Summer Student’s EEG Research Continues to Develop at ARL

Ben Burke’s summer project at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory focused on the development of a phantom head for testing electroencephalography, or EEG headsets. EEG is the process of measuring electrical activity on the scalp to determine brain function. Shown with Burke (center) are his mentors, Alfred Yu (left) and Dave Hairston.

By Joyce M. Conant, ARL Public Affairs

Ben Burke’s College Qualified Leadership, or CQL, internship at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Human Research and Engineering Directorate came to an end this summer when he returned to college at the University of Maryland, College Park, but his project at ARL continues to develop.

Burke’s project focused on the development of a phantom head for testing electroencephalography, or EEG headsets. EEG is the process of measuring electrical activity on the scalp to determine brain function.

Burke, who is majoring in biological sciences with a possible minor in neuroscience, was mentored by Drs. W. David Hairston and Alfred Yu – both of whom are in ARL’s Translational Neuroscience Branch.

“The goal of this project was to design and fabricate a molded human head out of ballistics gel. The mold is based on an MR (magnetic resonance) image of one of our lab members, with some of the facial features anonymized. This image was used to 3D print an inverse mold, which also contains a specially designed base containing wires to serve as internal electrical sites inside of the head,” said Hairston. “Since ballistics gel is grossly similar to organic tissue in its conductance profile, the head can then be used as a test fixture with our EEG equipment either to test the equipment’s function, model different sources of environmental noise and how it affects the equipment, or verify different kinds of algorithms that we use for processing or analyzing data.”

Hairston said the team had to rely on collecting EEG data from a person. He indicated this is quite inconvenient for people as they have to sit still for long periods and they cannot predict what the signals will actually look like. So as a result, they started a long-term effort on developing a so-called ‘phantom’ device to replace the human head for testing equipment and algorithms and to serve as an ‘ideal’ platform.

So with that, Burke, along with his mentors, decided to try something different – develop a phantom device out of gelatin.

“My mentors and I chose to make the phantom head out of gelatin as it simulates the physical properties of the human head and can conduct electricity. We created the head by designing and 3D printing a mold and base combination, using a 3D printer from VTD [Vehicle Technology Directorate] for this step, and by instrumenting wiring through the base and extending into the head in order to send electrical current through it,” said Burke.

Burke described the process in more detail and spoke of how he worked with variety of directorates within ARL to accomplish his goals.

“We experimented with various types of gelatin in order to determine the ideal gelatin. We chose to go with organic ballistics gelatin we received from SLAD [Survivability/Lethality Analysis Directorate] for our phantom head. I manipulated different concentrations of the ballistics gelatin, doping (adding) different amounts of salt to these concentrations to increase phantom head conductivity and lower electrical resistance in the gelatin,” explained Burke.

Burke continued and explained his involvement with ARL’s Weapons and Materials Research Directorate.

“We collaborated with WMRD [Weapons and Materials Research Directorate] during this stage, receiving help with the process of doping conductive filaments into the gelatin. We poured the gelatin into the sealed mold we have set up and, after letting it sit in a fridge overnight, we cracked open the mold in order to obtain our phantom head. The next stage of our project from here will focus on using synthetic ballistics gelatin, largely because it has a longer lifespan than the organic gelatin that we have been using so far,” said Burke.

Hairston expanded on the involvement of others within ARL who were instrumental to the project.

“We worked with multiple groups across ARL’s directorates,” said Hairston. “SLAD researchers (John Polesne, Bill Mermegan and Mike Kilduff) provided ballistic gel for our testing, and served as a deep well of institutional knowledge on mixing and forming ballistic gel. Another group of SLAD researchers (Charles Kennedy, Patrick Gillich, Kevin Jubb) helped us acquire a CT scan of our finished product, which allowed us to accurately characterize the electrode placement within the mold. Dr. Randy Mrozek brainstormed with Ben about potential projects to pursue, and has provided his time and expertise to mentor Ben in fabricating new synthetic, conductive gelatins for the next generation of phantom heads. Mr. Geoff Slipher helped us set up test equipment for determining the electrical properties of these gelatins, in order to compare them to human skin.”

Yu further explained Burke’s contribution.

“Ben’s specific contribution was to determine a more cost-effective and easy method for creating a phantom head that can serve as a workable solution in the meantime – one that even cash-strapped neuroscience labs can easily and reliably follow,” said Yu. “We think this has the potential to become a standard device in the EEG labs across the world. In particular, he was working on the design and initial fabrication of a ballistics gelatin-based model with embedded wiring to simulate brain activity.”

Burke said he enjoyed the opportunities he received and loved the exposure he got at ARL.

“My favorite part of the summer was getting exposure to various different programs at ARL. While I mainly focused on neuroscience, I also engaged in work that touched on different disciplines that also related to our work. I really am appreciative and thankful of the opportunity to work here this summer. Getting to work in world-class research facilities and with top scientists was a fantastic opportunity that most people my age do not get to experience, and I was very fortunate to have had this experience,” said Burke.

Burke added, “I would like to thank my mentors for helping and teaching me this summer, as well as to ARL for providing me with the opportunity to work here.”

Yu commended Burke on his accomplishments and said he was instrumental part of the team.

“We had been toying with this idea for a while, but did not have the impetus or manpower to just try it out. Ben did a great job of asking the right questions and working out the details via careful lab work,” said Yu. “Without his efforts this summer, this idea would not have gone very far. Ben served as a critical motivator for pushing the project from an idea to a tangible product with real applications. His ability to work independently on a wide variety of tasks also gave us the leverage to go to other folks to ask for help and resources – Ben basically helped tie together an inter-disciplinary team of ARL researchers to work together on a practical problem.”

from Armed with Science http://ift.tt/20fUMPH

Ben Burke’s summer project at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory focused on the development of a phantom head for testing electroencephalography, or EEG headsets. EEG is the process of measuring electrical activity on the scalp to determine brain function. Shown with Burke (center) are his mentors, Alfred Yu (left) and Dave Hairston.

By Joyce M. Conant, ARL Public Affairs

Ben Burke’s College Qualified Leadership, or CQL, internship at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Human Research and Engineering Directorate came to an end this summer when he returned to college at the University of Maryland, College Park, but his project at ARL continues to develop.

Burke’s project focused on the development of a phantom head for testing electroencephalography, or EEG headsets. EEG is the process of measuring electrical activity on the scalp to determine brain function.

Burke, who is majoring in biological sciences with a possible minor in neuroscience, was mentored by Drs. W. David Hairston and Alfred Yu – both of whom are in ARL’s Translational Neuroscience Branch.

“The goal of this project was to design and fabricate a molded human head out of ballistics gel. The mold is based on an MR (magnetic resonance) image of one of our lab members, with some of the facial features anonymized. This image was used to 3D print an inverse mold, which also contains a specially designed base containing wires to serve as internal electrical sites inside of the head,” said Hairston. “Since ballistics gel is grossly similar to organic tissue in its conductance profile, the head can then be used as a test fixture with our EEG equipment either to test the equipment’s function, model different sources of environmental noise and how it affects the equipment, or verify different kinds of algorithms that we use for processing or analyzing data.”

Hairston said the team had to rely on collecting EEG data from a person. He indicated this is quite inconvenient for people as they have to sit still for long periods and they cannot predict what the signals will actually look like. So as a result, they started a long-term effort on developing a so-called ‘phantom’ device to replace the human head for testing equipment and algorithms and to serve as an ‘ideal’ platform.

So with that, Burke, along with his mentors, decided to try something different – develop a phantom device out of gelatin.

“My mentors and I chose to make the phantom head out of gelatin as it simulates the physical properties of the human head and can conduct electricity. We created the head by designing and 3D printing a mold and base combination, using a 3D printer from VTD [Vehicle Technology Directorate] for this step, and by instrumenting wiring through the base and extending into the head in order to send electrical current through it,” said Burke.

Burke described the process in more detail and spoke of how he worked with variety of directorates within ARL to accomplish his goals.

“We experimented with various types of gelatin in order to determine the ideal gelatin. We chose to go with organic ballistics gelatin we received from SLAD [Survivability/Lethality Analysis Directorate] for our phantom head. I manipulated different concentrations of the ballistics gelatin, doping (adding) different amounts of salt to these concentrations to increase phantom head conductivity and lower electrical resistance in the gelatin,” explained Burke.

Burke continued and explained his involvement with ARL’s Weapons and Materials Research Directorate.

“We collaborated with WMRD [Weapons and Materials Research Directorate] during this stage, receiving help with the process of doping conductive filaments into the gelatin. We poured the gelatin into the sealed mold we have set up and, after letting it sit in a fridge overnight, we cracked open the mold in order to obtain our phantom head. The next stage of our project from here will focus on using synthetic ballistics gelatin, largely because it has a longer lifespan than the organic gelatin that we have been using so far,” said Burke.

Hairston expanded on the involvement of others within ARL who were instrumental to the project.

“We worked with multiple groups across ARL’s directorates,” said Hairston. “SLAD researchers (John Polesne, Bill Mermegan and Mike Kilduff) provided ballistic gel for our testing, and served as a deep well of institutional knowledge on mixing and forming ballistic gel. Another group of SLAD researchers (Charles Kennedy, Patrick Gillich, Kevin Jubb) helped us acquire a CT scan of our finished product, which allowed us to accurately characterize the electrode placement within the mold. Dr. Randy Mrozek brainstormed with Ben about potential projects to pursue, and has provided his time and expertise to mentor Ben in fabricating new synthetic, conductive gelatins for the next generation of phantom heads. Mr. Geoff Slipher helped us set up test equipment for determining the electrical properties of these gelatins, in order to compare them to human skin.”

