• Why werewolves give us the willies

    Werewolves took center stage in "The Wolfman," a movie released in 2010.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Linda Godfrey is so sure about the existence of weird walking wolves that she's written a book titled "Real Wolfmen: True Encounters in Modern America." In more than 300 pages, she lays out dozens of stories about sightings of nasty-looking beasts running around on their hairy hind legs. Scientists are unconvinced — but they do admit that humans are virtually hard-wired to watch out for wolves on the darkness.

    "The werewolf idea is strictly a product of our imagination, but it comes along with a culture of thousands of years of fear of wolves," said Michigan Tech's Rolf Peterson, who has studied wolves for decades at Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior. "It's just an outgrowth of that. But there's nothing out there that's anything like a werewolf. It's all in our heads."

    Try telling that to Godfrey and the people whose dog-man reports are featured in her book.

    "I've received hundreds of reports over the years ... and that's probably a small percentage of the actual sightings of these creatures," she told me. "So many people are in denial when they have these experiences, because it sort of rocks their world."

    Quest for the beast
    Godfrey had her own world rocked in 1991 when, as a rookie reporter in Elkhorn, Wis., she wrote about a sightings of a creature that came to be known as the "Beast of Bray Road." The beast was said to be a 6-foot-tall, fur-covered wolflike animal that chased after witnesses on its hind legs.

    Linda Godfrey

    Linda Godfrey, author of "Real Wolfmen," created this sketch of an upright canid based on reports from witnesses.

    "I can't find any scientific reason why feral canines should walk on their hind legs, in the absence of, say, a missing forelimb," Godfrey said. "I can't find any experts who can tell me why they should do this. But they do."

    Sure, there have been hoaxes: The most famous case is the Gable Film, a home-movie reel that appears to show a dark shape attacking the person holding the camera. The film was eventually traced to a couple of guys trying to hype a "Michigan Dog-Man" tale.

    Godfrey acknowledges that some of the wolfman reports actually turn out to be misidentifications of four-legged wolves, or bears rearing up on their hind legs. Other "wolfmen" have turned out merely to be weird men lurking around the countryside. And there's actually a rare malady known as hypertrichosis that can make people look like the wolfmen in the movies.

    But Godfrey insists that even after all those cases are eliminated, there are solid sightings that can't be explained away.

    She emphasized that she's not making claims about magical beings that change from humans to wolves and back again, like Jacob and his fellow shape-shifters in the wildly popular "Twilight" saga. "The thing about these creatures that people report to me is that they're not describing something that has human characteristics, only odd behavior that reminds them of humans," Godfrey said.

    So if there are all these reports of "upright canids," why haven't scientists identified this, um, unusual species? "It has the ability to get around whichever way is most convenient," Godfrey explained. "If you saw one of these things on four legs, you would just say there's an extremely large, creepy-looking canine that's walking by on all fours."

    In her book, Godfrey voices the hope that high-tech gear such as motion-sensitive trail cameras and night-vision imaging devices will eventually produce indisputable evidence to back up all the stories Godfrey has heard over the past 20 years. But so far, scientists aren't buying it. "I haven't had any that say, 'Yes, I know there are dog-men,'" Godfrey acknowledged.

    Rabies and other reasons
    Michigan Tech's Peterson is one of the scientists Godfrey has contacted in the course of her wolfman quest — and although he doesn't see any reason to believe the dog-man reports are real, he notes that there are plenty of reasons for werewolf tales to take root.

    "The basis for people's fear of wolves is not totally without evidence," he told me. "The wolf is the species that has posed the most difficulty for us, aside from our own species."

    For one thing, there's rabies, a disease that was common in Europe during the heyday of the werewolf saga, starting in the 16th century. It would have been unnerving to see someone who was bitten by a rabid dog or wolf sicken and go mad within a matter of days — and that would have added credence to the idea that such people were being transformed into a kind of wild animal.

