The hidden role of the Milky Way in ancient Egyptian mythology

Ancient Egyptians were known for their religious beliefs and astronomical knowledge of the Sun, Moon, and planets, but up until now it has been unclear what role the Milky Way played in Egyptian religion and culture.

A new study by a University of Portsmouth astrophysicist sheds light on the relationship between the Milky Way and the Egyptian sky-goddess Nut.

Nut is goddess of the sky, who is often depicted as a star-studded woman arched over her brother, the earth god Geb.

She protects the earth from being flooded by the encroaching waters of the void, and plays a key role in the solar cycle, swallowing the Sun as it sets at dusk and giving birth to it once more as it rises at dawn.

The paper draws on ancient Egyptian texts and simulations to argue that the Milky Way might have shone a spotlight, as it were, on Nut's role as the sky.

It proposes that in winter, the Milky Way highlighted Nut's outstretched arms, while in summer, it traced her backbone across the heavens.

Associate Professor in Astrophysics, Dr Or Graur, said: "I chanced upon the sky-goddess Nut when I was writing a book on galaxies and looking into the mythology of the Milky Way. I took my daughters to a museum and they were enchanted by this image of an arched woman and kept asking to hear stories about her.

"This sparked my interest and I decided to combine both astronomy and Egyptology to do a double analysis -- astronomical and cross-cultural -- of the sky-goddess Nut, and whether she really could be linked to the Milky Way."

Dr Graur drew from a rich collection of ancient sources including the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, and the Book of Nut and compared them alongside sophisticated simulations of the Egyptian night sky.

He found compelling evidence that the Milky Way highlighted Nut's divine presence.

Furthermore, Dr Graur connected Egyptian beliefs with those of other cultures, showing similarities in how different societies interpret the Milky Way.

He said: "My study also shows that Nut's role in the transition of the deceased to the afterlife and her connection to the annual bird migration are consistent with how other cultures understand the Milky Way. For example, as a spirits' road among different peoples in North and Central America or as the Birds' Path in Finland and the Baltics.

Read more at Science Daily

Devourer of planets? Astronomers dub star 'Kronos'

Sun-like star Kronos shows signs of having ingested 15 Earth masses worth of rocky planets, prompting Princeton astronomers to nickname it for the Titan who ate his young. This artist's rendering of the diverse rocky planets in our galaxy hints at what Kronos's planets might have looked like before the star enveloped them.

In mythology, the Titan Kronos devoured his children, including Poseidon (better known as the planet Neptune), Hades (Pluto) and three daughters.

So when a group of Princeton astronomers discovered twin stars, one of which showed signs of having ingested a dozen or more rocky planets, they named them after Kronos and his lesser-known brother Krios. Their official designations are HD 240430 and HD 240429, and they are both about 350 light years from Earth.

The keys to the discovery were first confirming that the widely separated pair are in fact a binary pair, and secondly observing Kronos' strikingly unusual chemical abundance pattern, explained Semyeong Oh, a graduate student in astrophysical sciences who is lead author on a new paper describing Kronos and Krios. Oh works with David Spergel, the Charles A. Young Professor of Astronomy on the Class of 1897 Foundation and director of the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics.

Other co-moving star pairs have had different chemistries, Oh explained, but none as dramatic as Kronos and Krios.

Most stars that are as metal-rich as Kronos "have all the other elements enhanced at a similar level," she said, "whereas Kronos has volatile elements suppressed, which makes it really weird in the general context of stellar abundance patterns."

In other words, Kronos had an unusually high level of rock-forming minerals, including magnesium, aluminum, silicon, iron, chromium and yttrium, without an equally high level of volatile compounds -- those that are most often found in gas form, like oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and potassium.

Kronos is already outside the galactic norm, said Oh, and in addition, "because it has a stellar companion to compare it to, it makes the case a little stronger."

Kronos and Krios are far enough apart that some astronomers have questioned whether the two were in fact a binary pair. Both are about 4 billion years old, and like our own, slightly older sun, both are yellow G-type stars. They orbit each other infrequently, on the order of every 10,000 years or so. An earlier researcher, Jean-Louis Halbwachs of the Observatoire Astronomique of Strasbourg, had identified them as co-moving -- moving together -- in his 1986 survey, but Oh independently identified them as co-moving based on two-dimensional astrometric information from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission.

During a group research discussion at the Flatiron Institute, a colleague suggested pooling their data sets. John Brewer, a postdoctoral researcher from Yale University visiting at Columbia University, had been using data from the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, to calculate the spectrographic chemistries and radial velocities of stars.

"John suggested that maybe we should cross-match my co-moving catalogue with his chemical-abundance catalogue, because it's interesting to ask whether they have the same compositions," Oh said.

Binary stars should have matching radial velocities, but that information hadn't been available in the Gaia dataset, so seeing their matching velocities in Brewer's data supported the theory that Kronos and Krios, though two light years apart, were a binary set.

Then the researchers noticed the extreme chemical differences between them.

"I'm very easily excitable, so as soon as they had the same radial velocities and different chemistry, my mind already started racing," said Adrian Price-Whelan, a Lyman Spitzer, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow in Astrophysical Sciences and a co-author on the paper.

Oh took more convincing, both scientists recalled. "Semyeong is careful and was skeptical," said Price-Whelan, so her first step was to double-check all the data. Once simple error had been ruled out, they began entertaining various theories. Maybe Kronos and Krios had accreted their planetary disks at different times during stellar formation. That one can't be tested, said Price-Whelan, but it seems unlikely.

Maybe they only started moving together more recently, after trading partners with another pair of binary stars, a process known as binary exchange. Oh ruled that out with "a simple calculation," she said. "She's very modest," Price-Whelan noted.

Oh's skepticism was finally overcome when she plotted the chemical abundance pattern as a function of condensation temperature -- the temperatures at which volatiles condense into solids. Condensation temperatures play a key role in planetary formation because rocky planets tend to form where it's warm -- closer to a star -- while gas giants form more easily in the colder regions far from their star.

She immediately observed that all of the minerals that solidify below 1200 Kelvin were the ones Kronos was low in, while all the minerals that solidify at warmer temperatures were abundant.

"Other processes that change the abundance of elements generically throughout the galaxy don't give you a trend like that," said Price-Whelan. "They would selectively enhance certain elements, and it would appear random if you plotted it versus condensation temperatures. The fact that there's a trend there hinted towards something related to planet formation rather than galactic chemical evolution."

That was her "Aha!" moment, Oh said. "All of the elements that would make up a rocky planet are exactly the elements that are enhanced on Kronos, and the volatile elements are not enhanced, so that provides a strong argument for a planet engulfment scenario, instead of something else."

Oh and her colleagues calculated that gaining this many rock-forming minerals without many volatiles would require engulfing roughly 15 Earth-mass planets.

Eating a gas giant wouldn't give the same result, Price-Whelan explained. Jupiter, for example, has an inner rocky core that could easily have 15 Earth masses of rocky material, but "if you were to take Jupiter and throw it into a star, Jupiter also has this huge gaseous envelope, so you'd also enhance carbon, nitrogen -- the volatiles that Semyeong mentioned," he said. "To flip it around, you have to throw in a bunch of smaller planets."

While no known star has 15 Earth-sized planets in orbit around it, the Kepler space telescope has detected many multi-planet systems, said Jessie Christiansen, an astronomer at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the research. "I see no problem with there being more than 15 Earth masses of accretable material around a solar-type star." She pointed to Kepler-11, which has more than 22 Earth masses of material in six planets with close orbits, or HD 219134, which has at least 15 Earth masses of material in its inner four planets.

"At the moment, we are still at the stage of piecing together different observations to determine how and when exoplanets form," said Christiansen. "It's difficult to directly observe planet formation around young stars -- they are typically shrouded in dust, and the stars themselves are very active, which makes it hard to disentangle any signals from the planets. So we have to infer what we can from the limited information we have. If borne out, this new window onto the masses and compositions of the material in the early stages of planetary systems may provide crucial constraints for planet formation theories."

Read more at Science Daily

Vaccine Fears Not New - Here's Why

There has been a lot of discussion and controversy about vaccinations over the past few months. In February the Toronto Star issued — and later retracted — a sensational front-page investigation suggesting that vaccines were dangerous; the next month talk show host Jimmy Kimmel encouraged his audience to get their kids vaccinated and ribbed vaccine-averse parents with a mock PSA from exasperated doctors.

