Snake in the grass

Okay, now I've heard everything.

If you ever run across a more ridiculous claim, I do not want to know about it.  This one already lowered my opinion of the average intelligence of the human species by ten IQ points.

You've probably heard the conspiracy theories about COVID-19 -- that it was deliberately started by the Chinese, that the vaccine contains microchips so The Bad Guys ™ can keep track of us, and so on.  But none of them can hold a candle to what one Bryan Ardis is saying.  Ardis is allegedly a "chiropractor, acupuncturist, and medical researcher," but after you hear his claim, you will probably come to the conclusion that his medical degree came from Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse.

Ready?

Ardis says the Catholic church created the COVID-19 virus from cobra venom, and is using it to turn us all into Satan worshipers.

So far, it's just a wacko guy who came up with a wacko idea.  Nothing special, because after all, that's what wacko guys do.  What sets him apart is that radio broadcaster Stew Peters took him seriously enough that he made a documentary about Ardis and his idea -- a documentary called "Watch the Waters" which has already gotten 640,000 views and is trending on Twitter.

I'd like to hope a significant chunk of the views are by people who are saying, "Whoa, listen up to what this nutcake is saying," but chances are, there are enough people who believe him that it's troubling.  Here's what Ardis says, which I feel obliged to state is verbatim:

The Latin definition historically for virus—originally and historically, virus meant, and means, "venom."  So, I started to wonder, "Well, what about the name ‘corona’? Does it have a Latin definition or a definition at all?"  So I actually looked up what’s the definition and on Dictionary.com, it brings up thirteen definitions: ‘Corona, religiously, ecclesiastically, means gold ribbon at the base of a miter.  So, this actually could read, "The Pope’s Venom Pandemic."  In Latin terms, corona means crown.  Visually, we see kings represented with a crown symbol.  So put that together for me: king cobra venom.  It actually could read, "King Cobra Venom Pandemic."

I actually believe this is more of a religious war on the entire world.  If I was going to do something incredibly evil, how ironic would it be that the Catholic Church, or whoever, would use the one symbol of an animal that represents evil in all religion? …  You take that snake or that serpent, and you figure out how to isolate genes from that serpent and get those genes of that serpent to insert itself into your God-given created DNA.  I think this was the plan all along; to get the serpent’s—the Evil One’s—DNA into your God-created DNA.  And they figured out how to do this with this mRNA [vaccine] technology.  They’re using mRNA—which is mRNA extracted from I believe the king cobra venom—and I think they want to get to that venom inside of you and make you a hybrid of Satan.

 Probably needless to say, I read this whole thing with this expression on my face:

It does leave me with a few responses, however:

• Satan has DNA?
• Linguistics is not a cross between free association and a game of Telephone.  
• When mRNA is injected into you (e.g. the COVID vaccine), it degrades in only a couple of days.  By that time, if the vaccine worked, you've begun to make antibodies to the protein the mRNA coded for (in this case, the spike protein).  It doesn't get into your DNA, nor affect your DNA in any way.  So if the COVID vaccine was engineered to turn us into demons, we'd all turn back into ordinary humans a couple of days later, which now that I think of it could be kind of fun.
• Injecting king cobra venom into you would kill you within minutes, given that this is basically what happens when you get bitten by a king cobra.
• "Corona" is Latin for "crown," that bit is correct.  But coronaviruses are a big family of viruses that has been known to scientists since Leland Bushnell and Carl Brandly first isolated them in 1933, and were named not for the pope's miter but because the rings of spike proteins on the surface look a little like a crown.
• Is Bryan Ardis stark raving loony?  Or what?

So there you have it.  We are now in the Pope's King Cobra Venom Pandemic.  Despite these dire warnings, my wife and I have both been vaccinated three times, and we haven't turned into hybrids of Satan.  But we have, so far, avoided getting COVID, which is kind of the point.

But I will end with reiterating my plea: if you find a crazier claim, please don't tell me about it.  Reading about this one made countless cells in my cerebral cortex that I can ill afford to lose die screaming in agony.  From now on in Skeptophilia, I think I'll focus on happy bunnies and rainbows.  We'll see how long that lasts.

