SGU Episode 346

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Skeptical Rogues

• S: Steven Novella
• B: Bob Novella
• R: Rebecca Watson
• J: Jay Novella
• E: Evan Bernstein

• GM: Gordon Maupin

Introduction

You're listening to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, February 29th 2012, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

B: Hey everybody

S: Rebecca Watson

R: Hello everyone

S: Jay Novella

S: And Evan Bernstein

E: Evening, gentleman and lady

This Day in Skepticism (0:28)

R: Happy leap day!

S: Happy leap day!

E: It ‘’is’’ leap day

S: This is the only time that we have recorded a show on February 29th, and it may be a long time before we get an opportunity to do so again.

R: That’s true, yeah, very exciting

E: That’s true

J: So explain to me, leap year, a leap day, what’s happening here?

(laughter)

R: ‘’well’’, ok, so our current calendar is 365 days in a year, however, the way we figure up days does not have anything to do with the way we figure up what makes a year. So, there aren’t actually 365 days that make up one year, there are actually 365 and a quarter days, almost, sort of

E: Almost, roughly

R: Yeah, and so to make up that quarter, every four years, we add an extra day. Of course, that is not true, it is an oversimplification, because every four years we add one day ‘’unless’’ that year is divisible by 100, but not 400, and we do that because it’s not exactly 365 days and a quarter, it’s 365.24…

B: two-two, point two-four-two-two

S: two-four-two-two-two-two-two

R: Good, yeah, so that’s about as close as we can get it at the moment. We can get it closer by, I believe, skipping a leap year every 4,000 years, and then that will put us back on track. But right now, the way we’re doing it now, it is keeping us pretty much on track.

E: I think it’s a pretty good system, all told

R: It is

B: Yeah, it works fine

R: It is, and it’s interesting how long it took us to get there. I mean, the ancient Greeks knew, you know, how many days it took us to go around the sun, they knew, down to the decimals, you know, that it wasn’t exactly 365 days. But, the history of the human calendar is long and arduous, in fact, there are tons of places where, as recently as the 1700s, whole countries have skipped an entire week or two, usually, I think it’s 11 days or so, so that they could catch up to the rest of the world, switching from the Gregorian calendar to the Julian calendar.

B: Other way around?

R: Because of this switch, Sweden in the 1700s actually had a February 30th of 1712. It happened only once, never to happen again, poor February.

J&S together: Wouldn’t it would be cool if you were born on that day

(laughter)

R: Yeah, you never get another birthday

B: Never age, awesome.

E: Stuck in limbo.

S: Did you know that in the Chinese calendar, they have a leap ‘’month’’ that they add every 16 or 17 years?

B: Really?

E: Is it the year of the frog or something?

S: They add an extra month

B: Really? Do you know what that is called?

J: leap month

S: They have a lunisolar calendar, it’s called an ‘embolismic’ month

B: Oh, really, I didn’t hear of that one. The term I came across was ‘intercalation’, which is the insertion of a leap day, week or month. So that would fall under that rubric.

S: Yeah, so this is one of my favorite bits of astronomical trivia: do you know how many times the Earth rotates on its axis in one year.

E: 364 and change?

S: You’ve kind of got the right idea, but,-

B: Yeah, but then there’s a little extra rotation because-

S: Yeah, just the wrong way, 366

E: Oh!

B: Yeah, we actually talked about this

J: Come on, Evan

S: Cos every time- yeah, because as it travels around the Sun, it has to rotate a little bit farther each day, and that adds up to one day. So it actually has to rotate one extra day as it moves round the Sun.

E: Cool

B: Yeah, one thing I’ll throw in, as good as the leap year idea is, and the end of century leap year that Rebecca mentioned, we’re still off by 30 seconds each year. Which isn’t much, but it does add up, and I think the number is 3300 years, in about that time, we’ll be off by a day. So that means the calendar year will have diverged from the solar year by an entire day. So I wonder, if this concept is even around in 3 millenia, will they actually add an extra day then?

R: Actually, I just looked it up, and it was astronomer John Herschel in the 19th century who proposed an extra- skipping a leap day on years that are divisible by 4000.

E: Herschel, good man.

S: Alright, well that’s more than you ever wanted to know about leap year

E: Oh yeah

J: I wish I didn’t ask!

