I regret asking the question

I should have known I wouldn’t like the answer. I asked, What kind of ridiculous poison will they ingest next to avoid a simple vaccination?. I already got one answer. Uranium mine offers radiation treatment.

Americans are flocking to defunct uranium mines in Montana for what many believe is a fountain of youth gushing with radioactive gas in defiance of the advice of health officials.

Among them is Brian Tichenor, who drives 1,200 miles each way from his home in Kansas twice a year to breathe and bathe in radon in the hope of reducing the pain from an eye condition.

I’m going to slap myself for asking stupid questions.

Aubrey de Grey exonerated! Not.

I guess the Aubrey de Grey affair, in which he was accused of sexual harrasment and lost his job, has been concluded with the release of the independent investigation’s report. De Grey has his own peculiar twist on it.

Now that the relevant portion of the independent investigator’s work is finished, and especially because her report quoted the full text of the email in question, I am at last in a position to apologise – which I gladly do publicly – to Laura Deming for my email to her in 2012, about which I had forgotten until the investigator reminded me of it. As STAT reported three weeks ago, I consider that that email would have been a mistake even if she had been five years older, because we were in a mentor-mentee relationship. I catgorically deny Laura’s current (though, as she made clear on August 10th, not contemporaneous) view, shared by the investigator, that I sent that email with improper intent – but my email does not become OK just because improper intent is now being misread into it. It’s also no excuse that I had interpreted the email from Laura to which I was replying as light-hearted, rather than as expressing “concerns about mentors doing stuff like that” (as she wrote on August 10th), and allowed myself to be emboldened by it. Laura: I unreservedly apologise.

So only now can he apologize, after the investigators published his offensive email in full. If they hadn’t published it, he wouldn’t need to apologize? It’s nice that he apologizes now, but notice that he says nothing about the final results of the independent investigation, which found him guilty, guilty, guilty. It’s pretty scathing, actually, but I guess he’s in denial.

After a thorough review of the evidence, we make the following findings by a preponderance of the evidence.

First, we find Dr. de Grey purposefully and knowingly disregarded multiple directives (from the acting Executive Director, this investigator, and his own counsel) to retain the confidentiality of the investigation. In his interview, Dr. de Grey not only admitted to this conduct, he made unreasonable efforts to justify it (e.g., downplaying it as a “transgression” that “worked.”)

Second we find Dr. de Grey misrepresented facts to the Recipient. He suggested the investigation concluded Complainant #2’s claims were “100 percent fictitious.” Yet when pressed as to the source of that information, Dr. de Grey acknowledged he extrapolated this interpretation from Fabiny’s comment that he was going to be reinstated. We note in a Facebook post published after his termination on August 21, 2021, Dr. de Grey seemingly acknowledged taking liberty with Fabiny’s comment, characterizing his interpretation of her comment as “exaggerated.” We also note that after Dr. de Grey learned the following day that the investigation had in fact sustained Complainant #2’s claims against him, he made no efforts to correct his earlier misstatement, either to the Recipient or to his Facebook audience (having reposted on August 21, 2021 his original message referring to the claims as “100 percent fictitious.”)

Third, because of the public nature in which this investigation is being played out – including Dr. de Grey’s continued social media comments and his supporters’ prolific responses – we find it reasonable that key witnesses with material information (perhaps even more complainants), would be deterred and intimidated from meeting with the Firm. This deterrence and intimidation could seriously compromise the Firm’s ability to conduct a thorough investigation into ongoing sexual harassment claims, as the Board directed we undertake.

Fourth and similarly, Dr. de Grey’s message to the Recipient – incorrectly declaring the investigation was concluded in his favor – suggests he was privy to details of the investigation before others. Both aspects – that he had advance notice and that it was contrary to the actual findings – inaccurately portray the Firm as lacking impartiality and independence to potential witnesses and parties.

