Whenever you imagine any kind of altered reality — from dreams, to drug trips, to warp speed — the main image is always a tunnel, ringed by regular geometric patterns. And most of us see those odd, tunneling patterns at some point in our lives. What exactly is it about our brains that creates them?

There's a certain area in the brain that is the first stop for visual information. This visual cortex, called V1, is awash with nerves that interact with each other near-instantaneously. There are neurons that encourage activity among others, and neurons that inhibit activity among others. The combination of the both of them firing - say, during a drug trip - creates some interesting, and regular, patterns.

These patterns, though, don't create the tunnel effect. The tunnel springs from the fact that the visual system needs to perceive more than just a picture of contrasting values of light and dark. It also needs to perceive contour. The neurons in V1 are linked up in structures called hypercolumns. Each neuron in a hypercolumn perceives a different edge value. One neuron in a hypercolumn would perceive the vertical edge that two walls make when they come together. Another would detect the horizontal edge that a wall makes when it meets the floor. Although the neurons in each hypercolumn can interact with each other, they can't interact with all the neurons in the next hypercolumn. They can only interact with some, and the selective links between the columns are what scientists believe gives us the ability to perceive smooth, continuous curves.

It also means that, when we are hallucinating a pattern, we don't see the just the pattern. We create a symmetric pattern that comes together at certain angles. The interaction of the nerves in each hypercolumn causes an otherwise flat honeycomb or grid to curve around a central point in our vision. We see a tunnel, because our brain connects up that way.

Top Image: Garish

Second Image: Ksd5

Via Plus Magazine.

The Terminal Man

Michael Crichton is best known for coming up with the story for the enduring cinematic powerhouse that is Jurassic Park, but he'd been writing stories for over a decade before it hit theaters. One of his earlier books (which was made into one of his earlier movies), was The Terminal Man. A man suffers a car accident that leaves him with brain damage and neurological episodes that spur him to near-superhuman violence. Doctors implant a chip in his brain that's meant to calm the episodes, and, since it's a thriller, everything goes wrong. For modern audiences, one of the most puzzling aspects of the entire book is the man's diagnosis - psychomotor epilepsy.

Today we don't think of epileptics as a dangerous bunch, but in the 1970s and 1980s, a diagnosis of epilepsy was employed in many a court case. And the twentieth century was not the first time this notion was explored. The idea of epileptic seizures as times of abnegation of responsibility dates back to when it was called "the falling sickness," and "the sacred disease." People who had epilepsy felt things, saw things, and behaved in ways that were alien to normal experience. These experiences were sometimes considered visions from gods, or possession by spirits. It made sense, then, that if a god could give a person a vision, a god could make that person harm another person, without the epileptic being responsible.

Courts in the 1970s didn't hold with possession by the gods, but they did consider the idea that epileptics could commit great violence against someone else during a seizure without being responsible. The idea was backed both by individual claims and by scientific study. In 1978 a man who murdered his wife with a hammer claimed that he did it during an epileptic seizure. After his arrest and jailing, he was observed having seizures and committing acts of violence during those seizures. One study, done in 1982, found that out of 97 incarcerated young men, 18 had epilepsy. Their level of violence correlated with the number of their psychomotor symptoms. People were — and sometimes still are — arrested for violent behavior, during or immediately after epileptic seizures. Psychomotor epilepsy also seemed like the best candidate for such violent behavior. It is confined to only parts of the brain, and so seizures don't generally look like the full body seizures that often happen when the entire brain is involved.

When people began taking a closer look, though, the tide began to turn. The man who had been incarcerated was observed during his seizures. It was true that he had no history of violence before the crime, and didn't display violent behavior outside of the seizures. Still, during his seizures, his violence was not directed. Although he struck out, he struck randomly and didn't follow up any strike with a continuing attack. This lack of direction was noted in other epileptics as well. A seizure isn't just a flipped switch that causes people to fall to the ground or become absent. It starts with a period of confusion in which people talk without meaning, become agitated, and sometimes fumble at their clothes. This can disturb people around them, who either approach or try to physically restrain them. As the intensity of the seizure increases, the epileptic strikes out. Epilepsy sufferers can also strike at people when they're coming out of a seizure. Often they lose awareness during the seizure and are alarmed when they come to and have someone touching them or standing close to them. Rarely, if ever, does any epileptic make any sort of directed and sustained attack.

As wider surveys were done, evidence began to pile up against the severity of epilepsy being associated with severity of violence in an epileptic. In 1986 a study of prison populations did show that epilepsy was more prevalent among prisoners than a wide control population, but epilepsy was also more prevalent among the lower socio-economic levels from which much of the prison population was drawn. Epilepsy was not more common among people who had committed violent crimes, and severe epilepsy did not seem to correlate with severe violence. The researchers concluded that violence as a result of epilepsy was extremely rare, and should only be considered as relevant if it was shown to be part of each epileptic event, not just the occasional shove by a confused person coming out of a seizure.

So is there a link between epilepsy and violent outbursts? In 1999, a study of fifty epileptics was done. Twenty-five had intermittent explosive disorder, or IED, which is characterized by sudden physical or verbal violence grossly out of proportion with the cause of such violence. In the twenty-five patients with IED, the researchers found atrophy of the amygdala and an increased rate of history of encephalitis. The amygdala processes both memory and emotion, helping us deal with things like confusion, anger, and fear. Encephalitis is brain inflammation, and has been shown to increase a risk of both IED and epilepsy. So a disease that increases the odds of epilepsy can also increase the odds of extreme violent outbursts, but that's hardly a correlation.

By the end of the 1980s, the epilepsy defense — and the idea that epilepsy might cause acts of violence — were both generally abandoned. In a post-script in a reprinting of The Terminal Man, Crichton himself wrote that any sort of violent behavior from epileptics was incredibly rare. Today, the link is almost forgotten, and so modern authors will have to find some other neurological bogeyman.

