The sound of thunder

Last Sunday (April 14) we had a series of thunderstorms roll through the region, kind of unusual for upstate New York at this time of year.  We're not particularly stormy in general, but most of the thunder and lightning we do get comes in the heat of midsummer.  On Sunday, though, a warm front brought in turbulent, moist air, and we got some decent storms and rain for most of the day.

At 11:51 AM (EDT), though, something odd happened.  There was a deep, shuddering rumble that repeated three times within the span of about two or three minutes.  (The first was the strongest.)  I grew up in the Deep South, where thunder is a frequent occurrence, and to my ears this didn't feel or sound like thunder.  Immediately I thought of a mild earthquake -- primed, of course, by the April 6 quake, centered in New Jersey, which was felt over large regions of New York and the neighboring states.

The rumble we experienced preceded the arrival of the strongest of the storms; because of that, and the fact that it "sounded wrong," I was convinced that we'd experienced an earthquake.  That conviction intensified when reports began to pour in that the same noise had been heard at the same time -- in locations separated by fifty kilometers or more.  (Thunder ordinarily can only be heard about fifteen kilometers from the source.)  

My wife, on the other hand, was absolutely sure it was thunder, albeit rather powerful and deep-pitched.

Well, let it never be said that I won't admit it when I'm wrong.

I started to doubt myself when the Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca (only ten miles from my home) reported on Monday morning that despite numerous people calling in to report noise and shaking, their seismometer had not recorded an earthquake.  That seemed pretty unequivocal -- and after all, there had been storms in the area, even though at the time we heard the rumble, the center of the front wouldn't arrive for over an hour.  But if it had been thunder, how had a single thunderclap (or three in rapid succession) been heard over such a great distance?

The answer turns out to be a temperature inversion.  Ordinarily, temperature decreases as you go up in altitude; but this effect competes with the fact that cool air is denser and tends to sink.  (This is why in winter, the greatest risk of frost damage to plants is in isolated valleys.)  So sometimes, a wedge of warm air gets forced up and over a blob of cooler air, meaning that for a while, the temperature rises as you go up in altitude.

This is exactly what happens in a warm front; the warm air, which carries more moisture, rises and forms clouds (and if there's enough moisture and a high enough temperature gradient, thunderclouds).  But this has another effect that is less well known -- at least, by me.

The difference in density of warm and cool air means that they have different indices of refraction -- a measure of how fast a wave can travel in the medium.  A common example of different indices of refraction is the bending of light at the boundary between air and water, which is why a pencil leaning in a glass of water looks kinked at the boundary.  At a shallow enough angle, the wave doesn't cross the boundary at all, but reflects off the surface layer; this causes the heat shimmer you see on hot road surfaces, as light bounces off the layer of hot air right above the asphalt.

Sound waves can also refract, although the effect is less obvious.  But that's exactly what happened on Sunday.  A powerful lightning strike created a roll of thunder, and the sound waves propagated outward at about 343 meters per second; but when they struck the undersurface of the temperature inversion, instead of dispersing upward into the upper atmosphere, they reflected back downward.  This not only drastically increased the distance over which the sound was heard, but amplified it, changing the quality of the sound from the usual booming roll we associate with thunder to something more like an explosion -- or an earthquake.

So despite the jolt and the odd (and startlingly loud) sound, we didn't have an earthquake on Sunday.  I'm kind of disappointed, actually.  I didn't feel the one on April 6 -- although some folks in the area did -- and despite having lived in a tectonically-active part of the country (Seattle, Washington) for ten years, I've never experienced an earthquake.  I'd rather not have my house fall down, or anything, but given that the pinnacle of excitement around here is when the farmer across the road bales his hay, a mild jolt would have been kind of entertaining.

But I guess I can't check that box quite yet.  Thunder, combined with a temperature inversion, was all it was.

