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SCIENCE

100
SCIENCE
MYSTERIES
EXPLAINED
Contents
PHYSICAL MATTER AND FORCES
Is Light a Wave or a Particle?
What Makes a Boomerang Come Back?
Is the Mpemba Effect Real?
What Is the Hottest Temperature
Possible?
Is Cold Fusion Possible?
Do Atoms Last Forever?
Can We Travel Through Time?

3
 Will We Ever Be Able to Harness
Nuclear Fusion?
Does Spontaneous Human Combustion
Ever Happen—and How?

SPACE
What Are Fermi Bubbles?
Why Do Pulsars Pulse?
Does Alien Life Exist?
Why Don’t Moons Have Moons?
What Is the Moon Illusion?
What’s at the Bottom of a Black Hole?
What Does Space Smell Like?
How Long Would It Take to Walk a
Light-Year?
What Causes Jupiter’s Red Storm?
Are There Habitable Planets Beyond Our
Solar System?
What Is Dark Energy?
How Will the Universe End?
What Is the Shape of the Universe?

4
 Can We Deflect Asteroids?
Why Is the Milky Way a Spiral?
Will We Find Other Universes?
Could We Live on Mars?
What Is Dark Matter Made Of?
What Causes Gamma Ray Bursts?
Is a Space Elevator Possible?
How Does Gravity Work?
How Do Stars Explode?
What Causes the Aurora Borealis?
Is a Holodeck Possible?
How Did Saturn Get Its Rings?
Could a Supernova Wipe Out Life on
Earth?

HUMAN BODY
Why Do We Blush?
What Is the Evolutionary Purpose of
Tickling?
Why Do We Yawn?
Why Are Peanut Allergies on the Rise?

5
What Is a Memory?
Why Do We Dream?
Why Do We Laugh?
Do Cells Make Noise?
How Does the Brain Work?
What Is Emotion?
Is It True That You Use Only 10 Percent
of Your Brain?
What Causes Déjà Vu?
Is the Y Chromosome Doomed?
Do Men and Women Have Different
Brains?
Why Do We Sleep?
Why Do We Hiccup?
Why Aren’t (Most) Humans Furry?
What Is the Science Behind Love?
Why Does Sunlight Make Some People
Sneeze?
What Is Consciousness?
Can the Food You Eat Affect Your
Descendants’ Genes?

6
 Are Telomeres the Key to Immortality?
Why Do We Have an Appendix?
Why Do We Have Fingerprints?
What Happens When You Die?
Is There an Alternative to DNA?
Why Do We Age?
When Will We Evolve Out of Our
Useless Appendages?
How Much of the Human Body Is
Replaceable?
Why Do Amputees Sense a “Phantom
Limb”?
Can You Upload Your Brain to a
Computer?
What Is Intelligence?

EARTH
What Causes Volcanic Lightning?
Just How Old Is Dirt?
How Do Plate Tectonics Work?
How Big Would a Meteorite Have to

7
 Beto Wipe Out All Human Life?
Are We Really Drinking Dinosaur Pee?
How Do Fire Tornadoes Form?
When Is the Next Ice Age Due?
Are Earthquake Lights Real or Illusory?
What Is Ball Lightning?
Why Can’t We Predict Earthquakes?
Where Did Earth’s Water Come From?
Why Do Earth’s Magnetic Poles Flip?
How Do Icicles Form Under Water?

OTHER LIFE-FORMS
How Did Life Arise on Earth?
How Do Animals Sense Magnetic
Fields?
How Do Animals Migrate?
Why Do Cats Purr?
Why Do Ducks Have Orange Feet?
Will Disease Drive Us All to Extinction?
What Do Whales Sing About?

8
 Can We Clone Extinct Animals?
Could Cockroaches Survive a Nuclear
Holocaust?
What Caused the Extinction of the
Megafauna?
Why Are Bees Disappearing?
Why Do Geese Fly in a V Formation?

HUMAN TRIUMPHS AND

TROUBLES
What Was the Purpose of Stonehenge?
How Were the Easter Island Statues
Built?
What Happened to the Neanderthals?
Is the Doomsday Argument for Real?
Why Can’t the Voynich Manuscript Be
Deciphered?
Is the Antikythera Mechanism the
World’s First Analog Computer?
How Were the Pyramids Built?
What Caused the Decline of the Mayan
Civilization?

9
Index
Credits

10
 CHAPTER 1

Physical Matter and Forces

11
Is Light a Wave or a
Particle?
For centuries, scientists debated the
nature of light. Some claimed that
light was a wave, behaving like a
ripple in a pool. The opposing view
was that light was a particle, like the
droplets of water that flow from a
kitchen faucet. Just when a prevailing
view gained momentum, evidence for
the other caused confusion. Finally,
in the early 20th century, Albert

12
Einstein called a tie: Light is both
wave and particle.
Those who believed in the particle theory
of light followed Sir Isaac Newton. He
described light as a series of particles,
using a prism to prove his theory. To
Newton, the clarity and sharpness of the
prism shadows meant that light traveled as
a shower of particles, each following a
straight line until disturbed.
Those who opposed Newton’s theory
followed scientist Christiaan Huygens,
who cited light’s diffraction and
interference as proof that it is a wave.
Diffraction, the bending of light as it
passes around an object, and interference,
when waves combine to form greater or
lesser amplitude, occur in other mediums
with wave-like properties, such as sound
and water. Astronomers studying moving
galaxies proved that light follows the
Doppler Effect, the name for the change in
sound as waves from the source move
closer or farther away from you, elongating

13
as they move away and shortening as they
come closer. Visible light, as seen in the
colors of the rainbow, exhibits similar
properties, with longer wavelengths
appearing as a red shift and shorter
wavelengths as a blue shift. Until the turn
of the century, this overwhelming evidence
convinced most scientists that light was a
wave, until Albert Einstein settled the
score.
One thorn in the argument for light-as-
a-wave purists is a phenomenon called the
photoelectric effect. When light shines on a
metal surface, electrons fly out. But higher
intensity of light does not cause more
electrons to be released, as you would
expect with the wave theory. Albert
Einstein studied this effect and came up
with a compelling theory that stated light
was both wave and particle. Light flows
toward a metal surface as a wave of
particles, and electrons release from the
metal as an interaction with a single
photon, or particle of light, rather than the
wave as a whole. The energy from that

14
photon transfers to a single electron,
knocking it free from the metal. Einstein’s
declaration of wave-particle duality earned
him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921.
Since Einstein’s discovery, physicists
have embraced this theory. Einstein
declared: “We have two contradictory
pictures of reality; separately neither of
them fully explains the phenomena of
light, but together they do.” Understanding
light as a wave led to the development of
important technology, such as lasers. The
discovery of photons made possible the
electron microscope.
And thanks to Albert Einstein, we can
stop the centuries-old debate and declare
everyone a winner.

15
The boomerang is one of humanity’s oldest
heavier-than-air flying inventions. King
Tutankhamen, who lived during the 14th
century, owned an extensive collection,
and aboriginal australians used
boomerangs in hunting and warfare at least
as far back as 10,000 years ago. The
world’s oldest boomerang, discovered in
Poland’s Carpathian Mountains, is
estimated to be more than 20,000 years

16
 old.

What Makes a Boomerang

Come Back?
Anthropologists theorize that the first
boomerangs were heavy projectile objects
thrown by hunters to bludgeon a target
with speed and accuracy. They were most
likely made out of flattened sticks or
animal tusks, and they weren’t intended to
return to their thrower—that is, until
someone unknowingly carved the weapon
into just the right shape needed for it to
spin. A happy accident, huh?
Proper wing design produces the lift
needed for a boomerang’s flight, says John
“Ernie” Esser, a boomerang hobbyist who
works as a postdoctoral researcher at the
University of California at Irvine’s Math
Department. “The wings of a boomerang
are designed to generate lift as they spin
through the air,” Esser says. “This is due to
the wings’ airfoil shape, their angle of

17
attack, and the possible addition of
beveling on the underside of the wings.”
But a phenomenon known as gyroscopic
precession is the key to making a returning
boomerang come back to its thrower.
“When the boomerang spins, one wing is
actually moving through the air faster than
the other [relative to the air] as the
boomerang is moving forward as a whole,”
explains Darren Tan, a PhD student in
physics at Oxford University. “As the top
wing is spinning forward, the lift force on
that wing is greater and results in
unbalanced forces that gradually turn the
boomerang.” The difference in lift force
between the two sides of the boomerang
produces a consistent torque that makes the
boomerang turn. It soars through the air
and gradually loops back around in a
circle.

18
Is the Mpemba Effect Real?
For more than 2,000 years, scientists
have observed the unique
phenomenon that, in some
conditions, hot water freezes faster
than cold water. In the fourth century
B.C.E., Greek scientist Aristotle
noted, “The fact that the water has
previously been warmed contributes
to its freezing quickly: for so it cools

19
sooner.”
Seventeenth-century English scientist
Francis Bacon noted, “slightly tepid water
freezes more easily than that which is
utterly cold.” Several years later, French
mathematician René Descartes echoed his
predecessors’ observations, writing, “One
can see by experience that water that has
been kept on a fire for a long time freezes
faster than other.”
Given the centuries old knowledge that
hot water does indeed freeze faster than
cold in certain circumstances, it should
have come as no surprise when Tanzanian
schoolboy Erasto Mpemba claimed in his
science class in 1963 that ice cream would
freeze faster if it was heated first before
being put into a freezer. “You were
confused,” said his teacher; “that cannot
happen.” Mpemba’s assertion also amused
his classmates—but their laughter quickly
turned to a murmur of assent when a
school supervisor ran the experiment and
proved the young man correct.

20
 Scientists have offered many
explanations to account for the unexpected
phenomenon, but to date none has been
accepted by the wider scientific
community. Here are a few suggestions:

EVAPORATION As the warmer water

cools to the temperature of the cooler
water, it may lose large amounts of water
to evaporation. The reduced mass more
easily allows for the water to cool and
freeze.

DISSOLVED GASES Hot water can hold

less dissolved gas than cold water. This
may somehow change the properties of the
water, making it easier to develop
convection currents, and therefore easier to
freeze.

FROST Frost conducts heat poorly. If the

containers of hot water are sitting on layers
of frost, the water will cause the frost to
melt. This would establish better thermal
contact with the cold refrigerator shelf or

21
floor.

To date, experiments have not adequately

illustrated which, if any, of the proposed
processes is the most important one. “It
seems likely that there is no one
mechanism that explains the Mpemba
effect for all circumstances,” explained
Monwhea Jeng of the Department of
Physics at the University of California, in
1998.

22
23
What Is the Hottest
Temperature Possible?
It’s easy to understand the theoretical
minimum temperature: absolute zero.
The absolute maximum, on the other
hand, is squirrely. “We just don’t
know whether we can take energy all
the way up to infinity,” says Stephon
Alexander, a physicist at Dartmouth
University. “But it’s theoretically
plausible.”
The most straightforward candidate for an
upper limit is the Planck temperature, or
142 nonillion (1.42 × 1032) kelvins (K)—
the highest temperature allowable under
the Standard Model of particle physics. But
temperature comes about only when
particles interact and achieve thermal
equilibrium, Alexander explains. “To have
a notion of temperature, you need to have a

24
notion of interaction.”
Many cosmologists believe the hottest
actual temperature in the history of the
universe was several orders of magnitude
cooler than the Planck temperature. In the
first moments after the Big Bang,
expansion occurred so rapidly that no
particles could interact; the universe was
essentially temperatureless. In the tiny
slivers of a second that followed,
Alexander says, ripples of space-time may
have begun to vibrate with matter and
forced that matter into thermal equilibrium.
This would have caused a quick reheating
of the universe to something like 1027 K.
It has been continually expanding and
cooling ever since.

25
Is Cold Fusion Possible?
Italian inventor Andrea Rossi really
wants us to believe in cold fusion. He
claims that his Energy Catalyzer, or
E-Cat, a liter-sized device he

26
designed, can output three times as
much energy as it draws via low-
energy nuclear reactions, or LENRs.
As hydrogen passes over an
electrified nickel-based catalyst,
hydrogen nuclei supposedly fuse to
the nickel, transmuting the metal into
copper and releasing heat in the
process. If we could harness that
heat, the process could furnish cheap
electricity while simultaneously
banishing the production of
greenhouse gases—all without
creating any harmful waste.
There’s only one problem: Cold fusion is
almost certainly a myth. Backers aside,
Rossi has yet to perform a truly
independent test of his E-Cat; in most tests
by third parties, Rossi handled the
materials or was involved in some way.
Critics argue that Rossi’s device doesn’t
produce nearly as much energy as he

27
claims and that his suggestion of building
factories for large-scale production of
electricity is baseless. They also note that
his backers refuse to publicly reveal
themselves and that the physics behind the
project are at best unclear.
Worst of all, every purportedly
successful attempt at cold fusion up until
now has been the result of experimental
error or downright fraud. Martin
Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, chemistry
professors at the University of Utah,
claimed to have discovered cold fusion in
1989. No one has been able to replicate
their results since and their ideas were
discredited. Rusi Taleyarkhan, a Purdue
University professor who claimed to have
produced a “bubble fusion” reaction, was
found guilty of “research misconduct.”
Besides, most physicists say that the
findings just don’t make sense: The energy
required to bond hydrogen is simply too
high for a catalyst to achieve at earthly
temperatures.
Except in one case: Muon-catalyzed

28
fusion is the only instance in which a
catalyst is known to enable nuclear fusion.
Muons are subatomic particles that occur
on Earth principally as a result of cosmic
rays slamming into the atmosphere. When
muons replace the hydrogen atom’s
electrons, they can draw those hydrogen
atoms close enough to fuse together.
Unfortunately, muons require substantial
energy to produce, and they don’t last long
enough for the chain reaction to produce
more energy than goes into the reaction.
Until physicists overcome these barriers,
cold fusion will remain elusive.

29
Do Atoms Last Forever?
Despite what you may have heard,
diamonds are not forever. Given
enough time, your sparkling rock will
degrade into common graphite. The
carbon atoms that constitute that
diamond, however, are forever, or
close enough. Stable isotopes of
carbon are thought to enjoy lifetimes
that extend far longer than the
estimated age of the universe.

30
But not every atom of carbon lives forever.
Radioisotopes are forms of chemical
elements with unstable nuclei and emit
radiation during their decaying process to a
stable state. Carbon-14, a radioisotope, is
unstable, with a half-life of less than 6,000
years; after 5,730 years, there is a 50
percent chance that a carbon-14 atom will
lose an electron and become nitrogen-14
(which is itself stable and the most
common form of nitrogen on Earth).
Carbon-14 is the key element in carbon
dating: Since radioactive carbon is only
absorbed through respiration by living
creatures, the date of their death can be
determined by measuring the remaining
carbon-14 in the specimen.
In addition to carbon-14, there are
scores of other naturally occurring
radioisotopes and more than a thousand
manmade. Each of these radioisotopes
tends to decay into another isotope: some
in a matter of days, others in hundreds of
millions of years. In this sense, these atoms
do in fact die. In another way, however,

31
they are simply reborn as different
isotopes.
There is one mechanism by which even
stable atoms might “die.” Some exotic
models of physics hypothesize that protons
(which along with electrons and neutrons
constitute atoms) can decay into lighter
subatomic particles. Even if protons do
decay, they are nevertheless
incomprehensibly durable. Experiments
put the lower bound of a proton’s half-life
at 1033 to 1034 years, or 23 orders of
magnitude longer than the current age of
the universe. In conclusion, atoms are
forever on just about any relevant
timescale.

32
Can We Travel Through
Time?
The mystery of time travel as it is
portrayed in science fiction is not as
simple as building a time machine. In
fact, these fictional ideas require

33
overturning Albert Einstein’s special
theory of relativity and somehow
traveling close to the speed of light.
Physicists continue to ponder the
possibilities of faster-than-light travel
(FLT) and what it means for space
exploration and our universe. The first
example of faster-than-light speeds in
popular culture occurred in the television
series Star Trek, when “warp drive” sent
spaceships traveling billions of light-years
away in a matter of seconds. If this were
possible, those space travelers might return
to their original location and find that time
had progressed at its usual speed, meaning
50 years may have passed during the short
time the ship was absent, simulating time
travel.
While most people view time as a
constant, Einstein proved that time is
relative to how fast an object moves
according to its surroundings. Einstein
pointed out that time is not a consistent

34
flowing entity, but linked with space, and
so the faster one travels through space, the
more the perception of time changes, a
phenomenon called time dilation. If an
astronaut can somehow travel close to the
speed of light, he will experience time
differently than his friends left behind on
Earth traveling at the usual speed. Time
will pass much slower for the astronaut,
and when he returns to Earth, his friends
will have aged faster. However, the laws of
physics state that the speed of light is
constant, represented by c in Einstein’s
famous equation E = mc. The speed of
light in a vacuum is 186,000 miles per
second (299,337 km/h), and while some
physicists have identified processes like
quantum entanglement that travel faster
than light, they do not carry mass or
information. For a particle with mass,
reaching the speed of light would require
infinite acceleration and therefore infinite
energy—an unrealistic accomplishment.
In 2011, physicists at the CERN
institute in Switzerland thought they were

35
close to a FLT discovery. A new subatomic
particle called the neutrino, which carried a
very small mass, appeared to travel faster
than the speed of light. Their experiment
launched particles from Switzerland to
Italy, and the neutrinos arrived in Italy in
record time, intriguing the world with
thoughts of time travel and visits to distant
galaxies. Unfortunately for CERN, the
experiment was flawed. One cable was not
properly connected, resulting in incorrect
measurements.
According to Einstein’s theory, objects
with mass cannot exceed the speed of light
because they would require an infinite
amount of energy—be they spaceships or
neutrinos. Even in all theoretical scenarios
in which we travel faster than light, we can
never travel backward in time, only
forward. However, many scientists believe
that traveling into the future is still a
possibility that just needs more study.
Wormholes, a theoretical passage through
space-time that connects distant points in
the universe, are attractive starting points

36
for these theories. But however enticing
the possibilities, it seems that success is
still light-years away.

37
Will We Ever Be Able to
Harness Nuclear Fusion?
The year is 2050. The carbon crisis is
a thing of the past. A new source of
power delivers cheap, plentiful
electricity to large, contained cities
populated by millions of people.
Fusion power has birthed a utopia on
Earth by neutralizing the most
imminent threat to human survival,

38
the finite supply of fossil fuel, while
eliminating a persistent source of
conflict. All is well—until a robotic
alien from outer space destroys your
fusion plant along with the rest of
your city.
The scenario just described is familiar to
anyone who grew up playing the popular
1990s simulation game SimCity 2000. As
far as fusion power is concerned, the
predictions of Maxis (the company that
designed SimCity) from two decades ago
seem prescient: Steve Cowley, a plasma
physicist and the CEO of the United
Kingdom’s Atomic Energy Authority,
expects the first viable demonstration
reactors to be available sometime in the
2040s. That said, critics and proponents
alike lament that nuclear fusion is “always
30 years away.” What’s changed? Recent
breakthroughs indicate that the future of
fusion is brighter than it has been in some
time.

39
 Physicists since the 1950s have been
seeking to harness the power of the Sun.
As it turns out, birthing a miniature star in
a lab and keeping it under control is a
difficult undertaking. The fusion reaction
requires more energy than the reaction
itself produces. It wasn’t until October
2013 that any project broke even, when the
National Ignition Facility (NIF) in
California produced more energy than it
consumed.
The success at the NIF, although
exciting, is just another step on a long
journey. To be commercially viable and to
overcome basic inefficiencies in the
conversion of raw energy into electricity,
the reaction must continually produce 10
times the amount of power that goes into it.
Candidates for exceeding this threshold
include the International Thermonuclear
Experimental Reaction (known as ITER,
pronounced “eater”), a project with the
backing of seven countries that should
come online by the end of the decade.
Recently, aerospace and technology giant

40
Lockheed Martin’s covert Skunkworks
facility has announced a breakthrough in
fusion technology that may yield results
within the decade.
Secrecy still surrounds the research, but
scientists hope that covert research
facilities like Skunkworks will make “the
impossible” possible.

41
Does Spontaneous Human
Combustion Ever Happen—
and How?
In 1980, Henry Thomas, a 73-year-
old man living in Wales, was found
burned to death in the easy chair of
his living room—the trunk of his
body nearly completely incinerated,
but oddly, his feet unburned and the
remains of his legs still clothed in
socks and pants, practically

42
untouched by the fire. Thomas’s
death was ruled “death by burning,”
although no cause of the apparent fire
was noted.
In December 2010, the body of 76-year-
old Michael Faherty was discovered
burned beyond recognition in the living
room of his home in Galway, Ireland. The
damage caused by the fire was limited to
Faherty’s burned body, the ceiling above,
and the floor beneath him. The coroner
concluded Faherty’s death “fit into the
category of spontaneous human
combustion.”
Can human bodies spontaneously burst
into flame without being ignited by an
external source of heat? Most scientists
would argue that humans cannot catch fire
without an apparent cause. In fact, in the
more than 200 cases of spontaneous human
combustion (SHC) that have been reported
worldwide, the true causes of death are far
less fanciful than SHC.

43
 In a study of 30 cases of alleged SHC,
investigators Joe Nickell and John Fischer
showed that candles, lamps, fireplaces,
cigarettes, and other sources of heat were
the likely reasons for ignition. Clothing,
chair stuffing, and floor coverings usually
provided additional fuel sources to sustain
the fire.
One of the most commonly accepted
explanations for alleged SHC is a
phenomenon called the “wick effect.” This
theory suggests that an ignition source,
such as a lit cigarette, will burn through the
victim’s clothing and into the skin. This
releases body fat, which is absorbed into
the clothing and burns like a candlewick.
The fire will burn until the body’s fat and
the clothing are both consumed. Scientists
believe such a “self-contained” fire is the
reason victims’ bodies are incinerated, yet
their surroundings barely suffer damage.
“SHC is a non-explanation for bizarre
burning deaths, no better than positing the
attack of a fiery demon,” says forensic
analyst Nickell, “because there is not only

44
no scientifically authenticated case of SHC
but no credible mechanism by which it
could happen.”

45
Chapter 2

Space

46
 Fermi Bubbles extend 50,000 light-years,
roughly half of the Milky Way’s diameter.

What Are Fermi Bubbles?

In 2010, data gathered by the Fermi
Gamma-Ray Space Telescope
revealed a new discovery. Scientists
were surprised to find two enormous,
bubble-like clouds that extend 50,000
light-years across the center of our
galaxy, the Milky Way.

47
The two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles
stretch across more than half of the visible
sky and may be millions of years old.
(Gamma rays are electromagnetic radiation
at the highest-energy, or shortest-
wavelength, end of the electromagnetic
spectrum.) The origin of these previously
unseen structures, however, remains a truly
baffling mystery.
A research paper appearing in the
Astrophysical Journal in 2014 described
some features of the aptly dubbed “Fermi
bubbles.” First, the outlines of the
structures are very sharp and well defined,
and the bubbles glow evenly across their
enormous surfaces. The most distant areas
of the bubbles feature extremely high-
energy gamma rays, yet there is no
apparent cause for them that far from the
galactic center. Lastly, the parts of the
Fermi bubbles nearest the nucleus of the
Milky Way contain both gamma rays and
microwaves, but as the bubbles extend
farther out, only the gamma rays are
detectable.

48
 Theorists have offered several
explanations for the unusual structures.
The two most predominant theories both
suggest the bubbles were formed by a
large, rapid energy release.
One possibility claims that enormous
streams or jets of accelerated particles
originating and blasting out of the
supermassive black hole at the center of
the Milky Way created the Fermi bubbles.
Astronomers have observed such a
phenomenon in other galaxies, and while it
is unknown if the Milky Way black hole
has an active jet today, it may have had one
millions of years ago.
Another commonly held theory argues
that the Fermi bubbles were created during
star formations over a period of millions or
even billions of years. The gas ejections
created from bursts of star formations,
similar to the ones that produced huge star
clusters in the Milky Way, theoretically
rode massive galactic winds out to far-off
distances and are held there by powerful
magnetic forces.

49
 Scientists are eager to unravel the
mystery of the Fermi bubbles’ origin.
“Whatever the energy source behind these
huge bubbles may be,” says David N.
Spergel, a theoretical astrophysicist at
Princeton University, “it is connected to
the many deep questions in astrophysics.”

50
51
 Images taken with the Hubble Space
Telescope show the Crab Nebula, the
remains of a massive star explosion. In the
center, the pulsar rotates approximately 30
times per second.

