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The argument continues about whether the virus causing covid originated in a wet market in Wuhan or as an accidental release from The Wuhan institute of Virology.  While several U.S. government agencies have agreed that the evidence is tilted towards a lab-leak origin, in my view the evidence is not dispositive on either side.

Matt Ridley, however, has been a hard-core advocate of the lab-leak theory, and even co-wrote a book with Alina Chan that, at the time, presented both sides and, as Ridley says below, he “remained unsure what happened at that stage.”

No longer. Since 2021, Ridley has promoted the lab-leak theory, which he does in a Torygraph article shown below (click on headline below to get the archived version). Apparently Ridley teamed up with another collaborator, P. Anton van der Merwe, and wrote a scientific paper laying out his evidence for a lab-leak origin of covid. I’ve put the paper’s title below, but you can read it at the same Torygraph site. The scientific argument was published in the newspaper rather than in a scientific journal because the journal rejected it. (No explanation is given.)

In the intro before he shows the paper (surely a first for the Torygraph), Ridley explains how this came about:

In 2024 I was approached by a single member of the editorial board of a respected biological journal with a request that I team up with a British biologist with relevant expertise and compose an academic paper setting out the case for the lab leak hypothesis: he hoped the journal would consider it. With the help of Anton van der Merwe of Oxford University, and advice from Alina Chan, I drafted such a paper. The paper was rejected; I suspect that it was another case of not wanting to rock the scientific boat. Now I am posting this paper online for all to read. It was composed several months ago so one or two small new items may be missing, but nothing in it has proved wrong. It is written not in my normal style but in dry, scientific prose, with each statement backed up by a source, in the shape of nearly 100 end-note references, so that readers can check for themselves that we have represented the sources faithfully. It deserves to be available to people to read. So the paper was commissioned, but the reviewers’ comments that led to rejection aren’t shown. Here’s the paper itself:

Here is some of the evidence Ridley and van der Merwe adduce:

• Attempts to find evidence for a wet-market leak have been unsuccessful. The cases found around the wet market could simply reflect sampling bias, as the Chinese concentrated on looking for infected people in that area.
• The Chinese have not been forthcoming with their data, and in fact locked one site with a catalogue of the sequenced but unpublished viruses they were working on
• If a person got infected with a bat virus from Yunnan (one theory), that person would have infected others on his/her journey to Wuhan, but there is no such trail of infection
• The Wuhan institute was doing “gain of function” experiments to increase the infectivity of SARS viruses (not the progenitor of the covid virus), but these did involve making viruses more transmissible.
• There were plans to put “furin cleavage sites” into SARS viruses, sites that make it easier for the viruses spike protein to get into cells. The virus causing covid has such a site—12 nucleotides long— which Ridley and van der Merwe insist was inserted into the virus progenitor by humans. As Ridley notes:

When the pandemic began in January 2020, Shi Zhengli of the WIV published two articles, one co-authored with Shibo Jiang, yet in both of them failed to mention the furin cleavage site, by far the most remarkable feature of the new virus’s genome. This may have been an oversight, but by contrast, it was the furin cleavage site that immediately alarmed several western virologists on first seeing the genome of the virus and led to the drafting of the Proximal Origin paper. Messages released during a congressional investigation reveal that the authors of the paper were not themselves convinced that a laboratory origin could be ruled out, either during or after the writing of the paper

• The containment of viruses at Wuhan for the SARS experiments was Level 2, which American scientists think was far too lax for such potentially dangerous experiments (this itself, of course, is not great evidence for a lab leak).

Here’s Ridley and van der Merwe’s conclusion:

In only one city in the world were sarbecoviruses subject to gain-of-function experiments on a large scale involving human airway cells and humanised mice at inappropriate safety levels: Wuhan. At only one time in history was research to create novel sarbecoviruses with enhanced infectivity through furin cleavage under consideration: 2018 onwards. The surprising failure to find better evidence for a natural spillover, and the lack of transparency from the Chinese scientists, is therefore best explained by positing a laboratory accident involving a live virus experiment as the cause of the Covid pandemic and attempts to cover it up.

This is a Bayesian conclusion, arguing that the total weight of the evidence supports a lab-leak prior. And it sure sounds conclusive, but I’m wondering why the paper was rejected (they don’t say what journal they submitted it to).