All this happened as a measles outbreak that began in December 2014 at Disneyland unfolded; 147 people became infected with the disease before the outbreak ended in April. Many who fell ill were not immunized against measles, and spurred in part by public concern over the episode California governor Jerry Brown introduced (and last week signed) a law requiring all school-attending children to be vaccinated for public safety.

The law does not require childhood vaccinations for every child — only those enrolled in California public schools. Parents are not required to vaccinate children who go to private home schools or are home-schooled.

The move was widely praised by doctors but had many detractors. For example actor Jim Carrey took to social media to claim that Brown’s “fascist” law would “poison more children with mercury and aluminum.” During his rant Carrey used a photo of an autistic boy, without his family’s permission, suggesting that his condition had been caused by vaccines; Carrey later apologized. With passionate advocates on both sides of the issue the debate is far from over.

Anti-Vaccination Efforts

Why do some people doubt vaccine safety and efficacy? One reason is that their effectiveness cannot be proven on an individual basis. For example even people who are effectively vaccinated against a specific disease can still catch it (no vaccination is completely effective, and you might catch a different virus strain than the one you were inoculated against). This can lead people to doubt the usefulness of vaccines: if it’s possible to catch a disease with or without a vaccination, what’s the point?

But this position misses that fact that vaccinated people are far less likely to get the disease in the first place, and if they do happen to get it the symptoms will be less severe and more survivable.

A specific person’s experience with a specific vaccine (or any other medicine) is not a valid measure of the overall effectiveness. However the institutions best equipped to conduct the necessary large-scale studies (i.e., governments and big drug companies) are also those that the public often distrusts, leading to conspiracy theories.

Indeed one reason the anti-vaccination theme is so persistent is the strong conspiracy theory element to it. Conspiracy theories are of course notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to disprove. Many people distrust the medical establishment and “Big Pharma” almost as much as they distrust the government. The assumption is that the dangers and risks of vaccines are being intentionally hidden from the public by doctors and drug companies, in collusion with the government, for big profits.

Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent, in their book “American Conspiracy Theories,” note bluntly that “Conspiracy theories about vaccines are partially to blame for decreased rates of vaccination and an increased incidence of disease.”

Andrea Kitta, an Associate Professor at East Carolina University and author of “Vaccinations and Public Concern in History,” notes that “The content of vaccines, especially in the case of preservatives, is a widely debated issue. Ingredients such as thimerosal, formaldehyde, mercury, and others, are frequently linked [in anti-vaccination claims] to the causation of diseases… All of these ingredients, regardless of whether or not they have been linked to an actual disease, are to blame because they are considered not ‘natural’.”

Many of the claims about “natural” versus “unnatural” chemicals used in vaccines have been thoroughly debunked. A USA Today article notes, for example, that “Vaccines have never contained methyl mercury, the toxic metal that can cause brain damage” and that while it’s true that vaccines contain aluminum, “babies get far more aluminum from food, including breast milk, than from vaccines.”

Given the current controversy some may think that protests about vaccinations are a recent phenomenon, but in fact the concerns date back centuries. There was resistance to the first smallpox vaccine, created in the late 1700s. Parents and the public — unfamiliar with medicine and how vaccination works — were horrified and disgusted when they learned that the vaccine was created by taking pus from the wounds of infected cows. Nevertheless, that procedure, as unappetizing as it may be, was effective and saved countless lives.

A British Anti-Vaccination League was created in 1853, asserting that the smallpox vaccine was dangerous, ineffective, and an infringement on personal rights by the government. Over 160 years later that theme continues to resonate strongly with anti-vaccination activists. Medical folklorist Kitta told Discovery News that “People who choose not to vaccinate truly believe their rights are being violated and believe they are in danger of further violation… Some people will now reject vaccines solely on the basis that they feel their rights are being violated—not because they necessarily oppose or are even uncertain about vaccination.”

Read more at Discovery News

Genies Blamed For School Sickness, Possessions

Last week in Saudi Arabia nearly 200 elementary and middle school students “refused to attend classes after nine students claimed that genies — or jinn, as they are better known in the Arabic world — had made them sick” according to ArabNews.com, which added that “the students had fainted and experienced spasms at the start of the second semester, prompting many parents to believe jinns were present at the school.”

Jinn are described in the Koran, the Muslim holy book, as creatures made by Allah of smokeless fire. Belief in jinn is widespread throughout the Arabic and Muslim world. Just as many Christians readily accept the literal reality of angels, many Muslims accept the existence of genies as self-evident. Both religions share the belief that spirits such as demons and jinn can take possession of humans. Jinn are believed, like ghosts, to haunt buildings, homes and other locations.

It will often begin with one or two people exhibiting symptoms and as others in the same location see the behavior they unconsciously begin experiencing the same or similar symptoms. Episodes are most common in closed social units such as schools and factories, and among females — likely because they tend to have stronger social bonds than males. The symptoms are not serious and go away on their own, often within hours or days.

This is not the first time that jinn have been blamed for unexplained fits in Saudi schools. In his book “Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar” Robert Lebling notes that in 2000:

“Newspapers in Saudi Arabia reported the haunting of the al-Fikriyah Institute of Education, a functioning girls’ school in the Red Sea port of Jeddah, in an incident with unusual psycho-social overtones. A number of teachers at the school were reportedly subjected to fits and epileptic-like seizures, supposedly as a result of a (jinn) haunting.”

Though many doctors attributed that incident — like the one last week — to mass hysteria, some, including a cleric tasked with investigating the matter, insisted that jinn did in fact inhabit the school and were responsible for the symptoms.

As with many folk beliefs, the reality of jinn is less important than whether people believe in them; if a group of students or teachers believe that jinn can make them faint and there is no other ready explanation, then jinn will be blamed.

Though the school fits were harmless and soon passed, sometimes these beliefs can be dangerous; earlier this month a Moroccan woman who was believed to be possessed by a jinn died during an exorcism. According to a news story:

“To cast out the evil spirit from her body, the Fqih (exorcist) loudly recited incantations and passages from the Koran, the holy book of Islam. With the help of four of his assistants, the Fqih hit her with a stick all over her body in order to ‘force the evil spirit’ to leave her.”

In 2012 a Pakistani man and his family was convicted of killing his young wife during an exorcism who he believed was possessed by a jinn.

Read more at Discovery News

Dwarf Dragons Discovered in the Andes

Three new lizards that researchers describe as "dragon-esque" have just been discovered in the Andean cloud forests of Ecuador and Peru.

The woodlizards, which really do look like tiny dragons, are described in the latest issue of the journal ZooKeys.

"That more than half of the diversity of a group of large, dragon-looking reptiles from South America has been discovered in recent years should be heard by people in charge of conservation and funding agencies," lead author Omar Torres-Carvajal of Ecuador’s Museo de Zoologia said in a press release.

The discoveries increase the known number of woodlizards to 15.

He and colleagues Pablo Venegas and Kevin de Queiroz explained that the reptiles are active during the day and live in lowland tropical rainforests, such as the Chocó and western Amazon basin, as well as cloudforests on both sides of the Andes.

Although the finds were made in a region known as the "Tropical Andes hotspot," cloudforests are known less for heat than for their near-persistent low-level cloud cover. They typically are located at altitudes between 3000 and 8000 feet, and are characterized by wet tropical mountain forests.

DNA analysis proved that the newly found lizards represent new species.

Could ancient people have noticed the lizards and been inspired to create dragon myths about them? It's possible.

At least three indigenous cultures from South America created stories about dragons. Folklore from Patagonia, the Jivaro of Ecuador's Amazon region and certain other cultures referred to dragon-like animals. Dragon myths, however, seem to be a worldwide phenomenon. Countries like China and India also have popular dragon myths.

Indonesia, in particular, has its Komodo dragon lizards. With some imagination, these huge carnivorous lizards do sort of look like they are spitting fire when they forcefully stick out their long tongues. The mouths of Komodo dragons may also contain venom-like proteins that can cause intense pain in victims.

The "dwarf dragons" -- some of which measure just under 5 inches in length -- aren't nearly as threatening. There could be a lot more of them, though.