Fifth, we find Complainant #2 reasonably interpreted Dr. de Grey’s message to the Recipient to be a threat to her career. She heard from the Recipient that Dr. de Grey referenced her “career will be over soon.” This is consistent with his actual email. It is undisputed Dr. de Grey made the following statement, suggesting he alone could save her career, but only if she did his bidding: “I find [Complainant #2’s] career is absolutely over as things stand, and the only reason it actually isn’t is because I am a man of honour who refuses to let somebody (especially a meteoric rising star) be burned at the stake while an actual villian gets away scot free and is thereby emboldened.” While Dr. de Grey characterized his proposed course of action in the email to the Recipient as “rescuing” Complainant #2, we do not find this plausible, given the language he used. Dr. de Grey’s message to the Recipient did exactly what the confidentiality admonitions were designed to prevent – attempt to interfere with an investigation by influencing a party’s allegations. Dr. de Grey’s ill-advised message to the Recipient was in fact conveyed to Complainant #2. Indeed, Dr. de Grey intended this course of action by stating, “And you need to tell her so, as probably only you can. Go to it.”

Next, we find Dr. de Grey’s message an attempt to distract from his own conduct – part of which he admitted (sending a sexual message to underage mentee Complainant #1) – and to point to another individual as the “actual villain.” Regardless of anyone else’s motives or conduct in pursuing an investigation, the fact remains that Dr. de Grey is responsible for his own conduct, regardless of how it came to light.

Finally, we find the fact that Dr. de Grey sent the emails to the Recipient from his SRF email account was yet another attempt to unduly influence, at best, and threaten, at worst, the Recipient into taking the actions Dr. de Grey wanted, namely putting pressure on both the Recipient and Complainant #2. In this regard, we note Dr. de Grey’s subject line to the Recipient – “You will thank me.” – suggests Dr. de Grey was doing him a favor by asking him to put pressure on Complainant #2. This can only be interpreted as a demand the Recipient interfere with a confidential investigation and unduly influence a witness.

In closure, Dr. de Grey’s unapologetic interference with the investigation by reaching out to a witness through a third party, and repeatedly posting about the investigation, has generated angry attacks on the accusers and perpetuated misinformation (i.e., that he has been exonerated). This compromises the Firm’s ability to retain credibility and trust with witnesses. We find his attempt to influence a party may chill, and likely has chilled, others from coming forward; was an effort to alter and sidetrack the investigation; and, was reasonably threatening to a party.

De Grey’s response to all that was to announce, with a sigh of relief, that he can finally apologize to one of his accusers for one thing, while denying everything else, in spite of the fact that the investigation found him clearly in the wrong on everything. Furthermore, the investigators noticed all the squirrely stuff he was doing on social media to mislead and lie…it was danged obvious to everyone, except of course, to his cult-like fans who truly believe that Aubrey de Grey is going to cure death.

Don’t drag me into your petty squabbles, loons

I got the strangest email from Ted Steele, one of those panspermia kooks, addressed to Paul Davies, complaining about priority. Why he wrote to me, I don’t know — I’m not a fan of either of them. It’s just so odd what set these guys off.

Here it is.

Dear Paul :

Scientific Behaviour of Paul Davies

I am writing to you directly and to ASU President Professor Michael Crow, and copied to many other scientific colleagues who know exactly what I am talking about [I guess that’s me?]

We are living through our Covid-era where outright lies and misinformation is being pushed on us on a grand scale- by the main stream media in lock step with BigPharma, Big Government and, and in many distressing situations, as we have here, by senior scientists who operate at the sophisticated extreme end of dishonesty, knavery and thievery.

There is a news article in The Guardian newspaper, and, as I now understand it , also promulgated in some low grade science weeklies, which paints Arizona State University’s Professor Paul Davies as the essential founder of the new scientific disciple of Astrobiology.

Viruses may exist ‘elsewhere in the universe’, warns scientist (msn.com)

The article quotes Davies on the possibility of extraterrestrial viruses, which he thinks is possible (sure, why not), but that we shouldn’t worry about them, and he says only a few batty things like this:

A friend of mine thinks most, but certainly a significant fraction, of the human genome is actually of viral origin, said Davies, whose new book, What’s Eating the Universe?, is published this week.

I think the offense to Steele, though, is that the article calls Davies “an astrobiologist”. Not the essential founder of the new scientific disciple of Astrobiology, just “an astrobiologist”. This is unforgivable.