Via Epilepsy, Violence, and Aggression: Legal Implications, American Journal of Psychiatry, The Epilepsy Foundation, Epilepsia, Brain, Epilepsia, Medscape.

Emil Rupp spent the late 1920s and early 1930s being lauded as the most impressive experimental physicist in the world. He managed to pull off experiments that no one else could. He worked with Einstein. And he'd made it all up.

Emil Rupp was born in Germany in 1898; he had an interest in physics, which meant that he was born at the perfect place in he perfect time. Germany was a nearly holy site for physicists throughout the first part of the 20th century — people traveled there to learn, to collaborate, and to become the best in the world. By age 27, Rupp was the best in the world.

His work focused on canal rays, which were produced in little glass tubes. On one side of a tube was an anode, a positively charged electrode. At the center of the tube was a cathode, a negatively charged electrode with little holes — sometimes called canals — drilled in it. Positive ions would shoot from the anode to the cathode, and some would shoot through the holes; these would continue into a vacuum on the far side of the tube, where they emitted enough light that they could be studied with the naked eye.

Rupp was one of the researchers studying these rays, particularly their interference patterns as they came through the canals and the coherence of the beams in the vacuum. He came up with some remarkable results. Basically, his observable phenomena, from interference patterns, to wave trains (a series of waves traveling in sync), to beam coherence were larger than anyone else had every observed. By studying them, he noticed that the rays underwent two different kinds of Doppler shift. One shift was due to the acceleration of the ion in the ray. The other was thermal Doppler shift, the shift that comes about from the random jiggling of the ion.

Everyone took note of Rupp's experiments and their strong, observable results. Even Einstein noticed, and the phenomenon that Rupp observed gave him an idea for an experiment. He wanted to know if waves emitted by atoms were emitted over time, or emitted instantaneously. The large coherence and the interference patterns for the canal ray beams given by Rupp gave him hope that he could set up experiments with observable results using hydrogen atoms. What Einstein didn't know was that Rupp only got such lovely results because he was making everything, from the experiments to the data, up as he went along.

Not everyone shared Einstein's confidence. Robert Atkinson noticed that Rupp's atoms in motion seemed more easily observable than atoms at rest. Thermal motion alone should make this impossible. A hydrogen atom at rest has thermal motion because it is bumped by other hydrogen atoms. Accelerate it incredibly fast in one direction and it should bump into even more atoms, be more jittery, and less observable. When Einstein inquired about this, Rupp said that Atkinson was right, but his experiment had compensated for that — although he hadn't mentioned the problem at all before Atkinson had brought it up.

What followed would have made a decent farce. Einstein noticed a flaw in Rupp's experiment and corrected for it. Reasoning that Rupp had already seen the flaw, corrected it, and forgotten to mention it, Einstein wrote to Rupp about the correction. Rupp said yes he had corrected it, and thanked Einstein for reminding him. Rupp started on the experiments and wrote to Einstein about his results. Einstein had a problem with the results. Rupp said he'd use a 'purer canal ray' and try again. Rupp wrote again with data, which Einstein analyzed and which seemed to agree with Einstein's predictions. Einstein noticed another problem with the experiment, and puzzled about why the data had come out right when the experiment was wrong. Rupp wrote back saying that, yes, it was all very puzzling.

At length, Rupp came up with an answer that seemed plausible to Einstein, and Einstein himself presented the work that they had done together. The connection launched Rupp's career. He was given what he wanted, and pursued any experiments he wanted to pursue (though he must have been relieved to have severed the connection with Einstein after their difficult collaboration), and published several more papers — until 1935.

In 1935, he went a bit too far. People were getting new and better results with canal rays, and so Rupp wrote that he'd managed to get beams of positrons accelerated in ways that no one ever had before. At last, the physics community in general turned its eyes to him and asked, "Oh yeah? With what?" Rupp had tripped himself up in the most obvious way possible — he didn't even have access to the equipment necessary to create such beams.

At last, people started combing back over his papers, finding flaws, omissions, and sometimes outright impossibilities. Knowing the game was up, Rupp published a retraction covering five recent papers that could absolutely be proved wrong. He included a doctor's note saying he suffered from psycasthenia, a state which gives people obsessive compulsions, and that he'd written the papers in a "dreamlike state." He withdrew from scientific life, and his work was quietly buried.

Einstein walked away from the mess relatively unscathed. His notes to and from Rupp survived, and it was clear he had mainly been guilty of giving Rupp the benefit of the doubt. That guilt was shared by most of the physics community by that time, and so the matter was left in the past. There's little to read about Rupp and his 10 years of fame nowadays. Although, if he were somehow able to write his biography, it would probably make for fascinating reading.

[Via History and Philosophy of Physics]

Did you know that working around a certain chemical can make your jaw glow green and have to be chopped off? Not your teeth. Not your bones. Not your head. Your jaw. Learn what happens when biochemistry gets terrifyingly specific.

Around the mid-1800s the first instances of "phossy jaw," cropped up. It wasn't called phossy jaw at first. It was just a terrible disease that seemed to afflict mostly those who worked in a factories that manufactured matches. It began as generalized pain in the jaw and swelling of the gums. Then abscesses would crop up along the jaw, and more and more bone would be exposed. The bone would glow in the dark. That got people's attention, but not as much as the people who had to have their jaws amputated in order to prevent infection from spreading to the rest of the body.