52
Why Do Pulsars Pulse?
Seven thousand years ago, a
supermassive star in the constellation
we now call Taurus collapsed in on
itself and exploded into a supernova
so bright that—when its light reached
Earth in 1054 C.E.—it could be seen
in broad daylight. What was left
behind was the brilliant Crab Nebula,
a well as the Crab Pulsar that
illuminates it. This neutron star
pulses out radiation across the entire
electromagnetic spectrum at a rate of
30 times per second. But why does it
pulse at all?
Only half a century ago, nobody knew that
pulsars, short for “pulsating stars,” existed.
In 1967, when astronomers Jocelyn Bell
Burnell and Antony Hewish first
discovered a pulsating source of emissions
all coming from the same point in the sky,

53
among the first hypotheses was that these
pulses were radio waves emitted by an
alien civilization. Burnell and Hewish even
went so far as to name the object LGM-1,
short for “Little Green Men.” Subsequent
discoveries of new pulsars, including the
Crab Pulsar, ruled out the alien emissions
hypothesis.
Today, scientists know that pulsars are
generated by rotating neutron stars. The
stars rotate quickly due to the conservation
of angular momentum: When a large
rotating body collapses, the remaining
matter spins at a much higher rate, akin to
the effect spinning figure skaters
experience when they hold their arms close
against their body. Some of these neutron
stars have strong magnetic fields—in the
case of pulsars, about 1 trillion times as
strong as Earth’s—and emit a beam of
radiation that coincides with their magnetic
poles. This radiation can be the result of
the quickly spinning star’s slowing
momentum, the accretion of matter as it
falls into the star, or the twisting of the

54
star’s magnetic field. This magnetic axis is
not always the same as the axis of rotation.
When they do not coincide, the beam of
radiation wobbles about the rotational axis.
The result of this wobbling is a beam of
radiation that, when viewed from Earth,
seems to be pulsating.
Since Burnell and Hewish first
discovered pulsars, astronomers have
identified nearly 2,000 more, emitting
visible light, X-rays, and, in some cases,
only gamma rays. And while we have a
general idea of why pulsars pulse,
astrophysicists believe that there is still
much more to discover.

55
Does Alien Life Exist?
It’s easy to proclaim that the
existence of aliens is a crazy idea,
until you consider these words from
astrophysicist Stephen Hawking: “To
my mathematical brain, the numbers
alone make thinking about aliens
perfectly rational. The real challenge
is working out what aliens might
actually be like.”
Other scientists agree. But while the
existence of alien life is mathematically
probable, humans have not been able to
prove that extraterrestrial life does exist.
The quest to find that life has taken several
forms. The Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence (SETI) Institute, based in
California, uses giant radio telescopes to
try to detect radio signals sent by far-off,
technically advanced life forms. NASA’s
Kepler Space Telescope has found planets

56
within the Milky Way that could have the
right conditions for life to develop. By one
estimate, as many as 20 percent of the stars
in the galaxy have such a suitable planet. A
2015 report highlighted one planet in
particular, about 150 light-years away from
Earth, that seemed like a possible
candidate to support the development of
alien life. It orbits a star called Epic
201367065, which is about half the size
and mass of Earth’s Sun.
While some people wonder about the
complexity of possible alien life-forms,
some scientists think it makes more sense
to imagine “aliens” as simple
microorganisms. Life on Earth started out
as single cells, and life on other planets
might still be at that stage of evolution.
And as Hawking notes, Earth was lucky to
avoid a cataclysmic collision with an
asteroid or comet in the past 70 million
years. Other planets could have had their
early life-forms wiped out in such a cosmic
crash.
NASA research done in the 1990s found

57
what scientists thought were signs of
ancient bacteria on a meteorite from Mars
that reached Earth in 1984. Other
scientists, though, dismissed the claim, and
no one has proved the existence of
microbes on Mars, now or in the past.
The possibility that the Red Planet once
had water, however, was raised in 2014
after NASA scientists studied another
meteorite from the planet that reached
Earth. That same year, the NASA rovers,
Curiosity and Opportunity, were able to
capture high-resolution images of what are
believed to be ancient riverbeds on the
surface of Mars. The presence of water
raises the possibility of biological activity
as well. So does the discovery of large
amounts of methane, which Curiosity also
detected. The methane, however, could be
the product of geochemical processes,
rather than biological.
For now, scientists can feel confident in
the odds that alien life does or did at some
point exist, but without any idea of its
form. As for the possibility of intelligent

58
alien life ever visiting us on planet Earth,
Hawking had this insight: The arrival of
aliens could turn out to be much like
Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the
Americas—and be followed by a steady
stream of conquistadors and explorers from
another universe. And we all know how
that turned out for the people already living
there.

59
60
Why Don’t Moons Have
Moons
Astronomers can say with near

61
certainty that there are no moons with
moons in our solar system. But that
doesn’t mean it’s physically
impossible. After all, NASA has
successfully put spacecraft into orbit
around our moon.
Although astronomers have spotted some
asteroids with moons, a parent planet’s
strong gravitational tug would make it hard
for a moon to keep control of its own
natural satellite, says Seth Shostak, a senior
astronomer at the nonprofit Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
Institute. “You would need to have a wide
space between the moon and planet,” he
says. Orbiting far from its parent planet, a
relatively massive moon might be able to
hold onto a moon of its own.
Conditions like these might exist in far-
off solar systems, but while hundreds of
exoplanets (planets outside of our solar
system) have been detected, there’s almost
no chance we’ll be able to spot exomoons,

62
much less moons of exomoons, for decades
to come. Most planet-hunting methods—
such as spotting one as it passes a large star
—lend themselves to detecting huge,
Jupiter-like planets, or sometimes Earth-
sized, rocky planets, but not their moons.
Even if astronomers spot a moon with a
moon, it probably won’t last long. “Tidal
forces from the parent planet will tend,
over time, to destabilize the orbit of the
moon’s moon, eventually pulling it out of
orbit,” says Webster Cash, a professor at
the University of Colorado’s Center for
Astrophysics and Space Astronomy. “A
moon’s moon will tend to be a short-lived
phenomenon.”

63
64
What Is the Moon Illusion?
The Moon seems larger when it is
near the horizon than when it is high
in the sky, a phenomenon called the

65
Moon illusion. Although recognized
for centuries—the horizon Moon was
important to early civilizations that
functioned according to the Moon’s
cycle—this ancient phenomenon has
only recently been explained.
Early astronomers believed the Moon at
the horizon was physically closer to Earth
than when it was high in the sky, and the
closeness meant a larger Moon. However,
Newton’s description of the Moon’s orbit
showed the contrary to be true. The Moon
is actually closest to the observer at its
zenith, or when it is high in the sky, but the
difference is so small that it is negligible
anyhow. Others theorized that the Moon
illusion was caused by refraction when
light rays passed through more of Earth’s
atmosphere. Today, scientists guess that
the illusion occurs not externally, but
through a trick of our brains.
Optical illusions play a big role in the
appearance of the Moon. When the Moon

66
is placed as a backdrop against objects of
known heights—such as trees, cars, or
buildings—it appears larger than when it is
isolated in the sky. In one experiment,
researchers asked participants to view the
horizon Moon through a cardboard tube,
which caused background objects to
disappear. They found the Moon seemed to
shrink to a size similar to the zenith Moon.
The Ebbinghaus illusion describes this
perceived effect. Two circles of identical
size are placed near each other. One circle
is surrounded by smaller circles, and the
other circle is surrounded by larger circles.
Although we know the original circles are
identical, we perceive the circle surrounded
by smaller circles as larger than the
neighboring circle surrounded by larger
circles. We also view the Moon as we do
other objects, like clouds and birds, that
recede into the skyline. We expect them to
look smaller as they get farther away. In
what is known as the Ponzo illusion, our
brain tricks us into thinking the Moon is
getting smaller as it rises in the sky, and in

67
our minds only, farther away from Earth.
But the Moon is still mostly the same
distance away in its orbit. Nothing has
changed in its size or its distance from our
planet. To practice this, draw two identical
parallel lines horizontally across a photo of
a receding railroad track. The line closest
will appear smaller than the line farther
away, because as the tracks recede into the
horizon, they become smaller, and your
brain expects the line to do the same.
Still not convinced? Try taking a picture
of the large Moon at the horizon. The
camera doesn’t suffer from the same visual
cues that make the Moon appear as
massive as in real life. This illusion is not
unique to the Moon—the Sun and stars
show the same properties. And while
interesting to consider, the Moon illusion
offers little insight into astronomy and the
atmosphere. Instead, it proves an example
of optical illusion.

68
 An artist’s rendition of a black hole
drawing matter from the blue star beside it.

What’s at the Bottom of a

Black Hole
Black holes are already among the
most mysterious objects in the
universe, even before we begin to
contemplate what might be at the
“bottom” of one. The concept of a

69
tiny star whose gravitational field is
so strong that neither light nor matter
can escape was so foreign to those
who first theorized their existence
that even Albert Einstein himself,
whose math confirmed their
possibility, dismissed the likelihood
of their existence. As to the question
of what’s at the bottom, the answer—
depending on the physicist—may be
just about anything, or nothing, or
even another universe.
At the outer edge of a black hole is the
event horizon, the boundary where velocity
required to escape its gravity exceeds the
speed of light. Past this point, all energy
and matter that enter the black hole will
proceed infinitely toward the singularity, a
point of infinite density that, according to
Einstein’s theory of general relativity,
represents a bottomless pit of space-time.
If the hole is truly infinite and nothing can

70
escape past the event horizon, then the
bottom of a black hole could theoretically
hold an infinite amount of matter and
energy.
However, while that interpretation may
square with general relativity, the laws of
thermodynamics maintain that a system
cannot infinitely increase its mass while
maintaining a similar temperature and level
of disorder. Other theories that account for
black hole thermodynamics suggest that
anything falling toward the event horizon
never really reaches the singularity,
eventually evaporating back into space.
According to astrophysicist Stephen
Hawking, this is because black holes aren’t
truly black: They emit a minute amount of
radiation, far less than the background
radiation of space, but enough to
eventually return the mass of the black
hole back to the rest of the universe.
Other more exotic theories posit that at
the bottom of a black hole lies an entire
universe. How can this be? The
combination of the insanely high

71
temperatures, densities, and rotational
velocity at the center of a black hole is so
powerful that it could produce a massive
expansion in space-time that might give
rise to a new universe—a process not
unlike that of the Big Bang that gave rise
to our own universe. The logical extension
of this theory implies that even our
universe may lie at the bottom of a black
hole.
The mystery has only deepened of late
as prominent astrophysicists (including
Hawking) change their minds on whether
black holes even exist. According to
Hawking and others, the laws of quantum
mechanics may prevent a neutron star from
collapsing beyond a small enough radius to
fit within its event horizon. This would
mean that no black hole is ever small
enough for its escape velocity to exceed
the speed of light, and thus there is no
black hole.

72
What Does Space Smell
Like?
The final frontier smells a lot like a
NASCAR race— a bouquet of hot
metal, diesel fumes, and barbecue.
The source? Dying stars.

73
The by-products of all this combustion are
smelly compounds called polycyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons. These molecules
“seem to be all over the universe,” says
Louis Allamandola, the founder and
director of the Astrophysics and
Astrochemistry Laboratory at NASA Ames
Research Center. “And they float around
forever,” appearing in comets, meteors,
and space dust. These hydrocarbons have
even been short-listed as the basis of the
earliest forms of life on Earth. Not
surprisingly, polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbons can be found in coal, oil, and
even food.
Though a pure, unadulter- ated whiff of
outer space is impossible for humans
(space is a vacuum, after all; we would die
if we tried), we can get an indirect sense of
the scent: When astronauts work outside
the International Space Station, spaceborne
compounds adhere to their suits and hitch a
ride back into the station. Astronauts have
reported smelling “burned” or “fried” steak
after a space walk, and they aren’t just

74
dreaming of a home-cooked meal.
The smell of space is so memorable and
distinct that, three years ago, NASA asked
Steven Pearce of the fragrance maker
Omega Ingredients to re-create the odor for
use in its training simulations. “Recently
we did the smell of the Moon,” Pearce
says. “Astronauts compared it to spent
gunpowder.”
Allamandola explains that our solar
system is particularly pungent because it is
rich in carbon and low in oxygen, and “just
like a car, if you starve it of oxygen, you
start to see black soot and get a foul smell.”
Oxygen-rich stars, however, have aromas
reminiscent of a charcoal grill.
Once you leave our galaxy, the smells
could get really, really interesting. In dark
pockets of the universe, molecular clouds
full of tiny dust particles may host a
veritable smorgasbord of odors, from wafts
of sweet sugar to the rotten-egg stench of
sulfur.

75
76
77
How Long Would It Take to
Walk a Light-Year
If you had started just before the first
dinosaurs appeared, you’d probably
be finishing your hike just about
now.
Here’s how it breaks down. One light-year
—the distance light travels in one year,
used as the yardstick for interstellar
distances—is about 5.9 trillion miles (9.5
trillion km). If you hoofed it at 20 minutes
a mile, it would take 225 million years to
complete your journey (not including stops
for meals or the restroom). Even if you
hitched a ride on NASA’s Mach 9.8 X-43A
hypersonic scramjet, it would take more
than 90,000 years to cover the distance.
You’d need to bring a big backpack,
too: Walking such a distance requires
substantial supplies. The average adult
burns about 80 calories per mile walked, so

78
you’d need about six trillion granola bars
to fuel your trip. You’d also produce a
heap of worn-out shoes. The typical pair of
sneakers will last you 500 miles (800 km),
so you’d burn through some 11.8 billion
pairs. And all that effort wouldn’t get you
anywhere, astronomically speaking: The
closest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri,
is 4.22 light-years away.

79
 Jupiter’s great red spot is a high-pressure
storm that has battered the planet
consistently for 400 years. Its size is so
great that you can see it with a backyard
telescope.

What Causes Jupiter’s Red

Storm?
At one time, the storm was at least 20,000
miles (32,000 km) in diameter and big
enough to envelop three Earths. It is
similar to a hurricane on Earth, rotating
counterclockwise with a maximum wind

80
speed of 268 miles per hour (430 km/h),
almost twice as fast as the worst hurricanes
on Earth. Historic observations date as far
back as the 1600s. Since then, the spot has
changed, fluctuating between a deep red
and a pale salmon color. Laboratory
experiments suggest that complex organic
molecules, red phosphorus, and other
sulfur compounds cause the vibrant color.
But since the 1930s, the storm has shrunk
to half its largest diameter. Even though it
may be dwindling in size, the longevity
and enormity of our solar system’s biggest
storm is full of mystery.
The reason for the persistence of the
Great Red Spot is unknown, but
presumably comes from the fact that it
never moves over land, unlike hurricanes
on Earth. Jupiter is composed of hydrogen
and a small amount of helium and has no
“land” in its form. Jupiter’s internal heat
source is a driving force, and the spot tends
to absorb nearby weaker storms. However,
based on computer models, the spot should
have disappeared after several decades.

81
Waves and turbulence in and around the
storm sap it of energy. The powerful jet
streams that surround the spot should slow
its spinning. And even though the storm
absorbs smaller ones, researchers say that
doesn’t happen enough to explain the
storm’s longevity. Some scientists think
vertical flows in the storm are just as
important as the more-studied horizontal
flows. When the storm loses energy,
vertical flows move hot and cold gases in
and out of the storm, restoring energy.
Understanding Jupiter’s red storm could
reveal more clues about the vortices in
Earth’s oceans and also the nurseries of
stars and planets. Philip Marcus, a fluid
dynamicist and planetary scientist at the
University of California at Berkeley,
explains the importance of understanding
the Great Red Spot: “Vortices with physics
very similar to the GRS are believed to
contribute to star and planet formation
processes, which would require them to
last for several million years”—even as the
Great Red Spot shrinks, it retains

82
enormous significance for Earth and the
very beginnings of the solar system.

83
 Relative Sizes of Habitable Zone
Planets: Illustrated representations of
exoplanets that have potential to support
life as we know it. They are ranked here
closest to farthest from Earth.

Are There Habitable Planets

Beyond Our Solar System
Ever since people first tilted their
gaze up toward the heavens, they
have wondered about the possibility
of other worlds like ours orbiting
distant suns. Until very recently, such
questions were left to the realm of
speculation. Today, thanks to
telescopes like the Kepler space

84
observatory and increasingly
advanced surveys from ground-based
technology, we know that the galaxy
is swarming with planets. But are any
of them habitable? Do any of them
resemble our own?
The question of habitability is a tricky one,
and the odds of any individual planet
possessing Earth-like properties are rather
low. That said, the numbers are in our
favor. Kepler recently confirmed the
discovery of its 1,000th exoplanet. Some
astronomers now estimate that there is one
exoplanet for every star, on average. That
means there are billions and billions of
planets in our universe! Many of these
planets, though, are nothing close to
habitable. The first exoplanets that
astronomers found orbited impossibly
close to their suns, tidally locked, exposing
one side to scorching heat and radiation
and the other side to permanent night. In
contrast, Earth orbits the Sun in the so-

85
called Goldilocks Zone: not so close that
all liquid water boils away, but not so far
that it is perpetually frozen in ice.
What’s water got to do with the
existence of other planets? The capacity to
harbor liquid water is the key characteristic
that astronomers look for in the search for
habitable alien worlds, due to water’s
paramount importance to life on our own
planet. But liquid water and a planet’s
average orbital distance are but two of
several key factors. For instance, the class
of star that serves as the sun is important:
Habitability requires a sun that emits the
right type of radiation and is likely to live
long enough to allow life to evolve. A
stable orbit is also important, ensuring that
the planet’s climate doesn’t fluctuate
wildly. The mass of the planet—massive
enough so that it’s capable of generating
and holding onto an atmosphere, but not so
massive that the atmosphere is
oppressively dense—is also critical.
While astronomers have not yet
confirmed the presence of habitable

86
exoplanets, all signs currently point to the
affirmative. Scientists reviewing data from
the Kepler observatory recently discovered
eight planets, roughly the size of Earth, in
their respective sun’s Goldilocks Zone.
Other candidates exist, from as nearby as
40 light-years to thousands of light-years
distant, some orbiting superclose to colder
suns, and some much larger than Earth; so-
called super-Earths range in size from two
to 10 Earth masses. We seem on the verge
of discovering a planet that might not only
be capable of supporting life, but could
hypothetically support life.
Whether these habitable planets already
support life-forms and whether those life-
forms are intelligent—well, that’s a whole
other mystery.

87
 In this illustration, dark energy, a force
found throughout the universe and
theorized to stimulate its expansion, is
represented by the purple color. The green
grid represents gravity. For now, the
mystery of dark energy continues to
confound scientists. The NASA website
concludes, “The thing that is needed to
decide between dark energy possibilities—
a property of space, a new dynamic fluid,

88
 or a new theory of gravity—is more data,
better data.”

What Is Dark Energy?

In 1929, American astronomer Edwin
Hubble studied a number of
exploding stars, or supernova, and
determined that the universe was
expanding. The notion that distant
galaxies were moving away from
ours was a radical idea.
It seemed obvious to astronomers that
gravity—the mutual attraction between all
matter—would affect the expansion
process. But how? Would the pull of
gravity completely halt the expansion of
the universe? Could the universe stop
expanding and then reverse itself back
toward us? Or would the universe
eventually escape the gravitational effect
and continue to expand? The universe may
be expanding, reasoned the scientific

89
community, but its expansion was surely
slowed by the forceful effects of gravity.
Fast forward nearly 70 years to a time
when two teams of astrophysicists—one
led by Saul Perlmutter at the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory and the
other by Brian Schmidt at Australian
National University—began studying
supernovas to calculate the assumed
deceleration of expansion. To their
astonishment, they discovered that
supernovas as far as 7 billion light-years
away were not brighter than expected but
rather dimmer, meaning they were more
distant than the teams had calculated them
to be. The universe isn’t slowing down,
they concluded. It’s speeding up.
The discovery turned the scientific
world on its head: If gravity isn’t the most
dominant force in the universe, what is? In
1998, American theoretical cosmologist
Michael S. Turner dubbed the mysterious
new something “dark energy.” Yet even
with a name, we know little about dark
energy.

90
 Theorists have come up with several
explanations for dark energy. The leading
theory claims that dark energy is a property
of space. Albert Einstein claimed it is
possible for more space to come into
existence and that “empty space” can have
its own energy. “As more space comes into
existence,” reports NASA, “more of this
energy-of-space would appear. As a result,
this form of energy would cause the
universe to expand faster and faster.”
NASA reports that scientists have been
able to theorize how much dark energy
there is out there because we know how it
affects the expansion of the universe.
Roughly 69 percent of the universe is dark
energy. Dark matter accounts for about 27
percent, leaving the rest—all normal
matter, everywhere—adding up to less than
5 percent of the universe.
Another explanation posits that dark
energy is a new type of energy field or
energy fluid that fills space but affects the
expansion of the universe differently than
matter and normal energy. Scientists have

91
labeled this energy “quintessence,” but we
still don’t know what it interacts with or
why it even exists.

92
An image of a small area of space in the
constellation Fornax, created using Hubble
Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004.
By collecting faint light over many hours
of observation, the data revealed thousands
of galaxies, both nearby and very distant,
making it the deepest image of the universe
ever taken at that time.

93
How Will the Universe End?
In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered
that the universe is not in fact static,
but expanding. In the years following
his discovery, cosmologists took up
the implications of the discovery,
asking how long the universe had
been expanding, what forces caused
the expansion, and whether it will
ever cease.
Cosmologists are pretty confident about
the first question: just shy of 14 billion
years. A great deal of evidence supports
the predominant answer to the second
question: The universe rapidly emerged
from a singularity in an event that
cosmologists call the Big Bang. The third
question is a bit more mysterious, and the
answer relies on an obscure, confounding
phenomenon known as dark energy. The
density of dark energy in the universe
determines its ultimate fate. In one

94
scenario, the universe does not possess
enough dark energy to forever counteract
its own gravity and thus ends in a “Big
Crunch.” Under this scenario, the
universe’s gravity will overcome its
expansion and the cosmos will collapse in
on itself, resulting in a singularity that may
precipitate another Big Bang. However, the
evidence cosmologists have gathered over
the last few decades leads us away from
this scenario.
For the Big Crunch to occur, we’d see
signs that gravity was winning out over
dark energy, slowing its expansion.
However, measurements of distant galaxies
indicate that cosmic expansion is not
slowing down—it’s speeding up!
Apparently, the density of dark energy in
the vacuum of space is simply too high to
permit a Big Crunch.

Some say the world will end in fire

Some say in ice.
— ROBERT FROST
This is the way the world ends

95
 Not with a bang but a whimper.
— T.S. ELIOT

That leaves two possible fates for the

cosmos: 1) a Big Freeze, in which the
acceleration eventually halts but the
universe keeps expanding, creating a
system where heat becomes evenly
distributed, allowing no room for usable
energy to exist and thus, “heat death,” or 2)
a Big Rip, in which the expansion of the
universe continues to accelerate forever. In
the former scenario, the universe will
progressively become darker and colder
until the end of time. In the latter, all
matter down to the most fundamental
particles will be torn asunder.
All the recent data from the Planck
space observatory and the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey suggest there is just enough
dark energy to continue the universe’s
expansion, but not enough to keep it
accelerating forever. This conclusion
points toward the Big Freeze, or “heat
death” of the universe. The most up-to-date

96
science leads us to the conclusion that our
universe—and Robert Frost’s—is more
likely to end in ice than in fire. That,
however, assumes that what we believe
about dark energy is true. Considering that
dark energy itself is a phenomenon cloaked
deeply in mystery, such assumptions may
yet prove untenable.

97
The entire observable universe is 93 billion
light-years. The Milky Way is in the
center, but it is too small to be seen in this
diagram, above left.

What Is the Shape of the

Universe?

98
Most casual observers would assume
that the cosmos is a space that
expands into infinity, but the answer
is not as simple as gazing into a
starry sky and hazarding a
measurement. Einstein’s theory of
general relativity, when paired with
estimates of the relative amounts of
matter and energy in the cosmos,
allows for only one possible solution
—the universe is infinite.
General relativity requires that the universe
remain the same throughout (homogeneity)
and appear the same in all directions
(isotropy). Therefore, the shape of the
universe is the result of the push and pull
of gravity and dark energy. This may
sound familiar. The same characteristics
determine the universe’s three possible
fates: the Big Crunch, the Big Rip, and the
Big Chill.
Just as a universe with an energy

99
density less than its gravitational pull will
eventually collapse in on itself (the Big
Crunch scenario), the same gravity will
overcome dark energy to mold the universe
into a sphere. A spherical universe implies
that there is a finite amount of space (just
as there is a finite amount of surface on a
sphere), that two lines appearing parallel
will eventually converge (just as lines of
longitude on Earth converge as they
approach the poles from the equator), and
that by traveling far enough we can return
to our original position.
Conversely, a universe with an energy
density greater than its gravitational pull
will exhibit the opposite geometry, better
resembling a saddle than a sphere. In such
a universe, the overwhelming force of dark
energy pulls the universe into an inverted
curve where initially parallel lines will
gradually diverge. Much like the previous
scenario, this universe is still finite.
However, just as cosmologists are fairly
confident that the cosmos will not end its
life in a Big Rip or Big Crunch, they are

100
equally confident that the geometry of the
universe is neither spherical nor saddle-
shaped. When both gravity and dark
energy reach a balance in their effect on
the cosmos, the math implies that the
universe will simply stretch out forever as
an infinite flat plane. In this universe, two
initially parallel lines remain parallel
forever, and we will never be able to return
to our starting point by traveling any
distance in the same direction.
It is worth noting that confidence in this
measurement depends on the correctness of
Einstein’s assumptions about homogeneity
and isotropy as well as the accuracy of the
current understanding of dark matter.
These assumptions underlie the standard
models of cosmology, but should they
prove even marginally inaccurate, we
could be living in a much different
universe indeed.

101
102
Can We Deflect Asteroids?
Will an asteroid hurtling through space
some day crash into Earth and cause
massive damage? The odds are small, but

103
they’re real. Deflecting an incoming
asteroid might seem like the stuff of
science fiction, but scientists say it can be
done—if the asteroid is detected in time.
Given enough prior knowledge, former
U.S. astronaut Ed Lu says, governments
could launch one or more spacecraft into
the threatening asteroid and change its path
enough so that it would miss Earth. These
“kinetic impactors,” Lu says, could even
divert an asteroid the size of the one that
brought down the dinosaurs.
Lu is one of the co-founders of the
B612 Foundation, a non-profit
organization that monitors asteroids and
other Near Earth Objects (NEO) and
studies how to protect Earth from them. Its
goal is to fund the building and launch of a
space telescope named Sentinel. The
telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018,
will map all the asteroids around Earth.
Realizing the threat of an asteroid collision
is real, in 2013 the United Nations called
for the creation of the International
Asteroid Warning Network. The goal is to

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bring together scientific organizations and
nations with active space programs so they
can share knowledge about the asteroid
threat.