Further, a number of virologists I respect either adhere to the alternative wet-market theory or remain agnostic.  When I asked a colleague some questions about this, he/she said this:

All the **data** (including new stuff) points to a natural origin. It might have been a leak, but all the evidence that has been obtained points in the direction of a spillover in the wet market. Not everyone who disagrees with the prevailing view of something is Galileo.

And then I asked “What about the furin cleaveage site?” This was something that Nobel laureate David Baltimore considered almost conclusive evidence for the lab-leak theory, but walked it back a bit:

The virologist David Baltimore commented that “these features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” later clarifying that “you can’t distinguish between the two origins from just looking at the sequence” (Caltech Weekly 2021).

My colleague commented about the furin cleavage site: “It is common in closely related [corona]viruses.” also citing a paper saying, “This is a good summary of the issues.”

That article, in the Journal of Virology from 2023, concludes that the wet-market hypothesis is more likely, though is somewhat agnostic:

Scientific conclusions are based on likelihood given the scientific data, and conclusions can change as new data are obtained. Based on the scientific data collected in the last 3 years by virologists worldwide, hypotheses 1 and 2 are unlikely. Hypotheses 3 and 4 cannot be ruled out by existing evidence. Since hypotheses 1 and 2 support the lab leak theory and hypotheses 3 and 4 are consistent with a zoonotic origin, the lab leak- and zoonotic-origin explanations are not equally probable, and the available evidence favors the latter. Further insight into CoVs in animals at the animal-human interface requires additional surveillance of circulating virus sequences from animals. There is ample precedent for the seeding of pandemics and more geographically limited outbreaks from nonhuman species. Common-cold CoVs, SARS-CoV, Ebola virus, HIV, influenza A virus, mpox virus, and others all have zoonotic origins (31–33). SARS-CoV-2 is the ninth documented coronavirus to enter the human population. The best existing scientific evidence supports a direct zoonotic origin. As new evidence continues to emerge from scientific studies or other investigations, our understanding of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 will continue to evolve. Nevertheless, it is possible that its origin may never be known with certainty.

I’ll add that Ridley is, as he says below, an adherent to a less stringent form of climate change than many scientists. He calls himself  a “climate-change” lukewarmer (see comment #2 below). Of course, he could be wrong about that yet right about covid. Nevertheless, I remain agnostic about how the virus got into our species. We may never know how this occurred, but investigating its origin is still worthwhile. In the article cited above, David Baltimore explains why:

Why is it important to know where the virus originated?

Well, I think we want to know the pathway of generating highly infectious new viruses that could cause pandemics because we want to protect ourselves against this happening again. If it happened by natural means, it means that we have to increase our surveillance of the natural environment. We have to try to find the hosts that provide an ability for the virus to change its sequence, to become more infectious. This would mean we need to keep surveillance on markets, on zoos, on places where viruses could jump from one species to another.

But if SARS-CoV-2 came about by an artificial means, it means we’ve got to put better defenses around laboratories. I’m not suggesting that it was deliberately released if it came from a laboratory, but we have to realize that whatever a laboratory does might get out of the laboratory and create havoc. It means that work of this sort should only go on in what are called biosafety level 4 laboratories.

UPDATE 1:  Author van der Merwe wants me to add another point, which I will, despite his rude last line:

I would add one more point, concerning why this issue matters.

Even the possibility that the COVID-19 was the result of a lab leaks mandates that close attention is paid to preventing another research related pandemic in future. At present scientists largely self-regulate when it comes to deciding what gain of function experiments to do, even if such experiment could generate a pandemic organism. Many of the scientists arguing most strongly for natural origins have a clear conflict of interest as they oppose tightening of restrictions on these sorts of experiment.

Refusing to tighten regulations until a lab leak is proven, is equivalent to refusing to reduce CO2 emissions until it is proven beyond doubt that these greenhouse gas emissions will result in catastrophic effects.

It is ‘pandemic-risk denialism’.
Are you siding with these people?

UPDATE 2.  Ridley also wrote me, as expected. and wants me to change my article. I have modified my comment on climate change to reflect his claim that he is a “lukewarmer.”  But his last point I already dealt with in my comment from Baltimore in the original post.