This is scientific misconduct pure and simple – somewhat more sophisticated than many, but misconduct nevertheless. The published scientific record in science is inviolate, it cannot be messed with.

The strong objective scientific concept that the universe is teeming with life and the marshalling of the key evidence, experimental data and observations- and their appropriate critical analysis and interpretation, can be fairly traced and attributed directly to Professor Sir Fred Hoyle and Professor N Chandra Wickramasinghe. These two great scientists are in the that special home that human history knows as the “ Pantheon”.

The Pantheon? Really? I’ve been calling Wickramasinghe the boss of the Panspermia Mafia, but maybe I have to upgrade “mafia” to “cult”.

You allude to Fred Hoyle in your article, but I could not figure out why then there was no proper attribution of scientific priority, particularly because at your Wikipedia site you make the following strong claim in your CV

“In 1970, he completed his PhD under the supervision of Michael J. Seaton and Sigurd Zienau at University College London.[1][2] He then carried out postdoctoral research under Fred Hoyle at the University of Cambridge. “

This claim is then repeated in the Wiki side box.

Why then not cite all the prior body of work by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe and colleagues if you were one of Fred’s post docs?

This is a strange argument. That is what Wikipedia says, but Wikipedia is not Paul Davies CV. If you look at Davies’ actual CV, he doesn’t mention being a post-doc with Hoyle. That’s a curious insertion by who ever did create that Wikipedia entry.

But also, even if he had been Hoyle’s post-doc, that association does not imply that one has to “cite all the prior body of work” in a short article in the Guardian.

But you see that statement in your CV is a lie i.e. untrue, it is bogus. It may well be a real fantasy in Paul Davies’ mind, but it is a lie nevertheless. Fred would be turning in his grave. As I understand it he told you to go away.

Oooh. Oooh. Do tell. Spill that tea.

If Hoyle told Davies to go away, that would somewhat enhance Davies’ reputation to my mind. Ted Steele, though, must be in his dotage to take such offense at a wiki article that Davies did not write and to be so outraged that a journalist clumped Davies in the same category as Hoyle and Wickramasinghe. He’s just beginning to get worked up.

There are two fundamental conditions that distinguish true scientists from the run of the mill ordinary behaviour, which all real scientists learn as they develop and continue in their search for the truth:

• When the facts change, you change your mind.

• Report and tell the Truth – do not lie and cheat.

These two guiding principles of course are also being torn up on a grand scale right now. But they still need to be restated, and when transgressed, firmly called out :

Paul Davies… you are simply a grub criminal trying to make a fast buck.

The whole matter is really quite disgusting – but has to be exposed for what it is.

Then he goes on to include a link to all of Chandra Wickramasinghe’s articles, because apparently that is what one must do nowadays.

It’s amazing what petty bullshit will trigger the Panspermia Cult. ‘Oh no, you didn’t praise Hoyle and Wickramasinghe enough!’ I also wouldn’t be surprised if Steele and Wickramasinghe and gang are prepared to claim that SARS-CoV-2 fell from outer space. Oh, wait, he already has.

I’m hoping for a Kilkenny-cats-style outcome.

Today I learned about Terrain Theory

I’m so sorry. I stumbled into a den of rabid naturopaths who were just oozing this malarkey to justify their beliefs, and now I’m exposing you to it. It’s just a quick exposure, you’ll develop resistance quickly enough.

First I have to point out that calling something a theory doesn’t make it true. A valid theory has to be supported by a wide base of observation and experimental evidence — you don’t get to label something as a theory because you think it would dignify your brain fart. I will point out that Haeckel’s recapitulation theory was a theory, too, which was built on nothing but speculation and misinterpretation, and it collapsed thoroughly.

Secondly, theories are not sanctified by attaching a 19th century scientist’s name to it, allowing you to ignore all work ever since. Haeckel was, I think, a pretty good guy, but that doesn’t make his ideas valid. Likewise (and this is a common creationist mistake), Darwin wasn’t the be-all and end-all of evolutionary thinking, and glorifying or trashing Charles Darwin has no effect on whether evolution is true or not.