Yu further explained Burke’s contribution.

“Ben’s specific contribution was to determine a more cost-effective and easy method for creating a phantom head that can serve as a workable solution in the meantime – one that even cash-strapped neuroscience labs can easily and reliably follow,” said Yu. “We think this has the potential to become a standard device in the EEG labs across the world. In particular, he was working on the design and initial fabrication of a ballistics gelatin-based model with embedded wiring to simulate brain activity.”

Burke said he enjoyed the opportunities he received and loved the exposure he got at ARL.

“My favorite part of the summer was getting exposure to various different programs at ARL. While I mainly focused on neuroscience, I also engaged in work that touched on different disciplines that also related to our work. I really am appreciative and thankful of the opportunity to work here this summer. Getting to work in world-class research facilities and with top scientists was a fantastic opportunity that most people my age do not get to experience, and I was very fortunate to have had this experience,” said Burke.

Burke added, “I would like to thank my mentors for helping and teaching me this summer, as well as to ARL for providing me with the opportunity to work here.”

Yu commended Burke on his accomplishments and said he was instrumental part of the team.

“We had been toying with this idea for a while, but did not have the impetus or manpower to just try it out. Ben did a great job of asking the right questions and working out the details via careful lab work,” said Yu. “Without his efforts this summer, this idea would not have gone very far. Ben served as a critical motivator for pushing the project from an idea to a tangible product with real applications. His ability to work independently on a wide variety of tasks also gave us the leverage to go to other folks to ask for help and resources – Ben basically helped tie together an inter-disciplinary team of ARL researchers to work together on a practical problem.”

from Armed with Science http://ift.tt/20fUMPH

Clean Energy: The State of the States [Greg Laden's Blog]

One of the problems we have in making a quick transition to clean energy in the US is the fact that energy production and distribution is typically regulated by states, and some states are not as smart as other states. Or, if they are smart, they are controlled by political forces intent on maintaining fossil carbon based fuels as our primary energy source, which of course, is a totally bone-headed policy.

When it comes to the transition to clean energy, we can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way. The easy way is to encourage the picking of low hanging fruit, such as solar panels on flat spots, at the same time we work towards tackling some of the more expensive projects that require more up front investment but that will eventually pay off. The hard way, of course, is the total collapse of civilization. Most imaginable post apocalyptic worlds don’t use to much fossil fuel!

And, whether the hard way or the easy way is the most likely path at any moment in time is often a matter of what is happening on the state level. Here are a few examples of what is going on right now around the US.

In Maryland, a state commission is calling for the state to pledge slashing greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030. That sounds like a large amount, but it is actually a modest and easily attainable goal. They should probably be going for more.

The goal — which if passed into law would be one of the most ambitious set so far by a state — drew unanimous support of the 26-member panel, which includes lawmakers, environmentalists, representatives of business and labor, and top officials in the Hogan administration.

The recommendation is likely to lead to legislation in the General Assembly, which must decide next year whether to stick with the goal it set in 2009 of reducing climate-warming emissions 25 percent by 2020.

Meanwhile, Texas and California are leading the nation in carbon emissions. The overall pattern of carbon emissions by state (using two year old data because for some reason those who keep track of these things haven’t discovered twitter and spreadsheets) is largely a matter of population size and similar factors.

But while we might expect California to be high on the list, Texas is way way higher, to the point one wonders what they are up to down in the Lone Star State.

Data released this week by the administration shows each state’s energy-related carbon dioxide emissions between 1990 and 2013. Texas doesn’t just top the list, its emissions — 641 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — are almost double those of California, the nation’s second largest carbon emitter, which spewed 353 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

On a per-capita basis, Wyoming leads all the other states in greenhouse gas pollution.

In New Mexico, Santa Fe has an interesting program in mind. There, The Heath Foundation, a private 501c(3) representing the community interests of Jim Heath, has a plan. Here’s part of it:

• HeathSUN will provide a complete rooftop photovoltaic solar system for homeowners in Santa Fe County at no charge to the customer. HeathSUN owns and maintains each rooftop solar system, and the ancillary metering and control equipment, and there’s no lien on the house.
• Under HeathSUN’s set-up, customers will continue to have access to electricity from PNM when needed. For solar energy from the rooftop system, the customer pays HeathSUN 80 percent of the going PNM rate, so the solar power’s cost would rise and fall with how much PNM is charging. The customer gets separate bills from HeathSUN and PNM.
• In a new twist, HeathSUN says there will be no “net metering” in this model, meaning no HeathSUN solar power would flow through a PNM meter, the standard way to provide a seamless household electrical system. When someone turns on an appliance in a HeathSUN house, technology in the home’s own electrical control box decides whether to pull from the rooftop solar system or from PNM…

In Hawaii, there is a plan to charge up some big batteries with a big solar array, for use to meet evening/nighttime demands.

The nation’s leading residential installer is building the project near Lihu’e on Kaua’i’s southeast corner. The project includes a 13 MW photovoltaic solar array, but is unique in that it includes its own solution to the intermittency problem that solar power faces.

The power generated by the PV cells will be used solely to charge a 13 MW battery array capable of providing 52 MWh to customers of Kauai Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC), the island’s sole electricity provider. That means the solar cells will charge the batteries during the height of the day, and the batteries will discharge the stored power to customers during the evening peak between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m.

“Anyone that’s been out to Kauai will notice that they have a lot of solar on the island and really don’t have any appetite at all for solar at midday,” Rudd said. “If anything, they were already in a bit of a curtailment state during certain days. So, they love solar, they want more because it’s cheaper than what they otherwise would realize, but they don’t need it during the day.”

New York State is working out the details of how to deploy meters to allow the grid to become smart.

There is a big waste-to-energy project in the works in Oregon.

And that is a sampling of the news that came across my desk just today.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1MZrCuw

One of the problems we have in making a quick transition to clean energy in the US is the fact that energy production and distribution is typically regulated by states, and some states are not as smart as other states. Or, if they are smart, they are controlled by political forces intent on maintaining fossil carbon based fuels as our primary energy source, which of course, is a totally bone-headed policy.

When it comes to the transition to clean energy, we can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way. The easy way is to encourage the picking of low hanging fruit, such as solar panels on flat spots, at the same time we work towards tackling some of the more expensive projects that require more up front investment but that will eventually pay off. The hard way, of course, is the total collapse of civilization. Most imaginable post apocalyptic worlds don’t use to much fossil fuel!

And, whether the hard way or the easy way is the most likely path at any moment in time is often a matter of what is happening on the state level. Here are a few examples of what is going on right now around the US.

In Maryland, a state commission is calling for the state to pledge slashing greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030. That sounds like a large amount, but it is actually a modest and easily attainable goal. They should probably be going for more.

The goal — which if passed into law would be one of the most ambitious set so far by a state — drew unanimous support of the 26-member panel, which includes lawmakers, environmentalists, representatives of business and labor, and top officials in the Hogan administration.

The recommendation is likely to lead to legislation in the General Assembly, which must decide next year whether to stick with the goal it set in 2009 of reducing climate-warming emissions 25 percent by 2020.

Meanwhile, Texas and California are leading the nation in carbon emissions. The overall pattern of carbon emissions by state (using two year old data because for some reason those who keep track of these things haven’t discovered twitter and spreadsheets) is largely a matter of population size and similar factors.

But while we might expect California to be high on the list, Texas is way way higher, to the point one wonders what they are up to down in the Lone Star State.

Data released this week by the administration shows each state’s energy-related carbon dioxide emissions between 1990 and 2013. Texas doesn’t just top the list, its emissions — 641 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — are almost double those of California, the nation’s second largest carbon emitter, which spewed 353 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

On a per-capita basis, Wyoming leads all the other states in greenhouse gas pollution.

In New Mexico, Santa Fe has an interesting program in mind. There, The Heath Foundation, a private 501c(3) representing the community interests of Jim Heath, has a plan. Here’s part of it:

• HeathSUN will provide a complete rooftop photovoltaic solar system for homeowners in Santa Fe County at no charge to the customer. HeathSUN owns and maintains each rooftop solar system, and the ancillary metering and control equipment, and there’s no lien on the house.
• Under HeathSUN’s set-up, customers will continue to have access to electricity from PNM when needed. For solar energy from the rooftop system, the customer pays HeathSUN 80 percent of the going PNM rate, so the solar power’s cost would rise and fall with how much PNM is charging. The customer gets separate bills from HeathSUN and PNM.
• In a new twist, HeathSUN says there will be no “net metering” in this model, meaning no HeathSUN solar power would flow through a PNM meter, the standard way to provide a seamless household electrical system. When someone turns on an appliance in a HeathSUN house, technology in the home’s own electrical control box decides whether to pull from the rooftop solar system or from PNM…

In Hawaii, there is a plan to charge up some big batteries with a big solar array, for use to meet evening/nighttime demands.

The nation’s leading residential installer is building the project near Lihu’e on Kaua’i’s southeast corner. The project includes a 13 MW photovoltaic solar array, but is unique in that it includes its own solution to the intermittency problem that solar power faces.

The power generated by the PV cells will be used solely to charge a 13 MW battery array capable of providing 52 MWh to customers of Kauai Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC), the island’s sole electricity provider. That means the solar cells will charge the batteries during the height of the day, and the batteries will discharge the stored power to customers during the evening peak between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m.

“Anyone that’s been out to Kauai will notice that they have a lot of solar on the island and really don’t have any appetite at all for solar at midday,” Rudd said. “If anything, they were already in a bit of a curtailment state during certain days. So, they love solar, they want more because it’s cheaper than what they otherwise would realize, but they don’t need it during the day.”