1. The (anonymous) virologist colleague that you consulted has misled you in a rather shocking way. He told you that furin cleavage sites are  “common in closely related [corona]viruses.” This is simply untrue: the only coronaviruses that count as “closely related” by a reasonable definition of that term are other sarbecoviruses. None of the over 800 sarbecoviruses yet found have a FCS. Not one. Other less closely related coronaviruses do have one, as we state in our article, where we say “MERS has one”. But to call other coronaviruses, such a as merbecoviruses “closely related” to SARS-CoV-2 is like calling birds or reptiles “closely related” to a mammal. You would not argue that finding the first mammal to grow feathers was unsurprising because “closely related tetrapods have feathers”. And if it was found near a lab that had engineered feather genes into other animals, I would be surprised if you did not find it suspicious. Note that an FCS is selected against in bats, where sarbecoviruses cause enteric infections, as we state.

2. Your colleague says “all” the data points towards the market. That’s just an empty slogan: what data? Not a single infected animal has been found, the very minimum expected in every other zoonotic outbreak. We set out the data on both sides of the argument in our paper and lots point to the lab. None of the data is proof but that does not make it “un-data”.

3. You wonder what the editor said to justify rejection. He said that there is no evidence of gain of function research at the WIV. That’s simply laughable. There’s tons of published evidence of exactly that, proudly published in journals by the WIV scientists.

4. You call me a climate denialist. This is false, lazy (easy to check) and defamatory. I have covered climate change in print for more than 40 years. I have repeatedly stated exactly why I think climate change is real and man-made. I just don’t yet see good arguments for it being net very dangerous. That’s not “denialism”. I am a lukewarmer.

5. Several commenters argue that it does not really matter how it started. This is gobsmacking. Knowing how this pandemic began is vital for preventing the next one: next to no effort is being made to enhance lab safety currently, or to prevent terrorists gaining access to virology expertise. In addition, a lab leak could explain why the virus was so highly infectious from the start of the outbreak. I have yet to hear anybody argue after an airliner crashes that it does not matter what caused it.

I suggest your readers read the whole paper.

h/t: Christopher for the Torygraph archive.

Reader Gregory sent us what may be the hardest “spot-the” photo ever.  There are two flies in this photo, but I’ll let Gregory describe the scene:

While kayak camping on the Kansas River this weekend, we were entertained by the energetic searching of a spider wasp (Hymenoptera: Pompilidae) seeking a spider to paralyze and oviposit on. However, following the spider were small flies, which turn out to be satellite flies, a subfamily of Sarcophagidae (flesh flies). The larvae of the flies are kleptoparasites and feed on prey captured by solitary wasps like the spider wasp. So the adult female flies were following the spider wasp to lay their eggs on the paralyzed spider and use it for their young. There are two flies in the photo.

Good luck. If you find them, just say so in the comments but don’t tell people where they are! As I said, this will take some searching, so I suggest you enlarge the photo.   The reveal will be at 11 a.m. Chicago time.

Math professor and Hero of Intellectual Freedom Abby Thompson of UC Davis has sent us some tidepool photos, along with a few birds. Her captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

The first picture is of a pair of foolish birds from my back porch, followed by some Northern California tidepool pictures from late April and May.   The tides the last week of May were among the lowest of the year, occurring at a very unfortunate time of day (near dawn) for those who prefer a leisurely morning, like me.    As usual I got help from people on inaturalist for some of the IDs.

I don’t understand how mourning doves ever manage to reproduce. Here’s a pair pondering building a nest on the extremely wobbly fan hanging from the trellis over our porch. I’ve also seen them trying to nest on the peak of the roof and on a very narrow garden railing.  They give new meaning to the word birdbrain.    I strung up a nice, spacious, secure basket for them right near the fan, which they totally ignored.   They eventually gave up on the fan; they’ve probably found a nice spot smack in the middle of a parking lot somewhere.