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Dream songs

Last night I dreamed that our local mall had been converted into a giant used book store.  (Something I would entirely approve of.)  We were going to to go shopping ("we" being my wife, me, and our younger son, who lives in Houston but was apparently up for a visit) but we realized that a bunch of other family members were unexpectedly going to descend upon us, and for some reason we knew they were going to walk into our house without knocking, which our dogs would not appreciate, so we had to get home fast.  But while trying to get out of the mall we were hindered by a bunch of science-fiction cosplayers wearing silver body paint.

After that, it got kind of weird.

Dreams are a very peculiar thing, but they (and the REM sleep stage during which they occur) are ubiquitous in the brainier species of animals.  In fact, as I'm writing this, my puppy Jethro is curled up in his bed by my desk dreaming about something, because his paws are twitching and every once in a while he makes a very cute little "oof" noise.  But what would a puppy dream about?  Presumably the things that make up his waking life -- playing, chasing squirrels, swimming in our pond, eating his dinner.

You have to wonder if sometimes dogs, like humans, have weird dreams, and what they might make of them.

The function of dreaming is unknown, but what's certain is that it's necessary.  Suppress REM and dreaming, and the results are hallucinations and psychosis.  Aficionados of Star Trek: The Next Generation will no doubt remember the chilling scene in the episode "Night Terrors," where something is preventing the crew from experiencing REM sleep, and Dr. Crusher is in the makeshift morgue where the victims of a massacre are being examined -- and when she turns around, all the dead bodies are sitting up, still shrouded in their sheets.  She closes her eyes -- exhibiting far more bravery than I would have -- and says, "This is not real," and when she opens them, they're all lying back down again.

*shudder*

In any case, what brings up this topic today is far cheerier; a fascinating piece of research out of the University of Buenos Aires that looked at dreams in an animal we usually don't associate with them -- birds.  A team led by Gabriel Mindlin looked at a species of bird called the Great Kiskadee (Pitangus sulphuratus), a brightly-colored and vocal flycatcher found in much of Central and South America.  

Mindlin is one of the foremost experts in the physiology of bird song.  Birds have a unique apparatus called the syrinx that allows them to make some of the most complex vocalizations of any group of animals; not only can some (such as many wrens and thrushes) produce two or more tones at the same time, birds like parrots, mynahs, lyrebirds, and starlings are brilliant mimics and can imitate a variety of other sounds, including human speech.  (A lyrebird in a park in Australia learned to convincingly imitate a chainsaw, a car alarm, various cellphone ringtones, and a camera shutter.)

What Mindlin and his team did was to implant electrodes in the obliquus ventralis muscle, the main muscle birds use to control pitch and volume in vocalization, and also outfit some Great Kiskadees with devices to monitor their brain waves.  When the birds went into REM sleep, the researchers found that the OV muscle was contracting in exactly the way it does when the birds vocalize while awake.

The birds were singing silently in their sleep!

Singing in birds generally serves two purposes; mate attraction and territorial defense.  (As one of my AP Biology students put it, "they sing when they're mad or horny.")  It's more complicated than that -- science generally is -- but as a broad-brush explanation, it'll do.  Many species have different songs and calls for different purposes, each associated with a specific pattern of contractions and relaxation of the muscles in the syrinx.  Mindlin and his team used software capable of taking the muscle movements the electrodes detected and decoding them, determining what song the bird would have been producing if it was awake.  What they found was that the song their test subjects were dream-singing was one associated with marking out territories. 

"I felt great empathy imagining that solitary bird recreating a territorial dispute in its dream," Mindlin said.  "We have more in common with other species that we usually recognize."

So birds dream, and the content of their dreams is apparently -- just like Jethro -- taken from their own umwelt, the slice of sensory experience they engage with while they're awake.  (I wrote in more detail about the umwelt a while back, if you're curious.)  

On the other hand, how this accounts for my dream of silver-body-painted cosplayers in a mall filled with old books, I have no idea.