New York State is working out the details of how to deploy meters to allow the grid to become smart.

There is a big waste-to-energy project in the works in Oregon.

And that is a sampling of the news that came across my desk just today.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1MZrCuw

A 50 minute infomercial for traditional Chinese medicine disguised as a radio show, courtesy of Colin McEnroe [Respectful Insolence]

When I wrote about YouYou Tu, the Chinese scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her successful identification, isolation, purification, and validation of Artemisinin, an antimalarial medication that was quite effective. It was also derived from an herbal remedy used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which has led a fair number of TCM advocates to portray this Nobel Prize as a “validation” or “vindication” of TCM. It wasn’t. Nor was it a validation of naturopathy or herbalism, as has been claimed. It was a validation of the good, old-fashioned science-based medical research discipline of pharmacognosy, or natural products pharmacology. Not that this has stopped a number of quackery apologists from arguing these things and saying that this Nobel Prize means that we should take a closer look at Chinese medicine. Never mind that what passes for “TCM” these days is really the result of a retconning of Chinese folk medicine by Chairman Mao back in the 1950s.

A reader sent me just such an example of TCM apologia in the wake of the announcement of the Nobel Prize being awarded to Tu. It comes in the form of a radio show broadcast on Wednesday on WNPR in Connecticut, which is part of the Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network. This was a particularly misguided bit of radio, courtesy of The Colin McEnroe Show, entitled Is It Time to Take Chinese Medicine More Seriously? Now, you know the law that says when a headline is in the form of a question the answer is usually no? This is a violation of that law, given that the panel discussing this question included:

• David McCallum – Licensed Acupuncturist and practitioner of holistic healing methods at the Chi Healing Center in Canton, Connecticut. He’s a graduate of Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in China
• Mary Guerrera – Professor of Family Medicine, Director, Integrative Medicine in Dept. of Family Medicine, UConn Medical School
• Vitaly Napadow – Associate professor at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He’s also President, Society for Acupuncture Research.
• Michael Kelly – Cancer survivor who has benefited from Chinese medicine
• Elizabeth Curreri – Owner, Curreri Public Relations

Yep. Not a skeptic in the bunch. I haven’t heard of any of these people; they’re clearly local and not national heavy hitters, but that doesn’t stop them from laying down the usual line about TCM being more holistic.

If there were any doubt that the answer to the question posed in the title would be a resounding “Yes!!!” the very beginning of the broadcast (which can be streamed at the link), where there is a conversation in the first couple of minutes between the producer Chion Wolf and McEnroe. The Wolf starts by praising Nexium and going on and on about how taking pharmaceuticals is the American way. McEnroe tells here that those pills don’t address her real medical problems. The topic of TCM is brought up, and she asks McEnroe how TCM can be so great if it doesn’t have commercials in which an announcer intones a bunch of side effects rapid-fire. Overall, this opening segment is a pretty pathetic attempt at humor, but it does serve the purpose of setting out right from the beginning exactly what the viewpoint of the show would be in no uncertain terms. This will be a 50 minute commercial for TCM.

Right off the bat, McEnroe makes a huge error of history. Telling the story of James Reston, the New York Times reporter who came down with acute appendicitis in 1971 while on assignment in China, first he claims that TCM didn’t do too well under Chairman Mao. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. It was Chairman Mao who, as part of his “barefoot doctors” program, resurrected Chinese folk medicine, rebranded it as “traditional Chinese medicine,” and tried his best to “integrate” it with “Western” medicine. As I like to say, he retconned TCM into what it is today. At least he didn’t gush over the claim that Reston had pain relieve mostly from acupuncture. Then McEnroe expresses surprise that the Nobel Prize went to a practitioner of TCM. Again, wrong, wrong, wrong. Tu was not a practitioner of TCM; she attended what is now Beijing Medical College in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and graduated in 1955. Later Tu did train for two and a half years in traditional Chinese medicine at what is now the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing. All of this was before she undertook her research into Artemisinin. In any case, as far as I can tell, Tu was a researcher, not a practitioner, of TCM.

McEnroe starts out by asking McCallum about TCM, revealing that he has been treated by McCallum. Big surprise, eh, that he is a believer in TCM? Not really. In any case McCallum apparently suffered as severe injury to his back in high school football and didn’t want the surgery that they were proposing for him; so the ended up. McCallum, of course, is an acupuncturist who actually trained in China. He also claims that he didn’t believe in acupuncture at first, thinking all the stuff about qi was just nonsense (which it is). He started to believe it when he witnessed a patient’s back spasms get better after needling an acupuncture point behind the knee. He then “tested this theory” on many patients, apparently blissfully unaware of the phenomenon of confirmation bias, and became a believer.

Next up is Mary Guerrera at UConn. Now, if there is a specialty that seems particularly prone to woo, it’s Family Medicine, unfortunately (with oncology probably running a close second). Her job, clearly, was to promote the ubiquitous message among believers that “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) and “integrative medicine” are becoming more popular and are the wave of the future. Of course, my retort to that is that integrating quackery with medicine does not make the medicine better, but that apparently has never stopped advocates of integrative medicine before. Like the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH, formerly the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, or NCCAM), she touts acupuncture and TCM as a solution for an “epidemic” of chronic pain. Of course, whenever I hear the claim that there is an “epidemic” of chronic pain, I wonder whether there really is more chronic pain in the US than there was in years past or whether what we’re really seeing is an epidemic of opioid use and overuse of opioids. Be that as it may, the answer to such an epidemic, if such an epidemic exists, is not to start treating chronic pain with quackery, as tempting as that option might look. It’s to do the hard work in terms of research in order to figure out better ways of treating chronic pain.

Guerrara is, as I like to mention, a quackademic. She’s in medical academia, but she integrates quackery with conventional science-based medicine to offer quackademic medicine. I also can’t help but notice that McEnroe might have a rather distorted view of how popular acupuncture is. He claims that it’s hard to find someone who hasn’t had acupuncture at some point in his life. If you hang out with people who are woo-prone, that’s probably true, but in reality use of what I like to refer to as “hardcore” CAM, like homeopathy or acupuncture, has remained pretty much flat for many years. For instance, in the 2015 National Health Interview Survey showed that only 1.5% of the population had used acupuncture in the last year, virtually unchanged over the last decade.

Hilariously, McCallum discusses how all that stuff about “wind” and the five elements in TCM are really metaphors. For instance, to him qi is not one thing but is a metaphor for all the unseen things that happen because science did not yet understand what made blood flow, for instance, or muscles move. So to him the ancient Chinese came up with metaphors for this as “energy.” This is a profoundly silly argument, of course. Just because you call it qi or “wind” or whatever doesn’t make it any less vitalistic, and TCM is rooted in vitalism. Risibly he claims that ancient Chinese had explanations for the “interrelatedness” of symptoms that explain things that modern medicine can’t.

Because, I guess, everything is related, at least when it’s convenient.

Guerrara flails discussing qi. For instance, she says that “Western medicine” measures all sorts of energy, as it does when we measure EKGs, EEGs, and the like, which is trivially true, as is her observation that the body has a magnetic and electrical field. It’s a good thing that, as I was listening and typing last night, I hadn’t just taken a drink, or Guerrara would have owed me a new laptop. This is a seriously ignorant thing to say, and here’s why: The energies that she discusses can be measured quite accurately. We know they exist. You hook up electrodes to the chest and you get an EKG. You hook up electrodes to the head and you can measure an EEG. The patterns of these energies mean something, something that’s been studied and validated over many decades. They are reproducible. They are also predictive; changes in them can signal disease or dysfunction. In marked contrast, no one has ever demonstrated the existence of qi, Guerrara’s attempt to link qi to biomagnetism and bioelectricity notwithstanding. Qi, “metaphor” or not is basically a magical force or “energy” that can be invoked when it needs to be invoked and “does” whatever a TCM practitioner needs it to do. Guerrara’s comparions is utter nonsense of course, as is her invoking the concept of team care (which is a good thing) as a reason to “integrate” quacks into the team giving the care. To paraphrase Mark Crislip, adding cow pie to apple pie does not make the cow pie better; it makes the apple pie worse. Adding TCM to a team of practitioners of science- and evidence-based medicine is the equivalent of adding cow pie to apple pie.

Not that the entire segment was worthless. Guerrara does point out the importance of physicians knowing what supplements and herbal medicines their patients are taking, which is an observation that virtually no doctor could disagree with. None of it validates herbalism or TCM. More amusing is her statement that you should find a practitioner who is well trained. From my perspective, “well-trained’ in quackery is not reassuring.

Next up, McCallum tells us that we must embrace the body’s “innate wisdom.” I don’t know about you, but from my perspective the body’s “wisdom” leaves much to be desired. He views acupuncture as a “signal,” which is hard to argue with. After all, sticking needles into the skin will send a signal, mainly a pain signal. In any case, to him this signal is received and translated to cause “reaction throughout the whole system.” He compares this to the old Chinese way of thinking of it, by which sticking needles in “meridians” somehow redirects energy (which is a metaphor) somehow causes effects.

Vitaly Napadow then chimes in. He’s a neuroimager. The whole discussion leading up to his appearance annoyed me, I must say. Basically, it’s a whole lot of false equivalence. McEnroe (and later Napadow) talk about how there are people who “believe” that acupuncture doesn’t work. There are people who “believe” that it “works” through placebo effects. There are even people who “believe” that acupuncture works the way TCM believers say, through redirecting the flow of this invisible, undetectable “life energy” (or qi).