On to the tidepools:

Thorlaksonius subcarinatus: This is a species of amphipod, which (I feel like I keep saying this) is tiny, just a bright orange speck. Amphipods are like isopods (the roly-polys in your garden) except they’re flattened vertically instead of horizontally.  The Thorlaksonius part is for sure, the species seems likely correct:

Liparis florae (tidepool snailfish).  About 2” long.  The second picture is a close-up of its weird eye:

Rostanga pulchra (nudibranch). This species eats a bright orange sponge, on which it becomes practically invisible:

(Family) Sabellidae (feather duster worm) It’s not possible even to determine genus from this photo:

Phidiana hiltoni (nudibranch):

I took a picture of the brown-and-white-striped worm (Tubulanus sexlineatus) and only noticed afterward that the photo includes both a nudibranch (Coryphella trilineata) to the right of the worm and a sea spider (Pycnogonum stearnsi) to the left. Tidepools are crowded places:

A little jellyfish, Polyorchis haplus (I think). This one was stranded on the sand, but when plopped into a small pool it started zipping around. The red spots are eyespots:

Acanthodoris nanaimoensis (nudibranch). I don’t see this species very often, and it’s a knock-out:

 

Camera info:  Mostly Olympus TG-7 in microscope mode, pictures taken from above the water.

Mining craters on the moon could be more practical than extracting precious metals from asteroids, but it might also introduce new legal difficulties

Surprising new fossil evidence undermines the idea that there was ever a mass extinction on land – and may force us to reframe the current biodiversity crisis

I was away on vacation the last week, hence no posts, but am now back to my usual schedule. In fact, I hope to be a little more consistent starting this summer because (if you follow me on the SGU you already know this) I am retiring from my day job at Yale at the end of the month. This will allow me to work full time as a science communicator and skeptic. I have some new projects in the works, and will announce anything here for those who are interested.

On to today’s post – I recently received an e-mail from Janyce Boynton, a former facilitator who now works to expose the pseudoscience of facilitated communication (FC). I have been writing about this for many years. Like many pseudosciences, they rarely completely disappear, but tend to wax and wane with each new generation, often morphing into different forms while keeping the nonsense at their core. FC has had a resurgence recently due to a popular podcast, The Telepathy Tapes (which I wrote about over at SBM). Janyce had this to say:

I’ll be continuing to post critiques about the Telepathy Tapes–especially since some of their followers are now claiming that my student was telepathic. Their “logic” (and I use that term loosely) is that during the picture message passing test, she read my mind, knew what picture I saw, and typed that instead of typing out the word to the picture she saw.

I shouldn’t be surprised by their rationalizations. The mental gymnastics these people go through!

They’re also claiming that people don’t have to look at the letter board because of synesthesia. According to them, the letters light up and the clients can see the “aura” of each color. Ridiculous. I haven’t been able to find any research that backs up this claim. Nor have I found an expert in synesthesia who is willing to answer my questions about this condition, but I’m assuming that, if synesthesia is a real condition, it doesn’t work the way the Telepathy Tapes folks are claiming it does.

For quick background, FC was created in the 1980s as a method for communicating to people, mostly children, who have severe cognitive impairment and are either non-verbal or minimally verbal. The hypothesis FC is based on is that at least some of these children may have more cognitive ability than is apparent but rather have impaired communication as an isolated deficit. This general idea is legitimate, and in neurology we caution all the time about not assuming the inability to demonstrate an ability is due purely to a cognitive deficit, rather than a physical deficit. To take a simple example, don’t assume someone is not responding to your voice because they have impaired consciousness when they could be deaf. We use various methods to try to control for this as much as possible.

So this was not an inherently bad hypothesis, but their approach to controlling for this possibility was to have a facilitator hold the hand of a non-verbal client and “help” them to spell out responses on a letter board (or keyboard or whatever). This was based on the much less plausible hypothesis that non-verbal clients were mainly limited by physical coordination and not cognition, and while they could not point to the letters on their own, they could subtly indicate to the facilitator which letter they intended to point to. I don’t fault early FC users for testing this hypothesis – in fact, I fault them for not properly testing it, but rather just going full steam ahead using and promoting the method. When FC was properly tested it utterly failed – it turns out the facilitators were doing all the communicating (mostly through the ideomotor effect). In many cases the clients were not even looking at the letter board, and they were spelling far faster than is plausible given the premise that their main limitation is motor function.

