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The author of Ringworld, the latest read for the New Scientist Book Club, is quizzed on everything from if he’d like to meet an alien to the art of writing

Scientists have discovered that black holes don't just devour everything—they also fire back. While nothing can escape the event horizon, black holes generate ferocious winds that blast outward at significant fractions of the speed of light. New research challenges the long-held belief that they flow smoothly and continuously. Instead, these winds are violent, fragmented bursts resembling rapid-fire streams of gas bullets. Astronomers have now witnessed this phenomenon firsthand, detecting five distinct gas components travelling 20-30% the speed of light and erupting like geysers from the black hole's vicinity.

"Almost all crank movements will eventually devolve to sectarian strife... It’s the only upside of watching these idiots is knowing this fate." Dr. Mark Hoofnagle

The post Doctors Who Rose to Power Bashing the Medical Establishment Are Now the Medical Establishment. Good Luck With That. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Astronomers have discovered a protoplanetary disks where planets are born thrive in the most violent region of our Galaxy. For years the galactic center was thought to be too chaotic and hostile for planet formation. This is wrong. New ALMA observations have seen planet nurseries flourishing in the turbulent Central Molecular Zone near our Galaxy's heart, challenging everything we thought we knew about how worlds are born. Planets find a way.

A new gene editor may soon open the door to gene therapies for a wider array of diseases.

A new study explores how EOS transmits ultrashort laser pulses through crystals that change in response to an applied electric field. This technique allows researchers to accurately capture the shape and timing of electric fields across a broad range of frequencies.

A new study explores how EOS transmits ultrashort laser pulses through crystals that change in response to an applied electric field. This technique allows researchers to accurately capture the shape and timing of electric fields across a broad range of frequencies.

Whether bismuth is part of a class of materials highly suitable for quantum computing and spintronics was a long-standing issue. Research has now revealed that the true nature of bismuth was masked by its surface, and in doing so uncovered a new phenomenon relevant to all such materials.

Whether bismuth is part of a class of materials highly suitable for quantum computing and spintronics was a long-standing issue. Research has now revealed that the true nature of bismuth was masked by its surface, and in doing so uncovered a new phenomenon relevant to all such materials.

Skeptics are well aware that there are issues with eyewitness testimony as evidence. These issues are popular topics of discussion at skeptical conferences and are the impetus for numerous skeptical articles. Human perception and memory are notoriously inaccurate, indeed malleable. Preconceptions and cognitive biases shape both our immediate perceptions of events and how we later recall, interpret, and relate them.

The testimony issue goes beyond simple eyewitness accounts, i.e., the descriptions people give of things they visually saw. Testimony can include any description or characterization of something that a person draws from the memory of their perceptions. Something they heard, felt, smelled, read, viewed indirectly, or sensed in any way.

While skeptics find it logically correct to point out these problems, it’s not going to do anyone any good if all that happens is you make people angry.

In discussing contentious topics, the interpretation of testimony can become highly emotional and swiftly evolve into an overly polarized argument that misses the nuance of the situation. I routinely encounter this type of reaction to my examination of testimony, in particular with UFO witnesses. At first I found this rather surprising. After all, I was just trying to be logical, follow the facts, and cover all the bases—one of which being the possibility of false witness testimony. But I was often met with an unexpectedly angry response.

This is something we need to avoid. Anger, of course, is rarely helpful in scientific communication. While skeptics find it logically correct to point out these problems, it’s not going to do anyone any good if all that happens is you make people angry. In fact, if you are perceived (as I often have been) of attacking, disrespecting, or denigrating a witness, then this can affect your credibility and destroy communication opportunities in other areas too.

Over the last couple of decades of encountering this problem, I’ve come across a few important concepts that have been helpful to keep in mind. Essentially, they are blind spots on the part of the supporters of the testimony, but if we don’t take them into account, they become our blind spots too.

