightaway the desire for beautiful-crowned Aphrodite will seize him."

As an aside, I'm not sure that getting the hots for Aphrodite would, in the long run, be a good thing.  In The Iliad and The Odyssey the gods mostly come across as petulant, willful, and perpetually horny teenagers, and mortals were generally better off avoiding getting noticed by them.  As far as Nestor himself, he's over and over called "a great and wise counselor," but if you know the story, this comes across as a little weird because Nestor is the one who convinced Agamemnon to take the Achaeans into battle (with disastrous results), and was also the one who gave Patroclus the advice that ended up getting him killed.

So if Nestor handed me a cup and said, "Hey, drink this and Aphrodite will be ready to hop in bed with you!" I doubt I'd be all that inclined to take him up on it.

Be that as it may, the artifact itself is fascinating.  It was found in a burial site in Pithekoussai, a Greek colony on the island of Ischia (currently owned by Italy).  It may have originally been used as a drinking vessel, as per the inscription, but in the eighth century B.C.E. it was buried along with the ashes of three adults, and various other fancy and expensive items.

"Our research rewrites the history and the previous archaeological interpretation of the tomb, throwing new light on funeral practices, culture and society of the Greek immigrants in the ancient West Mediterranean," said study co-author Melania Gigante.  "Pithekoussai is widely considered one of the most important archaeological findings of pre-classical Mediterranean archaeology."

The other story comes from an even more famous site -- Herculaneum, which along with Pompeii was destroyed by a catastrophic pyroclastic flow from Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E.  Wealthy communities like Pompeii and Herculaneum were mostly inhabited by the Roman upper crust, who were well-read and owned extensive libraries.

Unfortunately, Roman books and scrolls -- being made of parchment or paper -- would have been incinerated during the eruption, as the material in pyroclastic flows can easily reach a temperature of 1,000 C.  However, the temperatures rose (and then dropped) so fast, and the remains then blanketed by ash, that the scrolls in the libraries weren't burned to cinders but instead were carbonized in situ, where they were found, still rolled up, when the ruins were excavated.

The problem is that these blackened cylinders are exceptionally fragile.  Unrolling them would immediately cause them to crumble into tiny fragments.  So while there might be traces of the ink left behind, how could you ever open them up to see it?

It was impossible... until now.

Using a non-invasive laser imager and a complex machine-learning algorithm, archaeologist Luke Farritor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has succeeded in discerning a single word -- πορϕυρας, meaning "purple" -- in a proof-of-concept that gives antiquarians hope of reading at least some of Herculaneum's damaged scrolls.

The most exciting part is that the majority of the documents we have from the Greeks and Romans are copies of copies of copies that finally made their way into medieval libraries.  The inevitable errors (not to mention deliberate editing) from this kind of literary Game of Telephone mean that we really have no idea how close our versions are to the originals.  If we could read the scrolls of Herculaneum, this would bring us one step closer to seeing what the ancients actually wrote, as well as opening up the thrilling possibility of recovering works that were thought to be lost forever.

So that's the news from the world of antiquity.  My thanks to the eagle-eyed reader who sent me the links.  Now I think I'll sit and drink my coffee (from an ordinary, non-Aphrodite-summoning mug) and ponder what it was like to live thousands of years ago, and see -- at least faintly -- through the eyes of the ancients.

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The firehose

There's some weird stuff going on with M87.

M87 is a supergiant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo.  It was discovered and catalogued in 1781 by French astronomer Charles Messier -- the "M" designation in many of the brightest nebulae and galaxies comes from their listing in the Messier catalogue -- but the telescopes of his time weren't good enough to make out much detail.  Even through better telescopes it looks like an uninteresting fuzzy blob, mostly because it's 53 million light years away.

This belies its magnitude.  It contains over a trillion stars, and is orbited by around fifteen thousand globular clusters (compare this to the Milky Way's paltry two hundred or so), and has a ginormous black hole at its center with a mass 2.4 billion times that of the Sun.  It is this black hole that you undoubtedly remember from the famous photographs in March of 2021:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Event Horizon Telescope, A view of the M87 supermassive black hole in polarised light, CC BY 4.0]

So this is impressive enough as is.  But then the astronomers and astrophysicists starting noticing that the black hole itself was behaving... oddly.