FC moved to the fringe for a couple decades, although kept popping up with different clothes. Recently, however, FC has been given a boost by a popular podcast, the Telepathy Tapes, which adds a new wrinkle to the FC pseudoscience. To first back up a bit, however, one of the hallmarks of pseudoscience is the logical fallacy called special pleading. One of the core ways in which science proceeds is to come up with a way to test your hypothesis. If my hypothesis is true, then the result of this experiment or observation will be A, if it is false, then the result with be B. If the result is B, then you modify or discard the hypothesis. But pseudoscientists will often, upon getting the falsifying result B, make up a special excuse for why B was the result, to rescue their hypothesis from falsification.

The Telepathy Tapes is a massive exercise in special pleading to rescue FC from clear falsification. ESP or telepathy, the ability to read minds, is invoked to explain away all of the many reasons why the evidence falsifies FC. For example, if you secretly show the facilitator a rubber duck and the client a teddy bear then ask the client what they saw, the answer is invariably a rubber duck – because the facilitator is doing the communicating and does not know what the client actually saw. The makers of the Telepathy Tapes, however, conclude that the client read the mind of the facilitator and communicated what they saw – classic special pleading. This is also a great example of using one implausible claim to apparently support another implausible claim. This is the process that Janyce is referring to above.

She then goes on to describe another example of massive special pleading. Another fatal flaw in the FC evidence base is that often times clients are not even looking at the letter board. If you want to see how impossible this is, just try to one finger type with your eyes closed. In other words, you cannot feel the keyboard to center yourself, you have to rely entirely on proprioception to know precisely where your finger is in three-dimensional space to hit the correct key. It’s basically impossible. But apparently these clients who have severe motor impairment can do it. This is as solid proof as you can get that the clients are not doing the communicating.

But if you are just making shit up, and magical shit at that, you can easily invent some BS reason why they can do this, and that is where the synesthesia argument comes in. They argue that these mind-reading non-verbal clients also have “synesthesia” in which they can see the aura of the keys or letters, apparently in their peripheral vision. Seeing auras has nothing to do with actual synesthesia, which is when one sensory modality bleeds into another, or gets crossed with another in higher-order processing. So, for example, a synesthete may be able to smell colors, or feel numbers. The number three may feel rough to them, while four is smooth. So I guess they are saying their clients can feel the auras of the letters, and therefore don’t have to look at them.

This is as close to pure magical thinking as you can get. It is a fantastic example of pseudoscience – of why we need to processes of science in order to constrain our thinking about reality. Otherwise our ideas will tend to drift off into fantasy land. We will see patterns where they don’t exist, and we can construct intricate and complex webs of special pleading to explain any set of observations. Proper blinding and hypothesis testing is needed to slice away all the nonsense so that only reality remains. The people involved with the Telepathy Tapes are not doing that. They are simply engaging in pure fantasy. Unfortunately, in this case, their clients are their victims. This is not a benign practice at all, and can cause tremendous harm.

 

The post Telepathy Tapes Promotes Pseudoscience first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

When dogs given spot treatments for fleas go swimming, they release levels of pesticides dangerous to aquatic life for at least a month after the treatment

Researchers have proposed a more accurate way to calculate the global surface air temperature, which suggests we are just three years away from breaching the 1.5°C climate goal

The idea that the Milky Way (MW) and Andromeda (M31) will collide emerged after decades of observations by a host of astronomers. The Hubble played a decisive role in the determination during the early 2000s. It was a triumph of precision astronomy and space telescopes. Now, the Hubble has played an equally important role in cancelling the collision.

I was in Chicago this weekend attending the ASCO meeting, the largest oncology meeting in the world. Nary a talk or poster about "turbo cancer" was seen, but that doesn't mean there wasn't cancer quack fight online to distract me from the meeting.

The post No turbo cancer at ASCO: William Makis vs. Scott Adams and A Midwestern Doctor instead? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

As I say repeatedly, I find it very difficult to listen to long videos (and long podcasts without visuals are even worse). But I happened to click on the one below, part of the biweekly Glenn Show dialogue between Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, and found it quite worthwhile, even though it’s a bit more than an hour long (Loury gives an advertisement between 11:12 and 13:14). It’s interesting because of the topics: wokeness, race, and their intersection, and McWhorter (with whom I’m on a panel in three weeks) is particularly interesting.

The first thing we learn is that Loury has left (actually been fired from) the rightish-wing Manhattan Institute. He explains why in his website post “I was fired by the Manhattan Institute. Here’s why.”:

 In short, I think they disapproved of my opposition to the Gaza War, my criticisms of Israel’s prosecution of that war, and my praise of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s meditations on the West Bank settlements.