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106
Why Is the Milky Way a
Spiral?
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The shape of our galaxy is nothing
special. Among the other clusters of
stars that can be easily observed from
our corner of the universe, a few are
blobby and egg-shaped, but more
than two-thirds are so-called “disc
galaxies” whose stars have settled
into flat orbits, as if traveling along
the surface of a giant vinyl record.
Almost every disc galaxy looks at
least a bit like ours, with stars that
group together into spiral arms.
What causes the spirals? “A galaxy is
constantly bombarded by satellite
galaxies,” says Chris Purcell of West
Virginia University. When one galaxy
passes by or through another, the resulting
forces can send a shock wave throughout
its structure, bunching stars together in
spindly shapes that rotate around the
center. “It’s essentially a vibration that
travels gravitationally throughout the disc,”

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Purcell explains. As a galaxy ages, these
perturbations tend to mount, and the disc
goes from being thin, circular, and
relatively homogeneous to thicker and
more distorted. It’s a natural process, says
Purcell: “These galaxies are not only trying
to turn themselves into spirals; they are
constantly getting banged into by things
that are turning them into spirals.”
The Milky Way would seem to be
somewhat early in the process, as
evidenced by its slender figure. But things
are changing: Several of the other, smaller
galaxies are now (on a cosmological
timescale) bumping up against us. One of
these is the Sagittarius Dwarf. “It turns out
that it’s on the opposite side of the galaxy
from us,” Purcell says, “and so it’s hitting
the disc from underneath.” Purcell’s
simulations suggest that these collisions
could account for the spiral that we see
today.
An even more extreme collision could
be in our future. “We’re on our first in-fall
toward Andromeda,” Purcell warns. “It’s

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going to destroy both discs and turn the
entire system into an elliptical blob.” But
let’s not get ahead of ourselves: That crash
is still more than a billion years off.

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Wrapped up in our own daily trials, it’s
hard to imagine life outside of earth, let
alone in an alternative universe. But
according to some scientists, there may be
an infinite number of alternative universes,
also called multiverses, and finding them is
not only possible, but probable.

Will We Find Other

Universes?
There are several theories of the
multiverse. One comes from the “many
worlds” interpretation of quantum physics
by Hugh Everett. In 1955, over a bottle of
sherry while a student at Princeton
University, Everett considered the

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implications of quantum physics. At the
elementary level (protons and electrons),
each particle exists in a superposition of
different locations, velocities, and
orientations of its spin, but when measured
by scientists there is a definitive result.
Somehow our unique world emerges in a
system that has a multitude of possibilities
at the quantum, or nanoscopic, level. In
this theory, every possible outcome in the
universe exists simultaneously in other
universes. For example, if you shoot a
basketball and miss, there is a parallel
reality in which your basketball slides right
through the net. This alternative universe
doesn’t occupy a physical space, but is
instead a co-existing, abstract reality.
However, for many physicists,
understanding and proving this alternative
reality is too far afield.
Another type of multiverse is
conceivable through a theory called
inflation. In the first moments after the Big
Bang, the universe expanded
exponentially, traveling faster than the

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speed of light. Some theorists suggest that
random quantum fluctuations in the early
universe caused this inflation to stop in
some regions but not in others. In places
where inflation stopped, pocket universes
formed, where atoms, stars, and even
planets could assemble. Our universe may
even be one of the myriad of pocket
universes. Recently, this theory gained
momentum as physicists behind the Bicep2
telescope in Antarctica found ripples in the
space-time fabric of the cosmos called
gravitational waves. The unique pattern in
the sky reinforced the inflation theory.
But traveling to one of these alternate
universes may be impossible. Each pocket
universe would exist as a bubble, with its
own laws of physics. The bubbles are
connected, but in between them, eternal
inflation is still stretching space-time faster
than the speed of light. Even if we could
somehow travel faster than light, the
journey would be rough. As Anthony
Aguirre, a physicist at the University of
California at Santa Cruz, explains, “You

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also have to survive the inflation in
between that would want to inflate every
atom in your body. It’s not very practical.”

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115
Could We Live on Mars?
What happens when the human
population outpaces the resources of
our planet? Many people wonder if

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moving humankind to another planet
is possible. Scientists agree that of all
the other planets in our solar system,
Mars would be the most habitable.
But that’s not saying much. If the
goal is to create a self-sustaining
Martian world, life will be difficult
and dangerous.
Mars has some similarities to Earth. Its
axial tilt is about the same, so Mars
experiences similar seasons; however, its
orbital eccentricity is much larger, so the
length of the seasons varies and a year lasts
almost twice as long as on Earth. The
length of a day is about the same. The
desert terrain is similar to some regions on
Earth. However, despite these similarities,
Mars is a completely hostile environment.
There is no breathable air and very little air
pressure. Lower gravity presents problems
for prolonged settlement. Temperatures
vary widely: While they may climb as high
as 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees

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Celsius), in some places they drop as low
as minus 225 degrees (-142 degrees
Celsius). The soil is toxic, and radiation
from the Sun is deadly. All this may seem
a little too out-of-this-world, but some
scientists and a few entrepreneurs hope to
make the dream of life on Mars a reality.
Technology will be a major player in a
successful Mars settlement. Residents will
require constant pressurized and heated
environments. Luckily, the planet provides
a few raw materials, such as soil, to make
concrete. Mars is home to several large
caves, which would screen settlers from
radiation. Residents may be able to grow
plants after removing harsh chemicals from
the toxic soil. Water on the fourth planet
from the Sun is available, but the
atmosphere is too thin for liquid water to
exist for long. Instead, water is trapped just
under the surface of the polar regions.
Extracting water would be vital for
drinking, growing food, and producing
oxygen.
Space is opening up to the private

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sector, and a few companies are taking one
small step toward life on Mars. Elon Musk,
the founder of SpaceX, a space exploration
and technology company, aims to build a
colony of 80,000 people. SpaceX
announced plans to put humans on Mars as
early as 2026, 10 years ahead of NASA.
But getting to Mars isn’t as difficult as
landing, surviving on the planet, or even
returning to Earth. Musk told CNBC, “the
thing that matters long term is to have a
self-sustaining city on Mars, to make life
multiplanetary,” indicating that Mars could
be a refuge in case we outgrow our current
planet. Given Earth’s dwindling resources,
that could be sooner than we think.

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 The shadowy ring in this galaxy cluster,
captured by the Hubble Space Telescope,
is evidence of dark matter, a mysterious
substance that pervades the universe.

What Is Dark Matter Made

Of

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As far back as the 1930s, evidence
for the existence of a “dark matter” in
the universe began to emerge.
Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky measured
the velocities of several galaxies in the
Coma cluster, a group of more than 1,000
identified galaxies, and concluded that
many of them were moving so fast that
they should have escaped the gravitational
pull of the other galaxies. Zwicky, and
other astronomers noticing the same
phenomenon, concluded “that something
we have yet to detect is providing these
galaxies with additional mass, which
generates the extra gravity they need to
stay intact. This “something” is invisible—
hence the nickname “dark matter.”
But exactly what is dark matter, and
what is it made of?
NASA notes that we’re “more certain
what dark matter is not than we are what it
is.” Dark matter does not take the form of
stars and planets we can see, yet it

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constitutes about 27 percent of all the
matter in the universe. It is not made of
baryonic matter, the protons, electrons, and
neutrons that make up regular space matter
such as stars, planets, rocks, and gas
clouds. It does not absorb, emit, or reflect
light—the very reason it is extremely
difficult to see. In fact, we can only infer
its existence based on its gravitational
effects on the motions of galaxies and
stars.
So what is dark matter made of? The
most common view is that dark matter is
composed of weakly interacting massive
particles, or WIMPS. These particles
interact weakly with baryonic matter via
gravity. WIMPS have as much as 100
times the mass of a proton, but their weak
interactions with baryonic matter make
them nearly impossible to see.
Other nonbaryonic candidates include
neutralinos, hypothetical heavy particles;
the smaller neutrinos, subatomic particles
without charge; and photinos, a
hypothetical subatomic particle. Some

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scientists believe that dark matter may be
composed of bodies of baryonic matter that
emit little light and drift through space
unattached to any single solar system.
Because they emit no light, these bodies,
called massive compact halo objects, or
MACHOs, would be difficult to detect.
A clearer understanding of the
composition of dark matter could help
scientists better understand the nature of
our universe—especially, how galaxies
hold together.

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A gamma ray burst is the brightest event in
the universe, theoretically visible from
billions of light-years away.

What Causes Gamma Ray

Bursts
Imagine a single blast of energy
powerful enough to destroy the
equivalent of a thousand Earths in a
second. Explosions of that magnitude
happen in the universe every day,
thanks to gamma ray bursts.
Scientists didn’t know these extreme

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bursts of energy existed until the
1960s, when satellites designed to
monitor nuclear weapons tests on
Earth picked up the phenomenon.
A long the electromagnetic spectrum of
energy—which includes radio waves,
ultraviolet waves, and visible light—
gamma rays are the most powerful. A
gamma ray burst is a focused stream of
energy that can last from just a few
seconds to several minutes. Just one 10-
second burst releases more energy than our
Sun will produce over its 10-billion-year
lifetime. Most bursts occur outside the
Milky Way in galaxies with many massive
stars.
Today scientists have two main theories
to explain what might cause a gamma ray
burst. One idea involves neutron stars. If
two of these massively dense stars orbit
each other and their orbits start to decay
because of gravitational pull, they collide.
That collision creates a black hole. Before

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some of the stars’ matter tumbles into the
black hole, it releases energy that some
scientists think produces a gamma ray
burst.
The second theory gives hypernovas
credit for the bursts. The “death” of a star
with a mass 10 times greater than the Sun’s
creates an explosion called a supernova.
The death of an even more massive star
creates a hypernova explosion. Hypernovas
might cause some gamma ray bursts.
Scientists also consider that both theories
might be accurate: Neutron star collisions
create short bursts, and hypernovas create
longer ones. Or another process the
scientists haven’t considered could explain
all the bursts.
Knowing what causes gamma ray bursts
may not be as important as understanding
how they could affect Earth. In 2014,
astronomers Tsvi Piran and Raul Jimenez
calculated fairly high odds that a past
gamma ray burst caused a mass extinction
of life on Earth. Long-ago bursts might
also explain why humans have not yet

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found life on other planets.

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 Next stop: 11,740,608th floor.
Housewares! Lingerie! Geostationary
orbit!

Is a Space Elevator Possible

New developments in
nanotechnology have scientists

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hopeful that the idea of a space
elevator should no longer be
relegated to the imagination of
futurists and sci-fi authors. In fact,
several organizations, including
NASA and Google X, have recently
investigated this latest vision of
rocket-free space flight.
It is technically possible that we can use
Earth’s own rotation as a means to deliver
people and cargo to orbit. By constructing
a tether 60,000 to 90,000 miles (96,000 km
to 145,000 km)long, with a counterweight
at one end and the other anchored to a
point along the equator, we could
theoretically use Earth’s approximately
1,000 miles per hour (1,609 km/h)
rotational velocity to keep the tether
suspended (just as a rope with a rock tied
at one end remains taut as you spin it
around). This tether could then act as a
conduit for sending elevators up and down.
Any cargo released at a high point along

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the elevator would remain in orbit.
While theoretically possible, there are
several problems with this approach. The
biggest is tensile strength: A long enough
cable will break under its own weight.
Steel cables falter under their own weight
at about 15 miles (24 km); Kevlar can hold
up at about 10 times that length, but still
well short of the 60,000 miles (96,000 km)
required for a space elevator. Materials
engineers are placing their hopes in carbon
nanotubes, tiny carbon structures that,
when woven together, exhibit enormous
tensile strength.
But engineers aren’t yet sure how to
manufacture a nanotube tether (and even if
they could, it’s not clear that it would be
strong enough to support a space elevator).
If they can build a strong enough tether,
engineers will still need to overcome
additional barriers, including how to avoid
meteorites, space junk, and the inevitable
swaying that will occur as a craft inches up
the tether and drags against Earth’s natural
rotation.

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 Despite the barriers, the potential of a
space elevator remains alluring. Sending a
payload into orbit is currently an expensive
and inefficient undertaking. If we could do
away with the rocket itself, then
(relatively) cheap exploration of our solar
system could be within our grasp.

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132
How Does Gravity Work?
You probably don’t think about it
regularly, but in the back of your
mind you know that gravity affects

133
your every move. You see it at work
each time you watch the rain fall,
throw a ball into the air, or drop a
pencil. Without this omnipresent,
invisible “force” you would fly off
into space, along with everything else
on Earth. The universe itself would
become a chaotic landscape of
planetary bodies aimlessly hurtling
through space and often colliding.
What is gravity and how does it work? The
answer is simple: We’re not quite sure. To
this day, gravity’s mystery hasn’t been
solved.
In 1687, Isaac Newton described gravity
as a force, claiming that any two objects in
the universe exert a force of attraction
upon each other. The Sun exerts gravity on
all the planets, keeping them in orbit.
Similarly, the planets exert gravity on the
Sun and on all the other planets as well.
The strength of these relationships is
determined by the mass of the objects and

134
the distance between them. The greater the
mass of the two objects and the closer the
objects are to each other, the stronger the
pull of gravity.
For more than 200 years, Newton’s
theory of gravity went unchallenged. Then
enter Albert Einstein. In early 1915,
Einstein, in his groundbreaking general
theory of relativity, explained that gravity
is a curvature in the space-time continuum,
or the “shape” of space-time. The mass of
an object, Einstein claimed, causes the
space around it to bend, or curve.
To understand the phenomenon,
imagine a heavy ball sitting on a rubber
sheet. The area occupied by the ball sags,
or becomes distorted, due to the mass of
the ball. Other smaller balls on the sheet
roll in toward the heavier object because
the heavy ball warps the sheet. According
to Einstein, celestial bodies are not feeling
the force of gravity, but rather following
the natural curvature of time-space.
A recent alternative hypothesis to
Einstein’s theory of gravity states that

135
particles called gravitons, emitted by Earth,
cause a gravitational force between objects.
But gravitons have never been observed
and, to date, remain hypothetical. Yet
another idea holds that gravity is the result
of gravitational waves, generated by an
interaction between two or more masses,
such as the merge of two galaxies or the
orbit of two black holes. Like gravitons,
however, gravitational waves have never
been detected.
And so the great mystery of gravity
remains unsolved. And without
discovering its secret, humankind may
never truly comprehend how the universe
works.

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 As for many of us here on earth, the life
span and ultimate fate of a star depends
largely on its mass. The heaviest of stars
go out with a bang. We call this bang a
“supernova.”

How Do Stars Explode?

Supernovas can occur in one of two

137
ways: through a process of runaway
nuclear fusion or through a rapid
collapse of the star’s core.
The first process occurs in binary star
systems where at least one star is a white
dwarf, a dense, aging star that can no
longer support nuclear fusion. The second
star can be another white dwarf, a red
giant, or a main sequence star such as our
own Sun, that fuses hydrogen atoms to
form helium atoms at its core. In either
case, the white dwarf siphons off (or
collides with) the mass of its companion
star, reigniting nuclear fusion. Once the
white dwarf reignites, it gets so hot so fast
that it blows apart, outshining an entire
galaxy and leaving no remnant behind.
Less luminous, though no less
spectacular, are core collapse supernovas.
Instead of exploding in a runaway fusion
reaction, this type of supernova occurs
when the star’s fusion reaction grinds to a
halt. For most of a star’s life, it burns by

138
fusing hydrogen atoms. This is the same
process that ignites thermonuclear
weapons. Eventually, the star converts
most of its hydrogen into helium. The star
then must fuel itself by fusing helium into
carbon. If the star is heavy enough—about
eight times the mass of the Sun—it will
then proceed to fuse carbon into neon and
helium. The star continues to fuse heavier
and heavier elements until it reaches the
iron phase.
It’s during the iron phase that things get
really heavy. Fusing iron does not produce
more energy—in fact, iron fusion requires
energy. Without the fusion pressure that
counteracted the star’s gravity, the core of
the star, which is approximately the size of
Earth, collapses into a space less than 10
miles (16 km) in diameter at about one-
quarter light speed. When the stellar mass
bounces back into space (crashing into the
outer shell of the doomed star), the
resultant shock wave is what we on Earth
witness as a supernova.
Upon going supernova, the star may tear

139
itself apart entirely or leave behind an
extremely dense neutron star. If the core of
the star is heavy enough, the supernova
leaves behind one of the most mysterious
objects in the known universe: a black
hole.

140
In the night skies above a certain latitude,
stargazers see an awesome display of
shimmering colored lights known as the
Aurora Borealis. Nations bordering the
arctic ocean get the best show, while the
southern regions of the Southern
Hemisphere get a similar display, named
the Aurora Australis.

141
What Causes the Aurora
Borealis
The aurora appears as a curtain, an arc or a
spiral, usually following the lines of
Earth’s magnetic field. Most displays are
green, but strong occurrences can be red,
violet, and white. For most of human
history, the colors were a source of
mystery. Northern cultures created legends
about the lights, often associating them
with life after death. The Inuit believed the
spirits of their ancestors were dancing
across the sky, and in Norse mythology,
the aurora was a bridge of fire connecting
the gods to the heavens. But by the 1880s,
scientists suspected a connection between
the northern lights, as they are also known,
and the Sun.
The temperature above the surface of
the Sun is millions of degrees Celsius,
causing frequent and violent collisions
among gas molecules. Electrons and
protons thrown free by the collisions hurtle

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outward from the Sun’s rotation and escape
through holes in the magnetic field. Solar
wind carries the charged particles, most of
which deflect off Earth’s magnetic field.
However, near the North and South Pole,
the magnetic field is weaker, allowing
some particles to enter the atmosphere.
When the charged particles from the Sun
strike the atoms and molecules in Earth’s
atmosphere, they excite those atoms. An
excited atom is one whose electrons move
to high-energy orbits, and in the process
the atom releases a particle of light, or
photon. Different gases in the atmosphere
give off light of different colors. Oxygen
causes a green display and nitrogen
produces red or blue colors. We perceive
the collisions between solar particles and
atmosphere gases as the northern lights.
Many tourists trek to the northern and
southern poles of Earth to catch a glimpse
of the auroras, now considered one of the
seven wonders of the natural world. And
even though science can explain the once-
mysterious phenomenon, the dazzling

143
display of lights still provokes magical
thoughts of dancing ancestors and bridges
to the world beyond.

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Star Trek fans will be happy to hear that a
holodeck is not that far away from reality.

Is a Holodeck Possible?
The fictional simulator located on starships
and starbases gave the Starfleet crew
entertainment, a training mechanism, and a
way to investigate mysteries. In the science
fiction realm, the holodeck was a room
equipped with a hologrid containing
multidirectional holographic diodes, using

145
photons and force fields to create a realistic
environment. In an otherwise empty room,
“solid” props and characters interacted
with a holographic background capable of
creating any scenario possible. Science has
a different name—“tele-immersion”—for
Star Trek’s holodeck. The technology for
this interactive virtual world is closer than
you might think.
Some scientists and researchers think
we will have holodecks as early as 2024.
While the technology exists to create one
already, it would be crude compared to the
one on Star Trek. Taking the science
fiction genre out of the equation, holodecks
are simply an attempt by Hollywood and
video game makers to move entertainment
closer to reality. Instead of slouching on a
couch during a movie or getting a thumb
workout during a session of Halo, a player
can maneuver a battle site while interacting
with actors or run around the bases after
hitting a grand slam at a New York
Yankees game.
Many of the difficulties of creating a

146
holodeck have already been solved. For
example, the U.S. Army has created a floor
called an “omnidirectional treadmill” that
allows users to walk around a room
without running into walls. Microsoft is at
the forefront of this technology, filing
several patents for holodecks. The
IllumiRoom, a Microsoft project, can
manipulate surroundings and make
furniture disappear. Lightspace is a digital
chandelier by Microsoft that can detect
people and objects in a room and display
images from the ceiling that cover the
walls and floor. And in 2014, scientists at
the University of Illinois created CAVE2,
which uses 8-foot-(2.4-m)-high screens
that cover 320 degrees of a room and can
model global weather patterns, study the
effects of drugs, and help doctors practice
surgery.
Researchers have already created a 3-D
reality. The difficulty is creating a realistic
interactive reality, where a participant can
shake the hand of a coworker thousands of
miles away or hit a home run that feels

147
exactly like the real-life alternative. If
science does master the holodeck, there
may be significant changes in how we
function. TVs, even flat-screen, HD, and
“smart” devices, may become obsolete as
people opt for a real-world experience.
Business travel could decline if holodecks
become less expensive than airplane flights
and hotels. In fact, many people may opt
never to leave the house again since any
experience they desire can virtually drop
into their living room.

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 While several planets in earth’s galaxy
have rings, none are as large and
impressive as the rings of Saturn.

How Did Saturn Get Its

Rings?
Scientists have identified seven major
rings, named for the first seven letters of
the alphabet, which are made up of many
more, thinner “ringlets.” Although they
appear solid from a distance, each ring is
actually composed of individual bits of ice
along with dust and fragments of space

149
rock. These particles range in size from a
tiny speck to perhaps as much as one half-
mile (0.8 km) wide. The space objects that
form the rings whiz around the planet at
high speeds—up to thousands of miles per
hour.
How Saturn got its rings is still open to
debate. The NASA spacecraft Cassini,
which reached Saturn in 2004, could
provide answers. Cassini’s research
suggests that the outer E Ring is formed, in
large part, from pieces of ice that break off
from Enceladus, one of Saturn’s known 53
moons. Closer to the planet’s surface, some
rings seem to be formed by particles that
break off other moons when small
meteoroids collide with them.
Several theories that explain how some
rings formed rest on the Roche limit, which
is based on a calculation first made by the
19th-century French astronomer Edouard
Roche. In simple terms, the Roche limit
means gravity will cause a satellite orbiting
a planet to break apart if it approaches
within a certain distance of the planet. The

150
rings may be pieces of the material used to
form Saturn’s moon. It’s possible some of
the matter may have traveled within the
Roche limit, the small pieces coming
together in ring form. Alternatively, a
small moon might have drifted within the
Roche limit and Saturn’s gravitational
force pulled it apart, creating space debris
that formed a ring.
The Cassini mission will last until at
least September 2017. Scientists hope the
spacecraft will provide more answers about
Saturn and its rings.

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An artist’s drawing of gamma rays hitting
earth’s atmosphere, where they would
eventually deplete the ozone layer,
allowing in ultra-violet radiation from the
sun. This effect would damage small life-
forms, disrupt the food chain and possibly
bring about mass extinction.

Could a Supernova Wipe

152
Out Life on Earth
A supernova is a stellar explosion.
Incredibly strong, a typical supernova
can outshine an entire galaxy at its
peak, ejecting a Sun’s worth of stellar
mass at a significant fraction of the
speed of light within seconds.
And here’s the harsh reality: A supernova,
if it were close enough, could certainly
spell the end of civilization and, perhaps,
wipe out all life on Earth. As heavy
radioactive elements in the ejected matter
decayed, they would produce gamma rays.
These gamma rays would be powerful
enough to convert our ozone layer into
nitrogen oxides and pure nitrogen, neither
of which would protect us from the
radiation of space.
The bombardment of solar and cosmic
rays would destroy key parts of the
ecosystem, especially plankton and coral
reefs. With the collapse of these systems,

153
the oceanic biome would likely collapse,
leading to a mass extinction that would
vibrate across the food chain. Given long
enough exposure, the bombardment of
cosmic and solar rays would threaten and,
eventually, wipe out surface life—
including humankind—everywhere. If any
life survived, it would likely be microbes
hiding deep inside Earth’s crust.
As scary as this scenario is, it is also
extremely unlikely. In cosmic terms, that
supernova would have to be awfully close
to cause any real damage. Powerful, Type
Ia supernovas dim significantly beyond 75
light-years, and less powerful Type II
supernovas are unlikely to cause
significant damage at a distance greater
than 25 light-years. Thankfully, there are
no stars close enough and massive enough
to go supernova. The nearest candidate is
IK Pegasi, safely 150 light-years away
(and creeping even further away from us).
Luckily for us, of the 200 to 400 million
stars in the Milky Way, an average of three
go supernova every century. This isn’t

154
something we have to worry about any
time soon.

155
CHAPTER 3

Human Body

156
Charles Darwin called blushing “the most
peculiar and most human of all
expressions.” To the average person,
blushing only serves to make an
embarrassing situation even more
unpleasant. To scientists, however,
blushing from embarrassment is a unique
physiological and emotional phenomenon.

Why Do We Blush?
We understand the chemistry, the physical
process, of blushing, butwe blush remains
an elusive mystery to researchers. The

157
physiology of blushing is quite simple.
When you’re embarrassed, your adrenal
glands and certain neurons of the central
nervous system release the hormone
adrenaline. The general effect of adrenaline
is to prepare the body for the “fight or
flight” response: increasing heart rate and
blood pressure, enlarging the pupil of the
eye, and increasing blood flow and oxygen
to the muscles, among other consequences.
When you experience the stress of
embarrassment, adrenaline causes the veins
in your face to dilate, or widen, allowing
more blood to flow through them. The
increased presence of blood in your face
makes your cheeks feel warm and creates
the reddened look that signals to others
you’re embarrassed.
Blushing triggered by embarrassment is
a one-of-a-kind phenomenon: It is
exclusive to humans, and it does not
happen anywhere else in your body. Why
is this reaction so specific? Why have
humans developed this unique response to
embarrassment?