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Stellar wind, the BOAT, and the Dragon's Egg

Since the news down here on Earth is not looking so good, today we're going to escape to my happy place, which is outer space.

We've got three new studies of fascinating astronomical phenomena to look at, the first of which comes out of the University of Vienna.  A team led by astrophysicist Kristina Kislyakova has, for the first time, directly detected stellar wind from three nearby Sun-like stars -- something which may effect the stability of the atmospheres of any planets orbiting them, and thus, their potential habitability.

Stellar wind -- which until now, we only knew about from studies of our own solar wind -- is a stream of particles given off by the upper atmosphere of stars, mainly composed of electrons, protons, and alpha particles with a kinetic energy of under 10 keV.  The solar wind is why comet tails always point away from the Sun (not, as many people erroneously think, simply the opposite of their direction of motion, like the wake of a boat).  Kislyakova's team looked for x-rays of specific frequencies coming from the three stars they studied (70 Ophiuchi, Epsilon Eridani, and 61 Cygni), because the stellar wind is expected also to contain small amounts of ionized oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon; as those ions are blown from the surface of the stars and ultimately slow down, they capture electrons, which drop into the atom's ground state and emit electromagnetic energy in the form of x-rays at particular frequencies.  From the amount of x-rays detected, they estimated the mass loss rate of the stars.

All three have much stronger stellar winds than the Sun does -- around 66, 16, and 10 (respectively) times the rate of mass loss from solar wind that the Sun experiences, which is itself considerable (estimated at 1.5 million metric tons per second).  The reason for the higher mass loss from the three stars studied is unknown -- but the Sun's calmer behavior is a good thing, because a strong stellar wind can peel away the atmosphere of exoplanets.  Any planets around 70 Ophiuchi, for example, are likely not to have much in the way of an atmosphere.

The second study is out of Northwestern University, and looked at something that has been nicknamed the BOAT (brightest of all time) -- a gamma-ray burst picked up in October of 2022 that saturated every gamma-ray detector on Earth.  It came from a source about 2.4 billion light years away in the constellation of Sagitta, and lasted for a few hundred seconds before starting to fade.  During that time it outshone the next-brightest observed gamma-ray burst by a factor of ten.

A team led by astrophysicist Peter Blanchard found that the BOAT was caused by a supernova -- but one acting very strangely.  The gamma-ray burst was so powerful that it took scientists some time to figure out that there even had been a supernova (imagine something so bright that it hides the light coming from a supernova!).  "The GRB was so bright that it obscured any potential supernova signature in the first weeks and months after the burst," Blanchard said.  "At these times, the so-called afterglow of the GRB was like the headlights of a car coming straight at you, preventing you from seeing the car itself.  So, we had to wait for it to fade significantly to give us a chance of seeing the supernova."

So why would an ordinary (if you can use that word) supernova cause such an enormous gamma-ray burst?  One possibility is that we might just be at the right place at the right time.  Models indicate that a rapidly-spinning massive star, when it reaches the end of its life, collapses into a black hole that gives off a a narrow jet of gamma rays aligned with the axis of its rotation.  It's possible that we just happened to be perfectly lined up with the black hole's axis -- looking right down the gun barrel, as it were.  But the fact is, they're still trying to figure that out, so we'll have to wait to see what more they learn.

The third study, led by astrophysicist Abigail Frost of the European Southern Observatory in Chile, looked at a strange and beautiful object nicknamed the "Dragon's Egg," in the southern constellation of Norma.

[Image credit: European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Cerro Paranal, Chile. ESO/VPHAS+/CASU/]

The curious thing about the pair of stars in the middle of the Dragon's Egg is that one of them has a magnetic field and the other doesn't.  Frost and her team believe that the same process that created the nebula surrounding them is what created the magnetic field in one of the stars.