Hopefully a while, at least.  The last thing we need is my brain cell loss contributing to a further drop in the average human IQ.

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Mysterious planet

You never hear people talking about the planet Neptune much.

The other planets are all famous for something or another.  Mercury is the closest to the Sun; Venus is ridiculously hot; Mars has been the subject of repeated visits; Jupiter's the biggest; Saturn has rings; and Uranus is best known for being a name you can't say without all the immature people giggling. 

To be fair, the unfortunately-named Uranus has some fascinating features, the most obvious of which is its axial tilt.  Its rotational axis is tipped at a bit over ninety degrees -- so it, in effect, rolls around its orbit on its side.  This means that at its summer solstice, its northern hemisphere is almost entirely illuminated all day long, and the entire southern hemisphere is in the dark; the opposite is true on the winter solstice.  (And given that its orbital period is 84 Earth years long, its winters are even longer than the ones we have here in upstate New York.)

But Neptune?  Other than the fact that it's a gas giant, and very far out in the Solar System, most people don't know much about it.

That's a shame, because it's a pretty interesting place.  Being about 1.5 times farther away from the Sun than Uranus, it's got a much longer year, at 164.8 Earth years.  It's really cold, with an average temperature somewhere around 70 K (-200 C, give or take).  Also, it's an interesting color -- a really deep, rich blue, something we didn't know until the first good images came back from the Voyager 2 flyby almost a little over thirty years ago.  Some of the color apparently comes from crystals of methane, but according to NASA, it's way deeper blue to be accounted for solely from that.  Their page on the planet says, "Uranus' blue-green color is also the result of atmospheric methane, but Neptune is a more vivid, brighter blue, so there must be an unknown component that causes the more intense color that we see.  The cause of Neptune's bluish tinge remains a mystery."

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

What brings this up is a study out of the University of Leicester showing that we haven't come close to exploring all of Neptune's oddities.  Currently the planet is in the southern hemisphere's summer; Neptune's axial tilt is a little over 28 degrees, so more than the Earth's (at 23.5) but nowhere near as tilted as Uranus (at 97.7).  So as with the Earth, when the southern hemisphere is pointed toward the Sun, it should be slowly warming up.

It's not.  It's cooling down.  The average temperature of the upper atmosphere in the southern hemisphere has dropped by 8 C.  (Remember that being a gas giant, Neptune has no well-defined surface.)  Even odder, there one place that's warming -- the planet's south pole, where the average temperature has gone up by 11 C.

These are not small changes, especially given how big Neptune is (seventeen times the mass of the Earth).  And the astronomers have no idea what's causing it.  It sounds like something that could be driven by convection -- atmospheric turnover, where warmer gases from lower down in the atmosphere rise, displacing colder, denser gases as they do so -- but that's a hell of a big convection cell if it's affecting the entire southern hemisphere of the planet.

Of course, when it comes to moving stuff around, Neptune is pretty good at it.  It has the fastest winds ever clocked in the Solar System (at a little over 1,900 km/hr).  An enormous storm called the "Great Dark Spot" was spotted by Voyager 2 in 1989 -- but by 1994, it had completely disappeared.

"I think Neptune is itself very intriguing to many of us because we still know so little about it," said astronomer Michael Roman, who was lead author on the paper, which appeared this week in The Planetary Science Journal.  "This all points towards a more complicated picture of Neptune’s atmosphere and how it changes with time."

So the most distant planet from the Sun is still largely a mystery, and this week's paper just added to its peculiarities.  Amazing that since its discovery by German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle in 1846, we are still largely in the dark about what makes it tick.

And I, for one, find that absolutely fascinating.

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A flower in amber

Today's post comes to us purely from the "Okay, This Is Cool" department.