Truth & Lies

When I explain that I don’t believe an individual’s testimony is true then their supporters will assume I’m accusing the witness of lying. This then drags the conversation either down the irrelevant path of “why would they lie” or the more perilous road of “how dare you suggest this wonderful person is lying!”

This is a false dichotomy. It’s not a simple matter of “truth” vs. “lies”. There are other options. Yet, even great minds fall into the trap. Here is Thomas Paine on miracles in his 1794 classic The Age of Reason:

If we are to suppose a miracle to be something so entirely out of the course of what is called Nature that she must go out of that course to accomplish it, and we see an account given of such miracle by the person who said he saw it, it raises a question in the mind very easily decided, which is: Is it more probable that Nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, Nature go out of her course, but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.

That paragraph gives me deeply mixed feelings each time I read it. Paine was examining the possibility of miracles from a rationalist perspective. He asked the reader to consider that people verifiably lie all the time, but miracles are both rare and lacking in scientific evidence. So which is more likely? In this dichotomy, the witness lying seems by far the most probable.

So this classic skeptical quote is fatally flawed, enough to make it useless because the opposite of truth is not lies. The opposite of truth is falseness. Truth means a statement is correct, in agreement with fact or reality. The opposite concept, falseness, means a statement is incorrect, and is contradicted by fact or reality, whether or not a person is lying. Paine’s contemporary, David Hume, in his analysis of miracles in his 1758 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, acknowledged that in addition to deceiving (lying) people can also be deceived:

The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), “That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.” When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

There are many more ways for people to be deceived than to deceive, yet it’s oh-so-easy to fall for the false dichotomy of true vs lie. As evidenced by the rather clumsy and unfamiliar set of antonyms we have for “truth” (“falseness,” “falsity,” “untruth”), the idea that if someone speaks falsely then they are lying is familiar, quite understandable and inevitable, and so we must take great pains to explicitly avoid that misperception and give other options their appropriate weight.

There are many more ways for people to be deceived than to deceive, yet it’s oh-so-easy to fall for the false dichotomy of true vs lie.

If someone is not telling the truth, then they might be lying, but they might also simply be wrong—perhaps they are misinterpreting something, or they made a mistake, or they succumbed to some perfectly ordinary illusion. Either way, the fact that they are saying something that is false does not mean they are lying. Giving people the benefit of the doubt, skeptics should focus on the possibilities other than lying. Before accusing people of lying, one might perhaps ask, “Perhaps they made a mistake?” “What if they misremembered?” “Could it have been an optical illusion?”

Of course, people lie, and we shouldn’t rule that out entirely, but my experience with believers in UFOs, conspiracy theories, and strange phenomena, the majority of witnesses are quite honest in their descriptions, and unless you are dealing with an obvious charlatan it’s best to avoid even mentioning the lie hypothesis because it will immediately become the focus of outrage and resistance. Focus instead on the possibilities of mistakes, misperceptions, faulty memory, illusions, and hallucinations, and assume lies will be revealed in the process of deeper investigation.

Illustration by James Bennett for SKEPTICTrusting the Victim

When a witness to an event or situation is also a victim (i.e., they have been hurt, assaulted, become ill, or suffered other harm) then things become even more fraught with highly charged emotional obstacles to investigation and communication. The witness testimony of victims is simultaneously revered as sacrosanct, yet it is also known to be unreliable.

Nevertheless, as a general principle the accounts of victims should not be automatically disbelieved. I think everyone deserves a fair hearing with the assumption that they are acting in good faith. Examining the accounts of people who were hurt, especially emotionally, is a tricky path to tread, and very easily leads to the perception of the skeptic being on the attack. In response, a blocking defense attenuates further discussion.

In recent years I’ve focused on the UFO community, and while skeptics don’t usually think of UFOlogists as being victims, many people who feel they had some kind of extraterrestrial encounter often feel they suffer from an associated emotional trauma. Sometimes this is from what they feel happened to them (which can be quite extreme, with perceived physical effects, even abductions and physical examinations) but can also be the result of years of being disbelieved.

