A commenter, BCWebb, mentioned this recent paper, which is mind-blowingly bad. It’s a combination of crackpot physics plus crackpot biology, so it should never have cleared review, but there it is in the Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences…oh, wait, which means it may not be peer-reviewed, although the journal claims it is. It has an optional peer review process in which the paper apparently gets published, but a reviewer can email comments that get added to it? I think? Anyway, the paper is titled “A Black Hole at the Center of Earth Plays the Role of the Biggest System of Telecommunication for Connecting DNAs, Dark DNAs and Molecules of Water on 4+N- Dimensional Manifold”. Oooeee, sciencey! Black holes and DNA! Here’s the abstract.
Recently, some scientists from NASA have claimed that there may be a black hole like structure at the centre of the earth. We show that the existence of life on the earth may be a reason that this black hole like object is a black brane that has been formed from biological materials like DNA. Size of this DNA black brane is 109 times longer than the size of the earth’s core and compacted interior it. By compacting this long object, a curved space-time emerges, and some properties of black holes emerge. This structure is the main cause of the emergence of the large temperature of the core, magnetic field around the earth and gravitational field for moving around the sun. Also, this structure produces some waves which act like topoisomerase in biology and read the information on DNAs. However, on the four-dimensional manifold, DNAs are contracted at least four times around various axis’s and waves of earth couldn’t read their information. While, by adding extra dimensions on 4 +n-dimensional manifold, the separation distance between particles increases and all of the information could be recovered by waves. For this reason, each DNA has two parts which one can be seen on the four-dimensional universe, and another one has existed in extra dimensions, and only it’s e_ects is observed. This dark part of DNA called as a dark DNA in an extra dimension. These dark DNAs not only exchange information with DNAs but also are connected with some of the molecules of water and helps them to store information and have memory. Thus, the earth is the biggest system of telecommunication which connects DNAs, dark DNAs and molecules of water.
Whoa. I’m going to have to stop you at the very first sentence. Really? NASA says there may be a black hole at the center of the earth? I had to dig deeper. In the intro it says,
Newly, some scientists who worked in NASA claimed that there is a black hole at the centre of the earth which is the main cause of the high temperature of the core and magnetic field around the earth [6].
What is reference 6?
6. Riofrio L. Scientist Claims Theres a Black Hole in Center of the Earth. 2019 May 3; https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/05/scientist-claims-theres-a-black-hole-in-center-of-the-earth.
Umm, Houston, we have a problem. “Mysterious Universe” is a blog that posts articles about “ancient mysteries”, “ghosts & hauntings”, “cryptozoology”, and “conspiracy theories”. The article itself cites one source, a woman named Louise Riofrio, as a scientist who used to work at NASA, it claims, although no credentials are given and no specific role is mentioned. Thousands of people work for NASA. It sounds like she had a job there for a while and is now citing that vague experience as making her an authority, and using it to tint her wacky crackpot theory as having the imprimatur of NASA. It doesn’t.
Further, “Mysterious Universe” is citing a single source for Louise Riofrio’s idea: a YouTube interview with a site called “thirdphaseofthemoon”, another woo-woo UFO site, titled NASA Insider PROVES Time Travel Is REAL! Black Hole Discovered In Earth’s Core? 2019-2020. It’s just Riofrio babbling about her self-published book that claims her formula, GM=tc3, is equivalent to E=Mc2, and shows that the force of gravity is a function of the age of the universe (t) times the speed of light cubed.
She does not have any evidence that there is a black hole at the center of our planet. She only has kooky theories.
Well look at that. I only got as far as the first sentence of the abstract, and it has already sent me tumbling down a rabbithole to crazytown. I didn’t even get to the biology!
OK, just a little taste of the biology.