I've been fascinated with plant taxonomy since long before I knew the word.  I couldn't have been more than about seven years old when a friend of the family gave me a lovely old book by the early twentieth-century botanical illustrator F. Schuyler Mathews called Field Book to American Trees and Shrubs.  Not only did I use it to try to identify every tree in my neighborhood, I found out something about how plants are classified -- not by leaf shape (which at the time seemed to me the most logical characteristic to use) but by flower structure.  That's when I learned that beeches, oaks, and chestnuts are in the same family; so are rhododendrons, heather, blueberries, and cranberries; so are birches, alders, and hazelnuts; so, most surprisingly to me, are willows and poplars.

It was also my first introduction to how difficult the classification of organisms actually is, something I learned a great deal more about when I took evolutionary biology in college.  The standout from Mathews's book in that respect is the genus Crataegus, hawthorns, of which he lists (and illustrates with beautiful woodcuts) over a hundred species, many of which looked (and still look) exactly alike to my untrained eye.  Taxonomists argue vehemently over how particular species are to be placed and who is related to whom, although the advent of genetic analysis and cladistics has now provided a more rigorous standard method for classification.

What I didn't know, even after my umpteenth perusal of the Field Book, was that the strange and magical-sounding scientific names of plant families Mathews mentions are barely scratching the surface.  You go elsewhere in the world, all bets are off; you'll run into plants that are in families with no members at all in the United States.  An odd historical filigree is that one of the reasons the British colonizers felt so at home in northeastern North America was that the plants were familiar; oaks, ashes, beeches, birches, willows, maples, pines, and spruces are found in both places (although the exact species vary).  Go to southeast Asia, South America, or pretty much anywhere in Africa, though, and even someone well-versed in the plants of North America and western Europe might well not recognize a single species.  I found that to be the case in Malaysia -- a (very) little bit of reading about the flora of the places I visited gave me at least a name or two, but I'd say 95% of what I saw I couldn't even have ventured a guess about.

One of the many peculiar plants I saw in the rain forests of Malaysia -- I still don't know what it is, but it sure has a cool-looking leaf.

The reason this comes up is an article sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia about a fossil from Myanmar that was the subject of a recent paper in The Journal of the Botanical Institute of Texas.  Encased in amber, the flower is almost perfectly preserved -- despite being just this side of one hundred million years old, a point at which the dinosaurs would still be in charge of everything for another thirty-four million years.

If it sounds like figuring out the taxonomy of modern plants is a challenge, it gets way worse when you start looking at plant fossils.  Not only do we not have living plants to analyze genetically, often what we're having to judge by is what's left of a leaf or two.  Fortunately, in this case what the researchers have is a preserved flower -- remember that flowering plants are classified by flower structure -- and that was enough to convince them that they were not only looking at a previously unrecorded species, but a previously unrecorded genus -- and possibly a whole new family.

The flower of the newly-named Micropetasos burmensis [Image by George Poinar of Oregon State University)

Most fascinating of all, the researchers aren't even sure how Micropetasos fits into known plant systematics.  The paper says about all we can say so far is that it seems to belong to the clade Pentapetalae -- which doesn't narrow it down much, as that same clade contains such distantly-related plants as roses, asters, cacti, cucumbers, and cabbage.

Long-time readers might recognize the name of the lead author of the paper -- George Poinar.  This isn't the first time he's pulled off this kind of botanical coup.  About a year and a half ago, I wrote about another of Poinar's discoveries in Burmese amber, a little flower called Valviloculus pleristaminis, which also was of uncertain placement amongst known plant families.  Amazing that in bits of fossilized tree sap we can find remnants that allow us to piece together the flora of the Cretaceous Period.

Of course, what it always brings up is the elegiac thought that however many fossils we find, the vast majority of species that have existed on Earth left no traces whatsoever that have survived to today.  If we were to take a time machine back a hundred million years, Micropetasos and Valviloculus we might perhaps recognize from Poinar's work; but there would be thousands more that are completely unfamiliar.  The lion's share of prehistory is unknown -- and unknowable.

But at least we have one more little piece, a tiny flower in amber.  When it was growing, there were triceratopses and T. rexes stomping around, and our closest ancestors were small, rodent-like critters that still had tens of millions of years of evolution before they'd even become primates.  That we can have any sort of lens into that distant, ancient world is astonishing.