Read more at Discovery News

Fantastically Wrong: The Weird, Kinda Perverted History of the Unicorn

This woman is a virgin. How do I know? Because unicorns ain’t got time for no non-virgins.

In late 2012, the North Korean regime made a rather bizarre announcement, even by the standards of the North Korean regime. According to The Guardian, the country’s archaeologists had discovered “the lair of one of the unicorns ridden by the ancient Korean King Tongmyong,” just 600 feet from a temple in the capital city. What might have tipped the scientists off was, no joke, the words “Unicorn Lair” written right in front of the damn thing.

But a week later, The Guardian ran a second article with a frank admission. “There is only one problem with the story,” they wrote. “It isn’t exactly true.” North Korea’s claim was in fact referring to the kirin, a mythical creature not too dissimilar from the unicorn, with the same hoofed, quadruped look but sometimes having two horns instead of one. But eccentricities of the North Korean regime aside, why is it that the unicorn, or a unicorn-like beast, pervades both Asian and European cultures?

On the Horn

If you’re looking to figure out how an ancient myth started to get out of hand, a good place to start is with the great Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, whose epic encyclopedia Natural History stood largely as fact for some 1,600 years. Problem was, Pliny wasn’t the most incredulous of writers, and crammed his encyclopedia with pretty much any account he could get his hands on.

A father and son pose with a kirin statue at the Summer Palace in Beijing, China.

“The unicorn,” Pliny wrote, “is the fiercest animal, and it is said that it is impossible to capture one alive. It has the body of a horse, the head of a stag, the feet of an elephant, the tail of a boar, and a single black horn three feet long in the middle of its forehead. Its cry is a deep bellow.”

The unicorn then shows up in various places in the Bible, at least according to some translations (it’s sometimes instead referred to as the oryx, a kind of antelope whose antlers were indeed sold as unicorn horns in medieval times, or as the auroch, a massive type of cattle that went extinct in the 17th century). Here, its fierceness is affirmed. In Numbers 24:8, for instance: “God brought him forth out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn: he shall eat up the nations his enemies, and shall break their bones, and pierce them through with his arrows.”

In the 7th century, the scholar Isidore of Seville chimed in, noting that the unicorn “is very strong and pierces anything it attacks. It fights with elephants and kills them by wounding them in the belly.” He also helped popularize the myth that would serve as a hallmark in European folklore for centuries to come: Catching a unicorn is impossible…unless you have access to a virgin woman. “The unicorn is too strong to be caught by hunters,” he writes, “except by a trick: If a virgin girl is placed in front of a unicorn and she bares her breast to it, all of its fierceness will cease and it will lay its head on her bosom, and thus quieted is easily caught.” It’ll suckle until it’s lulled to sleep. So…yeah.

This is one alarm that the unicorn shan’t be sleeping through.

The scene (above) is one of the most iconic images in wildly popular medieval books known as bestiaries, encyclopedias of sorts that cataloged nature’s beasts, both real and imagined. Not only was the natural history of the animal given, but each was then compared to a biblical figure. And the unicorn stood for Christ, since he was captured and put to death like the unicorn is done in by the virgin (though pretty much every other animal was also compared to Christ, even the pelican, which was said to peck at its own breast to revive its young with blood, like Jesus shed his own blood for us).

Thus the unicorn became firmly implanted in European lore. What followed was a full-blown mania for their horns, which were said to detect poison if you stirred them around in your food or drink. They went for tens of thousands of dollars in today’s money, and were particularly popular among paranoid royalty. More industrious users who didn’t want to wait around to have their food poisoned would grind up the horns—usually those of the oryx or narwal (whose horn is actually a giant tooth)—to gain immunity from toxins.

Over in the East, royalty had a rather more complicated relationship with their version of the unicorn, the aforementioned kirin, or qilin. Its appearance was said to foretell the birth of a royal baby, which is nice of it, but can also predict an imminent death, which is not so nice. In the 15th century, a giraffe was brought to China for the first time and presented to the emperor as a kirin, which was a gutsy move considering its proclivities for letting royalty know they’re going to die soon. The emperor, though, dismissed it as a fraud and went on to live another 10 years.

This is what it looks like when an artist draws a rhino without ever having seen one with his own eyes…while maybe huffing a bit of glue.

A Myth Is Born

The myth of the unicorn may have come from sightings of antelope and such ungulates with only one horn, having either been born with the defect or lost the horn when scrapping with a predator or one of its own kind. Less likely still is seeing a normal antelope from afar in profile, since that would only last as long as the animal didn’t move.

A far more likely culprit is the Indian rhinoceros, and clues for this are sprinkled throughout the early accounts—indeed, the unicorn is sometimes referred to as the Indian ass. Pliny, for instance, mentions that the unicorn has “the feet of an elephant,” a rhino’s feet in fact being not hooved like a horse’s, but fleshy like an elephant’s. He also notes that it has “the tail of a boar,” much like a rhino’s, “and a single black horn three feet long in the middle of its forehead.” Writers would only later describe the horn as white.

The ancient Greeks and Romans, you see, had been making forays into India and bringing back tales of the strange beasts there, and the facts tended to get a bit…lost. Cotton, for instance, was said to grow in India as an actual lamb that sprouted from the ground, just hanging there patiently producing cotton. And while Pliny actually did a pretty good job of describing the rhino, his popularization of the “unicorn” picked up more and more improbabilities as the centuries wore on. We also know that the ancient Chinese had contact with rhinos from art made out of their horns, so the animal could well have also inspired the kirin.

Read more at Wired Science

Fantastically Wrong: The Bizarre Mirages That Once Scared the Bejesus Out of Sailors

The mysterious fata morgana: making people question their sanity since the beginning of time.

Jesuit priests aren’t especially known for their heavy drug use, but it would seem that Father Domenico Giardina was tripping pretty hard on August 14, 1643. Looking out over the sea from Messina, Sicily, Giardina saw “a city all floating in the air, and so measureless and so splendid, so adorned with magnificent buildings, all of which was found on a base of a luminous crystal.” The metropolis suddenly transformed into a garden, and next a forest. And then in a flash it all descended into chaos. Huge armies sprang forth, as did the towns they had laid waste to, before the whole mess disappeared.

Father Giardina, you see, was high on life. The “great and marvelous theater” he had witnessed was the mysterious fata morgana, an incredibly complex mirage that has historically both fascinated and scared the hell out of sailors and landlubbers alike. Whether it be the work of necromancers or fairies or a god, few phenomena have captivated humankind quite so thoroughly as fata morgana.

It was Jesuits like Father Giardina, argues Marina Warner in her brilliant book Phantasmagoria, who made the first “careful” observations of fata morgana, that is, not freaking out about them and instead beginning to apply a dash of science to the matter. The good Father claimed, writes Warner, that the minerals and salts in the region “rise up in hot weather in vapours from the sea to form clouds, which then condense in the cooler upper air to become a mobile specchio, a moving, polyhedrical mirror.” It was wrong, but it actually wasn’t that far off.

Light being refracted downward as it passes from air into a denser material, plexiglass. (Some light is also reflected upward)

At work here is some basic physics. When the sun heats up the atmosphere above the ocean, it creates a gradient of temperatures: Near the surface, it’s still relatively cool because the water is chilling that air, but sitting above that is a layer of warmer air. Now, light doesn’t always travel in a straight line. When it hits a boundary between two layers of the atmosphere that are different temperatures (and therefore different densities), it bends and travels through the new layer at a different angle. This is known as refraction. The change in the light’s angle of travel depends on the difference in density between the two layers.

How does bending light create a mirage? The rest of the effect is caused by how your brain works. When light hits your eyes, your brain assumes it arrived there in a straight path between you and the object reflecting the light. So if light is bent on its way toward you, your brain will think the object is where it would be if the light’s path was straight. This is why when you are looking down on a surface of water, objects under the surface will appear to be in a different spot than they actually are—just ask a spear fisherman…if you happen to know a spear fisherman. The human brain doesn’t automatically account for the refraction. (Interestingly, the brains of some birds like ospreys do correct for the effect so that when they dive headlong into the water after a fish, they are right on target.)