It seems to be a case of stellar fratricide.  The more massive star in the binary pair is the one with the magnetic field, and the theory is that it used to be a triple star system -- but two of the stars underwent a merger.  The violence of that collision blew material out into space (the origin of the glowing dust cloud surrounding the remaining two stars) -- and the result dramatically increased the spin rate of the combined star, a bit like water speeding up as it goes down a drain.  Electrically-charged particles, such as those in stellar atmospheres, traveling in circles generate a magnetic field as per Maxwell's Laws, and that's why the more massive member of the surviving binary has such a powerful field.

So that's today's exploration of astronomical news.  Always makes me feel a bit tiny, when I consider phenomena out there in the depths of outer space.  Nothing wrong with that, of course -- humility is good.  And all in all, I'd rather be looking up than looking down in any case.

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The stowaways

Aficionados of the Star Trek universe undoubtedly recall the iconic character Jadzia Dax.  Dax was a Trill -- a fusion of a humanoid host and a strange-looking brain symbiont.  The union of the two blended their personalities, resulting in what was truly a new, composite life form.

Star Trek is amazing in a lot of ways, not least because of their attention to current science and an uncanny prescience about where science is heading.  It turns out that we're all composite life forms.  We carry around something like 39 trillion bacterial cells in and on our own bodies -- the vast majority of which are either commensals (neither helpful nor harmful) or are actually beneficial -- a number that is higher than the number of human cells we have.  Each of our cells also contains mitochondria, which are the descendants of endosymbiotic bacteria that have inhabited the cells of eukaryotes for billions of years, and without which we couldn't release energy from our food molecules.  Plants have not only mitochondria but chloroplasts, yet another species of bacteria that like mitochondria, have their own DNA, took up residence in their hosts billions of years ago, and have been there ever since.

But the rabbit hole goes a hell of a lot deeper than that.  By some estimates, between five and eight percent of our genomes are endogenous retroviruses -- genetic fragments left behind by viruses that spliced their DNA into ours.  Like our bacterial hitchhikers, a good many of these are either neutral or beneficial; for example, the production of bile, estrogen, and several proteins essential for the formation of the placenta are all directly affected by endogenous retroviral genes.  A few do seem to be deleterious, and have roles in certain cancers, autoimmune diseases, and neurological disorders like ALS and schizophrenia.

What brings this topic up is an astonishing study led by Tyler Coale, of the University of California - Santa Cruz, that came out in the journal Science this week.  Coale's study found there's yet another example of endosymbiosis -- this one a lot more recently evolved -- which turned a formerly free-living nitrogen-fixing bacterium into a true cellular organelle.

Nitrogen is critical for the production of both proteins and DNA.  Although 78% of the air we breathe is nitrogen, it's completely useless to us; we breathe it right back out.  All the nitrogen in our bodies' proteins and nucleic acids had to pass through a food chain that started with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, the only known organisms that can absorb nitrogen from the air and convert it to an organic compound.  Leguminous plants like beans, peas, alfalfa, and clover have a nifty symbiotic arrangement with nitrogen-fixing bacteria; they create nodules in their roots where the bacteria live, and the bacteria provide the plants with a ready source of nitrogen.

But in legumes, the two remain independent organisms.  What Coale and his colleague discovered is a species of algae (Braarudosphaera bigelowii) in which the bacteria (UCYN-A) have evolved to become inseparable from the host cells.  In other words, they became an organelle, just like mitochondria and chloroplasts.

Although there's no canonical definition of organelle, most biologists include two must-haves: (1) coordinated division of the organelle within the cell; and (2) the evolution of a transport system that allows for specific tagging and importation of proteins into the organelle.  By those standards, UCYN-A is definitely an organelle.  

"Both boxes are checked by Coale," said Jeff Elhai, microbiologist at Virginia Commonwealth University.  "Even to the semantic purists, UCYN-A must be counted as an organelle, joining mitochondria, chloroplasts and chromatophores."