…we should design a model which explains the relationship between earth, water and life. To this aim, we can use ideas of scientists for the existence of a black hole at the centre of the earth. This black hole may be constructed from a DNA black brane with 109 times longer than the core of the earth which is compacted interior of the core. The number of excited states of this object is similar to the number of microstates of a black hole. However, its material is similar to the material of a DNA. This structure produces a temperature around 6000 K which is in agreement with the predicted temperature of the core. Also, this structure is the main cause of the emergence of the magnetic field around the earth and gravitational waves for moving around the sun. We show that DNA black brane of the earth is the biggest system of telecommunications which exchange waves with all DNAs and molecules of water. Also, we introduce a new type of DNAs called dark DNAs on the eleven-dimensional manifold. In fact, on the four-dimensional manifold, DNAs are contracted at least four times around various axes and waves of earth couldn’t read their information. However, by adding extra dimensions, the separation distance between particles increases and all of the information could be recovered by waves.Induced DNA black brane interior of the core by imaging all DNAs on its meta
For this reason, each DNA has two parts which one can be seen on the four-dimensional universe, and another one has existed in extra dimensions, and only it’s effects can be observed. This extra dark part of DNA called as a dark DNA in an extra dimension. Waves of the earth’s DNA connect DNAs on four-dimensional universe and dark
DNAs in extra dimensions and act like topoisomerases in biology. These waves are different for males and females and also different from linear waves which radiate by electronic devices.
Perhaps you are curious about these different DNAs in males and females, and what this dark DNA is? Don’t ask.
We can write below results from our model and calculations: 1. Molecules of water are in related to dark DNAs in extra dimensions. On the other hand, dark DNAs have gender like normal DNAs.
Thus, molecules of water can have some properties like gender, and each molecule of water with the gender of the male can attract by DNAs with the gender of female and reversely, each molecule of water with the gender of a female can attract with molecules of water with the gender of male
I told you, don’t ask.
However, by adding extra dimensions to four dimensions of the universe, the separation distance between elements of DNAs increases and waves of earth could recover their information. Thus, each DNA has an extra dark part in extra dimension which we call them dark DNAs. These extra parts couldn’t be observed, however, their effects can be seen. DNA black brane of the earth’s core exchange waves with both dark and light parts of DNA and connect them. These waves are different for males and females and play the role of topoisomerases in biology.
On the other hand, our calculations and experiments show that these waves interact with molecules of water. However, the chemical structure of water (H2O) is very simple and cant store any information. This means that there are some extra dark DNAs on the 4+n-dimensional manifold which are related to molecules of water and play the role of memory for it. These dark DNAs have gender like other DNAs and give properties of gender to molecules of water. On the other hand, DNA black brane of the earth could emit some special waves to molecules of water and extract dark DNAs from extra dimensions. This means that the origin of life could be a system of telecommunication which is formed by DNA black brane interior of the earth, dark DNAs, waves and molecules of water.
Wow. So there’s a black hole spinning around the core of the earth, producing a black brane which encodes all this dark DNA, which no biologist has ever found, which is transmitted to life on the surface. There is no evidence for any of it, nor for the idea that water molecules are gendered.
Any physicist want to tackle the physics in this article? I gave up when I found the source, and lost all enthusiasm for addressing the bullshit biology.
Are we sure this was not algorithmically generated?
What.
WTF is happening to the people of this planet?
@nomdeplume, #3:
They’re being their usual selves. We like to think that there was a thing called The Enlightenment and that modern civilization is all rational and science-based, but that was never entirely true — the actual Nazis in Germany ¾ of a century ago went in for the whole weird-ass mystical gobbledygook of antisemitism complete with demon worship and blood libel, and drove out most of their decent physicists for being Jewish, then made up a bizarre “scientific” cosmology based on racism. (I saw a great article once on the official Nazi physics — it was at least as kooky as this stuff.) The same kinds of people are still coming up with the same kinds of ideas; they always did — all through the post-WWII 20th century professors received “proofs” of crank theories. We’re just noticing it particularly right now because of the combination of a surge in the anti-intellectual right wing and the way the Internet helps kooks find each other and seem “respectable”.
As a physicist I will certify that this has some physicy words in it but only from the realm of the unknowable, i.e. superstring mythology, and even those words “do not mean what you think they do.”
There are physics terms which appear to have been randomly put together, and make no sense as far as I can see.
A lot of these people seem to work/study at G. Marconi University in Rome. I’m guessing it’s not highly ranked.
Oh, I dunno, Rob Grigjanis. It seems to me very rank indeed.
I’m definitely borrowing some of the figures for my next work presentation.
What the entire fuck.
This stuff falls into the category of ‘too easy’. Like wasting time on flat earth. Why bother ?