E: It’s also St Oswald’s day, and there’s more

R: It’s also the international day of rare diseases, I believe, which I thought was kind of clever.

J: What, do you hang out with people who have rare diseases and talk about your stuff? What do you do?

R: I think it’s kind of like any other awareness day.

S: Do you know where the national organization of rare diseases has it’s headquarters?

J: Deathville, Wyoming?

S: Nope, New Fairfield, Connecticut

B: What?

J: No shit!

E: Oh!

R: and rare diseases don’t necessarily end in death, so-

S: Yeah, that’s true

R: Just putting that out there

J: Well, just so people know, that’s the town that we grew up in.

S: Alright, Jay, tell us about-

R: Wait! One other thing

(laughter)

S: Oh, god!

R: Quickly, very quickly

E: Very quickly, we can only do this once every four years, folks

R: I just wanted to mention that this year is special because there will also be a leap second introduced on June 30th 2012. We can talk about that closer to then

J: Why don’t they- why leap?

B: I love leap seconds

J: -week, month, year, why don’t they just put them all together? Make it all happen at the same time?

R: Well we’ll talk about it in June

E: Leap time!

News Items

Iceman Genome (6:33)

BBC News: Oetzi the Iceman's nuclear genome gives new insights

S: Alright Jay, tell us about our favorite prehistoric man

J: So you guys know who-

B: Fred! Fred Flintstone

(laughter)

S: He comes from a stone-age family

J: Do you guys know who Oetzi the Iceman is?

B: Yeah

R: Yeah

E: Hootzi?

R: My favorite tattooed ancient dead person.

J: Well, I’ve read a lot about Oetzi recently, and I didn’t know ‘’anything’’ about this guy other than they’d found some frozen dude years and years ago. So here’s a quick one-two. Oetzi the Iceman was the name given to a well preserved, natural mummy of a man that lived about 5,300 years ago. So, Oetzi was found in 1991 in the &Oumltztal Alps on the border between Austria and Italy, by two German tourists. He is Europe’s oldest natural human mummy, and has offered an unprecedented view of chalculithic Europeans. His body and belongings are displayed in the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology in Bolzano, South Tyrol, and every single word I just said I could have mispronounced, and I’m sorry if I did. He was about 1.65m, or 5’5” tall, he weighed about 50kg, or 110 pounds, so he wasn’t a big guy. And estimated to be about 45 years old, and if you haven’t read about him, it’s actually really cool. The things that they found out about this person that used to live by his corpse is pretty amazing, the scientists collected an incredible amount of information on him by studying the contents of his stomach and analyzing his hair and taking samples of pollen that they found all over him and in the food that he ate and the grains that he was eating. So I dare any pseudoscience to try and collect this kind of data with this kind of accuracy.

S: He is the most studied mummy in existence. I mean he’s been having one hi-tech evaluation after the other over the last 20 years.

J: So what’s happening is, up until recently, they knew little about his genetics, but finally, Oetzi’s full genome has been reported in Nature Communications. So his mitochondrial DNA was found and analyzed in 2008, and although this gave them some information, it was nowhere near the complete picture. In this latest study though, they were able to perform next-generation whole-genome sequencing that revealed a much more complete genetic snapshot, found in the nuclei of Oetzi’s cells, so nuclear DNA is rare and typically less well preserved than DNA within the mitochondria. Albert Zinc from the Eurac Institute for mummies said that

"Whole-genome sequencing allows you to sequence the whole DNA out of one sample; that wasn't possible before in the same way.”

J: They now know that he had brown eyes, he’s type-O blood, he was lactose intolerant, and he was predisposed to heart disease-

S: and he had a fabulous singing voice

(laughter)

J: They found all this stuff out, though, just by- they had this advanced testing that they had on this genome sequencing. They also discovered that he had been infected with Lyme disease

S: Oh!

E: Oh!

