Nice smile!

Back in December, I completely skeeved out some of my readers with a discussion of parasites, more specifically the protist Toxoplasma gondii.  Toxoplasma causes the disease toxoplasmosis, and a number of mammalian species are hosts, most notably cats, humans, and rats.  It's the cat/human connection that is why you've probably heard that pregnant women shouldn't clean cat litter boxes; contact with an infected cat's urine can transmit the parasite to a human, and Toxoplasma is associated with birth defects in human infants.

More interesting, though, are its behavioral effects.  In December's post, I described how toxoplasmosis alters the behavior of all three of its main hosts -- it makes cats more affectionate, humans more neurotic, and rats more fearless, all three of which serve the evolutionary function of increasing the likelihood that the pathogen will jump to another host.  (The cats seek out human company; the humans crave the comfort that pets can give; and the rats become unafraid of predators.  In fact, some studies have even shown that infected rats are actively attracted to the scent of cat urine.)

Which is creepy enough.  The idea that a brain parasite is, at least in some respects, in the driver's seat of our emotional state is a little unsettling.  Or maybe I'm only saying that because I've got it myself, having had cats off and on for pretty much my entire adult life.  But I'm not indulging in hypochondria, here; if you've ever owned a cat, especially one allowed outdoors, your chances of having a Toxoplasma infection is nearly 100%.  Kevin Lafferty, a microbiologist who is one of leading experts on Toxoplasma, estimates that there are three billion people in the world who have it.

Yes, that's "billion" with a "b."  As in just shy of 40% of the world's population,

But now another filigree of "holy shit, that is freaky" has been added to this already bizarre pathogen.  A team made up of Javier Borráz-Léon and Markus Rantala (of the University of Turku), Indrikis Krams (of the University of Latvia), and Ana Lilia Cerda-Molina (of the Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatría of Mexico City) found out that not only does Toxoplasma change our personalities, it changes our appearance.

The idea came from the fact that in other mammals, Toxoplasma can be spread through sexual contact, so there was no reason to believe the same couldn't be true of humans.  The researchers wondered if -- given that the parasite is pretty damn good at engineering its hosts to do things that pass it on -- there might be some way that being Toxoplasma-positive increased your likelihood of having sex.

And hoo boy, what they found.

They took a large test sample of infected and uninfected individuals, and rated them (or had others rate them, as the case may be) for a variety of features -- attractiveness (both self-perceived and as perceived by others), perception of healthiness, number of sexual partners, number of minor ailments, body mass index, mate value, handgrip strength, facial fluctuating asymmetry (i.e. asymmetry in features that change, such as how you smile), and facial width-to-height ratio, all of which could feasibly connect to sexual attractiveness.  

Some of the features (like handgrip strength and minor ailment susceptibility) showed no statistically significant difference.  But... well, let me quote you directly from the paper, so you don't think I'm making this up:

[We] found that infected men had lower facial fluctuating asymmetry whereas infected women had lower body mass, lower body mass index, a tendency for lower facial fluctuating asymmetry, higher self-perceived attractiveness, and a higher number of sexual partners than non-infected ones.  Then, we found that infected men and women were rated as more attractive and healthier than non-infected ones...  The present study offers novel evidence supporting the idea that some sexually transmitted parasites such as T. gondii may produce changes in the appearance and behavior of the human host, either as a by-product of the infection or as a result of the manipulation of the parasite to increase its spread to new hosts.

Which is probably why everyone finds me so dashingly handsome, and why my entire adult life I've had to fight off people trying to break down my bedroom door.

(Maybe having toxoplasmosis also makes you more sarcastic, I dunno.)

So.  Yeah.  That's not creepy at all.  Having a brain parasite causes you to look healthier and have a more attractive smile, and makes it more likely you'll get laid.  Who would have thought something that completely bizarre could be real?

