Morgellons was invented (it would not be accurate to say diagnosed) in 2001, by a mom whose toddler son developed an unremarkable raw patch on his chin. When the scab collected fibers — almost certainly from the environment — she believed that they were being extruded from his skin. She took him to doctor after doctor, looking for one who would confirm her belief, but none would. A consensus rose among the doctors that she suffered from Munchausen by Proxy, in which an individual thrives on attention from doctors through presenting a family member as an extraordinary medical case. Reports are that she tried eight different doctors, and when none agreed with her claim, she coined the term Morgellons disease. An active community of Morgellons sufferers has grown worldwide ever since.

The general feeling among the medical profession (and with which I agree, based on my research) is that most of the patients who have self-diagnosed with Morgellons are suffering from acute stress or other psychiatric conditions. Among the many possible physical manifestations of acute stress is skin sores. The sufferer scratches, causing scabs. Environmental fibers become caught in the scab. Combined with other highly uncomfortable symptoms, and a bit of Internet research, the fibers convince the sufferer that Morgellons is the cause. It is noteworthy that prior to Morgellons’ appearance on the Internet in 2001, there were no reports of a strange disease in which the body extrudes colorful plastic fibers.

In accordance with public pressure to investigate Morgellons, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initiated a large-scale investigation of the reports, to determine whether a new medical condition had indeed been discovered. As noted in my Skeptoid episode, the CDC’s latest news was reported on a special web page, http://www.cdc.gov/unexplaineddermopathy/. Sufferers were able to keep up on the latest research.

And now, on January 25, 2012, the CDC has released its results. In short, they found no physiological cause, and that nearly all sufferers also reported other conditions considered to be psychogenic. An accurate summary of their findings is that the patients who believe their body is extruding fibers are wrong, the fibers come from elsewhere (cotton was the most common composition detected), and the condition is delusional (my words, not the CDC’s). The study, reported in PLoS ONE, concluded:

To our knowledge, this represents the most comprehensive, and the first population-based, study of persons who have symptoms consistent with the unexplained dermopathy referred to as Morgellons. We were not able to conclude based on this study whether this unexplained dermopathy represents a new condition, as has been proposed by those who use the term Morgellons, or wider recognition of an existing condition such as delusional infestation, with which it shares a number of clinical and epidemiologic features. We found little on biopsy that was treatable, suggesting that the diagnostic yield of skin biopsy, without other supporting clinical evidence, may be low. However, we did find among our study population co-existing conditions for which there are currently available therapies (drug use, somatization). These data should assist clinicians in tailoring their diagnostic and treatment approaches to patients who may be affected. In the absence of an established cause or treatment, patients with this unexplained dermopathy may benefit from receipt of standard therapies for co-existing medical conditions and/or those recommended for similar conditions such delusions infestation.

How will this news be received by the Morgellons community? Predictably, the findings will be rejected, in favor of their desired theory that an actual disease agent is present. There will most likely be claims of a Big Pharma conspiracy, or charges that doctors are afraid of discovering new conditions that “rock the boat” or conflict with “mainstream dogma”.

But the true problem is that many such patients will continue to go untreated, due to their hostility toward a psychiatric diagnosis which (in my experience) they misinterpret as “calling them crazy”. After all — they reason — the fibers are there, real, and physical; how could it just be psychological? Acute stress and other psychiatric conditions can be highly disabling and can cause physiological symptoms. No one is “calling them crazy”; it’s simply a different diagnosis than the one they prefer.

Even assuming the CDC’s findings are correct, they will likely have very little impact helping the sufferers. And that’s the real tragedy of Morgellons.

Obviously this is an English language blog written by primarily American authors, so we cannot extrapolate this data to indicate the relative popularity of skepticism in general in each country. But there are two surprises.

The first surprise is that the United States is not the country where we’re most popular. We’re most appreciated in Canada. Either this means that our lone Canadian blogger, Daniel Loxton, is more popular than the rest of us put together; or that Canadians generally appreciate this content more than Americans. There are all kinds of demographic reasons that this may be true. Without surveying our readers for their demographic information and comparing that to the population at large, we can only speculate what some of these are. The United States has higher religiosity than Canada, and the population is generally less educated. But far be it from me to assert that only an educated public would appreciate this blog; it’s all speculation.