    Another reason is that wolves truly are predators: In the old days, children who were pressed into service as shepherds made for tasty targets, Peterson noted. And we're not just talking about the old days. Peterson pointed to a grisly string of wolf attacks on children in India that took place in 1996-97, as well as more recent episodes.

    There's another side of the coin, of course: Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated wolves to create man's best friend. "We've been around wolves for tens of thousands of years, and we developed dogs out of it, so we have a long association with that particular species," Peterson said. With that kind of complex love-hate relationship, it's not surprising that the world's cultures have produced such a rich store of wolf-man archetypes — ranging from the skinwalkers of Native American lore to Jacob's hunky wolf pack. Our tendency to see wolves in the shadowy shapes of the night may well be a reflex that's been fine-tuned over countless millennia.

    But what about the wolves? Peterson's specialty is the study of relationships between wolves and their prey, and he's noticed that the wolves of Isle Royale periodically change their perspective on people as well.

    "Seven, eight years ago, after 45 years of being totally terrified of people, the wolves suddenly lost their fear of people," he told me. "Then, after about three years, they switched back to being afraid. I have absolutely no idea what caused either switch. They have their own cultural knowledge about us, and they transmit that from generation to generation, I suspect."

    Did I just feel a chill going down my spine?

    More Halloween stories to chew on:

    Stay tuned for a Halloween reality check on vampire legends.

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Sleuth finds the truth in ghost stories

    Twentieth Century Fox

    A scene from the 2008 movie "Shutter" shows a ghostly shape in a photo.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Paranormal investigator Joe Nickell has busted a lot of ghostly myths over the past 40 years — but the spookiest part of his job comes when he actually catches a ghost red-handed.

    No, we're not talking about spirits of the dead: These "ghosts" are hotel clerks who flick the lights to keep the guests talking about the place's ghost story. Or a mischievous child who plays tricks on his parents. Or maybe a camera crew catching weird-looking "orbs" floating through the frame — orbs they didn't notice until they looked at the pictures later.

    "Much of what so-called ghost hunters are detecting is themselves," Nickell, the author of "The Science of Ghosts," told me this week. "If they go through a haunted house and stir up a lot of dust, they shouldn't be surprised if they get a lot of orbs in their photographs."

    The orbs are actually out-of-focus reflections from a camera flash, created by dust particles floating in front of the lens. The clumping noises that ghost hunters hear often turn out to be the footsteps of crew members elsewhere in the building, or even someone on a stairway next door. And those weird readings they pick up with thermal imagers? They're typically left behind by the flesh-and-blood visitors.

    A tough job
    Tracking down the truth behind spooky sightings is a tough job, but somebody's got to do it, Nickell said.

    "It takes only a moment for someone to say that they saw something," he said, "but it can take a huge expenditure for someone to fly somewhere, and they might never re-create that one little moment."

    Joe Nickell

    Paranormal investigator Joe Nickell appears to be surrounded by an aura in a photograph that was created to duplicate a spooky effect.

    Nickell, a former professional magician and detective, has been that someone for Skeptical Inquirer magazine and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry since the 1970s. "I've been in more haunted houses than Casper," he joked. And the truth is that there are worse jobs in the world.

    "I wouldn't want anyone ever to know this, but it really is a great deal of fun to do what I do," Nickell said.

    In "The Science of Ghosts," Nickell spins a series of tales about his worldwide travels. His first haunted-house investigation, in 1972, took place at Toronto's Mackenzie House, where residents reported seeing apparitions hovering over their bed, and hearing footsteps when no one else was in the house. Nickell ascribed the apparitions to "waking dreams," a phenomenon that leads people to see things when they're half-asleep or in an idle reverie. And as for those footsteps: Nickell found out that there was an iron staircase in the building next door. The strange sounds were traced to a late-night cleanup crew tromping up and down those stairs.

    Nickell learned a lot from that first case. "You must go on site, and you must investigate just like any other piece of detective work," Nickell said. "You can treat the house as a sort of crime scene."