Three weeks ago, a team led by Yuzhu Cui of Shanghai Jiao Tong University published a paper in Nature showing that the black hole at the center of M87 was not only spinning (which isn't at all unusual; most black holes spin) but was precessing.  If you've ever played with a gyroscope, you've seen precession; get it started spinning, and for a little bit it'll stand upright, but then it starts to wobble, and its spin axis traces out a cone that gets wider and wider as the spin rate goes down because of friction.  The Earth precesses, with a period of about 26,000 years, meaning that Polaris wasn't the North Star a few thousand years ago, nor will it be a few thousand years in the future.  Twelve thousand years ago, the North Star was the bright star Vega in the constellation Lyra, made famous as the home of the benevolent aliens in the brilliant movie Contact.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tauʻolunga, Precession N, CC BY-SA 2.5]

So precession of a spinning body isn't that unusual, either, but considering the angular momentum of a 2.4 billion solar mass object, it's kind of surprising that the M87 black hole is precessing fast enough to be observable from 53 million light years away.  But it is -- and its period of precession is only eleven years!

This means that the fountain of radiation and debris being shot out along its spin axis is flailing around like the jet from a loose firehose.  

Then, a new paper -- still in the preprint stages -- has added another bizarre twist.  A team of astrophysicists led by Michael M. Shara, Curator of Astrophysics for the American Museum of Natural History, has found that wherever that wildly-precessing jet nozzle is aimed, there's a higher rate of stars going nova.  Novae are explosions less violent than supernovae (those actually blow the unfortunate star to smithereens); they seem to occur mostly when white dwarf stars accrete matter from nearby dust clouds or by stealing it from a binary star partner, triggering instability and a sudden flare-up.  Here, though, the mechanism isn't understood.  Whether the jet of debris from the black hole is compressing the stars that get in the way and triggering detonation, or if it's simply that the material itself is getting caught by white dwarfs and causing the novae, isn't known.

But it's quite a mental image, isn't it?  A careening jet from a spinning supermassive black hole blasts away at stars in its path, and makes them blow up.

Leaves me feeling glad we live in the tranquil outer reaches of our own galaxy.  I know the Milky Way has its own massive black hole at the center, but out here in quiet stellar suburbia, we're pretty insulated from all that craziness.

I'm perfectly happy hearing about the wild gyrations of M87 -- from a safe vantage point 53 million light years away.

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Drawn together

Convergent evolution occurs when only distantly-related species are under the same selective pressures, and evolve to look alike.  A particularly good example of this is the North American flying squirrel (a rodent) and the Australian sugar glider (a marsupial).  Put them side-by-side, and they're hard to tell apart, and both have the distinctive kite-like flap of skin between the forelegs and hind legs, allowing them to catch a breeze and glide from tree to tree.

It's important to emphasize that while convergent evolution can result in organisms being similar in appearance or habits, it doesn't ever cause them to fuse into a single species.  Flying squirrels and sugar gliders maintain major differences in their genetic make-up, skeleton, dentition, and so on -- so however close the resemblance, they're still two separate species.

Convergence is actually fairly common in the natural world, which is why appearance is such a poor guide to determining who is related to whom.  There are only so many solutions to the problems posed by living in a particular environment, so it's inevitable that different lineages will happen on the same ones.  Flying, for example, has evolved independently at least four times -- birds, bats, pterodactyloids, and insects.  The structure and mechanics is different in each, which is indicative that they were independent innovations.

I was thinking about convergent evolution this morning as I read a paper in the journal Geodiversitas about the discovery of a remarkable fossil in Colombia.  It's the best-preserved and most complete skeleton ever found of Anachlysictis gracilis, a Miocene apex predator that belonged to a group called the sparassodontids.  (The name comes from the Greek σπαράσσειν, to tear to pieces, and ὀδόντος, tooth -- an indicator of how scary these animals were.)