All these stowaways, in the cells of just about every living thing on Earth, call into question what exactly we mean not only by the word organelle but by the word organism.  The high-school-biology-class definition of an organism is "an individual life form of a species."  But is there any such thing?  The ostensibly individual life form called Gordon who is currently writing this post is made of (at least) equal numbers of human cells and cells from different species of bacteria, without many of which I'd be sick as hell, or possibly even dead.  Remove the symbiotic mitochondria from within my cells, and I'd definitely be dead -- within minutes.  Deeper still, at a minimum, one in twenty of the genes in my "human DNA" comes from viruses and bacteria.

Looked at closely, I'm as put together of spare parts as the Junk Man in Lost in Space.  Fortunately, I appear to run a bit more smoothly most days than he did.

In any case, calling me "a single organism" is so far from accurate it's almost laughable.

Honestly, it's kind of cool how interconnected everything is.  Back in the days of the first serious taxonomist, Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus, scientists had the idea that all living things were categorizable into neat little cubbyholes.  Not only is that incorrect on the species level (something I wrote about in detail a couple of years ago), it's not even true on the individual level or on the level of genomes.  Life on Earth is a huge, tangled skein of threads.  The whole thing puts me in mind of a quote from John Muir: "Tug at a single thing in nature, and you find that it is hitched to everything else in the universe."

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The kakistocracy

Today I'd like to look at the state of Arizona, where this week a 4-2 decision by the state's Supreme Court made abortions illegal in any circumstance except to save a woman's life -- practically speaking, making them illegal period, because few doctors will want to risk their livelihood (or their freedom) based on whether a court will decide a particular abortion was a medical necessity.

This decision caused the state law to revert to a code passed in 1864 -- decades before women even had the right to vote.  It's an interesting historical filigree that the man who pushed the 1864 law through in the first place, then Speaker of the House for the Arizona Territory W. Claude Jones, was a notorious adulterer, philanderer, liar, and pedophile (he openly called himself a "pursuer of nubile females"), whose victims included a twelve-year old Mexican girl and a fifteen-year-old who had recently arrived with her parents from Texas.  The decision by the court is also irrespective of the fact that such restrictions are wildly unpopular; in a 2023 poll, only thirteen percent of Americans responded that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, and just over sixty percent stated that the United States Supreme Court's Dobbs decision (which overturned Roe v. Wade) was "a bad thing."

What's striking about this is that despite the fact that the majority of American citizens are at least pro-choice in some circumstances, they keep electing people who are somewhere to the right of Tomás de Torquemada.  Take, for example, Arizona State Senator Anthony Kern, who crowed, "Looks like our prayer team stirred up some God-haters," and led a prayer circle on the floor of the Senate in which -- I shit you not -- he "spoke in tongues."

Is it just me, or do these people sound like this?

A point I've made (many times) here in Skeptophilia is that I have no issue with what you believe, as long as you don't use those beliefs as a hammer to force others to comply.  On the other hand, I am under no obligation to refrain from saying those beliefs are ridiculous, especially when you make a point of exhibiting them in public.

Put another way: I always try to respect people, but ideas only deserve respect if they make sense and honor other people's rights.

A few days ago I saw a post on social media where a guy took exception to those of us who were making fun of Rapture-believers who thought the total eclipse on Monday was a sign of the End Times.  "Most Rapture-believers don't think that," he said (despite the fact that people like Marjorie Taylor Greene stated that the eclipse was a "sign from God to repent"), then sniffed, "People who are making fun of Rapture-believers are actually making fun of themselves."

Um, no.  We're actually making fun of the Rapture-believers.  If you hold silly beliefs, you can't blame other people for laughing.

