Very like a mammal

"Prior to the End-Cretaceous Extinction, mammals were all small and shrew-like, restricted to skulking, scurrying forms because of competition from, and predation by, dinosaurs.  Once the dinosaurs were out of the way, the mammals were free to diversify and to grow larger."

How many times have we all heard this?  And it certainly sounds plausible; being large and obvious when there were hungry carnivores like Velociraptor around seems like a good way to be turned into dinner.

But the fossil record shows that the truth is more complicated -- and far more interesting.

Take, for example, Castorocauda lutrasimilis.  This animal was around fifty centimeters long and weighed in at around three-quarters of a kilogram.  It was sleek, streamlined, with a bullet-shaped head, a fine pelt of soft fur, and a flat, paddle-like tail.  Here's an artist's reconstruction:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com), Castorocauda BW, CC BY 3.0]

If you're reminded of something like a beaver or an otter, you're not alone; the scientific name means "beaver's tail and looks like an otter."  Surprisingly, it was closely related to neither one; in fact, it's not even a true mammal, but a docodont, which split off from other mammal-like forms (including our own ancestors) way back in the early Jurassic period -- while there were plenty of dinosaurs lumbering around the place.

The docodonts, and a handful of other groups of Mesozoic cousins to mammals, are mostly known from the exceptional fossil beds of the Tiaojishan Formation in northern China, where paleontologists have found a wealth of mid- to late-Jurassic fossils of mammaliaformes -- as they call Mesozoic mammals and their near relatives.  And amongst those fossils they not only find otter-like aquatic species, but ones that have adaptations an awful lot like moles, squirrels, and possums.

This adds another cluster to the list of cool examples of convergent evolution, where two only distantly-related species evolve to resemble each other superficially because of similar selective pressures.  (A famous modern pair is the North American flying squirrel and the Australian sugar glider; at a quick glance these two look very much alike, but a closer examination would show that they're not even in the same order.  The flying squirrel is a rodent, and the sugar glider a marsupial.)

The docodonts and other side branches of the mammaliaformes all disappeared by the middle of the Cretaceous Period, replaced by true mammals including multituberculates, monotremes, marsupials, and placentals.  Why this happened isn't certain; given that we know the non-mammal mammaliaformes from only a few isolated geological strata, our information on them is limited.  We do know, however, that the mammals who survived were mostly "small and shrew-like," so there's a grain of truth to the old model.

What's most fascinating is that after the End-Cretaceous Extinction, these survivors re-diversified, and "re-invented" a bunch of the adaptations the docodonts had a hundred million years earlier.  This has interesting implications, not only for the evolution of life on Earth but for the kinds of living things we might expect to find on other planets.  It's long been a fascinating question to me to what extent evolution is constrained -- what limitations there are on natural selection that might result in its generating the same patterns over and over because those are the features that work best in pretty much any environment.  There are a few that seem likely, such as having the main sensory organs near the mouth and at the anterior of the body; I'd expect those to be frequent no matter where you go.

But what Castorocauda and the other docodonts show is that other sorts of traits can repeat, too.  After all, there are only so many ways you can move around, find food, find shelter, avoid being eaten, and regulate your own body temperature.  It might be surprising at first that the otter-like Castorocauda (and the possum-like Borealestes and the squirrel-like Shenshou) "re-evolved" (as it were) over a hundred million years later, but it suggests that making a living requires the same toolkit pretty much regardless.  

So maybe when we find life on another planet, it'll be far more familiar than we expect -- and that "life as we know it, Jim" might be there to greet us when we arrive.

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Doomsday translation

In my Latin and Greek classes, I always warned my students to avoid Google Translate.

It's not that it's a bad tool, honestly, as long as you don't push it too far.  If you want to look up a single word -- i.e., use it like an online dictionary -- it's reasonably solid.  The problem is, it has a good word-by-word translation ability, but a lousy capacity for understanding grammar, especially with highly inflected languages like Latin.  For example, the phrase "corvus oculum corvi non eruit" -- "a crow will not pluck out another crow's eye," meaning more or less the same thing as "there's honor among thieves" -- gets translated as "do not put out the eye of the raven, raven."  Even worse is Juno's badass line from The Aeneid -- "Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo"  ("If I cannot bend the will of heaven, I will raise hell") -- comes out "Could be bent if you cannot bend, hell, I will move."