Similarly, New Zealand takes second place, relegating the United States down to third. What are the reasons that New Zealanders visit SkepticBlog more often than Americans?

The second surprise is that a block of three non-English speaking countries, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, have snuck in there higher than Ireland and the United Kingdom. Much of their population is bilingual and reads English without a problem, but it’s still their second language; we’d typically tend to expect more readers from the UK on an English language blog than from Scandinavia.

Scandinavia has a reputation for having low religiosity and low poverty, so perhaps this shouldn’t be so much of a surprise. My personal experience with attendees at skepticism conferences and talks that I give on the road has been that all socioeconomic levels appear to be well represented, but that’s my own informal observation only, and could well be wrong.

The Amaz!ng Meeting has had two conferences in London and one in Australia. Maybe it’s time the JREF threw one in Sweden?

I’m posting this blog not so much to make you aware of it, but to solicit your feedback. The show is called inFact with Brian Dunning and is now in its second season. Today’s episode, season 2 number 8, is about conspiracy theorists. Must we assume that they’re nuts, or is there a more rational explanation for why belief in conspiracies is so widespread? See how I answered this question:

I’m trying specifically to hit these points:

• The videos are intended for the general YouTube audience, and presumes little to no previous experience with scientific skepticism.
• The videos must be no more than about 3 minutes. Data shows very clearly that most viewers only watch short videos all the way through, and almost nobody even starts videos that are much longer than this.
• All content is legal. All backgrounds, images, and music are rights released (most are purchased, sponsored, or public domain).

Now obviously, there is far more that could be said about this particular topic. What I discussed – which many of you may recognize as agency detection – is only a single bullet point. When limited to a 3-minute runtime, I have to do my best to make a single strong point. And I have to make it to an audience that I assume has no previous exposure to the subject. Considering my previous experience with Skeptoid, I also assume that many of the viewers are going to have preconceived notions that make them hostile to my message, so I try to be engaging rather than confrontational.

I’ve heard many times from teachers who use the series in classrooms (which is obviously encouraged and free). So far, they like the single subject nature of each video, which allows for focused discussion. And I think the language and presentation is a good mix between accuracy and simplicity.

It’s also noteworthy that inFact is crowdfunded. I’m pleased to report that this has worked quite effectively; it’s meant I’ve not had to spend money out of my own pocket to produce the series since season 1, or to miss a paying workday to work on it. The pace of per-episode funding has not been as fast as I’d hoped, but if we can improve the show and gain a larger crowdfunding base, perhaps that will change too. (The show is ad-supported too, but so far that’s a pittance that’s not even worth counting.)

I’m interested on your thoughts on the show’s content and its direction. I’m less in need of production notes; everyone is Cecil B. DeMille and I do already have talented people continuing to help me with some of the lingering production issues. But your thoughts on content and direction are most welcome. Thanks!

As you may know, I am a huge proponent of the technology of genetic engineering of crops (full disclaimer). Compared to old-school, trial-and-error cross pollination, GMO is like using a word processor instead of a manual typewriter. It’s the difference between a plant that’s naturally resistant to pests and naturally able to thrive in the native conditions, versus a plant that must be doused with expensive pesticides and fertilizers. So I wanted to know the true story behind these headlines.

It goes all the way back to 1964, when the Maharashta Hybrid Company (Mahyco) was founded with the same Rockefeller money that created the International Rice Research Institute in Asia, whose products now feed most of the world. Located in Mumbai, Mahyco developed a successful Pusa Sawani Okra, still a staple product, and has been a principal developer of crops specialized for India ever since.

In 1998, Monsanto acquired a 26% stake in Mahyco, which they still own today.

In 2003, India passed the Biological Diversity Act of 2002 which, among other things, established regulations governing the sources of genes used in biotech research. In reality, the BDA was a thinly-veiled line drawn in the sand to discourage foreign companies from doing research on Indian varieties without paying major licensing fees.