Yeah, look at that smile. I bet you a hundred bucks David Tennant has toxoplasmosis. Maybe it even accounts for his amazing hair. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rach from Tadcaster, York, England, 2009 07 31 David Tennant smile 09, CC BY 2.0]

Interestingly, I wrote a short story called "The Germ Theory of Disease" (which you can read for free at the link provided) that riffs on this very idea -- a pathogen that makes you more social.  Unfortunately, it also turns you into a werewolf.  (C'mon, it's me we're talking about here, you had to know there'd be a paranormal twist.)

But hell's bells, I thought it was fiction.

And little did I know that I'm very likely to be carrying around a pathogen myself that does just that.  (Well, not the werewolf part.  I hope.)  Sometimes, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, life imitates art just as much as art imitates life.  Or, to quote Mark Twain, "The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to be believable."

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A snapshot in amber

A few days ago I finished reading the wonderful new book by paleontologist Riley Black, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World.  I can't say enough positive things about it -- it tells the gripping story of the impact of the seven-kilometer-wide Chicxulub Meteorite, which hit a spot just north of the Yucatán Peninsula so hard that most of the giant rock vaporized, what was left punched twenty kilometers into the Earth's crust, and it left an impact crater 180 kilometers across.

Artist's impression of the moment of impact [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of artist Donald E. Davis and NASA/JPL]

Black gives us a vivid description of the event and its aftermath, each chapter from the point of view of one individual animal who experienced it (not necessarily lived through it, of course).  The day before the impact; the impact itself; the first hour; the first day; the first year; and so on, up until a hundred thousand years after the strike, at which point the Earth's ecosystems had largely recovered -- albeit with a completely different assemblage of species than it had before.

Black's contention, which is generally accepted by researchers, is that there's little truth to the old trope of the dinosaurs being a moribund group anyhow and the asteroid just finished them off.  The dinosaurs were doing just fine.  While some species were headed toward extinction, that had been happening during the group's 190 million year hegemony (and has happened in every single group of life forms ever evolved).  Dinosaurs as a group were still widespread and diverse -- and if it hadn't been for the impact, it's pretty likely that they would have remained in charge (as it were) for millions of years afterward.

Which means that it's probable that mammals would never have taken off the way they did.  (More accurately, "the way we did.")  It's also an incorrect understanding that mammals only launched after the dinosaurs were "out of the way."  Mammals had been around for a very long time themselves (the first ones, the morganucodontids and multituberculates, overlapped the dinosaurs by over a hundred million years).  What seems to be true, though, is that the dinosaurs occupied most of the large-apex-predator and giant-herbivore niches, so mammal groups were mostly small, and a lot of them were burrowers -- something that was an adaptation to there being a lot of carnivores around, but turned into a key to their survival during the searing infrared surge that swept across the world the day the asteroid hit.

What brings this up, besides my wanting to promote Riley Black's awesome book, is a link sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia about a series of recent discoveries by paleontologist Robert DePalma at a dig site in Tanis, North Dakota.  What's stunning about these finds is that DePalma believes -- and the evidence seems strong -- that they represent the remains of organisms that died on the day of the Chicxulub Impact.

In other words, we're looking at a snapshot of the event that killed every non-avian dinosaur species, and changed the face of the world permanently.

Hard as it is to imagine, in the late Cretaceous, what is now North Dakota was a tropical wetland bordering the Western Interior Seaway -- an inlet of the ocean that has since vanished from a combination of uplift, the Rocky Mountain Orogeny, and simple evaporation.  Picture southern Louisiana, and you have an idea of what North Dakota looked like.

Then the meteorite struck.

Despite the fact that the distance between the impact site and the Tanis wetland is around four thousand kilometers, it only took an hour before there was a blast of heat, a rain of red-hot debris, and a series of earthquakes.  The first-mentioned is probably what did the most immediate damage; large animals that were too big to shelter were probably all dead within minutes after the the infrared surge started, as were just about all the terrestrial plants.  Even aquatic organisms weren't safe, though.  One of the more horrifying fossil finds was a turtle -- that had a stick driven all the way through its body.  The earthquakes triggered a series of seiche waves, which occur when an enclosed body of water is shaken laterally.  (Picture the sloshing of water in a metal tub if you jostle it back and forth.)  The seiche in the Western Interior Seaway and nearby lakes flung aquatic animals onto shore and then buried them under tons of debris -- DePalma and his team found layers of fish fossils right at the K-T Boundary Layer that were also victims of that awful day the impact occurred.