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 Science does not yet have all the
answers, but recent studies suggest that
blushing serves a functional purpose,
having evolved as a means of establishing
social relationships. In a study conducted
in 2009, a team of Dutch psychologists led
by Corine Kijk, Peter de Jong, and
Madelon Peters discovered that blushing
“serves to signal the actor’s genuine regret
or remorse over a wrongdoing.” In effect,
blushing functions as a nonverbal “I’m
sorry” for committing an embarrassing act
or breaching a societal norm. It thereby
mitigates “the negative social impression
that was caused by the infraction.”
According to the researchers, your
blushing makes others perceive you have
acknowledged your blunder and learned
from your mistake.
The Dutch study concluded with some
helpful advice: “Our results showed that in
the context of transgressions and mishaps,
blushing is a helpful bodily signal with
face-saving properties. It seems therefore
unwise to hide the blush or to try not to

159
blush in these types of contexts.”

160
What is the Evolutionary
Purpose of Tickling?
You probably know that you can’t
tickle yourself. And although you
might be able to tickle a total
stranger, your brain strongly
discourages you from doing
something so socially awkward.

161
These facts offer insight into tickling’s
evolutionary purpose, says Robert R.
Provine, a neuroscientist at the University
of Maryland and the author of the book.
Tickling, he says, is a mechanism for
social bonding between close companions,
helping to forge relationships between
family members and friends.
Laughter in response to tickling kicks in
during the first few months of life. “It’s
one of the first forms of communication
between babies and their caregivers,”
Provine says. Parents learn to tickle a baby
only as long as she laughs in response.
When the baby starts fussing instead, they
stop. The face-to-face activity also opens
the door for other interactions.
Children enthusiastically tickle each
other, which some scientists say not only
inspires peer bonding but also might hone
reflexes and self-defense skills. In 1984,
psychiatrist Donald Black of the University
of Iowa noted that many ticklish parts of
the body, such as the neck and the ribs, are
also the most vulnerable in combat. He

162
inferred that children learn to protect those
parts during tickle fights, a relatively safe
activity.
Tickling while horsing around also may
have given rise to laughter itself. “The ‘ha
ha’ of human laughter almost certainly
evolved from the ‘pant pant’ of rough-and-
tumble human play,” says Provine, who
bases that conclusion on observations of
panting in apes that tickle each other, such
as chimpanzees and orangutans. In
adulthood, our response to tickling trails
off around the age of 40. At that point, the
fun stops; for reasons unknown, tickling
seems to be mainly for the young.

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Why Do We Yawn?
We all do it, and even some animals
as well, when we’re ready to go to
sleep and sometimes when we awake.
We do it when we’re bored, and we
might do it under stress. We can even
catch it from another person, but as
common as yawning is, scientists
have struggled to explain why we
yawn. Recent research suggests some
possible explanations.

164
One theory among chasmologists—
scientists who study yawning—is that the
act is a form of social behavior. Contagious
yawns are quite common—about half the
people who see or hear a yawn will yawn
too. Christian Hess of the University of
Bern in Switzerland thinks the easy spread
of yawns helped early humans learn to
synchronize their desire to go to sleep and
awake at the same time, allowing them to
coordinate their daily activities.
Maryland psychologist Robert Provine
is one chasmologist who thinks a yawn
stirs up our brains. So when we’re sleepy, a
yawn wakes us up, and if we need mental
sharpness to deal with stress, the yawn
provides it. As part of this theory, the yawn
could be stimulating the flow of
cerebrospinal fluid, which clears out
chemicals in the brain that make us sleepy.
The brain-stimulating yawn also has a
social component: Provine says a
contagious yawn spawned by stress could
signal members of a group to prepare for
danger.

165
 Instead of synchronizing bedtimes or
sweeping out unwanted chemicals, a yawn
could regulate temperature. That’s the
theory of Andrew Gallup, a psychologist at
the State University of New York at
Oneonta. Basically, he says, “We yawn to
cool our brains.” Yawning increases the
flow of blood to the brain, forcing out
warm blood that has gathered there.
Simultaneously, the yawn brings cooling
air into the body through the mouth and
nose. A typical yawn, Gallup said, can
lower the temperature in the brain by 0.2
degrees Fahrenheit. A string of yawns can
lower it by half a degree more.
Working off this theory, Gallup and
some scientists in Vienna tested the
incidence of contagious yawning at
different temperatures. Their results
suggested that contagious yawning most
often takes place when the outside
temperature is in a “thermal window” of
around 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees
Celsius). Yawning decreases when the
outside temperature and body temperature

166
are close, or when it’s cold outside.

167
 The number of school-age children with
peanut allergies has doubled in the past
decade. Yet scientists have not identified
what makes the legume such a threat or
why the allergy has become so prevalent.

Why Are Peanut Allergies

on the Rise?
Typically, the immune system treats
peanuts as safe, but some scientists believe

168
that early and heavy exposure to peanut-
laden products might cause the immune
system to misidentify them as dangerous.
This theory is strengthened by the fact that
8 out of 10 allergic kids have a reaction the
first time they eat a peanut, indicating a
previous indirect exposure, possibly even
in the womb or through breast milk.
Theories about peanut allergies abound
and most involve an overactive immune
system. “We have done such a good job of
eliminating the threats that the immune
system is supposed to manage that it’s
looking for something to do,” says Anne
Muñoz-Furlong, former CEO of the
nonprofit Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis
Network. Parents today feed their kids a lot
of ready-made snacks, many of which
contain peanuts or their derivatives.
“We’re bombarding the immune system
with these [food-based] allergens, so it’s
attacking those instead.” Indeed, food
allergies in general are on the rise.
But peanuts seem to trigger especially
violent immune reactions. This might be

169
because they contain several proteins not
found in most other foods, posits Robert
Wood, an allergy specialist at Johns
Hopkins University, and the structure of
these proteins can stimulate a strong
immune response. Research suggests that
roasting peanuts, as American companies
do, might alter the proteins’ shape, making
them an even bigger target. Allergy rates
are lower in China, where it’s customary to
boil peanuts, which damages the proteins
less. (It’s worth noting, though, that China
is also more polluted, so people’s immune
systems might be concentrating on
traditional threats.)
Or maybe it’s all the time indoors.
Children who spend little time outdoors
tend to be deficient in D, Wood says, so
their bodies might mislabel peanut proteins
as dangerous. Parents looking to protect
their kids might consider sending them
outside—and not washing their hands
when they come home.

170
 Do you ever wonder why you forgot what
you were looking for as soon as you set off
to find something? Or why you can’t recall
the ending of a book you read last year?

What Is a Memory?
Scientists say there could be a reason why
you don’t remember what you ate for

171
breakfast last week but can vividly
describe your first day of kindergarten.
Emotional meaning attached to a memory
makes it stick in a way that everyday
details can’t. But memories aren’t just
about the past. They help us learn and
make decisions about the future.
Neuroscientists do not completely
understand the physical representation of
memories in the brain. Neurons, or brain
cells, communicate with each other
through electrochemical pathways. An
electrical impulse travels down the
outgoing branch called an axon, where it
stimulates fingers known as dendrites at
the end, releasing neurotransmitters. These
tiny molecules send messages that
incoming branches pick up. The space
between these branches is called a synapse.
The reconstruction of a past experience
happens through synchronous firing of
neurons involved in the original
experience. A memory is not a static entity
but a unique pattern of activity that can
shift or migrate between different parts of

172
the brain. It is like a jigsaw puzzle that
assembles throughout various areas of the
brain, rather than a video clip stored as a
whole file. Short-term memories do not
“stick” in the synapse, and long-term
memories might be distorted when they
reassemble.
One of the most important attributes of
memory is our ability to learn. When we
learn or recall information, we use memory
to retrieve the idea we have learned. Every
time you eat, drive a car or read a book,
you are remembering learned traits. New
technology called optogenetics uses light
beams to excite or silence a targeted group
of neurons in the brain, helping scientists
study and perhaps control memories. It
may be possible to open up a pathway to
selectively implant memories or erase
certain memories altogether. For people
with amnesia or severe emotional trauma,
that will be a moment worth remembering.

173
Why Do We Dream?
Dreams remain one of the most
mysterious aspects of the human
experience. Diviners, doctors and
scientists have pondered the
phenomenon of dreaming for
centuries. Despite a plethora of
competing theories that attempt to
explain why we dream, no particular
idea has achieved a consensus among
researchers.

174
The classic exploration of dreams—the
one that pop culture invokes time and time
again—is Freud’s, The Interpretion of
Dreams published in 1899. The founding
psychotherapist believed that dreams are
our mechanism for living out our most
aggressive, carnal desires—the urges that
we’re not allowed to act on in real life—so
that we don’t go insane from repressing
them during the daytime. Though the field
of psychoanalysis has largely moved on
from Freud, our need to ascribe meaning to
our dreams and to master our subconscious
renders the Freudian approach compelling
to this day.
On the other hand, minimalist sleep
researchers propose that dreams are devoid
of any objective meaning. Harvard
psychiatrists J. Allan Hobson and Robert
McCarley generated a firestorm of
controversy in 1977 when they argued that
dreams are nothing but the side effects of
spontaneous activity taking place in the
synapses in the brain stem during sleep. In
other words, our dreams (and the meanings

175
that we ascribe to them) are nothing but
our subjective attempt to reconcile those
mental stimuli.
In between these two extremes are a
slew of theories that frame dreams as
functionally, if not necessarily
psychologically, important. Experiments
show that dreams help subjects solve
problems and puzzles that researchers
posed to them before dream sleep. This
finding jibes with theories that dreaming is
crucial to memory storage, information
processing, and cleaning out the synaptic
garbage that the brain collects as a result of
its normal operation. Other research
indicates that dreams play an important
role in stress relief, a theory supported by a
decrease in stress hormones during dream
sleep.
Psychologist Deirdre Barrett, also of
Harvard, focuses on our least favorite
subset of dreams: nightmares. She claims
that even these unwelcome dreams once
posed the important evolutionary function
of focusing attention on the dangers our

176
ancestors faced in everyday life. All these
functionalist hypotheses suggest that
dreams developed as a function of the
mammalian brain in order to fulfill an
evolutionary purpose. What that purpose is
remains a puzzle. Perhaps we should sleep
on it?

177
Why Do We Laugh?
We hear laughter all the time—from
a giggle to a snicker to a full-blown
belly laugh. Laughter is undoubtedly
a common human behavior, yet it has
vexed scientists for centuries. To this
day, the question “Why do we
laugh?” remains a much-debated
topic.

178
An apparent answer to the question would
be that we laugh when we think something
is funny. In this case, laughter—the
contractions of facial muscles accompanied
by an audible sound ranging from a quiet
titter to a loud cackle—would be the
physiological response to humor. This
might be the answer, but it’s not the full
story. The reasons that we need this
response are more complicated than you’d
think.
As it turns out, studying laughter is no
joking matter, according to Robert R.
Provine, professor of psychology and
neuroscience at the University of
Maryland. Provine, the author of the book,
has conducted numerous studies on mirth.
“Most laughter is not in response to jokes
or humor,” says Provine. Most of it occurs
in ordinary conversations, in which nothing
at all humorous transpires. In one of his
most-publicized studies, Provine observes
that laughs can be elicited by a variety of
non-joke statements such as “Hey, John,
where ya been?” or “How did you do on

179
the test?”
“It is about relationships between
people,” claims Provine. “We don’t decide
to laugh at these moments. Our brain
makes the decision for us. These curious
‘ha ha ha’s’ are bits of the social glue that
bond relationships.”
Provine believes that human laughter
predated human speech by millions of
years. Before speech, laughter was a
primary form of communication.
“Laughter,” says Provine, “evolved from
the panting behavior of our ancient primate
ancestors.” Apes and other animals,
including rats, make “laugh-like” sounds
and high-pitched vocalizations while
playing, but it would be erroneous to
equate them with human laughter.
However, “When we laugh, we’re often
communicating playful intent. So laughter
has a bonding function between individuals
in a group,” says Provine.
While most laughter is a positive
behavior, it can have negative intent.
Pointing out one social function of

180
laughter, Provine cites the difference
between “laughing with” and “laughing at”
someone. “People who laugh at others may
be trying to force them to conform or
casting them out of the group,” he says.
While studies have yet to prove that
laughter is the best medicine or has any
appreciable degree of health benefits, for
that matter, Provine notes, “If we enjoy
laughing, isn’t that reason enough to
laugh? Do you really need a prescription?”

181
Spherical-shaped Staphylococcus bacteria
(shown in purple and yellow) try to escape
destruction by white blood cells in these
colorized scans. Scientists think that this
kind of cell activity might create noise—
but they don’t yet have proof.

Do Cells Make Noise?

You have to listen very, very closely,
but yes, cells produce a symphony of
sounds. Although they won’t win a

182
Grammy anytime soon, the various
audio blips produced by cells give
scientists insight into cellular
biomechanics and could even be used
to help detect cancer.
Researchers at the University of California
at Los Angeles studying brewer’s yeast
discovered that the yeast’s cell walls
vibrate 1,000 times per second. These
motions are too slight and fast to be caught
on video, but when converted into sound,
they create what the scientists describe as a
high-pitched scream. It’s about the same
frequency as two octaves above middle C
on a piano, but it’s not loud enough to hear
with the naked ear. “I think if you listened
to it for too long, you would go mad,” says
biological physicist Andrew Pelling, at the
University of Ottawa. Pelling and Jim
Gimzewski, a professor of biochemistry at
UCLA, theorize that molecular motors that
transport proteins around the yeast cell
cause the walls to vibrate.

183
 It’s a little harder to get sound out of a
human cell than from a yeast cell: So far,
scientists have not observed mammalian
cells that audibly shimmy on their own, at
least in part because animal cells’ wiggly
membranes are less likely to vibrate than
the sturdy cell walls of yeast and plants.
But human cells certainly squeal when
zapped with light, a trait that could be
surprisingly useful for medical science,
particularly cancer research.
When Richard Snook and Peter
Gardner, biologists at the University of
Manchester in England, blasted human
prostate cells with infrared light, their
microphones picked up thousands of
simultaneous notes generated by the cells.
Through statistical analysis of these sounds
—which are created as the cells rapidly
heat up and cool down, causing vibrations
in the air molecules directly above them—
Snook and Gardner can differentiate
between normal and cancerous cells. “The
difference between a healthy cell and a
cancer cell is like listening to two very

184
large orchestras playing their instruments
all at the same time,” Gardner says. “But in
the cancerous orchestra, the tuba is
horribly out of tune.” Gardner is fine-
tuning the technique in hopes of replacing
current, unreliable pre-biopsy prostate-
cancer tests. His ultimate goal is to reduce
the number of prostate biopsies performed,
75 percent of which come back negative.

185
186
Your brain—the 3-pound (1.3-kg) blob of
neurons, chemicals, hormones, water, and
fat sitting in your skull—is the most
complex part of the human body.

187
How Does the Brain Work?
The main functional unit of the brain
is a type of nerve cell called the
neuron, of which the human brain
possesses roughly 100 billion. The
human body contains three types of
neurons, each different in function.
Sensory neurons carry signals from
the outside world into the central
nervous system. Motor neurons carry
signals from the central nervous
system to muscles and glands.
Interneurons form a connection
between other neurons; they are
neither sensory nor motor. Each
sensation, memory, thought, and
movement we experience is the result
of electrochemical signals that pass
through neurons. The ability of our
brain to function is the result of the
24/7 activity of neurons.

188
The human brain consists of the brain
stem, the cerebellum, the cerebrum, and
the limbic system.

The BRAIN STEM contains the medulla,

which regulates heart rate and breathing;
the pons, which links to the cerebellum to
help with movement and posture, as well
as creating a certain level of consciousness
necessary for sleep; and the midbrain,
which helps regulate body movement,
hearing, and vision.

The CEREBELLUM, often called “the

little brain,” allows the body to move
properly, controlling functions such as
posture, balance, and coordination.

The CEREBRUM is the largest part of the

brain, and responsible for most of its
functions. It is divided into four sections:
(1) the frontal lobe, which controls, among
other things, intellect, judgment, creative
thought, problem solving, muscle
movements, smell, and personality; (2) the

189
parietal lobe, which focuses on
comprehension and monitors visual
functions, reading, and tactile sensation;
(3) the temporal lobe, which controls
visual and auditory memories; and (4) the
occipital lobe, which is responsible for
processing visual information. The
cerebrum is split into a left and a right
hemisphere, connected by neurons that
pass information from one side to the
other.

The LIMBIC SYSTEM contains glands

that help relay hormonal responses in the
body. The amygdala is responsible for the
response and memory of emotions,
especially fear. The hippocampus helps
process long-term memory and emotional
responses. The hypothalamus controls
hunger, thirst, and body temperature, while
the thalamus helps control attention span
and monitors information in and out of the
brain to track bodily sensations, such as
pain.
The regions of the brain frequently

190
work independently, but sometimes
different regions work together to perform
a task. For example, several regions in the
brain function cooperatively to allow us to
read. MRI brain scans show that the ability
to sound out printed words is a function of
a part of the parietal lobe, while making
connections with a new word and sound is
associated with the cerebellum and
hippocampus. The ability to read out loud
quickly appears to be a function of several
brain locations.
Despites centuries of scientific study,
however, we are at still at a loss to explain
many of the human brain’s mysteries.
Among the unsolved puzzles scientists are
trying to unravel are the following:
How are memories stored and retrieved?
How do brains make sound predictions
about the world?
What does “intelligence” mean in
biological terms?
Getting a stronger grip on the
functioning of the brain could have
enormous ramifications. According to

191
Norman Weinberger, a neuroscientist at the
University of California, Irvine, “If we
understand the brain, we will understand
both its capacities and its limits for
thought, emotions, reasoning, love, and
every other aspect of human life.”

192
What Is Emotion?
Although feelings of love, hate,
anger, and joy are common responses
for most people, emotions have
always been thought to be subjective
feelings that vary depending on the
person. For example, two people
engaging in an argument will have

193
different levels of response and may
experience different sensations.
Emotions are a difficult field of study
for scientists because their
complexity and uniqueness make
them nearly impossible to measure.
Neuroscientists studying the brain have
narrowed down the areas most active
during an emotional response. Feelings of
happiness and pleasure are linked to the
prefrontal cortex, while anger, fear, and
other negative emotions are linked to the
amygdala. Expressive behavior, such as
smiling or laughing, is the outward sign of
emotion. Most people also have
physiological responses to emotion, such
as turning red, a pounding heart, or
adrenaline release. Different chemicals in
the brain control the level of emotion a
person experiences. At any moment,
dozens of neurotransmitters, or chemical
messengers, travel through individual cells
throughout the entire brain. If a person is in

194
danger, the brain releases stress hormones,
flooding certain regions with adrenaline.
These measurable signs of emotion differ
between individuals, however, again
suggesting that emotion is subjective. But
according to a new study by Cornell
neuroscientist Adam Anderson, that is not
exactly the case. Two people who have a
similar reaction to a sunset share a similar
pattern of activity in the orbitofrontal
cortex, a region of the prefrontal cortex.
“Despite how personal our feelings feel,
the evidence suggests our brains use a
standard code to speak the same emotional
language,” Anderson explains.
Whether emotions are objective or
subjective, scientists are still not entirely
sure why we feel what we feel, or why we
express it in particular ways. Anderson
calls emotions “the last frontier of
neuroscience.” Most people consider
emotions a necessary part of being human.
They add depth to the human experience.
Empathy, in particular, is an important by-
product of emotion. Scientists trace the

195
feeling of empathy to mirror neurons, cells
in the brain that fire when we see someone
else in a situation that we can imagine
ourselves in. People with autism spectrum
disorders have difficulty showing empathy,
and researchers believe that a better
understanding of the physical processes
behind emotion can solve these and other
psychological disorders.

196
197
Is It True That You Use
Only 10 Percent of Your
Brain?
Historians have traced the earliest
reference to this rumor back to the
beginning of the 20th century, when
it was perpetuated by self-help gurus
promising to expand people’s mental
abilities. However, like so many
things hucksters have told us, the
brain claim is false. “There’s no
question,” says Marcus Raichle, a
neurologist and professor of
radiology at Washington University
in St. Louis, “you’re using every little
bit of this thing.”
Even when you’re sleeping or just
watching TV, your brain is burning a
surprising amount of energy for its size.

198
Although your brain constitutes about 2
percent of your body weight, it accounts
for 20 percent of the total energy that your
body consumes.
Scientists know that most of your
brain’s energy is used for basic upkeep and
communication between neurons. The rest,
they speculate, might go toward preparing
the brain to receive information by making
predictions based on past experiences. For
example, instead of scanning your entire
fridge each time you want to grab some
milk, you can reach directly for the shelf
where you last left it—because your brain
is working hard to remind you of its
location and shoot your hand in that
direction. This preprocessing helps you
deal with the enormous amount of detail
you encounter every day.
You can be certain that all of your brain
is working hard, even when you’re not
thinking hard. “We should back away from
the notion that the only thing the brain is
doing is sitting around waiting for
something to happen,” Raichle says.

199
“Every piece of it is running full-tilt all the
time.”

200
What Causes Déjà Vu?
Few of us ever experience significant
supernatural phenomena, but 60 to 80
percent of us do report having the
strange sensation that we’ve already
experienced something that we
consciously we are actually
experiencing for the first time. Like

201
feeling you’ve had the same exact
conversation with someone before.
Or walking into a room you have
never been in before, and sensing that
you’ve been there in the past.
If you’ve ever had feelings such as these,
you’ve experienced déjà vu, the sense of
having experienced something previously,
although it is, in reality, entirely new. Déjà
vu comes from the French term meaning
“already seen.”
The phenomenon of déjà vu is difficult
to study because it occurs only briefly and
without notice, and it fades quickly. In
addition, there is no physical manifestation
of the experience, leaving scientists little to
work with other than self-reported
descriptions. So although researchers have
been studying déjà vu for more than 100
years and theories to explain it abound,
there is no single conclusive explanation
for why it happens or what processes are
involved in its occurrence.

202
 Many modern researchers believe déjà
vu is a memory-based cerebral experience.
The precise interplay of brain functions,
however, remains uncertain. One prevalent
hypothesis, called the cellphone theory, or
divided attention, proposes that a brief
distraction might explain the feeling that
we have experienced something before.
Imagine walking down a street while
chatting with a friend on your cellphone.
Engrossed in your conversation, you pass a
brand-new restaurant for the first time,
your brain subliminally, shallowly
acknowledging the new eatery. Moments
later, when the conversation has ended and
you focus your complete attention on your
surroundings, you become fully conscious
of the restaurant—and are struck with a
feeling of déjà vu. What’s happened? Your
brain, while observant of all your
surroundings, had been working below
conscious awareness, and when you
returned your full attention to the
restaurant, you got the feeling you were
familiar with it. In fact, you were: You just

203
hadn’t been paying attention.
Another hypothesis, the hologram
theory, proposes that some feature in our
environment, such as a sight or a sound
that resembles a distant memory, triggers
the brain to create a complete scene of the
déjà vu experience. As you study a small
portion of a painting you’ve never seen
before, for instance, a distant memory
surfaces from deep within your brain.
According to the hologram theory, this
occurs because memories are stored in a
form like holograms, and with holograms
you need only one fragment in order to see
the full picture. Your brain identifies the
portion of the painting with the past
memory, perhaps a similar painting or a
comparable photograph you’ve seen.
However, instead of remembering that
you’ve seen something similar in the past,
your brain recalls the old memory without
identifying it, leaving you with a sense of
familiarity with the painting—your déjà vu
experience—but no recollection of the
original memory.

204
 Researchers are hopeful that advances
in brain imaging technology will allow us
to better understand how the human brain
works and to pinpoint exactly how the déjà
vu phenomenon occurs.

205
The Y chromosome is small in comparison
to other chromosomes, containing only 27
unique genes as compared to thousands on
others. A result of natural selection, this
indicates that it is stripped down to its
essential purpose.

Is the Y Chromosome
Doomed?
Humans store their genes in 23 pairs
of chromosomes, 22 of which are
identically matched. The 23rd is a
two-sided biological coin—twin Xs

206
mean you’re female; an X and a Y,
male. Chromosome pairs often trade
bits of DNA in a process called
recombination, the purpose of which
is to keep genes functioning properly.
Talk of men’s path toward extinction
began in the late 1990s, when it was
discovered that the human Y chromosome,
which is stumpy compared with the X,
does not share enough genetic material
with the X to practice recombination. Left
without a way to renew damaged genes,
the Y would continue to degrade and
would eventually disappear, geneticists
announced. They slapped an expiration
date on the male half of the species of
sometime in the next 5 to 10 million years.
To get a perspective on this prediction,
scientists looked to our closest genetic
relatives—the chimps. Because humans
and chimpanzees shared a common
ancestor 6 million years ago, geneticist
David Page of the Whitehead Institute for

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Biomedical Research in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, studied how the chimp Y
chromosome and its human Y counterpart
have evolved differently in the intervening
years. What he found surprised him: The
chimp Y chromosome is far more degraded
than the human Y chromosome.
Page and his colleagues speculate that
chimps’ promiscuity—females mate with
multiple partners—has led to enhancement
of the Y genes that produce sperm, to the
detriment of other genes. Among chimps,
“there are sperm wars going on. Each male
is trying to pass his own genes down,” says
Jennifer Hughes, who coauthored the
study. Neglected, the chimp Y
chromosome’s nonreproductive genes have
declined.
The Whitehead Institute scientists think
that although the human Y chromosome
also lost genes at first, in recent eons it has
been relatively stable. The human Y has
eluded the chimp Y’s fate, they suggest,
because humans are largely monogamous.
Human sperm don’t face the same

208
competition as chimps’, so there isn’t as
much pressure on the human Y to produce
good sperm.
Not all geneticists are convinced that
the human Y has stopped deteriorating.
Jenny A. Marshall Graves of the Australian
National University in Canberra, believes
that the Y chromosome’s days are
numbered. “The human Y has been
degenerating since it was born, 300 million
years ago,” she says. And so the
controversy continues. Rest assured,
though; the Y chromosome—and the guys
—will be around for a while.