Which I think we can all agree doesn't quite have the same ring.

But today I found out, over at the site Mysterious Universe, that there's another reason to avoid Google Translate:

It's been infiltrated by the Powers of Darkness.

At least that's how I interpret it.  Some users of Reddit (where else?) discovered that if you typed the word "dog" into Google Translate twenty times and have it translate from Hawaiian to English, it gave you the following message:

Doomsday Clock is three minutes at twelve.  We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus’s return.

Within hours of the message being reported on Reddit, it had vanished, which of course only made people wiggle their eyebrows in a significant fashion.

Which brings up a few questions.

1. Who thought of putting "dog" in twenty times and then translating it from Hawaiian?  It's kind of a random thing to do.  Of course, Redditors seem to have a lot of free time, so I guess at least that much makes sense.  But you have to wonder how many failed attempts they had.  ("Okay, I put in 'weasel' fifteen times and translated it from Lithuanian, but it didn't work.  Then I put in 'warthog' seventy-eight times, and translated it from Urdu.  No luck there either.  The search continues.")
2. Even if it's a valid message, what did it tell us that we didn't already know?  It's not like we haven't all just watched Donald Trump hand over the control of government agencies to a mob of incompetents, degenerates, lunatics, and the downright evil, and nearly all of the Republicans responding by issuing a stern rebuke ("Bad Donald!  Naughty Donald!  If you do that again, we'll have to roll over on our backs and piss all over our own bellies!  That will sure show you!")  So we're definitely not hurting for dramatic developments, with or without the message.
3. Even if the message was real, isn't it far more likely that it's the result of some bored programmers over at Google sticking an Easter egg into the code than it is some kind of message from the Illuminati?
4. Don't you think the fact that it vanished after being reported is because the aforementioned bored programmers' supervisor ordered that it be taken down, not because the Illuminati found out we're on to them?  I see it more like how the Walmart supervisors dealt with Shane:

So I'm not all that inclined to take it seriously.  Brett Tingley at Mysterious Universe, however, isn't so sure:

As always though, it’s an interesting thought to think that Google’s vast AI networks might be trying to warn us, finding obscure places to hide these warnings where their human overlords won’t find them.  When AI becomes self-aware and starts taking over, will we even know it before it’s too late, or will odd and seemingly meaningless stories like this serve as prescient warnings for those who know where to look?

Somehow, I think if AI, or anyone else, were trying to warn us of impending doom, they wouldn't put it online and wait for Steve Neckbeard to find it by asking Google to translate "dog dog dog dog dog etc." from Hawaiian.

So that's our trip into the surreal for today.  I still think it's a prank, although a fairly inspired one.  Note that I'm not saying the overall message is incorrect, though.  Considering this week's news, I figure one morning soon I'll get up and find out that Donald Trump has nominated Vladimir Putin to be the head of the Department of Homeland Security, and the Republican Congresspersons responded by tweeting that they're "disappointed" and then widdling all over the floor.

At that point, I think I'd be in favor of offering the presidency to Shane.

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The cabinet of Doctor MAGAligari

So Dictator-for-Life-elect Donald Trump has started to select his appointees for cabinet and other major government positions, and his choices are as appalling as they are unsurprising.  Apparently the only qualification for being selected is how fervently a prospective candidate has kissed Trump's ass.  Many of these are so awful they'd be funny if the consequences weren't so dire; the worst make replacing a distinguished jurist like Ruth Bader Ginsburg with the vapid Amy Coney Barrett seem like, "Eh, okay, that's not so bad."

Let's start with one that's so weird that when I first saw it posted, I thought it was a parody.  Alas, it isn't.  Trump has proposed a new department of the federal government, to be run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, called "The Department of Governmental Efficiency."  Or... DOGE.

I swear, sometimes the jokes write themselves.

It's unlikely that Trump can just declare the creation of a new department without Congress's approval, so it might be that this will be some sort of advisory board -- or considering the current Congress, maybe they'll just rubber-stamp it.  Whatever form it takes, Musk has already promised to cut two trillion dollars from the federal budget, which is going to be tricky because the discretionary budget is only around 1.7 trillion dollars.