I've written about this event before, of course; I've always had a fascination with things that are big and powerful and can kill you.  But what made me decide to revisit it was a new discovery at Tanis of amber that contains glass spherules.  Amber, you probably know, is fossilized tree sap; it can contain other fossils, including pollen and animals that were trapped in the sap before it hardened (made famous by Jurassic Park, although it must be added that there's never been any found with intact DNA).  But these glass spherules were altogether different.  Silicate rocks turn to glass when they're melted and then cooled quickly; that's where the rock obsidian comes from.  But an analysis of the spherules showed something fascinating.  There were inclusions in the glass of tiny chips of two different kinds of rock; one type was high in calcium, while the other was largely metallic, with high content of chromium, nickel, and other heavy elements.

The first, DePalma says, are the remnants of the limestone bedrock from the spot in the Yucatán where Chicxulub hit, blasted into the air and landing four thousand kilometers away.

The other are the (thus far) only actual pieces of the meteorite itself which have ever been found.

It's absolutely astonishing that we can identify rocks and fossils that formed on a specific day 66 million years ago, and doubly so that it was a day when an event occurred that quite literally changed the course of life on Earth.  As horrifying as the Chicxulub Impact was -- Riley Black calls it "the worst day the Earth ever experienced," and it seems an apt description -- in a real sense, we owe our existence to it.

Without Chicxulub, it's pretty likely it'd still be a dinosaur-dominated world -- and one in which mammals were still small, furtive furballs that never had a chance to control their own destiny.

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A door into RNA world

[N.B.: This post is a little on the technical side, if you're not a biology type.  Trust me, the work is worth it, because what these people have discovered is stupendous.]

I had the experience yesterday of stumbling on an article published in Nature this week that, from the title, seemed like something that could only interest biochemistry geeks.

Then I started reading it, and I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.

Before I tell you about the paper, a little background.

Most laypeople know that genes are basically stretches of DNA, and that DNA is a double helix made of chains of smaller molecules called nitrogenous bases, of which there are four -- adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine.  (A, T, G, and C for short.)  Because the bases always pair the same way (A to T, C to G), it allows for DNA to replicate itself.

So far, so good.  But how do you get from a gene to a trait?  It took a long time to figure this out, and there's still work being done on how genes switch on and off during development.  But a simplified explanation goes like this:

The first step is that one gene (a piece of DNA) is copied into a similar, but not identical, chemical called RNA.  (This is called transcription.)  RNA is a single helix, so only one side of the DNA gene is copied; the other side only exists so the DNA can be replicated.  Then the RNA goes to a cellular structure called a ribosome, where the base sequence is read in threes (a group of three is a codon), and each trio instructs the ribosome to bring in a specific amino acid.  The amino acids dictated by the codon sequence are linked together into a protein, and those proteins directly generate the trait.  (This is called translation.)  Every trait is basically produced this way, whether it's something simple like skin color, or the interaction between the thousands of genes and proteins that it takes to generate a functioning human heart.

Okay, gene > RNA > protein > trait.  The sequence is so ubiquitous that it's been nicknamed The Central Dogma of Molecular Genetics.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons  , Pre-mRNA-1ysv-tubes, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But here's the problem.  When life first began, how did the process get started?

The problem isn't the building blocks; given the conditions that we're virtually certain existed on the early Earth, all of the pieces -- the bases, the sugars that make up the backbone of both DNA and RNA, the amino acids -- form spontaneously and abundantly.  They will even link up to form chains on their own.  It's likely that any Earthlike, water-containing planet has plenty of all the biochemical bits and pieces.

But how do you get from a particular RNA to a particular protein?  Remember, it's the sequence of bases in RNA that determines the sequence of amino acids in the protein, but to read the RNA sequence and assemble those amino acids requires a lot of cellular machinery -- first and foremost the ribosome.