Of course, no discussion of acupuncture is complete without someone like Napadow discussing neuroimaging, such as functional MRI. Here’s my view on this sort of thing. If you stick a needle into the body, of course there will be changes in the brain! You’ve just caused pain, and pain is the sensation that results when a painful stimulus activates a nerve that sends a signal back to the brain that interprets it as pain. Indeed, the surprising thing would be if there were no changes in activity in specific parts of the brain in response to acupuncture. Napadow says that “he loves things that work” and doesn’t necessarily care how they work. That’s rather a problem, isn’t it, given that there’s no compelling evidence that acupuncture works—for anything.

I wonder if Steve Novella knows about this. (Actually, I know he does because I sent him a link.) In any case, this show was basically a propaganda piece for the quackery that is TCM that didn’t even bother to have a word of skepticism. David McCallum and Mary Guerrara ruled the roost, and Vitaly Napadow invoked dubious brain imaging studies as scientific evidence that there must be “something” to acupuncture. All of them implied that TCM had predicted things that “Western medicine” is only now discovering and that TCM can successfully treat things that “Western medicine” cannot (like chronic pain).

I frequently complain about false “balance” in reporting, but this show was no balance at all. Sure, occasionally McEnroe would offhandedly mention that “skeptics would say,” but only as a softball pretext for TCM believers to respond. His show had no balance at all; it was basically a 50 minute infomercial for David McCallum’s TCM practice. For shame, WNPR!

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When I wrote about YouYou Tu, the Chinese scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her successful identification, isolation, purification, and validation of Artemisinin, an antimalarial medication that was quite effective. It was also derived from an herbal remedy used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which has led a fair number of TCM advocates to portray this Nobel Prize as a “validation” or “vindication” of TCM. It wasn’t. Nor was it a validation of naturopathy or herbalism, as has been claimed. It was a validation of the good, old-fashioned science-based medical research discipline of pharmacognosy, or natural products pharmacology. Not that this has stopped a number of quackery apologists from arguing these things and saying that this Nobel Prize means that we should take a closer look at Chinese medicine. Never mind that what passes for “TCM” these days is really the result of a retconning of Chinese folk medicine by Chairman Mao back in the 1950s.

A reader sent me just such an example of TCM apologia in the wake of the announcement of the Nobel Prize being awarded to Tu. It comes in the form of a radio show broadcast on Wednesday on WNPR in Connecticut, which is part of the Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network. This was a particularly misguided bit of radio, courtesy of The Colin McEnroe Show, entitled Is It Time to Take Chinese Medicine More Seriously? Now, you know the law that says when a headline is in the form of a question the answer is usually no? This is a violation of that law, given that the panel discussing this question included:

• David McCallum – Licensed Acupuncturist and practitioner of holistic healing methods at the Chi Healing Center in Canton, Connecticut. He’s a graduate of Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in China
• Mary Guerrera – Professor of Family Medicine, Director, Integrative Medicine in Dept. of Family Medicine, UConn Medical School
• Vitaly Napadow – Associate professor at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He’s also President, Society for Acupuncture Research.
• Michael Kelly – Cancer survivor who has benefited from Chinese medicine
• Elizabeth Curreri – Owner, Curreri Public Relations

Yep. Not a skeptic in the bunch. I haven’t heard of any of these people; they’re clearly local and not national heavy hitters, but that doesn’t stop them from laying down the usual line about TCM being more holistic.

If there were any doubt that the answer to the question posed in the title would be a resounding “Yes!!!” the very beginning of the broadcast (which can be streamed at the link), where there is a conversation in the first couple of minutes between the producer Chion Wolf and McEnroe. The Wolf starts by praising Nexium and going on and on about how taking pharmaceuticals is the American way. McEnroe tells here that those pills don’t address her real medical problems. The topic of TCM is brought up, and she asks McEnroe how TCM can be so great if it doesn’t have commercials in which an announcer intones a bunch of side effects rapid-fire. Overall, this opening segment is a pretty pathetic attempt at humor, but it does serve the purpose of setting out right from the beginning exactly what the viewpoint of the show would be in no uncertain terms. This will be a 50 minute commercial for TCM.

Right off the bat, McEnroe makes a huge error of history. Telling the story of James Reston, the New York Times reporter who came down with acute appendicitis in 1971 while on assignment in China, first he claims that TCM didn’t do too well under Chairman Mao. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. It was Chairman Mao who, as part of his “barefoot doctors” program, resurrected Chinese folk medicine, rebranded it as “traditional Chinese medicine,” and tried his best to “integrate” it with “Western” medicine. As I like to say, he retconned TCM into what it is today. At least he didn’t gush over the claim that Reston had pain relieve mostly from acupuncture. Then McEnroe expresses surprise that the Nobel Prize went to a practitioner of TCM. Again, wrong, wrong, wrong. Tu was not a practitioner of TCM; she attended what is now Beijing Medical College in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and graduated in 1955. Later Tu did train for two and a half years in traditional Chinese medicine at what is now the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing. All of this was before she undertook her research into Artemisinin. In any case, as far as I can tell, Tu was a researcher, not a practitioner, of TCM.

McEnroe starts out by asking McCallum about TCM, revealing that he has been treated by McCallum. Big surprise, eh, that he is a believer in TCM? Not really. In any case McCallum apparently suffered as severe injury to his back in high school football and didn’t want the surgery that they were proposing for him; so the ended up. McCallum, of course, is an acupuncturist who actually trained in China. He also claims that he didn’t believe in acupuncture at first, thinking all the stuff about qi was just nonsense (which it is). He started to believe it when he witnessed a patient’s back spasms get better after needling an acupuncture point behind the knee. He then “tested this theory” on many patients, apparently blissfully unaware of the phenomenon of confirmation bias, and became a believer.

Next up is Mary Guerrera at UConn. Now, if there is a specialty that seems particularly prone to woo, it’s Family Medicine, unfortunately (with oncology probably running a close second). Her job, clearly, was to promote the ubiquitous message among believers that “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) and “integrative medicine” are becoming more popular and are the wave of the future. Of course, my retort to that is that integrating quackery with medicine does not make the medicine better, but that apparently has never stopped advocates of integrative medicine before. Like the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH, formerly the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, or NCCAM), she touts acupuncture and TCM as a solution for an “epidemic” of chronic pain. Of course, whenever I hear the claim that there is an “epidemic” of chronic pain, I wonder whether there really is more chronic pain in the US than there was in years past or whether what we’re really seeing is an epidemic of opioid use and overuse of opioids. Be that as it may, the answer to such an epidemic, if such an epidemic exists, is not to start treating chronic pain with quackery, as tempting as that option might look. It’s to do the hard work in terms of research in order to figure out better ways of treating chronic pain.

Guerrara is, as I like to mention, a quackademic. She’s in medical academia, but she integrates quackery with conventional science-based medicine to offer quackademic medicine. I also can’t help but notice that McEnroe might have a rather distorted view of how popular acupuncture is. He claims that it’s hard to find someone who hasn’t had acupuncture at some point in his life. If you hang out with people who are woo-prone, that’s probably true, but in reality use of what I like to refer to as “hardcore” CAM, like homeopathy or acupuncture, has remained pretty much flat for many years. For instance, in the 2015 National Health Interview Survey showed that only 1.5% of the population had used acupuncture in the last year, virtually unchanged over the last decade.

Hilariously, McCallum discusses how all that stuff about “wind” and the five elements in TCM are really metaphors. For instance, to him qi is not one thing but is a metaphor for all the unseen things that happen because science did not yet understand what made blood flow, for instance, or muscles move. So to him the ancient Chinese came up with metaphors for this as “energy.” This is a profoundly silly argument, of course. Just because you call it qi or “wind” or whatever doesn’t make it any less vitalistic, and TCM is rooted in vitalism. Risibly he claims that ancient Chinese had explanations for the “interrelatedness” of symptoms that explain things that modern medicine can’t.

Because, I guess, everything is related, at least when it’s convenient.

Guerrara flails discussing qi. For instance, she says that “Western medicine” measures all sorts of energy, as it does when we measure EKGs, EEGs, and the like, which is trivially true, as is her observation that the body has a magnetic and electrical field. It’s a good thing that, as I was listening and typing last night, I hadn’t just taken a drink, or Guerrara would have owed me a new laptop. This is a seriously ignorant thing to say, and here’s why: The energies that she discusses can be measured quite accurately. We know they exist. You hook up electrodes to the chest and you get an EKG. You hook up electrodes to the head and you can measure an EEG. The patterns of these energies mean something, something that’s been studied and validated over many decades. They are reproducible. They are also predictive; changes in them can signal disease or dysfunction. In marked contrast, no one has ever demonstrated the existence of qi, Guerrara’s attempt to link qi to biomagnetism and bioelectricity notwithstanding. Qi, “metaphor” or not is basically a magical force or “energy” that can be invoked when it needs to be invoked and “does” whatever a TCM practitioner needs it to do. Guerrara’s comparions is utter nonsense of course, as is her invoking the concept of team care (which is a good thing) as a reason to “integrate” quacks into the team giving the care. To paraphrase Mark Crislip, adding cow pie to apple pie does not make the cow pie better; it makes the apple pie worse. Adding TCM to a team of practitioners of science- and evidence-based medicine is the equivalent of adding cow pie to apple pie.

Not that the entire segment was worthless. Guerrara does point out the importance of physicians knowing what supplements and herbal medicines their patients are taking, which is an observation that virtually no doctor could disagree with. None of it validates herbalism or TCM. More amusing is her statement that you should find a practitioner who is well trained. From my perspective, “well-trained’ in quackery is not reassuring.