The “physics” in that isn’t even really cogent enough to make fun of. I rate it 0.7 metric timecubes.
A solid 650 milliTimeCube article.
In other news, on the PBS Space Time youtube channel: Could Life Evolve Inside Stars?
Their answer: if there can be DNA-like structures made of magnetic monopoles connected with cosmic strings, which also happen to be in stars, then … possibly?
Ten whole minutes wasted. The channel has 2.12M subscribers, and the video has 191k views after only two days (with 11k likes, 177 dislikes).
That’s what the board-approved form of crackpottery/clickbait is like. But relatively speaking, it’s a fairly mild specimen. I mean, when will Elon Musk make an appearance? And why not a crossover with a blockbuster movie like The Matrix? One can’t technically rule out such things, so maybe that is forthcoming. More research is needed (desperately) as well as your money via patreon.
I liked the picture of the blue egg throwing out those hard candies your gramma keeps in her pockets. I can almost smell the vanilla. (Yes, I know those are actually TIE fighters attacking, as the arrows show, but let me have this)
Are we sure they’re talking about genetic material when they say DNAs? They might mean Dextrorotatory Non-limiting Anti-spirals as far as I can tell.
Man, if Gene Ray had only held on for a few more decades, he could have been a published researcher instead of an internet crank.
cr @13: That is hypothetical, but certainly not crackpottery. If you watched more of Matt O’Dowd’s videos, you might learn some physics.
It’s word salad with a physics flavor. The author affiliations are very weird.
It has an optional peer review process…
And optional checking by an English-fluent copy editor, clearly not exercised in this case.
Also, the graph in figure 5.
Also, several of the figures are just copied directly from reference 19, and I bet if I cared enough, I could backtrack through references to find the original usage in some other crap paper. These “journals” just don’t give a shit at all.
Ridana:
I’m pretty sure those represent TIE Interceptors. Those have four laser cannons on the wing tips (unlike TIE Fighters), which of course is how you get adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thiamine.
And I know what you’re thinking….Darth Vader’s TIE Advanced starfighter does have curvy wings, but it only has two lasers (plus cluster missiles). Also, it’s only a single prototype, so no, that’s not true. That’s impossible.
Are we sure this whole thing isn’t just some ass-backwards attempt to justify homeopathy? I mean, the whole thing seems to be leading up to the “water has memory, even though it doesn’t” assertion. Sure seems like they’re trying to give a sciency explanation for that hoary old pseudo-science.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it (or giving the authors too much credit for having an actual purpose, however wacky.)
I got lost in the “extra added demons added to the other 4 dimensions ” and it was only my dumb luck I got out of there alive.
uncle frogy
This ridiculous paper is not the first batshit insanity I’ve seen published from the first author Massimo Fioranelli. He wrote a paper claiming that the skin absorbs 5G waves and this is what causes coronavirus, but I guess it was finally retracted.
PubPeer has one entry on this rubbish. Enough to say, it’s not only not right, it’s not even wrong.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/4FF927238DE6155BC0DB4FF4BCB04D?utm_source=Firefox&utm_medium=BrowserExtension&utm_campaign=Firefox
As in, were an actual peer review to occur, it’d be rejected instantly by said peers.
There are other papers on the same site, all by the same folks, all with the very same kind of rubbish papers presented to revolted senses.
wzrd1, at least trim the link. Most of it just tells us you’re using Firefox.
So now even DNA is gendered? How do asexual species exist?
@1
A deep learning algorithm could probably come up with something a lot more coherent. If this is not an intentional hoax, it looks like the work of a crackpot. Maybe something much simpler like a Markov chain could do it.
I’m not sure there is a larger point to be made except that this “journal” is asleep at the wheel in terms of peer review.
The articles in the journal appear to share authorship amongst many of the same small group of researchers. Perhaps this is their way of gaming ‘publish or die’.
This paper was a few days ago also mentioned in the leading German political journal “Der Spiegel” in the context of one of the authors. Uwe Wollina, a chief physician at a clinic in Germany (he is also at the rank of a university professor, chairman of a federal approbation board, and chief editor of two scientific journals), is mentioned in the article as – on paper – one of the most proliferic scientists in Germany if not the whole world with over 2500 publications to his name. Although, when you have a look at his output, you see that it is mostly crap like the paper mentioned above. The full Spiegel article is unfortunately behind a paywall, so I did not read more than the first paragraph, but it looks as if this guy went really down the deep end.