Which is itself made of RNA.

So it seems like the first life had to pull itself up by its own bootlaces.  Put succinctly, to do transcription and translation, you need to have the mechanisms of transcription and translation already in place.

Or at least, that's what I thought until I read this paper.

Enter the team led by Felix Müller of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, and their paper "A Prebiotically Plausible Scenario of an RNA-Peptide World."  Here's how the paper begins, with a couple of parenthetical notes added by me:

A central commonality of all cellular life is the translational process, in which ribosomal RNA catalyses peptide [i.e. protein] formation with the help of transfer RNAs, which function as amino acid carrying adapter molecules.  Comparative genomics suggests that ribosomal translation is one of the oldest evolutionary processes, which dates back to the hypothetical RNA world [the theory that the earliest self-replicating genetic molecules were RNA, not DNA, which is generally accepted in the scientific world].  The questions of how and when RNA learned to instruct peptide synthesis is one of the grand unsolved challenges in prebiotic evolutionary research.

The immense complexity of ribosomal translation demands a stepwise evolutionary process.  From the perspective of the RNA world, at some point RNA must have gained the ability to instruct and catalyse the synthesis of, initially, just small peptides.  This initiated the transition from a pure RNA world into an RNA–peptide world.  In this RNA–peptide world, both molecular species could have co-evolved to gain increasing ‘translation’ and ‘replication’ efficiency...

We found that non-canonical vestige nucleosides [i.e. unusual bases which are still part of some structures made of RNA, but aren't on the list of the four standard bases], which are key components of contemporary RNAs, are able to equip RNA with the ability to self-decorate with peptides.  This creates chimeric structures, in which both chemical entities can co-evolve in a covalently connected form, generating gradually more and more sophisticated and complex RNA–peptide structures...  We... found that peptides can simultaneously grow at multiple sites on RNA on the basis of rules determined by sequence complementarity, which is the indispensable requirement for efficient peptide growth.

Which is way more dignified than what I'd have written, which is, "Holy shit, we just figured out how gene expression evolved!"

In my AP Biology classes, I ended the unit on evolution with a list of some of the questions that evolutionary theory had not yet solved, and the origins of gene expression and protein synthesis topped the list.  It looks like that one might now be checked off -- which, if my assessment is correct, should put Müller and his team in contention for this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry.

I find it so fascinating that there are still some of the Big Questions out there, and that scientists are actually making inroads into answering them.  Good science doesn't just say "it's a mystery" and forthwith stop thinking.  We're gradually chipping away at problems that were thought to be intractable -- in this case, giving us insight into how life began on Earth four billion years ago.

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An act of faith

Over the last couple of months I've been dealing with a health problem that is one of those collections of symptoms that falls somewhere on the spectrum between "mild inconvenience" and "I'm going to be dead in three months."  Fortunately, at the moment the doctor is leaning strongly toward the former.  (I won't go into further details because I hate it when People Of A Certain Age begin every conversation with what my dad called "the organ recital" -- telling everyone they talk to intimate details of their various health-related issues.)

In any case, this kind of thing absolutely plays hell with someone who has chronic anxiety.  Frankly, over the last two months the anxiety has been far worse than the symptoms themselves, and I have no doubt that it's actually made the symptoms more severe.  But it's put making any firm summer plans on hold, given that my brain keeps shouting at me that I might not be able to follow through on them on account of being incapacitated, hospitalized, or dead.

But it started me down a line of thought that, for once, was productive instead of irrational and paralyzing.  It brought to mind the word faith.  I realize this is not one you'd expect to hear from a skeptical atheist type.  But it struck me that faith is what's invoked any time we make plans -- faith that we and the ones involved will still be around when the plans come to fruition.

That seems pretty dark and pessimistic, but actually it's the opposite.  None of us are guaranteed another day, another hour, another minute, so the only option is to act as if we do, to be right here in the moment and let the future take care of itself.  It's like what Jean-Luc Picard -- then in the mind of the character Kamin -- said to his daughter in the beautiful episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "The Inner Light:" "Seize the time, Meribor – live now.  Make now always the most precious time.  Now will never come again."