It didn't take long before researchers narrowed down the culprit for this particular ill - the new chemical known as yellow (now called white) phosphorus. Eventually, the manufacture of white phosphorus in everyday materials was stopped, and proper safety standards were put in the few places that still did use the chemical. But the horror of "phossy jaw" remained. The horror wasn't just due to the physical devastation that phosphorus caused, but to the element of the bizarre. If a chemical is inhaled it might damage the lungs. If it is touched it should poison the skin. If it enters the entire body, it might poison the whole body or work best in one tissue or organ. But how could it specifically single out the jawbone? Why, of all the places in the body, did it only show up there? If you had read, in a novel, about a poison that made the jaw bone glow, would you believe it?

Phosphorus has the ability to affect tissue this way because of the way bone is maintained in the body. Although it seems static and unchanging, bone is thinning, thickening, breaking and repairing all the time. Two major cells responsible for this are osteoclasts and osteoblasts. The osteoclasts are the cells that break down bone and, in a way, ingest it. The osteoblasts build it back up. The break down and build up of bone is crucial to keeping the tissue healthy. Phosphorus binds to bone. Osteoclasts break down that bone tissue and assimilate it. The chemical poisons them and they die, and so bone no longer gets broken down. Bone "turnover," or rejuvenation, stops. In some tissues, this turnover rate is naturally higher than others, and jaw, particularly the tissue around the teeth, has a high turnover rate. The osteoclasts get poisoned, the process stops, and the tissue sickens and dies in the most gruesome and bizarre way possible. Sometimes fiction doesn't hold a candle to life.

Image: Sebastian Ritter

Via RDH Magazine and NCBI.

If you got a great score on a test, you'd like to continue your winning streak, wouldn't you? One experiment proves you wouldn't. You'd self-sabotage. Not unintentionally and not subconsciously. You'd knowingly and deliberately screw up.

We sometimes engage in behaviors that scuttle our chances of getting what we want. This is a baffling behavior that, no matter how ridiculous it sounds, we have all engaged in at some point. Sometimes we are so anxious to impress someone that we don't want to say anything wrong - and so we don't say anything at all, which is hardly impressive. Sometimes we so want to relax for that big day tomorrow that we have a drink. Or eight.

These incidents can be viewed as any number of things, from flawed but sincere success strategies to unconscious attempts at self-sabotage. The unconscious part of the equation is key. However much nerves prey on the mind, they can't ever make someone actually say, "I will specifically do this to screw everything up."

And yet, in 1978, a group of students did exactly that. Two researchers, Edward Jones and Steven Berglas, asked students to take a test. They pretended to score the test and happily told the students that they'd gotten a perfect score. This had to have come as good - and somewhat surprising - news to the students, who were then asked to take another test.

Before they took this second test, they were asked to take their choice of two different drugs. Both were perfectly legal, the researchers assured the students. One was designed to improve academic performance. The other was designed to lower it. Guess which ones the students overwhelmingly chose.

Its true that the stakes were not particularly high for the test, but one assumes that, even during the swinging seventies, a bunch of goody-two-shoes students who had volunteered to be part of a psychology experiment wouldn't want to do badly on a test. And yet that's exactly what they consciously and explicitly chose. Jones and Berglas related the experiment to the impulse to drink to excess at crucial moments. Blame the drug for your poor performance and you won't have to blame your own brain. At the same time, it's surprising that so many of the study participants were willing not only to ruin their "grade," but to admit that they wanted to out loud. Maybe what we want more than anything is to fail.

Via You Are Not So Smart, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

There are certain times when the woods begin to glow. Sometimes they glow so much that people call the Park Service and ask them to send a hazmat team. What they're actually seeing is foxfire. And although we know how it happens, we don't know exactly why.

The picture above is a lovely example of one instance of the phenomenon known as foxfire. It's the jack-o-lantern mushroom, a cheery orange mushroom during the day, that goes ethereal around the gills at night. Taking a jack-o-lantern mushroom into a dark room and letting your eyes adjust and the delicate light from the underside of the mushroom gives you a beautiful look at the ruffled bottom of the canopy.

The picture to the left is also an image of foxfire, and you can see why it sometimes causes people to think they're at the origin site of the teenage mutant ninja turtles. Although it can be pretty, it's not symmetric, it's not readily identifiable, and it occasionally covers entire forest glades. Less overwhelming, but equally unsettling, it shows up in people's woodpiles. This is the work of the honey mushroom. The body of the mushroom is above ground, but its rootlike structures grow underground and up into rotting wood. On dark nights, it looks like the wood is glowing green.

The reaction is the result of a pigment, luciferin, and an enzyme, luciferase. Combine the two in the presence of oxygen and the luciferase obligingly glues two atoms of oxygen to the luciferin. The reaction produces energy, which is released as light. It's the same reaction that lights up the firefly. Unlike the firefly, the mushroom can't turn the process off and on at will, and so glows all the time. During the day or on bright nights, we already see so much light that we don't notice the dim glow of the foxfire.

Although the luciferin reaction is extraordinarily energy efficient, it has to cost the mushroom energy to dispense so much light. Why, then, do the mushrooms do it? No one quite knows. Some people think they serve as warning signals, the same way bright colors on a beetle warn off predators. Others think that they are actually meant to draw insects to the mushroom, which can help spread the mushroom's spores.

I just like to think that fungi have poetic souls.

Top Image: Noah Siegel

Second Image: Bruce McAdam

Via: Chicago Wilderness, Warnell, Firefly Science.

Never.

We were all impressed with the dramatic trailer for Gravity, with George Clooney weathering an explosion on an orbiting space station and Sandra Bullock spinning off into the void of space. Things like that make good cinema. There are other space crises, though, that will never get their own movies. Here are some space disasters that are just too awkward for the cinema.

Sewage System Failures

If there’s a failing system somewhere on a spaceship in a movie, something that’s spraying things all over, it’s always going to be either water or fire. Possibly, if the movie is set in the future, it’s antimatter. Whatever it is, it’s elemental and anodyne. It lets someone announce over the intercom system, “The coolant leak is shorting out the life support systems!” What it isn’t, however, is literal crap bursting out of the walls and spraying all over the delicate equipment.

