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“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” —DOUGLAS ADAMS

Here is a picture of my aura. I had it taken at a woo festival that I attended “undercover” with two goals: learn more about New Age beliefs and annihilate some surplus neurons I no longer needed. Underneath that winky face, resplendent in reds and yellows, is a pseudonym—a nom de bullshit—that I chose for the occasion.

The festival was a two-day event, and the booths were exactly what you’re imagining: psychics, mediums, clairvoyants, tarot readings, chakras, reiki. The whole gamut of New Age stuff. One booth promised quantum spirituality—you can tell that it’s scientific because of the word “quantum,” you see. Another booth offered visionary guidance on your life path. A third promised to combine energy and chakra healing with past life regression. (I passed on that one because my current life is regressed enough as it is, thank you very much).

But back to that winsome aura: one of the festival experts kindly interpreted it for me. You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to hear that the reading was a meandering three-minute analysis in which I was fed a variety of feel-good platitudes and told that I was going to start a successful and lucrative company. The price tag for this reassuring pablum: $25.

With my future now secure and my pocket considerably lighter, I moved on to the next booth, manned by a guy who specializes in past life readings. A full reading runs you $125, but you can get an abbreviated 40-minute version for $90. I couldn’t imagine sitting there with a straight face, hemorrhaging money as I listened to stories about my past lives for 40 minutes, so I declined and moved on.

Of all the booths at the festival, my favorite was run by a man who looked arrestingly like a wizard. He had a Merlinesque gray beard, flowing white robes, and the world-weariness of a guy whose bones are tired because, obviously, magic is draining and warlocks bear great responsibility. Customers came to him seeking relief from their medical ailments; he cured these by having the patients lie down and waving his hands above their bodies in especially good, healing-y ways. He referred to himself as a literal wizard and called his service Medical Intuitive, Quantum Shaman. (I swear I’m not making this up).

The Lectures

The festival included lectures, too, and they looked even more exciting than the booths, so I attended as many of these as I could. My goal was to take notes, ask questions, and learn as much as possible about people’s unusual beliefs.

The first talk was about ancestors, spirits, and messages from other planes of existence. The audience learned that our dead ancestors are constantly sending us messages. Also, animals that cross your path are sending you messages from other realms, and white feathers are special signs from angels. The speaker declared that she had been a Mayan warrior queen in a past life. In another, she had been an Egyptian priestess. In a third, she was one of the first human cave people. As she explained, she accessed these memories of past lives through her dreams because when you dream, you’re actually astral traveling. Perhaps tellingly, she had never been anybody forgettable or uninteresting in any of her past lives.

I was mainly there to observe and learn more about people’s beliefs, the way a non-believer might go to a religious service out of curiosity. But I was also interested in what psychological principles might be at play. (By day, I’m a psychologist who studies human cognition.) The first thing that struck me was that all the messages the presenter received from other realms were confidence-boosting. The missives told her that it was OK to be herself, to drop her anxieties, to strive for what she wanted. For some people, this can be a major motivator for woo-y beliefs: a desire for self-reassurance, for ego security, and for believing that things are going to be OK.

Another couple of themes leapt out quickly: hyperactive pattern recognition and promiscuous meaning-making. Humans are hyperactive pattern detectors, which means we’re prone to seeing patterns even where there are none.1 One of the festival speakers said that when she sees numbers like 11:11 or 10:10, it’s the spirits reassuring her that she’s on the right path. If she sees pennies or rainbows or hears a certain genre of music, it’s her deceased loved ones watching over her. This seemed to both reassure her and imbue her life with meaning.

The next lecture was on Sound and Harmonic Therapy. The presenter struck bowls of different sizes with a sort of drumstick, producing vibrations that were supposed to cure our health issues. This talk included some real head-scratchers. My favorites were “the whole point of sound is to get the energy from your head to go down to your feet,” which, if you think about it, is a fantastically teleological view of physics, and “harmonic sounds travel as fast as the speed of light.” (They actually travel at the speed of sound, which, in air, is about 880,000 times slower than the speed of light).