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Angels on ice

I guess it's natural enough to ascribe all sorts of bizarre stuff to places we don't know much about.  And top of the list of places we don't know much about is Antarctica.

The first recorded landing on the shores of Antarctica by humans (you'll see why I added "by humans" in a moment) was in 1821, when the American seal-hunting ship Cecilia, under Captain John Davis, anchored in Hughes Bay, between Cape Sterneck and Cape Murray along the west coast of the continent.  There's a possibility that the Māori discovered it first, perhaps as far back as the seventh century C.E., but that's based only on their legends and at this point is pure conjecture.

Since that time, there's been a good bit of exploration of the place, but there's a ton we still don't know.  The reason for this is not only its inaccessibility, but its ridiculously cold temperatures; the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth was on July 21, 1983, when in Vostok Station, Antarctica it reached just this side of -90 C.  (For reference, carbon dioxide freezes at -78.5 C, so some of the white stuff on the ground there was dry ice.)

The mystery and inhospitable conditions just invite speculation, not to mention outright invention.  Perhaps the most famous story set in Antarctica is H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," in which a team of explorers finds the remnants of monumental architecture that predates the earliest humans by a good hundred million years -- at which time Antarctica was a tropical rainforest.  (What's most fascinating about this story is that Antarctica was a tropical rainforest at one point, when the continent was a great deal farther north, and that Lovecraft had conjectured this a good forty years before plate tectonics was discovered.)  Of course, being a story by HPL, it wouldn't be complete without monsters, and the unfortunate explorers discover that the place is still inhabited, and by the time it's over most of them have been eaten by Shoggoths.

Interestingly, this leads us right into the story that spawned today's post, because although most people know that Lovecraft's stories and others of their type are fiction, there are some for whom that distinction has never really taken hold.  I found out about this because a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link that had popped up on Ranker called "These Fallen Angels Might Have Been Imprisoned in Antarctica," about a fellow named Steven Ben-Nun who claims that according to the Book of Enoch (a Jewish text dated to somewhere between 200 and 100 B.C.E., which is considered apocryphal by most Christian sects) when the angels fell, they didn't go to hell, they went to Antarctica.

Which, I suppose, is hellish enough.

Ben-Nun (and Enoch) give a great many details.  Apparently there were a bunch of angels called the Watchers, who became enamored of humans, and not just of watching, if you get my drift.  They came down to Earth and immediately taught humans "unholy ways" that apparently involved lots and lots of sex.  This resulted in lots and lots of babies, who were half-angel and half-human, and these are the Nephilim, about whom the conspiracy theorists still babble, lo unto this very day.

If this nineteenth-century marble statue of a fallen angel by Belgian sculptor Joseph Geefs is accurate, you can see why humans were tempted.  I wouldn't have said no either.

But new and fun sexual diversions weren't the only thing the angels taught humans.  According to the article:

Azazel, the leader of the Watchers, taught men to make tools for war and women to make themselves more attractive with jewelry and cosmetics.  Shemyaza taught magical spells; Armaros taught the banishment of those spells; the angel Baraqijal taught astrology; Kokabiel gave humans knowledge of astronomy; Chazaqiel taught them about weather; Shamsiel gave humans knowledge of the sun cycles; Sariel taught them the lunar cycles; Penemuel instructed humanity to read and write, and Kashdejan gave humanity the knowledge [of] medicine.

Well, all this was unacceptable to the Old Testament God, who above all seemed to resent it whenever he saw humans learning stuff or enjoying themselves.  So he and the unfallen angels (who presumably were just fine with humans not knowing about astronomy and weather and reading and writing and sex) waged war, and the Watchers were defeated.  At that point, Ben-Nun says, God looked about for the worst place possible to put them, and decided, understandably enough, on Antarctica.

And there they still reside, frozen underneath Wilkes Land.  Why specifically Wilkes Land, you might ask?  Well, it's because that's where the Wilkes Land Gravitational Anomaly is, the conventional explanation for which is that it's the site of an impact crater from a meteorite that hit about 250 million years ago.

But you can see how that explanation leads directly to the conclusion, "... so there must be a hundred fallen angels frozen under here somewhere."