J: or the Lyme disease bacterium, and that makes him the first documented case of this infection. Which is pretty interesting. And after analyzing anomalies in his DNA, they found that he was more closely related to modern inhabitants of Corsica or Sardinia. They said that it’s more likely that he’s from those places than from the Alps where they found his corpse. And I was wondering if that means that ‘’he’’ himself traveled from those two islands, which can be found nestled between France and Italy, or maybe his ancestors were from there. But, to continue down that same questioning, they found that some of his DNA sequences showed that his ancestors were likely to have migrated from the Middle East. So, going even further back, they can show where his people came from, and how they migrated. And Zink, the scientist I mentioned earlier said they’re only just beginning the analysis of this new data, and that means that there’s a lot more new stuff on the way that we’re going to find out about him.

S: Did you know that the Iceman has tattoos on his body that correspond to acupuncture points

B: Oh no!

R: That’s why I mentioned that earlier.

S: Yeah, think about ‘’that’’. Think about that cultural contamination though. This is a guy from Sardinia, found in the Alps with ... a tradition that we now associate with the Far East, and this really implies that the whole notion of blood-letting versus acupuncture or whatever, these ideas were just floating around Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and they were all shared, and influenced each other, these weren’t, you know, completely separate ideas that were formed independently in isolated cultures, they were really shared ideas among these cultures.

J: That is really cool. You know that, by studying pollen that they found on him, if you read some of the literature here, they were able to tell what time of year he died, and by the way, he was murdered, they found, I don’t know if you guys knew that he was shot by an arrow.

S: Yeah

B: Yeah

E: Well, murdered, it could, it could be… aggravated manslaughter or something

B: The funny thing is, they were trying to determine his cause of death for quite a long time, and then, just by accident, somebody just happened to notice: ‘oh look, there’s an arrowhead in his back’

(laughter)

B: how did they miss that? They did all sorts of x-rays and MRIs and CAT- they did everything on him, and nobody notices an arrowhead stuck in his… latissimus dorsi

E: In his back, too.

S: It was funny.

J: So I will close this segment with Oetzi has chutzpah!

S: You think so?

B: (laughs)

S: We’re gonna hear more stories about him, I mean, he’s still- what an amazing find. And in 20 years of research, unraveling the information from this one find really is an important window into this bit of our past. Alright, let’s move on.

FTL Neutrino Followup (12:26)

Neurologica: FTL Neutrinos? Einstein Can Rest Easy

S: Bob, there’s an important update about a story perhaps we thought was one of, if not ‘’the’’, news story of 2011: the alleged neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. Tell us what’s going on.<!—include links to other transcriptions→

B: So, yeah, we’ve got another important update on what I call ‘one of the biggest and most unlikely to be true science stories of 2011’

(laughter)

B: And I don’t think this is the last we’re gonna hear of this, but, you guys remember, of course, all the ‘neutrinos traveling faster than light’ hubbub from last Fall. It was such a huge, huge item. It seems now that CERN may have uncovered a maximally mundane explanation for their results. Many online accounts, that I have read anyway, ascribe it to something as boring and apparently knuckle-headed as a loose wire. But, as we’ll see, reality is much more interesting and complicated than that. Just real quickly, scientists at CERN last year revealed that they had spent three years shooting a ghostly beam of neutrinos through the Earth from Switzerland to Italy, and they surprisingly and consistently confirmed that the beam arrived 60 nanoseconds ‘’earlier’’ than it should have, meaning that they were traveling faster than the speed of light. And, of course, this should not merely be hard, but downright ‘’impossible’’ according to everything that physics tells us. And most of the scientists, including the CERN researchers themselves, knew this, and much of the scientific discourse on this topic was concerned with reasonable explanations for the anomaly.

Now, it turns out that CERN has continued to investigate this, and they ‘’may’’ have hit upon the problem. What they recently revealed, however, is not as simple as a loose wire as you have been led to believe if you were kinda perusing the news sites discussing this. That’s actually an insulting description of what they uncovered, don’t you think? I mean, don’t you feel really stupid when you’re messing around with an electrical device and you can’t get it to work, and you discover that the plug wasn’t all the way in. Or worse, it’s not plugged in at ‘’all’’, right? It’s something that happens to everybody now and then. And that’s kind of the image that many of the headlines and news reports are conjuring, it’s like, ‘oh, these stupid scientists, they had a loose plug and they didn’t even know it’. But that’s not really what happened at all. So in reality, it wasn’t a loose plug, but a misaligned optical cable. This cable was really important, it sent critical timing signals to the master clock of the experimental set-up. Through extensive detective work, this wasn’t easy at all, they realized that this timing signal would be delayed by minute fractions of a second if it weren’t aligned ‘’perfectly’’. This delay would then cause a misreporting of the neutrino transit time, making them seem faster than they really are. Actually, they don’t know what happened during the years that they were doing these experiments. They don’t know if this optical cable was actually aligned perfectly or not, so they’re not even sure how much of a factor this is.