In the case of a fata morgana mirage, light reflecting from a distant object such as a ship is bent downward as it passes through the colder, denser air near the surface of the ocean (or sometimes cold land, particularly ice). But your brain places the object where it would be if the light came to you in a straight path—higher than it actually is. This bending effect can even work with the curvature of the Earth if conditions are just right, which is why some fata morgana images can actually be refracted cities and ships from beyond the horizon.

A superior mirage or fata morgana, left, and an inferior mirage, what you’d see on a hot day on asphalt, right.

The opposite situation is what produces mirages like an oasis of water in the desert. In this case, a hot layer of air just above the surface bends light rays up toward your eyes, causing your brain to perceive things as much lower than they actually are. The desert oasis is actually the sky. This kind of mirage is known as inferior, while the fata morgana, which places objects higher than they actually are, is superior.

But before the Scientific Revolution and all its wonderful advances in physics, mirages were firmly in the realm of mysticism (thank a Frenchman named Pierre de Fermat, by the way, for his pioneering work in decoding inferior mirages right around the same time Father Giardina was making his own observations). Indeed, fata morgana takes its name from Morgan le Fay, the treacherous fairy, enchantress, and half-sister of King Arthur.

Morgan le Fay: fairy, enchantress, sandal enthusiast.

According to Warner, the Normans brought stories of Morgan’s magic to Italy, particularly her penchant for luring sailors to an undersea palace with visions of castles in the air—fata morgana is particularly prevalent in southern Italy’s Strait of Messina, where Father Giardina experienced his own vision. Another Italian version of the legend has Morgan falling in love with a regular fella, granting him immortality, and keeping him in captivity, then putting on shows in the sky when he gets bored with the whole never dying thing.

And long before Arthurian legend, it could have been that sightings of these phenomena gave rise to any number of the “whoa something is appearing in the sky” scenes in antiquity, Warner argues. The Second Book of Maccabees, for example, tells of sky-people coming to the aid of the Jews in their skirmishes with the Romans: “When the battle became fierce, there appeared to the enemy from heaven five resplendent men on horses with golden bridles, and they were leading the Jews.” The ghostly warriors fired arrows and thunderbolts at the rascally Romans, “so that, confused and blinded, they were thrown into disorder and cut to pieces.”

Fata morgana’s most famous offspring, though, is the legend of the Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship said to sail aimlessly around the high seas. The tale was first popularized in a story called “Vanderdecken’s Message Home” from 1821, which told of a boat from Amsterdam that haunts the Cape of Good Hope, trying to hand off letters from its dead crew to the vessels of the living (uh, no thanks, the sailors would say, you can deliver your own damn mail). Warner connects this to fata morgana showing a ship from beyond the horizon: The mirage vessel could suddenly disappear with no explanation, and there you have your legend.

Read more at Wired Science

East Africa Tries to Stem Albino Magic Murders

The East African country of Tanzania has reportedly banned witch doctors in an effort to prevent further witchcraft-related murders of albinos.

According to a story reported by Agence France-Presse, “The ban follows the kidnapping last month of a four-year-old girl by men armed with machetes, who took her from her home in the northern Mwanza region. Police have since arrested 15 people, including the girl’s father and two uncles, but she remains missing. ‘These so-called witches bear responsibility for the attacks against albinos,’ interior ministry spokesman Isaac Nantanga told AFP Wednesday.”

In Tanzania and Burundi at least 50 albinos have been murdered for their body parts in recent years according to a 2010 Red Cross report. In November 2009, four people were arrested and sentenced to death in northern Tanzania for killing an albino man to harvest his body parts.

A month earlier, albino hunters beheaded a 10-year-old boy and hacked off his leg. In May of last year two witch doctors were arrested in connection with the death of an albino woman who was murdered for her body parts.

Throughout Africa witch doctors are consulted not only for healing diseases, but also for placing (or removing) magic curses or bringing luck in love or business. The belief and practice of using body parts for magical ritual or benefit is called muti. Muti murders are particularly brutal, with knives and machetes used to cut and hack off limbs, breasts, and other body parts from their living victims.

Laws Against Witchcraft

Some of the news headlines about Tanzania’s effort are misleading; for example AFP wrote that “Tanzania Bans Witch Doctors in Attempt to End Albino Killings.” Sensational headlines aside, as a practical matter there is no chance that witchcraft will be effectively abolished in Tanzania or elsewhere in Africa.

It’s been tried before: Colonial governments, and the British Empire in particular, instituted various anti-witchcraft laws in the 19th and 20th centuries. By passing those laws the governments did not officially endorse the reality of magic or witchcraft but instead implemented them to curb accusations of witchcraft.

Tanzania’s neighbor Zambia, for example, passed a law known as the Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1957, which criminalized “on the advice of any witchdoctor, witch-finder or other person or on the ground of any pretended knowledge of witchcraft, uses or causes to be put into operation any means or process which, in accordance with such advice or his own belief, is calculated to injure or damage any person or thing.”

This would of course include the harming or killing of albinos for their body parts to be used in magic spells.

Despite such efforts, attempts by African countries to outlaw witchcraft have historically failed. Gerrie ter Haar, a professor of Religion, Human Rights and Social Change, writing in “Imagining Evil: Witchcraft Beliefs and Accusations in Contemporary Africa,” notes that “a law that makes witchcraft a criminal act punishable by the state…would seriously undermine the integrity of the law. Whereas the law properly operates on the basis of written rules and strict procedures that follow international standards, witchcraft accusations are generally based on gossip and hearsay that lacks actual proof since it is based on belief, and not on evidence of a type required in court. Whereas law enforcement is fully institutionalized, witchcraft accusations operate beyond any institutional control…. The Witchcraft Suppression Act that is still in force in South Africa appears to have done nothing to reduce the widespread fear of witchcraft.”

“Most of the literature on the efficacy of Western education for combating witchcraft belief holds that insight into the natural causes of diseases and other misfortunes will show Africans that their fear of witchcraft is unfounded.”

South African Professor of Theology and Religious Studies Selaelo Thias Kgatla, writing in the same book, explains that legislation against witchcraft is ineffective because it fails to address the root of the problem.

In other words as long as people believe that the bad things that happen to them are caused by enemies’ black magic instead of random chance or bad luck, they will seek magical protections and remedies against them — including, sometimes, albino body parts.

The vast majority of witch doctors and traditional healers throughout Africa are not involved in muti murders, though they routinely offer magical services to attract luck or dispel curses.

Read more at Discovery News

Fantastically Wrong: Why So Many People Think They’ve Seen Ghost Dogs With Glowing Eyes

This one’s eyes are closed so you can’t tell that they’re glowing. Promise.

At the height of World War II, a four-year-old British girl was sent to bed but could not sleep. Sitting on edge of her bed, fiddling with its ornamental knobs and staring out the window, the girl heard a scratching noise. Then, out of the corner of her eye, a massive black dog appeared and trotted in front of her, turning its head to stare at her as it passed between the bed and the window.

“It had very large, very red eyes, which glowed from inside as if lit up,” she later recounted, “and as it looked at me I was quite terrified, and very much aware of the creature’s breath, which was warm and strong as a gust of wind.” But before it had reached the door, it vanished.

It was a hound that goes by many names: black shuck, the hellhound, black jack, gallytrot. Depending on the observer, it can also be white or yellow; it rarely speaks but sometimes laughs; every once in a while it’s missing its head completely; and a few have been known to shapeshift. And it’s not just England that the hellhound stalks—similar tales can be found all over the world. (I’ll be referring to it as the hellhound from here on out, because that best encompasses all of the versions out there.) But why is this myth so widespread? And how can we explain why so many people have claimed to have seen the hound?

This tale necessarily begins with the wolf. Humankind has had a long, complicated relationship with the beast, largely because before we’d fully ascended to the top of the food chain, wolves were a serious threat. But with time they warmed up to us. They’d hang around our fires, waiting for our scraps, while the bolder ones slowly edged closer. In time, we domesticated the wolf into the dog. Their wild brethren, though, remained hostile, and to this day have been known to attack humans (our attacks on them, it should be noted, have been far more frequent and devastating).

Don’t get much more majestic than the wolf. Except maybe a wolf with like, a top hat or something.

