We all know that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a massive meteor strike, 65 million years ago. We know where it struck: off the Yucatan peninsula, forming the Chixculub crater. What I didn’t know was that the impact was so fierce that the site was burning hot for millions of years afterward.

The collision was intense enough to cause deformation far beneath the surface. Subterranean effects reached 35 km (almost 22 miles) down, and included the melting an immense amount of rock. Exposure to seawater made that rock porous. As hot water seeped into the pores, a hydrothermal system formed. The hot water gushing into an isolated region of the freezing depths could have attracted microorganisms and possibly other life forms that were otherwise struggling to survive.
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Traces of argon found inside a rock are indicative of potassium decay. Since the gas will also escape from molten rock, this provides a measure of when the rock solidified. How much time has passed since that rock melted can be determined from potassium-argon dating, which involves measuring the amount potassium-40 isotope present relative to the argon-40 it decays into. Levels of argon meant the hydrothermal system stayed heated from 66 million years ago, when the asteroid first hit, to 58 million years ago.

With 8 million years of heat and nutrients, life had more than enough time to colonize the hydrothermal system in the Chixculub crater. Pickersgill also ran computer simulations of hydrothermal activity in that location. Results suggested that cooling to 90° C (194° F) took between 1.5 and 2.3 million years after the impact at depths of one kilometer. Cooling to below 50° C (122° F) took up to 5 million years, still enough heat for colonies of microbes to thrive. After 6 million years, significantly less hot water was flowing, and by 8 million years, the flow had ceased. These results matched the rock age found by isotope analysis.

The impact had consequences for millions of years — it killed the world and set a pot to simmer for long ages afterwards.

We lived in Philadelphia in the 1990s, and we made fairly frequent day trips to the downtown. Because I was a science nerd, there were three destinations we prioritized over all the history and art museums: the Mütter Museum (because it was kind of gross), the Franklin Institute (great hands-on interactive exhibits for the kids), and my favorite, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. It’s a great working science museum with about 200 years of active research housed behind its doors. They also regularly hosted science meetings, so I’d go there for the regional meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, and Philadelphia science fairs were held there. It’s a real jewel in the center of the city.

It’s a great place. I miss the opportunity to visit it.

But now I learn that it was bought up by Drexel University. This was part of an ugly consolidation of academic institutions that distorted higher learning in the the region — they also bought up the Medical College of Pennsylvania, Hahnemann University, and Salus University, as part of a pattern of expansion. They slapped their name on the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University (I will never call it that.) And now, on September 1, they abruptly announced that they were closing the Academy as of September 30. That’s rather short notice for a collection that has been growing since 1812.

At the time I lived there, Drexel had a great reputation as an engineering and computer science school, but apparently they’ve now become a massive do-everything school with a focus on making lots of money, and screw science and history. Drexel has become the bad guy in this story.

Keep up with the news at the Save the Museum page, and sign the petition. What the hell happened to Drexel?

This figure, used by ScienceDaily, is totally irrelevant to the topic and has a caption that doubles-down on the nonsensical part of the article: “The human brain may actually be two ancient nervous systems fused into one, a discovery that could transform how scientists study brain development and devastating neurological diseases.”

I guess I should address this, since so many people are emailing me about it. There is an article titled “Stanford scientists discover the human brain may actually be two separate organs”, which takes a basic reality of developmental biology and blows it up with a ridiculous conclusion. No, your brain is not two separate organs, any more than your liver is multiple organs because it contains multiple tissue types — that, for instance, there are different lineages of hepatic progenitor cells in liver differentiation that produce hepatocytes and cholangiocytes. We take this for granted; development is a hierarchical, branching process, and so yeah, we see sequential separation of developmental lineages. It’s to be expected! We don’t promote the work by claiming various organs are in fact multiple organs.

The sensationalist spin is being placed on competent work that traces markers that distinguish regions of a single organ, markers that have a deep history in both development and evolution. Calm down. This is a routine observation that does have some practical uses.

The weird twist was put on it by the Stanford press office and ScienceDaily. The actual paper (which is fine) it is based on is titled “Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain”, a much more sensible and accurate title, although it also claims that the brain is a “composite organ”, which is a little bit silly. Every organ is a composite organ in some sense. We are a multicellular gemisch with some regional organization.

Development is hierarchical and sequential. It’s disappointing that this isn’t taught in grade school.

A recent article in Science has been deleted and a curious editorial comment added to it. The article title is Your heartbeat quietly shapes how your brain processes information, and the editor’s note is:

Editor’s note, 16 September, 3:05 p.m.: Although no specific errors in this story have so far been identified, we have removed it after determining the author was impersonating the identity of an established science journalist, both with the News editors at Science and with sources in the story. Furthermore, two of the quotes provided by the author have since been found in previously published stories by other writers.