Other than that, the claim doesn't have much going for it, and I don't think the scientists need to worry about waking up a bunch of Watchers.  The Lovecraftian cyclopean architecture is kind of a non-starter, too.  Too bad, because otherwise, most of Antarctica seems like nothing much more than rocks and ice.  It could use a few Shoggoths or hot-looking scantily-clad angels to liven thing up a bit.

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Tick-tick-tick

A former student of mine (and current friend) is a veterinarian in Scotland.  Being committed to a scientific approach to health, she frequently weighs in on Skeptophilia posts regarding medical issues of all kinds.

Saturday's post, about the highly dubious alternative-medical claims of a woman named Christina Lopes, prompted her to mention (after she basically gave me a round of applause for calling out Lopes's bullshit) that it's not just in human health that the alternative medicine specter raises its ugly head.  She is understandably frustrated with pet owners who think their home remedies and ten-minute "research" on Google supersedes her DVM and years in practice, and -- just as with Lopes -- frequently want to avoid the expense and pain of an actual effective treatment for what amounts to waving a magic wand and shouting "accio health."

She followed this up by sending me a website claiming to have discovered a new approach to the scourge of dog owners all over: ticks.  Not only are these repulsive little arachnids unpleasant in and of themselves, they carry a number of serious diseases -- most notably Lyme disease, but also Rocky Mountain spotted fever, babesiosis, ehrlichiosis, anaplasmosis, and Powassan virus.  (As an aside, in the southeastern United States, the bite of the lone-star tick can have another dreadful result -- alpha-gal syndrome, the main characteristic of which is a life-threatening anaphylactic allergy to consuming red meat.)

The lone-star tick (Amblyomma americanum)  [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the Center for Disease Control]

So it's natural enough for pet owners -- well, anyone who spends time outdoors, actually -- to want a good tick repellant.  The problem is, not much repels them.  Some of the chemical-infused tick collars contain compounds that can harm humans, so while they're probably the best option, I can understand people's reluctance to use them.  We've had decent success with tucking cardboard tubes containing cotton balls soaked with permethrin solution in out-of-the-way parts of our property, the idea being that one of the main tick carriers in our area -- deer mice -- will pull bits of the cotton to make their nests, killing any ticks they happen to be carrying.  We've noticed a significant decrease in ticks in our yard -- last summer we barely saw any -- so our admittedly anecdotal and small-sample-size experiment appears to work fairly well.

But it does take some effort, and handling a Scary Chemical (although it must be said that a thorough analysis by the FDA has found permethrin to be completely safe for humans when used properly, and the World Health Organization includes it on their List of Essential Medicines).  So people who gravitate toward "natural" solutions tend to cast about for other ways to take care of the problem.

It's this impulse that resulted in the British pet supply company Harbour Hounds to market a new approach.  They call it the "EM Tick-Off Necklace."  On their website they remind us repeatedly that all of their names and products are registered and/or trademarked, but I'll hope one mention will fly under the radar, especially since I'm not selling anything and have no plans to swipe their idea.

You'll see why in a moment.

"EM" stands for "Effective Microorganisms."  What they apparently are claiming is that the reason ticks flourish is because the soil microbiome is off, so if you encourage the right kinds of microbes, the problem goes away.  The upshot is what they do is to take three species of beneficial microorganisms (a yeast, a photosynthetic bacterium, and a lactic-acid fermenting bacterium), and incorporate them into some clay beads, then string the beads to make a necklace for your dog.

"How," you may be asking, "does encasing the microbes in clay beads and hanging them around your dog's neck help the soil microbiome?", you may be asking.  I know that's what I was asking, by this point.

Well, it's one step beyond even that.  After mixing the yeast and bacteria in the clay and making it into beads, they "bake it at high temperatures to capture the DNA" of the microbes.