Fast-forward several thousand years to ancient Greece and the dog is firmly planted in mythology with Cerberus, the three-headed hound that guards the underworld. But this is far from the only association of dogs with the underworld, according to Bibek Debroy in his book Sarama and Her Children: The Dog in Indian Myth. “For instance,” he writes, “in ancient Persia, dogs were the preferred means of disposing dead bodies.” Elsewhere around the world, stray dogs resorted to scavenging—at times on humans—earning them an association with death.

However, Debroy notes, “this association with the afterworld or dead souls did not prevent dogs from being elevated to divinity.” There’s the ancient Egyptian Wepwawet, a dog-like god that opened roads to the underworld. The Aztecs also deified the dog as Xolotl, who carried the sun through the underworld. So just as our relationship with wolves was complicated, so too is our relationship with dogs the world over. We’ve feared them as creatures of the underworld, yet rely on them for companionship.

Alcohol and Other Factors That Just Might Have Led to the Hellhound

So that’s the cultural background, but what about the cause of the hellhound phenomenon? It’s worth relating another experience, this time from Simon Sherwood of England’s University of Northampton. When he was around three to five years old, he awoke to the patter of feet. “I looked up thinking it was my dog, but to my terror I saw a massive black animal probably with horns, but perhaps ears, galloping along the landing towards my bedroom. I tried to scream but I found it impossible. The creature’s eyes were bright yellow and as big as saucers. The animal got to my bedroom door and then vanished as quick as it has appeared. I then managed to scream and my mum came in to calm me down.”

There’s a very important clue here, which Sherwood himself quite rightly recognizes (he goes on to uncritically report other more paranormal and impossible potential causes of the phenomenon, but whatever). Not being able to speak or move while still seemingly conscious is a classic symptom of sleep paralysis, which happens when the brain and the body are out of sync during sleep.

Tales of ghost dogs have been floating around England for hundreds of years, and I’m willing to bet they’ll be around for hundreds more.
During REM sleep, your muscles are so relaxed that they’re essentially worthless (which, by the way, may be an evolutionary trick to keep you from acting out your dreams and injuring yourself). Should you wake up, though, and your muscles don’t immediately kick back into gear, you can feel paralyzed and probably quite a bit panicked. But soon enough it’s all over. This would explain why Sherwood was unable to scream at first, then eventually recovered his voice.

Some people like Sherwood even hallucinate and see a giant black dog, for example. But why would reports of the hellhound be largely consistent? Well, folklore is a powerful thing, even for a child, especially when it’s terrifying. Tales of ghost dogs have been floating around England for hundreds of years, and I’m willing to bet they’ll be around for hundreds more. Well, at least until we come up with a good treatment for sleep paralysis.

There are other stories, though, of wide-awake folks seeing evil dogs out in the open. An account from 1908 of an Englishman walking home from an inn: “I suddenly saw an animal that seemed to be like a large, black dog appear quite suddenly out of the hedge and run across the road quite close in front of me; I thought it was the dog belonging to the curate. I was just going to call it to send it home, when it suddenly changed its shape, and turned into a black donkey standing on its hind legs. This creature had two glowing eyes, which appeared to me to be almost as big as saucers. I looked at it in astonishment for a minute or so, when it suddenly vanished.”

Fun fact: Hellhounds love car rides, just like regular dogs. Except they fall out easy, because they’re ghosts and just kinda float through things.

Whether or not the man had tied on a few at the inn is lost to history, but I suspect as much. Experiences like this can be explained by … the existence of big dogs and the existence of alcohol and drugs. And those glowing eyes? They have a perfectly rational explanation as well.

Some creatures, including cats, raccoons, and dogs, have a layer of reflective tissue in their eyes known as the tapetum lucidum. This acts like a mirror to bounce light at the retinal cells for a second pass, greatly enhancing night vision. It’s responsible for eye-shine, that glow you get if you snap a flash at your dog or cat. And it’s not hard to imagine that it’s this eye-shine that gave rise to the myth of a hound with burning eyes.

Read more at Wired Science

Top 10 Winter Holiday Myths

Introduction 

 With Thanksgiving and Hanukkah behind us and Christmas and New Year's Day still ahead, the holiday season is in full swing.

Given the mix of stories and superstitions that constitute holiday preparations and celebrations, seasonal myths can carry over year to year along with the traditions themselves. Consider those myths debunked.

Holiday Travel

Anyone flying home for the holidays last week probably saw a familiar sight at the airport: frantic passengers, long lines at the security screening and a cramped seat on a plane. The day before Thanksgiving certainly does feel like the busiest air travel time of the year.

Except it's not. In fact, some years it's not even in the top 10. In 2006, it was the 36th busiest and 55th in 2007.

The busiest travel days of the year aren't anywhere near the winter holiday season, but rather take place in the summer, on Friday in June, July and August.

Savory Dreams

 If you're still recovering from that food-induced coma you received on Thanksgiving, don't blame the tryptophan in your turkey. Despite the widespread belief that the amino acid triggers sleepiness, it's actually not the turkey's fault for causing drowsiness after a Thanksgiving meal.

Rather, it's the massive amount of carbohydrates and often alcohol that lead to that inevitable post-meal nap.

Traditional Thanksgiving?

Despite celebrating in what we believed the fashion of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Thanksgiving today in no way resembles similar occasions that would have been held in the 17th century. Such events weren't organized or ritualized, according to a religious scholar at Davidson University.

When clergy did find occasion to call together parishioners to give thanks to God, Puritans didn't spend all day feasting, but rather sitting in church.

Our modern conception of Thanksgiving can be credited to a 19th-century magazine editor named Sarah Hale, who saw the holiday as a means of uniting Americans during a time of increasing factionalism.

In the Dark

Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) can lead to the winter blues, affecting some 5 percent of Americans. But the dark days of winter aren't as big a driver of depression in others, despite the lack of light being cited as a leading cause. Stress, sickness and other sources are more likely to blame.

Suicide Spike

Suicides don't spike during the holiday season, a grim myth with no statistical support. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the suicide rate is at its lowest in December. It's actually at its highest in the spring and fall.

Read more at Discovery News

Fantastically Wrong: The Scientist Who Thought 22 Trillion Aliens Live in Our Solar System

Does Saturn have life on it? If you count gas as life, then yeah, sure.

In 1837, the Scottish scientist Thomas Dick had a big idea. A really, really big idea: Build “a huge triangle or ellipsis of many miles in extent, in Siberia or any other country.” He figured that because there are some 22 trillion aliens living in our solar system, 4.2 billion of which are on the moon, even if they don’t have telescope technology to spy the triangle, surely some would have eyes powerful enough to see it unaided. Perhaps realizing just what a big idea this was, he added, “Schemes far more foolish and preposterous than the above have been contrived and acted upon in every age of the world.”

Here’s what Dick figured. At the time, there were an average of 280 people per square mile in England. And because he thought every surface of our universe bears life, it would naturally occur at roughly the same population density. So from comets and asteroids to the rings of Saturn, if you knew how big something was, you could guess how many beings live there. Thus, Jupiter would be the most populated object in the solar system, with 7 trillion beings. The least populated would be Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the asteroid belt, tallying just 64 million.

Dick, you see, was a very religious man, but also a voracious scientist, one of the last of the so-called natural theologists, who looked for signs of God’s influence in nature. For Dick, it simply did not make sense for God to have created the cosmos just to have it sit around unoccupied. There must be creatures out there capable of enjoying its beauty, because God wants all his work appreciated.

Well thanks very much, Thomas. Nice of you to say.

In his book Celestial Scenery, which when it isn’t rambling is actually quite interesting, Dick writes: “This is a conclusion which is not merely probable, but absolutely certain, for the opposite opinion would rob the Deity of the most distinguishing attribute of his nature, by virtually denying him the perfection of infinite wisdom and intelligence.”

If you think waterfalls and sunsets here on Earth are neato, Dick promises you’ll be floored by what you’d see on other planets. “What should we think of a globe appearing in our nocturnal sky 1,300 times larger than the apparent size of the moon, and every hour assuming a different aspect?” he asked. “What should we think of a globe filling the twentieth part of the sky, and surrounded with immense rings, in rapid motion, diffusing a radiance over the whole heavens?” It’s a lovely image, isn’t it? These are also scenes we see realized in modern sci-fi—from a brain that was ticking fully two centuries ago.