But Musk's grasp on reality is such that he considers the loss of three-quarters of the users of Twitter since he took over a sign of his excellent business acumen, so why not?

What's most amusing about this one is that apparently Musk is already rubbing Trump the wrong way, and there are signs that his stay in the administration might be under half a Scaramucci long.  It's unsurprising when you think about it; there's no way in hell Musk and Trump could share the limelight.  There can only be one egotistical, sociopathic man-baby getting the praise, or else sparks start to fly.  What I wonder is what will happen when they have a serious falling out; Musk's way smarter than Trump (not that this is a high bar), and if he starts using his obscene amounts of wealth to sabotage Trump's agenda, things could get ugly fast.

Then there's the nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.  At first, tapping Hegseth struck many people as a puzzling WTF moment; his sole qualification seemed to be that he'd been a host on Fox & Friends.  But further inquiry into Hegseth's background found that there's something darker behind this choice.  Hegseth has frightening ties to the Christofascist movement, especially the "Reformed Reconstructionists" (nicknamed the "TheoBros"), who advocate laws based on Christian supremacy, male dominance, and "building the Kingdom of God on Earth."  A sign of his beliefs is his tattoo someone found an image of:

"Deus Vult" ("God Wills It") was the rallying cry of the Crusaders, and has been taken over by the Christian Dominionists -- who want laws passed requiring Christianity as a prerequisite for holding elected office.

The Environmental Protection Agency is going to be run by New York State congressman Lee Zeldin, whose definition of "protection" is "deregulate the absolute fuck out of everything."  Zeldin has strong ties to the fossil fuel and auto industries, and basically wants to repeal any legislation holding back oil and natural gas drilling.  "While protecting access to clean air and water," Zeldin said, almost as an afterthought, although how he plans on doing both simultaneously is a mystery to everyone, probably including himself.

Then there's Mike Huckabee -- who stated "there's no such thing as a Palestinian" -- as ambassador to Israel.  Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been nominated for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services; in a speech Trump said he was going to let RFK "go wild on health care."  The man is an antivaxxer, a conspiracy theorist who said that COVID-19 was genetically engineered to spare Jews and Chinese people, and promotes a whole shelf full of fringe-y "alt-med therapies."  He, in fact, seems simply to be an all-around general-purpose wacko, whose extreme anti-science views and determination to spread them was directly responsible for a measles epidemic in Samoa that killed dozens of children.  

And how about Tulsi Gabbard, who called media coverage of the January 6 coup attempt "sensationalized," and labeled Trump's 34 felony convictions as "persecution," who has been nominated for Director of National Intelligence despite having zero experience in intelligence (in both senses of the word).  Representative Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer, said about Gabbard, "Not only is she ill-prepared and unqualified, but she traffics in conspiracy theories and cozies up to dictators like Bashar-al Assad and Vladimir Putin.  As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I am deeply concerned about what this nomination portends for our national security.  My Republican colleagues with a backbone should speak out."

But of course they won't, because no one questions Dear Leader.

Perhaps worst of all (at least so far -- heaven only knows what other hideous revelations await in this warped and surreal horror movie), there's the nomination of Florida Representative Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, which may have moved Trump onto shaky ground even with some of his supporters.  Gaetz has been the subject of investigation for having sex with a minor and for child sex trafficking, so putting him in the position of Attorney General -- the top legal advisor to the president, who oversees all issues of law enforcement nationally -- is a horrifying choice.  (I heard an interview with one Republican on the radio this morning who was one hundred percent supportive of Gaetz, and who said that one positive result of the nomination would be shutting down the investigation into Gaetz's actions -- further evidence that the majority of the GOP have more of a problem with a child being queer than they do with a child being raped.)  At least there were two Republicans, who (for obvious reasons) declined to be named, who said they were "stunned and disgusted" by the pick, and that "we wanted him out of the House, but this isn't what we had in mind."

Oh, and Republican Senator Susan Collins went so far as to say she was "shocked" by Gaetz's nomination, thus exceeding her previous most-overwrought emotional state, which was "concerned."  I'm sure she'll even make a frowny-face as she votes "yes" on confirming him.