Here's a photograph of the skeleton:

[Image courtesy of Daniella Carvalho and Aldo Benites-Palomino]

My guess is that looking at this, you're immediately reminded of the saber-toothed cats such as the famous Smilodon, which also were around during the Miocene Epoch but reached their pinnacle a few million years later, during the Pleistocene.  Surprisingly, this parallels my earlier example of the flying squirrel and sugar glider -- the saber-toothed cats were true felids, and thus placental mammals, while Anachlysictus and the other sparassodonts were marsupials.  The two species were drawn together by the forces of convergent evolution.  If you're a predator, having big nasty pointy teeth is a pretty good adaptation regardless what taxonomic group you belong to.

These striking carnivores were present in South America during what is called the "splendid isolation," prior to the tectonic shift that formed the Isthmus of Panama and allowed for the Pliocene Great Biotic Interchange.  South America had developed a unique biota, including not only the sparassodonts but a variety of other marsupial groups, most of which are now extinct.  Even the South American placentals didn't do so well, and were outcompeted (or hunted to death) by North American migrants.  Not long after the formation of Central America, a great many of the South American groups -- not only the sparassodonts, but the glyptodonts, litopterns, astrapotheres, pyrotheres, and xenungulates -- were gone forever.

The new fossil discovery will allow paleontologists to make some deductions about not only its anatomy, but its behavior. "In a future study we will address all the other bones in its body, which include various sections of the spine, ribs, hip, scapulae -- what we call 'shoulder blades' for humans -- and bones in its legs," said Catalina Suarez, of the Argentine Institute of Nivology, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences, who led the research team.  "This will allow us to explore aspects of how it moved, the position in which its neck held its head, whether it was a runner, whether it could climb, whether its hands could hold objects more easily, as many marsupials do when feeding, or whether it was a bit more difficult, as it is for example for a dog or a cat."

It's fascinating to learn more about these long-extinct animals, whose ecological role would be taken over by predatory placental mammals like wolves and the various big cats.  Even if they're extinct, their bones still have a story to tell -- of a saber-toothed marsupial who hunted in the forests of Colombia thirteen million years ago.

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Collision of worlds

Recently I've done posts about exploding lakes and colossal solar storms and places where continents are being torn in two, so it seems fitting to end the week on an appropriately cataclysmic note with the discovery of the remnants of a collision between two giant ice planets.

The coolest part of all of this is that one of the people who first realized something weird was going on was an amateur astronomer named Arttu Sainio, of Järvenpää, Finland (who is listed as an author and credited as "Independent Researcher" in the paper that appeared in Nature this week -- how awesome is that?).  Matthew Kenworthy, of Leiden Observatory, was scouring the data looking for evidence of rings around stars that might be involved in planet formation, which would be indicated by a periodic dimming and brightening of the light from the parent star.  Kenworthy found a candidate -- a sunlike star called ASASSN-21qj, 1,800 light years from Earth -- and posted his find on Twitter, saying, "It's amazing, this star is fading!"  Sainio saw his tweet and responded, "But did you know that it is brightening in the infrared?"

Sainio had been looking at data from NASA's NEOWISE orbiting telescope, and found that nine hundred days before the star had begun dimming, it had shown a strong uptick in the infrared region of the spectrum.  This clued in Kenworthy that his hopes of finding a ring were dashed -- but that maybe there was something even cooler going on here.

He assembled a team of astronomers to analyze the data, including Sainio's peculiar discovery, and they came to the conclusion that the best explanation for the anomalous brightening in the infrared and dimming in the visible light region was the collision of two Neptune-sized planets -- leaving an incandescent cloud of debris orbiting the star which radiated in the infrared as the heat from the collision dissipated, but partially blocked the star's visible light at the same time.

Artist's conception of the planetary collision around ASASSN-21qj [Image courtesy of artist Mark Garlick]

What will happen to the debris cloud next is a matter of speculation, because this is the first time anyone's seen an event like this occur.  While planetary collisions aren't uncommon -- our own Moon, for example, is thought to have formed when a huge protoplanet slammed into the Earth, blowing a blob of molten rock into space that eventually coalesced as the Moon -- no one's ever watched it happen more-or-less in real time.  It's probable that the debris will pull together gravitationally and eventually form one or more planets, but there's no certainty about how long that'll take.

"It will be fascinating to observe further developments," said Zoe Leinhardt, of the University of Bristol, who co-authored the paper.  "Ultimately, the mass of material around the remnant may condense to form a retinue of moons that will orbit around this new planet, but whether that will take ten years or a thousand, we don't yet know."