You might think that living on other worlds might be difficult, but Dick assures us they’re arranged much like Earth, with mountains and valleys and such. The moon in particular has “an immense variety of elevations and depressions,” and while we can’t directly observe such features on Jupiter, Saturn, or Uranus, given their distance, when light hits them it reveals “the spots and differences of shade and color which are sometimes distinguishable on their disks,” thus betraying the uneven surfaces underneath. (We know today, of course, that these are all in fact gas giants.)

The gas giants aren’t really this close to each other. They have pretty big personal space bubbles.

God also provides atmospheres on other planetary bodies, “but we have no reason to conclude that they are exactly similar to ours.” Mars’ atmosphere, for example, is denser than our own, bestowing the planet that lovely red hue (it’s actually less dense). Others may be so thin that they allow their inhabitants to “penetrate much farther into space than we can do,” with the added bonus that such an atmosphere could “raise their spirits to the highest pitch of ecstasy, similar to some of the effects produced on our frame by inhaling that gaseous fluid called the nitrous oxyde.” Yes, he actually wrote that, complete with the superfluous “the,” like your grandpa decrying “the hip-hop” and “the reefers.”

There is, though, the rather glaring problem of the crushing gravity of a planet the size of Saturn. But Dick posits that “the density of Jupiter is little more than that of water, and that of Saturn about the density of cork.” Jupiter, therefore, would have a gravity only twice as great as Earth’s—not so terrible in the grand scheme of things.

For as bizarre as all this may seem, notice how scientific Dick was about his theory. This was not mere daydreaming. He had numbers, and he had principles, and with them he formulated a wildly wrong idea, but nevertheless pieced it together fairly logically. And he wasn’t even the first scientist to argue that life existed elsewhere in our solar system. Far from it: It was none other than the famed astronomer William Herschel who argued that not only was there life on every planet, but on the sun as well. That blinding glow we see is simply a luminous atmosphere hiding a rocky surface that teemed with life.

And oddly enough, it was Herschel’s son John who indirectly eclipsed Dick in an epic way.

The Great American Tradition of Newspapers That You Can’t Even Remotely Trust

According to Paul Collins in his book Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World, on August 21, 1835, the New York Sun dropped a bombshell of a story: Astronomer Sir John Herschel had erected an enormous telescope in South Africa that could magnify celestial bodies an astounding 42,000 times. And when he pointed it at the moon he saw a field of poppies.

It was all just a hoax, but the issue sold like mad. And so, four days later, the paper dropped another bombshell: Herschel next saw bison on the moon. And not just bison, but monsters of “bluish lead color, about the size of a goat, with a head and beard like him, and a single horn, slightly inclined forward from the perpendicular.” Not only that, but bipedal beavers as tall as humans. Based on the Sun’s account, Collins describes them “skating gracefully among their villages of tall huts, which all had chimneys, showing them to be acquainted with the use of fire.”

Then on August 28th came the kicker. Herschel had spotted humans up there on the moon—4-foot-tall humans “with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane,” the Sun reported. They had built giant sapphire pyramids, and apparently had a fondness for cucumbers. Perhaps more importantly for the hoaxster journalists—Richard Adams Locke (a descendent of philosopher John Locke) and Sun publisher Moses Beach—The New York Times and New York Evening Post endorsed the claims as entirely plausible. So it seemed a good a time as any for the men to compile their stories into a book: Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope, 60,000 copies of which sold out in a flash.

Notice the whatcha thinkin bout bat person at lower left.

Locke eventually made the mistake of confiding his secret to a journalist friend (as if you needed another reminder not to trust journalists with secrets), and the whole thing fell to pieces. The Sun, ever the champion of the public good, claimed, no joke, that it was actually all a public service… to get the nation to stop worrying so much for a second about that whole slavery thing.

John Herschel, supposed discoverer of life on the moon and a 24/7 party animal.

Dick died in 1857, and his books on the many beings of the universe went out of print not long after, due at least in part, according to Collins, to the fact that “Dick’s narrative became almost less credible than Locke’s.” The compiled newspaper hoaxes went through five editions, the last published in 1871.

And just two years after Dick’s death, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Dick’s brand of natural theology, long on the wane, would not survive it. Darwin had put forth a shocking theory (for Victorian minds, at least) that explained life as we know it without a creator. Even true scientists with strong allegiances to God, like Richard Owen, who famously battled Darwin’s blasphemous idea to his death, were snuffed by the intellectual tsunami that was evolution by natural selection.

Read more at Wired Science

Ancient Mythical Carvings Found in Silk Road Cemetery

A cemetery dating back roughly 1,700 years has been discovered along part of the Silk Road, a series of ancient trade routes that once connected China to the Roman Empire.

The cemetery was found in the city of Kucha, which is located in present-day northwest China. Ten tombs were excavated, seven of which turned out to be large brick structures.

One tomb, dubbed "M3," contained carvings of several mythical creatures, including four that represent different seasons and parts of the heavens: the White Tiger of the West, the Vermilion Bird of the South, the Black Turtle of the North and the Azure Dragon of the East.

The M3 tomb also "consists of a burial mound, ramp, sealed gate, tomb entrance, screen walls, passage, burial chamber and side chamber" the researchers wrote in a report published recently in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics.

The cemetery was first found in July 2007 and was excavated by the Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, with assistance from local authorities. The research team, led by Zhiyong Yu, director of the Xinjiang Archaeological Institute, published the findings in Chinese in the journal Wenwu. The article was recently translated into English and published in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics.

The identity of the people buried in the cemetery is a mystery. The cemetery had been robbed in the past and no writing was found that indicates the names of those buried or their positions in life.

The seven large brick tombs were likely constructed for people of wealth, the researchers said.

But, when the skeletal remains were analyzed, the researchers found that the tombs had been reused multiple times. Some of the tombs contain more than 10 occupants, and the "repeated multiple burials warrant further study," the researchers wrote.

The excavators think the cemetery dates back around 1,700 years, to a time when Kucha was vital to controlling the Western Frontiers (Xiyu) of China. Since the Silk Road trade routes passed through the Western Frontiers, control of this key region was important to China’s rulers.

"In ancient times, Kucha was called Qiuci in Chinese literature. It was a powerful city-state in the oasis of the Western Frontiers" the researchers wrote.

Read more at Discovery News

Fantastically Wrong: Unicorns Dig Virgin Women, and Other Lessons From Medieval Bestiaries

The unicorn, perhaps the most famous of legendary medieval beasts, here in the embrace of a maiden who's like "Oh looks like you've got a little boo-boo back here."

Unicorns may be magical, majestic, beautiful, etc., but they have a serious weakness: virgin women. Indeed, ancient lore says that using a maiden as bait is the only way to snag yourself one of these elusive beasts. When the unicorn falls asleep in her lap, you can capture it, or if you’re feeling particularly plucky, run it through with a spear.

That was far from mere fantasy back in the Middle Ages, though. The story was one of the more famous passages in what are known as bestiaries, gorgeous compendiums of creatures both real and imagined that sold like mad—second only to the Bible itself. While they were passed off as solid knowledge, bestiaries were almost always wildly wrong about the natural world. Nonetheless, these charming tomes were indispensable to the beginnings of modern science, helping lay the groundwork for the field of zoology as we know it.

Unicorn murder notwithstanding, bestiaries tended to hold a certain reverence for the natural world, ascribing the cleverness, not to mention vices, of humans to various animals. The beaver, for instance, was said to chew its own testicles off when pursued by hunters. And the asp could resist the snake charmer’s song by putting one ear against the ground and plugging the other with its tail.

Adorable little hedgehogs roll around on fruit to stick them to their quills. They’ll then store them in their den for the lean times.

Each creature usually was explained in just a few paragraphs, followed by an often lengthy moral tale to relate its biology or behavior to human beings. So in casting off its testicles and throwing them in the hunter’s face, the beaver thus relieves himself of vice and tosses it right back at the devil. By plugging its ears, the asp is unwisely resisting the word of Christ.