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Do Men and Women Have
Different Brains?
While it’s not exactly true that men
are from Mars and women from
Venus, scientific evidence shows
they are wired differently.

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Anecdotally speaking, men tend to
gravitate toward math and science
disciplines, while women lean toward
excellence at language.
To study brain connectivity, researchers
use a type of scan called DTI, a technique
that maps the diffusion of water molecules
within brain tissue, tracing fiber pathways
that connect different regions of the brain.
Female brains contain about 9.5 times as
much white matter, the substance that
connects various parts of the brain. The
bridge of nerve tissue that connects the
right and left side of the brain is stronger in
women, perhaps explaining why they are
more equipped for multitasking. Women
activate both the left and right hemispheres
when listening to language. The frontal
area and the temporal area of the cortex are
bigger and better organized, helping
women score better on attention, facial
recognition, and social cognition. Women
are faster and more accurate when

211
identifying emotions and seem better at
controlling them.
In contrast, men tend to focus on a
single issue and excel at it. Studies of male
brains show fewer connections between the
right and left hemispheres. Male brains are
about 10 percent larger than female brains
and contain about 6.5 times more gray
matter, or “thinking matter.” Men appear to
be better at special processing, meaning
that they are more aware of where they sit
on a map (and also that they are less likely
to ask for directions). They rely on the
hippocampus to place where they are,
whereas women tend to rely on landmarks.
But it’s not all good news for the male sex
—men are more susceptible to attention
deficit disorder and lack of impulse
control.
Despite these differences, women and
men still have a lot in common. “All of
these things have overlapping distributions.
There are many women with better-than-
average spatial skills, and men with good
writing skills,” says David Geary,

212
professor of psychological services at the
University of Missouri. Some researchers
argue that exercising one’s brain,
especially at a young age, can enhance
areas of difficulty. Most importantly, while
men and women take different routes, they
perform equally well on broad measures of
cognitive ability.

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Why Do We Sleep?
Catch 40 winks, nod off, hit the hay
—we all sleep, spending roughly
one-third of our lives doing it. Why
humans need to sleep, though, is a
question scientists still haven’t
answered.
What’s obvious is that without sleep, we
lack energy and our thinking process can
become muddled. Sleep deprivation can
also lead to accidents on the road or at
work, various health ailments, decreased

214
sex drive, and symptoms of depression,
among other problems. And while reported
cases of human beings directly dying from
lack of sleep are rare, the physiological
changes that occur from sleep deprivation
can be more detrimental, and possibly
fatal, than going without food.
Over the years, scientists have advanced
several theories about the role sleep plays
in human health. One theory suggests that
sleep, and the conservation of energy that
goes with it, helped humans and other
species evolve. Using less energy for part
of the day lowers the demand for food. For
humans, sleeping at night meant they were
conserving energy during the time when it
would be hardest to find food. Some
scientists see a link between this theory
and one called the adaptive or evolutionary
theory. Early humans saw the value of
staying inactive at night in order to avoid
drawing the attention of nocturnal
predators. This prolonged inactivity
evolved into sleep.
Another explanation for why we sleep is

215
the restorative theory. During sleep, parts
of the body restore themselves—tissues are
repaired, hormones are released, proteins
in brain cells are synthesized.
Neuroscientists talk about the brain’s
plasticity—its ability to modify its internal
structure as it encounters changes in the
environment or the body itself. Sleep
seems to play a role in this plasticity, as
neurons forge new pathways during those
hours, especially in young people. While
asleep, the brain also processes memories
so that they can be drawn upon for future
use. Research suggests that the neural
connections that create memories
strengthen when we sleep.
A more recent theory about the
importance of sleep has called it a
“biological dishwasher.” During sleep, the
brain flushes out waste products that
accumulate there during the day. One of
these substances is adenosine, which is
found in all cells. In the brain it’s created
during neural activity, and as it
accumulates it makes us feel sleepy. When

216
we actually do sleep, the body flushes the
adenosine out of the brain, helping us feel
revived when we wake.
In 2013, this idea of sleep and
biological cleansing received a boost from
research done on mice. Their brain cells
shrank while they slept, creating pathways
for spinal fluid to pass through. The fluid
flowed ten times faster during sleep than
when the mice were awake. The flow of
the spinal fluid helped carry away the
brain’s waste products as well as proteins
that can harm the brain when too many of
them accumulate there.
Today, scientists don’t agree that any
one theory explains why we sleep. They
continue to probe what exactly happens in
the brain when we grab some shut-eye.

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Why Do We Hiccup?
If you’ve ever chugged a carbonated
drink, felt overwhelmed by fear, or
experienced a bloated stomach, you
might have hiccuped soon after.

218
These and other actions and
conditions can trigger hiccups, and
sometimes they start for no clear
reason at all.
Hiccups—singultus in the medical world—
occurs during the breathing process when
the diaphragm breaks out of its normal
rhythm of moving up and down and
suddenly contracts involuntarily. When
this happens, air rushes down the throat
and hits the vocal cords as they shut,
creating the “hic” sound.
Although hiccups are a common
occurrence, they don’t seem to have any
real biological purpose. As to why they
happen, one theory is that the nerves that
control the vocal cords and the diaphragm
get out of whack, for some reason
scientists don’t understand. The
malfunction could result from damage or
irritation to those nerves. From an
evolutionary standpoint, hiccups may have
once been helpful in swallowing food or

219
dislodging a stuck morsel.
Humans start hiccuping very early: A
fetus may hiccup in the womb. Some
scientists think hiccups could help
developing infants prepare for breathing
once they leave the womb. Whatever their
purpose, fetal hiccups are common.
Hiccups be a sign of illness or hurt us
on their own. Although most outbreaks last
for only seconds or minutes, some people
have endured nonstop hiccups for days or
weeks. In those extreme cases, a person
could develop problems with eating,
sleeping, or breathing, and doctors
recommend seeking treatment if hiccups
last more than 48 hours. In 2007, a Florida
teenager made the news when she hiccuped
for more than five weeks straight,
sometimes 50 times per minute. She
couldn’t go to school and had trouble
sleeping, and doctors couldn’t explain what
caused this severe hiccuping bout. The girl
received various medical treatments,
including acupuncture, but it isn’t clear
whether the hiccups responded to the

220
treatment or finally just stopped on their
own.

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Why Aren’t (Most) Humans
Furry?
Ever since Darwin first made
headlines, scientists have been
pondering why humans lost their
natural coats as they evolved from
apes. The theories range from lice to
cannibalism.
The traditional theory—refined by
scientists over the past 40 years—proposes

222
that humans gradually became furless in
order to withstand the brutal heat of the
African savanna or to prevent overheating
while chasing prey.
One alternative idea, put forth in 2003
by evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel of
the University of Reading in England, is
that as humans learned to keep warm by
making clothing and building shelters, they
no longer needed heavy body hair. This
hairlessness prevented parasites, such as
mites and ticks, from sticking to their
bodies. Avoiding parasites led to healthier
humans, Pagel posits, and because there’s
nothing as attractive as a bug-free hominid,
hairlessness became a desirable feature in a
mate, and natural selection drove the
hairier folks into extinction.
In 2006, developmental psychologist
Judith Rich Harris suggested a far more
gruesome mechanism. As humans became
hairless as a result of chance mutations,
they split geographically from their hairy
cousins. Once hairlessness was in style,
any hirsute baby born to a hairless tribe

223
was abandoned. As hairlessness became
the norm, a thick fur coat would have
become so rare that hairy humans would
have been seen as animals and hunted for
food. The days before waxing were savage
indeed.

224
The romantics of the world believe in love
at first sight. Science, however, suggests
that a number of chemicals in the brain, as
well as genetics and background, all shape
the process of falling in love and, perhaps
more importantly, how long love lasts.

What Is the Science Behind

225
Love?
Helen Fisher is a biological anthropologist
at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a
leading researcher of the science behind
love. She divides the process of falling and
staying in love into three stages—each
driven by corresponding hormones that
play a part in directing our actions. First,
humans meet someone who excites them
sexually, with testosterone—in both men
and women—playing a part. Once two
people establish a mutual attraction, they
move on to romantic love, the head-over-
heels stage of a relationship.
Working in the brain at this point is
dopamine, which creates the emotional
high of being in love. At the same time,
other chemicals, including adrenaline,
make the heart pound a little harder when
the beloved is around.
The third stage, sustaining a loving
relationship, is possible, in part, because of
oxytocin. Scientists have studied the role

226
this hormone plays in creating a bond
between a mother and her child. Oxytocin
also helps build the bonds of attachment
between partners. Studies done by Beate
Ditzen at the University of Zurich indicate
that the hormone makes lovers more able
to express their feelings and be supportive
of each other. Oxytocin also reduces
cortisol, a hormone that stimulates stress.
Genes may play a part in how receptive
someone is to the power of oxytocin.
Once we find the right person, our body
responds in particular ways. Couples with
successful, lasting relationships show
fewer signs of stress (measured by the
fight-or-flight syndrome scale) when
they’re conversing, while couples facing
rocky times show signs of stress even
when talking about mundane things. This
increased stress between partners can
affect their immune and endocrine systems,
raising the risk of disease.
Despite these findings, Fisher believes
that biology alone does not determine
whom we fall in love with and whether the

227
relationship lasts: “your culture, your
background, and…your upbringing” also
play a role. But below the surface of our
thoughts, biology does indeed operate in
shaping our love lives.

228
229
230
Why Does Sunlight Make
Some People Sneeze?
Gesundheit! You step out into bright
sunshine after spending a couple of
hours in a dark movie theater and
immediately experience a sneezing
fit. Does this happen to you often?
Does it happen to your children?
The Sun induces sneezing in 10 percent of
the U.S. population, says Louis J. Ptácek, a
neurologist at the Howard Hughes Medical
Institute in Maryland and a professor at the
University of California at San Francisco.
Just how and why this happens, though,
has remained a mystery ever since
Aristotle raised the question some 2,300
years ago.
Research suggests that the photic sneeze
reflex, or PSR, is inherited, but scientists
have yet to pinpoint the gene or genes
responsible. “There’s precious little known

231
about PSR, and part of that is because it’s
not a disease,” Ptácek says. “No one dies
from it.”
One theory is that the gene involved—
whatever it is—crosses wires in the brains
of those with PSR. For these people, light
entering their eyes activates their brain’s
visual cortex but also stimulates the motor
region that causes the diaphragm to quickly
contract, forcing a sharp burst of air out
through the nose.
Although Sun-triggered sneezing is
more of a quirk than a serious condition,
Ptácek says, understanding the science
behind it could shed light on the
underlying biology of other reflex
phenomena, such as certain types of
epilepsy.

232
The question “what is consciousness?” Is
really two questions: why are we awake
and aware, and how does a physical
network of electrical impulses give rise to
our subjective experiences?

What Is Consciousness?
Perhaps not surprisingly, neither scientist
nor philosopher has developed a
convincing answer to either question
beyond Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum” (I

233
think, therefore I am).
In the 1970s, Tulane University
biopsychologist Gordon Gallup developed
the “mirror test” of self-recognition. If a
person or creature recognizes a red dot on
his or her forehead in the mirror, the test
presumes that the subject is conscious. The
mirror test grew out of a modern
interpretation of Descartes’ maxim that
knowledge of self implies consciousness.
Yet it remains unclear why some
animals (e.g., humans, primates, dolphins,
magpies) pass the test and most others
don’t. Researchers generally believe that
there are specific brain centers that are
crucial to awakening and that there is
probably something about the complexity
of the network of electrical connections in
the brain that gives rise to consciousness.
How exactly one leads to the other remains
a mystery.
Trying to distill the subjective human
experience from individual parts of the
brain has proven an even more futile
undertaking. Adherents of a field called

234
“integrated information theory” argue that
some systems are too complex to be
understood by breaking them into their
constituent parts, and certainly the brain is
the most complex biological system known
to mankind. This theory gets us closer to
understanding why conventional
approaches can’t explain consciousness,
but doesn’t go as far as to explain how
consciousness should arise out of complex
network effects.
With the failure of classical physics to
provide an explanation for consciousness,
physicists have proposed that the mind
may arise via quantum mechanical
processes. (Quantum mechanics is the
study of relationships between subatomic
particles.) Some interpretations of quantum
mechanics imply that the world only takes
the order it does when observed by a
conscious individual. Conversely, the
resolution of the random, quantum
universe within very small structures in the
brain may itself trigger consciousness.
However, if these structures do exist,

235
scientists have yet to discover them.
If the search for consciousness seems
hopeless at this point, there may be good
reason. University of Miami philosopher
Colin McGinn believes that the mind is
fundamentally incapable of understanding
itself. If true, consciousness will forever
remain the ultimate science mystery.

236
Can the Food You Eat Affect
Your Descendants’ Genes?
A recent study suggests that the same
vitamins in spinach that perform
instant wonders for Popeye’s biceps
might pack longer-lasting effects,
such as dictating the hair color and
health of future generations. Your
lunch order could make a bigger
difference than you think.
A 2006 study led by David Martin, an
oncologist at the Children’s Hospital
Oakland Research Institute in California,
tested whether a mouse’s diet alone can

237
affect its descendants. The researchers fed
meals high in minerals and vitamins—such
as B12, which fortifies leafy greens—to
pregnant mice that have a gene that makes
their fur blond and also increases the
likelihood that they will grow obese and
develop diabetes and cancer. On the new
diet, the mice produced brown-haired
offspring that were less vulnerable to
disease. Even when the second-generation
mice were denied the supplements, their
offspring retained the improved health and
still grew dark fur coats.
Martin’s study isn’t the first to note this
type of generation-spanning phenomenon.
In 2002, Swedish researchers digging
through century-old records determined
that a man’s diet at the onset of puberty
affected his grandson’s vulnerability to
diabetes. The study tracked 303 men, and
those with an abundant supply of food
were four times as likely to have
grandchildren die of diabetes. Though far
from exhaustive, the study indicated that
genes are more susceptible to outside

238
forces than has been commonly believed.
But don’t start your teenager on that all-
spinach diet just yet—scientists warn that
the influence of diet on human gene
expression is not fully understood.
Nevertheless, Martin says, “The general
implication for human health is an obvious
one: An external agent can have an effect
for a very long time. Given how long
human generations last, the environmental
exposures experienced by a pregnant
mother can still have an effect 100 years
later.”

239
Are Telomeres the Key to
Immortality?
Thanks to recent breakthroughs in
genetics research, we may be on the
verge of discovering a fountain of
youth in our own genetic material.

240
In 2009, three researchers—Elizabeth
Blackburn of the University of California,
San Francisco, Carol Greider of Johns
Hopkins University, and Jack Szostak of
Massachusetts General Hospital—won the
Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work
linking the aging process to telomeres.
Telomeres are clusters of DNA that cap the
chromosomes of complex organisms,
protecting the rest of the genetic code
during cell division. As cells age, these
caps grow smaller, exposing the DNA to
breaks and mutations that can lead to
cancer or cell death.
These discoveries hint at a connection
between telomeres and the broader aging
process. People of an advanced age do tend
to have cells with shorter telomeres when
that cell is of a type that replicates
frequently. Analysis of the white blood
cells of Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper, a
Dutch woman who lived to the age of 115,
revealed extremely short telomeres on such
cells compared with cells that divide
infrequently (such as nerve cells).

241
Similarly, patients who suffer from
accelerated aging diseases have also been
shown to possess much shorter telomeres
than unaffected individuals of a similar
age.
So can we prevent or even reverse aging
by preserving our telomeres? Maybe.
While early results indicate a correlation
between shorter telomeres and aging, this
does not by itself imply a causal
relationship. It could be that the two
processes simply coincide or even that
aging itself is what causes telomeres to
shrink. And even if the relationship is
causal and significant, how do we take
advantage of this fact? Gene therapy is still
in its infancy. Worse still, telomerase, the
enzyme that inhibits the decay of
telomeres, is also present in 90 percent of
cancerous cells; by preventing cell death,
we may grow malignant tumors.
It’s worth considering that this
relationship serves a purpose. Our genetic
code may have evolved to encourage cells
to die in order that they might not grow

242
into cancer. If there is indeed a fountain of
youth, it may behoove us to blaze a
different path on our way there.

243
Why Do We Have an
Appendix?
For decades, scientists have thought
that the appendix no longer serves a
purpose for the human body. That
notion came in part from Charles

244
Darwin. He theorized that the
appendix and a section of the small
intestine it’s attached to, the caecum,
once played a role in digestion for
our ancestors.
The caecum was where intestinal bacteria
used to digest leaves were found. But,
according to Darwin’s thinking, as humans
evolved and began eating more fruit, which
was easier to digest, the caecum shrank,
and the appendix was no longer necessary.
Recent research, however, suggests the
appendix is still important. In 2007,
scientists at Duke University Medical
Center said circumstantial evidence
convinced them that the appendix stores
helpful bacteria.
When an infection causing intestinal
stress strikes, diarrhea forces most of the
good bacteria out of the body along with
everything else in the digestive tract. But
some of the good bacteria take refuge in
the appendix. The tissue there is similar to

245
tissue in the lymphatic system, part of the
body’s immune system. While the
intestinal bacteria hide out in the appendix,
the lymphatic system protects them from
the illness ravaging the body. When the
illness is over, the bacteria go back into the
intestinal system to repopulate it with
helpful bacteria.
This role for the appendix might be
more important in parts of the world where
sanitation is suspect and diarrhea common.
Duke University Medical Center professor
William Parker, who led the 2007 study,
says, “In industrialized societies with
modern medical care and sanitation
practices, the maintenance of a reserve of
beneficial bacteria may not be necessary.
This is consistent with the observation that
removing the appendix in modern societies
has no discernible negative effects.”
Parker has continued to study the
appendix. Among his recent findings:
More mammals have an appendix than
previously thought (50 out of 361 animals
studied, including rabbits, wombats, and

246
opossums), and the appendix has evolved
at least 32 times among them. What’s still
unsure is, if the appendix plays such an
important role in preserving health, why
don’t even more mammals have one?

247
We’ve heard that everyone’s fingerprints
are unique, and we know that law
enforcement officials often use them to
track down criminals. But why humans
have those prints is still an open question.

Why Do We Have
Fingerprints?
Many scientists once thought fingerprints
help us hold onto objects. From an
evolutionary perspective, getting a better
grip on tools or weapons would have made
life easier for early humans. In 2009, Dr.
Roland Ennos of Manchester University

248
designed an experiment that tested the
gripping power of our fingerprints. He
used a machine equipped with weights to
pull strips of Perspex, a kind of acrylic,
across a subject’s fingertips. The machine
measured the amount of friction created as
the acrylic passed over the tip. In the real
world, a high amount of friction between
two solid objects in contact with each other
would indicate a better grip. In the
experiment, the fingertips created some
friction on the acrylic, but not as much as
Ennos had expected.
Ennos compares our fingerprints to the
tires on a race car. Ridges in the tire reduce
the surface area of the tire in contact with
the road, which reduces friction. The ridges
on fingertips have the same effect. Smooth
skin has more surface area and so more
friction when in contact with an object than
fingerprints do. Where fingerprints might
provide more grip, Ennos suggested, is
when we grab objects with rough surfaces.
The ridges on the fingertip extend into the
object’s depressions and increase the

249
contact area.
At almost the same time Ennos was
doing his research, a team of French
scientists suggested a possibility for why
we have fingerprints. They think
fingerprints help gather information about
objects we touch and send signals about
them to the brain via the nervous system.
In their study, the scientists outfitted one
artificial hand with grooves on its tips to
simulate fingerprints. Another robotic hand
had smooth “skin.” The hand with the
fingerprints was much more sensitive to
different surface textures. According to
Georges Debrègeas, who helped lead the
study, “We believe that fingerprints act
like antennas, amplifying the signal.”
Other theories about the possible role of
fingerprints suggest that they help to divert
water and keep our hands dry or that they
prevent blisters. To support that second
theory, Ennos notes we rarely get blisters
on our fingers or the other parts of the
body with natural ridges, such as the palms
of our hands and the soles of our feet. The

250
ability to pin down what role our
fingerprints actually play could help
scientists develop more lifelike prosthetic
hands.

251
What Happens When You
Die?
Different religions throughout the
world claim to understand what
happens to us after we die. Scientists
are not as certain. They can explain,
of course, what happens in and to our
bodies at the moment of death and
just after.
To doctors, clinical death comes when the
heart goes into cardiac arrest, which can
occur from a variety of causes—from a car
accident to illness. In effect, most of us die
from cardiac arrest. The heart stops
beating, cutting off the flow of blood, and
thus oxygen, to the brain. Next comes
biological death, as the brain, other organs,
and cells stop functioning because of a lack
of oxygen.
Before reaching that point, however, in

252
the window between clinical and biological
death, doctors have been able to start the
heart beating again, thus preventing death,
or irreversible brain damage due to lack of
oxygen. Thanks to research over the past
several decades, doctors can now revive
people whose hearts have stopped beating
for as long as two hours, without any brain
damage.
Sam Parnia, who studies heart
resuscitation at the State University of New
York at Stony Brook, says doctors now
know that some cells, including brain cells,
can function without oxygen for longer
periods than once thought. After cardiac
arrest, Parnia says, people enter a “gray
zone, where death can be reversed.” The
key is chilling the body by about seven
degrees as quickly as possible, so doctors
can begin the resuscitation process.
Parnia’s work has convinced him that
even after cardiac arrest has led the brain to
shutdown, a person’s consciousness can
remain intact for up to several hours,
though in what Parnia calls a hibernated

253
state. That fact could explain the “near-
death experiences” (NDEs) some revived
patients report. But beyond those few
hours, most researchers believe,
consciousness disappears, since, as
scientist Richard Dawkins has said, the
brain creates consciousness. Without a
functioning brain, there can be no
consciousness.
Not all scientists, though, share this
view. Dr. Robert Lanza believes that
quantum physics allows for the possibility
that human consciousness is separate from
the brain, and that consciousness continues
after the body dies. Space and time are not
external realities, he argues, but products
of our consciousness. The world, in reality,
has no space or time, and “death does not
exist in a timeless, spaceless world.”
Whatever religions teach about life after
death, it’s clear science is still trying to
solve the mystery of what happens after we
die. David Wilde, a British research
scientist studying NDEs said in 2014, “We
are still very much in the dark about what

254
happens when you die ….”

255
Is There an Alternative to
DNA?
DNA and RNA are the molecular
blueprints of life. They encode and
pass on genetic information, known
as heredity, and they can adapt over
time, the process known as evolution.
Without heredity and evolution, life
would not exist.

256
Scientists wonder whether these important
traits can occur only through DNA or
RNA, or if other molecules might be able
to perform the exact same tasks.
At the MRC Laboratory of Molecular
Biology in Cambridge, England,
researchers developed chemical methods to
turn DNA and RNA into six alternative
genetic polymers called XNAs—
xenonucleic acids. The process exchanges
the sugar backbone, the deoxyribose and
ribose (the “d” and “r” in DNA and RNA),
for other molecules. The resulting XNA
double helix is more stable than the natural
genetic material. One of the XNAs, a
molecule called anhydrohexitol nucleic
acid, or HNA, is even capable of
undergoing directed evolution. So far, the
artificial material uses conventional DNA
as a foundation, but some scientists hope to
make synthetic organisms from scratch
someday, creating an evolutionary
shortcut.
Artificial XNA will drive research in
medicine and biotechnology while

257
shedding light on the original molecules
that created life billions of years ago.
Alternative DNA can enable scientists to
make new forms of life in the laboratory.
Medicine may benefit since the human
body has not evolved to create enzymes
that break down the foreign XNA
structure. Most importantly, XNA proves
that two fundamental elements of life,
heredity and evolution, are possible using
alternative genetic material and that life is
not completely reliant on RNA and DNA
as previously thought. Some scientists
think we may find evidence of XNA in
extraterrestrial life. However, if you’re
worried about researchers creating
synthetic life using XNA anytime soon,
don’t be. John Chaput, a molecular
biologist at Arizona State University, says,
“That’s possible, but much further down
the road.”

