One of my hobbies is inventing fringe science theories. Here’s one of them.

There is a shrew called Eurasian least shrew (Sorex minutissimus). It weighs around 2 g (0.07 ounces). In Yakutia it lives in places where winter temperatures drop below -60C, there’s only a couple inches of snow on the ground, and immediately underneath the snow is a layer of permafrost half a mile thick. The shrew has short fur and naked snout and paws, yet remains active all winter, maintaining body temperature of 39C, which can be 100+ degrees above the ambient. This would be absolutely impossible to achieve by chemical metabolism (Hanski, 1984) even if food was abundant, which it isn’t. Sorex shrews actually decrease their metabolism and spend little time foraging in winter (Aitchison, 1987), and their metabolic rates at lower temperatures are inconsistent with chemical heat production (Schaeffer et al., 2020).

Obviously, the shrews utilize some unknown energy source. I strongly suspect cold fusion along some unknown pathway. We know that (1) nuclear fusion usually ends with iron production because iron is the first element that can’t be fused further without consuming energy rather than producing it, and (2) Sorex shrews deposit excessive iron in their teeth, hence their common name “brown-toothed shrews”. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the shrews actually run fusion all the way to iron: they could be fusing deuterium atoms on some kind of iron substrate, or maybe inside carbon-iron nanospheres.

This would explain why Sorex shrews living in coldest areas evolve to be the tiniest: the smaller you are, the easier it is for high-energy particles and gamma rays – dangerous byproducts of nuclear fusion – to escape your body without causing tissue damage. It also explains why Sorex shrews famously shrink their brains and other radiation-sensitive organs in winter (Dehnel, 1949) and switch from lipid to glucose metabolism (Thomas et al., 2023) apparently to be able to stop cell division to prevent radiation sickness. But the protection is not complete: Sorex shrews seem to have high mutation rates and some speces have numerous chromosomal races due to high chromosome instability (Zima et al. 1996).

This theory would be easy to test by catching a Sorex shrew in Alaska or Siberia in winter and checking it for isotopic anomalies and radioactivity, but this has never been done as far as I know. And if my theory is proven wrong, perhaps some studio would be interested in making a horror movie based on it?

I wish I didn’t have to write to President Biden for the third time, but here we go…

Dear Mr. President:
I am a Democrat who voted for you in 2020 and will very likely vote for you this year considering that there is no viable alternative. That said, I am deeply concerned with some aspects of your presidency, and worried that you will be remembered in history for your one failure rather than your many successes.
Just like Mr. Obama before you, you would be a perfect peace-time president, but you are not one. We are in a war with Russia and its allies both abroad and inside the US. Pretending that it is not so and continuing to turn the other cheek is suicidal. You can already see the disastrous consequences of that strategy. Withholding modern long-range weapons from Ukraine has robbed it of a certain quick victory and plunged us into a stalemate that costs the US billions of dollars and Ukrainians a lot of blood. And these are just the immediate costs. Our cowardly betrayal of a critically important ally is destroying the last vestiges of our international prestige. Failure to designate Russia as a terrorist state is making a mockery of our entire foreign policy. We are showing the world that being our ally is a losing strategy. And the consequences of Russia’s continuing existence, which is largely your fault by now, are equally catastrophic for our internal politics, as Russia keeps providing extensive propaganda and, I am sure, financial support to its US arm, the Republican Party.
I don’t know why you are still listening to advisors like Jake Sullivan who are being proven wrong literally every day. It should be obvious by now that showing fear of escalation is the worst possible strategy in our war with Russia and its client regimes around the world, not to mention China. It is also obvious that our sanctions against Russia are insufficient and will remain so until we aim at the chocking points of their weapons industry by preventing companies like Texas Instruments, Siemens and particularly GFM Steyr from supplying the enemy with precision machinery and other critical hardware and software. Real experts in Russian politics and military production have been telling you this for years now, with no effect. I understand why someone like Olaf Scholz, who is obviously compromised by Russia, would spend two years sabotaging effective military aid to Ukraine, but your failure to make obvious, simple, and game-changing steps is unexplainable and inexcusable.
It is not too late yet. For a quarter of a century, Russia has been uniting and arming our enemies, sabotaging our work in all areas from climate meltdown prevention to promoting democracy, flooding our internet with malware and our media with lies. Ukraine can still win this war and deliver the Russian Empire the final blow. But to let Ukraine win, we must stop being afraid.