Well, I knew that Loury was a stringent critic of Israel, but praising Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “meditations” on the West Bank, meditations that followed just 10 days visit in the Middle East and did not even mention Palestinian terrorism, isn’t something to praise.  At any rate, since Loury retired from Brown, he’s contemplating his next move, and hints that the University of Austin (UATX) has been courting him.

That leads to a brief discussion of whether schools like UATX are the wave of the future: schools that can teach humanities courses without them being polluted by extreme “social justice” mentality. Both men ponder whether universities like that are the wave of the future, and whether regular universities will devolve into “STEM academies”.  That, in turn, leads to a discussion, mostly by McWhorter, about music theory and how that, one of his areas of expertise, has been polluted by wokeness.

The biggest segment of the discussion involves McWhorter’s recent visit to Washington’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and his thoughts about it (read his long NYT op-ed piece, which is very good, here). McWhorter characterizes it as not a dolorous place but a “happy place,” and one that gives a balanced view of black history—a view in which black people are more than simple oppressed people who serve to remind the rest of us of their guilt. It portrays as well, he avers, the dignity and positive accomplishment of African Americans. (McWhorter compares the dolorous view of black history with the narrative pushed by Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project.)  His description makes me want to visit that museum more than ever (I haven’t yet been but will, and I must also visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).

Finally, they discuss the question of whether they were wrong to be so hard on DEI, given that some aspects of it (e.g., a call for equality) are positive. Here McWhorter is at his most eloquent, saying that, given the overreach of DEI, it was imperative for both of them to have criticized it. As McWhorter notes, the extreme construal of DEI did not “fight for the dignity of black people” and, he says, in the face of that extremist ideology, their silence would not have been appropriate. Loury agrees.  At this point McWhorter brings up Claudine Gay, ex-President of Harvard, claiming that she was hired simply because she was a black woman, which was “wrong and objectifying.” (Only McWhorter could get away from saying something like that.) The elevation of Gay, says McWhorter, was the sort of thing they were pushing back against when they opposed DEI.

This is worth a listen, and I’ve put the video below.

It’s time for a Sunday Duck Report. Esther’s brood hatched on May 6, and so today they are 26 days old, coming on to four weeks. As we’ll see at the bottom, in the last week or so they’ve started growing their feathers.

Here are some videos and pictures of the brood, most taken around May 20 when they were two weeks old.

The brood (still six):

A swimming duckling. They are starting to look like big ducks, though they still have their baby down:

A diving duckling. It’s learning a skill that will help it not only forage, but also escape predators:

They get fed two or three times a day and are coming quite close to us. (I whistle for them, a call that they recognize as “feeding time,” but all I really have to do is show up at the pond with my bag ‘o duck food, and they coming swimming towards me rapidly.)

By the way, they get a good diet: Mazuri duck chow, which is a complete diet. Esther and big ducks get big pellets (I get this in 50 lb. bags), while the babies get the same thing, but in smaller pellets since their bills are too small to engulf the big ones (this “waterfowl starter chow” I get in 25-lb bags).  As a special treat, they get freeze-dried mealworms, which are high in fats and protein. This is their favorite food, but it’s a dessert, not the main course.

They love to enter the plastic tubs that used to be used as supports for the “plant cages”. I think of it as a duck spa:

Here are two ducklings, their swollen craws making it obvious that they just ate. They store some of the foot they eat in their esophagus.

About a week ago, the ducklings and Esther climbed up the southern “ramp” on the east side of the pond, where they’d sun themselve and then, going further into the brush, would all rest together. Here they are approaching the ramp that leads to their resting spot.  Esther always leads the way, but sometimes the brood is reluctant to land as they still want to swim and play:

More recently, since the babies have gotten large enough to jump directly out of the pond onto its edge, they like to do that together and sun themselves on the cement. Esther, of course, is always nearby.

Having a good rest:

Sometimes they pile up a few feet away from mom, but she’s always nearby. The piling up keeps them warm, as it’s been a bit chilly lately.