But Mahyco is not, and never was, a foreign company. They’re big on eggplant, which has long been a major crop throughout India. There it’s called brinjal, where crops suffer terribly from butterflies and moths, requiring expensive pesticides that Indian farmers can’t always afford. Mahyco inserted a gene from a soil bacterium into brinjal, creating what they called Bt brinjal. Bt brinjal proved highly resistant to the pests, and was formally approved by India’s Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) in October 2009. It was India’s very first genetically modified crop.

Then, in 2010, GMO opponents in India pressured the government to delay its release. The environment minister announced a moratorium on its release, pending further study of possible environmental effects, even though such studies had already been completed. And so the pest resistant Bt brinjal has sat on Mahyco’s shelves, and Indian farmers have had to continue spraying pesticides.

The other shoe dropped in October 2011, when India’s National Biodiversity Authority decided to sue Mahyco and its much better known (and deeper pocketed) minority stakeholder Monsanto. The allegation is that Mahyco violated the BDA by not obtaining proper authorization for collecting the bacterium from which the crucial gene in Bt brinjal was drawn. In fact Mahyco did not collect this gene; it was provided by the University of Agricultural Sciences at Dharwad, royalty free. So although the lawsuit is not likely to succeed, it is likely to be lengthy and expensive, and has refocused attention on the biotech industry in one of the world’s hungriest countries.

GMO opponents in India like Gangula Ramanjaneyulu, director of the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, express enthusiasm over the lawsuit:

This is a victory for India’s food sovereignty, preserving the control of seeds and food in the hands of our farmers and consumers instead of a few multinational corporations like Monsanto.

But Indian scientists are less thrilled. Govindarajan Padmanabhan from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore:

Our national labs have all the genes for rice improvement, we do not need Monsanto. The moratorium will actually affect the indigenous effort [to create GM crops that could feed India's rapidly growing population].

Shanthu Shantharam, a biotechnology consultant in the United States:

I am simply appalled that NBA’s lawyers have given such a poor advice for it to prosecute the developers of Bt brinjal. By this reckoning, all genetic improvements done so far to develop all these local varieties and hybrids would also constitute a violation of the biodiversity act, which is absurd.

Ananda Kumar, project director for plant biotechnology at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) in New Delhi:

We have no less than ten GM products to get into the regulatory system for trials — including brinjal, chickpea, sorghum, sugar cane, castor [oil plant], rice and potato — that took 15 years to develop and a lot of money. All scientists associated with these projects are disillusioned.

So that’s what actually happened, if you’re wondering what’s behind the “Monsanto Biopirated India” headlines. Somehow I don’t foresee these same activists charging their favorite superfruit and nutraceutical importers with biopiracy, but that’s another subject for another time.

Main sources:

• http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100210/full/news.2010.65.html
• http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/08/indias_biodiversity_agency_to.html
• http://www.mahyco.com/milestones.html

I had never heard of this before, so I read the story with interest (and, of course, a touch of skepticism). It begins with a woman who reported that her husband, a psychologist, learned something extraordinary from his patients in the military:

I remember clearly an evening when my husband came back to our apartment on Doctor’s Circle carrying a thick official looking folder in his hands. Inside were hundreds of pages of certain studies commissioned by the government. He was in shock from the contents. What he read in those documents completely changed his life. From that moment on my conservative middle of the road husband grew his hair and beard and never cut them again. What is more, the VA Medical center let him do it, and other very conservative men in the staff followed his example.

Why should psychologists and other professional men suddenly decide to stop cutting their hair? Surely there must be some compelling reason. I read on with interest.

The native American trackers, renowned for an almost supernatural ability to track anyone over anything, were recruited and sent into action in Vietnam. But:

Once enlisted, an amazing thing happened. Whatever talents and skills they had possessed on the reservation seemed to mysteriously disappear, as recruit after recruit failed to perform as expected in the field.

How could that be? Evidently, the trackers themselves offered the answer:

When questioned about their failure to perform as expected, the older recruits replied consistently that when they received their required military haircuts, they could no longer ‘sense’ the enemy, they could no longer access a ‘sixth sense’, their ‘intuition’ no longer was reliable, they couldn’t ‘read’ subtle signs as well or access subtle extrasensory information.