This is strange, since biological leavings are the one thing that we’ll never get rid of in human space travel. And, no matter what level of technological sophistication you are at, any sewage spill is always going to be a massive emergency. The most basic, retro movie could have something as simple as, “poop bag explodes!” Because astronauts had to go in a bag, put in some chemicals that dissolve the product, and knead the bag to work the chemicals through, it’s not an unthinkable possibility. Any bursting of the bag would send liquidy poop flying through the capsule, doing a lot of damage. More recent spacecraft have toilets that shunt human leavings to an unheated compartment that then opens into space. This means that solid waste, and sometimes even liquid waste, freezes. Any sort of pressure from the outside would send frozen poop bullets and peecicles flying into the space craft. Again, causing a lot of damage. And not just damage to the equipment. There’s a reason people don’t live in sewers. With the limited availability of cleaning facilities, and the possibility of getting impaled by frozen feces, you’re looking at massive infections for the entire crew.

Even in the future, sewage problems present a major crisis. If you look at the Enterprise, it was a long-haul space ship that was meant to cross vast distances, and when it came across new civilizations it was not allowed to interfere with them in any significant way. This presumably included not dumping megatons of sewage on them and taking all their food. This, in turn, meant that the crew was eating food, and leaving waste. You figure out the connection there. Any problem with the sewage system would mean cutting, or changing, the food supply. Imagine the effect this would have on crew morale. Sure, it’s easy to be an enlightened, peace-loving civilization if every time you want a sundae the computer will give it to you. If Picard, or even Spock, had to chow down on barely-processed crap patties to scrape by on 1200 calories a day, they’d turn into a raiding party in about a week.

Minor Health Problems in Space

Movies are rife with space plagues and space madness and evil space worms that creep into your ear and burst out of your chest — but rarely does any space movie deal with the minor, annoying health problems that inevitably crop up. We know about the host of medical problems brought about by the sudden loss of significant gravity. Generally this causes headache, nausea, and back ache, because the body naturally curves into a fetal position during weightlessness. This, in turn, leads to a hell of a lot of crankiness and, eventually, depression. Even during relatively short voyages, this is a problem – especially when there’s a lot of work to do. There have been missions, even during the hyper-competitive space race days, that have been cut short because the some of the astronauts simply couldn’t take any more. In one case, on Skylab-4, there was a 24-hour mutiny during which the crew switched off communications and relaxed for a day, in rebellion against a punishing work schedule. This isn’t a glamorous fight-the-man kind of problem, but exhaustion, overwork, and a myriad minor pains can make people simply stop working, even if that means cutting off communication with the people whose job it is to keep them alive.

Again, this would be more of a real emergency if this were set in the future. It’s one thing for a crew of five to twenty to have a few aches and pains between them. It’s another when a ship of thousands, complete with families, suddenly loses artificial gravity so that everyone has a health problem. Imagine the chaos if everyone in an entire city got sick. Some are violently nauseous. Some have blinding headaches. Some have minor health problems that are suddenly exacerbated by the crisis. Some just have constant pain that denies them any adequate rest. No place could ever be built to deal with one hundred percent of the population getting hurt. It would be a death of a thousand cuts. A thousand, mundane, annoying little cuts.

The Depopulation of the Earth

Have you ever watched a program about space voyages and thought, “Man, I wish during this amazing age of discovery, I was still on Earth, wearing neutral-colored jumpsuits and growing grapes?" No. Nobody has. Most movies and TV shows get around the fact that it’s cooler to be in space by showing spaceships as grungy or colony worlds as miserable wastelands that look, I’m sure by coincidence, like the bleaker parts of California’s southern deserts. It’s no surprise that no one wants to go there.

And yet, in a future where space ships jet around the galaxy filled with attractive people doing interesting things and discovering worlds that are semi-paradises, it doesn’t seem like the Earth would be a major attraction. Yes, we’ve all seen the nature documentaries. The Earth is a wondrous place. But there are plenty of wondrous places on Earth – wide majestic deserts, fertile rolling valleys, silent solemn mountaintops - that have all been depopulated because some people discovered birth control and others decided that they’re going to New York to make performance art or become a stock broker. The world is full of ghost towns. In a future that, seemingly, has birth control available to everyone and a star ship ready to take you to any planet you desire, would you hang around the Earth? There are movies about space prisons. Maybe they’ve got it the wrong way around. Maybe the only way people will stay on Earth is if it’s turned into a prison.

Non-Evil Sentient Computers

HAL is one of the best movie villains ever. So is the Terminator. Evil, sentient computers are cool. They make for riveting movies. But there’s no real guarantee that, when a computer gains sentience, it’s going to be evil. The problem is, it’s equally unlikely that its sentience is going to be suited for space travel. The vast majority of people aren't candidates for NASA not because they are serial killers, but because they’re distracted, lazy, ignorant of the subject material, and not interested enough in learning it. They’d be a disaster if they went up on a mission.

But they wouldn’t be a fascinating movie-type disaster. They’d just be a miserable co-worker that everyone around them had to compensate for.

But no one can compensate for the computers on a space ship, or space station, if they turn out to be sentient and lazy. Computers on space ships need to be non-sentient, not because of the remote chance that they’ll be evil, but because of the very real chance that they’ll just not feel like doing the millions of boring things that we require them precisely when we require them to do it. Astronauts would have to spend hours cajoling a computer into doing the calculations necessary for navigation. They’d have to nag it to keep up the air filtration. (I’m guessing maintaining the sewage systems would also be a point of contention.) And that’s just routine maintenance. When timing really counts – like landing on planets, taking space walks, or maneuvering up to other ships – there would be moments of sheer terror while everyone wonders if the computer will be distracted by a cat video and forget to run the numbers at some crucial point. It would be like living with a negligent coworker who could kill you if they don't feel like making a fresh pot of coffee. And that's scary, but not glamorous.