Next up, McCallum tells us that we must embrace the body’s “innate wisdom.” I don’t know about you, but from my perspective the body’s “wisdom” leaves much to be desired. He views acupuncture as a “signal,” which is hard to argue with. After all, sticking needles into the skin will send a signal, mainly a pain signal. In any case, to him this signal is received and translated to cause “reaction throughout the whole system.” He compares this to the old Chinese way of thinking of it, by which sticking needles in “meridians” somehow redirects energy (which is a metaphor) somehow causes effects.

Vitaly Napadow then chimes in. He’s a neuroimager. The whole discussion leading up to his appearance annoyed me, I must say. Basically, it’s a whole lot of false equivalence. McEnroe (and later Napadow) talk about how there are people who “believe” that acupuncture doesn’t work. There are people who “believe” that it “works” through placebo effects. There are even people who “believe” that acupuncture works the way TCM believers say, through redirecting the flow of this invisible, undetectable “life energy” (or qi).

Of course, no discussion of acupuncture is complete without someone like Napadow discussing neuroimaging, such as functional MRI. Here’s my view on this sort of thing. If you stick a needle into the body, of course there will be changes in the brain! You’ve just caused pain, and pain is the sensation that results when a painful stimulus activates a nerve that sends a signal back to the brain that interprets it as pain. Indeed, the surprising thing would be if there were no changes in activity in specific parts of the brain in response to acupuncture. Napadow says that “he loves things that work” and doesn’t necessarily care how they work. That’s rather a problem, isn’t it, given that there’s no compelling evidence that acupuncture works—for anything.

I wonder if Steve Novella knows about this. (Actually, I know he does because I sent him a link.) In any case, this show was basically a propaganda piece for the quackery that is TCM that didn’t even bother to have a word of skepticism. David McCallum and Mary Guerrara ruled the roost, and Vitaly Napadow invoked dubious brain imaging studies as scientific evidence that there must be “something” to acupuncture. All of them implied that TCM had predicted things that “Western medicine” is only now discovering and that TCM can successfully treat things that “Western medicine” cannot (like chronic pain).

I frequently complain about false “balance” in reporting, but this show was no balance at all. Sure, occasionally McEnroe would offhandedly mention that “skeptics would say,” but only as a softball pretext for TCM believers to respond. His show had no balance at all; it was basically a 50 minute infomercial for David McCallum’s TCM practice. For shame, WNPR!

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1ipDUUv

Me in the Media: Two New Interviews [Uncertain Principles]

I’ve been slacking in my obligation to use this blog for self-promotion, but every now and then I remember, so here are two recent things where I was interviewed by other people:

— I spoke on the phone to a reporter from Popular Mechanics who was writing a story about “radionics” and “wishing boxes,” a particular variety of pseudoscience sometimes justified with references to quantum mechanics. The resulting story is now up, and quotes me:

It is hard to investigate the ethereal thinking around radionics, but physics is something that can be parsed. So I got in touch with Chad Orzel, a physics professor at Union College in New York and the author of several popular science books, including How To Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog. This sounded about my speed, and I ran a few ideas about physics and radionics past him, particularly “quantum entanglement,” which several people offered as evidence that radionics is possible.

“Entanglement is a very strange phenomenon,” says Orzel. “But it’s a very real thing.”

[…]

“People try to invoke this as a way of justifying ESP sorts of things: ‘Well, maybe electrons in your brain are entangled with electrons somewhere else.’ There’s a couple of problems with it,” Orzel says.

You’ll have to click through to see what the couple of problems are, though…

— A little earlier, Irene Helenowski interviewed me by email. This went live last week, when I was in California, which is my excuse for not posting it until now.

Professor, how is Emmy doing these days?

She’s doing well. She’s getting on in years for a dog– she’s 13– so she’s slowed down a bit. But she’s still pretty spry, and can about pull me off my feet when she really wants to get to something on one of our walks.

You discuss simulating a black hole at CERN. What is the current status on the scientists’ progress with that project?

It’s not so much simulating, as trying to _create_ a black hole. The idea is that if you can pack enough energy into two colliding protons, you can create a situation where they get close enough together, and have enough total energy that they form a tiny black hole.

This is very much a long-shot possibility at the energy of the actually existing LHC– if nothing exotic is going on, there’s no way the LHC energy is enough to make a black hole. There are some exotic theories where gravity gets dramatically stronger at short distances, though, and if one of these turned out to be true, there’s a chance you could get a black hole. This would evaporate through Hawking radiation almost immediately, spraying out a burst of particles that could identify it as a black hole rather than a more typical collision.

There have been some searches for this in data from the first LHC run, and no sign of black holes has been seen. They just recently re-started at a higher energy (by a factor of two, not enough to make mini-black-holes likely), and I’m sure there will be more such searches. Nobody really expects this to pan out, but it would be tremendously exciting if it did.

Again, click through to read the rest.

————
And while you’re clicking on things, please consider taking a few minutes to respond to Paige Jarreau’s survey of blog readers. It’s for SCIENCE!, specifically her postdoctoral research on communicating science online.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1GAR4cY

I’ve been slacking in my obligation to use this blog for self-promotion, but every now and then I remember, so here are two recent things where I was interviewed by other people:

— I spoke on the phone to a reporter from Popular Mechanics who was writing a story about “radionics” and “wishing boxes,” a particular variety of pseudoscience sometimes justified with references to quantum mechanics. The resulting story is now up, and quotes me:

It is hard to investigate the ethereal thinking around radionics, but physics is something that can be parsed. So I got in touch with Chad Orzel, a physics professor at Union College in New York and the author of several popular science books, including How To Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog. This sounded about my speed, and I ran a few ideas about physics and radionics past him, particularly “quantum entanglement,” which several people offered as evidence that radionics is possible.

“Entanglement is a very strange phenomenon,” says Orzel. “But it’s a very real thing.”

[…]

“People try to invoke this as a way of justifying ESP sorts of things: ‘Well, maybe electrons in your brain are entangled with electrons somewhere else.’ There’s a couple of problems with it,” Orzel says.

You’ll have to click through to see what the couple of problems are, though…

— A little earlier, Irene Helenowski interviewed me by email. This went live last week, when I was in California, which is my excuse for not posting it until now.

Professor, how is Emmy doing these days?

She’s doing well. She’s getting on in years for a dog– she’s 13– so she’s slowed down a bit. But she’s still pretty spry, and can about pull me off my feet when she really wants to get to something on one of our walks.

You discuss simulating a black hole at CERN. What is the current status on the scientists’ progress with that project?

It’s not so much simulating, as trying to _create_ a black hole. The idea is that if you can pack enough energy into two colliding protons, you can create a situation where they get close enough together, and have enough total energy that they form a tiny black hole.

This is very much a long-shot possibility at the energy of the actually existing LHC– if nothing exotic is going on, there’s no way the LHC energy is enough to make a black hole. There are some exotic theories where gravity gets dramatically stronger at short distances, though, and if one of these turned out to be true, there’s a chance you could get a black hole. This would evaporate through Hawking radiation almost immediately, spraying out a burst of particles that could identify it as a black hole rather than a more typical collision.

There have been some searches for this in data from the first LHC run, and no sign of black holes has been seen. They just recently re-started at a higher energy (by a factor of two, not enough to make mini-black-holes likely), and I’m sure there will be more such searches. Nobody really expects this to pan out, but it would be tremendously exciting if it did.

Again, click through to read the rest.

————
And while you’re clicking on things, please consider taking a few minutes to respond to Paige Jarreau’s survey of blog readers. It’s for SCIENCE!, specifically her postdoctoral research on communicating science online.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1GAR4cY

Halloween derived from ancient Celtic cross-quarter day

Photo via Kurt Magoon on Flickr

Halloween – short for All Hallows’ Eve – is an astronomical holiday. Sure, it’s the modern-day descendant from Samhain, a sacred festival of the ancient Celts and Druids in the British Isles. But it’s also a cross-quarter day, which is probably why Samhain occurred when it did. Early people were keen observers of the sky. A cross-quarter day is a day more or less midway between an equinox (when the sun sets due west) and a solstice (when the sun sets at its most northern or southern point on the horizon). Halloween – October 31 – is approximately midway point between the autumn equinox and winter solstice, for us in the Northern Hemisphere.

In other words, in traditional astronomy, there are eight major seasonal subdivisions of every year. They include the March and September equinoxes, the June and December solstices, and the intervening four cross-quarter days.

In modern times, the four cross-quarter days are often called Groundhog Day (February 2), May Day (May 1), Lammas (August 1) and Halloween (October 31).

Equinoxes, solstices and cross-quarter days are all hallmarks of Earth’s orbit around the sun. Halloween is the fourth cross-quarter day of the year. Illustration via NASA

Halloween is the spookiest of the cross quarter days, possibly because it comes at a time of year when the days are growing shorter. On Halloween, it’s said that the spirits of the dead wander from sunset until midnight. After midnight – on November 1, which we now call All Saints’ Day – the ghosts are said to go back to rest.

The October 31 date for Halloween has been fixed by tradition. The true cross-quarter day falls on November 7, representing a discrepancy of about one week. According to the ancient Celts, a cross-quarter day marks the beginning – not the middle – of a season.

The Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters. This tiny, misty dipper is easy to pick out in the night sky. Photo by Flickr user Dave Dehetre.

The Pleiades connection. It’s thought that the early forbearer of Halloween – Samhain – happened on the night that the Pleiades star cluster culminated at midnight.