A video showing their postprandial resting on the edge of the pond:

A pile o’ ducklings:

Finally, in the last eight days or so the babies have been sprouting their feathers.  Feather appearance starts at the tail, in which a few tiny feathers make the tail look like a paintbrush:

. . . then the feathers start sprouting on their wings (arrow). Next stop: scruffy-looking “punk ducks” with a mixture of feathers and fluff.  Stay tuned for that!

How can humanity use the developing Lunar Gateway as an appropriate starting point for advancing human space exploration beyond the Moon? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) hopes to address as a team of researchers evaluated a myriad of ways that Lunar Gateway could be used as a testbed for future technologies involving sending humans to Mars and Ceres. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, astronauts, and mission planners develop novel strategies for advancing long-term human space exploration.

The search for life on other worlds needs a way to sift through the chemistry of their atmospheres. If another species observed Earth to search for life, they'd look for "smoking gun" chemistry in the atmosphere. That includes looking for oxygen, since it is created through photosynthesis by plants and some bacteria. So, the key is to look for life-dependent chemical "signals" at exoplanets.

Here’s the latest comedy/news stint from Bill Maher’s “Real Time” show, a “New Rule” segment called “Freak-end update”, referring of course to Diddy’s “Freak offs,” his drug-fueled sex orgies often involving prostitutes. Diddy is very likely to be convicted (you’ve seen the tape, right?), and it will be a huge come-down from his status as music king to living in a cell sans sex and drugs.

Maher’s new rule is this: “If you’ve being abused, you gotta leave right away.” He understands why abused women and loath to report it, and will even send affectionate messages to their abusers, but Maher adds that we must understand these dynamics and not let them soften our attitudes towards abuse. He then recounts how laws and attitudes are changing to punish abusers more seriously, and advises abused women to go to the police immediately rather than just telling a few friends or writing about it in a journal.

This is far more serious than most of Maher’s other bits, but he feels strongly about it.  Yet he still manages to eke out a few laughs.

Quickie with Steve: Global Warming and Ocean Currents; News Items: Infrared Contact Lenses, Trees Respond to Solar Eclipse, Affective Polarization, The Brain's Motor Switchboard, New Dwarf Planet Candidate; Discussion: The Effect of Science Fiction; Your Questions and E-mails: HHS Cancels Vaccine Contract; Science or Fiction

Today we have a historical/natural history post by reader Lou Jost, who works as a naturalist and evolutionary biologist at a field station in Ecuador.

A diatom sample from the HMS Challenger expedition of 1872-76

The Challenger in 1873, painting by Swine

The HMS Challenger was a British naval ship equipped with both sail and steam power. At the urging of scientists, and riding the wave of popular curiosity about our then-poorly-known planet, the ship was converted by the Royal Society of London to become the world’s first specialized oceanographic vessel. It went on a mission from 1872 to 1876 to systematically explore the world’s oceans, especially the scientifically almost completely unknown Southern Ocean near Antarctica. This mission was the 19th century equivalent of a trip to the moon or to Mars (except that this  HMS Challenger mission had a much more interesting and diverse subject region!).

One of the navigators, Herbert Swine, made contemporaneous drawings and paintings on site, including the two HMS Challenger images I have shared here (though these were probably polished somewhat for publication). He also published his lively diaries of his time on the expedition, in two volumes, just before he died of old age. He was the last survivor of the crew.

A map of the expedition

The voyage of exploration went 80,000 miles, lasted 1250 days, and circumnavigated the globe. They made systematic chemical, temperature, and depth readings across the globe, taking biological specimens along the way. They discovered over 4000 new species, from vertebrates to phytoplankton, and lost several lives along the way. They were the first to systematically explore the mid-Atlantic Ridge, and by pure chance they also discovered the Marianas Trench,  the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. In 1950-1951 a modern vessel, again bearing the name Challenger in a homage to the original, found the deepest part of any ocean, the “Challenger Deep”, just 50 miles from the HMS Challenger’s deepest depth record.

The Challenger at work

The immense number of samples obtained by the crew of the Challenger took 19 years to analyze and publish, in 50 volumes. Specimens were sent to many scientists of the time, and some of these still circulate today. Among the most interesting organisms they sampled are diatoms. Diatoms are single-celled organisms that make up much of the oceans’ phytoplankton, and their most notable features are the finely sculpted glass cases called “frustules” that enclose them. These glass frustules are often preserved intact for tens of millions of years, sometimes forming enormous deposits of pure frustules known as “diatomaceous earth” on the beds of ancient lakes and oceans. Some of these deposits are so big that millions of tons of diatom frustules thousands of years old are whipped up by the wind in dry parts of Africa every year, and then cross the Atlantic by air and rain down on the Amazon basin in South America.