Unfortunately for Harbour Hounds, I'm an amateur potter, and I know something about baking clay.  When I'm making a piece of pottery, the lowest temperature necessary to harden the clay into ceramic is what potters call "cone 06" -- just this side of 1,000 C.  (My wife and I, and a lot of potters, actually go higher than that, to "cone 04," which is around 1,060 C.)  And I've seen what these temperatures do to organic matter.  A while back I was loading our kiln and found that there was a dead fly in a rather hard-to-reach spot on the kiln shelf, so I just shrugged my shoulders and left it.  After firing and cooling, I opened the kiln, and what had been a dead fly was now a tiny pile of completely calcined white ash.

Also unfortunately for Harbour Hounds, I spent thirty-two years teaching biology, so I know something about DNA as well, including the awkward fact that when heated, DNA denatures (breaks down) -- it completely degrades at 190 C, over five times lower than the minimum temperature it takes to fuse clay into ceramic.  So not only would the microbes themselves be gone after firing, so would every last trace of their DNA.

Nevertheless, Harbour Hounds claims that it's still in there, and furthermore, that the DNA in the ceramic emits far-infrared light.  These wavelengths, they say, are "non-evasive," whatever the hell that means.  But apparently they also repel ticks.

And this brings up the third unfortunate thing for Harbour Hounds, which is that I have a bachelor's degree in physics, so I am aware that any object above room temperature emits infrared light.  In fact, you emit infrared light -- that's why you can be seen at night through infrared goggles -- yet the ticks, mosquitoes, and other unpleasant little bastards can find you just fine.

So this claim seems to be batting zero, here.  However, they cover their own asses by two disclaimers: (1) the collars aren't guaranteed to prevent ticks completely, so you should always check your dog thoroughly and pull off ticks when you find them; and (2) you and your dog should avoid walking in areas where there are lots of ticks.

To sum the claim up, then: "send us lots of money for tick collars that do absolutely nothing, making sure to replace them every year, and then do exactly what you were doing before."

Anyhow, thanks to my friend for the lead on this story.  Me, I'm gonna keep using cotton with permethrin and (a little hesitantly, I must admit) standard tick collars for our pups.  It's not a perfect solution, but at least I know it has a better success rate than what Harbour Hounds is claiming.

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A whole lot of shakin'

I didn't realize how complicated it is to calculate the magnitude of an earthquake.

Most of us are probably familiar with the Richter Scale, the one most commonly used in the media.  It was developed in 1935 by seismologist Charles Francis Richter to give a standard scale to measure the power of earthquakes.  The scale is logarithmic; each increase in one on the scale represents a ten-fold increase in intensity.  The scale is based upon the displacement amplitude on a seismograph at a distance of one hundred kilometers from the epicenter, starting with a magnitude 0 earthquake causing the needle to move with an amplitude of one micron.  The scale extends up to an unspecified "greater than 9" -- because at that point, pretty much everything in the vicinity, including the seismograph, gets completely pulverized.

When you start looking more closely, though, the problems with the scale start to become obvious.  First of all, if the measurement is being made one hundred kilometers from the epicenter, the terrain in between is a significant factor.  Tremors passing through material with a high amount of shear (such as sand or mud) will lose intensity fast, as compared to ones going through a material that is rigid (such as solid rock).  Second, the origin of the earthquake usually isn't at the epicenter, which is the point on the surface nearest the source; the origin is the hypocenter, directly underneath -- but which can be at any depth from right near the surface down to hundreds of kilometers down.  (The deepest earthquake ever recorded was a minor tremor off the island of Vanuatu in 2004, which had a hypofocus 736 kilometers deep.)  Then there's the fact that earthquakes can be of different durations -- a less powerful earthquake that lasts longer can do as much damage as a more powerful, but shorter, tremor.

Another problem is that earthquakes can result in differences in the oscillation of the waves relative to the direction they're moving.  This is largely due to the fact that there are three basic sorts of faults.  There are thrust faults or convergent faults, where two tectonic plates are moving toward each other; what happens then can be one plate being pushed underneath the other (subduction), which is what causes the quakes (and the volcanoes) in Indonesia and Japan, or the two plates kind of smashing together into a jumble, which is the process that created the Himalayas.  There are extension faults or divergent faults, where the two plates are moving apart; this usually creates smaller but more frequent quakes, and lots of volcanism as magma bubbles up from the underlying mantle.  This is happening in Iceland, and is also the cause of the Great Rift Valley in Africa, which will eventually peel off the Horn of Africa (Somalia and parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania) and open up a new ocean.  Last, there are strike-slip faults or transform faults, where the plates are moving in opposite directions on each side of the fault, such as the famous San Andreas Fault in California.