A few more examples of fantastical bestiary critters, which you can see in the gallery at top:

• To steal a tiger cub, a hunter must grab a bunch at once and make off on a swift horse. As their furious mother closes in on him, he drops a single cub, which the mother snatches up and takes back to her den. She thus returns to the hunter for one cub at a time, until he escapes on a ship, ideally with at least one left.
• The magical salamander was said to be fireproof as well as extremely poisonous, tainting wells and even fruit on trees. Indeed, when a salamander got into a river that Alexander the Great’s army drank from, 4,000 men and 2,000 horses supposedly grew sick and, no doubt weakened by the embarrassment of being bested by a salamander, keeled over.
• Crocodiles may be jerks, but they’re far from invincible. As they sun themselves on the shore, mouths agape, the serpent will crawl in and make its way into the crocodile’s guts, eventually bursting through the poor reptile.

For all of the popularity of bestiaries in the Middle Ages, strangely enough one wasn’t translated into English (most were written in Latin) until 1954: T. H. White’s seminal Book of Beasts. In it, White goes to lengths to emphasize that while bestiaries were wildly wrong nearly all of the time, they were in fact quite compassionate works, painting animals as creatures to be not only respected, but revered.

The fox was said to roll itself in red mud to appear blood-stained, then flop over on its back and hold its breath. The scavenging birds that come to investigate it are thus bamboozled (read: devoured).

Now, it’d be an understatement to say there was a bit of an illiteracy problem in the Middle Ages. Consequently, bestiaries featured incredibly vivid, lively illustrations that spelled out the behaviors of the various creatures. Above, for instance, is a fox, a “fraudulent and ingenious animal” that was said to play dead to attract and attack birds. A medieval illiterate peasant would have heard such a cautionary tale in church, for the devil metaphorically works in much the same way on humans. Thus was the bestiary a work of universal accessibility.

Such symbolism was so important in the Middle Ages, according to White, “that it did not matter whether certain animals existed”—the part man, part lion, part scorpion with probably some identity issues known as the manticore, for instance—but “what did matter was what they meant.” It was an era of intense faith that a higher power had created every creature with a meaning to be decoded by man, or in the case of plants, a clue that the species was meant to treat a certain organ. Known as the doctrine of signatures, this held that a walnut, for instance, could treat brain problems because it looks an awful lot like a brain itself.

The bestiaries can all trace their lineage to one masterwork: the Physiologus, whose anonymous author probably lived in Alexandria in the first few centuries AD. He or she dug deep into the animal lore of the ancients, combining thoughts of Aristotle, who was arguably the first true scientist (if you haven’t yet picked up Armand Marie Leroi’s fantastic new book The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science, do so immediately), as well as Pliny the Elder, who in compiling an encyclopedia of all Roman knowledge was sure to include epically fantastical animal “facts,” I guess just in case they turned out to be true.

Not only is the asp exceedingly deadly to humans, it’s far from easy to charm. When snake charmers try to lure it out of its hiding place, the asp will press one ear against the ground and plug the other with its tail. White’s bestiary translation notes: “Apart from men, asps are the only other creatures which do such a thing, namely, refuse to listen.”

The Physiologus was a huge hit. It was translated into everything from Syriac to Latin to Icelandic, spreading all over Europe and the Middle East and Africa. And when a scribe got his hands on it, according to White there was no reason he “should not expand his copy with interpolations” from later authorities. Thus the bestiary “began to grow like a living tree.” Later authors grabbed older bestiaries and tacked on extra bits. They cut things here and there. In the words of White, the bestiary was “a kind of naturalist’s scrapbook, which has grown with the additions of several hands.”

This went on throughout the Middle Ages until the 16th century rolled around, and naturalists started growing suspicious of the bestiaries’ claims. Then came along British polymath Sir Thomas Browne, science’s most accomplished party pooper, whose work Vulgar Errors ripped the bestiary’s many bizarre claims to pieces. Elephants do indeed have knees, he assured his readers, and beavers aren’t anywhere close to being capable of chewing off their own testicles. And in busting these myths, according to White, Browne “began to raise the subject of biology to a scientific level for the first time since Aristotle.”

Generations of natural historians followed Browne, trusting not in the strange moral tales of their forebears, but in direct observation. And in 1859, the science of biology tallied what is arguably its ultimate triumph with Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species. Far from the fanciful speculations of the bestiaries, science could now explain not only the deep biology of animals, but how and why they got that way.

Read more at Wired Science

Fantastically Wrong: The Scientist Who Seriously Believed Criminals Were Part Ape

Cesare Lombroso, accomplished pseudoscientist.

If you’ve been following this column, you’ve noticed that I while I’m admittedly a tad flippant and snarky, I try to make it clear that in science, being wrong is perfectly OK. Because when someone comes along to prove you incorrect, it’s progress. Edmond Halley hypothesizing that our Earth was hollow, for instance, helped solidify the scientific method as we know it. Even the dazzling cruelty of trying animals for crimes and executing them strangely enough had an upside. You can be wrong and still contribute much to society.

The 19th century professor of criminology Cesare Lombroso was not one of those people. Cesare was a dum-dum.

Lombroso took Darwin’s recently published theory of evolution and added a horrifying twist that would reverberate for decades. You’d be hard-pressed to find an upside to his argument that criminals in fact express the physical qualities of our ancestors, bringing them closer to the dispositions of an ape than a human. Or see what good came from the towering whirlwind of racism that accompanied his hypothesis. Or in profiling people with big earlobes, “as in the ancient Egyptians,” as born criminals.

But you’re welcome to give it a shot.

Around the World in 80 Racial Slurs

Where to begin? Well, first of all, Lombroso’s “revelation.” It was during a post-mortem of a famous brigand that Lombroso discovered a distinct impression at the base of the man’s skull, which he named the median occipital fossa. This was indeed peculiar, similar to the skull of “inferior animals, especially rodents.”

“This was not merely an idea, but a revelation,” Lombroso later wrote. “At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who produces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.”

Now, when diagnosing someone as a “born criminal,” we don’t exactly have the option of opening their heads to find this tell-tale giveaway of their savage nature. But we have savages all over the world to help us profile the fiends in our midst. How lucky! (In fairness, it should be noted, to a degree Lombroso was a product of his time—even in On the Origin of Species, Darwin himself invoked the “savagery” language.) Their features, Lombroso argued, are the hard evidence we need to identify their counterpart European delinquents.

Tattoos, according to Lombroso, aligned criminals with savage peoples who also got ink done.

Like the related pseudoscience of physiognomy, which advocated judging your personality based solely on your face (a story for another week, perhaps), criminal anthropology had a long list of qualities to look out for in hooligans. Here are just a few of the giveaways of being apish, which Lombroso’s daughter summarized in 1911’s Criminal Man, the first English translation of her father’s views:

• “The projection of the lower face and jaws (prognathism) found in negroes.”
• “Oblique eyelids, a Mongolian characteristic.”
• A nose with a “tip rising like an isolated peak from the swollen nostrils, a form found among the Akkas, a tribe of pygmies of Central Africa.”
• Aside from biology, the tattoos criminals adorn themselves further harken to the same practice “among primitive peoples.” And their pictographs scrawled on prison walls are also much like the hieroglyphics used by ancient man.

We might also find characteristics the European criminal shares not just with his fellow savage man, but with beasts:

• An entirely missing earlobe, or one that “is atrophied till the ear assumes the form like that common to apes.”
• A hooked nose, which “so often imparts to criminals the aspect of birds of prey.”
• “And in some cases there is a prolongation of the coccyx, which resembles the stump of a tail, sometimes tufted with hair.” (What, what?)

Indeed, Lombroso thought many animals themselves are criminals, according to Adalbert Albrecht in his 1910 essay “Cesare Lombroso: A Glance at His Life Work.” The bloodshot eyes of the tiger and hyena, for instance, is a sign of their immorality. Birds of prey, in addition to their nasty hooked beaks, have large eye sockets that indicate sexual perversity. Animals in general, he insisted, are exceedingly violent and prone to murder.

Some thieves and, interestingly, an effeminate pyromaniac at lower left known as “The Woman.”

“In view of these facts,” Lombroso wrote, “how can one fail to come to the conclusion that crime in its rudimentary expressions is bound to organic conditions and is one of their direct effects? This is absolutely confirmed when we study crime and prostitution among savages.”

And study he did—at length. While a French psychiatrist named Bénédict Morel already had declared “the criminal to be a form of degeneration or a morbid variation from the normal type of mankind,” Lombroso took those ideas and got a bit … carried away with the whole thing, to the point where “no one can dispute his right to be considered the godfather” of what would become known as criminal anthropology, writes Albrecht.