I mention these two things because they are the totality of the evidence for Terrain Theory: it is called a theory, therefore it is a theory, and it was formulated by a 19th century scientist named Antoine Béchamp, a rival of Louis Pasteur, and Pasteur was a fraud who recanted Germ Theory on his deathbed, therefore Béchamp wins. That’s kind of it. It’s an archaic hypothesis that did not survive the testing grounds of science a hundred years ago, but now it’s been resurrected by anti-vax loons who are waving the banner of Béchamp and Terrain Theory, never mind the evidence.

So what is it? Here’s one definition from a Dr Karen (note: linking to her site is not an endorsement. She’s a kook who sells nutritional supplements and cleanses and superfoods, all the latest grifter buzzwords).

Terrain theory states that diseases are results of our internal environment and its ability to maintain homeostasis against outside threats. Terrain theory believes if an individual maintains a healthy terrain, it can handle outside invaders or threats which cause diseases. When terrain is weak, it favors the microorganisms. Hence, the health depends on the quality of an individuals’ terrain.

She’s understating it. Most scientists and doctors wouldn’t find the overall idea objectionable: your ability to resist disease is going to be affected by your general health, that poor nutrition will impair your ability to fight off bacteria and viruses, and hey you, get out and exercise more and eat a healthy diet. That aspect is fine. Where Terrain Theory goes off the rails is when it becomes a complete denial of the role of microorganisms in disease. Polio, for instance, isn’t caused by a virus, the virus is just a symptom of the lousy condition your body is in. Cancer isn’t caused by mutations in cells that lead to overproliferation, it’s a product of your pH. You’ve probably seen garbage like this — cancer cures that are all about eating the right foods to adjust your body chemistry, or purging yourself of toxins with magical cleanses.

Here’s another quack, “Dr” Young (again, linking is not an endorsement, Young is an evil creep. See Gorski’s take-down as a “cleanse”).

Béchamp was able to see bacteria, and other nano materials emerge from the cell, as opposed to coming
from outside the cell, like most people have been taught.

Dr. Young doesn’t believe that corona, ebola, or zika can infect a human being, let alone exist at all.
“For you are dust, and to dust you shall return” Genesis 3:19

Béchamp proposed that the environment of the body, determines what can live and not live. Young says that the source of common disease, is chemical poisoning, which can come in many forms, such as pesticides, herbicides, genetically modified foods, and vaccines. All of which, do not come from nature. They are produced by the military – industrial – pharmaceutical complex.

There’s a lot of familiar tropes in Young’s “work”. There’s the referring to himself in the third person, the false authority of a title (he has a doctorate from a diploma mill), the irrelevant Biblical reference, the pretense of idolizing a long-dead scientist, the denial of all contemporary evidence, and the choice of convenient scapegoats, the military–industrial–pharmaceutical complex and Louis Pasteur. He also cites this weird claim that Pasteur recanted germ theory on his deathbed. What is it with these people? They also claim Darwin recanted evolution on his deathbed (he didn’t), as if any of that would matter. Both Pasteur and Darwin died quietly in their old age after long illnesses; they had more important things on their mind, and weren’t busily marshaling arguments for an academic debate. They were busy dying. The people who cite Béchamp are quacks.

I expect we’ll hear more about Terrain Theory now and in the future. The anti-vax brigade will rush to endorse anything that sounds sciencey, while doing their damnedest to ignore 150 years of good, solid, evidence-based science that shows that germ theory is still valid.

Sheesh. If you’d told me 40 years ago that in the far future, in the 2020s, I’d have to defend the germ theory of disease, of all things, I’d have to ask what cataclysmic disaster had destroyed civilization and reduced us to a post-apocalyptic wilderness. But no! All it took was Fox News and the Republican party to shatter the public understanding of science.

By the way, at least Robert Young was convicted of multiple counts of grand theft and conspiring to practice medicine without a license a few years ago. So I guess some vestiges of justice still linger in our desolation.

Also, not this Robert Young.

I get email

Oh, look. I got an invitation.