This is the problem with being in an environment where anything that goes wrong can kill you. Anything can go wrong. But not anything makes a death you'd want to admit to. Or watch someone else suffer.

And not figuratively, either. Sometimes people have found that certain emotions literally cause their muscles to unhook from their brains. They collapse entirely. This is not some strange disease, or weakness — tt's the misapplication of a necessary function.

The emotion and physical responses occupy the same body. They both flood the body with chemicals, so it makes sense that they influence each other. Most emotion-triggered physical responses are so commonplace that we take them for granted — nobody raises an eyebrow when sadness or emotional upset causes a person's eyes to water. Tiredness or boredom causes people to open their mouths very wide, stretch their jaw, and make sea lion sounds and nobody's surprised—- although a few people are offended. And when someone dissolves into paroxysms of semi-shrieks after a joke, it's expected.

But if those semi-shrieks stop and the person freezes and crumples to the ground, then people get all excited. They shouldn't. Laughter is one of the more common triggers of cataplexy. Cataplexy can pop up at any time during a person's life, and though it is treatable, it isn't curable. The condition can't be cured because it isn't a solitary condition — it seems to be an unnecessary application of a very necessary function.

Before we slip into REM sleep, we experience something called muscle atonia. Muscle atonia is why, after a dream about wandering in the desert, you don't wake up five miles from your house walking into the sea. It's why a dream about boxing results in no more than a twitching of your eyelids and fingers, rather than a full-scale fight with whoever is nearby. At some point, your brain unhooks your muscles and paralyzes them, so they can do no more than twitch through the most vivid dreams. When you wake up, the muscles come back online. If the brain doesn't get the timing right, there are quite a few problematic things that can happen. Sometimes people experience 'sleep paralysis,' waking from a dream only to be unable to move their body. Because the mind is still waking, sleep paralysis often coincides with hallucinations, some of them terrifying. A less traumatic disorder of muscle atonia happens when the brain starts dreaming before disconnecting the muscles completely, so a dream about falling will lead to the dreamer jerking upright in bed and waking themselves up.

Cataplexy is more serious than that. When a person experiences the trigger, their muscles stop functioning, just the way they would during sleep. Sometimes they freeze, but more often they hit the ground. The condition itself offers no danger, but because it could happen almost any time, there are obvious hazards. Driving is generally off-limits, as are sports like swimming or skiing. Cataplexy sufferers also tend to be leery of stairs or cooking over a hot stove. The difficulties add up.

Triggers are also a problem. One of the most common triggers is laughter — which is not known to provoke sympathy in those people who witness an attack. Others are extreme anger — again, not a good emotional time to need help. People with cataplexy find themselves constantly having to guard against certain emotions. This is difficult when the emotional triggers are bad, and torturous when they're good.

There are a few medications that help control cataplexy, but they are expensive and relatively rare. Doctors generally give patients pills meant to combat fatigue. Cataplexy and narcolepsy, which often coincide in patients, are both related to sleep disorders and both brought out by extreme fatigue and over-tiring situations. They're essentially sleep following people into their waking life.

One last note — there is one patient out there that has an attack every time he feels extremely smug. This makes me feel extremely smug. How bad should I feel about that?

Top Image: David Tribble

Second Image: Eric McGregor

Via Journal of Neuroscience, American Physiological Society, NCBI, The Guardian.

Ever seen white phosphorus? It takes very little heat to ignite, and burns on contact with oxygen. A phosphorus sun is an experiment that involves filling a glass vessel with pure oxygen and lowering phosphorus into it. It doesn't always go well, but at least it's always pretty.

If there's anything you'd want to combine, it's highly-reactive chemicals, heat, pure oxygen, and a lot of glass — so you can see why the phosphorus sun caught on as a science experiment. Generally undertaken by science teachers and anyone who enjoys spending the day manufacturing hazardous chemicals, it has a definite aesthetic appeal.

The phosphorous in the phosphorous sun is white phosphorous. Red phosphorous, generally used on matches, is a placid type of phosphorous that, as a molecule, resembles a warped set of monkey bars. It takes quite of bit of heat to ignite. Black phosphorous looks a bit like a complicated pattern made by outlining a lot of bow ties. It doesn't take as much heat to oxidize, but does take quite a bit of pressure. White phosphorus looks like a group of tetrahedrons, and requires the minimum amount of temperature and pressure to burn. So, naturally, white is the allotrope that everyone's interested in.

To make a phosphorus sun, a spherical bowl is pumped full of oxygen, and a lump of the waxy substance is lowered inside. After that, all it takes is a slight nudge from a warm metal rod, and the phosphorus starts to burn. The smoke from the burn fills the bowl, at first rising up, then cooling and curling down in tendrils. The continued burning of the phosphorus lump lights up the smoke, and the combined effect looks like a beautiful, swirling sun.

The experiment is prized by science teachers and was prized by alchemists — who thought it was a first step towards making gold. The modern day teachers manage to do the experiment well. The alchemists, not so much. If they weren't burned or suffocated, they were often poisoned by the exposure to phosphorus. This is definitely an experiment to admire from the sidelines.

Top Image: Robot Byn

Via Popular Science and Jefferson Lab.

"Sacrifice," the Arrow season finale, finally deals out the deaths that fans have been predicting all season, along with a generous helping of trailer-worthy lines like, "You have always known the man he is," and "Someone needs to put an end to this." Let us applaud all the characters as they exit, stage left — some never to return.

I've vented a lot of snark at Arrow over the course of the season, but this episode is stuffed full of character nobility, and it has made me repent. As Arrow takes a summer-long curtain call, I'd like to take this recap to applaud each character as they have their great moment.