Wow! I … I mean … I’s just … WOW!
The mildly deranged penguin just went up to the centre of the Earth. (She was standing on the ceiling at the time.) She confirms there’s no black hole there, just what she expected to find: A very large lump of British Industrial Cheddar. This alleged cheese is inedible, essentially indestructible, dissolves just about anything, and is produced and purchased in great quantities. But not consumed, leading to question of what happens to it?
Some do try and eat it. After being vomited up or otherwise exiting the digestive system, that portion plus all uneaten lumps are thought to be discarded, either in the waste bin or down the sewer. However, sampling of sewers, dumps, incinerators, and the like consistently finds only a minuscule amount of British Industrial Cheddar. Most of it is “missing”.
Researchers finally realised it’s dissolving it’s way out and heading towards the centre of the Earth. Unlike the molten nuclear reactor cores in a “China syndrome” event, British Industrial Cheddar will eventually reach the centre of the Earth… and dissolve and replace the original centre. (And lots of other things — on its escape and trip to the centre, it would have also dissolved many other things, so there’s no real surprise there could be traces of DNA, RNA, and teh legendary sensible Republican.)
The mildly deranged penguin noticed it is outgassing. Exactly what its being outgased is unknown — she had to leave in a hurry with insufficient time to take any measurements. It does have a very foul odour. She did get a sample, but it turned the sample tube to mush and she was forced to jettison the sample.
Back on the ceiling, she’s noticed traces of that ordour. Worryingly, she’s since been having dreams of massed ranks of penguins shedding their tuxedos, putting on brownshirts, and — well, trying to — goosestep. This doesn’t work very well (not at all, actually) and the brownshirts are itchy, so the penguins eventually snap out of it and start wearing tuxedoes again.
She speculates the outgassing British Industrial Cheddar at the centre of the Earth is having a similar effect on long pigs, and has triggered if not actually caused the current mass stoopidity and resurgence of facism. (It also may explain why some Brits keep on making the stuff — they’re exposed to greater concentrations earlier.)
PBS Space Time is actually a great channel- but for physics. “Could Life Evolve Inside Stars?’ is one of the few times they seem to have gone a bit off the rails. I do think it’s an interesting topic to consider, though, and this channel is as far as you can get from the above nonsense we’re discussing. Please don’t judge it based on one video- they really have a lot of good episodes.
On the plus side, trying to read that pseudoscientific bafflegab put me right to sleep last night.
bmatchick @32: It does sound bizarre (as O’Dowd says), and it is highly speculative, but it is also certainly physics, and it is certainly not “off the rails”.
The physics – topological defects in gauge field theories – is a subject that has been around for decades. A sampling;
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0550321374904866?via%3Dihub
https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9411342
https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.03384
The authors of the relevant paper (which you can read here) ask whether these defects could give rise to structures which have some of the basic properties of life. Far out? Sure. Crankery? No.
@34 It seems to fit the pattern of: many new and good ideas, but the good ones aren’t new and the new ones aren’t good.
I do not see how it would be fruitful to connect black holes and DNA, which functions as a replicating information-bearing molecule in a narrow range of conditions not likely to be present at the earth’s center let alone in a black hole not likely to be at the earth’s center.
I mean if there M ideas here and N ideas over there, you can form the product of MxN “papers” about both together, but I expect a little more selectivity before I’m willing to call any one of them science. This sounds like crankery to me even if individual parts make sense.
@34
Fair enough, but your explanation is way more coherent than what the paper actually says. Don’t say “DNA” if what you really mean is information-bearing structures roughly analogous to DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid, a specific class of molecule with particular chemical properties). Don’t draw pictures of a double helix if what you are proposing has nothing to do with the double helix.
bmatchick, #32:
Agreed. The channel is generally pretty good, and the discussion is normally about real things.
RobG@34 Oh never mind. I see you were talking about “life inside stars” in general, not this crazy paper. It’s a fine topic for science fiction (like Robert L. Forward or maybe Iain M. Banks). It is “real” speculative science, sure.
Strangely (not), the author is also the author of a retracted paper linking 5G technology to coronavirus: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32668870/