Map of the (known) tectonic plates [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

The problems with the Richter Scale have led to the development of several other scales of intensity, such as the Surface-wave Magnitude Scale (which is pretty much just what it sounds like, and doesn't take into account source depth), the Moment Magnitude Scale (which is based on the amount of energy released as measured by the amount and distance of rock moved), the Duration Magnitude Scale (which figures in how long the tremor lasts), and so on.  But these all use different numerical benchmarks, and given that the Richter Scale is more widely known, a lot of people have continued to use that one despite its downsides.

The reason all this comes up is a new study from the University of Southampton that has identified evidence of what appears to be the biggest earthquake known; an almost unimaginable 9.5 on the Richter Scale quake that happened in Chile 3,800 years ago.  Trying to find the epicenter brings up yet another problem with measuring quake intensity, because the evidence is that this particular quake originated from the rupture of a part of the thrust fault between the Nazca Plate and the South American Plate off the coast of the Atacama Desert -- a rupture that was one thousand kilometers long.

The result was a tsunami that deposited marine sediments and fossils of oceanic animals several kilometers inland, and then traveled across the Pacific Ocean and slammed into New Zealand, tossing boulders the size of cars over distances of hundreds of meters.  That region of the Atacama Desert had been inhabited prior to the quake -- astonishing considering how dry and inhospitable the place is -- but it was (understandably) abandoned by the survivors for a long while afterward.

"The local population there were left with nothing," said geologist James Goff, who co-authored the study.  "Our archaeological work found that a huge social upheaval followed as communities moved inland beyond the reach of tsunamis.  It was over a thousand years before people returned to live at the coast again, which is an amazing length of time given that they relied on the sea for food.  It is likely that traditions handed down from generation to generation bolstered this resilient behavior, although we will never know for sure.  This is the oldest example we have found in the Southern Hemisphere where an earthquake and tsunami had such a catastrophic impact on people’s lives.  There is much to learn from this."

The obvious next question is, "Could this happen again?"  The answer is not just that it could, but it will.  Probably not in the same spot, but somewhere along the many tectonic boundaries in the world.  Nor do we know when.  Earthquake prediction is very far from an exact science.  We have instruments like strain gauges to estimate the tension rock is experiencing, but that doesn't tell you what's going on deeper in the ground, nor when the rock will fracture and release that energy as an earthquake.  Predicting volcanic eruptions is much easier; vulcanologists have gotten pretty good at detecting magma movement underground, and recognizing when a volcano is likely to blow.  (This is why the ongoing hoopla about the Yellowstone Supervolcano is all hype; sure, it'll probably erupt again, but some time in the next hundred thousand years or so, and it's showing no signs of an imminent eruption.)

The Earth is a dynamic planet, and the plates on the surface are in constant motion, jostling, coming together, moving apart, a bit like ice sheets on a river when they begin to break up in the spring.  You can't help but be fascinated by the amount of power it's capable of -- a catastrophic release of energy so large that the scales we've developed to measure such things are all but incapable of expressing.

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What's the harm?

One of the questions I get asked pretty frequently, apropos of my work as a debunker and critic of woo, is "What's the harm?"  So what if people want to believe in astrology or divination or whatnot?  Surely it's harmless to check your horoscope daily or make your decisions on your latest Tarot card reading.  Just leave people alone and let them do whatever floats their boat.

The problem is, these kinds of beliefs aren't harmless.  I see three different ways in which such practices generate a potential for direct harm.  First, belief in something despite a complete lack of evidence establishes a habit of credulity; so your acceptance of something fairly benign (like astrology) can predispose you to believe something that isn't benign at all (like the claim that homeopathy is a legitimate way to treat human disease).  Once you've fallen for one bit of nonsense, the next one is that much easier to fall for.