First, let's start with the Island Gang. As Fyers launches the missile at the airplane, Ollie cuts the world's toughest leather band around his wrist and the gang springs into action. With a lot of gun-firing by Slade, a lot of ass-kicking and missile reprogramming by Shado, and a lot of looking alarmed by Ollie, they manage to re-route the missile back down into the camp, killing most of the bad guys. Ollie gets his big moment when it's discovered that Fyers is still alive and holding Shado hostage. Picture Ollie as William Tell and Fyers as the apple. It is a triumphant day for them all, even if they are still marooned.

Shado? You're the most competent character on the show. From helpful martial arts tutorials to ass-kicking to missile-launcher reprogramming, you get things done. Congratulations. Slade? I like your swagger, but mostly I like that Arrow totally fooled me with you. I wrote an entire rant on the fake Deathstroke they brought in originally, wondering why he was nothing like the guy from the comics and then? Bam. You come along. Well done, show.

And well done, show on the next twist. Remember how all year long Ollie did ridiculous shirtless wall-climbing stunts? It wasn't gratuitous! It was setting things up for his ridiculous, shirtless, wall-climbing escape. Barrowmerlyn puts Ollie in arm-chains suspended from the ceiling and — horror! — monologues at him. It's a bragging monologue, about why Ollie can't win, "because you don't know, in your heart, what you're fighting for — what you're willing to sacrifice. I do." When he leaves, Ollie inverts his body, climbs the chains, and then drops, breaking the bar the chains are tied to. Badass. Now, I like Ollie's manly tears at the end of this episode, but I like to think that this is the vindication for both the character and the actor. All year Ollie and Stephen Amell have been subjecting themselves to torture dressed up as a combination of exercise and performance art, and now, at last, all of their effort comes to fruition. Again, well done.

The newly-freed Ollie makes a fairly awkward round of conversations. He lets Tommy know that his dad is a supervillain (while Tommy lets him know that he knows Ollie is a cheating asshole). He lets Laurel know that she should stay out of the Glades. And he lets Moira know that they need to stop the earthquake that's about to flatten the Glades. This leads to two more moments of glory.

The first belongs to Moira, who calls a press conference with every news outlet in town because, damn it, she isn't going to confess over the phone with bad eye make-up and a computer-altered voice like her classless son. Moira, you've managed to mesh Lady MacBeth with Jocasta in this series, and you've done it with style and grace. In this scene alone you were enough to make Barrowmerlyn lose his cool to the point where he smashed things like the Hulk, and you weren't even in the same room with him.

The second moment of glory belongs to hurricane Thea. She provides the one moment of hilarity in this episode. She watches her mother confess to being an accomplice to multiple murders, being part of a conspiracy to commit thousands more murders, and doing all this under the threat of family annihilation. She watches her mother get arrested. Her mother comes up to her and says, "I love you." And Thea says, "I love Roy!" Moira's confused delivery of "Roy?" is a delight. Thea then yells that Roy is in the Glades, and as Moira helplessly screams after her not to go to the Glades, she goes stomping off to the Glades. Into an evacuation zone. With no practical skills of any kind. For a boyfriend with a functional pair of legs and an ability to steal cars. To summarize my reaction to this, I have to turn to Tai from Clueless. What, exactly, are you going to do, Thea?

Some viewers don't like Thea. Some viewers might argue that her true moment of glory comes later, but not everyone in a superhero TV series has to be a superhero. In a series where nearly every character faced death daily, Thea managed to spin unimaginable drama out of her brother not being open enough to her, her mother perhaps once having an affair, and her purse getting snatched. Her brattiness transcended mere plot and character and reached the sublime, and I love her for that.

Roy's moment of glory comes in the Glades, where people are rioting. In what I like to think is a touching tribute to comic book Ollie's 1960s protest sensibilities, many of them carry cardboard signs with slogans. Roy sees a guy being mugged by three people, beats two of them up, and looks alarmed when a the third pulls a gun on him. Thea comes out of nowhere and cracks the guy in the head with a bottle. They manage to procure a car, slalom through a "say no to texting and driving" PSA that I'm impressed Arrow had the balls to put in the season finale, and find themselves staring at a group of people who are trapped on a bus. Roy sends Thea on her way and vows to stay and save the people. But before that happens? He grabs Thea and gives her a big dramatic kiss. That's another tribute to the Green Arrow comic. Heroism is all well and good, but nookie first. By honoring that, Roy gets his moment of glory.

Meanwhile, Tommy laughingly tells his dad that Ollie thinks he's a supervillain, and is dismayed to learn that Ollie was right. Barrowmerlyn plays the tape of his wife dying to Tommy, apparently attempting a vengeance transfer, but it fails. So he knocks Tommy out and goes on his way.

Ollie, Felicity, and Dig have tracked the earthquake maker to an abandoned subway station over a fault line in the Glades. Ollie says he'll go after Barrowmerlyn while Dig deactivates the earthquake device with remote guidance from Felicity. Dig says no, he's going with Ollie to hunt down the archvillain. Some would see this as heroism. I don't. I see it as smarts. Ollie pretended like he was on the most dangerous mission, but come on. He was sending Dig to a decrepit building, underground, over a fault line, at the direct epicenter of an earthquake. Dig's too smart for that. He's always been a smart character, and he's supplemented those smarts with a general good nature and some dry-as-burnt-toast humor. Congrats on that, Dig. I'm sorry your love subplot fizzled, but let's hope you steam up the screen with Felicity next season.