(Signed)

This is me after becoming an ensign of the Soviet Air Force at the age of 21, three weeks after arriving to a military airfield in Lithuania. I found a way to escape the mandatory service a couple days later. By that time, it was obvious to everyone that my continuous presence there wasn’t beneficial to the Soviet military (to put it mildly), so getting out was easy.

One thing that I always found remarkable in the Soviet military was the deep divide between soldiers and officers, rather striking for a relatively egalitarian society. Officers’ rations, and life in general, were relatively decent by away-from-Moscow Soviet standards. But drafted soldiers served their 2 years in conditions not that different from those in prison camps.

This extreme stratification wasn’t a Soviet invention. Russian army before the Bolshevik revolution was infamous for this, in part because its soldiers were forcibly recruited peasants while the officers were mostly aristocrats. When that army collapsed along the Eastern Front of WWI in 1917 and entire divisions deserted, nobody was surprised that hundreds of officers were shot by angry soldiers.

From what I’ve heard, things haven’t improved much in post-Soviet era, and might have gotten worse. But one thing has certainly changed since 1917. Even though Russian officers savagely beat the soldiers, sell their basic supplies, and charge them a lot of money for any chance to survive, killings of officers are now rare. I don’t know if it’s because during the last 100 years everyone capable of disobedience either has left the country or has been killed, or because there’s no hope anyway, or because centuries of heavy drinking have destroyed the cognitive abilities of the Russian population. But the fact is that modern Russians are much more obedient slaves than Tsars’ peasant serfs have ever been.

My late father worked all his life at a research institute where Novichok poison was developed (not by him). When the stories of FSB assassinations using the chemical broke out, he was incredulous. “The people who invented it are all dead,” he said, “and there’s no way FSB goons can synthesize it properly.”

He was later proven right. Many of the dozens of poisonings attempted by the FSB in recent years (some apparently for no reason other than filling a quota) were unsuccessful. So it looks like the FSB has gone back to its all-time favorite method: staged hit-and-runs by cars or trucks. They first tried it in 1948, killing a famous actor and the designated poster Jew of the Soviet Union Solomon Mikhoels. They also staged car accidents to frame people (most recently, another famous actor, Michail Efremov).

Four days ago they killed a poet, Lev Rubinshtein. At 77 he was still too smart to buy into Putin’s propaganda, but, like many older Russians, he’d been indoctrinated into believing that leaving his deranged motherland was somehow morally wrong. He had the option of moving to Israel but failed to use it and paid for it with his life.

Many other Russians who don’t like being Putin’s slaves are also patiently waiting for their turn to be slaughtered. But, unlike Rubinstein, they don’t have the excuse of old age. They are just dumb, and it’s difficult not to think that they deserve their inevitable fate.

My friend Casey Handmer has won (with other people) the Vesuvius Challenge prize for reading the charred scrolls from Villa Papyri, the only ancient library still existing. Here’s his post on what to expect next. (The rest of his blog is also interesting). https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/11/10/time-to-read-all-the-scrolls/?fbclid=IwAR2DLA_V3D1GMTugxTyrslK8hRXG-5sdoeB3SiaQt_k41lw9FI9IT5tlyP8

My LJ post from 2019; unfortunately it’s aging well.

I keep running into people who call themselves naturalists but are still profoundly ignorant about the ongoing climate meltdown. Let me summarize the current situation so that in the future I can simply send them to this post.

1. The fact that human activity is causing an unnaturally rapid climate change has been known for decades; even oil companies accepted it (as their internal documents show). It is one of the best-proven facts in recent history of science. All subsequent “controversy” has nothing to do with science (or freedom of speech) – it’s a propaganda war waged by oil, gas and coal companies, politicians they have bought, and a few idiots who serve them for free.

2. Constant attacks by paid trolls have made climate scientists overly cautious in their predictions. Also, many secondary causes of accelerated warming and feedback loops making it worse are outside the realm of climate science. What it means is that all predictions are too optimistic. Even the most extreme “climate alarmists” actually have no idea how bad it really is.

3. The climate meltdown is not just unnaturally rapid, it also happens at a time when all of our planet’s ecosystems are already falling apart. The pressure on them has been steadily growing since people killed virtually all large animals on one continent after another during the last seventy thousand years, but in the last 300 years it has been worsening exponentially. Many parts of the world are now basically wastelands, and the oceans are also dying fast. We just don’t realize how screwed up our planet is because no human living today has ever seen a fully functional, intact natural ecosystem.