So a sharp-eyed amateur astronomer tipped off a whole bunch of professional astronomers and astrophysicists to take a closer look at a star that was behaving oddly, and ended up discovering something no one had ever seen happening before.  Just goes to show what a dedicated enthusiast can accomplish.  I've often felt awkward about my lack of credentials in the field I worked in -- I taught biology for over three decades with a bachelor's degree in physics and a master's in historical linguistics -- but I suppose there's nothing wrong with being a deeply curious, passionate-if-uncredentialed amateur.

Dilettantes FTW!

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Hair apparent

One of the most frustrating things about being a skeptic is that you're never truly done putting nonsense to rest.

And I'm not even talking about nonsense in general.  Of course, humans will continue to come up with goofy ideas.  It's kind of our raison d'être.  I'm talking about specific pieces of nonsense that, no matter how thoroughly or how often they're debunked, refuse to die.

We saw one example of that last week -- the ridiculous "your name's deep meaning" generators -- but there are plenty of others.  And just yesterday, I ran into one of the most persistent.  I've seen various forms of it for years, but this time, it took the form of a jpg with a photograph of a young, handsome, long-haired (presumably) Native American man gazing soulfully out at us, and the following text, which I've shortened for brevity's sake:

This information about hair has been hidden from the public since the Vietnam War.

Our culture leads people to believe that hair style is a matter of personal preference, that hairstyle is a matter of fashion and/or convenience, and that how people wear their hair is simply a cosmetic issue.  Back in the Vietnam War however, an entirely different picture emerged, one that has been carefully covered up and hidden from public view.

In the early nineties, Sally [name changed to protect privacy] was married to a licensed psychologist who worked at a VA Medical Hospital.  He worked with combat veterans with PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. Most of them had served in Vietnam.

Sally said, ”I remember clearly an evening when my husband came back to our apartment on Doctor’s Circle carrying a thick official looking folder in his hands. Inside were hundreds of pages of certain studies commissioned by the government.  He was in shock from the contents.  What he read in those documents completely changed his life.  From that moment on my conservative husband grew his hair and beard and never cut them again.  What is more, the VA Medical Center let him do it, and other very conservative men in the staff followed his example.  As I read the documents, I learned why.  It seems that during the Vietnam War special forces in the war department had sent undercover experts to comb American Indian Reservations looking for talented scouts, for tough young men trained to move stealthily through rough terrain.  They were especially looking for men with outstanding, almost supernatural, tracking abilities.  Before being approached, these carefully selected men were extensively documented as experts in tracking and survival.

With the usual enticements, the well proven smooth phrases used to enroll new recruits, some of these Indian trackers were then enlisted. Once enlisted, an amazing thing happened. Whatever talents and skills they had possessed on the reservation seemed to mysteriously disappear, as recruit after recruit failed to perform as expected in the field.

Serious causalities and failures of performance led the government to contract expensive testing of these recruits, and this is what was found.

When questioned about their failure to perform as expected, the older recruits replied consistently that when they received their required military haircuts, they could no longer ’sense’ the enemy, they could no longer access a ’sixth sense’, their ’intuition’ no longer was reliable, they couldn’t ’read’ subtle signs as well or access subtle extrasensory information.

So the testing institute recruited more Indian trackers, let them keep their long hair, and tested them in multiple areas.  Then they would pair two men together who had received the same scores on all the tests.  They would let one man in the pair keep his hair long, and gave the other man a military haircut.  Then the two men retook the tests.

Time after time the man with long hair kept making high scores.  Time after time, the man with the short hair failed the tests in which he had previously scored high scores...

So the document recommended that all Indian trackers be exempt from military haircuts. In fact, it required that trackers keep their hair long.”

The mammalian body has evolved over millions of years.  Survival skills of human and animal at times seem almost supernatural.  Science is constantly coming up with more discoveries about the amazing abilities of man and animal to survive.  Each part of the body has highly sensitive work to perform for the survival and well being of the body as a whole.  The body has a reason for every part of itself. 