Instead they send poor Quentin Lance, who has not caught a break all season. He heads down into the subways, with Felicity guiding him, and starts disarming the thing. As he clips a wire, the countdown clock suddenly starts dropping fast. He breathes, walks away, and makes a phone call to Laurel. It's very sweet, as he tells her not to make the mistakes he made and push people away, but what I like best is the fact that he instantly knows she ran straight to her law firm in the Glades and just accepts it. It's nice to have actual smart cops in a superhero story, and that's what he is. Hurray for Quentin. He says a heartfelt goodbye, and then . . .

Felicity gets him to go back to the bomb and freakin' disarm it. And this is what I like about Felicity. Some people find her verbal awkwardness funny, but often it comes off as forced to me. What I like about her is she gets things done. In this scene she listens to him make his dying call and is all, "Oh, you think you're going out a hero? Not on my watch. You're gonna live. Now do as I say."

Meanwhile, there is the ultimate battle between Barrowmerlyn and Ollie on a rooftop. He begins with "Welcome, gentlemen," spirals through, "Are you ready to die?" and ends, wonderfully, with, "Your mother and sister will be joining you in death!" This last is said as Ollie is being choked into unconsciousness. Ollie grabs an arrow lying on the roof in front of him and shoves an arrow right through Barrowmerlyn's chest (by way of Ollie's own chest). He then tells Barrowmerlyn that they've deactivated the earthquake device. Barrowmerlyn smiles and says the one thing he learned as a businessman was the value of redundancy. And dies. And breaks my heart. Oh, John Barrowman. Your portrayal of a black-hearted bastard was a source of joy. I sincerely hope you find a way to come back to life, just so I can see that cleft chin and those preternaturally white teeth say more evil things. Goodnight, sweet prince.

There's a second device. It spares most of the Arrow gang and seems to hit only on the east side of the Glades, which is where Laurel's law firm is. Laurel, I think, got the most thankless role in this entire series. As the long-term love interest, she had all relevant information kept from her while she was bounced around by plot points she couldn't possibly understand. I think they'll keep the ignorance going but, I hope, next season, they do more stuff with her split relationship with Ollie and with the Hood. Katie Cassidy really shines with that stuff. This episode, I thought it was fun to see her, as the Endlessly Crusading Lawyer, still clutching files as she ran out of the law firm — only to get pinned under falling cement blocks.

And who should save her but... Tommy. He tells her he came because he loves her, and lifts the block off of her. When he yells that she should run and he'll be right behind her, we know that Arrow has just about washed its hands of the Merlyn family. Sure enough, the building explodes outwards and when Ollie gets there, Tommy has a piece of iron through the chest. Ollie comforts Tommy, telling him that he saved Laurel's life and that he's nothing like his father. Tommy looks up at Ollie, and it's a measure of how all-around good the character has become, since he started the series as the obnoxious best friend, that he pulls off his lines with Ollie.

"Did you kill him?"

"No."

"Thank you."

And so Tommy is the last to go. Damn. That was really sad. You got me, Arrow.

I'm shot through the heart. And you're to blame.

For most modern people, the story of Marie Antoinette ends with her death. For some, though, it didn't end until 1998, when one of the most credible pretenders to the throne of France was, posthumously, discredited. See how genetics solved a 200-year-old mystery.

Marie Antoinette's story has become a sort of legend. Whether it's imagined as the martyrdom of a powerless pawn or the comeuppance of a callous plutocrat, it has both the perfect stage and the perfect timeline. In the narrative, the curtain closes with the fall of the guillotine. Real life wasn't as precise; both Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were widely seen as martyrs by their contemporaries, but more significantly, they were seen as royals. That meant that whoever inherited the throne could get both their tragic glamour and, eventually, the wealth of the restored crown.

The couple had two living children at the time of their deaths, Marie Therese and Louis Charles. The law forbid a woman from ever inheriting the throne of France, and so all the hopes of the royalists fell on Louis Charles. The hopes were dashed when Louis Charles died at the age of 10, only two years after his parents' deaths and while still in the custody of the radical republicans of France.

Rumors swirled about his fate. Most believed that his jailers had killed him (historians generally think it was tuberculosis), but more intriguing gossip hinted that he'd escaped. Long after the Terror was over, a number of different Louis Charleses popped up around Europe. One new worlder even claimed the throne, saying he had been taken in by "tribes in America." The most credible candidate was a German clock-maker named Karl Wilhelm Naundorff. Naundorff, despite speaking limited French, convinced much of the old French court, and gained a spectacular coup when he won the recognition of Louis Charles' nanny. "Louis XVII" is even written on his gravestone, albeit under his instructions.

Although Naundorff's claims were never accepted officially, there was no way to absolutely disprove his story until genetic testing came into the picture. Marie Therese, the only child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to survive the Terror, never had children, and so there were no direct descendants from whom to get samples. There are genetic benefits, though, to being part of a big family. Marie Antoinette was the daughter of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, who had sixteen children. Many of them married royals and had children of their own. There are surviving descendants from the maternal line. And not all genetic material has to come from living people. Marie Antoinette herself had a habit of exchanging locks of hair with her family. Because she became so famous at the time of her death, hair samples from both Marie Antoinette and two of her sisters survive.

Samples of bone marrow were taken from the grave of Naundorff — don't pretend to be royalty if you don't want your body exhumed — and scientists did a mitochondrial DNA analysis. The mitochondria is the cell's energy converter; without it, there would be no point in consuming glucose, because it would never been turned into something that the cell can use. We picture all human DNA being packed into the cell's nucleus, but mitochondria, out floating in cytoplasm, have their own set of genes dubbed mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA. Although both sperm and egg have mitochondria, and mitochondrial DNA, the mtDNA in sperm simply disintegrates upon fertilization of the ovum. The ovum's mtDNA is replicated, and stays with a person for life. Mitochondrial DNA is then passed down through the female line. Although a boy will have his mother's DNA, he will not pass it on.