Invitation to Publish a Critique: Fungi/Tube Worms on Mars

Dear Dr. Myers

You have been cited in news articles as stating you believe Dr. Joseph’s work is harmful to science and to the field of astrobiology. We are aware you are a leading opponent of all claims favoring extraterrestrial life. The Journal of Astrobiology is very interested in publishing your views

The Editors of the Journal of Astrobiology (JOA) are inviting you to submit a critical analysis of the claims and recent findings of Dr. Rhawn Joseph and his team, RE: Fungi on Mars. Tube Worms on Mars.

If you accept our invitation, the critical analysis must be scholarly, fully referenced, and less than 2000 words, including Abstract, Title, Figure Captions.

We are aware of the insults, false statements and personal and hominem attacks directed at Dr. Joseph by some science news reporters. We are confident, if you should decide to submit a critical analysis, your article will be scholarly and factual.

Your article will be peer reviewed. However, be assured: JOA is interested in publishing your views.

There are no page or publication charges. All articles are published online, open access, and authors have the right to reprint and post their article at Researchgate and their website.

Sincerely,

Sheila Van Akker
Managing Editor
JournalofAstrobiology.com

Right. Please write us a review that doesn’t point out the idiocy of our work, and dignifies it by treating it as if if were serious scholarly research.

No. It’s garbage.

Also, I’m not a leading opponent of all claims favoring extraterrestrial life. I’m just someone who can clearly see when a pseudoscientific fraud is trying to bamboozle the public.

Bumps and lumps and crannies, oh my

I’ve been informed by Spirobranchus that a preprint of Rhawn Joseph’s latest ravings is available. How could you? I have baby spiders that require tending, and you serve up this colossal distraction?

At least it’s exactly what I predicted: page after page of color glossy photos with circles and arrows. Unfortunately, he missed the mark on making a homage to Alice’s Restaurant, though, because it’s not 28 photos…it’s FORTY ONE PAGES OF NASA PHOTOS. 41. He really thinks mind-numbing repetition will make his point.

Here’s an example from page 15. Can you find the tube worms?

I know I can’t. Even the red circles don’t help. So let’s look at page 20, where the red rectangle will help us focus on the really important features in the photograph.

Hey, man, have you ever like really looked at dirt? It’ll like blow your mind, man.

You know what else is really annoying? None of these images have legends or captions, they don’t even have figure numbers. The body text mentions that the results are summarized in Table 3, but there are no tables in the preprint. The text also references figures 5, 7, and XX, and that’s it — how do you justify 41 pages of figures without even mentioning their existence? This is particularly galling because I tell my students, who have to write simple little lab reports, that every figure must have an explanatory caption, they must all be numbered, and each figure has to be referenced in the body text. If it isn’t cited or explained, I get to just rip it out and ignore it. I have failed student work that commits even a fraction of the sins in this work that the author thinks is ready for peer review. This paper is a very, very bad rough draft by an exceptionally lazy and undisciplined author, with essentially no thought about the data, and no real analysis.

Further, the paper has 40 references listed; 22 of them are by Rhawn Joseph. Let’s add that the author is lazy, undisciplined, and exceptionally vain.

Are you ready for the conclusion?

If the specimens identified in this report are alive, fossilized, mineralized, or dormant is unknown. That they are biological is obvious. Thus, the specimens presented in this report serve as further evidence that there is and was life on Mars.

Jesus. None of the photos show anything that is biological, obvious or otherwise. This thing is an unprofessional mess that wouldn’t even pass muster in an introductory high school biology class.

Another bad anti-vax paper sidles into the literature

If you’ve paid any attention to anti-vaxxers, or are on the mailing list of some annoying conservative, you may have heard this one: there is a peer-reviewed study in an established science journal that shows that vaccines kill almost as many people as the pandemic. Oh no, you might say, maybe I shouldn’t get vaccinated if doing so has a significant risk of death!

Unfortunately, as I’ve said before, sometimes complete bollocks slithers through the peer-review process, and this is no exception. It’s such utter garbage that the board of the guilty journal is experiencing a wave of resignations in protest

Several reputed virologists and vaccinologists have resigned as editors of the journal Vaccines to protest its 24 June publication of a peer-reviewed article that misuses data to conclude that “for three deaths prevented by [COVID-19] vaccination, we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination.”