But that wasn’t even the only potential problem though, the other was an oscillator that was in that same clock, that kept time before and after these timing signals came in. So you’d have these timing signals coming in from the optical cable to make sure everything was synchronized right, and then you had the oscillator who was keeping time in-between these timing signals that would occasionally come in from the optical cable. So the oscillator, unfortunately, seems not to have been the best of time-keepers, it was running a little fast. Now this would ‘’then’’ make the neutrinos seem to take ‘’longer’’ to reach their destination, slowing down their apparent speed. So what we have then, are these two separate sources of potential error that are in opposition to each other. Also, they don’t yet even know what the magnitude of these errors are. So the result then is that there’s an uncertainty as to what the net effect was, you know, these two glitches could have perfectly cancelled each other out. It’s possible, and that would mean that there must be yet another source of error, ‘’or’’ the other possibility is that the neutrinos can really go faster than light, you know, guess which one is most likely, pretty obvious, I think. So this could, of course, mean that the net effect was to slow down, or speed up, the apparent speed of the neutrinos. So the point is, this anomaly has not yet been fully resolved, and there’s definitely more work to be done to actually find out if these two potential problems actually ‘’caused’’ this apparent increase in speed of the neutrinos. So stay tuned yet again for more neutrino stuff coming down the pike this year.

E: I imagine they’re going to re-align, re-calibrate and re-test, and then come up with new results.

B: Yeah, that’s what they’re going to have to do. They’ve got to fix this, see what happens, and do more tests.

J: It’s a good example of the scientific process, right?

E: Oh yeah.

B: Oh my god, it’s such a beautiful example.

J: They were aware that something weird was going on, they didn’t just say, you know ‘hey, look at this’, and then start making products off of their find. You know, they decided that to retest, and then their testing was replicated in other places, and everything, and the truth comes out.

S: Yeah, the bottom line is, to me, now, the error bars ‘’encompass’’ the neutrinos going at the speed of light, right? The speed that we thought they were supposed to go. It’s now just that it ‘’encompasses’’ the right answer. And until those error bars are narrowed, this is now meaningless. The mystery’s gone unless they fix everything, narrow those error bars, and the answer is outside of the range of what current physics can explain. But this essentially erases the claim of faster-than-light neutrinos.

E: Were they wrong to do the initial reporting?

B: No, I think they had vetted it to such a degree, you reach a point where you’re like: ‘Alright, we give up- not ‘’give up’’, but we’ve done a very reasonable amount of testing and verifying and rechecking and all that’, and it was time to bring other people in and start a wider discussion. And that’s fine.

S: Yeah, I think they handled it exactly as they should. They did everything they could that, by themselves when they were exhausted what they could think of, they opened it up to the broader scientific community ‘’mainly’’ with the notion of ‘help us figure out what we did wrong’. And we’ve talked before about the fact that that this is what ‘’happens’’, this is the process of science. The only thing that’s different now, if anything, is that the media is sort of peeking over the shoulder of the scientist and reporting on the process as it’s happening. So now the public is seeing the sausage being made, right? It’s seeing all the messiness, and they’re being scandalized by the fact that scientists are people who make mistakes, and are wrong, and have incomplete knowledge, and all of that stuff. I- my ‘’hope’’ is that eventually, you know, through the efforts of public education about science, and access to information over the internet, that eventually the public will more completely get it. They’ll get the notion that, Ok, this is what happens. And then the next time somebody announces some law-breaking, you know, law of science-breaking discovery, they’ll be more mature in dealing with that news, and go ‘oh, Ok, this probably didn’t just break the laws of physics, it has to be vetted, you know, it has to go through the ‘meat-grinder’ of peer-review etc. etc. They’ll be familiar with the process and they won’t be so scandalized by it, or easily duped by it.