No skeptical red flag yet. It’s not surprising at all that people might attribute a skill to something that’s got nothing to do with it. I know very little about whatever culture these men may have come from (the tribe was not specified in the article) and it’s perfectly plausible that they might attribute much to a hairstyle. The hair is probably not actually doing anything, but that wouldn’t stop the men from believing that it would.

So the testing institute recruited more Indian trackers, let them keep their long hair, and tested them in multiple areas. Then they would pair two men together who had received the same scores on all the tests. They would let one man in the pair keep his hair long, and gave the other man a military haircut. Then the two men retook the tests.

Time after time the man with long hair kept making high scores. Time after time, the man with the short hair failed the tests in which he had previously scored high scores.

And, apparently, based on that, the psychologist decided to stop cutting his hair. This struck me as odd. I was intrigued by the idea that some testing had found that hair length affected tracking ability, and was curious to learn more. Perhaps the testing methodology was weak (which happens all the time) or perhaps there was some unknown, uncontrolled factor (also common), or perhaps there’s something there: a very exciting thought. But none of this suggests a reason why a psychologist should let his hair grow, unless he’s planning to become a tracker. Reading a little further gives the answer:

Hair is an extension of the nervous system, it can be correctly seen as exteriorized nerves, a type of highly evolved ‘feelers’ or ‘antennae’ that transmit vast amounts of important information to the brain stem, the limbic system, and the neocortex.

Ummmm… no, hair is not correctly seen as “exteriorized” nerves or antennae. Hair is dead tissue that has no metabolism, yet hair can also sense air vibration, like it does in the ear. Could this article perhaps be woo?

Not only does hair in people, including facial hair in men, provide an information highway reaching the brain, hair also emits energy, the electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain into the outer environment. This has been seen in Kirlian photography when a person is photographed with long hair and then rephotographed after the hair is cut.

Unfortunately the answer seems to be yes, the article is simple woo. Kirlian photography merely shows a corona discharge when any conductive object is connected to an electrode. Whether your head hair has been cut would not affect the conductivity of your hand if you place it on a plate for a Kirlian photograph.

Are any other miraculous benefits claimed?

Cutting of hair is a contributing factor to unawareness of environmental distress in local ecosystems. It is also a contributing factor to insensitivity in relationships of all kinds. It contributes to sexual frustration.

Ah! I see they are. Big surprise.

But whether this article’s author is a woo-believer or not says nothing about the validity of the research with the native American trackers. That’s interesting regardless, and I still wanted to know more. So I scrolled to the bottom of the article hoping to find the references. Instead I found this:

Comment: SOTT can’t confirm this story or the research it suggests took place, however, we have wondered on many occasions, what is the use of hair and why so many legends refer to hair as being a source of strength, from Samson, to Nazarenes, to the Long Haired Franks.

Nice. Willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, I spent a few moments asking Professor Google if he knew anything about this research, but he didn’t. Though many native Americans served in Vietnam, I found no record of any special “tracker” units, or anything remotely suggestive of the research mentioned in this article. Every indication is that someone just made it up to support their woo belief in not cutting hair.

Note: Since 1972 the Immigrations and Customs services have maintained a tiny unit of 15 native American trackers called the Shadow Wolves who follow drug smugglers across the border in a law enforcement capacity, but this was not formed until after Vietnam, and I’ve seen no reference to hair length being a tool they employ. If anyone has more information about the alleged Vietnam test unit and their long hair, please let me know.

For six months in 1957, Operation Plumbbob put 29 thermonuclear devices to the test in the Nevada Test Range. They were the most varied in the program’s history; all sorts of devices, fired in the air, on the surface, underground, at pigs, near soldiers, and at all kinds of structures. Two of them were particularly interesting. Pascal-A and Pascal-B, on July 26 and August 27, were detonated at the bottom of 500-foot vertical shafts. Both shafts were covered with great heavy steel lids, some four inches thick and weighing some 900 kg.

Pascal-A was supposed to have a yield of 1-2 pounds, but somebody got his slide rule wrong: the true yield turned out to be 55 tons, about 50,000 times greater than expected. For Pascal-B, they added a concrete collimator about halfway down the hole. Once again, the yield was far more than expected, moreover by about six times as much: 300 tons. The concrete collimator was (obviously) instantly vaporized by the explosion, and the massive gas expansion from the concrete turned the shaft into a compressed-gas cannon. That giant metal lid was launched straight up, at what was estimated to be six times escape velocity.