The presenter explained that the bowls’ vibrations force your emotions to come up, which helps you get grounded in your legs, and that enables you to make decisions with clarity. I learned that deeper vibrations are better than shallower vibrations and that if you ever get a sound bath, you should always ask “What is my message?” because the bowl will always give you a message. (To be honest, I can’t for the life of me figure out what that means, but I guess if thou seekest meaning from the bowl, the bowl will deliver meaning unto thee. Or something like that.)

The lecture on vibrations was distinct from the first one: the first presentation made no pretense to scientific accuracy, whereas this one was cloaked in a veneer of scientific jargon to make it sound respectable. But it bungled all the key concepts: energy, vibrations, and even harmonic. The presenter said that harmonic sounds relax us, so I asked what “harmonic” meant. The word has a precise formal definition, but all we got was a tautology: harmonic sounds are those that cause relaxation. The best line of all was the speaker’s cartoonishly immodest description of her trade: “I do very deep work.”

On we trudged.

The next presentation was about Divine Source, which turned out to be a tragically underspecified fount of life, divinity, and good stuff at the root of everything. The speaker exhorted us to “ascend into divinity, union, higher calling, purpose, and Source”. She had an obvious strategy: list so many good-sounding words in rapid succession that the audience would be lulled into a stupor, critical thinking faculties suspended, vaguely impressed but unsure why. I think the stupor was part of the point.

Like the presentation before it, this one was sprinkled with science-y words to create the implication of evidentiary grounding and paint a façade of scientific respectability. Listeners got sprinkles of quantum, genome, biological, neural, synapse, and energy adorning a cake of staggering BS. I learned that “The divine being in human form is imprinted with its true purpose,” a profoundly vacuous string of words reminiscent of the deliciously random nonsense churned out by the Wisdom of Deepak Chopra generator.2 We also learned that “The divine being is the being that is constructed out of light from the Source in the 5th-dimensional realm,” and that “the Earth is a portal for all 5 dimensions.” Rule of thumb: just take the number of dimensions in conventional physics and add one. This makes it sound as if you’re saying something groundbreaking (or at least tantalizingly mysterious), like you might just be wrapped in a shroud of secret esoteric knowledge. My favorite meaningless quote in the deluge of imponderables was probably “You’re creating a conscious energetic polarity with your own being.” You better believe I am!

I had questions—and decided that I was masochistic enough to read more of this word salad to try to get some answers. But read what? I raised my hand and asked the speaker how she acquired all this knowledge and what I could read to deepen my learning. Her answer took me by surprise: “,” she said, “I was guided not to take on the teachings of others so that my consciousness remains pure.” Translated into plain English: all the knowledge is simply within her; she didn’t learn it from anyone or read it anywhere.

Psychology at the Festival of Woo

A few key psychological principles shone through at the woo festival. The first is our irrepressible human tendency to “see” patterns even where there are none. Humans are meaninghungry creatures;3 we constantly yearn for and seek meaning. We’re equipped with these pattern-detecting and meaning-making propensities because detecting patterns was crucial in avoiding threats and availing oneself of opportunities during the evolution of our species.4 And it was probably more dangerous to fail to notice a pattern that was there than to “see” a pattern that wasn’t there, so we evolved a cognitive bias toward the less dangerous of the two errors5—“seeing” patterns even where there aren’t any. This is why we’re so prone to false positives, and why we often “detect” patterns out of randomness and coincidence. And although this cognitive bias is adaptive on average and evolved for a reason, it can often lead us astray.6

We have a related tendency to project meaning onto ambiguous situations that can be interpreted in different ways. A combination of promiscuous meaning-seeking and self-centeredness tricks us into thinking that the universe is speaking to us when it’s really just events causing other events. I’m sorry to say it, but the universe has no message for us nor any particular concern for us.

Self-help was another important theme that reared its head repeatedly. Many of the beliefs at the festival were geared toward reducing people’s feelings of uncertainty, encouraging them to remove self-imposed shackles and pursue their dreams.