Second, a great many of the people who are purveyors of this nonsense are in it for one reason: money.  They are happy to relieve you of your hard-earned cash in exchange for a tissue of lies.  One good example of this is faith healing, which even today brings its practitioners millions of dollars a year, ripped off from the gullible and the desperate.

Last, though, is that some forms of woo -- the ones that, like homeopathy and faith healing, claim to alleviate something real, something with an actual physical cause -- lead people to abandon practices that might actually work, and seek out what amounts to magic.  And that brings me to Christina Lopes, a self-styled "healer and life coach."

I ran into Christina Lopes over at the r/skeptic subreddit, where someone posted one of her videos along with some rather acidic commentary.  I'd never heard of her, so I decided to watch the video.

In order to save you a half-hour of your life that you'll never get back, allow me to summarize the main points.

First, she says we're all "ascending."  Our bodies, supposedly, are in the process of transforming into something "higher."  What she means by "higher" is never defined in any rigorous way, but apparently it has to do with two things -- your "light quotient," the amount of light your body can hold, and the rate at which you're vibrating.  Lopes subscribes to the idea that the faster something is vibrating, the better it is, an idea you'd think anyone would realize is false just based on sound waves.  (If you don't believe me, you listen to a guy playing a solo piccolo for an hour, and I'll listen to a guy playing a cello, and we'll see who has a headache afterward.)  Better still, consider that claim applied to the light she likes talking about so much; compare the effect on the body of very high-frequency light (e.g. gamma rays) as compared to lower-frequency light (e.g. visible light).

I know which one I'd want bombarding me.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Salma2789, Spirit man, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So far, nothing so different than a lot of these kinds of wacky spiritual claims.  But then she goes into the health effects of "ascension," and that's where things get dangerous.

She says that when you start "ascending," it's hard on the body.  Our cells (which she claims are sentient) "literally purge themselves of lower energy."  If she means "literally" literally, it's hard to fathom why the scientists have never detected this energy purge, since you'd think it would be measurable somehow.  But she goes on to tell us that this phase of things creates some real physical symptoms -- muscle inflammation, which "could be anywhere" including your chest, and mental agitation (disjointed, dark, or violent thoughts).  If this happens to you, she says, don't be afraid, because fear is a "dense emotion" which will just make things worse.  You should also increase water intake, because "water is a conductor of energy."  (Good idea, but for the wrong reason.)

At this point, she's moved into the realm of advice that could cause actual harm.  The symptoms she describes -- inflammation and mental agitation -- can be the result of real, and potentially serious, medical conditions.  Believing her bullshit explanation about this being just a natural result of "ascension," and nothing to worry about, means someone might forgo legitimate medical treatment, perhaps until it's far too late.  (For fuck's sake, chest pains and mental agitation are signs of a heart attack.  If you're feeling this, don't mess around with wondering if you're "ascending," get your ass to a hospital now.)

It's to be hoped that the scope of damage she's doing is limited; not only is she not especially widely-known (I couldn't find any mention of her on RationalWiki, for example), but fortunately a lot of the little aches and twinges we experience, and many of the disjointed or chaotic thoughts, are completely normal and not the sign of any dire problems.  But one person dying of cancer because he thought his symptoms were signs of "ascension," and he put off seeing a doctor, is way, way too many.

It's amazing how quickly beliefs can move from "weird but basically harmless" to "actively dangerous."  The problem is, setting aside rational thought so you can accept the former means you'll be much more likely to accept the latter without question.  All the "your body is light" and "high-frequency vibrations are good" stuff is innocuous enough; but as you can see from Lopes's video, those lead directly to "here are some real physical symptoms you shouldn't worry about."

I don't see any way to stop her from posting her videos; her advice is mostly vague enough that trying to establish culpability for harm in a legal sense would be next to impossible.  Failing that, the best we can do is to stress once again how important education in critical thinking is.  Not to mention a solid background in actual science.  If enough people call this out as the bullshit it is, purveyors of snake oil like Christina Lopes will be permanently out of a job.

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