 Hair is an extension of the nervous system, it can be correctly seen as exteriorized nerves, a type of highly evolved ’feelers’ or ’antennae’ that transmit vast amounts of important information to the brain stem, the limbic system, and the neocortex.

Not only does hair in people, including facial hair in men, provide an information highway reaching the brain, hair also emits energy, the electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain into the outer environment.  This has been seen in Kirlian photography when a person is photographed with long hair and then rephotographed after the hair is cut.

When hair is cut, receiving and sending transmissions to and from the environment are greatly hampered. This results in numbing-out.

Cutting of hair is a contributing factor to unawareness of environmental distress in local ecosystems.  It is also a contributing factor to insensitivity in relationships of all kinds.  It contributes to sexual frustration.

In searching for solutions for the distress in our world, it may be time for us to consider that many of our most basic assumptions about reality are in error.  It may be that a major part of the solution is looking at us in the face each morning when we see ourselves in the mirror.

The story of Sampson and Delilah in the Bible has a lot of encoded truth to tell us.  When Delilah cut Sampson’s hair, the once undefeatable Sampson was defeated.

Well.  Let's take a closer look at this esoteric information hidden since the Vietnam War that is so incredibly top-secret and arcane that you'd only find it if you did a fifteen-second Google search for "the truth about long hair."

First, the alleged controlled experiments using Native trackers in the military never happened.  F. Lee Reynolds, of the United States Army Center for Military History, was asked to look into the claim and see if there was anything to it, and responded that the story was "pure mythology." 

The whole thing apparently didn't originate anywhere even remotely military.  It was dreamed up in toto in 2010 by one David "Avocado" Wolfe, an American conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, alt-med proponent, and raw food advocate, who is also noted for saying that "gravity is a toxin" and that "water would levitate right off the Earth if the oceans weren't salty" and that solar panels drain the Sun's power.

So we're not exactly talking about someone with a shit tonne of credibility, here.

There's no doubt that in a lot of cultures, men wear their hair long, and forcing them to cut it can cause some distress, but it has nothing to do with stopping them from "receiving and sending transmissions to and from the environment."  If this was true, bald people would be significantly stupider than people with full heads of hair, and all you have to do is compare John Fetterman (bald) with Marjorie Taylor Greene (full head of hair) to see this can't be true, because you will find that Fetterman is a pretty smart guy while Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to have the IQ of a PopTart.  

Hair does increase your skin sensitivity some, but it is not an "extension of the nervous system," much less "exteriorized nerves."  Hair is made of strands of keratin -- i.e., not living cells.  Can you imagine how much getting a haircut would hurt if it was actually living tissue?

And if anecdotal evidence counts for anything, I can vouch first-hand for the fact that long hair does diddly-squat for your perceptivity.  I've had long hair during three periods in my life -- like, down to the middle of my back -- and I can state authoritatively that during those times, I was not receiving magical signals from the Earth Spirits or whatnot, nor was my rather abysmal sense of direction any better than usual.  Mostly what it turned out to be was a confounded nuisance, because my hair is really thick and gets curly when it's long, so in even a mild breeze I ended up looking like this guy:

Well, I have better teeth than he does.

I now have my hair really short, which is far more comfortable when it's hot, and I haven't noticed any significant impairment of my spatial awareness.

Oh, and Kirlian photography is not picking up "electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain."  It's a photograph of the static electrical discharge emitted by an object when you place it in contact with a high-voltage source.  You can take a Kirlian photograph of a dead leaf, and last time I checked, dead leaves (1) are unable to send and receive transmissions from the environment, (2) have very poor tracking skills, and (3) don't have hair.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rarobison11, MDR Dusty Miller, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So the whole thing is kind of a non-starter.

Anyhow, the claim is patently absurd, but that hasn't stopped it from circulating, and (like the fake name meaning generators) seems to be coming around once again.  It'd be really nice if you see it posted somewhere, you'd send them a link to this post, or at least respond "This is bullshit" (feel free to reword if that's a bit harsh for you).  I don't know if my feeble efforts to stop the flow of nonsense online will do much good, but you do what you can.

Even if you're all "numbed out" from wearing your hair short.