Being ill has made this thought come back to me again and again.  It occurred to me a couple of weeks ago when I bought a couple of tropical plants to replace some of the ones I lost this past winter when my greenhouse heater malfunctioned on one of the coldest nights in January, and I heard a sepulchral voice in my mind say, "Maybe I won't be around to see them flower."  When I saw the daffodils blooming in April and it occurred to me that this might be the last time I ever would.  When I was outside playing with my dogs and wondered how many more opportunities I'd have.

I know these thoughts are coming from my mental illness; I do trust the doctor that I'm probably going to be okay.  But really, isn't that the situation we're all in?  It's all an act of faith.  Getting out of bed in the morning is an act of faith.  We maneuver our way through this dangerous, unpredictable, endlessly weird world and plan for meeting some friends at the pub day after tomorrow, for a vacation this summer, for visiting with family during the winter holidays, simultaneously knowing that none of it might happen.  But that's what we have to do.  The only other option is to descend into panic now because of what might or might not occur later, to willfully destroy our present because our future isn't guaranteed.

My grandma used to tell me, "Worry is like a rocking chair; it keeps you busy but it doesn't get you anywhere."  I'd make it even stronger, though.  Worry wastes what we've got right here in our hands.  I'm not going to say it's easy to conquer; I've had anxiety disorder my entire life, and I'm not expecting it to go away magically.  But I have -- and so does everyone -- control over deliberately choosing to live life the best I can regardless of how much of it I have left.  It's all a risk; every action we take, or decide not to take.  As J. R. R. Tolkien wrote, in The Fellowship of the Ring, "It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door.  You step into the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to."

The question is not whether you want to take a risk; the question is which risk you want to take.  For me, I'd rather risk the possibility of my plans and aspirations not coming to fruition than risk giving in to my anxiety, then getting to the end of the path and realizing what I missed.

So my advice: carpe the absolute fuck out of every diem you've got left, whether it's one or ten thousand.  I'm completely agnostic about whether there's an afterlife; maybe there is, maybe there isn't.  But as far as what I know for sure, this right here, right now, is all I've got.  And right now the sun is shining and the weather is warm and pleasant and there are people who love me.  There's music to listen to and stories to write and dogs to play with and books to read.  Okay, it won't last forever.  But I'll hang on to the sweetness I've got right now for all I'm worth, and have faith that whatever happens tomorrow, I'll have made the most of today.

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Seeing stars

I am endlessly amused (or endlessly frustrated, depending on my mood) by the way the same piece of information can be interpreted by different woo-woos to support each of their varying, and in many cases mutually contradictory, views of the world.  All of them take the same bit of data, and put their own spin on it, so that it becomes some kind of purportedly incontrovertible support for whatever they already believed.

In short order, you have a multilayered rainbow-colored cake of confirmation bias, with nuts.

Take, for example, the curious photograph that is currently zinging its way around the Internet, an image from Google Maps taken by satellite of a spot near Lisakovsk, Kazakhstan:

The thing is real, not a photoshopped image; type the coordinates 52°28’46.86″N 62°11’7.68″E into Google Earth to see it for yourself.  But of course, once you know it's real, what is it?

You can bet that the fundamentalist Christians have an answer to that.

The upside-down pentagram is well known as a sign of Satan, and this cadre has accompanied the photograph with a dire-sounding message that the Time Of The Antichrist Is At Hand.  This version of the story is also accompanied by a claim that the pentagram appeared near a pair of towns called "Adam" and "Lucifer," a statement that is supposed to be significant somehow but for which I could find no corroboration whatsoever.  And frankly, that part sounds more than a little spurious to me.  Most of the towns in Kazakhstan that I could find on a map have names like "Zhezkagan" and "Stepnogorsk."  "Adam" and "Lucifer" sound a little... anglo to me to be place names in that part of the world.