The whole problem escalates when these people are elected to public office, and start using their bizarre worldviews to drive policy.  For example, a law in Louisiana just passed the House which would require all public school classrooms to post the Ten Commandments.  (And before you @ me about how the Ten Commandments are just guides to good behavior, and apply regardless of whether you're religious or not, allow me to remind you that the First Commandment is "I am the Lord thy God; you shall have no other gods before me.")  Another proposed bill in my former home state, HB777, would make it a criminal offense for a librarian to belong to the American Library Association -- because libraries have long stood for free access to information, which is absolutely anathema to the Far Right.  (Also because the ALA has championed the availability of books representing racial diversity and LGBTQ+ representation; apparently we can't have the world knowing there are people who aren't straight white Christians.)

I can only hope that Americans are becoming aware of the extent to which people who proudly espouse loony beliefs have taken control of the government, and that this will galvanize voters to turn out for the election this November.  I'm not talking about true conservatives (people like former congressman Joe Walsh) -- although I may not agree with him about all that much, I could have a reasonable discussion with him.  But I have zero common ground with irrational religious ideologues like current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and snarling hypocrites like Lauren Boebert, who publicly stated that she's all about "family values" and is "tired of this separation of church and state junk" but who apparently thinks it's A-OK to give her boyfriend a handjob in a public theater.

We have allowed ourselves to be controlled by a group of men and women whose outsized impact on our laws far exceeds their numbers.  We can turn this around -- but only if people get themselves to the polls.  We don't need elected officials like Anthony Kern babbling, "Ickety ackety ooh aah aah," then claiming those are God's words saying what a Very Good Boy He Is.  We need people capable of reasoned discourse, who -- even if they disagree -- can present their arguments based on facts and logic, not on some bizarre set of beliefs that make about as much sense as claiming that the universe is being controlled by a Giant Green Bunny From The Andromeda Galaxy.

Which means that we need to vote.  All of us.  Our system is far from perfect, but this year the choice is stark.  (Maybe it always is.)  The Greeks had a word for the direction we're heading: a kakistocracy, government by the worst, the most unfit, or the most unscrupulous.  Remember the quote from Plato: "The price of apathy toward public affairs is to be ruled by those who are actively evil."

Or, in the case of Anthony Kern, flat-out insane.  

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Requiem for a visionary

I was saddened to hear of the death of the brilliant British physicist Peter Higgs on Monday, April 8, at the grand old age of 94.  Higgs is most famous for his proposal in 1964 of what has since come to be known as the "Higgs mechanism" (he was far too modest a man to name it after himself; that was the doing of colleagues who recognized his genius).  This springboarded off work by the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese physicist Yochiro Nambu, who was researching spontaneous symmetry breaking -- Higgs's insight was to see that the same process could be used to argue for the existence of a previously unknown field, the properties of which seemed to explain why ordinary particles have mass.

This was a huge leap, and by Higgs's own account, he was knocking at the knees when he presented the paper at a conference.  But it passed peer review and was published in the journal Physical Review Letters, and afterward stood up to repeated attempts to punch holes in its logic.  His argument required the existence of a massive spin-zero boson -- now known as the Higgs boson -- and he had to wait 48 years for it to be discovered at CERN by the ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments.  When informed that the Higgs boson had been discovered, at exactly the mass/energy he'd predicted, he responded with his typical humility, saying, "It's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime."

It surprised no one when he won the Nobel Prize in Physics the following year (2013).

Higgs at the Nobel Prize Awards Ceremony [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Bengt Nyman, Nobel Prize 24 2013, CC BY 2.0]

Higgs, however, was a bit of an anachronism.  He was a professor at Edinburgh University, but refused to buy into the competitive grant-seeking paper-production culture of academia.  He was also famously non-technological; he said he'd never sent an email, used a cellphone, or owned a television.  (He did say that he'd been persuaded to watch an episode of The Big Bang Theory once, but "wasn't impressed.")  He frustrated the hell out of the administration of the university, responding to demands for a list of recent publications with the word "None."  Apparently it was only caution -- well-founded, as it turned out -- by the administrators that persuaded them to keep him on the payroll.  "He might get a Nobel Prize at some point," one of them said.  "If not, we can always get rid of him."