The witness testimony of victims is simultaneously revered as sacrosanct, yet it is also known to be unreliable.

It is even more of an issue when the harm a victim is experiencing is the main evidence, or the actual contended phenomenon. Here any examination of the validity of their testimony can readily be perceived or reframed as a personal attack on the individual, and that’s the end of the discussion.

This deference to victims crops up in many areas of interest to skeptics. In the curious case of Havana syndrome, discussed in depth in Vol. 26 No. 4 of Skeptic, several people have become very ill, and were then convinced that their symptoms were related to a loud noise they heard, or sensation they felt, which they now attribute to some kind of directed energy weapon attack. Since they are obviously suffering, it makes it difficult to critique their testimony without seeming callous.

My own experience with this issue dates back to 2006, when a condition known as “Morgellons disease” was getting some media attention. According to sufferers of the malady, their symptoms of itching and general malaise consistent with aging coincided with what they described as “fibers” that wormed their way out of their skin.

Morgellons disease is a form of delusional parasitosis in which individuals report fibers or filaments emerging from the skin, often accompanied by itching, pain, and persistent sores. While sufferers attribute symptoms to an infectious or environmental cause, most scientific studies have found no underlying pathogen—linking the condition instead to psychiatric disorders.

From their descriptions, their testimony, and the occasional images and video provided, it seemed quite apparent that they were simply finding normal hairs and clothing fibers. I blogged about this, describing how I could find similar fibers on my own skin (they are literally everywhere), and how the accounts of fibers emerging from skin were probably a mistake from not understanding the prevalence of microscopic fibers (a base rate error in Bayesian reasoning).

In response to my explanation, I was attacked, portrayed as someone who was accusing the victims of malingering or making up their symptoms, which I certainly was not. But because my initial skeptical approach was to point out what they had got wrong it came across as contradicting their entire testimony. While the fibers were almost certainly unrelated to their experiences, they were actually suffering from a variety of physical symptoms and conditions.

The Morgellons experience taught me that we need to first treat the victim testifier with respect. Their suffering is real, regardless of the cause. Acknowledge that and avoid describing their testimony in absolutes. Instead, as with the “truth vs. lies” issue, raise other possibilities as considerations for them, not assertions from you. Instead of leading an assessment of a traumatic alien abduction story with “that’s nonsense, obviously they dreamt the whole thing!” instead ask “is it possible that sleep paralysis might have played a part here?”

Highly Trained Observers

On a near daily basis I am accused of dismissing the eyewitness testimony of highly trained observers. For example, Commander David Fravor, a decorated U.S. Navy pilot, has testified that he saw a 40-foot Tic-Tac-shaped UFO engage his plane in a short dogfight, and then shoot off at incredible speed with no visible means of propulsion.

I don’t know what he saw, but from his description of how the object seemed to perfectly mirror him, I suspected he had mistaken the size of the object and hence fallen for a parallax illusion that made it seem to move much faster than it actually was (if it was moving at all.) So I proposed this idea and was met with a range of responses, mostly derisive and angry that I would have the temerity to insult the testimony of a highly trained observer like a U.S. Navy pilot.

The notion of a “trained observer” is something of a myth.

These moving responses included the perception that I was accusing Fravor of lying, or being incompetent, stupid, or insane. But I was doing none of those things; rather, I was simply pointing out that he might have made an understandable mistake.

U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor was flying an F/A-18 Hornet when he reported seeing a UFO, later nicknamed the “Tic Tac.” The object hovered over the ocean, appeared to respond to the jets, and perplexed those who watched it. Fravor described the encounter in a report for the Navy and has since been a proponent of the theory that he encountered alien life.

The notion of a “trained observer” is something of a myth. Of course military personnel are trained to observe things, but they are trained to observe specific known things, and not things that are highly unexpected (like a giant flying tic-tac) or out of the realm of human experience (like craft exhibiting non-Newtonian physics.)

Fast-moving UFOs are not something that pilots are trained to observe.