    Other cases involved spirit photographs, such as the ones that show orbs or bright streaks. One family called Nickell in to explain a series of pictures that showed bright, hazy loops of energy in the foreground. Nickell eventually figured out that the loops were created when a flash bounced off a camera strap dangling in front of the lens. "Now we know about the camera-strap effect," Nickell said.

    Taking on TV psychics
    Nickell also takes on psychic mediums who claim to speak with the dead. In the book, he traces his encounters with TV-show medium John Edward, who uses so-called "cold reading" techniques to draw information out of a crowd. (For example, "I feel like someone with a J- or G-sounding name has recently passed. ...")

    "The people who profess to be able to talk to the dead tend to be either fantasy-prone personalities, or charlatans, or possibly a bit of both," Nickell declared. "They would be harmless if they didn't mislead so many people."

    Nickell totally understands why a belief in ghosts and the afterlife is so important to people. "If ghosts exist, then we don't really die, and that's huge. ... It appeals to our hearts," he said. "We don't want our loved ones to die. We have this whole culture that we're brought up with, that encourages this belief in ghosts."

    Once a ghost story gets attached to a place or a situation, then almost anything that happens can be interpreted as supporting that story, he said. That's one reason why ghostbusting can be a thankless job. Another reason is that it's so hard to wrap your arms around the evidence — or, more appropriately, the lack thereof.

    "No one is bringing you a ghost trapped in a bottle," Nickell said. "What they're offering is, 'I don't know.' Over and over, they're saying something like this: 'We don't know what the noise in the old house was, or the white shape in the photo. So it must be a ghost.' These are examples of what's called an argument from ignorance. You can't make an argument from a lack of knowledge. You can't say, 'I don't know, therefore I do know.'... If I could just teach people a little bit about the argument from ignorance, I think we could give the ghosts their long-needed rest."

    Do you agree? Or do you have some truly spooky ghost stories to share for the Halloween season? Whether you're a believer or a skeptic, feel free to share your tale as a comment below.

    Extra credit: Even as Nickell and I were having our conversation this week, word was getting out about the death of skeptical thinker Paul Kurtz at the age of 86. Kurtz was the founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism, the Center for Inquiry, Prometheus Books and Skeptical Inquirer. He was also Nickell's mentor.

    "Paul really gave me an office to work out of, and he just let me work," Nickell said. "I think of him as the father of the worldwide skeptic movement."

    Nickell noted that some skeptics think there's no need to respond to claims they consider silly. But Kurtz took a different view. "He realized early on that there really needed to be a voice to respond," Nickell said. And that's what made Nickell what he is today: the world's longest-running full-time professional paranormal investigator.

    More Halloween tales:

    Stay tuned for more Halloween angles in the days ahead, including reality checks on werewolves (Team Jacob!) and vampires (Team Edward!).

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Why the 'paranormal' is just normal

    Paramount Pictures

    The recently released movie "Paranormal Activity 3" focuses on the boundary between dreaming and waking - which psychologist Richard Wiseman says is prime territory for perfectly normal "paranormal" experiences.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    Halloween is the peak time to dwell on ghosts, spooky noises, weird premonitions and other "paranormal activities" — but despite that label, such phenomena are totally normal. You can even create them yourself.

    That's the message of Richard Wiseman's latest book, "Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There." Wiseman, who began his career as a magician and is now an experimental psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, reveals the tricks of the paranormal trade — including the methods used by on-air psychics to make themselves seem, well, psychic. (To try them out, download Wiseman's "Instant Superhero Kit.") 

    Wiseman wishes normal people had a better understanding of the psychology behind seemingly paranormal activities.

    "There's an enormous problem," he told me today, "actually more in America than in Britain, because the level of belief in the States is huge. We're talking about more than three-quarters of the population believing in some sort of paranormal phenomena — even with the rise in technology and science over the past 20 years or so. It's really quite staggering."