Since Friday, at least six scientists have resigned positions as associate or section editors with Vaccines, including Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Katie Ewer, an immunologist at the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford who was on the team that developed the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Their resignations were first reported by Retraction Watch.

It’s a case study in how to destroy a journal’s reputation with a single stupid paper.

The paper is a case of “garbage in, garbage out,” says Helen Petousis-Harris, a vaccinologist who directs the Vaccine Datalink and Research Group at the University of Auckland and who also resigned as a Vaccines editor after reading the paper. Diane Harper, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who was founding editor-in-chief of Vaccines, also resigned, as did Paul Licciardi, an immunologist at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Parkville, Australia, and Andrew Pekosz, a respiratory virologist at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The resignations began Friday, the day after the paper was published. By early Monday, Fanny Fang, the journal’s managing editor, wrote to the editorial board members that Vaccines—a reputable open-access journal launched in 2013 by Basel, Switzerland–based publisher MDPI—had opened an investigation into the paper. “We are treating this case with the utmost seriousness and are committed to swiftly correcting the scientific record,” she wrote.

The first obvious problem is that none of the paper’s authors have any expertise in the field. Further, the reviewers who let it through are similarly bereft of experience. Despite the fact that the journal is titled Vaccine, apparently some of the editors are also lacking in relevant knowledge.

None of the paper’s authors is trained in vaccinology, virology, or epidemiology. They are: Harald Walach, a clinical psychologist and science historian by training who describes himself as a health researcher at Poznan University of Medical Sciences in Poland; Rainer Klement, a physicist who studies ketogenic diets in cancer treatment at the Leopoldina Hospital in Schweinfurt, Germany; and Wouter Aukema, an independent data scientist in Hoenderloo, Netherlands.

The three peer reviewers on the paper, two of them anonymous, did not offer any substantial criticism of the authors’ methodology in these brief reviews. One of them, Anne Ulrich, a chemist who directs the Institute of Biological Interfaces and is chair of biochemistry at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, wrote that the authors’ analysis “is performed responsibly … and without methodological flaws … and the results were interpreted with the necessary caveats.”

To make it worse, the authors relied on data from a Dutch study…and the authors of that study are saying that their work was misused and inappropriately interpreted.

On 25 June, the day after the paper’s publication, Lareb’s head of science and research, Eugène van Puijenbroek, sent an email to Vaccines’s editors, criticizing the paper and requesting a correction or retraction.

“A reported event that occurred after vaccination is … not necessarily being caused by the vaccination, although our data was presented as being causally related by the authors,” van Puijenbroek wrote. “Suggesting all reports with a fatal outcome to be causally related is far from truth.”

He also took the authors to task for stating in the paper that “the Dutch [registry] data, especially the fatal cases, were certified by medical specialists.”

“This point is simply incorrect,” van Puijenbroek wrote. “The authors seem to refer to [Lareb’s] policy plan. However, in this plan (in Dutch), it is nowhere mentioned that the reports are ‘certified’ by medical specialists.”

Woopsie. The paper has since been retracted, and the journal is doing an in-house investigation of how this screwup occurred, but it looks to me like a whole lot of the people competent to carry out such an investigation have up and quit altogether. And the damage has been done. The anti-vaxxers will continue to cite the paper — they still think Andrew Wakefield’s work was credible — and they’ll scream “Cover up!” at the retraction.

Marshrooms and araneiforms, oh my: the ongoing absurdity of Rhawn Joseph

Rhawn Joseph is back. Two years ago, I posted a comprehensive list of my engagements with that fraud, so if you want, you can review it there. There’s a lot. It’s all very silly. I even made a video about his claim to have found Marshrooms. Last year, I made a post about his latest publication, in which I wrote, “Let’s hope this is the end of Joseph and Wickramasinghe.” Hah! Right.