In an interview, Higgs said that he'd never get hired in today's academic world, something that is more of an indictment against academia than it is of Higgs himself.  "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964," he said.  "After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department.  I thought I was well out of it.  It wasn't my way of doing things any more.  Today I wouldn't get an academic job.  It's as simple as that.  I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough."

Reading about this immediately made me think about the devastating recent video by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, a stinging takedown of how the factory-model attitude in research science is killing scientists' capacity for doing real and groundbreaking research:

It was a rude awakening to realize that this institute [where she had her first job in physics research] wasn't about knowledge discovery, it was about money-making.  And the more I saw of academia, the more I realized it wasn't just this particular institute and this particular professor.  It was generally the case.  The moment you put people into big institutions, the goal shifts from knowledge discovery to money-making.  Here's how this works:

If a researcher gets a scholarship or research grant, the institution gets part of that money.  It's called the "overhead."  Technically, that's meant to pay for offices and equipment and administration.  But academic institutions pay part of their staff from this overhead, so they need to keep that overhead coming.  Small scholarships don't make much money, but big research grants can be tens of millions of dollars.  And the overhead can be anything between fifteen and fifty percent.  This is why research institutions exert loads of pressure on researchers to bring in grant money.  And partly, they do this by keeping the researchers on temporary contracts so that they need grants to get paid themselves...  And the overhead isn't even the real problem.  The real problem is that the easiest way to grow in academia is to pay other people to produce papers on which you, as the grant holder, can put your name.  That's how academia works.  Grants pay students and postdocs to produce research papers for the grant holder.  And those papers are what the supervisor then uses to apply for more grants.  The result is a paper-production machine in which students and postdocs are burnt through to bring in money for the institution...

I began to understand what you need to do to get a grant or to get hired.  You have to work on topics that are mainstream enough but not too mainstream.  You want them to be a little bit edgy, but not too edgy.  It needs to be something that fits into the existing machinery.  And since most grants are three years, or five years at most, it also needs to be something that can be wrapped up quickly...

The more I saw of the foundations of physics, the more I became convinced that the research there wasn't based upon sound scientific principles...  [Most researchers today] are only interested in writing more papers...  To get grants.  To get postdocs.  To write more papers.  To get more grants.  And round and round it goes.

You can see why a visionary like Peter Higgs was uncomfortable in today's academia (and vice versa).  But it's also horrifying to think about the Peter Higgses of this generation -- today's up-and-coming scientific groundbreakers, who may not ever get a chance to bring their ideas to the world, sandbagged instead by a hidebound money-making machine that has amplified "publish-or-perish" into "publish-or-never-get-started."

In any case, the world has lost a gentle, soft-spoken genius, whose unique insights -- made at a time when the academic world was more welcoming to such individuals -- completed our picture of the Standard Model of particle physics, and whose theories led to an understanding of the fundamental properties of matter and energy we're still working to explore fully.  94 is a respectable age in pretty much anyone's opinion, but it's still sad to lose someone of such brilliance, who was not only a leading name in pure research, but was unhesitating in pointing out the problems with how science is done.

It took 48 years for his theory about the Higgs mechanism to be experimentally vindicated; let's hope his criticisms of academia have a shorter gestation period.

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Ill winds

When you think about it, wind is a strange phenomenon.

In its simplest form, wind occurs when uneven heating of the surface of the Earth causes higher pressure in some places than in others, and the air flows from highs to lows.  But it's considerably more complex (and interesting) than that, because as surface-dwellers we often forget that there's a third dimension -- and that air can move vertically as well as horizontally.

I got to thinking of this because I've been reading Eric Pinder's fascinating, often lyrical, book Tying Down the Wind: Adventures in the Worst Weather on Earth.  Pinder is a meteorologist who was stationed as a weather observer on Mount Washington, New Hampshire, which one in every three days clocks hurricane-force winds (greater than 119 kilometers per hour) and is the spot that holds second place for the highest anemometer-clocked wind speed ever recorded on the Earth's surface (an almost unimaginable 372 kilometers per hour; the only higher one was on Barrow Island, Australia, which on April 10, 1996, during Cyclone Olivia, hit 407 kilometers per hour).