What's coming?  I'd have said his next likely move was to put Marjorie Taylor Greene in charge of the Department of Education, but he's planning on closing that.  So MTG will have to cool her heels in the House of Representatives for a while longer.  Maybe the My Pillow guy can become the head of the Department of Homeland Security or Surgeon General or something.  I dunno.

The only glimmer of hope I can find in all this -- and it's a slim one -- is that his choices for cabinet members are, one and all, so dramatically unqualified that they're likely to resemble the Keystone Kops more than they do the Wehrmacht.  The problem is, as the entire mess implodes, it can do a lot of damage, depriving American citizens of services they depend on, and in the case of Kennedy and HHS, actually killing people.  As usual, the GOP is the Party of Small Government Until They Want Large Government.  Cutting services to ordinary Americans, defunding public education, destroying health services and medical care, deregulating industry, and killing environmental standards, that's all fine and dandy; but let's get the government into libraries, schools, and people's bedrooms, and along the way get the church into everything.

So those of you who voted for Trump -- I hope you're happy with the chaos that's about to descend.  It's grimly satisfying to know that with Republican control of the Executive Branch, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and (likely) the House of Representatives, you people at least won't have the option of blaming the Democrats when things go to hell.

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History by proxy

In a study from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we learn something simultaneously fascinating and alarming; humanity's fingerprint on the globe is so clear that it can even track our wars, famines, and plagues -- back twenty-five centuries or more.

The whole thing was done using proxy records, which involve using indirect sources of evidence about the past to infer what conditions were like.  A commonly-employed one is using the constituents of air bubbles in amber and ice to make inferences about the global average air temperature at the time -- a technique that shows good agreement with the measurements of the same variable using other methods.

Here, in a team effort from the Desert Research Institute, the University of Oxford, the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Rochester, and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, researchers studied ice cores from thirteen different locations in the polar northern hemisphere, and found that the levels of one contaminant in the ice -- lead -- was enough to parallel all of the major plagues and wars that occurred in Europe and northern Asia back to 800 B.C.E.

What they found is that lead concentrations in the ice rose when things were quiet and prosperous, probably due to an expansion of smelting operations for items like lead seams for stained-glass windows and impurities in silver ore processing.  If the signature of wars was clear, the signature from plagues was blatantly obvious; the years following the Plague of Justinian (541-542 C.E.) and the two spikes of the Black Death (1349-1352 and 1620-1666 C.E.) were two of the lowest points on the graph.

"Sustained increases in lead pollution during the Early and High Middle Ages (about 800 to 1300 C.E.), for example, indicate widespread economic growth, particularly in central Europe as new mining areas were discovered in places like the German Harz and Erzgebirge Mountains," said study lead author Joseph McConnell of the Desert Research Institute.  "Lead pollution in the ice core records declined during the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period (about 1300 and 1680 C.E.) when plague devastated those regions, however, indicating that economic activity stalled."

Silver smelting plant in Katowice, Poland, ca. 1910 [Image is in the Public Domain]

The authors write:

Lead pollution in Arctic ice reflects midlatitude emissions from ancient lead–silver mining and smelting.  The few reported measurements have been extrapolated to infer the performance of ancient economies, including comparisons of economic productivity and growth during the Roman Republican and Imperial periods.  These studies were based on sparse sampling and inaccurate dating, limiting understanding of trends and specific linkages.  Here we show, using a precisely dated record of estimated lead emissions between 1100 B.C.E. and 800 C.E. derived from subannually resolved measurements in Greenland ice and detailed atmospheric transport modeling, that annual European lead emissions closely varied with historical events, including imperial expansion, wars, and major plagues.  Emissions rose coeval with Phoenician expansion, accelerated during expanded Carthaginian and Roman mining primarily in the Iberian Peninsula, and reached a maximum under the Roman Empire.  Emissions fluctuated synchronously with wars and political instability particularly during the Roman Republic, and plunged coincident with two major plagues in the second and third centuries, remaining low for >500 years.  Bullion in silver coinage declined in parallel, reflecting the importance of lead–silver mining in ancient economies.  Our results indicate sustained economic growth during the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, terminated by the second-century Antonine plague.