Here, in May of 2021, he has again published a Martian mushroom paper titled Fungi on Mars? Evidence of Growth and Behavior From Sequential Images in the journal Advances in Microbiology. It’s 63 pages long! Of course, most of it is photos cribbed from NASA that are blown up and processed to make his imaginary point. To quote some legitimate scientists:

Michael Brown, an astronomer at Monash University in Australia, said “there’s some pretty horrible over-interpretation of blurry photos,” while Gretchen Benedix, a geophysicist at Curtin University in Australia, noted “increasing image sizes to investigate the objects of interest does not change the resolution of the image and therefore does not give better analysis of the objects of interest.”

Rocco Mancinelli, the editor in chief of the International Journal of Astrobiology, called the science and logic “completely flawed,” and said he would recommend it be rejected for publication.

Yet various versions of this garbage hypothesis were and are being published. Here’s the abstract for Rhawn Joseph’s latest:

Fungi thrive in radiation intense environments. Sequential photos document that fungus-like Martian specimens emerge from the soil and increase in size, including those resembling puffballs (Basidiomycota). After obliteration of spherical specimens by the rover wheels, new sphericals-some with stalks-appeared atop the crests of old tracks. Sequences document that thousands of black arctic “araneiforms” grow up to 300 meters in the Spring and disappear by Winter; a pattern repeated each Spring and which may represent massive colonies of black fungi, mould, lichens, algae, methanogens and sulfur reducing species. Black fungi-bacteria-like specimens also appeared atop the rovers. In a series of photographs over three days (Sols) white amorphous specimens within a crevice changed shape and location then disappeared. White protoplasmic-mycelium-like-tendrils with fruiting-body-like appendages form networks upon and above the surface; or increase in mass as documented by sequential photographs. Hundreds of dimpled donut-shaped “mushroom-like” formations approximately 1mm in size are adjacent or attached to these mycelium-like complexes. Additional sequences document that white amorphous masses beneath rock-shelters increase in mass, number, or disappear and that similar white-fungus-like specimens appeared inside an open rover compartment. Comparative statistical analysis of a sample of 9 spherical specimens believed to be fungal “puffballs” photographed on Sol 1145 and 12 specimens that emerged from beneath the soil on Sol 1148 confirmed the nine grew significantly closer together as their diameters expanded and some showed evidence of movement. Cluster analysis and a paired sample ‘t’ test indicates a statistically significant size increase in the average size ratio over all comparisons between and within groups (P = 0.011). Statistical comparisons indicates that arctic “araneiforms” significantly increased in length in parallel following an initial growth spurt. Although similarities in morphology are not proof of life, growth, movement, and changes in shape and location constitute behavior and support the hypothesis there is life on Mars.

I admit, I perked up at the mention of araneiforms — that’s spider-like shapes. It’s not about spiders on Mars, darn it, it’s about these complex dendritic shapes that appear and disappear on the Martian landscape. Joseph wants to claim that that is evidence of fungal life, based on over-interpretation of photos from Mars rovers. It’s not. No one is denying that there are ongoing changes on Mars — seasonal variations, windstorms, erosion, shifting dunes, all that sort of geological stuff. The question is whether it is caused by biology, and so far, the answer is it is not. There are better explanations for the araneiforms, for instance: The formation of araneiforms by carbon dioxide venting and vigorous sublimation dynamics under martian atmospheric pressure.

The local redistribution of granular material by sublimation of the southern seasonal CO2 ice deposit is one of the most active surface shaping processes on Mars today. This unique geomorphic mechanism is hypothesised to be the cause of the dendritic, branching, spider-like araneiform terrain and associated fans and spots—features which are native to Mars and have no Earth analogues. However, there is a paucity of empirical data to test the validity of this hypothesis. Additionally, it is unclear whether some araneiform patterns began as radial and then grew outward, or whether troughs connected at mutual centres over time. Here we present the results of a suite of laboratory experiments undertaken to investigate if the interaction between a sublimating CO2 ice overburden containing central vents and a porous, mobile regolith will mobilise grains from beneath the ice in the form of a plume to generate araneiform patterns. We quantify the branching and area of the dendritic features that form. We provide the first observations of plume activity via CO2 sublimation and consequent erosion to form araneiform features. We show that CO2 sublimation can be a highly efficient agent of sediment transport under present day Martian atmospheric pressure and that morphometry is governed by the Shields parameter.