In other words, the Pleiades climbed to its highest point in the sky at midnight on or near the same date as this cross-quarter day. In our day, Halloween is fixed on October 31, though the midnight culmination of the Pleiades cluster now occurs on November 21.

Presuming the supposed connection between Samhain and the midnight culmination of the Pleiades, the two events took place on or near the same date in the 11th century (1001-1100) and 12th century (1101-1200). This was several centuries before the introduction of the Gregorian calendar.

At that time, when the Julian calendar was in use, the cross-quarter day and the midnight culmination of the Pleiades fell – amazingly enough – on or near October 31. But, then, the Julian calendar was about one week out of step with the seasons. Had the Gregorian calendar been in use back then, the date of the cross-quarter day celebration would have been November 7.

Calendar converter

But Halloween is now fixed on October 31. Meanwhile, the true cross-quarter day now falls on or near November 7 and the midnight culmination of the Pleiades cluster on or near November 21.

Bottom line: The present date for Halloween – October 31 – marks the approximate midway point between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. Halloween is one of the year’s four cross-quarter days. It is the modern-day descendant from Samhain, a festival of the ancient Celts and Druids. The Pleiades star cluster also plays a role in this story, because Samhain was said to happen on the night that the Pleiades star cluster culminated – or reached its highest point in the sky – at midnight.

Arcturus is a Halloween ghost of the summer sun

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Photo via Kurt Magoon on Flickr

Halloween – short for All Hallows’ Eve – is an astronomical holiday. Sure, it’s the modern-day descendant from Samhain, a sacred festival of the ancient Celts and Druids in the British Isles. But it’s also a cross-quarter day, which is probably why Samhain occurred when it did. Early people were keen observers of the sky. A cross-quarter day is a day more or less midway between an equinox (when the sun sets due west) and a solstice (when the sun sets at its most northern or southern point on the horizon). Halloween – October 31 – is approximately midway point between the autumn equinox and winter solstice, for us in the Northern Hemisphere.

In other words, in traditional astronomy, there are eight major seasonal subdivisions of every year. They include the March and September equinoxes, the June and December solstices, and the intervening four cross-quarter days.

In modern times, the four cross-quarter days are often called Groundhog Day (February 2), May Day (May 1), Lammas (August 1) and Halloween (October 31).

Equinoxes, solstices and cross-quarter days are all hallmarks of Earth’s orbit around the sun. Halloween is the fourth cross-quarter day of the year. Illustration via NASA

Halloween is the spookiest of the cross quarter days, possibly because it comes at a time of year when the days are growing shorter. On Halloween, it’s said that the spirits of the dead wander from sunset until midnight. After midnight – on November 1, which we now call All Saints’ Day – the ghosts are said to go back to rest.

The October 31 date for Halloween has been fixed by tradition. The true cross-quarter day falls on November 7, representing a discrepancy of about one week. According to the ancient Celts, a cross-quarter day marks the beginning – not the middle – of a season.

The Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters. This tiny, misty dipper is easy to pick out in the night sky. Photo by Flickr user Dave Dehetre.

The Pleiades connection. It’s thought that the early forbearer of Halloween – Samhain – happened on the night that the Pleiades star cluster culminated at midnight.

In other words, the Pleiades climbed to its highest point in the sky at midnight on or near the same date as this cross-quarter day. In our day, Halloween is fixed on October 31, though the midnight culmination of the Pleiades cluster now occurs on November 21.

Presuming the supposed connection between Samhain and the midnight culmination of the Pleiades, the two events took place on or near the same date in the 11th century (1001-1100) and 12th century (1101-1200). This was several centuries before the introduction of the Gregorian calendar.

At that time, when the Julian calendar was in use, the cross-quarter day and the midnight culmination of the Pleiades fell – amazingly enough – on or near October 31. But, then, the Julian calendar was about one week out of step with the seasons. Had the Gregorian calendar been in use back then, the date of the cross-quarter day celebration would have been November 7.

Calendar converter

But Halloween is now fixed on October 31. Meanwhile, the true cross-quarter day now falls on or near November 7 and the midnight culmination of the Pleiades cluster on or near November 21.

Bottom line: The present date for Halloween – October 31 – marks the approximate midway point between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. Halloween is one of the year’s four cross-quarter days. It is the modern-day descendant from Samhain, a festival of the ancient Celts and Druids. The Pleiades star cluster also plays a role in this story, because Samhain was said to happen on the night that the Pleiades star cluster culminated – or reached its highest point in the sky – at midnight.

Arcturus is a Halloween ghost of the summer sun

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Ghost lights: Believe if you dare

Will-o-the-wisp lighting a bog or mire. Artist unknown. The source is Flammarion’s L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888, p.749). Image via inamidst.com.

Ghost lights and will-o-the-wisps are associated with our modern-day jack-o-lanterns. Here’s a traditional Cornish jack-o-lantern, made from a turnip. Image via Wikimeida.

The red dot indicates the location of Marfa, Texas, famous for its ghost lights.

McDonald Observatory Otto Struve Telescope, completed in 1938. I saw my first Marfa lights from the catwalk of this telescope dome, which, by the way, is a pretty creepy place to be alone at 3 a.m., especially in the old library.

Ghost lights used to be called will-o-the-wisps. They were a weird glow over swamps or bogs. Nowadays, people report strange lights in the sky in all sorts of places. Some are more famous than others. The ghost lights closest to me are in the desert-like Davis Mountains near Marfa, Texas, but you can also see them in the Brown Mountains of North Carolina, and other places in North America. There are modern, very ordinary explanations for these lights. Yet people still love to try to spot them. Follow the links below to some samples of North American ghost lights.

Ghost lights in history.

The Marfa Lights.

Brown Mountain Lights.

The St. Louis Light in Saskatchewan, Canada.

Ghost lights in history. In English folklore, a will-o’-the-wisp was thought to be a distantly viewed lantern or torch carried by a fairy or other mischievous spirit. These ghostly lights were said to recede if travelers approached them, so that the bone-tired wayfarers were drawn farther and farther into the bog.

Our modern-day pumpkin carving at Halloween is associated with this old story and tradition. Will-o-the-wisp and jack-o-lantern meant the same thing in old England. Turnip lanterns, sometimes with faces carved into them, were made on the festival of Samhain, which took place around the same time as our Halloween, a time when fairies and spirits were said to inhabit the night. Remember, Halloween comes at a time of year when the nights are growing longer. We in the electric light era don’t fully appreciate the primal fear to be had from this daily increasing darkness. It’s said that turnip lanterns were used to light one’s way outdoors on a Samhain night. The lantern might have represented the spirits and otherworldly beings, as in I’m with you guys.

Of course, we’re so much more sophisticated than that today. Aren’t we?

The Marfa lights. Well, we are, plus we have cars. So nowadays people travel long distances to seek out ghostly lights in the sky. A famous example in my area is the Marfa Lights. They’ve been observed in the sky near the tiny and remote West Texas town of Marfa for many years. I saw them on my first visit to the University of Texas McDonald Observatory in the late 1970s, while standing outside at night, on a catwalk of one of the large telescope domes. An astronomer pointed them out: two unmoving lights, a brighter one and a fainter one above the horizon, in a place where no stars should be.

Reports from some other eye-witnesses are much more elaborate than my sighting. Supposedly the lights are “brightly glowing” – “basketball-sized spheres” – “shining in many different colors” – “hovering at about shoulder height.” Or sometimes, people say, they shoot around rapidly in any direction. Or they appear in pairs or groups. Or they may divide into pairs or merge, disappear, reappear, and sometimes move in patterns that seem regular. The town of Marfa loves them, and has placed highway markers (see photo top of post) indicating where on-lookers can pull over to watch for the lights.

Papiblogger.com had a nice account of his family’s viewing of the Marfa lights.

After several driving delays and a huge gas shortage scare we finally arrived in Marfa past dinner time at night … From our kids’ perspective, Marfa’s big draw, of course, are the Mystery Lights, a Texas version of Alaska’s aurora borealis. To make things interesting I brought a professional digital camera and a tripod and took time-lapse images of the Marfa Lights from the observation deck where everyone normally sees them. If you look at my un-doctored photos [see below], you will notice a red light surrounded by other brighter lights. All appear to be around the same size but what’s interesting is that the white lights surrounding the red one clearly have some movement. For the record, I don’t believe there’s anything magical or alien-related to the lights but I do find them interesting, especially knowing that many experts and some documentaries have studied them and no one knows what to say they are.

Marfa lights – or not – from papiblogger.com.

Where to go to try to see the Marfa Lights. They’re said to be seen, typically, south of U.S. Route 90 and east of U.S. Route 67, five to 15 miles southeast of Marfa. Best thing to do is go to Marfa, Texas and ask … well, anyone. Marfa is only about an 8-hour drive from the city of Austin, if you don’t stop for lunch. And if you do stop for lunch, I recommend La Familia in Junction, Texas. Have fun!

Skeptic’s explanation for Marfa lights. The most credible explanation is that they are simply car headlights, seen from a great distance and distorted by temperature gradients. Critics of this explanation quickly point out that people have been reporting sightings of the Marfa Lights for over 100 years, since before there were cars. Meanwhile, Brian Dunning of the podcast Skeptoid disagrees, saying:

Well, apparently, the Marfa Lights have not been around all that long, after all. The earliest accounts come from a rancher named Robert Ellison in 1883. However, upon closer inspection, it appears that there is no actual record that Robert Ellison ever saw such a thing. There are reports from his descendants that Ellison said he saw lights, but there is no written record, not even when he wrote his memoirs about his life in the region in 1937. Curious that he would leave that out. Apparently, all evidence that the lights existed prior to the arrival of automobile highways in the region is purely anecdotal.