The expedition of the HMS Challenger launched the most systematic study of the 19th century on the diatoms of the Southern Ocean. They sampled at regular intervals during their voyage, and at multiple depths, including very deep water that had never before been studied, discovering new species of diatoms such as Asteromphalus challengerensis, named after the vessel (using bad Latin unfortunately). The samples were distributed to diatomists around the world, who carefully mounted them on microscope slides using special mountants of high-refractive-index liquid, designed to make the transparent diatom frustule more visible under standard microscopic illumination. Some of these Challenger diatom slides come up for sale periodically, and I could not resist buying one that appeared in eBay.

Increasing zooms of the diatoms on the slide:

This one slide, from 1873 during an Antarctic visit, has hundreds of individuals consisting of maybe a couple of dozen species. There are also many broken diatom fragments. Among the individuals, I was lucky enough to find several examples of what appear to be the aforementioned A. challengerensis. This is a rare species which is found only in water that is within 1 degree Centigrade of freezing. The taxonomy of this species and its relatives is in flux as we learn more about how the structures change with age.

Two slides of the species A. challengerensis:

Some of the taxonomic problems of these diatoms is caused by their weird way of replication. Diatoms can’t grow like a normal organism because they are in a glass case, so instead they shrink, each half of the frustule making a new matching half that is slightly smaller than the parent half-frustule, so that the two new halves each nest inside their parent half-frustule. Then they separate. Here is a nice illustration of this:

The population thus has a large spread of different sizes, and it appears that some frustule features may change as they get smaller, causing taxonomic confusions in the case of A. challengerensis and others.  By the way, eventually the smallest ones go through a sexual reproductive phase that builds a new full-sized frustule, so that the cycle can start over. This is really weird. Later I hope to write long post about the utterly astounding, almost unbelievable biology of diatoms.

Darwin published his theory of evolution just 13 years before this expedition, and evolution was on everyone’s mind, and the commander of the ship was an “early adopter” of the theory. At the time there was still not much clarity about the predictions of the theory. It was widely believed that the cold dark oceans would preserve “living fossils” similar to the earliest forms of life on earth. The expedition did not find this to be true, and so it actually was a slight setback for evolutionary theory. They unfortunately missed the hydrothermal vents which do indeed shed light on the origins of life.

I wrote at the beginning of this post that the HMS Challenger expedition was the 19th Century analogue of space exploration. So it was fitting that NASA decided to name one of the space shuttles “Challenger”, after the two scientific ships which carried that name. The photo above shows Challenger orbiting over the ocean 110 years after the original HMS Challenger sailed that same ocean. Unfortunately, as in the original Challenger expedition, people died on that space shuttle in the name of science, a reminder that exploration on the margins of what is known will always be risky, and the participants are real heroes of their age.

Solar storms have the potential to cause catastrophic damage. One that occurred around the end of October 2003 (now called the 2003 Halloween Storm) caused an estimated $27B in damages. That number will only increase as humanity has become more reliant on space-based and electrical infrastructure. However, if we could predict when storms would hit with some accuracy and adjust our use of the technologies that could be affected, we could avoid the worst damage. But, as of now, we don't have such a system that could help predict the types of events that could cause that damage accurately enough. That is where a new Sun activity monitoring system, described in a recent paper by Leonidas Askianakis of the Technical University of Munich, would help.

How can fission-powered propulsion help advance deep space exploration, specifically to the outer planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) hopes to address as a pair of researchers from India investigated the financial, logistical, and reliability of using fission power for future deep space missions. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and future astronauts develop next-generation technologies as humanity continues to expand its presence in space.

The grainy videos from the Apollo Moon landings are treasured historical artifacts. For many of us, that footage will be lodged in our minds until our final synaptic spark sputters out. But like all technology since the space race days, video technology has advanced enormously, and the next Moon landings will be captured in high-definition video. The ESA is so focused on getting it right that they're practicing filming lunar landings in a special studio that mimics the conditions on the lunar surface.