From the March 1992 issue of Air & Space magazine:

Every kid who has put a firecracker under a tin can understands the principle of using high explosives to loft an object into space. What was novel to scientists at Los Alamos was the idea of using an atomic bomb as propellant. That strategy was the serendipitous result of an experiment that had gone somewhat awry.

Project Thunderwell was the inspiration of astrophysicist Bob Brownlee, who in the summer of 1957 was faced with the problem of containing underground an explosion, expected to be equivalent to a few hundred tons of dynamite. Brownlee put the bomb at the bottom of a 500-foot vertical tunnel in the Nevada desert, sealing the opening with a four-inch thick steel plate weighing several hundred pounds. He knew the lid would be blown off; he didn’t know exactly how fast. High-speed cameras caught the giant manhole cover as it began its unscheduled flight into history. Based upon his calculations and the evidence from the cameras, Brownlee estimated that the steel plate was traveling at a velocity six times that needed to escape Earth’s gravity when it soared into the flawless blue Nevada sky. ‘We never found it. It was gone,’ Brownlee says, a touch of awe in his voice almost 35 years later.

The following October the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, billed as the first man-made object in Earth orbit. Brownlee has never publicly challenged the Soviet’s claim. But he has his doubts.

I first heard about this from reader Simon Spooner, who emailed me about it. He offered his own thoughts on the likelihood of this happening:

I agree that the although steel plate cap may have initially been accelerated past escape velocity (> 11.2 Km/s), given its unaerodynamic shape and the fact that it was travelling through the dense part of our atmosphere (rockets don’t approach escape velocity until very high altitude where the atmosphere is much thinner) it would have acted like a meteor in reverse (i.e. from the ground upwards rather than from the sky downwards) and it would have burned up like a meteor that never reaches the ground (meteors are often largely made of iron, just like the steel plate cap). If it didn’t completely burn up and gravity returned some of it to earth, it would have travelled quite some distance, necessitating a large search area, and the fast falling remains would have probably just buried on impact deep into the desert soil anyway. This might explain why nothing of it was found.

My guess is that the steel plate would fare even worse than Simon supposed: that a blast of such speed would cut a donut hole in the plate before it would lift it off the ground. But I really don’t know. I’d be shocked if it could survive the physical and aerodynamic stresses enough for any significant sized piece of it to make it into orbit.

Here are a few links if you’d like to read more about this. Note that there seems to be some confusion between Pascal-A and Pascal-B; some sources seem to have details between the two transposed, and it’s not always clear which articles are sourced from interviews with guys remembering stuff, and which are based on documentation. Consequently some of my details above may well be inconsistent with what you find on your own.

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Plumbob.html#PascalB

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEvxSqrtQt4

http://www.dtra.mil/documents/ntpr/factsheets/Plumbbob.pdf

It is from an extinct Giant Mako shark (Isurus hastalis) that died in the early Miocene epoch, at least 5,000,000 years ago. The shark’s remains settled into the silt that later became part of the Monterey formation in what is now Newport Beach, CA.

A long time later in 2006, my friend and chainmaille artist Chris Perley was poking around there for fossils. He’s found some 100 shark teeth of various species in this same spot, a well-known rocky promontory in town that probably wouldn’t benefit from this particular kind of publicity. But that’s not the surprising part.

What Chris had found was most of the specimen shown in this picture. Notice that the bottom left corner has been broken off (Chris glued it back together himself). Five years later in 2011, he was searching the same area, and found a piece of bone that looked a lot like the 2006 tooth. He brought it home, and, in an amazing confluence of cosmic energies, it was the missing piece now seen reassembled in the photo.

Chris brought the restored tooth to our Science & Suds gathering at an Irish pub in Newport this evening. It’s a jolly crew, and you’re invited to join us if you’re ever in the area.