And, after all, New York has an Adams County and a Lucifer Falls, and I've seen neither giant pentagrams nor Satan appearing around here, so there's that.

Another thing, though, is that whether this looks like an upside-down pentagram depends on the angle from which you view it.  Turn the photograph upside-down, or (in fact) rotate it by 36° in either direction, and all of a sudden it becomes a right-side-up pentagram.  So color me unconvinced that this is a sign of the End Times.

But of course, the evangelical Christians aren't the only ones who have weighed in on the curious photograph.  You also have the ones who think it's a sign from Mother Earth that we are "abusing nature" and that we need to be more considerate of our environment.  This version of the story has a piece about the pentagram being one of the "signs that we cannot continue to harm our planet without the planet letting us know about it."

These are presumably the same people who think that crop circles are a way for the Spirit of Nature to inform us to give up coal mining and take up organic farming and wear clothes woven from hemp.  And these folks think the upside-down pentagram isn't an evil symbol at all, but a positive, vital neopagan symbol that has suddenly appeared to bring us all to some kind of environmental enlightenment.

Then, you have the people who think that the pentagram is "an unfinished summer camp for the children of the Illuminati."  Because the Illuminati are just that sneaky and secretive, that they would create a structure that you couldn't ever find out about unless you happened to look on Google Maps.  According to this guy, "Kazakistan" (which is how he pronounces it throughout the entire video) is part of the "bloodline of the Illuminati."  Whatever the fuck that means.  But that's where the whole world is being controlled from, so... so... just don't let your guard down for a minute.

You know how that goes.

The speculation doesn't end there, however.  There's another group who weighed in on the topic, and they don't think the star is a symbol of Satan, the Illuminati, or Gaea, but a communiqué from... you'll never guess who.

Righty-o.  Because intelligent extraterrestrials who have expended a great amount of effort, time, and energy to get to Earth from a planet light years away would have nothing better to do than to draw a giant star on the ground and then leave.

Of course, the actual explanation turned out to be much simpler.  No Antichrist, Nature Spirits, New World Order, or extraterrestrials needed.

"It is the outline of a park made in the form of a star," archaeologist Emma Usmanova said in an interview with LiveScience about the geographical oddity.  "The star was a popular symbol during the Soviet era.  Stars were often used throughout the Soviet Union to decorate building facades, flags and monuments...  We believe that the star shape was the abandoned site of a Soviet-era lakeside campground."

And Usmanova apparently has years of experience working in the Lisakovsk area, so she should know.

Not that I expect that this will shut up the "It's Aliens" crew, much less the neopagans or the fundamentalists.  But that's how confirmation bias works, isn't it?  You latch on to an explanation for something because it fits what you already believed, and hang on like grim death even if there's a plausible explanation to the contrary.  Because, let's face it; when it comes to choosing an explanation, "an abandoned campground site" just doesn't have the gravitas that Satan, Mother Earth, the Illuminati, and aliens do.

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The cost of helplessness

The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction defines disaster to mean:

A serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society at any scale due to hazardous events interacting with conditions of exposure, vulnerability and capacity, leading to one or more of the following: human, material, economic and environmental losses and impacts...  [Disasters] may test or exceed the capacity of a community or society to cope using its own resources, and therefore may require assistance from external sources, which could include neighbouring jurisdictions, or those at the national or international levels.

This comes up because the UNDRR just released its Global Assessment Report, which was (to put it mildly) not optimistic.  The rate of disasters (as defined) has been rising steadily; over the last two decades the world has averaged between 350 and 500 medium- to large-scale disasters a year, but at the current rate of increase we'll be up to an average of 560 by the year 2030.

That's 1.5 disasters a day.

The reason seems to be a combination of factors.  One, of course, is anthropogenic climate change, which is destabilizing the climate worldwide (as just one of many examples, the southeastern and midwestern United States is forecast to have record-breaking heat over the next three days, and summer hasn't even officially started yet).  Sea level rise is not only threatening coastlines, if it gets much worse (and there is no reason to think it will not) there are a number of island nations that will simply cease to exist, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Vanuatu, the Marshall Islands, and the Maldives topping the list.  The combined cost of all these disasters, especially in Asia and the Pacific, is predicted to cost affected nations 1.6% of their GDP every year.