258
Why Do We Age?
Ponce de León sought the fountain of
youth. People today pin their hopes
on diets, supplements, exercise, or
plastic surgery. It’s a fact: Humans
age, and lots of us don’t like how
aging makes us look or feel. But what
if we were able to slow the aging
process?
Scientists call the process of aging
senescence. Why we age, according to
Marquette University professor Sandra
Hunter, is rather simple: “Cell death…

259
eventually leads to systems malfunctioning
and whole body death.” For example,
muscle fibers and nerves connected to
them gradually die, leading to a loss of
strength that begins at age 50 and
continues steadily thereafter.
A deeper question for scientists is, why
do the cells die? They’ve come up with
several theories, and most likely a
combination of them explains the aging
process. One theory rests on oxidative
damage. Normal cell processes release
harmful molecules called oxygen free
radicals. Substances in the body called
antioxidants neutralize some of them, but a
few free radicals escape unscathed and
damage cells. Oxidative damage is linked
to such diseases and conditions as heart
disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s.
Other theories pin cell death on genes,
which limit how often the cells can
replicate. Parts of our chromosomes, called
telomeres, get shorter with each cell
division until they are so short the cell
can’t divide anymore. Like free radicals,

260
shortened telomeres have been linked to a
number of illnesses.
Certain genes might also control the life
span of an entire organism. Research on
worms shows that when scientists mutate
genes related to the aging process, they can
extend a worm’s life to four times its
normal life span. If similar genes exist in
humans and can be changed the same way,
people could live up to 300 years old.
For rats, cutting their calorie intake by
30 percent of what’s considered normal
lengthens their life span. Scientists predict
that similar extreme dieting could have the
same effect on humans. And studies in
humans have shown that diet and exercise
can play a role in lengthening telomeres.
“Metaphysically speaking, we age
because time passes without our having
died,” says Marquette philosophy professor
Susan Foster. “Aging, at least, seems to
beat the alternative.”

261
When Will We Evolve Out
of Our Useless Appendages?
Never. We’re probably permanently
stuck with our pinky toes, tailbone,
and just about all our other
evolutionary holdovers. Wisdom
teeth could eventually go, but
significant changes like losing an
appendage (teeth included) take

262
millions and millions of years—who
knows if humans will even be around
that long? What’s more, most of our
seemingly useless vestiges are
actually helpful.
The coccyx, or tailbone, “is an attachment
point of a number of muscles at the pelvis.
We need it for upright locomotion. It
would be catastrophic if it went away,”
says Kenneth Saladin, an anatomist and
physiologist at Georgia College and State
University. The pinky toe helps us keep
our balance and diffuses impact throughout
the foot when we run.
There are only a handful of truly useless
parts of our body, but these are hanging on,
too. As Saladin puts it, “Since vestiges like
the muscles behind our ears have very little
impact on reproductive success, there’s no
way to select against them.” In other
words, the ability to ear-wiggle doesn’t
interfere with the ability to have kids.
The silliest of all vestiges is the male

263
nipple. “Those don’t have a function,”
Stearns says, “but they won’t disappear,
either.” All embryos, male and female,
begin developing according to the female
body plan. Only around the sixth week of
gestation do the genes on males’ Y
chromosomes kick in. “The developmental
plan has the two nipples there, so you can’t
get rid of them genetically, because that
would mess up the breasts of females.”
And nobody wants that.

264
 A lab technician looks at a petri dish
containing material populated with liver
cells.

How Much of the Human

Body Is Replaceable?
Fans of the old TV shows and saw
scientists revive nearly dead human
beings, bringing them back to life
with high-tech body parts that gave
them extraordinary capabilities.
Today, replacing parts of the human

265
body using state-of-the-art
technology is moving out of the
realm of science fiction and into
reality.
Replacement of body parts means
transplanting organs and tissues from one
person to another or using artificial body
parts. Organs currently transplanted are the
heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, pancreas, and
intestines. Tissues and cells include the
corneas, cartilage, muscles, tendons,
ligaments, skin, and heart valves
(mechanical versions of the valves are also
used).
Artificial limbs and organs can replace
parts throughout the body. Doctors
commonly replace knees and hips, along
with finger, elbow, and shoulder joints.
Cochlear implants are electronic devices
that restore hearing, and researchers are
currently testing a new brain implant that
can help patients who lack functioning
auditory nerves. Prosthetic noses, hands,

266
arms, and legs are available; artificial legs
are among the most sophisticated
prosthetics today, and researchers continue
to improve “bionic” hands with an almost
human sense of touch. One, the bebionic3,
has 14 different grip patterns, including
ones that allow users to pick up a coin or
write with a pen.
The science of developing artificial
body parts is constantly changing. In 2014,
hospitals across the United States tested a
“bioartificial” liver that combines liver
cells and a mechanical device that together
perform liver functions outside the body
while a patient’s diseased liver regenerates
healthy tissue. Researchers in Japan and
elsewhere are developing 3-D printers that
combine stem cells and artificial materials
to custom-make artificial ears. The
Japanese team hopes to also create skin
and bones using this method.
Scientists are also working to grow real
replacement parts in the lab. Doris Taylor
of the Texas Heart Institute is one of the
pioneers in using stem cells to create such

267
body parts as hearts, livers, and kidneys for
transplants. Taylor says, “I absolutely see a
day where you’ll walk into a
manufacturing facility somewhere, and
there will be jars of kidneys, jars of livers,
and jars of lungs, whatever it is you need.”

268
Why Do Amputees Sense a
“Phantom Limb”?

269
Phantom limb syndrome is the
sensation that an amputated limb is
still attached to the body and
functioning normally.
Amputees report feelings of warmth,
coldness, tingling, itchiness, numbness,
cramping or tickling in the missing limb.
An estimated 80 percent of amputees
report phantom pain in their amputated
limb, including shooting, piercing, burning,
or stabbing pain.
What is the exact cause of phantom
limb syndrome? For many years, the
favored theory has been that this condition
is the result of “maladaptive brain
plasticity.” In short, when the brain ceases
to receive signals from a missing body
part, input from another body part, such as
the face according to some research, begins
to dominate that region of the brain. This
“remapping” of the brain has long been
thought to cause the syndrome.
Results of a 2013 study conducted by

270
Oxford University neuroscientist Tamar
Malkin, however, reveal the opposite.
Malkin discovered that victims of phantom
pain have stronger rather than weaker brain
representations of the missing limb, with
no indication of brain remapping. MRI
scans of hand amputees and two-handed
subjects taken while they were performing
other activities, in this case smacking their
lips—a testing of the facial region—
showed no significant difference in cortex
activation in the hand area between the two
groups. Malkin concluded that cortical
representation of the lips was not taking
over areas associated with the missing
hand. In addition, lip-smacking movements
did not cause pain among the amputees.
“These findings shed new light on the
neural correlates of the conscious
experience of phantom pain,” says Malkin.
“We found that the hand area of the brain
seems to maintain its originally assigned
role, despite the loss of original inputs and
outputs,” she adds. “Our results may
encourage [new] rehabilitation

271
approaches.”
Currently, treatment for phantom limb
pain includes medication, biofeedback,
hypnosis, and vibration therapy.
Unraveling the mystery of phantom limb
syndrome will enable scientists and
physicians to develop better methods of
treatment for its symptoms.

272
273
Can You Upload Your Brain
to a Computer?
Within the next century, scientists

274
may discover a way of making
humans—or at least what goes on
inside our brains—live forever.
In a hypothetical process called mind
uploading, or mind transfer, all that exists
in an individual’s brain—memories,
personality, consciousness, perceptions—
would be transferred from the physical
brain to a computational device, such as a
computer or an artificial neural network.
Theoretically, the brain would be scanned
and mapped and its activities transferred to
the device, which could then run a
simulation of the brain’s information-
processing abilities. If the process works,
the computational device would generally
be able to respond in the same way as the
original human brain.
In essence, mind uploading means
humans could live indefinitely.
Mapping the human brain, however, is
no easy task, as neuroscientists working on
this technology will attest. The human

275
brain contains roughly 85 billion neurons,
each one connected to thousands of others
via branches called dendrites and axons.
While many people would disagree, some
scientists believe who we are—our
consciousness, our memories, our
personalities—lies solely in the sum of the
brain’s activity, the patterns of the
electrochemical impulses that occur both in
our waking and sleeping hours.
Researchers can detect and record
electrical brain activity, but they have yet
to unlock the mystery of how neurons
interact, among other intricate workings of
the brain. Many scientists are seeking
answers to these stumbling blocks,
however, and some predict mind uploading
will be a reality one day.
The prospect of such “eternal life”
technology has elicited strong responses
from opponents. Some claim that the
preservation of the brain after biological
death would violate their religious beliefs.
Others argue that natural aging and death
are part of the human experience and it

276
would be wrong to extend life beyond what
nature provides. Ethical and legal issues
also need to be considered. Political and
economic implications would also come
into play.
The flip side, of course, is to consider
the benefits to humanity of having the
brain of an Einstein, a Picasso, or a Lincoln
from which to extract knowledge and
study. Mind uploading would enable
family members to have access to the
uplifting and informative memories of
long-dead ancestors. In short, the
technology holds the potential to enable
each of us to remain connected, and
contributing, to the society that helped
form us.

277
What Is Intelligence?
The true meaning of intelligence is a
difficult code to crack. Simply
speaking, intelligence is the ability to
acquire knowledge and skills. But
which skills and how we measure
them varies. Furthermore, why do
some people, such as Albert Einstein,

278
have superior intelligence?
Academics tend to measure intelligence
using intelligence quotient (IQ) tests.
French psychologists Alfred Binet and
Theodore Simon developed the first
modern intelligence test in 1904. Each
year, a group of test takers establishes the
average intelligence, represented by a score
of 100. Since the first tests, each
generation seems to have grown in
intelligence, a phenomenon called the
Flynn effect. When the test subjects retake
older IQ tests, they almost always score
better than 100. But that doesn’t
necessarily mean we are more intelligent
than our grandparents—we may just be
better at taking tests.
Aptitude tests are one way of measuring
intelligence, but scholars note that most
aptitude tests are biased from the writer’s
point of view. For example, Isaac Asimov,
a novelist and professor of biochemistry,
once wrote that he believed himself
smarter than his auto-repair mechanic. But

279
if his auto-repair mechanic had devised a
test of intelligence, Asimov wrote that he
would certainly have failed.
For years, many researchers associated
skull size with high intelligence test scores.
But in 2007, after decades of research,
neuroscientists Rex Jung and Richard
Haier published a study describing 37
different neuroimaging studies of IQ. The
surprising results suggest that intelligence
is related not to brain size or structure, but
instead to how efficiently information
travels through the brain. The scientists
found the frontal and parietal lobes play
the most important role in intelligence.
These areas also control attention,
memory, and language, which Jung and
Haier believe is not a coincidence.
However, the neuroscientists found that
intelligence is scattered throughout the
brain; no single region is wholly
responsible. Perhaps this explains why
some people have higher levels of artistic
talent, mathematical skill or musical
ability. Since no single structure is

280
responsible for general intelligence,
different types of brain designs may
produce different types of intelligence.
Understanding the path intelligence
takes throughout the brain can boost IQ. It
can also help treat people who are
intellectually or developmentally disabled.
Dissecting how we learn can be an
important aid for children in schools. But
even an IQ test does not account for all
types of brainpower. Einstein himself
proclaimed, “The true sign of intelligence
is not knowledge but imagination.”

281
CHAPTER 4

Earth

282
What Causes Volcanic
Lightning?
On March 10, 2010, Eyjafjallajökull
volcano, a caldera in Iceland covered
by an ice cap, erupted. It sent plumes
of clouds across most of Europe and
the Atlantic Ocean. Photos of the
eruption show lightning originating
and ending in the cloud of ash that

283
hovered over the volcanic opening.
The largest volcanic storms are similar to
supercell thunderstorms that spread across
the American Midwest. But while those
thunderstorms are fairly well understood,
volcanic lightning still remains mysterious.
The remote location of volcanoes and
infrequent eruptions make volcanic
lightning difficult to study. In general,
lightning occurs through the separation of
positively and negatively charged particles.
Differences in the aerodynamics of the
particles separate the positive and negative.
When the difference in charge is great,
electrons flow between the positive and
negative regions. A lightning bolt is a
natural way of correcting the charge
distribution.
So what makes volcanic lightning so
difficult to understand? Scientists believe
ejections from the volcano into the
atmosphere carry a large electrical charge,
but they aren’t sure if it originates in the
volcano or occurs afterward. Very high-

284
frequency radio emissions and other types
of electromagnetic waves now allow
scientists to observe the lightning inside
the ash plume. Since 2006, scientists have
used the new technology during three
separate eruptions, including
Eyjafjallajökull, and can distinguish two
phases for volcanic lightning. The first
phase, called the eruptive phase, is the
intense lightning immediately after the
eruption near the crater. Presumably,
charged particles from the volcano are the
source of this lightning that occurs near the
crater. Phase two, called the plume phase,
is lightning that forms inside the ash plume
downwind of the crater. The origins of this
lightning remain a mystery.
In the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull,
plumes of smoke significantly interrupted
airline traffic, resulting in billions of
dollars of lost revenue. The more we
understand about volcanoes, the better we
get at predicting an eruption and the
potential consequences. Some scientists
hope that studies of the composition of

285
gases inside a volcanic plume could tell us
more about the early stages of our planet
and the conditions that created the building
blocks of life, making volcanic lightning a
worthy pursuit. At a safe distance, of
course.

286
Just How Old Is Dirt?
“It depends on what you mean by
dirt,” says Milan Pavich, a research
geologist with the U.S. Geological
Survey. “The oldest sedimentary
rocks are about 3.9 billion years old
—they’re in Greenland—and at one
time, they were dirt. That’s pretty
close to the time the Earth formed.”
But those rocks are just proof that dirt

287
existed on the planet way back then. The
stuff in your backyard is much fresher.
“Most of the dirt you see today is from the
past 2 million years,” Pavich says. Long
ago, the planet underwent major changes
that drove the formation of new dirt.
Global cooling and drying enlarged the
deserts, and dust storms redistributed that
dirt around the globe. Meanwhile, glaciers
began extending from near the poles,
grinding rocks, soil, plants, and everything
else into dirt as they moved over the land.
Dirt is still being produced all the time,
albeit in much lesser quantities. Beneath
the soil’s surface, rocks constantly react
with rainwater or groundwater and slowly
grind together, breaking down into smaller
minerals. So in that respect, dirt really isn’t
that old. Then again, Pavich notes, a lot of
what came out of the Big Bang was
essentially dust, which then condensed to
form the stars and, later on, planets. “If you
think about it,” he says, “dirt and its origin
are older than the stars.”

288
 The process of platetectonics
causesmovement alongfault lines
withinEarth, creating vastmountain chains
likethe Himalayas, overmillions of years.
Mount Everest, pictured on theright, has
severalcomplicated faultsrunning through
it.

How Do Plate Tectonics

Work?
If you’ve ever felt the ground shake
beneath your feet or seen pictures of

289
a lava-spewing volcano, you know
the effects of plate tectonics.
Earth has three major components. In the
center is the core, surrounding that is the
mantle, and the outer layer of the planet is
the crust. Together, the crust and the top
part of the mantle are called the
lithosphere, which is about 60 miles (97
km) deep in most places. The lithosphere is
made up of eight major tectonic plates and
some smaller ones. (The number, size, and
shape of plates change throughout Earth’s
history.) The plates can be oceanic—under
the oceans—or continental. Tectonic plates
are in constant but very slow motion,
propelled by the movement of molten rock
beneath the lithosphere.
The location where two plates meet is
called a boundary. How the plates interact
at a boundary creates different geological
and oceanographic processes and activities.
Scientists have identified three major types
of boundaries. At a divergent boundary,
two plates are moving away from each

290
other. Magma fills the gap between the two
plates, creating new crust. One divergent
boundary is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Over
hundreds of millions of years, the slow
separation of the North Atlantic and
Eurasian Plates along that boundary
created the Atlantic Ocean.
A convergent boundary occurs where
two plates are moving together. At times,
one plate might go underneath another,
creating what are called subduction zones.
The rising of an upper continental plate
over a subducting oceanic one creates
mountain ranges. Mountains also form
when two continental plates meet head on;
that’s how the Himalayas were created.
The two plates continue to grind together,
adding to Mount Everest’s height. The
meeting of two oceanic plates forms deep
trenches below the water’s surface, as
happened in the Pacific Ocean. In general,
convergent boundaries produce many
earthquakes and lots of volcanic activity.
Sometimes two plates slide horizontally
against each other, creating a transform

291
boundary. The area between the two plates
can develop transform faults, which can be
the scene of major earthquakes.
California’s San Andreas Fault stirs that
state’s greatest seismic activity. Los
Angeles is on the side of the fault that is
slowly moving northward, while most of
the state is on the side going south. In a
few million years, Los Angeles and San
Francisco will lie practically side by side.
The theory of plate tectonics suggests
that our planet’s landmasses and oceans are
constantly changing. Millions of years
from now, Earth’s surface will look much
different than it does today.

292
How Big Would a Meteorite
Have to Be to Wipe Out All
Human Life?

293
When it comes to meteorites, the
bigger they are, the more havoc they
generally wreak.
In 1997, University of Colorado
geoscientist Brian Toon and colleagues
predicted the aftermath of meteorite
impacts of various sizes. They found that a
space rock a ½ mile (0.8 km) wide would
produce an explosion with the energy of
100,000 million tons (Mt) of TNT. That’s
enough to cause widespread blast damage
and earthquakes, but nothing too out of line
with many natural disasters in the modern
age. Once a collision exceeds the 100,000
Mt threshold, you’re looking at a
catastrophe larger than any in human
history. A meteorite 1 mile (1.6 km) in
diameter might send enough pulverized
rock into the stratosphere to block out
sunlight and cause global cooling.
The object that killed off the dinosaurs
was probably 7 or 8 miles (11.2 or 12.8
km) wide, says Jay Melosh, a planetary

294
physicist at Purdue University. Its impact
would have ejected a dust plume that
spread clear around the planet and rained
blazing-hot ash onto forests, igniting them.
“The dinosaurs probably broiled to death,”
he says.
Such a collision today would kill
billions of people. Those who didn’t perish
in the initial blast or the fires that followed
would face long odds of finding food.
“People are going to starve to death,” Toon
says. Still, a few would likely weather the
apocalyptic storm. “Probably some
fishermen in Costa Rica,” he offers.
“People near the oceans who managed to
hide out and fish when the fires started.”
For a collision to obliterate the human
race altogether, Toon estimates it would
take a 60-mile-(96.5-km)- wide meteorite.
He says, “That would incinerate
everybody.”

295
Are We Really Drinking
Dinosaur Pee?
You might cringe at this idea the next
time you turn on the tap to fill a glass
with water, but scientists believe that
all water on Earth was at some point
consumed and passed by prehistoric

296
creatures. Whether you think of it as
water that passed through a dinosaur
or water that passed through
cavemen, all water on Earth has been
recycled.
Charles Fishman, in his book The Big
Thirst, notes, “No water is being created or
destroyed on Earth.” This might lead us to
believe that we are in fact drinking
dinosaur pee, but scientists caution against
describing it this way.
The water cycle controls the water on
the planet through the processes of
evaporation and condensation. The amount
of water in the water cycle has stayed the
same since the time of the dinosaurs.
Nature’s ecological filtering process
rejuvenates water, continuously breaking
down and re-forming the oxygen and
hydrogen bonds. So it’s true that the H’s
and O’s are the same since the time of the
dinosaurs, but are you drinking the exact
water molecules that a Tyrannosaurus rex

297
gulped down and later expelled millions of
years ago? No, and illustrating the process
in terms of dinosaur pee is a negative
image that recycled water can’t afford.
Since water resources are scarce in
many parts of the world, scientists are
experimenting with the idea of turning our
waste water into drinking water. Residents
in Southern California have been drinking
recycled water, endearingly nicknamed
“toilet to tap,” for decades. While many
people can’t stomach the idea of guzzling
someone else’s waste, this form of
recycling could be our answer to the water
shortage problem. Perhaps if people
thought of it as water rejuvenation, there
might be more acceptance. The negative
perception is driven not by what is in the
water, but by the history of where it’s been.
But ultrapurified water can be certified as
much “cleaner” than regular drinking water
from the tap. If we can change the negative
image, we may soon purchase “Bottled
Dinosaur Pee” at the local corner store.

298
 A wildfire in the Great Dismal Swamp
National Wildlife Refuge in Suffolk,
Virginia, in 2011 ignited a fire tornado.

How Do Fire Tornadoes

Form?
Veteran firefighters have seen
whirling columns of fire shooting

299
into the air. Known as fire tornados,
fire devils, fire whirls, or firenados,
they can be several hundred feet tall
and reach 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit
(1,093 degrees Celsius). While most
last only a few minutes, which
explains why they’re not often
captured on film, in 2012 an observer
in the Australian bush saw several
that lasted for more than 40 minutes.
A fire tornado is a vortex—a whirling mass
of a liquid or a gas, such as air, that
revolves around its own center. A vortex
forms when the flows of two forces meet,
such as when you pull a plug on a stopped
sink. The water rushing downward meets
air trying to escape upward through the
pipe, creating a swirl of water.
In a large fire, columns of hot air rise. If
winds are blowing, the two forces come
together and form a vortex. The wind does
not have to be intense for a vortex to form.
The spinning cylinder of air then picks up

300
burning embers and ash to create a moving
column of fire. The firenado can also suck
up flammable gases; these and the burning
items can spread a fire. Along with
spreading fires, firenados can also pick up
and toss objects, as tornados do. In 2000,
one firenado lifted a small vehicle off the
ground and slammed it into an SUV.
Observations by California firefighter
Royal Burnett, made in 2008, suggest fire
tornados are most likely to occur in desert
areas or places experiencing a drought.
Those conditions foster the extremely dry
fuel, rapid combustion, and high heat
associated with fire devils.
According to Andrew Sullivan, an
Australian fire researcher, it is difficult to
determine exactly when fire tornados will
form and how they will behave. Since they
usually appear during sudden, strong fires,
he says firefighters need to reduce the
amount of heat generated as quickly as
possible in order to prevent fire devils from
forming.

301
When Is the Next Ice Age
Due?
Ice ages have, in fact, been dominant
in Earth’s history. Interglacial warm
periods, like the current Holocene,

302
are an aberration. Orbital variations
and our current warming trend show
that the next ice age should begin
within the next 1,500 years. Is it time
to pack up and move to lower
latitudes?
Each transition to an ice age and back is
different, because the precise combination
of factors does not repeat exactly. This
could explain why interglacial periods are
not all the same length. Variations in
Earth’s orbit are one culprit. The subtle
wobbles are known as Milankovitch
cycles, after the Serbian scientist Milutin
Milankovitch, who first described the
effect 100 years ago. But the way orbital
variation affects Earth’s climate is not
entirely known. Researchers use data on
Earth’s orbit to find the historical warm
interglacial period that is most similar to
our current one. The most recent period,
called Marine Isotope Stage 19c, was
780,000 years ago. The transition to the

303
following ice age began with a period of
warming and cooling that swung between
the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
According to Richard A. Muller at the
University of California at Berkeley, the
next ice age may occur “any millennium
now,” but human effects on the
environment have altered the trajectory.
Even if we halted all current carbon
emissions, we will still enjoy a long
interglacial period. Atmospheric
concentration of CO2 will probably have to
fall below 240 parts per million (ppm)
before glaciation could begin. Our current
level is about 390 ppm, a consequence of
burning coal, oil, and other carbon-rich
fossil fuels that release billions of tons of
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The Holocene has lasted 10,000 years
and allowed the human species to flourish
through agriculture, technology, and
mobility. “We have taken over control of
the mechanisms that determine the climate
change,” says James A. Hansen, the
director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of

304
Space Studies. And some think that’s not a
bad thing, as an ice age may halt food
production and could even lead to the
extinction of human beings. Groups who
oppose restrictions on CO2 emissions cite
the warming trend as a reason not to
change our current habits. Scientists agree
that humans would be better off in a
warmer world filled with greenhouse gases
than in a frigid glaciation period. But, they
warn, we are not simply maintaining our
warm climate but heating it further.
Scientists also note the complexity of
climate change. In fact, human-induced
warming may shut down heated ocean
currents that keep the northern latitudes
warm, resulting in an even faster descent
into an ice age. Luke Skinner at Cambridge
University warns, “There are huge
consequences if we can’t cope with that.”

305
Are Earthquake Lights Real
or Illusory?
For centuries, eyewitnesses have
reported flashes of strange bright
lights in the sky before, during, and
after an earthquake. The lights
manifest in many different shapes,
colors and forms: bluish, flamelike
columns rising from the ground; balls
of light that seemingly float in the

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air; and rainbow-colored, flickering
flames. The strange phenomena,
called “earthquake lights,” appear for
seconds, minutes, or even hours at a
time.
In 1906, witnesses reported blue flames in
the foothills west of San Francisco just
before the historic earthquake devastated
the city. In 1988, a luminous purple-pink
orb of light crossed the sky above the St.
Lawrence River in Quebec, 11 days before
a powerful quake. Seconds before a 2009
earthquake struck L’Aquila, Italy, 4-inch
(10-cm) flames of light were seen
flickering above a cobblestoned street.
Various hypotheses to explain the
formation of earthquake lights have
suggested the disruption of Earth’s
magnetic field in the locale of tectonic
plate stress and the piezoelectric effect, in
which tectonic movements of quartz-
containing material produce voltages that
result in flashes of light.

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 In 2014, a team of scientists led by
Robert Thériault, a geologist with the
Quebec Ministry of Natural Resources, and
Friedemann Freund, professor of physics at
San Jose State University and a senior
researcher at NASA’s Ames Research
Center, published a study claiming that
earthquake lights appear to embody a
different electrical process altogether. The
team analyzed 65 earthquakes starting in
the 1600s that produced reports of lights.
According to Freund, their findings reveal
that, “when nature stresses certain rocks,
electrical charges are activated, as if you
switched on a battery in the Earth’s crust.”
The coarse-grained rocks are basalts and
gabbros, which are found in underground
vertical structures called dikes, resulting
from the cooling of magma deep
underground.
When a seismic surge impacts the dike,
electrical charges in the rocks are released
and funneled upward through cracks in the
rocks. “The charges can combine and form
a plasma-like state, which can travel at

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very high velocities and burst out at the
surface to make electric discharges in the
air,” explains Freund.