A fourth important theme was religion—but maybe not in the way you’d expect. Many of the attendees and presenters seemed religiously inclined in their epistemological disposition and cognitive style, and in their evidentiary requirements for belief. But they were resistant, or even hostile, to what they saw as the rigid and constraining doctrines of the monotheistic Abrahamic religions. That combination pervaded the festival. To an outside observer, it looked a lot like a religious framework for people who wanted nothing to do with traditional religions.

The fifth key theme was pervasive confirmation bias.7 People sought confirmatory rather than disconfirmatory evidence for their hypotheses, and they required much thinner evidence for belief than for refutation. Since most humans fall prey to confirmation bias,8 this one isn’t all that surprising. But the bias does vary in strength across individuals, and it was in full force at the festival.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.1
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While those five themes—pattern detection, meaning making, self-help, religion, and confirmation bias—were the most important and pervasive, I’m not suggesting this is a comprehensive analysis of the psychology underlying woo beliefs. The point here is to relay some experiences I had at the festival and share some of the psychological principles at play.

If the experience sounds interesting, you might consider going to one or two of these events and chatting with people. You can even provide gentle, civil pushback, and see where the conversation goes. What are the attendees’ evidentiary requirements for belief? How deeply have they considered the alternatives? What do they think about confirmation bias? You and your interlocutor will probably both learn something about your fellow humans.

And who knows—if you’re lucky enough, you might even ascend to a higher vibration of love and light, where the healing is quantum, the energy is rarefied, and sound moves at the speed of light.

About the Author

Laith Al-Shawaf is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Before moving to the U.S., he was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin and a researcher and professor in Turkey. His empirical research is focused on human emotion, with additional emphases on cognition and personality. His popular science essays for Nautilus, Areo, and Psychology Today have been translated into several languages. He is the primary editor of The Oxford Handbook of Evolution and the Emotions, and he has won awards for both his teaching and research.

References

1. https://bit.ly/47m4PsZ
2. https://bit.ly/48ygqpV
3. https://bit.ly/3vgm8yx
4. Mattson, M.P. (2014). Superior Pattern Processing Is the Essence of the Evolved Human Brain. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 265.
5. Haselton, M.G., & Nettle, D. (2006). The Paranoid Optimist: An Integrative Evolutionary Model of Cognitive Biases. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(1), 47–66.
6. https://bit.ly/3vgmaq9
7. Stanovich, K. E., West, R. F., & Toplak, M. E. (2013). Myside bias, rational thinking, and intelligence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(4), 259-264.
8. https://bit.ly/3vhVJAo

Through the Artemis Program, NASA will send astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. While the challenges remain the same, the equipment has evolved, including the rocket, spacecraft, human landing system (HLS), and space suits. In preparation for Artemis III (planned for September 2026), NASA recently conducted a test where astronauts donned the new space suits developed by Axiom Space and practiced interacting with the hardware that will take them to the Moon.

These new suits, the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU), were developed specifically for the Artemis III mission. The day-long test took place on April 30th at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, where astronaut Doug “Wheels” Wheelock and Axiom Space astronaut Peggy Whitson interacted with a full-scale model of the SpaceX Starship Human Landing System (HLS). This was the first time astronauts trained in pressurized spacesuits and conducted mock operations with the HLS hardware.

The Artemis III spacesuit prototype, the AxEMU. Though this prototype uses a dark gray cover material, the final version will likely be all-white when worn by NASA astronauts on the Moon’s surface. Credit: Axiom Space

The test provided valuable feedback on the Starship HLS and the AxEMU spacesuits for NASA and its commercial partners. It also gave astronauts a chance to gauge the suits’ range of motion and to get a feel for the interior of the Starship HLS and its mechanical systems. Said Logan Kennedy, lead for surface activities in NASA’s HLS Program, in a NASA press statement:

“Overall, I was pleased with the astronauts’ operation of the control panel and with their ability to perform the difficult tasks they will have to do before stepping onto the Moon. The test also confirmed that the amount of space available in the airlock, on the deck, and in the elevator, are sufficient for the work our astronauts plan to do.”