The attributed author was Caroline Williams. The real Caroline Williams has written elsewhere:

Fake Caroline update:

The person who was impersonating me managed to get an article published in Science, under my by-line. And they got paid for it!

I’ve seen the pitches (bad), and the email chain between editors who weren’t all that impressed, but googled me and decide to take a punt. When the article came in it was dry, clunky and badly written, but after several rounds of editing they managed to get it into a publishable state. It went online in June and was up until yesterday when it became clear they (and I) had been scammed.

Link to the retraction / editor’s comment here: https://lnkd.in/eSQ2XEAJ

The whole thing makes me feel sick. I know from my work as an editor that the reputational damage is real. Had I pitched a story to them afterwards they would very understandably have said “Hell no!”. Who has the time to do someone else’s job? They tried “me”, “I” didn’t deliver, so no thank you.

I have no idea how many more editors out there have me on their ‘do not commission’ list because of this person’s actions. There may also be several scientists who will not want to talk to me because they’ve had a bad experience with the fake one.

More broadly, if this is a wider scam (and based on what others have told me, I think it is), it is potentially a serious issue for science journalism and journalism in general. And I’m not sure what we can do about that.

On the plus side, I now have some very nice contacts at Science and Nature and plan to write something better for them as soon as possible. And the fact that payment was made opens up the possibility of tracking down who is behind this. Watch this space…

It’s weird. Fake Caroline got nothing out of this but a paycheck, which does make me wonder how much one gets paid for a news article in Science. It can’t be much, given that scientists who publish there get nothing, and are in fact expected to pay the journal for the privilege.

There is a great deal of gain to one’s reputation, but not if you publish under someone else’s name, obviously. You can’t list it on your CV.

It can hurt the real writer’s reputation — now editors might be on the alert that submissions by “Caroline Williams” could be fraudulent. But this is a lot of effort to go to for a weak effect on someone. I can’t believe this elaborate fraud was a devious hit piece.

So now I’m left wondering why anyone would do this. Is there some subtle scam at play?

Today I learned something that surprised me: plants that mimic other plants. The question is…how?

Seven years ago, Gianoli and Carrasco-Urra reported on their discovery of Boquila trifoliolata (Lardizabalaceae), a woody vine from temperate rainforests of southern Chile, capable of complex leaf mimicry, when leaves of up to three different host plants were mimicked by leaves of one B. trifoliolata plant. However, according to a side-by-side published commentary, the absence of any plausible hypothesis for such a phenomenon makes this report unexplainable and mysterious.

Gianoli and Carrasco-Urra preferred some chemical volatile signals released from the host plants, which would allow the B. trifoliolata to mimic leaves of host plants. As an alternative proposal, they also speculated that horizontal gene transfer between host plant and Boquila vine, mediated perhaps via airborne microbes, might allow this leaf mimicry. They proposed this scenario because B. trifoliolata leaves mimic the nearest foliage, irrespective if these leaves are from the host plants or some other neighboring plants.

Interesting ideas, and I find them very reasonable. Sure, horizontal gene transfer, of the diffusion of morphogenetic signals — that seems plausible, initially, when I didn’t know the degree of mimicry. These plants copy the shapes of leaves, and the degree and pattern of venation. That seems a bit much to attribute to the chance transfer of multiple genes, or picking up signals that change or modify the plant’s intrinsic signals. The authors of this paper propose a surprising alternative: the plants are watching other plants in their neighborhood, and copying them visually.

No way, I thought. Plants don’t have eyes. How do they see? Let’s skip right past that minor anatomical difficulty — maybe we can return to that issue another day — and instead block the possibility of genetic or developmental signaling. They came up with a delightfully simple experiment.

we have been given a rare opportunity to test plant vision in more detail. The simplest way to test the vision hypothesis with the B. trifoliolata would be to see if it would mimic a non-living leaf shape from an artificial plant. In this study, B. trifoliolata was exposed to the artificial plastic plant with a characteristic leaf shapes. The results of this study show that this is indeed the case as leaves of B. trifoliolata mimicked leaves of the artificial plant. Hopefully, this report will stimulate more experiments in future to improve our understanding of the plant sensory abilities.

Surprise! Organic Boquila leaves copied plastic leaves to varying degrees!

Leaf shapes in Boquila trifoliolata. (a) Non-mimic leaf, with three lobes, dense vascular network. (b) Mimic leaf, with a single lobe in the apex, less dense vascular network. Red asterisks shows examples of free-ending veinlets.

Now I’m confused…how do they do that? I haven’t thought of any alternatives, yet. I welcome your speculations.

Until I have a better explanation, though, I’m going to have to cover the houseplants.