You can't incur these kinds of costs and continue to function as a society.

South Tarawa Island, part of the nation of Kiribati [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Photo taken by Government of Kiribati employee in the course of their work, South Tarawa from the air, CC BY 3.0]

The UNDRR's report found that the primary culprits in our vulnerability were:

• Optimism -- sure, we built our town on the side of a volcano, but I'm sure it won't erupt.
• Underestimation -- if there's a flood, we'll get a bit of water in our basement, but we can manage that.
• Invincibility -- we'll just ride this hurricane out, I'm not afraid of some wind and rain.

I think that's spot on, but I'd like to add three of my own:

• Helplessness -- what can I do?  I'm just one person.  It doesn't matter if I continue to drive a gas-guzzler, because no one else is gonna give them up.
• Corporate callousness and greed -- strip-mining the Amazon Basin produces valuable resources that are absolutely necessary for industry.
• Media disinformation -- there's no such thing as human-caused climate change; Tucker Carlson said it was a myth made up by the radical Left.

Despite the odds, this is no time to give up and accept catastrophes as inevitable.  "The world needs to do more to incorporate disaster risk in how we live, build and invest, which is setting humanity on a spiral of self-destruction," said Amina J. Mohammed, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations.  "We must turn our collective complacency to action. Together we can slow the rate of preventable disasters as we work to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals for everyone, everywhere."

Which I certainly agree with in principle, but how do you put it into practice?  We've known about humanity's role in climate change, and the potential devastation it will wreak, for more than three decades.  I remember teaching students about it my first year as a public school teacher, which was 1986.  The people who have been the most vocal in advocating a global climate change policy -- my dear friend, the articulate and endlessly courageous Dr. Sandra Steingraber, comes to mind -- have been fighting a Sisyphean battle.

"Disasters can be prevented, but only if countries invest the time and resources to understand and reduce their risks," said Mami Mizutori, who heads the UNDRR.  "By deliberately ignoring risk and failing to integrate it in decision making, the world is effectively bankrolling its own destruction.  Critical sectors, from government to development and financial services, must urgently rethink how they perceive and address disaster risk."

Yes, but how?  Humanity is notorious for valuing short-term expediency and profit over long-term safety -- and even viability.  There are certainly days when I feel like I'm shouting into a vacuum; I've been ranting about environmental issues since I started Skeptophilia in 2011.  But giving up is exactly the wrong response, as tempting as it is some days.  Perhaps we don't know what positive effect we can have if we act, but we do know what positive effect we'll have if we throw our hands up and say, "To hell with it."

Zero.

I'll end with two quotes that I think are particularly apposite.

The first one comes from one of my personal heroes, Wangari Maathai, the amazing Kenyan activist, environmentalist, and women's rights advocate: "In order to accomplish anything, we must keep our feelings of empowerment ahead of our feelings of despair.  We cannot do everything, but still there are many things we can do."

And I'll give the last word to my friend Sandra: "We are all musicians in a great human orchestra, and it is now time to play the Save the World Symphony.  You are not required to play a solo, but you are required to know what instrument you hold and play it as well as you can.  You are required to find your place in the score.  What we love we must protect.  That's what love means.  From the right to know and the duty to inquire flows the obligation to act."

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Oops, I did it again

The following is a direct transcript of how I got welcomed into a multi-person business-related Zoom call a couple of years ago:

Me: How are you today?

Meeting leader: I'm fine, how are you?

Me: Pretty good, how are you?

Meeting leader: ...

Me: *vows never to open his mouth in public again*

I think we can all relate to this sort of thing -- and the awful sensation of realizing, microseconds after it leaves our mouths, that what we just said was idiotic.  When my then fiancée, now wife, told a mutual friend that she was getting married -- after we'd been dating for two years -- the friend blurted out, "To who?"  Another friend ended a serious phone call with her boss by saying, "Love you, honey!"  Another -- and I witnessed this one -- was at a trailhead in a local park, preparing to go for a walk as two cyclists were mounting their bikes and putting on their helmets.  He said to them, "Enjoy your hike!"