You’ve got a thin atmosphere where the repeated freezing and sublimation of carbon dioxide is a major factor, and you want to claim that mushrooms are thriving to the point that they spring up overnight in the tracks of Mars rovers? OK, pull the other one, guy.

By the way, Joseph still touts his affiliation as being with cosmology.com, his vanity website where he publishes articles about the Quantum Physics of Time Travel and the consciousness of the universe. That’s the fake journal I trashed, which he then put up for sale for $100,000. If you check it out now, he’s selling it for $50,000. I’m waiting for the price to get down around $1.98, and then I’ll snap it up.

Or…hey, Rhawn, I’ll take the responsibility off your hands right now, no charge, and keep the site up as a historical curiosity, with maybe just a little front-page editorial commentary. You know it’s an embarrassment, just dragging you down, pass it on to someone who’ll keep it alive a little longer.

Wanking over the Drake Equation, again

Oh, this is so silly. It’s a paper titled A Statistical Estimation of the Occurrence of Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the Milky Way Galaxy. All it is is an exercise in modeling the hypothetical distribution of hypothetical intelligent life in the galaxy, taking into account the age distribution of stars.

In the field of Astrobiology, the precise location, prevalence and age of potential
extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) have not been explicitly explored. Here, we address these
inquiries using an empirical galactic simulation model to analyze the spatial-temporal variations
and the prevalence of potential ETI within the Galaxy. This model estimates the occurrence of ETI,
providing guidance on where to look for intelligent life in the Search for ETI (SETI) with a set of
criteria, including well-established astrophysical properties of the Milky Way. Further, typically
overlooked factors such as the process of abiogenesis, different evolutionary timescales and
potential self-annihilation are incorporated to explore the growth propensity of ETI. We examine
three major parameters: 1) the likelihood rate of abiogenesis (λA); 2) evolutionary timescales (Tevo);
and 3) probability of self-annihilation of complex life (Pann). We found Pann to be the most
influential parameter determining the quantity and age of galactic intelligent life. Our model
simulation also identified a peak location for ETI at an annular region approximately 4 kpc from
the Galactic center around 8 billion years (Gyrs), with complex life decreasing temporally and
spatially from the peak point, asserting a high likelihood of intelligent life in the galactic inner
disk. The simulated age distributions also suggest that most of the intelligent life in our galaxy are
young, thus making observation or detection difficult.

<sigh>. Why? I sympathize with the idea of having fun with math, but the Drake equation is simple-minded algebra, not particularly interesting, and isn’t going to produce testable results.The authors seem to have confused their model with reality. This makes no sense:

We also concluded that at the current time of the study, most intelligent life in the Galaxy is
younger than 0.5 Gyr, with values of probability parameter for self-annihilation between 0 – 0.01;
with a relatively higher value of the annihilation parameter (≥ 0.1), most intelligent life is younger
than 0.01 Gyr. As we cannot assume a low probability of annihilation, it is possible that intelligent
life elsewhere in the Galaxy is still too young to be observed by us. Therefore, our findings can
imply that intelligent life may be common in the Galaxy but is still young, supporting the optimistic
aspect for the practice of SETI. Our results also suggest that our location on Earth is not within the
region where most intelligent life is settled, and SETI practices need to be closer to the inner
Galaxy, preferably at the annulus 4 kpc from the Galactic Center.

But…but…they’re talking about the parameters of their simulation! Their “probability parameter for self-annihilation” is something they set. All of the numbers they plug in are guesstimates, with varying degrees of reasonable justification. Of course they make an optimistic conclusion about SETI! But why should anyone accept their conclusions about an appropriate region for searching for intelligent life? Fudge their parameters a little more and you could shift the zone of likelihood where ever you want. They’ve added nothing to our understanding of the universe, unless you think that multiplying a bunch of numbers by a different bunch of numbers giving you a new result is earthshaking.

I really have to ask…why don’t reviewers simply stamp papers that are all about manipulating the Drake equation with a big red REJECT label? It would save them time and reduce the clutter in the scientific literature. Is there any value in YAWOD (Yet Another Wank Over Drake)? Who finds these informative?