    There are so many stories about chilling premonitions of doom, or alien visitations, or high-tech studies of haunted houses. Surely there must be some reality behind all those scary tales. It turns out that there is, but Wiseman says you don't have to turn to supernatural explanations. Here are five examples:

    1. Selective memory: Can dreams predict future events? Actually, psychologists have found that people tend to have far more dreams than they consciously remember. A significant event — say, a death or dramatic change of fortune — can trigger the memory of a past dream that may seem to relate to that event. Also, you're more likely to hear about the one seemingly prophetic dream than about the many other dreams that went nowhere. In this essay for The Guardian, Wiseman delves more deeply into the selective nature of dream recall.

    The  fact that we often hear only what we want to hear, or remember only what fits our expectations, also plays into psychic readings. Wiseman refers to this as "fishing and forking": The psychic throws out some generalities as a fishing expedition, watches to see which of those observations you pick up on, and then follows that fork in the road to build up the reading. The Skeptic's Dictionary outlines the process here.

    2. Ideomotor action: Sometimes zombies really are in control of our brains — but those zombies are our own mental processes that buzz along beneath our consciousness. For example, experiments have shown that unconscious muscle movements can guide your hands to rock a table during a seance, or move a Ouija board pointer to spell out a message, or twist a dousing twig to point to an underground water source (or not). But it works only if your zombie brain can process the results of the motor movements. If you're blindfolded, the effect is spoiled. The Straight Dope provides further discussion of the Ouija connection.

    3. Sleep paralysis: For thousands of years, tales have been told about strange beings who visit in the middle of the night and have their way with sleepers. In the old days, these were demons known as succubi and incubi. Nowadays, they're aliens or ghosts (like the ghosts in the "Paranormal Activity" movies). Such experiences are associated with a psychological phenomenon known as sleep paralysis, in which the brain hovers at the edge of consciousness but keeps the mind-body connection turned off (except for the connection to the genitalia, which may explain why those succubi were so sex-crazed). "The body paralyzes itself," Wiseman said.

    Researchers recently reported that they were able to train volunteers to experience out-of-body experiences as well as alien encounters during their semi-waking states.

    Richard Wiseman discusses "Paranormality" on "BBC Breakfast."

    4. Cold spots and infrasound: Ghostbusters often report feeling "cold spots," or suddenly becoming anxious, or getting weird readings on high-tech sensors when a specter makes its presence known. Wiseman said such sudden changes are due to natural rather than supernatural causes. Ten years ago, he and his colleagues used an array of thermal cameras and air movement detectors to figure out what was behind a "haunting" at Hampton Court Palace, near London. It turned out that chilly drafts blowing through cracks in the palace's concealed doorways created the unsettling sounds and the plummeting temperatures.

    Low-frequency sounds, created by changes in the weather or even appliances such as air conditioners, can also create a sense of uneasiness in listeners, even if they can't consciously sense the sound.  Wiseman conducted an experiment on the effects of "infrasound" during a concert and found that 22 percent of the listeners felt chills or other unusual sensations when they listened to music that was laced with the low-frequency tones. 

    5. Hyper-vigilance: All these effects are accentuated when visitors think they're in a haunted house. "Basically, when we become afraid, we become very vigilant. ... It feeds on itself," Wiseman said. He and many other scientists believe that such hyper-vigilance came in handy when our ancestors were in the midst of a mammoth hunt or a host of unseen threats. The same hard-wired instinct may explains why we seek out an eek by visiting a haunted house or watching a scary movie. "It's the way we've evolved," Wiseman said.

    Although Wiseman doesn't see anything supernatural in paranormal activities, he does see a lot of value in studying them. "Trying to understand why people have these experiences is very instructive," he said. In fact, research has shown that some concepts, such as mind-reading and out-of-body experiences, are rooted in solid neuroscience. Just as science fiction can give rise to real-life innovations, so can tales of the paranormal.

    "Whenever science has done well, so has the paranormal. ... You get this interesting relationship," Wiseman said.