4. My prediction is that by the end of this century the planet will be 7-10C warmer, 70-90% of all plant and animals species will be extinct, the climate will be too unstable for agriculture, all ice caps will be gone, the air will not be breathable for humans above 1000 m a.s.l., most if not all tropical and subtropical lowlands will be lifeless due to extreme heat waves, and human population will be below 10% of the present level and still falling.

5. It is too late to avert the disaster, but we can still try to avoid the worst. The most effective ways to do it are to (1) get rid of anti-environment politicians by whatever means necessary (all of them without exception are crooks anyway), (2) impose steep carbon taxes, (3) strip fossil fuel, timber, fishing and other extraction industries of all subsidies, (4) heavily subsidize renewable energy instead, and (5) subsidize and promote all methods of family planning, including abortion. It is all very simple and will make our lives better in so many ways.

Was the colonial era (meaning European colonialism from the 1450s to the 1950s) good or bad? Depends on who you ask. Lefties and many people living in unsuccessful post-colonial states will tell you that the world was a paradise enjoying an eternal peaceful bliss until evil white people showed up and ruined everything. Right-wingers would say that dirty savages were wallowing in bloody filth until white people brought railroads, toilets, private property, and bans on abortion.

I am a scientist, so I believe only proven facts. Of course, colonialism brought terrible things: genocide, Christianity, slavery… but when you look into it you realize that tribes killed each other very successfully even before the European contact, that some native religions were even worse than Christianity, that most of genocide was non-intentional (caused by infectious diseases, introduction of firearms, etc., which would happen sooner or later anyway), and that Muslim slave trade was much worse than Christian one (it lasted much longer, trafficked more people, and would likely depopulate sub-Saharan Africa if the British didn’t put an end to it). Of course, colonialism brought openness to global progress and modernization, but at a terrible cost; besides, some local rulers such as Muhammad Ali, Thai kings, or Emperor Meiji successfully modernized their realms without being colonized.

The best way to figure out if the net effect of colonialism was good or bad is to compare never-colonized countries with similar ones that have been colonized. It’s not easy because no two countries are identical, and also because very few non-European countries have never been colonies. But let’s try. For simplicity, I’ll look at per capita GDP although it’s far from being a perfect metric.

The Americas: all countries have been colonized.

Africa: the only country that has never been colonized is Ethiopia (Liberia is often mentioned but it was , in fact, brutally colonized by black Americans). Ethiopia is doing better than very similar (but not landlocked) Eritrea, but worse than (similarly diverse) Kenya.

SE Asia: never-colonized Thailand is doing better than most previously-colonized countries in the region, but not as well as Malaysia, not to mention Singapore.

E Asia: here Japan is the only country that has never been colonized (China was mostly colonized de-facto; Korea was colonized by Japan). Japan is doing much better than China and North Korea, but only marginally better than South Korea and Taiwan (probably worse than Taiwan if you consider the cost of living). Hong Kong and Macau are doing better than Japan despite never having been independent at all, but it’s obviously not a valid comparison.

S Asia: Nepal is worse off than former British colonies, while Bhutan is better off. Of course, India, Pakistan or Bangladesh are very different from small Himalayan countries. A better comparison is India-colonized Sikkim which is doing better than Bhutan (or India on average).

Central Asia: Never-colonized Afghanistan is a total mess, although it looks like things weren’t too bad prior to the Soviet invasion. Everybody else has been colonized by Russia or China; Xinjiang, Tuva, Tibet and all of Siberia still are.

SW Asia: All countries except Iran have been colonized by Turkey and/or European powers. Despite being oil-rich, Iran is doing worse than pretty much all others in the region except Yemen, Syria and Lebanon which are being wrecked by Iran’s proxies.

Oceania: Tuvalu is the only country that has never been fully colonized; it’s doing a bit better than Tonga and Samoa but worse than Fiji and Palau.

So we see that the history of being colonized had no consistent effect on subsequent development. But other interesting patterns are very obvious. (1) Countries that still have large ex-European population are doing much better than countries that don’t. (2) Countries that chose to remain colonized are doing better than similar ones that voted for independence, sometimes marginally (French Guiana vs. Guyana), but often a lot (Mayotte vs. the Comoros, French Polynesia vs. independent Polynesian states, American Samoa vs. Samoa, etc., etc.). There are some exceptions (Cayman Islands are doing better than British and US Virgin Islands), but very few. So much for the horrors of neocolonialism.

I am a zoologist and a writer. I study animal behavior and conservation, and write about nature, travel, and whatever else comes to mind. My permanent website is dinets.info

Here are my books – message me if you’d like a signed copy.