The test consisted of Wheelock and Whitson practicing putting on and taking off the spacesuits – which included the suit’s Portable Life Support System (PLSS) – in the Starship HLS‘ full-scale airlock. Since the Artemis III astronauts will need to put the suits on with minimal assistance, this test allowed NASA to test how easily the suits are to get in and out of. The suits were then pressurized and powered up, and Wheelock and Whitson began interacting with the mobility aids (handrails and straps) and control panel in the airlock.

They then walked from the airlock deck to the HLS elevator, which will take the Artemis III astronauts and their equipment to the lunar surface to conduct extravehicular activity (EVA). Though the tasks were routine, they validated the spacesuit design and brought NASA one step closer to achieving its goals through the Artemis Program. As Amit Kshatriya (NASA’s Moon to Mars program manager) expressed:

“With Artemis, NASA is going to the Moon in a whole new way, with international partners and industry partners like Axiom Space and SpaceX. These partners are contributing their expertise and providing integral parts of the deep space architecture that they develop with NASA’s insight and oversight. Integrated tests like this one, with key programs and partners working together, are crucial to ensure systems operate smoothly and are safe and effective for astronauts before they take the next steps on the Moon.”

Wheelock and Whitson tested the agility of the spacesuits by conducting movements and tasks similar to those necessary during lunar surface exploration on Artemis missions. Credit: SpaceX

Putting the spacesuits through rigorous testing is necessary since the Artemis III mission will include EVAs in space and on the lunar surface. The four-person crew will launch aboard an Orion spacecraft atop NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) while the Starship HLS launches separately and refuels in orbit. The Orion spacecraft will rendezvous and dock with the HLS in lunar orbit; two astronauts will transfer aboard and then take the HLS to and from the lunar surface. The AxEMU suits are designed to provide greater flexibility and accommodate a wider range of astronauts.

This is in keeping with NASA’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in its astronaut corps. Despite delays, things are undeniably coming together for Artemis III!

Further Reading: NASA

The post Astronauts are Practicing Lunar Operations in New Space Suits appeared first on Universe Today.

What species live in this coral reef, and are they healthy? Chemical clues emitted by marine organisms might hold that information. But in underwater environments, invisible compounds create a complex 'soup' that is hard for scientists to decipher. Now, researchers have demonstrated a way to extract and identify these indicator compounds in seawater. They found metabolites previously undetected on reefs, including three that may represent different reef organisms.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) remote sensing systems allow researchers to inspect and characterize pavements, retaining walls, and embankments from space and can help determine if there are flaws that should be further inspected for repair.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) remote sensing systems allow researchers to inspect and characterize pavements, retaining walls, and embankments from space and can help determine if there are flaws that should be further inspected for repair.

Researchers are developing a new therapeutic approach that uses nanoparticles for the treatment of skin and lung fibrosis, conditions that can result in severe damage to the body's tissues.

A research team has uncovered an eavesdropping security vulnerability in high-frequency and high-speed wireless backhaul links, widely employed in critical applications such as 5G wireless cell phone signals and low-latency financial trading on Wall Street.

A research team has uncovered an eavesdropping security vulnerability in high-frequency and high-speed wireless backhaul links, widely employed in critical applications such as 5G wireless cell phone signals and low-latency financial trading on Wall Street.

Red dwarf stars, also known as M-dwarfs, dominate the Milky Way’s stellar population. They can last for 100 billion years or longer. Since these long-lived stars make up the bulk of the stars in our galaxy, it stands to reason that they host the most planets.

Astronomers examined one red dwarf star named SPECULOOS-3, a Jupiter-sized star about 55 light-years away, and found an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting it. It’s an excellent candidate for further study with the James Webb Space Telescope.

SPECULOOS stands for the Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars. It’s a European Southern Observatory effort that searches for terrestrial planets orbiting cool stars like red dwarfs. (Its odd name is an homage to a Belgian sweet biscuit.) Its goal is to find planets that are good targets for spectroscopy with the JWST and the ELT.