Of course, there's nowhere in the ice cores that has as high a level of lead contamination as recently-deposited ice does.  "We found an overall 250 to 300-fold increase in Arctic lead pollution from the start of the Middle Ages in 500 C.E. to 1970s," said Nathan Chellman, a doctoral student at the Desert Research Institute, and co-author on the study.  "Since the passage of pollution abatement policies, including the 1970 Clean Air Act in the United States, lead pollution in Arctic ice has declined more than 80 percent.  Still, lead levels are about 60 times higher today than they were at the beginning of the Middle Ages."

As an aside, the Trump administration v. 2.0 has already promised to drastically roll back regulations requiring industry to conform to reasonable pollution standards, including allowable levels of air pollution.  So look for the contaminants in ice -- and in your lungs -- to spiral upward once again.

But hey, if the price of eggs goes down, then fuck the environment, amirite?  

Of course I'm right.  Nothing to worry about.  MAGA FTW!

Ahem.  Back to reality.

As I've pointed out (repeatedly), what we are doing does have a measurable, quantifiable effect on the environment, and studies like McConnell et al. should be a significant wake-up call.  And as I've also pointed out, it probably won't.  It's all too easy for people to say, "Meh, what do I care about a little lead in Arctic ice?  So it bothers a few seals and polar bears.  Too bad for them."  And continue with our throw-away, gas-guzzling, conspicuous-consumption lifestyles.

It's cold comfort knowing that when the aliens come here in a thousand years to find out why the Earth is barren, they'll be able to figure it out by looking at the traces we left behind in the ice, soils, rocks, and air.

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The world of the trickster

Sometimes I run across a piece of research that is just so charming I have to tell you about it.

This particular one comes from the European University of St. Petersburg, where anthropologist and folklorist Yuri Berezkin has been working on tracking down the origins of trickster myths worldwide.  Every culture seems to have them -- characters from folk tales who are clever, wily, getting themselves into and then deftly out of trouble, often helping we humans out as they go (although we're the butt of the joke just as frequently; one of the persistent themes is that tricksters may be dashing and funny, but they can't be trusted).

I remember first coming across trickster myths when I was a kid, and had a positive obsession with mythology.  Loki, from Norse mythology, was a trickster of a more malevolent kind; the Greek god Hermes was the messenger of Olympus, but got his start as a small child stealing his brother Apollo's sacred cattle; and Coyote, a character in the stories of many Indigenous American cultures, one that was generally more benevolent to his human acquaintances.  When as a teenager, I read Richard Adams's amazing novel Watership Down -- in the characters' tales of the wise and daring El-Ahrairah (his name means "The Prince With a Thousand Enemies," translated from Lapine), I recognized the tropes right away.  El-Ahrairah is courageous, sometimes to the point of foolhardiness; out for his own gain and that of his friends, even if it means breaking the rules; not above taking every opportunity to make his foes look like idiots; fiercely loyal to the weak and powerless who call on him for help.

What Berezkin found is that trickster figures fall into three broad categories: fox/coyote/jackal, the most common, found throughout Europe, Siberia, East Asia, North Africa, much of central and eastern North America, and the Andes region down into Patagonia; hare/rabbit, found in the tales from southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (from which it jumped to North America via the slave trade; thus the Bre'r Rabbit tales, and ultimately, Bugs Bunny); and raven/crow, found in northwestern North America and across central Canada, far eastern Siberia, and a few spots in east Asia and Australia.

Coyote the Trickster (Edward Curtis, ca. 1915) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What's fascinating is that it appears that as people moved, they carried their stories with them, but upon settling in new areas, simply applied the same stories to a different set of anthropomorphized animals, based on whatever wildlife lived in the new region.  (For example, as Indigenous Americans moved from the Northwest into the Plains, their stories remained similar in theme, but they substituted Coyote for Raven.)

Berezkin writes:

The existence of two major zones of trickster tales in Eurasia and Africa, one with the fox/jackal and another with the hare/rabbit, seems to reject the differentiation of Homo sapiens populations after entering Eurasia from Africa.  During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) the Pacific borderlands of Asia and the northern/continental Eurasia were isolated from each other by sparsely populated mountainous and desert areas.  Each of the major zones populated by modern people during the LGM produced its own cultural forms.  When the LGM was over, the bearers of both cultural complexes took part in the peopling of the New World.