    More Halloween tales from the Cosmic Log files:

    Check out Wiseman's "Paranormality" website for more about the book, plus lots of spooky photos and videos.

    Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

  • Pacman Nebula bares its teeth

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA

    NGC 281 has been nicknamed the Pacman Nebula because it looks like the "Pac-Man" video-game character in visible light. This infrared view, captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Explorer, casts the nebula in a different light. You can see a series of cloud columns pointing toward the central star cluster, making the nebula look as if it's a Pac-Man with sharp teeth.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    Just in time for Halloween, a new image from NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer puts some fangs on the Pacman Nebula.

    The nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia, formally known as NGC 281, was given its more whimsical nickname years ago because, in visible light, it looks like the dot-chomping character from the "Pac-Man" video game (as you can see below in the picture from the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona).

    NSF / AURA / WIYN / Univ. of Alaska / T.A. Rector

    This visible-light image of NGC 281 emphasizes the nebula's "Pac-Man" shape: a bright circle with a wedge missing to represent the character's mouth.

    NGC 281 is a cloud of gas and dust about 9,200 light-years from Earth, with a cluster of hot stars in the center. The dust obscures much of the light coming from the central cluster, designated IC 1590, particularly in the dark, dusty wedge that represents the Pacman's "mouth."

    The newly released infrared view from WISE cuts through the murk and reveals the hot stars at the center of the reddish-greenish nebula. The stars' ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds are blasting away at the surrounding dust from the inside out, giving the nebula a shell-like appearnce. Around the inner lining of the shell, you can see lots of eroded pillars of dust that point toward the center. Contained within the tips of those pillars are infant stars, squeezed into existence by the pressure of the radiation and the winds.

    You can think of those jagged pillars as the teeth of the Pacman. And if they also happen to look like a jack o' lantern's teeth, so much the better. After all, this is the weekend for things that go bump (or, in this case, bang) in the night.

    More cosmic treats for Halloween weekend:

    Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

  • How your brain handles terror scares

    Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters

    A New York police officer stands at the scene of a suspected bomb contained in a UPS package at a bank in Brooklyn today.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    Today's reports of suspicious packages sent from Yemen can add a real-life fear factor to the fictional scares that folks typically experience during Halloween weekend. Whether the scares are make-believe or real, neuroscience provides some strategies for channeling our fear response in the right way.

    Millions of years of evolution have optimized our brains' hard wiring to cope with immediate threats -- such as the predators that crossed paths with our ancestors in Africa, said Andreas Keil, a psychologist at the NIMH Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention at the University of Florida.

    "Today, we rarely experience the lions that want to eat us, or snakes that want to kill us ... but we respond a lot to cues where somebody tells us through a newspaper article or a Twitter tweet that a threat is around," Keil told me. "The brain's response to those cues is a lot like the response to the real thing."

    Acute vs. chronic stress
    Successfully coping with a stressful episode actually produces rewards in the brain, said Ki Ann Goosens, a neuroscientist at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research who specializes in the study of fear, anxiety and stress. "It's good to be in a state of moderate arousal," she said. "That can actually enhance your ability to perform."

    In contrast, chronic stress is bad for the brain. "Unfortunately, there's less known about the effects of chronic stress," Goosens told me. "The effects that it has on the cells of the brain aren't uniform. For a lot of the cells in the brain, their function is impaired. You can cause atrophy of cells in the brain."

    One of the targets of chronic stress is the hippocampus, the area of the brain that plays a key role in managing memory. "You can imagine that if you have atrophy in this structure, often it's associated with memory impairment," Goosens said. But chronic stress actually causes the opposite response in a different part of the brain, known as the amygdala. Stress boosts activity in the amygdala.

    "You might think, 'Well, great, there's a part of my brain that's enhanced by chronic stress,'" Goosens said. "But it turns out that the amygdala is particularly involved in negative emotions, like fear. ... It's actually maladaptive, because you're better at processing bad things."