The new planet is named SPECULOOS-3b, and its discovery was presented in a recent paper in Nature Astronomy. The paper is titled “Detection of an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting the nearby ultracool dwarf star SPECULOOS-3.” The lead author is Michaël Gillon from the Astrobiology Research Unit, Université de Liège, Belgium.

SPECULOOS is an automated search using four telescopes around the world: one at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, one at the Teide Observatory in Tenerife, one at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, and one at the Oukaïmden Observatory in Morocco. The project is searching 1,000 ultra-cool stars and brown dwarfs for terrestrial planets.

One of the problems in detecting planets around these stars is their low luminosity. Since they’re so dim, transiting exoplanets are difficult to detect, making their planetary populations difficult to characterize and study. So far, astronomers have found only one planetary system around one of these stars, and it’s rather well-known: the TRAPPIST-1 system. When it began, the SPECULOOS program expected to find at least one dozen systems similar to TRAPPIST-1.

“We designed SPECULOOS specifically to explore nearby ultra-cool dwarf stars in search of rocky planets,” lead author Gillon said. “With the SPECULOOS prototype and the crucial help of the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope, we discovered the famous TRAPPIST-1 system. That was an excellent start!”

The dimness of these stars can’t be understated. “Though this particular red dwarf is more than a thousand times dimmer than the Sun, its planet orbits much, much closer than the Earth, heating up the planetary surface,” said co-author Catherine Clark, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s JPL in Southern California.

The new planet is an Earth-sized world that orbits its star in only 17 hours. The star has a spectral type M6.5, and it delivers 16.5 more solar irradiation to its planet than the Sun does to Earth. That may sound surprising since the star is much cooler than the Sun. The Sun’s surface temperature is 5,772 K (5,500 C), while SPECULOOS-3’s temperature is only 2,900 K (2,627 C.) But SPECULOOS 3 bombards the planet with radiation due to the small distance separating them.

Since the irradiation is largely infrared and the star is only Jupiter-sized, it makes the planet an exceptional candidate for follow up observations, which is exactly what the SPECULOOS program is all about. The SPECULOOS Program 1 has found about 365 temperate, Earth-sized targets for further study with the JWST.

This chart shows the classifications by spectral type for main sequence stars according to the Harvard classification. Image Credit: By Pablo Carlos Budassi – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92588077

The SPECULOOS-3 system is about 6.6 billion years old. Its luminosity, mass and radius are 0.084%, 10.1% and 12.3% of those of the Sun. “Just slightly larger than TRAPPIST-1, SPECULOOS-3 is the second-smallest main sequence star found to host a transiting planet,” the authors explain in their paper.

Two different telescopes observed the planetary transits around the star in 2021 and 2022 over eight nights. “Visual inspection of the 2021 and 2022 light curves showed some transit-like structures that motivated future intensive monitoring of the star,” the authors explain. The star was re-observed in 2023.

This figure from the study shows the transit of SPECULOOS-3b around its dim, cool star. Image Credit: Gillon et al. 2024.

The researchers determined that SPECULOOS-3b is about the same size as Earth, about 96% of our planet’s radius. But the planet’s density and mass are so far unconstrained. “Nevertheless,” the authors write in their paper, “several factors strongly suggest a rocky composition.”

There are two empirical reasons why the planet is likely rocky, though. The first is that its radius is on the rocky side of the radius gap. The second is that “all of the known Earth-sized planets in the NASA exoplanet archive have masses that imply rocky compositions,” Gillon and his co-authors explain.

This figure from the research compares SPECULOOS-3b to other transiting terrestrial exoplanets with less than 1.6 Earth radii. All of these planets are also cool enough to have rocky daysides rather than molten daysides. The shaded green area highlights planetary radii most similar to Earth’s (0.9–1.1R). Image Credit: Gillon et al. 2024.

But the big question concerns the planet’s potential atmosphere.

“From a theoretical point of view, the intense extreme ultraviolet emission of low-mass stars during their early lives makes it unlikely that such a small planet on such a short orbit could have maintained a substantial envelope of hydrogen.” the authors explain.