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What Is Ball Lightning?
Imagine yourself taking shelter
during a powerful electrical storm.
Lightning strikes the earth nearby,
close enough for the thunder and the

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flash to reach your ears and eyes
almost simultaneously. You’re glad
you’re safely indoors during such a
ferocious storm, but then a startling
sight catches your eye: A glowing
orb, about the size of a basketball,
floats in through the window.
You stare, spellbound, as this orb hovers
past, maintaining an eerily steady
elevation. Just as you begin to reconcile
what you’re seeing with your own mental
catalog of sights and experiences, the orb
explodes with the report of an artillery
shell, knocking you to the ground. All
that’s left is the smell of sulfur and a story
your friends will scarcely believe.
You have just witnessed ball lightning.
Ball lightning has baffled and stunned
witnesses for centuries. Scientific
explanations for the phenomenon ranged
from air ionized by cloud-to-ground
lightning to vaporized soil, microwaves,
and even miniature black holes. One

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hypothesis held that ball lightning was not
real but rather a product of hallucinations.
A modern interpretation of the
hallucinatory hypothesis proposed that the
visions might be caused by magnetic
stimulation of the brain resulting from a
more typical lightning strike.
Recent laboratory experiments and
fortuitous real-world observations suggest
that ball lightning is, indeed, a real thing.
In 2012, Chinese scientists studying
ordinary lightning in northwest China
caught ball lightning on a spectrometer.
The spectral signature that the researchers
captured supports the vaporized soil
hypothesis, reflecting the same silicon,
iron, and calcium that are found in
common soil. Scientists in the lab have
also been able to replicate ball lightning by
shooting simulated lightning through
silicon wafers.
New findings aside, ball lightning
remains a science mystery. The vaporized
soil hypothesis doesn’t explain why ball
lightning has been observed traveling

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through solid objects like windows.
Without more data, it remains unclear if
ball lightning is a single phenomenon;
variations in reports on the size, color, and
movement of ball lightning raise the
possibility that it could be a collection of
several. Nor do these results rule out the
possibility that some sightings could be
hallucinatory. More experimentation and
observations are necessary before we
uncover the secrets of this spectacle.

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Why Can’t We Predict
Earthquakes?
Can scientists be imprisoned for not
accurately predicting earthquakes?
After the devastating earthquake in
L’Aquila, Italy, in 2009, seven

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scientists faced manslaughter charges
for not issuing explicit warnings after
small tremors shook the area. The
seven were convicted, though six
later had their verdicts overturned.
The original trial judge said the case
was not about a failure to predict the
quake, but rather about disseminating
misleading communication. That’s
good to know, since no scientist
anywhere in the world can predict
exactly when or where the next
temblor will strike.
Earthquakes occur along the faults
between two tectonic plates. While
scientists know where these faults are, they
never know when the plates will move.
Scientists can detect vibrations in the
ground right before a major quake, but they
don’t have enough time to alert people in
the area.
Although seismologists can’t predict

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when and where quakes will occur, they
can predict the probability of large
earthquakes happening along faults.
Through the study of patterns of strain in
the rocks along a fault, and the history of
earthquakes in the region, seismologists
can calculate the odds of a temblor of a
certain magnitude striking again within a
certain time frame. For example, the U.S.
Geological Survey predicts that over the
next 30 years, the odds of a major quake
hitting the San Francisco area are 67
percent.
What about the notion that some
animals can sense a quake before it
happens? While scientists acknowledge
that animals are more sensitive than
humans to the first wave of energy a quake
creates, we only have evidence that
animals detect it seconds before humans
feel the more powerful jolt that follows.

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317
318
Where Did Earth’s Water
Come From?
Our planet is wet. Seventy-one
percent of Earth’s surface is covered
in water. Most of that water is in the
oceans, but another 3.5 percent is in
rivers and lakes, locked up in the ice
caps, or floating in the atmosphere in
the form of water vapor. More fresh
and salty water hides beneath the
surface, and scientists have even
discovered that Earth’s mantle is
replete with the wet stuff. The watery
nature of our home planet makes it
unique. So where did all this water
come from?
At least some of that water was here at the
moment of creation. Scientists estimate
that 30 to 50 percent of the water on Earth
today originates from ice from the dust

319
cloud that eventually coalesced into the
Sun and its planets. Thanks to Earth’s
mass, volcanism, and distance from the
Sun, our climate now has the right
temperature and atmospheric pressure for
that ancient ice to exist in a state of liquid
water (whereas on other planets, it either
froze or outgassed back into space).
But where did the rest come from? For
years, the most obvious source was comets
—miles-wide snowballs that roam the solar
system and could have bombarded the
planet in the first billion years. Recent
spectrographic observations of comets that
buzzed Earth, and the latest findings from
the European Space Agency’s space probe,
Rosetta, point in another direction. The
spectrographic signature of the water of
these objects indicates higher levels of
heavy water—water with deuterium rather
than ordinary hydrogen—than is found on
Earth. Other findings from Rosetta indicate
the presence of a bluish hue on part of one
comet known as 67P/Churyumov-
Gerasimenko, which would suggest the

320
presence of frozen water beneath the
surface of dust and rock. So, if not comets,
what and where did our water come from?
The process of elimination leads us to
asteroids or, more specifically, a class of
meteorites called chondrites, which
originated from space rocks in the inner
solar system. These potential candidates
harbored water on their surface without
releasing it, thanks to the younger and
cooler Sun, depositing the moisture.

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800,000 years ago, a compass facing what
we now call “north” would point to
“south.” This is because a magnetic
compass is calibrated based on Earth’s
poles. The N-S markings of a compass
would be 180 degrees wrong if the polarity
of today’s magnetic field were reversed.

Why Do Earth’s Magnetic

Poles Flip?
Earth’s magnetic poles have flipped

322
many times over the last billion
years, switching magnetic north to
Antarctica and magnetic south to the
Northern Hemisphere. Geologists can
see the evidence of reversals in the
rock, but clues to how they happened
or why are elusive. On average, the
magnetic field reverses every
200,000 years. However, the time
between reversals varies
significantly. The last time the field
flipped was 780,000 years ago. So
are we headed for a flip anytime
soon?
Most scientists believe a theoretical
phenomenon, called the geodynamo,
sustains Earth’s magnetic field. However,
aside from somehow drilling 4,000 miles
(6,437 km) into Earth’s center, there is no
way to observe the process. Using a
computer model, scientists Gary
Glatzmaier and Paul Roberts at the

323
University of California describe what they
believe are the forces that create and
maintain the magnetic field. Deep inside
the planet, the inner core rotates
underneath a liquid outer core made of iron
and nickel. The churning acts like
convection, which generates electrical
currents and, subsequently, a magnetic
field. “Once in a while a disturbance will
twist the magnetic field in a different
direction and induce a little bit of a pole
reversal,” Glatzmaier told. These
instabilities constantly occur in the fluid
flow of the core, tracking like a hurricane
through Earth’s core, only moving at a
snail’s pace. Scientists can now pinpoint
the boundary where these instabilities in
the magnetic field occur. Currently,
scientists are following a disturbance in the
east-central Atlantic Ocean moving toward
the Caribbean.
Earth’s magnetic field shields most
parts of our planet from charged particles
in space, mainly from the Sun. Instabilities,
like the one moving toward the Caribbean,

324
cause Earth’s magnetic field to weaken.
Today, it is about 10 percent weaker than
when German mathematician Carl
Friedrich Gauss first measured it in 1845.
Most scientists believe this weakening
could lead to a field reversal, but fossil
records show it has had no significant
effect on living organisms. We may
experience more cosmic rays penetrating
Earth’s atmosphere, and observers might
see the aurora borealis at all latitudes.
Birds that rely on the magnetic field to fly
could become confused. However, as long
as the field remains strong enough, the
effects should be minimal. And while a
geophysicist might say the next big flip is
coming “soon,” it could still be as many as
10,000 years away.

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How Do Icicles Form
Underwater?
In the coldest parts of the world’s
oceans, icicles form on the surface
and shoot down toward the ocean
floor. They’re known as brinicles or
sea stalactites, and scientists have
only recently detected and begun to
understand them.
In the winter, seawater begins to freeze in
the extremely cold climates of the Arctic
and Antarctic. As ice crystals form, salt in
the water is separated from the freezing
water. This brine collects in the solid ice in
small pools and remains in the ice until it
begins to crack. The cracking releases
streams of the brine, which is denser and
colder than the surrounding seawater. As
the brine moves downward, it turns the
water around it into a tube of ice that looks

326
something like the stalactites that form on
cave ceilings.
In 2011, a camera crew for the British
Broadcasting Company filmed the
formation of a brinicle for the first time.
Some British media called it “the icicle of
death,” because as it shot downward
through the ocean and reached the bottom,
it killed tiny sea creatures living there.
Smaller sea icicles become feeding spots
for other forms of sea life, which eat algae
that cling to the brinicles. Andrew Thurber
of Oregon State University is one of the
few scientists who has seen brinicles form.
Working underwater in a dive suit, he
examined ones that attract swarming sea
life to feed. He compared his experience to
“swimming under a beehive. Thankfully,
they don’t sting.”

327
 CHAPTER 5

Other Life Forms

328
How Did Life Arise on
Earth?
Questions about the origins of life are
not only philosophical; many
biologists, chemists and geologists
struggle to find answers as well.
Plants and animals represent just a
fraction of the history of life on
Earth, which began 3.8 billion years
ago.

329
In fact, for most of the history of life on
this planet, microorganisms like bacteria,
protozoans, and algae ruled the roost.
Homo sapiens emerged only 200,000 years
ago, accounting for less than 0.004 percent
of Earth’s history. Most scientists agree
that life relies on natural selection and the
ability to reproduce, and over the years
evolution led us from simple beginnings to
humankind. But understanding the origins
of life takes some speculation.
Even the most basic living organisms
like bacteria are complex compared to the
first simple organic molecule that existed
on Earth. The long strains of simple
nucleotides were a composition of carbon,
hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and
phosphorus atoms, known as RNA (the
precursor to DNA). The living molecules
could self-replicate the way all living
things do, while natural selection gave
different variants an advantage. Eventually
a membrane evolved to surround the
genetic material, which proved so
advantageous that this type of molecule

330
quickly out-competed its “naked”
counterparts. Through natural selection,
two-stranded DNA evolved from the
simpler RNA into a more stable
alternative. This organism similar to
modern bacteria became the foundation to
life on Earth.
Finding proof of where the first organic
material came from isn’t the hard part.
Stanley Miller at the University of Chicago
conducted a famous experiment in the
early 1950s. Combining methane,
ammonia, hydrogen, and water in a beaker
(essentially the same components that were
present in Earth’s early atmosphere), he
inserted an electric charge simulating
lightning. A few days later he found brown
goo in the beaker, which turned out to be
amino acids, or the building blocks of
proteins. Meanwhile, Harvard biology
professor Andrew Knoll wonders about the
process of evolution from the simplest of
organic material to the complicated living
bacteria today. That is, how did life
progress from a “warm little pond on

331
primordial Earth that has amino acids,
sugars, and fatty acids to something in
which nucleic acids are actually directing
proteins to make the membranes of the
cell?” Somehow all the separate
constituents must work together, but
scientists are still unsure how that happens.
The billions of years between the first sign
of life on Earth and today’s complex living
organisms remain elusive. However, if
Miller’s experiment is valid, we know that
Earth created life, and life changed Earth.

332
How Do Animals Sense
Magnetic Fields?
Capable of returning home from a
location more than 1,000 miles
(1,609 km) distant, homing (also
known as messenger or carrier)
pigeons have been conveying
diplomatic correspondence, news of

333
great battles, and the results of
Olympic contests since the days of
Genghis Khan. How do they find
their way home? The answer is a
sense called “magnetoception.”
Magnetoception is the ability of organisms
to sense magnetic fields. Many biologists
believe it is the reason why homing
pigeons can so reliably find their way
home, why migratory animals can navigate
vast distances, and perhaps even why some
humans seem to have an innate sense of
direction. But how animals can sense
magnetic fields remains a mystery.
One hypothesis behind magnetoception
suggests that animals capable of sensing
magnetic fields actually possess small
amounts of magnetite, a magnetic iron ore,
and that perturbations of this internal
magnetite help the navigating creature
orient itself to magnetic north and south.
The discovery of small amounts of
magnetite in the beaks of pigeons helps to

334
strengthen this claim.
Another hypothesis proposes that
magnetoceptive animals sense the electric
induction produced as they move through
Earth’s magnetic field. Movement of
conductive material through a magnetic
field induces electricity, so if animals can
sense the variations in electrical induction,
they may very well be able to orient
themselves to Earth’s magnetic field.
Perhaps the most promising hypothesis
depends on chemical reactions that may
take place in the eyes of magnetoceptive
creatures. According to this hypothesis,
proteins called cryptochromes produce
chemical reactions that are essential to
circadian rhythms and also to sensing
magnetic fields. Proponents of this theory
believe that, changes in the field affect the
chemical reactions that cryptochromes are
responsible for, yielding a chemical signal
that can be subconsciously interpreted by
magnetoceptive creatures. Such
speculation is as yet unproven.

335
 Starting on the southeast coast of the
United States, loggerheadsea turtles hatch
and begin one of the most epic
migrationsin the animal kingdom,
following the Gulf Stream acrossto Europe
and down the western shore of Africa,
thenreturn across the Atlantic Ocean. The
solo journey coversan amazing 8,000 miles
(12,875 km); the turtles returnto the
starting point between 6 and 12 years later.
Theloggerhead turtles take on the difficult
migration withoutan external map or
detailed directions. Scientists arestill
unraveling the mystery of how they find
their way.

336
How Do Animals Migrate?
Navigating is not the same for all
species. Short-distance migration is
primarily a search for food. Rocky
Mountain elk travel a relatively short
distance, on average about 15 miles
(24 km), to the high alpine tundra in
the summer to find lush resources,
but retreat to the hills where food is
more abundant during the harsh
winter months. Along the way they
use landmarks, like rivers, to guide
them.
Long-distance migration is more complex,
determined by the genetic makeup of a
species. Arctic terns make the longest
migration of any species, from the Arctic
to the Antarctic and back—a round-trip of
more than 40,000 miles (64,374 km). How
they know where to go is mostly a
mystery. While birds may be sensitive to

337
the change in latitude, that doesn’t explain
the accuracy of some migration patterns.
Scientists believe birds use Earth’s
magnetic field, which grows stronger the
closer the birds fly to the equator. They
time their circadian rhythm to the cycle of
the Sun and use the stars to follow a north-
south path. Landmarks also provide visual
cues. It is probable that birds use several of
these methods to calibrate against each
other, ensuring they arrive at the same
destination year after year.
Protecting stopover areas and winter
destinations is key to helping species
survive. The endangered loggerhead turtle
has seen a resurgence in recent years, due
in part to local conservation groups
preserving and protecting nesting grounds
from North Carolina down to Florida.
Since many species travel the same path
every year, conservationists are working
hard to save important areas that are vital
to migration and consequently to the
survival of a species.

338
Why Do Cats Purr?
It’s a mystery as old as civilization
and as inscrutable as the mighty
Sphinx: Why does a cat purr? Despite
decades of research, the function of
the house cat’s purr remains unclear.
We know cats tend to purr when we
pet them and when they knead

339
(massage soft objects with their
paws). Some purr while eating. Some
purr while nursing an injury. Some
even purr while giving birth. Why
would one particular bodily function
evolve in response to so many
disparate stimuli?
Natural selection implies that unique
physiological characteristics evolve to
improve an organism’s chances for
survival. So how does purring improve
cats’ ability to pass on their genes? Leslie
Lyons, assistant professor of veterinary
medicine at the University of California at
Davis, cites evidence that sonic
reverberations at the frequency of a cat’s
purr—around 20 to 150 hertz—promote
bone density and prevent muscle atrophy.
House cats use purring as a way to solicit
food from their keepers and to signal to
their kittens that it’s time to feed. In these
ways, purring helps cats survive and
further their genetic line through their

340
offspring.
However, neither of these theories
explains why cats purr in response to both
pleasure and duress. Some veterinary
researchers, including Lyons, believe that
the function of a cat’s purr is similar to a
human’s tendency to smile, hum, sing, or
whistle. We might do any of these things
when we’re happy, but also when we’re
nervous or unhappy. These behaviors
release endorphins—hormones that make
us feel pleasure. For cats, purring might
release endorphins, either as an involuntary
response to feeling pleasure or as a semi-
voluntary means of relaxing when stressed.
In addition to the mystery of why
remains the mystery of how. Despite
extensive research, scientists and
veterinarians have yet to identify a unique
organ responsible for producing the purr.

341
342
343
Many species are attracted to bright colors
in their mate’s appearance.

Why Do Ducks Have Orange

Feet?
Actually, many species of ducks have
feet and legs tinted a bluish green or
gray. But for the ducks that do strut
around on orange feet—well, it’s all
about attracting the ladies. Chicks dig
orange.
Kevin Ornland is an evolutionary biologist
at the University of Maryland at Baltimore
County, and he knows as much about
mallard-duck coloring patterns as anyone;
it was the topic of his graduate thesis. “I
looked at male mallards and thought, gosh,
they exhibit so many wonderful colors; I
wonder which ones females care about,” he
says. Do lady ducks lust after the males’
green head plumage? Or maybe it’s the

344
blue patches on the males’ wings? Then
again, what female duck can resist a nicely
proportioned set of white “necktie”
feathers? After four years of documenting
mallard courtships, Ornland found that
none of those features mattered. All the
female ducks cared about was the
brightness of the guy’s yellow-orange bill.
Bright orange coloring suggests that a
male duck, also known as a drake, is
getting all his vitamins, particularly
carotenoids, such as beta-carotene and
vitamin A, which are antioxidants that can
be beneficial to the immune system. “This
indicates that his behaviors and genes are
good enough for him to recognize and eat
the right food, or that his immune system is
strong enough to produce bright orange
legs,” Ornland says. “The female sees this
as a very attractive trait to pass on to her
offspring.”
Ornland’s work only looked at drakes’
bills, but he thinks there’s enough
circumstantial evidence to confirm that
ducks check out each other’s feet, too.

345
“Blue-footed boobies have, obviously, very
blue feet, and it’s very well documented
that they use their feet in courtship and that
females do care about the coloration of
males’ feet,” Ornland says. “Perhaps
mallards, like the boobies, have a foot
fetish.”

346
 The 2014 Ebola epidemic in West
Africawas the largest in history and
launchedthe spread of isolated cases
incountries that had never beforeseen
people sickened with the virus.

Will Disease Drive Us All to

Extinction?
Virulent infectious diseases and
parasites have long been shown to be
a significant cause of decline in

347
biological populations. But can
disease lead to the actual extinction
of the host species—such as
humankind?
Scientists attempt to determine the
extinction-threatening effects of disease by
first studying its role in historical
extinctions. But proving that infectious
disease is responsible for past extinctions is
tricky business. After all, the extinct
species is not around for scientific
investigation. Even if a pathogen or
parasite were discovered in a disappearing
population, it would not prove that the
pathogen itself was responsible for the
decline.
However, reasonable evidence exists
that historical extinctions and extirpations
—local extinctions in which a species
ceases to exist in the specific geographic
area of study—are at least partly
attributable to infectious disease. Avian
malaria and bird pox are believed to have

348
decimated certain bird populations in
Hawaii in the late 19th century. In the
mammal kingdom, the abrupt
disappearance of native rats on Christmas
Island in the Indian Ocean at the turn of the
20th century is believed to have been
caused by disease-carrying, flea-ridden
black rats that arrived there on a merchant
ship.
In recent years, numerous extant species
have come under attack by invading
infectious disease. In Australia, koalas are
besieged by two major pathogens, one of
which can cause sterility or blindness. The
World Wildlife Fund claims that infections
of these types could lead to the extinction
of koalas within 50 years. Whether these or
other species disappear remains to be seen,
but research indicates that disease caused
by pathogens and parasites is not likely to
be the primary factor in the extinction-
threatening process. (Loss of habitat,
human overhunting, and competition with
new species are possible and/or
contributing causes.)

349
 Emerging diseases such as Ebola,
HIV/AIDS, SARS, and H1N1 influenza
have wreaked worldwide societal havoc
and resulted in tens of millions of deaths.
Reemerging infectious diseases, which
appear in new places or in drug-resistant
strains, also pose a significant threat to
human life. Among these diseases are
dengue virus, West Nile virus, and even
cholera, which affects 3 to 5 million people
each year and causes more than 100,000
deaths annually—despite the existence of a
safe and effective vaccine.

350
 The songs of humpback whales have been
instrumental in bringing awareness of their
dwindling numbers and the fight for bans
on deep-sea whaling.

What Do Whales Sing

About?
Humpback whales sing some of the
most beautiful songs in the animal
world. It’s not just “woo, woo,
woo”—their songs last 10 to 15

351
minutes and have a definite form,
usually consisting of five or six
unique phrases. Only the males sing,
which has led many scientists to
theorize that they croon to attract
females. The hole in this argument,
though, is that no one has ever
actually seen a female whale show
any interest at all in a male’s song.
Male songbirds change their tunes to
impress potential mates, but a group of
male humpbacks all sing the same song. If
the song changes midseason, they all adopt
the same change. We don’t really know
why they sing together. They might be
trying to create a sense of peace before
they mate, or they could be staking out
their territory. Either way, it makes the
competitive-mating theory seem less
believable.
We’re also not quite sure why they
change their songs in the first place. It
could be that one whale tweaks part of the

352
song, and if it’s catchy, the rest pick it up
quickly. David Rothenberg, professor of
philosophy and music at the New Jersey
Institute of Technology, whose book
analyzes whale songs, tested this by
playing the clarinet to a whale swimming
under his boat, and the whale seemed to
change his song in response.
Another theory is that whales’ brains
are programmed to change the tunes no
matter where they are in relation to other
whales. For example, scientists have made
recordings of humpbacks in Hawaii and the
Gulf of Mexico altering their songs in
similar ways at the same point in the
mating season, even though there’s no way
the groups could be hearing each other’s
songs.
Most of the research money goes to
studying whale songs for conservation
efforts (each whale has a unique voice, so
it’s a good way of estimating how many
are out there), not translating their
meaning. That hasn’t kept the public from
enjoying the soulful sounds, however, as

353
several record companies have released
albums featuring whale songs. One
particular recording by biologist Roger
Payne, released in 1970, is the best-selling
natural sounds album of all time.

354
Can We Clone Extinct
Animals?
It’s looking more and more likely
that scientists will be able to resurrect
some lost members of the animal
kingdom through cloning.

355
Disappointingly, dinosaurs would not
be first on the list—more recently
vanished species would offer the
most viable DNA samples for
reconstruction.
A Japanese team led by Akira Iritani,
professor emeritus of Kyoto University, is
hoping to deliver a real, live woolly
mammoth within five or six years.
Mammoths are unusually good candidates
for resurrection: Although they’ve been
extinct for thousands of years, their
northerly habitat means that numerous
mammoth bodies have been found
entombed in ice. Although freezing
damages DNA, Teruhiko Wakayama of the
Riken Center for Developmental Biology
has developed a technique for salvaging
viable DNA from long-frozen mice. The
mammoth team has adapted this method to
extract undamaged nuclei from mammoth
egg cells.
There’s a lot of work still to do,

356
however. The mammoth egg nuclei will
need to be implanted in elephant egg cells,
and the (hopefully) viable embryo that
results would then need to be carried to
term by an elephant mother—a process that
may well present new problems, despite
the strong genetic similarity between
mammoths and elephants. But with a little
luck and a lot of scientist-hours, we may
have our very own baby mammoth to
study. And from there, who knows? Pet
dinosaurs could be closer than we think.

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Could Cockroaches Survive
a Nuclear Holocaust?
First of all, nothing would live
through the intense heat at ground
zero. For instance, the 15-kiloton
bomb that exploded over Hiroshima
ignited a 1,800-degree Fahrenheit
(982-degree Celsius) firestorm that
incinerated everything within a radius
of 1¼ miles (2 km). Outside that
radius, however, roaches, and other
insects and smaller organisms, stand

358
a pretty good chance of surviving the
subsequent fallout.
The average cockroach can withstand a
dose of about 6,400 rads (the standard
measurement for radiation exposure). In
comparison, the lethal dose for humans is
only 500 rads—roughly the equivalent of
42 simultaneous full-body CT scans.
One theory on roaches’ resilience
credits their weekly larval molt, during
which their cells divide half as frequently
—and as adults, their cells divide even less
often. Because radiation causes the most
mutations in DNA that is replicating—
which occurs most frequently in dividing
cells—this slow replication protects
roaches from radiation. So your kitchen’s
unpaid tenants may indeed be the ones
building the next civilization after we
check out.

359
At the end of the last ice age, some 10,000
years ago, scores of species of large-bodied
animals, called megafauna, became extinct
throughout the world.