    Goosens' lab is focusing on the health effects of long-lasting stress -- effects that appear to range from cardiovascular disease to mental disorders.

    "If you're someone who's never been diagnosed with a mental illness, but you have a genetic predisposition for, let's say, bipolar disorder, and you experience a strong, lasting stressor -- for example, someone in your family dies -- then there's a higher likelihood that the illness would be triggered," she said. "Or if you're somebody who has been diagnosed, then you're more likely to start showing symptoms of mania or depression."

    Controlling the fear response
    So what does all this have to do with terrorism alerts? Our brains and our bodies are better-equipped to handle well-defined threats that come along with an action plan and a sense of resolution.

    "It's best to think about these fear episodes as networks that belong together in the brain," Keil said, "and one thing that goes with the fear response is to have an action plan. If I have no action plan, that will change the way the brain responds to the threat. ... The response is more unpleasant."

    That may be why so many people find scary movies and Halloween-style frights to be absolutely pleasurable. Such experiences let people experience the chemical high that goes along with the fear response, in a safe and controlled environment. In such a situation, it's easy to know what to do. "The action plan is to sit there and eat popcorn while the zombies are wreaking havoc," Keil said.

    In a way, the make-believe scares serve as "practice runs" for coping with real-life dangers -- and if they're handled in the right way, terrorism alerts can provide similar opportunities for visualizing how to deal with an immediate threat. "I get the benefit of the tickling of my fear system, but at all times I'm in control of my fear response," Keil said.

    The action plan is an important part of the process.

    "With a terror alert, what are you going to be doing?" Keil said. "When an alert doesn't come with a recommendation for what people shoud do, there's a vague fear that's less appropriate and less functional."

    Even if the authorities don't provide those recommendations, it's a good idea to take the opportunity to review your own personal emergency response plan. "That's so in line with common sense you don't even have to ask a brain scientist," Keil said.

    Goosens has another piece of common-sense advice: Don't fret alone. Being part of a group makes it easier to cope with fear -- whether it's stimulated by a visit to a haunted house or an actual terror threat. "That reduces your stress response while you're exposed to the threat, and when you're being social, you're activationg parts of your brain that are associated with reward," she said. "One of the things about people who are exposed to chronic stress is that they often exhibit social withdrawal or abnormal social interaction."

    Filling in the gaps
    Risk consultant David Ropeik -- a former msnbc.com contributor whose most recent book is titled "How Risky Is it, Really?" -- said that it's important for government officials and news media to fill in the gaps in information about a threat as fully as they can.

    "The psychological effect is called 'representativeness bias,'" he told me. "We take partial information, and when we don't have more, we fit that information itno the pattern that we already know and seems to make sense. Yemen? Ding-ding-ding-ding. Possibly explosive? Ding-ding-ding-ding. It's a mental shortcut that we use to make decisions about whether we're in danger."

    That effect meshes perfectly with our hard-wired response to perceived threats. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the hominids who were careful about keeping their distance from an unknown creature usually fared better than those who blithely walked into the predator's lair. But if the information gaps aren't eventually filled in, there could be negative consequences, particularly in a modern global society.

    "If the pattern forms in our minds, that Muslims are dangerous and that chemicals are dangerous, and if we don't find out the truth about all that, then we're left with that pattern. Everything fits the pattern, so we have Islamophobia and all sorts of stereotypes," Ropeik said. "The government and the media need to take more responsibility for clarifying those scary circumstances that, down the road, turn out not to fit the pattern. Because the more we have a pattern in our mind, the more it binds us to irrational representativeness bias. And that's bad for our health."

    What do you think? Is the news a source of chronic stress? Do you feel as if the gaps in our information about terror threats are being closed? Is there a psychological benefit to putting real-world worries aside and watching "Saw 3D" instead? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below. 

    Halloween tales from the crypt:

    To learn more about the workings of the brain, check out our interactive "road map to the mind." Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.