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Lights out

Regular readers of Skeptophilia may recall a post I did about a year ago about the Miyake Events, seven wild solar storms that occurred over the past ten thousand years that were powerful enough to alter the atmosphere's carbon-14 balance, leaving distinct traces in the composition of tree rings.  The last, and the only one that occurred during modern times, was the 1859 Carrington Event, which (even though it was one of the weakest of the recorded Miyake Events) was bad enough to short out telegraph lines, causing sparking and numerous fires, and triggered auroras as far south as the Caribbean.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Arctic light - Frank Olsen, Aurora Borealis I, CC BY-SA 3.0]

If anything like this happened today, it would be nothing short of catastrophic for the entire technological world, and I can say with little fear of contradiction that we are completely unprepared for any such eventuality.  A Miyake Event would very likely cause a near-total collapse of electrical grids, massive failure (or complete destruction) of satellites, and power surges in electrical wires that would almost certainly trigger widespread fires in businesses and residences.  Computers -- from home computers to massive mainframes -- would be fried.  Airline navigation systems and air traffic control would shut down pretty much immediately.  The disruption, and the cost, would be astronomical.

Well, a paper last week in The Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences describes evidence of a solar storm 14,300 years ago that makes the known Miyake Events look like gentle spring zephyrs.

The study focused on a site containing partially-fossilized tree trunks along the banks of the Drouzet River in Hautes-Alpes département, France, up in the Alps near the city of Gap, the location of which is coincidentally only ten miles from the tiny village (St. Jean-St. Nicolas) where my great-grandfather was born.  The carbon-14 levels in one ring in the tree trunks indicate the most powerful solar storm on record, consistent with a coronal mass ejection hundreds of times more powerful than the Carrington Event.

The worst part is that no one knows what causes solar storms.  They show no apparent periodicity -- the spacing between the known Miyake Events varies from a little over two hundred years to well over four thousand.  Even more alarming is that solar astronomers don't know if there's any warning prior to the storm occurring, or if we'll just be sitting here on our computers looking at funny pictures of cats, and suddenly be engulfed in a shower of sparks.

The damage from even a weak Miyake Event -- not to mention the one 14,300 years ago that was the subject of last week's paper -- is hard even to guess at.  "Extreme solar storms could have huge impacts on Earth," said Tim Heaton of the University of Leeds, who co-authored the study.  "Such super storms could permanently damage the transformers in our electricity grids, resulting in huge and widespread blackouts...  They could also result in permanent damage to the satellites that we all rely on for navigation and telecommunication, leaving them unusable.  They would also create severe radiation risks to astronauts."

Also unknown is how long it would take to repair the damage.  A conservative estimate is months.  Can you imagine?  Months with no computers, no email, no cellphones, no texting.  No online banking or business transactions.  No travel by airplane except for short hops.  No GPS.  No satellite contacts for television or radio... or national defense.  Restoring electrical grids would undoubtedly be first priority, and they'd likely be easier to repair, but still -- probably weeks with no electricity.

The result would be chaos on an unprecedented scale.

We've become so dependent on our high-tech world that it's hard to imagine what it would be like if suddenly it all just... went away.  I'm reminded of the last scenes of the brilliantly funny (if dark) Simon Pegg movie The World's End, where it turns out that the whole technological shebang is being run by a moderately malign intelligence (played to weary, long-suffering perfection by Bill Nighy) called The Network, who argues that humans need someone smart in control because we're just too idiotic to manage on our own:

The Network:  We are trying...

Gary:  Nobody's listening!

The Network:  If you'd only...

Gary:  Face it!  We are the human race, and we don't like being told what to do!
The Network:  Just what is it you want to do?

Gary:  We wanna be free!

Andrew: Yeah!

Gary:  We wanna be free to do what we wanna do!

Andrew:  Yeah!

Gary: We wanna get drunk!

Steven: Yeah!

Gary:  And we wanna have a good time!  And that's what we're gonna do!

The Network:  It's pointless arguing with you.  You will be left to your own devices.

Gary (incredulous that he's actually won the argument):  Really?

The Network:  Yeah.  Fuck it.

At which point The Network shuts down -- taking all of the world's technology with it.

Well, it looks like we might not need to fight The Network to destroy the whole superstructure of electronics we depend upon -- all it'd take is one good solar storm, and it'll be lights out for the foreseeable future.

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