Take that, Marfa Lights.

Brown Mountain Lights via spookyplaces.us.

The Brown Mountain Lights have their own road sign, too. Photo via spookyplaces.us.

Brown Mountain Lights. From the Blue Ridge Parkway near Brown Mountain in North Carolina, people sometimes say they see mysterious, red, circular lights. An early account of them dates back a report by a fisherman in the September 24, 1913 Charlotte Daily Observer. He said he saw:

… mysterious lights seen just above the horizon every night.

Skeptic’s explanation for Brown Mountain Lights. A USGS employee, D.B. Stewart, later studied the area and said the fisherman had seen train lights. Brian Dunning of the podcast Skeptoid agrees.

Where to go to try to see the Brown Mountain Lights. Wikipedia says:

Try the overlooks at mile posts 310 (Brown Mountain Light overlook) and 301 (Green Mountain overlook) and from the Brown Mountain Overlook on North Carolina Highway 181 between Morganton, North Carolina and Linville, North Carolina. Additionally, good sightings of the [Brown Mountain] Lights have been reported from the top of Table Rock, outside of Morganton, North Carolina. One of the best vantage points, Wisemans View, is about 4 miles from Linville Falls, North Carolina. The best time of year to see them is reportedly September through early November.

Phil Campagna has a good description of his experience seeing the St. Louis Light, in his blog.

The St. Louis Light. Apparently, there used to be train tracks near the small town of St. Louis, in Saskatchewan, Canada. Legends has it that they were taken out after a passenger train derailed. Now it’s said that a ghostly railway man, holding a lantern, haunts the tracks, looking for a baby that died in the accident. Its said the light appears in the distance along the track bed but has no easily identifiable source.

Skeptic’s explanation for St. Louis Light. Alysha and Shannon were in the 12th grade, living in northern Saskatchewan, when they won science fair gold medals for investigating and eventually duplicating the St. Louis Light phenomenon. Their project suggested that the light is caused by the diffraction of distant vehicle lights. Read about their science project here. By the way, before beginning this project, Shannon told VirtualSaskatchewan that she believes in the paranormal, while Alysha is the skeptical type. The project apparently got started when Shannon told Alysha how she and a group of friends “freaked out” when they spotted the ghost train during a road trip to St. Louis, and Alysha scoffed.

Where to go to see the St. Louis Light. St. Louis is south of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. The light sightings near the old railroad tracks happen about five miles north of St. Louis. By all accounts, the gravel road that leads to the place is unmarked and hard to find. Best bet: Go to St. Louis, and ask someone.

So there you have it, on this Halloween 2015. Ghost lights! Believe in them … if you dare.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/1WnygzP

Will-o-the-wisp lighting a bog or mire. Artist unknown. The source is Flammarion’s L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888, p.749). Image via inamidst.com.

Ghost lights and will-o-the-wisps are associated with our modern-day jack-o-lanterns. Here’s a traditional Cornish jack-o-lantern, made from a turnip. Image via Wikimeida.

The red dot indicates the location of Marfa, Texas, famous for its ghost lights.

McDonald Observatory Otto Struve Telescope, completed in 1938. I saw my first Marfa lights from the catwalk of this telescope dome, which, by the way, is a pretty creepy place to be alone at 3 a.m., especially in the old library.

Ghost lights used to be called will-o-the-wisps. They were a weird glow over swamps or bogs. Nowadays, people report strange lights in the sky in all sorts of places. Some are more famous than others. The ghost lights closest to me are in the desert-like Davis Mountains near Marfa, Texas, but you can also see them in the Brown Mountains of North Carolina, and other places in North America. There are modern, very ordinary explanations for these lights. Yet people still love to try to spot them. Follow the links below to some samples of North American ghost lights.

Ghost lights in history.

The Marfa Lights.

Brown Mountain Lights.

The St. Louis Light in Saskatchewan, Canada.

Ghost lights in history. In English folklore, a will-o’-the-wisp was thought to be a distantly viewed lantern or torch carried by a fairy or other mischievous spirit. These ghostly lights were said to recede if travelers approached them, so that the bone-tired wayfarers were drawn farther and farther into the bog.

Our modern-day pumpkin carving at Halloween is associated with this old story and tradition. Will-o-the-wisp and jack-o-lantern meant the same thing in old England. Turnip lanterns, sometimes with faces carved into them, were made on the festival of Samhain, which took place around the same time as our Halloween, a time when fairies and spirits were said to inhabit the night. Remember, Halloween comes at a time of year when the nights are growing longer. We in the electric light era don’t fully appreciate the primal fear to be had from this daily increasing darkness. It’s said that turnip lanterns were used to light one’s way outdoors on a Samhain night. The lantern might have represented the spirits and otherworldly beings, as in I’m with you guys.

Of course, we’re so much more sophisticated than that today. Aren’t we?

The Marfa lights. Well, we are, plus we have cars. So nowadays people travel long distances to seek out ghostly lights in the sky. A famous example in my area is the Marfa Lights. They’ve been observed in the sky near the tiny and remote West Texas town of Marfa for many years. I saw them on my first visit to the University of Texas McDonald Observatory in the late 1970s, while standing outside at night, on a catwalk of one of the large telescope domes. An astronomer pointed them out: two unmoving lights, a brighter one and a fainter one above the horizon, in a place where no stars should be.

Reports from some other eye-witnesses are much more elaborate than my sighting. Supposedly the lights are “brightly glowing” – “basketball-sized spheres” – “shining in many different colors” – “hovering at about shoulder height.” Or sometimes, people say, they shoot around rapidly in any direction. Or they appear in pairs or groups. Or they may divide into pairs or merge, disappear, reappear, and sometimes move in patterns that seem regular. The town of Marfa loves them, and has placed highway markers (see photo top of post) indicating where on-lookers can pull over to watch for the lights.

Papiblogger.com had a nice account of his family’s viewing of the Marfa lights.

After several driving delays and a huge gas shortage scare we finally arrived in Marfa past dinner time at night … From our kids’ perspective, Marfa’s big draw, of course, are the Mystery Lights, a Texas version of Alaska’s aurora borealis. To make things interesting I brought a professional digital camera and a tripod and took time-lapse images of the Marfa Lights from the observation deck where everyone normally sees them. If you look at my un-doctored photos [see below], you will notice a red light surrounded by other brighter lights. All appear to be around the same size but what’s interesting is that the white lights surrounding the red one clearly have some movement. For the record, I don’t believe there’s anything magical or alien-related to the lights but I do find them interesting, especially knowing that many experts and some documentaries have studied them and no one knows what to say they are.

Marfa lights – or not – from papiblogger.com.

Where to go to try to see the Marfa Lights. They’re said to be seen, typically, south of U.S. Route 90 and east of U.S. Route 67, five to 15 miles southeast of Marfa. Best thing to do is go to Marfa, Texas and ask … well, anyone. Marfa is only about an 8-hour drive from the city of Austin, if you don’t stop for lunch. And if you do stop for lunch, I recommend La Familia in Junction, Texas. Have fun!

Skeptic’s explanation for Marfa lights. The most credible explanation is that they are simply car headlights, seen from a great distance and distorted by temperature gradients. Critics of this explanation quickly point out that people have been reporting sightings of the Marfa Lights for over 100 years, since before there were cars. Meanwhile, Brian Dunning of the podcast Skeptoid disagrees, saying:

Well, apparently, the Marfa Lights have not been around all that long, after all. The earliest accounts come from a rancher named Robert Ellison in 1883. However, upon closer inspection, it appears that there is no actual record that Robert Ellison ever saw such a thing. There are reports from his descendants that Ellison said he saw lights, but there is no written record, not even when he wrote his memoirs about his life in the region in 1937. Curious that he would leave that out. Apparently, all evidence that the lights existed prior to the arrival of automobile highways in the region is purely anecdotal.

Take that, Marfa Lights.

Brown Mountain Lights via spookyplaces.us.

The Brown Mountain Lights have their own road sign, too. Photo via spookyplaces.us.

Brown Mountain Lights. From the Blue Ridge Parkway near Brown Mountain in North Carolina, people sometimes say they see mysterious, red, circular lights. An early account of them dates back a report by a fisherman in the September 24, 1913 Charlotte Daily Observer. He said he saw:

… mysterious lights seen just above the horizon every night.

Skeptic’s explanation for Brown Mountain Lights. A USGS employee, D.B. Stewart, later studied the area and said the fisherman had seen train lights. Brian Dunning of the podcast Skeptoid agrees.

Where to go to try to see the Brown Mountain Lights. Wikipedia says:

Try the overlooks at mile posts 310 (Brown Mountain Light overlook) and 301 (Green Mountain overlook) and from the Brown Mountain Overlook on North Carolina Highway 181 between Morganton, North Carolina and Linville, North Carolina. Additionally, good sightings of the [Brown Mountain] Lights have been reported from the top of Table Rock, outside of Morganton, North Carolina. One of the best vantage points, Wisemans View, is about 4 miles from Linville Falls, North Carolina. The best time of year to see them is reportedly September through early November.

Phil Campagna has a good description of his experience seeing the St. Louis Light, in his blog.

The St. Louis Light. Apparently, there used to be train tracks near the small town of St. Louis, in Saskatchewan, Canada. Legends has it that they were taken out after a passenger train derailed. Now it’s said that a ghostly railway man, holding a lantern, haunts the tracks, looking for a baby that died in the accident. Its said the light appears in the distance along the track bed but has no easily identifiable source.