Military pilots’ training in observation of airborne objects comes largely in the form of recognizing other known planes. Since the 1940s pilots have been issued Visual Aircraft Recognition study cards, which show a variety of known friendly and enemy aircraft, usually in silhouette from various angles. More sophisticated recognition training takes place in simulators. But fast-moving UFOs are not something that pilots are trained to observe.

In fact, this intensive training might make matters worse. Being highly trained to identify a particular set of things can mean you will shoehorn outliers into that set. When Fravor saw the Tic-Tac he had no way of judging how large it was, but he settled on 40-feet, because he felt it was about the same size as an F/A-18, the most common plane he saw in the air. Would he have picked the same size if he had been a commercial pilot of larger jets?

No matter how valid my hypothesis, and the potential for error on Fravor’s part, the “how dare you!” reaction prevents wider consideration of the hypothesis. Even though it seems annoying, I find it works better if I set the scene by explicitly explaining how I don’t think he’s lying, or incompetent, stupid, or crazy. I have to establish that I do think he’s a highly skilled pilot, with years of experience, and trained in observing other aircraft. Then when this is established, I can tentatively explore how an understandable mistake might have been made by such a highly trained observer.

This awareness of the emotional reactions to criticism of witness testimony, and the techniques for avoiding those reactions, feels annoying and even unnecessary, as if pandering to bad thinking. But the goal here is effective communication, so getting people to consider an alternative hypothesis is best done by understanding them in the hope that they, in turn, will understand you.

Sometimes it's fun to look back at old missions that never were. There are more of those than the missions that receive funding and are launched, but many of those were influenced by the ones that were funded that came before. A great fountain of mission ideas is the Alpbach Summer School, held annually in Austria. Every year, at least two teams publish papers defining a complete mission concept as part of their capstone experience at the school. One published in 2014 describes a mission designed to look at Venus' tectonic activity, and even though the concept is over 11 years old, the scientific questions it sought to answer are still outstanding today.

Several recent experiments showcase a sharp increase in the number of quantum bits that can be entangled, echoing Moore’s law for increasing computing power on traditional chips

The Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) aboard NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft has successfully completed its initial commissioning following the October 14, 2024, launch. Scheduled to arrive in the Jovian system in 2030, the spacecraft will orbit Jupiter and ultimately perform repeated close flybys of the icy moon Europa. Previous observations show strong evidence for a subsurface ocean of liquid water that could host conditions favorable for life.

The Small Magellanic Cloud is one of our closest galactic neighbours. It's a dwarf irregular galaxy about 200,000 light-years away, containing several hundred million stars. New research based on massive stars in the SMC shows it's being stretched along two different axes.

An infant with a severe genetic condition has shown signs of improvement after receiving a gene-editing treatment tailored to his specific mutation

Computational Fluid Dynamics. Those words are enough to strike fear into the heart of many an undergraduate engineer. Modeling how liquids move through a system is mathematically challenging, but in many cases, absolutely vital to understanding how those systems work. Computational Fluid Dynamics (more commonly called CFD) is our best effort at understanding those complex systems. A new paper from researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) applies those mathematical models to an area critical for the upcoming era of space exploration - propellant production from in-situ resources.

In Project Chimera, a game lab combines a VR computer game with educational problems in order to convey scientific content in a motivating way.

In Project Chimera, a game lab combines a VR computer game with educational problems in order to convey scientific content in a motivating way.

Location data is considered particularly sensitive -- its misuse can have serious consequences. Researchers have now developed a method that allows individuals to cryptographically prove their location -- without revealing it. The foundation of this method is the so-called zero-knowledge proof with standardized floating-point numbers.

Researchers have discovered the mechanism for supercurrent rectification, in which current flows primarily in one direction in a superconductor. By using a specific iron-based superconductor, they were able to observe this phenomenon over a broad range of magnetic and temperature fields. This understanding paves the way for the design and construction of superconducting diodes and other ultra-low energy electronics.