Chalk up another black mark against North Carolina’s governor, Pat McCrory. His administration has been pretending that mountains of coal ash couldn’t possibly be contaminating drinking water in the state. Their obstinance has finally led to the resignation of one of the state’s leading scientists.

North Carolina’s state epidemiologist resigned Wednesday to protest her employer’s depiction that “deliberately misleads” how screening standards were created to test private wells near Duke Energy’s power plants.

Dr. Megan Davies’ immediate resignation after seven years on the job deepens a rift between Gov. Pat McCrory’s administration and some of the state’s top public health scientists. McCrory is a former Duke employee who is running for a second term as governor.

The millions of tons of coal ash stored at Duke’s power plants has contaminated groundwater under them. State tests last year found that cancer-causing chemicals were present in hundreds of nearby private wells, although Duke denies coal ash is the source.

So wait…where is the vanadium and hexavalent chromium, carcinogens that are found in relatively high concentration in coal ash, coming from? This is one that would be tough to blame on transgender men and women — they just don’t have the magic powers that would do that. If it’s not the coal ash, the only remaining possibility really is magic…which means we’re going to have to blame Jesus. Why does Jesus hate North Carolina? Logically, the answer must be that he hates them because they elected a wanker named McCrory.

Extrapolating from current tectonic movements, the future state of the continents has been predicted. Apparently, we’ll get a new Pangaea back again in about 250 million years.

I’m thinking I may have to hang around long enough to witness that. Who’s with me?

John Timmer explains some experiments in physics that have exposed some unexpected behavior by protons. Read that article to get the story, but this little bit jumped out at me as universally applicable to all science.

This may sound like a minor puzzle, but remember that the proton’s radius is tied into theories like the Standard Model, so the result suggested that there might be something wrong with our understanding of some basic physics. Theorists, naturally, responded with enthusiasm and developed some new models that added an additional fundamental force that influenced the muon’s interactions with the proton.

Show a scientist a problem, a real problem with data to back it up, and scientists naturally respond with enthusiasm. That’s the Standard Model of Scientific Behavior.

When scientists respond with a groan and a facepalm when you tell them your new theory for how humans evolved, or how chi flows through the body, or how to cure cancer with mango smoothies, or worse, announce that your scientific explanation is invalid because it doesn’t include the Bible or the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita, it’s because you don’t understand how science works. Real difficulties with an idea get us worked up and excited. Imaginary difficulties lacking in substantial evidence are uninteresting and mean we have to shoo away an annoying loon.

We’ve already confirmed that some people are irrational and ignorant. That observation has been replicated repeatedly and doesn’t enthuse anyone at all.

Related: here’s a professional physicist who consults with self-taught “theorists”.

The majority of my callers are the ones who seek advice for an idea they’ve tried to formalise, unsuccessfully, often for a long time. Many of them are retired or near retirement, typically with a background in engineering or a related industry. All of them are men. Many base their theories on images, downloaded or drawn by hand, embedded in long pamphlets. A few use basic equations. Some add videos or applets. Some work with 3D models of Styrofoam, cardboard or wires. The variety of their ideas is bewildering, but these callers have two things in common: they spend an extraordinary amount of time on their theories, and they are frustrated that nobody is interested.

She charges $50 for 20 minutes of consulting, in which she directs them towards current literature and advises them on the deficiencies in their background that they need to fill. I’ve had so many of these kinds of people harangue me with their ideas and objections to evolution, but I never realized I should be charging for the service.

Except, for $50 they’d probably expect me to be nice.

Sometimes, New Scientist puts a strange twist on their stories — like this one, Universal ancestor of all life on Earth was only half alive. I got stuck on just the title. “Half alive”? What does that mean? It’s describing a paper that did a comparative analysis of genes found in 1800 bacteria and 130 archaea to identify what was common between them, which would suggest what genes were present in the last universal common ancestor.

Now we have the best picture yet of what that ancestor was like and where it lived, thanks to a study that identified 355 genes that it probably possessed.

“It was flabbergasting to us that we found as many as we did,” says William Martin of the University of Dusseldorf in Germany, who led the study. The findings support the idea that the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) lurked in hydrothermal vents where hot water rich in hydrogen, carbon dioxide and minerals emerged from the sea floor.

“It’s spot on with regard to the hydrothermal vent theory,” Martin says. He describes LUCA as half-living, because it may have depended on abiotic reactions in the vents to produce many of the chemicals it needed.

That last bit is where they lost me. I’m about 0.4% salt, which is abiotically derived…does that mean I’m only 99.6% alive? And what about water? I’m 60% water, which means I’m now 39.6% alive, or mostly dead. If you’re just talking about chemical reactions, I don’t have an autonomous power source, but rely on daily input of organic material produced by other living creatures. So by that definition, I am a mostly dead, or undead, zombie PZ that lives by ghoulishly feasting upon the bodies of the living.

When I put it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad.

But I think what is messing us up here is a continuing bias towards vitalism — there is no distinction between “life” and “chemistry”. If you just accept that, we’ll all stop wasting our time trying to figure out what part of our biology is life vs. not-life. This video is a nice simplified approach to the problem of the origin of life, but it also seems hung up on a pointless distinction between “dead chemicals” and “living cells”.

At least the story does make the case for the increasingly dominant hypothesis for the origin of life on earth — that it came from reactions that exploited electron gradients found at deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

One characteristic of almost all living cells is that they pump ions across a membrane to generate an electrochemical gradient, then use that gradient to make the energy-rich molecule ATP. Martin’s results suggest LUCA could not generate such a gradient, but could harness an existing one to make ATP.

That fits in beautifully with the idea that the first life got its energy from the natural gradient between vent water and seawater, and so was bound to these vents. Only later did the ability to generate gradients evolve, allowing life to break away from the vents on at least two occasions – one giving rise to the first archaea, the other to bacteria.