Skeptic’s explanation for St. Louis Light. Alysha and Shannon were in the 12th grade, living in northern Saskatchewan, when they won science fair gold medals for investigating and eventually duplicating the St. Louis Light phenomenon. Their project suggested that the light is caused by the diffraction of distant vehicle lights. Read about their science project here. By the way, before beginning this project, Shannon told VirtualSaskatchewan that she believes in the paranormal, while Alysha is the skeptical type. The project apparently got started when Shannon told Alysha how she and a group of friends “freaked out” when they spotted the ghost train during a road trip to St. Louis, and Alysha scoffed.

Where to go to see the St. Louis Light. St. Louis is south of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. The light sightings near the old railroad tracks happen about five miles north of St. Louis. By all accounts, the gravel road that leads to the place is unmarked and hard to find. Best bet: Go to St. Louis, and ask someone.

So there you have it, on this Halloween 2015. Ghost lights! Believe in them … if you dare.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/1WnygzP

What is a Dyson sphere?

View larger. | Here is a completely fantastic artists’ concept of a Dyson sphere. I like it. Notice the little moon or planet on the left side, being ravaged for raw materials. This image – called Shield World Construction – is by Adam Burn. More about it here. Via FantasyWallpapers.com

First step toward a Dyson sphere? Image via Flickr user langalex

Proponents of solar power know that only a tiny fraction of the sun’s total energy strikes the Earth. What if we, as a civilization, could collect all of the sun’s energy? If so, we would use some form of Dyson sphere, sometimes referred to as a Dyson shell or megastructure. Physicist and astronomer Freeman J. Dyson first explored this idea as a thought experiment in 1960. Dyson’s two-page paper in the journal Science was titled Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation because he was imagining a solar-system-sized solar power collection system not as a power source for us earthlings, but as a technology that other advanced civilizations in our galaxy would, inevitably, use. Dyson proposed that searching for evidence of the existence of such structures might lead to the discovery of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy, and indeed, in 2013, several groups of astronomers have begun a search for the telltale signs of Dyson spheres.

Read about KIC 8462852: Is this strange star surrounded by a Dyson sphere?

The central dot in this image represents a star. The simplest form of Dyson sphere might begin as a ring of solar power collectors, at a distance from a star of, say, 100 million miles. This configuration is sometimes called a Dyson ring. Image via Wikipedia.

Originally, some envisioned a Dyson sphere as an artificial hollow sphere of matter around a star, and Dyson did originally use the word shell. But Dyson didn’t picture the energy-collectors in a solid shell. In an exchange of letters in Science with other scientists, following his 1960 Science article, Dyson wrote:

A solid shell or ring surrounding a star is mechanically impossible. The form of ‘biosphere’ which I envisaged consists of a loose collection or swarm of objects traveling on independent orbits around the star.

As time passed, a civilization might continue to add Dyson rings to the space around its star, creating a relatively simple, but incredibly powerful, Dyson sphere. Image via Wikipedia.

A Dyson sphere might be, say, the size of Earth’s orbit around the sun; we orbit at a distance of 93 million miles (about 150 million kilometers). The website SentientDevelopments describes the Dyson sphere this way:

It would consist of a shell of solar collectors (or habitats) around the star. With this model, all (or at least a significant amount) of the energy would hit a receiving surface where it can be used. [Dyson] speculated that such structures would be the logical consequence of the long-term survival and escalating energy needs of a technological civilization.

And of course science fiction writers have had a field day writing about Dyson spheres. In fact, Dyson admitted he borrowed from science fiction before he began his technical exploration of the idea of a megastructure gathering energy from its star. Olaf Stapledon first mentioned this idea in his 1937 science fiction novel Star Maker, which Dyson apparently read and used as inspiration.

View larger. | Eventually, as a civilization evolved – aided by the boundless energy gathered from its star – its surrounding Dyson sphere would surely evolve as well, in ways that are hard to predict. This artist’s concept of a Dyson sphere is via SentientDevelopments.com

As mentioned above, astronomers in 2013 are now seriously discussing the search for evidence of Dyson spheres in the space of our Milky Way galaxy. Frustrated by decades of seeking radio signals from intelligent civilizations beyond Earth – and not finding any – a few have begun to contemplate this new search strategy. What would they be looking for? Consider that if a system of solar power collectors – a megastructure – were put in place around a star, the star’s light, as seen from our perspective, would be altered. The solar collectors would absorb and reradiate energy from the star. It’s that reradiated energy that astronomers would need to seek.

Stephen Battersby at New Scientist wrote a great article about this search, released in April 2013. The article is available by subscription only, but if you search on the title (“Alien megaprojects: The hunt has begun”), you might find an alternative link.

There’s also a very cool diagram published in New Scientist that helps explain astronomers’ new search, which you can see
here.

Bottom line: A Dyson sphere would consist of orbiting solar collectors in the space around the star of an advanced civilization. The goal would be to ensure a significant fraction of the star’s energy hit a receiving surface where it could be used to the civilization’s benefit. Freeman J. Dyson, who in 1960 became the first scientist to explore this concept, suggested that this method of energy collection be inevitable for advanced civilizations. In 2013, some groups of astronomers are seriously discussing the best ways to search for Dyson spheres in the space of our Milky Way galaxy.

How to build a Dyson sphere in five (relatively) easy steps

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/19eUVwc

View larger. | Here is a completely fantastic artists’ concept of a Dyson sphere. I like it. Notice the little moon or planet on the left side, being ravaged for raw materials. This image – called Shield World Construction – is by Adam Burn. More about it here. Via FantasyWallpapers.com

First step toward a Dyson sphere? Image via Flickr user langalex

Proponents of solar power know that only a tiny fraction of the sun’s total energy strikes the Earth. What if we, as a civilization, could collect all of the sun’s energy? If so, we would use some form of Dyson sphere, sometimes referred to as a Dyson shell or megastructure. Physicist and astronomer Freeman J. Dyson first explored this idea as a thought experiment in 1960. Dyson’s two-page paper in the journal Science was titled Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation because he was imagining a solar-system-sized solar power collection system not as a power source for us earthlings, but as a technology that other advanced civilizations in our galaxy would, inevitably, use. Dyson proposed that searching for evidence of the existence of such structures might lead to the discovery of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy, and indeed, in 2013, several groups of astronomers have begun a search for the telltale signs of Dyson spheres.

Read about KIC 8462852: Is this strange star surrounded by a Dyson sphere?

The central dot in this image represents a star. The simplest form of Dyson sphere might begin as a ring of solar power collectors, at a distance from a star of, say, 100 million miles. This configuration is sometimes called a Dyson ring. Image via Wikipedia.

Originally, some envisioned a Dyson sphere as an artificial hollow sphere of matter around a star, and Dyson did originally use the word shell. But Dyson didn’t picture the energy-collectors in a solid shell. In an exchange of letters in Science with other scientists, following his 1960 Science article, Dyson wrote:

A solid shell or ring surrounding a star is mechanically impossible. The form of ‘biosphere’ which I envisaged consists of a loose collection or swarm of objects traveling on independent orbits around the star.

As time passed, a civilization might continue to add Dyson rings to the space around its star, creating a relatively simple, but incredibly powerful, Dyson sphere. Image via Wikipedia.

A Dyson sphere might be, say, the size of Earth’s orbit around the sun; we orbit at a distance of 93 million miles (about 150 million kilometers). The website SentientDevelopments describes the Dyson sphere this way:

It would consist of a shell of solar collectors (or habitats) around the star. With this model, all (or at least a significant amount) of the energy would hit a receiving surface where it can be used. [Dyson] speculated that such structures would be the logical consequence of the long-term survival and escalating energy needs of a technological civilization.

And of course science fiction writers have had a field day writing about Dyson spheres. In fact, Dyson admitted he borrowed from science fiction before he began his technical exploration of the idea of a megastructure gathering energy from its star. Olaf Stapledon first mentioned this idea in his 1937 science fiction novel Star Maker, which Dyson apparently read and used as inspiration.

View larger. | Eventually, as a civilization evolved – aided by the boundless energy gathered from its star – its surrounding Dyson sphere would surely evolve as well, in ways that are hard to predict. This artist’s concept of a Dyson sphere is via SentientDevelopments.com

As mentioned above, astronomers in 2013 are now seriously discussing the search for evidence of Dyson spheres in the space of our Milky Way galaxy. Frustrated by decades of seeking radio signals from intelligent civilizations beyond Earth – and not finding any – a few have begun to contemplate this new search strategy. What would they be looking for? Consider that if a system of solar power collectors – a megastructure – were put in place around a star, the star’s light, as seen from our perspective, would be altered. The solar collectors would absorb and reradiate energy from the star. It’s that reradiated energy that astronomers would need to seek.

Stephen Battersby at New Scientist wrote a great article about this search, released in April 2013. The article is available by subscription only, but if you search on the title (“Alien megaprojects: The hunt has begun”), you might find an alternative link.

There’s also a very cool diagram published in New Scientist that helps explain astronomers’ new search, which you can see
here.

Bottom line: A Dyson sphere would consist of orbiting solar collectors in the space around the star of an advanced civilization. The goal would be to ensure a significant fraction of the star’s energy hit a receiving surface where it could be used to the civilization’s benefit. Freeman J. Dyson, who in 1960 became the first scientist to explore this concept, suggested that this method of energy collection be inevitable for advanced civilizations. In 2013, some groups of astronomers are seriously discussing the best ways to search for Dyson spheres in the space of our Milky Way galaxy.

How to build a Dyson sphere in five (relatively) easy steps

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/19eUVwc