The funniest one, though, was a friend who was in a restaurant, and the waitress asked what she'd like for dinner.  My friend said, "The half chicken bake, please."  The waitress said, "Which side?"  My friend frowned with puzzlement and said, "Um... I dunno... Left, I guess?"  There was a long pause, and the waitress, obviously trying not to guffaw, said, "No, ma'am, I mean, which side order would you like?"

I don't think my friend has been in that restaurant since.

This "oops" phenomenon probably shouldn't embarrass us as much as it does, because it's damn near ubiquitous.  The brilliant writer Jenny Lawson -- whose three wonderful books, Let's Pretend This Never Happened, Furiously Happy, and Broken (In the Best Possibly Way) should be on everyone's reading list -- posted on her Twitter (@TheBloggess -- follow her immediately if you don't already) a while back, "Airport cashier: 'Have a safe flight.'  Me: 'You too!'  I CAN NEVER COME HERE AGAIN.", and was immediately inundated by (literally) thousands of replies from followers who shared their own embarrassing, and hilarious, moments.  She devotes a whole chapter to these endearing blunders in her book Broken -- by the time I was done reading that chapter, my stomach hurt from laughing -- but here are three that struck me as particularly funny:

I walked up to a baby-holding stranger (thinking it was my sister) at my daughter's soccer game and said "Give me the baby."

A friend thanked me for coming to her husband's funeral.  My reply?  "Anytime."

A friend placed her order at drive thru.  She then heard, "Could you drive up to the speaker?  You're talking to the trash can."

Lawson responded, "How could you not love each and every member of this awkward tribe?"

This universal phenomenon -- particularly the moment of sudden realization that we've just said or done something ridiculous -- was the subject of a study at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center that came out last week, led by neurologist Ueli Rutishauser.  You'd think it'd be a difficult subject to study; how do you catch someone in one of those moments, and find out what's going on in the brain at the time?  But they got around this in a clever way, by studying patients who were epileptic and already had electrode implants to locate the focal point of their seizures, and had them perform a task that was set up to trigger people to make mistakes.  It's a famous one called the Stroop Test, after psychologist John Ridley Stroop who published a paper on it in 1935.  It's an array of names of colors, where each name is printed in a different color from the one named:

The task is to state the colors, not the names, as quickly as you can.

Most people find this really difficult to do, because we're generally taught to pay attention to what words say and ignore what color it's printed in.  "This creates conflict in the brain," Rutishauser said. "You have decades of training in reading, but now your goal is to suppress that habit of reading and say the color of the ink that the word is written in instead."  Most people, though, when they do make an error, realize it right away.  So this made it an ideal way to see what was happening in the brain in those sudden "oops" moments.

What Rutishauser et al. found is that there are two arrays of neurons that kick in when we make a mistake, a process called "performance monitoring."  The first is the domain-general network, which identifies that we've made a mistake.  Then, the domain-specific network pinpoints what exactly the mistake was.  This, of course, takes time, which is why we usually become aware of what we've just done a moment after it's too late to stop it.

"When we observed the activity of neurons in this brain area, it surprised us that most of them only become active after a decision or an action was completed," said study first author Zhongzheng Fu.  "This indicates that this brain area plays a role in evaluating decisions after the fact, rather than while making them."

Which is kind of unfortunate, because however we rationalize those kinds of blunders as being commonplace, it's hard not to feel like crawling into a hole afterward.  But I guess that, given the fact that it's hardwired into our brains, there's not much hope of changing it.

So we should just embrace embarrassing situations as being part of the human condition.  We're weird, funny, awkward beasts, fumbling along as best we can, and just about everyone can relate to the ridiculous things we say and do sometimes.

But I still don't think I'd be able to persuade my friend to eat dinner at the restaurant where she ordered the left half of a chicken.

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