The mitochondrial DNA in the hair samples from Marie Antoinette and her sisters all matched. Close relatives — those of the same generation — will match very closely. As time passes, mutations emerge in the mtDNA. It takes a little more research to see if differences in DNA are due to time or to lack of a blood relationship. Naundorff's DNA had two nucleotide differences from the hair samples. He had four nucleotide differences from the surviving relatives. He, most likely, was not in any way related to the executed queen.

What about the other Louis Charles candidates? They were excluded by a more grisly test. Reportedly, a royalist had come into the possession of the heart of Louis Charles. He smuggled it away. This is not as horrific as it sounds — the internal organs, including the heart, were often removed from the corpses of French royalty and preserved in ceremonial urns. Monks or court officials would kneel by these urns and venerate them. The plan might have been to do such a thing for the young boy, who, in the eyes of the royalists, had become king after his father hand been executed. The heart survived, mummified, to this day, and after the claim of Naundorff was disproved, the heart was tested at two different laboratories. The mitochondrial DNA matched the mtDNA in the hair samples exactly. Sadly, the young boy did die in prison in 1795, and the Louis Charles pretenders were just pretenders. After 200 years, there is no more speculation.

[Via The European Journal of Genetics and NCBI]

It's not everyday that you come across a childhood game in a psychology experiment — particularly one that you thought that you had made up. But the "finger tapping" game gives us some insights into our past, and explains why people can't understand you when you think you're being clear as day.

A few days ago I wrote about cryptomnesia, the phenomenon of people believing that they had invented a thought that they had in fact only remembered. (If you've ever been reminded by stone-faced companions that the joke you thought you made up was actually from The Simpsons, you've had a run-in with cryptomnesia.) What do I come across a few days later but a childhood game — one I thought I had invented with my friends — actually featuring in a psychology experiment.

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton came up with a test in which one person "taps out" a song with their finger, and sprung it on about fifty students. They each tapped out a popular and familiar song of their choice with their finger. They were assigned a partner who attempted to guess what the song was. Tappers thought that the other student would be able to guess their songs about fifty percent of the time. The other student was able to guess their song only about three percent of the time.

I never kept tabs on the games I played with my friends — we were a wild bunch, and would have no truck with formal statistics when it came to our crazy finger tapping games — but I remember the sense of frustration when my friends were unable to guess the music that I was tapping out as plain as day. I could hear how the taps perfectly coincided with the notes of the song. Why couldn't they?

They couldn't because all they heard was tap . . . tap tap tap . . . tap tap, tap-tap, tap tap (that, by the way, was Rule, Britannia) and it didn't correspond to any song they'd ever heard. Babies tend to believe that whatever information is obvious to them must be obvious to the world at large. Although we, intellectually, know that other people can't possibly know what's on our mind, there remains that lingering sense that we're communicating everything to the outside world. Games like Taboo and Pictionary capitalize on both sides of that frustration — especially when the player gets stuck in a loop because they can't possibly imagine that anyone could be dense enough not to understand what they've been communicating, while their team is going out of their minds with frustration because two circles and a square don't help us understand what you're trying to say, no matter how many times you underline them, Gary! (Sorry, I may be remembering something traumatic.)

But we don't need official games, or psychological experiments, to trip us up in this regard. In life it often seems clear to us that we've communicated something — enough information to get to a destination, our own discomfort at a situation, or the fact that we're only joking when we make a sarcastic remark — only to be surprised when people don't understand us. We're not as transparent, either with our mouths or our body language and expression, as we think we are. We don't understand that other people aren't trapped in our head with us.

Top Image: Jin

Via You Are Not So Smart, American Psychological Association.

And when I say long-term, I mean most-of-the-coming-millennium kind of long-term. There is a church in Germany that will be performing one musical piece until the year 2640. What will it mean if there's an applause as the end?

John Cage is best known for his piece, 4'33", or four minutes and thirty-three seconds. It's an experimental piece that is completely silent. Cage put the "art" in "arts and entertainment" and, some would argue, took the "entertainment" out of it. He aggressively pursued cutting-edge ideas. One of these was the famous score, "ASLSP," or "As SLow aS Possible." He wrote a score for the organ, and neglected to specify any boundary for the time span of the piece. Most of the time, concerts of ASLSP are anywhere from 20 minutes to a little over an hour. They can last for days. The church of St Burchardi in Halberstadt, Germany, is playing it for 639 years.

The performance, which first gained momentum at an organist's conference during a griping session about the pace of modern life, officially began in Cage's birthday, September 5th, 2001. Fortunately, no one had to tax themselves too much, since it began with a rest that didn't end until February 2003. Since then, note changes happen every couple of years, always on the fifth of the month, to honor Cage's birthday. Soon there is to be a long note, so the change in October of this year will be the last until 2020. Perhaps.

Or perhaps this note change will be the last one. This is, after all, a performance that's also a test of engineering (the organ), and of society. The reason that anyone managed to get their hands on a church organ at all was the fact that the church, once a nunnery, had fallen into such disuse that it was converted to a pigsty. The church was built in the 1360s, which means that if the performance lasts, the cathedral would have spent about as much time as a concert hall as a church. On the other hand, the order that built the cathedral — the Cistercians — still exist, and are still true to their original vocation of manual labor in the service of god.

It seems that actions hold up better than places do. Perhaps, like the Cistercians, this performance of ASLSP will survive by taking its act on the road — moving across instruments, across countries (or city-states, or giant dome communities, or whatever else the future will bring), and end in an Earth-evacuating space-ship. Or maybe it will be like Christmas, and other traditions that have changed over time — slowly taking on notes of other songs once ASLSP's original score is lost, and morphing into a simple sustained roar.

Or possibly people will get sick of the noise and insist it stop. It all depends on what the future holds.

[Via Atlas Obscura and New York Times]