References Chris used for his ID’ing and dating his tooth:
http://www.elasmo.com/genera/slides/gw_evo/escheri/escheri.html
http://www.archive.org/stream/fossilfishesofso00jorduoft/fossilfishesofso00jorduoft_djvu.txt
http://www.sharkteethrus.com/stuff/teeth/isurus/enlarged/BH-080.htm

Today Reuters reported that Canada has stated that the Kyoto Protocol is a “thing of the past” but has not yet confirmed whether it will formally pull out of the pact. Russia and Japan also said that they will not renew their commitment to the protocol unless it binds on the world’s greatest polluters.

The United States, which was the world’s largest emitter at the time of the Kyoto Protocol, refused to sign the treaty as it clearly had more to do with politics than with science. Since then, China and India have both probably surpassed US emissions, and have been producing sharply increasing emissions every year while wealthier nations have been striving to reduce CO₂.

As China and India are both in periods of extreme economic growth as they struggle to catch up to the rest of the world’s standards of living, it’s unlikely that either will bother to meet any CO₂ restrictions. There is just not enough immediate incentive to do so, and no immediate drawback in continuing to pollute their way to economic growth.

Most nations that did ratify the Kyoto Protocol have failed to meet its targets, and failed by huge margins. There is a really simple reason for this: as China and India discovered, there’s just no compelling reason to bother.

My opinion is that the only way any nation will truly change their CO₂ emitting ways (and I’m talking to you, United States, China, India, Brazil, Russia, etc.) is if we make it cheaper and more profitable to use clean energy. Not artificially so, through the use of penalties and incentives, but genuinely so. This means investment in clean energy sources, namely Generation IV nuclear technologies.

Discuss and flame.

Pitcairn Island (Photo: NOAA)

The year was 1808, and men of the American trading ship Topaz landed on Pitcairn Island, thus becoming the first to contact the colony founded by the infamous mutineers of the Bounty.

They found a tiny but prosperous village consisting of one remaining mutineer, a number of Tahitian women, and dozens of children. Life was well ordered; homes were clean and well built, the sabbath was observed, the log was meticulously maintained, and the calendar was wrong.

By one day.

It took a bit of figuring, but this minor mystery was eventually solved. When the Bounty mutineers had sailed east from Tahiti in search of Pitcairn Island, they had crossed the international date line. Perhaps it was because the ship’s complement of educated men had been sharply reduced, perhaps it was the stress of having other things to worry about; but for one reason or another, Fletcher Christian had never caught the error. The calendar was maintained for a quarter of a century on Pitcairn Island before the Topaz arrived and found the surviving Englishman, John Adams, still keeping a strict clock.

Savvy readers might catch a possible error in this reasoning: Tahiti lies east of the international date line. Pitcairn Island is on the same day as Tahiti; no crossing of the date line should have taken place. But this, too, has an explanation. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, most of the islands of the South Pacific were west of the date line. Only then did American influence gain enough traction to convince much of the region to sync up with the United States (Tahiti included), giving the date line the twisted, zig-zagging pattern it has now.

But this is not all just ancient history. This year, Samoa will skip over December 30 and move back to the west side of the date line, bringing it into sync with its major trading partners Australia, New Zealand, and Asia.

The Pitcairn Islanders finally did correct their calendar after the error was confirmed by later ships from England. Of course, it was probably easier then than it would have been to follow Samoa’s example today.

Steve Jobs' super-secret Illuminati barcode license plate

So as long as we’re on the subject of Steve Jobs, how about a little conspiracy theory about him?

It was well known by obsessive Apple fans that Steve had a barcode instead of a license plate on his car. Some believed this was because he had some special deal with the state of California, and many said that there was some kind of secret club of superstar celebrities and business leaders that allowed them to have a futuristic barcode instead of a plate. I remember reading old articles where it was speculated that this gave him special privileges; perhaps immunity from traffic citations, or special services from the motor vehicle department.

Do you know the truth? If you don’t, think a moment before reading on.

If Steve was a member of the Illuminati, this was not one of his perks. California gives you six months to put plates on a new car. Steve leased a new Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG every six months, and consequently was never required to have plates. He preferred his car not to be readily identifiable to paparazzi, and so he never put the plates on. We Californians are a laid-back bunch, so you’ll see many of us driving around with no plates. Also we like to impress each other with how new our car is.

And that barcode? Nope, not an Illuminati ID. That’s just the car’s VIN number; Mercedes-Benz sticks a similar barcode there on all their cars.