Humans have been storytellers for a very long time.  If Berezkin is right, trickster stories go back at least to the Last Glacial Maximum, which is on the order of twenty thousand years ago.  How much older they are than that is anyone's guess, but given how widespread they are, and the commonalities between them worldwide, they might be twice that old or more.

So the next time you tell folk tales to your children, or read mythical accounts of the derring-do, cleverness, and craftiness of figures like Prometheus and Anansi and Kokopelli and Veles, you are participating in a tradition that far antedates written language, and has been passed down through the oral tradition back into a shadowy and unknown past.  You are helping to keep alive something that unites every culture on Earth.

I think Coyote would be proud.

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Bubbles, dimensions, and black holes

One of the weirder claims of modern physics, which I first ran into when I was reading about string theory a few years ago, is that the universe could have more than three spatial dimensions -- but the extra ones are "curled up" and are (extremely) sub-microscopic.

I've heard it explained by an analogy of an ant walking on a string.  There are two ways the ant can go -- back and forth on the string, or around the string.  The "around the string" dimension is curled into a loop, whereas the back-and-forth one has a much greater spatial extent.

Scale that up, if your brain can handle it, to three dimensions of the back-and-forth variety, and as many as nine or ten of the around-the-string variety, and you've got an idea of what the claim is.

The problem is, those extra dimensions have proven to be pretty thoroughly undetectable, which has led critics to quote Wolfgang Pauli's quip, that it's a theory that "is not even wrong," it's unverifiable -- which is synonymous to saying "it isn't science."  But the theorists are still trying like mad to find an indirect method to show the existence of these extra dimensions.

To no avail at the present, although we did have an interesting piece added to the puzzle a while back that I somehow missed the first time 'round.  Astronomers Katie Mack of North Carolina State University and Robert McNees of Loyola University published a paper in arXiv that puts a strict limit on the number of macroscopic dimensions -- and that limit is three.

So sorry, fans of A Wrinkle in Time, there's no such thing as the tesseract.  The number of dimensions is three, and three is the number of dimensions.  Not four.  Nor two, unless thou proceedest on to three. 

Five is right out.

The argument by Mack and McNees -- which, although I have a B.S. in physics, I can't begin to comprehend fully -- boils down to the fact that the universe is still here.  If there were extra macroscopic spatial dimensions (whether or not we were aware of them) it would be possible that two cosmic particles of sufficient energy could collide and generate a miniature black hole, which would then give rise to a universe with different physical laws.  This new universe would expand like a bubble rising in a lake, its boundaries moving at the speed of light, ripping apart everything down to and including atoms as it went.

"If you’re standing nearby when the bubble starts to expand, you don’t see it coming," Mack said.  "If it’s coming at you from below, your feet stop existing before your mind realizes that."

This has been one of the concerns about the Large Hadron Collider, since the LHC's entire purpose is to slam together particles at enormous velocities.  Ruth Gregory of Durham University showed eight years ago that there was a non-zero possibility of generating a black hole that way, which triggered the usual suspects to conjecture that the scientists were trying to destroy the universe.  Why they would do that, when they inhabit said universe, is beyond me.  In fact, since they'd be standing right next to the Collider when it happened, they'd go first, before they even had a chance to cackle maniacally and rub their hands together about the fate of the rest of us.

"The black holes are quite naughty," Gregory said, which is a sentence that is impossible to hear in anything but a British accent.  "They really want to seed vacuum decay.  It’s a very strong process, if it can proceed."

"No structures can exist," Mack added.  "We’d just blink out of existence."

Of course, it hasn't happened, so that's good news.  Although I suppose this wouldn't be a bad way to go, all things considered.  At least it would be over quickly, not to mention being spectacular.  "Here lies Gordon, killed during the formation of a new universe," my epitaph could read, although there wouldn't be anyone around to write it, nor anything to write it on.

Which is kind of disappointing.

Anyhow, what Mack and McNees have shown is that this scenario could only happen if there was a fourth macroscopic dimension, and since it hasn't happened in the universe's 13.8 billion year history, it probably isn't going to.

So don't cancel your meetings this week.  Mack and McNees have shown that any additional spatial dimensions over the usual three must be smaller than 1.6 nanometers, which is about three times the diameter of your average atom; bigger than that, and we would already have become victims of "vacuum decay," as the expanding-bubble idea is called.