Smuggling a dagger into prison inside a crucifix is either sacrilegious or genius—or both.

Among the many criminals Lombroso studied, there are a few standouts worth mentioning. Representing the cynicism with which many deviants operate, “one criminal humbly entreated to be allowed to retain his own crucifix while in prison,” Lombroso’s daughter writes. “It was subsequently discovered that the sacred image served as a sheath for his dagger.” Representing impulsiveness was a man who had a habit of killing horses, who “even went to the length of throwing a lady down a well, because she ventured to contradict him.” Still another rather impulsive criminal was sentenced to labor aboard a galley, where he bravely “stole the bands from the masts, nails, and copper plates.” Classy.

Now, the question becomes: What to do with these scoundrels who are fated by their very nature to compulsively commit crimes? One of Lombroso’s colleagues, according to the great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, suggested that if “they ravish, steal, and kill, it is by virtue of their own nature and their past, but there is all the more reason for destroying them when it has been proved that they will always remain orang-utans.” Ouch. And Lombroso himself hinted at such. When it comes to criminals “organically fitted for evil,” we should have no compassion, for the fact that they continue their terrors “steels us against all pity.”

Picking on Epileptics, Because Why Not

There is of course the problem of criminals that don’t bear any of the requisite attributes: the small ears, the general hairiness, the long arms. What to make of them?

Well, not every criminal is born with qualities of earlier humans, Lombroso argued. There is the criminal of passion, which women tend to fall into more than men, and the criminal of opportunity, which, oddly, Lombroso ties to epilepsy. “According to him,” writes Albrecht, “epilepsy is not much else than a highly strung normal function of the nerves, so that some epileptics would appear to be merely highly strung impulsive natures.”

Lombroso believed epileptics, with their impulsive actions, were natural criminals.

Also, there’s the habitual criminal without the brain defects of the born criminal. “In consequence of a neglected upbringing, however,” writes Albrecht, “he does not gain the strength to overcome the naturally bad qualities of the child, developing them perhaps till habit makes him a criminal.” Interestingly enough, for all of the horrible predestination-style theories of Lombroso, this actually touches closer to what we now consider to be the driving factors of criminality.

While much debate still rages about what drives people into the life of crime, it seems clear that both genetic and environmental factors are at work. Men, for instance, may be more prone to aggression, but that doesn’t mean all men are like my crazy uncle, who probably spent 90 percent of his waking hours starting fights. On top of socioeconomic status and education, your upbringing, as Lombroso rightly noted, likely also plays a part. But a less-than-ideal upbringing of course doesn’t necessarily turn you into a criminal. My dad, for instance, is a lamb to his brother’s knife-wielding wolf. (I may be understating my uncle’s aggression. This was a man, after all, who once got in a bar fight and ended up with a pickax embedded in his brain.)

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Fantastically Wrong: History’s Most Hilarious Misconceptions About the Elephant

Antiquity’s saddest elephant laments the cursive that someone wrote all over it.

In the “Heffalumps and Woozles” ditty from Winnie the Pooh, elephants—those would be the heffalumps—wear tuxedos and use their trunks as accordions and suddenly turn blue. Fantastical, to be sure, but it’s downright unimaginative compared to what European natural historians used to believe about the elephant: That it has no knees and it can’t have sex until it eats the ridiculously toxic mandrake root, and even when it successfully mates, dragons eat its baby.

Oh, also, you’ve been lied to. Elephants aren’t afraid of mice. Sorry. I know it was cute and all.

Now, it’d be easy to chalk up these misconceptions to the fact elephants are naturally distributed in Africa and Asia, and Europeans simply didn’t have enough contact with the animals to inform their judgements. The reality, though, is that the elephant has an old (and brutal) history in Europe.

The Foot Bone’s Connected to the Leg bone, the Leg Bone’s Connected to the…Wait, Where’s the Knee Bone?

Let’s start with the elephant’s unfortunate lack of knees, a myth that persisted through the Middle Ages. In his charting of the history of this misconception, imminent 17th century skeptic and all-around ornery fellow Sir Thomas Browne notes that even the ancient Greeks knew this wasn’t so. Western armies first fought elephants at the Battle of Gaugamela in present-day northern Iraq in 331 BC, where Alexander the Great squared off against Darius of Persia. Yes, men fought elephants. The so-called war elephant, you see, was an incredibly effective weapon in ancient warfare—if you could manage to feed them and keep them from stepping on your own soldiers. But Alexander overcame the Persians, captured their elephants, and sent the beasts back to Greece. Having seen elephants for themselves, the Greeks had no reason to doubt their possession of knees.

Hannibal’s army and their war elephants crossing the Rhône. It’d be way more awesome if not for the inherent cruelty.

Indeed, Aristotle’s description of the elephant is incredibly descriptive, and he quite thoroughly busted the myth that they have no knees. And later on in Roman times, everyone who was anyone knew elephants had knees, because those lucky enough to attend gladiatorial games were treated to the cruel slaughter of the animals hauled in from Africa. In fact, in his sprawling encyclopedia Natural History, Pliny the Elder specifically mentions the elephant’s knees when recounting a battle in Rome’s Circus between 20 of the beasts and a number of men:

“One of these animals fought in a most astonishing manner; being pierced through the feet, it dragged itself on its knees towards the troop, and seizing their bucklers, tossed them aloft into the air: and as they came to the ground they greatly amused the spectators, for they whirled round and round in the air, just as if they had been thrown up with a certain degree of skill, and not by the frantic fury of a wild beast.”

An inexplicably tiny war elephant (would seem to defeat the purpose of using an elephant) at top, with wild ones at bottom. From the Rochester bestiary.

 Yet after Pliny and Aristotle debunked the notion that elephants don’t have knees, the idea popped back up after the fall of the Roman Empire. For that we can thank the Physiologus, which was written between the second and third centuries AD. Pulling from all manner of ancient authors, this was the mother of all bestiaries. “The elephant has no knee joints enabling him to sleep lying down if he wanted to,” it claimed. From there the fallacy made its way into other bestiaries throughout the Middle Ages.

More skeptical natural historians eventually began to question this, though. The 13th century’s Albertus Magnus, for instance, noted that the elephant wasn’t missing knees—it just had stiff joints in its legs, limbs he claimed were the same girth from top to bottom, like pillars of meat. Such robustness, Magnus claimed, was necessary to support its weight.

Dangerous Sex, Slaughtering Mice, and Other Elephantoid Pursuits

The Physiologus also helped disseminate other fanciful elephant “facts” that had been bouncing around intellectual circles in the ancient world. Take for instance, the beast’s odd sex life. According to the book’s anonymous author, when elephants want to conceive, a male and a female must head “to the east near paradise,” where they’ll find the mandrake. This plant’s root has a long history of being used by humans as an aphrodisiac, though as a member of the nightshade family it contains powerful toxins that can kill in high doses. (It was once said to take the form of a human that screamed bloody murder when you pulled it from the ground, killing anything within earshot.) The elephants supposedly give it a nibble, and “the female immediately conceives in the womb.”

Elephants gather to mate around a mandrake, lower right, which they’ll eat as an aphrodisiac. The voyeuristic dragon is presumably there to watch and eat their babies.

 According to the Physiologus, when it comes time for the female to give birth, the male must be vigilant, for the elephant’s eternal enemy, the serpent, will snatch the baby. Pliny refers to it as a dragon, but he’s likely referring to a large constrictor. This fiend is “perpetually at war with the elephant,” he writes, “and is itself of so enormous a size, as easily to envelop the elephants with its folds, and encircle them in its coils. The contest is equally fatal to both; the elephant, vanquished, falls to the earth, and by its weight, crushes the dragon which is entwined around it.” In the Physiologus, the serpent seems decidedly smaller, as the male elephant “kills it by trampling on it until it dies.”

Not bad for a creature that’s supposedly afraid of the lowly mouse. And for this myth we once again have Pliny to thank, believe it or not. Elephants “hate mice and will refuse to eat fodder that has been touched by one,” he claims. Not so. As a researcher of elephant behavior told LiveScience in 2011: “In the wild, anything that suddenly runs or slithers by an elephant can spook it. It doesn’t have to be a mouse—dogs, cats, snakes or any animal that makes sudden movements by an elephant’s feet can startle it.”

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