Month: April 2018

Enlarge (credit: Bhattacharya et al. 2018)

In 2003, Oscar Munoz found a mummy in the Atacama Desert ghost town of La Noria. The six-inch-long mummy, now called Ata, has an elongated skull, oddly shaped eye sockets, and only ten pairs of ribs... which helped fuel wild speculation that she was an alien hybrid. Ata was sold several times—probably illegally—and ended up in the private collection of Barcelona entrepreneur and UFO enthusiast Ramón Navia-Osorio. A 2013 documentary called Sirius soon helped immortalize Ata, focusing heavily on the alien hybrid claims.

When a team led by University of California, San Francisco bioinformatics researcher Sanchita Bhattacharya recently sequenced the tiny mummy’s genome, however, it revealed only a girl of Chilean descent. There were a complicated set of genetic mutations, including some usually associated with bone and growth disorders and a few more that have never been described before. Those mutations, the researchers claim, may help explain her unusual appearance.

It’s easy to see why the team's March paper attracted so much interest: a high-profile urban legend was fully debunked at last, but now there were hints at compelling medical discoveries. Most press outlets presented the results as conclusive, cut-and-dried science—except for a few UFO fan sites that loudly insisted the study was part of a cover-up. But even beyond the extraterrestrial exchanges, things have gotten very complicated, both in terms of the scientific claims and in terms of whether the research should have been done at all.

Enlarge / Southwest's Boeing 737-700, tail number N772SW, was the aircraft for Southwest flight 1380. A failure in its left turbofan engine caused the death of one passenger and multiple other injuries. (credit: Aeroprints)

At 10:43am on April 17, Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 took off from New York's LaGuardia Airport bound for Love Field in Dallas with five crew and 143 passengers aboard. But just over 20 minutes into the flight, at an altitude of about 30,000 feet somewhere above Hershey, Pennsylvania, the left engine of the Boeing 737-700 exploded, blowing off its cowling. Debris shattered a passenger window, fatally injuring a woman seated next to it. With the cabin rapidly decompressing and an engine gone, the crew immediately began a descent, diverting toward Philadelphia for an emergency landing.

American commercial airline travel has been remarkably safe over the last decade: it has been more than 9 years since the last fatality on a US airline. Worldwide, 2017 was the safest year for air travel on record. Incidents like this one—a death caused by engine debris—are exceedingly rare; the last time engine debris killed an American commercial airline passenger was in 1996.

But it's not like this was a random act of God. What happened aboard Flight 1380 appears to have been "uncontained engine failure" in the front portion of the left engine—a failure of one of the engine's fan blades causing a spray of debris that rips through the walls of the engine (hence the "uncontained" part). This isn't the first time that a Southwest jet has experienced such a failure: another Southwest 737-700 using the same type of engine (a CFM56-7B) occurred in August of 2016, with no fatalities. And a United Airlines 777 flying from San Francisco to Hawaii suffered an engine failure caused by a broken fan blade last month, though the failure was contained and the aircraft landed safely.

Enlarge / Insanity dog's got nothin' on homeopaths. (credit: Getty | Agency-Animal-Picture)

“Hair of the dog” remedies may do the trick for some hangover sufferers. But health experts say that a Canadian homeopath took the idea too far—way, way too far.

Homeopath and naturopath Anke Zimmermann used diluted saliva from a rabid dog to “treat” a four-year-old boy, according to a blog post she published earlier this year. Zimmermann claims that the potentially infectious and deadly concoction successfully resolved the boy’s aggressive behavior, which she described as a “slightly rabid-dog state.”

The tail fits with the scientifically implausible principles of homeopathy. These ruffly state that substances that produce similar symptoms of a particular ailment can cure said ailment (“like cures like”) and that diluting a substance increases its potency (“law of infinitesimals”).

Enlarge (credit: Fred Armitage at Flicker via Creative Commons)

Amazon will adapt William Gibson's novel The Peripheral, Variety reports. The show will be produced by a duo also responsible for Westworld on HBO.

Specifically, that means Jonathan Nolan (also a writer on the films Interstellar and The Dark Knight) and Lisa Joy (also a writer for TV's Burn Notice and Pushing Daisies). Scott B. Smith will be a writer and executive producer for the series; he is best known for his Oscar-nominated screenplay for the Sam Raimi-directed film A Simple Plan, released in 1998. The series will also be directed and executive produced by Vincenzo Natali, an established sci-fi director whose past credits include the films Cube and Splice, as well as episodes of Westworld and Netflix's recent Lost in Space reboot.

Published in 2014, The Peripheral takes place in two future timelines, both of them bleak. Among other things, it follows a woman who becomes a security guard in a virtual world but who begins to suspect that the virtual world is not so virtual after witnessing a murder-by-nanobots. Gibson is an acclaimed sci-fi author who also gave us the classics Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition and who coined the term "cyberspace."