Red dwarfs are known to emit extreme radiation that strips away planetary atmospheres. However, there is some evidence that some planets can hold on to their atmospheres despite intense radiation, as with the recently discovered TIC365102760 b. Only time and more observations can tell us if the planet has an atmosphere and what type it has.

The researchers watched closely to see if there was a second planet around the star but didn’t find one. They also examined the planet spectroscopically with ground-based facilities. But we’ll have to wait for the JWST to examine the planet before we can really understand its atmosphere. The two most likely types of atmospheres for hot rocky planets are CO2-dominated and H2O-dominated.

The JWST will be able to examine SPECULOOS-3b with emission spectroscopy. This means it can examine the light the planet is emitting rather than just the light from the star as it passes through the atmosphere, which is called transmission spectroscopy. Emission spectroscopy is unaffected by irregular stellar behaviour, which red dwarfs are known to exhibit. JWST emission spectroscopy can also help determine the surface mineralogy if there’s no atmosphere. There’s a potential wealth of information waiting to be uncovered.

“We’re making great strides in our study of planets orbiting other stars,” said Steve B. Howell, one of the planet’s discoverers at NASA Ames Research Center. “We have now reached the stage where we can detect and study Earth-sized exoplanets in detail. The next step will be to determine whether any of them are habitable or even inhabited.”

The post An Earth-sized Exoplanet Found Orbiting a Jupiter-Sized Star appeared first on Universe Today.

A new material may be the key to quickly flag damaged infrastructure. This material offers a way to reduce the manpower required to regularly monitor structures that undergo daily use such as bridges. Compared to previous methods, this environmentally friendly material boasts the ability to operate without a power supply, and store information about previous incidents of mechanical stress. The application of this mechanoluminescent material is expected to make it easier and less costly to assess the safety of structures we may use in our everyday lives.

A research team has developed a liquid metal-based electronic logic device that mimics the intelligent prey-capture mechanism of Venus flytraps. Exhibiting memory and counting properties, the device can intelligently respond to various stimulus sequences without the need for additional electronic components. The intelligent strategies and logic mechanisms in the device provide a fresh perspective on understanding 'intelligence' in nature and offer inspiration for the development of 'embodied intelligence'.

A research team has developed a liquid metal-based electronic logic device that mimics the intelligent prey-capture mechanism of Venus flytraps. Exhibiting memory and counting properties, the device can intelligently respond to various stimulus sequences without the need for additional electronic components. The intelligent strategies and logic mechanisms in the device provide a fresh perspective on understanding 'intelligence' in nature and offer inspiration for the development of 'embodied intelligence'.

Little is yet known about the health effects of nanoparticles on pregnancy. An interdisciplinary team is currently analyzing the risks for babies in the womb. Using a lab model, the researchers were able to determine that certain nanoparticles impair the release of chemical messengers in the placenta and thus the formation of blood vessels.

Advanced technologies enable the controlled release of medicine to specific cells in the body. Scientists argue these same technologies must be applied to agriculture if growers are to meet increasing global food demands.

A highly sensitive diamond quantum magnetometer utilizing nitrogen-vacancy centers can achieve millimeter-scale resolution magnetoencephalography (MEG). The novel magnetometer, based on continuous-wave optically detected magnetic resonance, marks a significant step towards realizing ambient condition MEG and other practical applications.

Engineers have created a patent-pending method that creates layered perovskite nanowires with exceptionally well-defined and flexible cavities that exhibit a wide range of unusual optical properties beyond conventional perovskites.

Surprisingly, the origins of financial discounting began with 17th-century English clergymen.

Research reveals a shocking discovery about the history of our universe: the Milky Way Galaxy's last major collision occurred billions of years later than previously thought.

Scientists show a new way of thinking about the fair impacts of AI decisions. They draw on a well-established tradition known as social welfare optimization, which aims to make decisions fairer by focusing on the overall benefits and harms to individuals. This method can be used to evaluate the industry standard assessment tools for AI fairness, which look at approval rates across protected groups.