The fact that air moves vertically, of course, is why air moves horizontally.  When the Sun heats a patch of ground, the air above it warms and becomes less dense, causing it to rise.  This creates an area of low pressure, and air moves in from the side to replace the air moving upward.  This process, writ large, is what causes hurricanes; the heat source is the ocean, and the convection caused by that tremendous reservoir of heat energy not only generates wind, but when the water-vapor-laden air rises high enough, it undergoes adiabatic cooling, triggering condensation, cloud formation -- and torrential rain.

The process can go the other direction, though.  A weather phenomenon that has long fascinated me is the convective microburst, something that most often happens in hot, dry climates in midsummer, like the American Midwest.  The process goes something like this.  Rising air triggers cloud formation, and ultimately rain clouds.  When the droplets of water become heavy enough that the downward force of gravity exceeds the upward force of the air updrafts, they fall, but they drop into the layer of warm, dry air near the surface, so they evaporate on the way down, often not making it to the ground as rain.  Evaporation cools the air that surrounds them, making it denser -- and if the process happens fast enough, it creates a blob of air so much denser than the air surrounding it that it literally falls out of the sky, hits the ground, and explodes outward.  Windspeeds can go from nothing to 100 kilometers per hour in a matter of fifteen seconds.  Then -- a couple of minutes later -- it's all over, the dust (and any airborne objects) settle back to Earth, and everyone in the vicinity staggers around trying to figure out what the hell just happened.

A convective microburst in Nebraska [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Couch-scratching-cats, Downburst 1, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Microbursts aren't the only weird weather phenomenon having to do with density flow.  Have you heard of katabatic winds?  If you haven't, it's probably because you live in an area where they don't happen, because they're really dramatic where they do.  Katabatic winds (from the Greek κατάβασις, "falling down") occurs when you have significant chilling of a layer of air aloft -- on top of a mountain, for example, or (even better) over an ice sheet.  This raises the density of the air mass, creating a huge difference in gravitational potential energy from high to low.  The superchilled air pours downward, funneling through any gaps in the terrain; the effect is accentuated when there's a low pressure center nearby.  The katabatic winds off Antarctica (nicknamed "Herbies," for no reason I could find) and the ones off Greenland (known by the Inuit name piteraq) can be unpredictable, fast, and frigid, often driving layers of snow horizontally and creating sudden whiteout conditions.

Then there's the foehn (or föhn) wind, created when onshore air flow is pushed up against a mountain range.  This occurs in the southern Alps, central Washington and Oregon, parts of Greece and Turkey, and south-central China.  On the windward side of the mountains, the air rises and cools; this causes condensation and higher rainfall.  But when the air piles up and gets pushed over the mountain passes, it warms for two reasons -- the pressure increases as it goes downhill on the other side, and the condensation of water vapor releases heat energy.  The result is a warm, dry wind that pours downhill on the leeward side of the mountains -- the source of the "Chinook winds" that desiccate the northwestern United States east of the Cascades.

Interestingly, foehn winds are associated with physiological problems -- headaches, sinus problems, and mood swings.  It's documented that prescriptions for anxiolytic medications go up when the foehn is blowing; and a study at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität München found that suicide and accident rates both go up by about ten percent during periods when there's a strong foehn, and no one knows why exactly.

In any case, there are a few interesting tidbits about a phenomenon we usually don't think about unless we're in the path of a hurricane or tornado.  Something to think about next time your face is brushed by a warm breeze.  We live at the bottom of a layer of moving fluid, driven by invisible forces that usually are benign.  Only occasionally do we see how powerful that fluid can be -- preferably, from a safe distance.

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