An Alien Signal, Resurrecting the Dead, & Super Geckos

Wednesday brief - October 23, 2024

Alien Signal?

Recently, a person with reasonable credibility announced “We have found a non-human extra-terrestrial intelligence in our galaxy, and people don't know about it.” Simon Holland is described as a “NASA filmmaker” who has worked on several projects related to the cosmos with various reputable organizations. He claims that the Breakthrough Listen project shared this information with him.

Holland described in a video on YouTube the signal that was purportedly found. Essentially, it was a signal that featured unusual traits compared to those that “natural” cosmic signals exhibit, but Sabine Hossenfelder pointed out that what Holland offered is old news. Hossenfelder, a physicist who hosts her own YouTube channel, did not readily dismiss the claim, however.

Instead, she noted that Holland has not pointed to anything that suggests that the needle has moved any closer to this signal being alien in origin. She identified and discussed the detailed studies conducted since the signal’s first detection in 2019 that have found no evidence to ascribe its causation to anything extraterrestrial or interesting (from the alien perspective).

In a separate video, Holland made the following rebuttal:

They've reanalyzed all the candidates in a novel way. They now have a way of multiplexing large telescopes together, potentially increasing how good they are. It's kind of complicated. Does it make them more sensitive? I'm not sure. I think it actually just opens up their window that they can see, but it's a very clever technology, but it's really complicated.

Any telescope with an antenna which is distant has a timebase error that needs to be combined. If you just combined all the signals by putting all the wires into a single computer you would get noise. But if you can correct all that timebase error of the observations, you can combine the signal to find something new.

One of the studies Hossenfelder mentioned, published in 2021, determined that the signal probably occurred as a result from nearby mobile devices operating on or near the same frequency. A 2023 study, though, found this to be unlikely although not impossible. Neither proffered any strong suggestions about the actual origin.

Holland’s rebuttal seems only to address this issue. He basically said the same thing except he added that scientists have what amounts to a plan to effectively eliminate any terrestrial noise artifact in future analyses.

So for now, the headlines seem premature or sensationalized, as does Holland’s preliminary announcement. But it will be interesting to see how this develops.

Colossal Biosciences’ home page (screen shot).

Resurrecting the Dead

An article published on October 14 in LiveScience opened with this dramatic statement:

Researchers working with Colossal Biosciences have assembled a near-complete Tasmanian tiger genome and developed artificial reproductive technologies that could help de-extinct the species.

De-extinct the species. What this rather innocuous phrase means is to splice the reconstructed genome into a living organism of close relation—in this case the fat-tailed dunnart (Sminthopsis crassicaudata)—to bring back to life a long-dead-and-gone creature.

As the fictional Dr. Ian Malcom once told the owner of Jurassic Park, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Paul and Anne Ehrlich make a cogent argument in Yale Environment 360 against de-extincting in line with Dr. Malcom’s assertion. Primarily, they posit three issues. First, they state that engaging in attempts at de-extinction would comprise a “misallocation of effort,” focusing on bringing back the already extinct in lieu of protecting those species that are still alive. On this they note,

Resurrecting a population and then re-inserting it into habitats where it could supply the ecosystem services of its predecessor is a monumentally bigger project than recreating a couple of pseudomammoths to wander around in a zoo…

To create even a single viable population [of pigeons] might well require fabricating a million birds or so, since the species apparently survived by a strategy of predator saturation.

Next, they point out that many of the habitats in which extinct creatures thrived simply no longer exist. Preserving currently endangered creatures in diminishing habitats has proven extraordinarily challenging itself. How, they ask, do we expect to do so for creatures (and habitats) that have been gone from the earth for 100 years or more?

Finally, they address the mammoth in the room—the moral hazard. They opine,

Right now the biggest moral hazard on the environmental front is created by the folly of “geoengineering” — the idea that, if humanity fails to limit the flux of greenhouse gases dramatically in the near future, overheating of the earth could be prevented by any one of a series of crackpot schemes.

De-extinction, to them, sounds dangerously close to the same idea. That is, it is clinging to a foolish notion that known—but complicated—solutions to biodiversity loss can be abandoned for shortcut or “crackpot” schemes. In other words, reintroducing extinct animals is not a solution to the ongoing depletion of biodiversity happening because of repeated destructive practices. If anything, it may add problems.

What do you think?

A Gold Dust Day Gecko; credit: Jurriaan Schulman, CC BY-SA 3.0

Are Geckos Super Creatures?

Geckos are fascinating lizards. They can run along surfaces at full speed, unhindered by pesky things like gravity. To stick to them, they use van der Waals forces, which are “molecular attractions that operate over very small distances,” or “dispersive forces that arise from instantaneous distortions in the electron cloud.” Put another way, the structures on Geckos’ feet interact with the object they move upon at the molecular level. This generates adhesive forces that allow them to stick regardless of the material.

The complexity of the Gecko’s sticky feet has inspired decades of study, and millennia of speculation—even Aristotle weighed in on the matter. Each of the Gecko’s feet possesses nearly five hundred thousand keratinous hairs or setae. These are subdivided at their tips into 100–1000 single nanofibers ending with flattened tips of both width and length of about 200 nm and thickness of about 15 nm.

Researchers have found that the effect of van der Waals forces are bolstered by “complex ensembles of cysteine-rich and serine-tyrosine–rich CBPs (corneous beta proteins) and a mixture of covalently [] and noncovalently [] bonded lipids” at the tips of their feet. In short, through complex molecular-level interactions with the surfaces upon which they run, Geckos’ feet can support weight many times the mass of the creature itself in defiance of gravity. The precise mechanisms continue to hold some mysteries.

But Geckos are even cooler than that. Scientists have also identified a “sixth sense” possessed by some subspecies. The Tokay Gecko, for example, can detect vibrations that are much lower and deeper than those that other lizards can detect—between 50 to 200 Hertz (Hz). At this range, humans tend to “feel” sounds rather than hear them. These are often referred to as “sub-bass” sounds, like those that a loud thumping car might play, that cannot be easily discerned up close. At the low end, most lizards hear sounds around 1,600 Hz. Thus, Tokay Geckos can “hear” sounds at many times lower frequencies.

Geckos use saccule, a structure in the inner ear common in amphibians and fish, to detect these low frequency sounds. Most creatures that have these structures use them to help regulate balance or position, much like the way human inner ears work. Only a few species also use them to detect vibrations that might indicate the presence of a nearby predator or other threat.

This is a key discovery in lizards because previously scientists found evidence that this method of vibration detection is used only in water. The study’s lead author, Dawei Han, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, explained:

A lot of snakes and lizards were thought to be ‘mute’ or ‘deaf’ in the sense that they do not vocalize sounds or hear sounds well. But it turns out they could potentially be communicating via vibrational signals using this sensory pathway instead, which really changes the way scientists have thought about animal perception overall.

On the importance of this discovery for future studies, he added:

The implications of this research extend beyond the world of reptiles. As we uncover these hidden mechanisms, we’re also gaining a richer and more nuanced picture of how animals perceive and interact with their environments—and potentially, new insights into our own sensory experiences.

See you Saturday!

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