A cheering notion, that.  Although I have to say, it's an indication of how bad everything else has gotten that "We're not dead yet" is the best I can do for good news.

That's our news from the world of scientific research -- particle collisions, expanding black holes, and vacuum decay.  Myself, I'm not going to worry about it.  I figure if it happens, I'll be gone so fast I won't have time to be upset at my imminent demise, and afterwards none of my loved ones will be around to care.  Another happy thought is that I'll take Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Andrew Tate along with me, which might almost make destroying the entire universe worth it.

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Color my world

When you think about it, color vision is kind of strange.  Our eyes -- unless you have a genetic or physical inability to do so -- are able to sort out the frequencies of light, and each range in the visible light spectrum looks different to us.  But why do we have the ability to distinguish between, for example, light with a wavelength of 570 nanometers (which looks yellow) and that with a wavelength of 470 nanometers (which looks blue)?  It's a small shift in wavelength, but triggers a completely different response in our eyes and brain -- so it must be important, right?

Color perception in the natural world seems to serve a fairly small number of functions.  There's sexual signaling -- the (often) brighter colors of male birds, for example, is most likely a cue for females signaling fitness (and thus good genes, worthy of producing young with).  It can be a sign that food is ready to eat, such as fruits changing from the blend-with-the-foliage shades of green to something more eye-catching.  It can also be a danger signal, as with the brilliant warning colorations of coral snakes, the foul-tasting bright orange and black monarch butterfly, and Central and South America's dart poison frogs.

So our ability to sense colors, an ability shared with many other mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and some arthropods, seems to have evolved as a way of distinguishing things that need to stand out from the background, for purposes of reproduction or survival.  There's a reason, for example, that stop signs are red; our dim-light vision is poorest in the red region of the spectrum, so when car headlights catch a bright red stop sign at night, it immediately grabs our attention.  (The flipside of this phenomenon is why snow under moonlight looks blue.  It's not that snow preferentially reflects blue light; it's simply that our eyes are better at picking up the blue region of the spectrum in low light levels, so it's almost as if our eyes are subtracting the red frequencies from the white light reflected from snowbanks, resulting in it appearing blue.)

What this means, of course, is that pigment production has to have evolved in tandem with color perception.  There are undoubtedly exceptions, where colorful chemicals have evolved for other purposes, and their hues are accidental byproducts of their molecular structure; but otherwise, the evolution of bright pigments must have coevolved with the ability to perceive them.  The brilliantly-colored organic compounds produced in the petals of many flowers, for example, are generally for the purpose of attracting pollinators, and the reds, oranges, and yellows of ripe fruit attract animals to consume the fruits and then disperse the seeds.

Scarlet passion flower (Passiflora coccinea) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons gailhampshire from Cradley, Malvern, U.K, Scarlet Passion Flower - Flickr - gailhampshire, CC BY 2.0]

What's curious about this, and why the topic comes up today, are the findings of a study out of the University of Arizona that appeared in the journal Biological Review last week.  It showed that based on genetic studies of distantly-related animal groups, color vision evolved a very long time ago -- on the order of five hundred million years ago, so the middle of the Cambrian Period -- while the first fruits didn't show up for another 150 million years, and the first flowers 150 million years after that.

So the earliest production of functional color (and the ability to perceive it) almost certainly was driven by sexual signaling and warnings.  Then, once animals were able to see in color, it became an evolutionary driver in plants to ride the coattails of that capacity in order to facilitate cross-pollination and seed dispersal.

And once that back-and-forth coevolutionary relationship was in place, it was off to the races.  Give it another couple hundred million years, and we have the rainbow hues of the natural world today.

One thing I still find hard to explain -- from an evolutionary standpoint, at least -- is why we find brightly-colored things beautiful.  Having our attention caught by a bright red apple, or the wild stripes and spots of the venomous lionfish -- sure, those make sense.  But why is it almost universal to find a daffodil or a wild rose beautiful?

Ah, well, maybe it's just one of those accidental things that is a consequence of other, more vital, evolutionarily-derived traits.  Whatever it is, we can certainly still enjoy it, and not let our wondering why it occurs interfere with our appreciation.

But it's still kind of cool that the ability that allows us to have that experience goes back at least five hundred million years.

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