What Caused the Extinction

of the Megafauna?
Megafauna—any animal weighing
more than 100 pounds (45 kg)—
included some of the most bizarre
beasts ever to inhabit the Earth:
glyptodons, armadillo-like mammals
the size of a Volkswagen Beetle;

360
ground sloths weighing 9,000 pounds
(4,082 kg) and reaching 20 feet (6 m)
in length; megalodons, 50-foot (15-
m) sea creatures bigger than the
largest great white shark; and beavers
that tipped the scales at 200 pounds
(90.7 kg). They all thrived for
millions of years and then simply
vanished.
Some scientists believe that global climate
change triggered the mass extinctions,
contending that megafauna came into
existence in colder, glacial conditions and
died out with the commencement of
warmer climates. As tundra was replaced
with forestlands, species adapted for colder
climates, such as mammoths and woolly
rhinoceroses, were supplanted by animals
better adapted to the new environment,
such as deer and pigs.
The megafauna, however, had
withstood millions of years of
environmental change. Why would they

361
disappear simply because the climate
warmed? They wouldn’t, claim supporters
of the human intervention theory: By
overhunting, humans were directly
involved in exterminating scores of
megafauna species. The archaeological
record indicates that the human exodus
from Africa to new locations across the
planet and into these animals’ territories
was occurring at this time.
Supporters of the climate change theory,
however, point to the lack of evidence that
human hunters were capable of
systematically overkilling megafauna.
After all, they reason, one of the world’s
most widely hunted large animals, the
American bison in North America,
managed to survive for nearly 10,000 years
after it first became a prey for hunters.
Archaeologist K. Kris Hirst offers a
more likely scenario for the extinction of
megafauna—that combined forces are
responsible. Animals that were not able to
adapt to Earth’s changing, colder
temperatures died out. Additionally, colder

362
air may have pushed human populations to
migrate, upsetting the predator-prey
balance. Easy targets were killed off, or the
presence of new pathogens led to
extinctions.
As it turns out, the disappearance of
numerous megafauna species had negative
impacts upon Earth’s environment. For
example, when gomphotheres, a large
elephant-like creature, went extinct in
South America about 9,000 years ago, the
delicate balance of the region’s food chain
was devastated. The animals ate in the
forest, and their droppings fertilized other
areas. “That no longer happens,” says
Yadvinder Malhi, professor of ecosystem
science at Oxford University, “and places
like the Amazon are today affected by low
nutrition as a result.”
Scientists are hopeful that solving the
mystery of the megafauna’s extinction will
help us better understand how other mass
extinctions might happen in the future—
including our own.

363
Why Are Bees
Disappearing?
Beekeepers first noticed something
strange in 2006—unusually large
numbers of bee colonies were dying
off. Scientists soon called the
phenomenon colony collapse

364
disorder (CCD). It was marked by a
hive having a live queen bee but few
or no adult honeybees.
The loss of millions of beesin just a few
years concerned both scientists and
farmers. In the United States each year,
bees pollinate agricultural crops worth
billions of dollars.
Scientists have suggested several
theories for the mysterious disappearance
of the valued honeybees. These include
natural enemies (such as the Varroa mite or
pathogens), deficiencies in the bees’ diet,
farming practices, and pesticides. The
pesticides that have received the most
attention are a class called neonicotinoids.
As the name suggests, they are derived
from nicotine, and they were introduced
during the 1990s. Once applied to a plant’s
roots or sprayed on the crop itself, they
remain in the plant’s system for at least one
growing season.
A 2014 study led by Harvard scientist

365
Chensheng Lu found that honeybees
exposed to sub-lethal levels of
neonicotinoids were more likely to
abandon their hive than bees in a control
group. The research, Lu’s team declared,
backed up earlier studies that showed “sub-
lethal exposure to neonicotinoids is likely
the main culprit for the occurrence of
CCD.” A U.S. government-funded study,
released in 2015, said that the pesticides
are probably not the sole source of the
disorder, but part of a larger host of causes.
Manufacturers of neonicotinoids argue
that the science is unclear about the role
their chemicals might play in CCD. After
all, unexplained colony losses occurred in
the United States before the introduction of
the pesticides. And in Great Britain,
scientists have found that previous
disappearances of wild bees and wasps,
also pollinators, occurred at times when
farmers changed their practices, such as
adding new fertilizers or taking over more
wild lands for agriculture.
Whatever the cause, American farmers

366
risk losing some of their crops if colony
collapse disorder continues.

367
Why Do Geese Fly in a V
Formation?
In many regions of North America
during fall and early winter, you
might spot large flocks of geese
flying overhead in a large V
formation. Typically, one bird
maintains the lead position, followed
by the others in two lines that fork

368
apart. Why do the geese fly in a V?
Why not assume a C or S formation?
Recent studies indicate that the V
serves two main functions: energy
conservation and visual contact.
As a bird flaps its wings in flight, air swirls
around its wingtips, creating an upward
lift, while air moving off the bottom pushes
downward. Flying in a V formation, each
goose is generally slightly behind and
above the bird ahead of it—a position
where the air is getting pushed up. The
goose rides the extra lift provided by the
bird it is following, thereby conserving the
energy required to flap its wings and thus
being able to fly farther.
According to researcher Steven Portugal
of the Royal Veterinary College in
Hatfield, United Kingdom, birds flying in a
V formation display unique mechanisms to
conserve energy. In a study conducted with
northern bald ibises flying in a V
formation, Portugal discovered that each

369
bird controlled its flapping strokes so its
own wingtips matched the wingtip path of
the bird in front of it. In addition, if a bird
got too close to or lagged too far behind
the first bird, it modified its flapping speed.
The apparent objective of these behaviors
is to maximize the amount of lift provided
by the first bird. “It’s amazing how quickly
they can respond to any changes [by] the
bird in front,” says Portugal.
Flying in a V formation also allows
geese to maintain visual contact with each
other, which helps keep the group intact
and flying as a single unit. Military aircraft
have patterned their flying formations in
the same manner. Researchers study the
pros and cons of conserving fuel by
reducing drag on the airplane versus the
effects of flying directly in another plane’s
wake.

370
 CHAPTER 6

Human Triumps and

Troubles

371
372
What Was the Purpose of
Stonehenge?
On Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire,

373
England, the circle of massive stones
known as Stonehenge has been a
place of mystery for 5,000 years.
Archaeological evidence shows that the
monu- ment was constructed in phases
between 3000 and 1500 The sheer size of
the stones is impressive, with some
reaching a height of 30 feet (9 m) and
weighing 25 tons (22,680 kg). Stonehenge
consists of two circles, an outer circle of
sandstone from a nearby quarry and an
inner horseshoe made of bluestone, named
for its blue sheen when wet or cut. Intense
speculation surrounds Stonehenge and its
original purpose. Many historians
suspected the circle of stones was a healing
site or temple of worship. Others theorize
that it was an astronomical observatory.
One reason Stonehenge remains
mysterious is that the site’s custodian,
English Heritage, a commission dedicated
to preserving England’s landmarks, does
not regularly permit excavations. Most of

374
the data comes from the 1920s, and later
the ’50s and ’60s, but the excavations
weren’t very well recorded. Some
scientists believe that understanding the
chronology of when the stones were
erected may provide clearer explanations
of the significance of Stonehenge.
Recently, two archaeologists gained
permission to excavate. Timothy Darvill
and Geoff Wainwright think the answer to
Stonehenge lies in the bluestones in the
center of the circle, whose origins are in
the mountains of Wales, more than 150
miles (241 km) away. Wainwright recalls,
“The pieces of the puzzle came together
when Tim and I looked at each other and
said, ‘It’s got to be about healing.’” They
believe that prehistoric people brought the
stones from a region with natural springs,
which they presumed had healing powers.
But how humans moved the bluestones
over those 150 miles (241 km) is still
unknown. There are no markings left by
tools on the stones that would suggest they
were quarried from their original location.

375
One theory is that glaciers carried the
stones most of the way and humans
dragged them to their current spot. But
evidence for this is lacking.
Inducted in 1986 as a World Heritage
Site, Stonehenge is vitally significant to
understanding life in the Neolithic and
Bronze Ages. It is also the most
architecturally sophisticated stone circle in
the world, spanning more than 2,000 years
of continuous use. Today, Stonehenge has
a significant role in religion and culture,
inspiring paintings, poems, books, music,
and films. While thousands of people visit
the monument every year, no day is bigger
for Stonehenge than the summer solstice
when the Sun rises above the heel stone, a
rough stone outside the circle. As the
architects of Stonehenge likely intended,
this helped ancient civilizations mark the
passing of time, and serve as a place of
ritual and celebration.
About 37,000 people gathered at
Stonehenge on June 21, 2014, to witness
the event, admiring the longest day of the

376
year just as prehistoric people did
thousands of years ago.

377
How Were the Easter Island
Statues Built?
On Easter Sunday 1722, the crew of a
Dutch ship sailing in the Pacific
Ocean roughly 2,000 miles (3,218
km) off the coast of Chile

378
unexpectedly sighted land. Admiral
Jacob Roggeveen was astonished to
see the island’s coast lined with
scores of giant statues. Roggeveen
named the island Paasch-Eyland,
meaning “Easter Island” in 18th-
century Dutch. The current name of
the Polynesian island is Rapa Nui.
The builders of the strange stone statues
were the descendants of Polynesian
voyagers who first settled the island in
about 1200. Since their discovery, the 887
mysterious carved figures, ranging in
height from 4 to 33 feet (1.2–10 m), have
baffled scientists and captivated the
public’s imagination. Large heads
featuring broad noses, jutting chins, and
deep-set slits for eyes rest on standing or
squatting torsos. Expressions on the stone
faces are solemn, as if the statues are
watching over the land or waiting for
something.
The statues, called moai, were carved

379
from stone called tuff, an easily workable,
compacted volcanic ash. Stone tools were
used to create the faces and designs on the
statues. Scientists believe that most of the
figures were carved in a quarry located in
an extinct volcano on the northeastern part
of the island. Yet without animals to pull
heavy loads or wheels to move stone or
wooden platforms, how did the people of
Easter Island transport the giant carvings—
some of which weigh more than 80 tons—
to their resting places, in some cases more
than 11 miles (17.7 km) from the quarry?
Some theorists have proposed the
statues were dragged across the island,
using rope. Others believe the figures were
rolled on the trunks of palm trees. Ancient
alien proponent Erich von Däniken claims
the moai were built and erected by
extraterrestrials.
Others offer a completely different
explanation. “The experts can say whatever
they want,” says Suri Tuki, a Rapanui man.
“But we know the truth. The statues
walked.” According to Rapanui religious

380
beliefs, a spiritual force animated the moai.
Surprisingly, Tuki’s proclamation may
actually be the answer scientists have been
searching for all these years.
In 2012, Terry Hunt, an archaeologist at
the University of Hawaii, and Carl Lipo, an
anthropologist at California State
University at Long Beach, conducted an
experiment in which they “walked” a 5-ton
(4,536 kg) replica moai on a dirt road in
Hawaii using only ropes and manpower.
People holding ropes attached to the
forehead of the faux moai stood on
opposite sides of the road and rocked the
statue forward and back, inching it down
the path. A third group of movers
positioned behind the moai used a rope to
keep the statue leaning a bit forward,
without falling.
The team moved the statue 330 feet
(100 m) in 40 minutes, suggesting to Lipo
that an experienced group of Rapanuians
could transport a typical moai from quarry
to resting place in about two weeks. The
researchers theorized that the builders

381
carved the statues with a curved bottom, to
allow an easy rocking motion. The bottom
was flattened once the figures arrived at
the stone platform, called ahu, on which
the statues were stood upright.
Not all researchers, however, agree on
the “walking” theory, citing Rapa Nui’s
rugged, hilly terrain. Even the island’s
roads, they say, were bumpy and uneven.
Finally, the statue that the Hunt-Lipo team
moved would have been a small-sized
moai, leaving doubters to question whether
the “walking” method could work for a
much larger statue.

382
What Happened to the
Neanderthals?
383
A quarter of a million years ago, our
distant ancestors left Africa and
evolved into the ancient humans we
know today as Neanderthals. They
fanned out across what is now
Southern Europe and Central Asia
and remained there for 200,000
years.
Yet despite eons at the top of the food
chain, the most up-to-date fossil record
indicates that Homo neanderthalensis went
extinct over a relatively short period of
time, between 45,000 and 40,000 years
ago. Where did they all go?
It seems that our most direct ancestors,
Homo sapiens, replaced the Neanderthals,
but it’s not entirely clear why or how. The
dominant theory is that H. sapiens were
simply more fit for their climate and biome
thanks to superior evolution. For instance,
studies of the craniums of Neanderthals
indicate that their brains were better tuned
to locomotion and night vision at the

384
expense of higher-level thinking. This
would have put them at a distinct
disadvantage when it came to hunting in
groups, planning ahead, and developing
innovations such as using a spear or bow
and arrow. Though competitive exclusion
can explain the downfall of the
Neanderthals, it cannot explain the
abruptness of their extinction. Why were
the Neanderthals suddenly so
uncompetitive after eons of dominating
their landscape? Climate change might
provide the answer. During the last ice age,
slow-moving, large mammals became
scarcer in Eurasia. A shift in game
populations toward faster-moving, smaller
mammals would have advantaged the
swifter Homo sapiens.
Or perhaps the competition was more
violent. Jared Diamond, author of Guns,
Germs and Steel, hypothesizes a much
darker end for the Neanderthals. We know
what happens when more technologically
advanced civilizations invade the lands of
another people: The newcomers slaughter

385
the established population, first with
weapons, then through disease. If
Neanderthal-era Eurasia were anything like
the pre-Columbian Americas, the
Neanderthal extinction would have been
violent as well as abrupt.
Even while H. sapiens were
outcompeting their less-advanced cousins,
Neanderthals managed to live on—in a
way. Recent analysis of the Neanderthal
genome indicates there was probably some
interbreeding between the two species
around 60,000 years ago. While not
enough to explain the entire disappearance
of the Neanderthals (there isn’t enough
similarity in our genomes for Homo
sapiens to have absorbed the entire
species), it does mean that we’re more like
our primitive cousins than we once
believed.

386
 The doomsday argument (da) utilizes
probability reasoning to predict
humankind’s prospects for survival.

Is the Doomsday Argument

for Real?
A Swedish philosopher and professor
at Oxford, Nick Bostrom has written
extensively on the Doomsday
Argument. Let’s take a look at his
explanation.

387
Consider two contrasting hypotheses: The
first, “Doomsday Early,” proposes
“humankind goes extinct in the next
century and the total number of humans
that will have existed is, say, 200 billion.”
The second hypothesis, “Doomsday Late,”
proposes that “humankind survives the
next century and goes on to colonize the
galaxy; the total number of humans is, say,
200 trillion.”
But how do we know to which end of
the continuum— from pessimistic to
hopeful—humanity belongs? Using
mathematical probability, we might be able
to determine an answer if we knew the
number of our birth rank, a number that
calculates the number of humans who have
ever lived and where we are on that
continuum—and we have a good idea of
this.
Bostrom calculates roughly 60 billion
humans have lived on Earth. Based on this
figure, probability should help us conclude
that we are likely to be a member of the
smaller group, 200 billion. From this, we

388
can reason the Doomsday Early hypothesis
is likely true—that is, given our birth rank,
it is highly unlikely there will exist 200
trillion humans. “From seemingly trivial
premises it [DA] seeks to show that the
risk that humankind will go extinct soon
has been systematically underestimated,”
says Bostrom.
The Doomsday Argument has come
under intense scrutiny from the scientific
and philosophic communities, “yet no one
refutation seems to have convinced many
people,” says Bostrom. It may be unlikely
that the Doomsday Argument becomes
reality in your lifetime, but if the DA is
true, what does it reveal about the future?
Scientists urge that we should not simply
give up all hope “because we’re doomed
anyway,” but rather make more urgent
efforts to reduce threats to human survival,
such as nuclear war, disease, and global
warming. Humanity’s life expectancy
could also increase if humans evolved into
a more advanced species, something
“other” than human beings, but that

389
assumes we have enough time left to
develop the technology to make that
happen. It is also possible that the
population of Earth declines in the next
century, which would change our birth
rank. The elements of the Doomsday
Argument remain fluid, but the compelling
nature of the argument makes it such that
study will continue on it in the years to
come.

390
Why Can’t the Voynich
Manuscript Be Deciphered?
Polish antique book collector Wilfrid
Voynich was convinced he hit the

391
jackpot when he purchased a highly
unusual manuscript in Italy in 1912.
It was written in a strange script and
profusely illustrated with images of
plants, the cosmos and zodiac, and
naked women cavorting in bathing
scenes. Voynich himself
acknowledged the difficult task that
lay ahead: “The text must be
unraveled and the history of the
manuscript must be traced.”
The Voynich manuscript is a codex written
on vellum sheets, measuring 9¼ inches
(23.5 cm) by 4½ inches (11.2 cm). The
codex is composed of roughly 240 pages,
with a blank cover that does not indicate a
title or author. The text consists of “words”
written in an unknown “alphabet” and
arranged in short paragraphs. Many
researchers say the work seems to be a
scientific treatise from the Middle Ages,
possibly created in Italy. The time frame,

392
at least, seems correct: In 2009, the
Voynich manuscript was carbon-dated to
1404–1438.
There’s only one problem: The contents
of the book are a complete mystery—and
not a single word of it can be understood.
The enigma of the manuscript certainly
isn’t due to a lack of research and careful
study. The text had already been analyzed
for many decades before Voynich
purchased it. Once in possession of the
codex, Voynich embarked on a brisk
campaign to have its text deciphered,
supplying photocopies to several experts.
Since then, dozens of cryptographers and
linguists have tried and failed to crack the
code and decipher its base language.
Astronomers, historians, chemists,
mathematicians, and scores of laypeople
have also proposed solutions, but none has
shed any light on what the text says.
Botanists, however, have identified many
of the plant species as New World or
European.
Indeed, the Voynich manuscript may

393
actually contain no meaningful content,
possibly because it was a deliberate
deception on the part of its author or
because its meaning became muddled in
the writing process. In 2007, Austrian
mathematician Andreas Schinner claimed
the manuscript may have been created by
“an autistic monk, who subconsciously
followed a strange mathematical algorithm
in his head.”
To this day, scholarship, speculation,
and debate over the meaning of the
Voynich manuscript continue unabated.
Among recent theories are that the
manuscript was written by a young
Leonardo da Vinci or by Cornelius
Drebbel, a 17th-century chemist and optics
developer, in collaboration with English
philosopher Francis Bacon, which would
put the carbon dating calculations into
question. Another theory suggests the
document originated with the Aztecs in
Central America.
And of course, there is the possibility
that the manuscript is a hoax.

394
Is the Antikythera
Mechanism the World’s
First Analog Computer?
In 1901, divers exploring the remains
of an ancient shipwreck off the Greek
island of Antikythera, northwest of
Crete, recovered a bizarre-looking
mechanical object that baffled the

395
international scientific community.
The mysterious device, found in 82
fragments heavily encrusted with
corrosion, is composed of 30 bronze gear
wheels covered with Greek inscriptions.
Decades of scientific examination revealed
that the ancient device, called the
Antikythera mechanism, is an analog
computer—the world’s first—designed to
calculate the position of heavenly bodies,
predict eclipses, and even pinpoint the
dates of the Olympic Games.
In 2014, James Evans, professor of
physics at the University of Puget Sound,
and Christián Carman, history of science
professor at the University of Quilmes,
Argentina, published an article in the
Archive for History of Exact Science
claiming that the mechanism was timed to
begin in 205 B.C.E., establishing the
device to be as many as 100 years older
than most researchers thought. The
incredibly complex machine was
engineered and built by ancient Greeks,

396
although “it’s probably safer not to try to
hang it on any one particular famous
person,” according to Evans. The
researchers believe the mechanism was
designed on Babylonian arithmetic
principles adopted by the Greeks.
The front dial of the mechanism
features two concentric scales that
represent the movement of the twelve
zodiac constellations in the sky. The outer
ring is marked with the months of the 365-
day Egyptian calendar in Greek letters,
while the inner ring is marked with the
Greek symbols of the zodiac. The rear face
of the mechanism includes numerous dials
believed to predict lunar and solar eclipses.
The mechanism was operated by turning a
small crank that was linked to the largest
gear on the front dial.
In 2012, in an exhaustive study of the
Antikythera mechanism, researchers Tony
Freeth and Alexander Jones concluded that
the device is “the sole witness to a lost
history of brilliant engineering, a
conception of pure genius, one of the great

397
wonders of the ancient world—but it didn’t
really work very well!” The researchers
attributed the mechanism’s lack of
exactness to its imprecise mechanical
engineering and the inaccurate
mathematical and celestial theories of the
time.
To date, no other ancient machine like
the Antikythera mechanism has been
found. The story behind this ancient
marvel of engineering has been long lost to
time.

398
What Caused the Decline of
the Mayan Civilization?
The collapse of the Mayan
civilization at the end of the so-called
classic period, between 200 and 900,
is a persistent archaeological

399
mystery.
The classical Maya were the most
advanced of the pre-Columbian
civilizations, anchored by a collection of
city-states in the lowlands of modern-day
Guatemala, Belize, and the Yucatan
Peninsula. But around 700, these city-
states began an inexorable decline that
ended in their total abandonment. While
the independent Maya survived until the
Spanish conquest in the late 17th century,
the postclassical Maya were a less urban
and populous civilization.
Archaeologists have posited a number
of theories explaining the decline of the
classical Maya, from foreign invasion to
disease epidemic to a collapse in trade with
neighboring cultures, but one of the oldest
and most persistent theories centers on
drought. The Yucatan Peninsula and Petén
Basin were already particularly susceptible
to variability in rainfall—the soil is thin
and sandy, and a regular seasonal drought
complicates agricultural productivity.

400
Though the Maya had solved this problem
through advances in fertilization and
irrigation, studies of soil and stalagmites in
the region indicate a decline in rainfall of
between 25 and 40 percent in the late
classical period. For a culture living off an
already fickle water supply, this
megadrought may have been too much for
even advanced Mayan hydrological
engineering to overcome.
Drought by itself, however, doesn’t
explain the fall in its entirety. It doesn’t
explain why the Maya didn’t return to the
classical cities after the climate righted
itself in the second millennium or why the
northern cities that ascended in the
aftermath never reached the heights of the
lowland city-states. Nor is it clear why the
drought occurred in the first place. It may
have been cyclical, but some researchers
believe that the Maya instigated the
drought by clear-cutting rain forest, cutting
short the water cycle that topped off the
reservoirs that slaked their thirst during the
dry periods.

401
 Almost as mysterious as the decline of
the Maya is the fact that the classic Mayan
civilization took root where it did. Dense,
urban settlements dependent on agriculture
have not historically thrived in jungle
climates rooted in limestone soil. That the
Maya flourished there at all is testament to
the ingenuity of their civilization.

402
How Were the Pyramids
Built?
The pyramids built by the ancient
Egyptians are among the most well
known and celebrated in the world.
Egyptians engineered the model for
what most of us consider the classic
pyramid design: a square base and
four smooth triangular sides.
The awesome design and massive size of
the pyramids have evoked some fanciful
explanations. Some people have suggested
that inhabitants of the legendary Atlantis
civilization, the biblical Noah, and even

403
extraterrestrials built them, while others
claim levitation was used or that the
Egyptians possessed a now-lost, unique
technology to help them erect the
remarkable structures.
Indeed, there is no known Egyptian
hieroglyph or relief or any surviving
written account from that time depicting
the building of the pyramids. For centuries,
Egyptologists, scientists, engineers,
writers, and mathematicians have theorized
how the pyramids were built. All agree,
however, about the basic techniques of
pyramid construction.
Copper chisels were used to quarry soft
rocks such as sandstone and limestone,
while dolerite, a hard, black igneous rock,
was used on granite and diorite. The blocks
were transported from quarries usually
located in Aswan to the construction sites
down the Nile River on rafts or barges
during the rainy season.
Without knowledge of the wheel,
pyramid builders used teams of oxen or
manpower to drag the stones—many

404
weighing more than 60 tons (54,431 kg)—
on a smoothed, level surface built from the
Nile to the construction site. The stones
were pulled on sleds or on rolling logs, and
the roadways may have been lubricated
with oil or water.
The big debate of archaeologists,
scientists, and professionals centers upon
exactly how the massive stone blocks were
lifted to the top of the pyramid as it was
constructed upward. Extant ramps—made
of mud, brick, earth, or rubble mixed with
fragments of brick for added stability and
strength—have been found at several
pyramid sites over the years. Some
Egyptologists theorize that side ramps
could have been erected, spiraling around
the four sides of the structure, while others
suggest a steep staircase-type ramp. Some
propose a straight, sloping ramp built from
the ground to each side, which was
constantly raised as the pyramid rose. One
recent theory suggests that two types of
ramps were used: an external ramp to build
the bottom portion of the pyramid and an

405
internal ramp to complete the structure.
Recently discovered tombs of pyramid
workers indicate that the structures were
built by paid laborers, rather than by slaves
as previously believed. Many of the
laborers were farmers and local villagers,
who considered it a high honor to work for
their god-king rulers and build their
monuments. The workers were provided
food, clothing, and decent housing, and
many received tax breaks and other perks
for their efforts. Modern Egyptologists
estimate as many as 30,000 laborers
worked on a single pyramid.
Whatever the exact construction
process, it is undeniable that the ancient
Egyptians engineered some of
humankind’s most massive and awe-
inspiring building projects. Archaeologists
are certain that they achieved their success
without supernatural aid—and certainly
without the assistance of alien beings.

406
407
Index
3-D printing body parts
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet

408
A
aboriginal Australians
adrenaline
aging
Aguirre, Anthony
Akira Iritani
Alexander, Stephon
alien life
Allamandola, Louis
allergies, peanut
alternative universes
amygdala
Andel-Schipper, Hendrikje van
Anderson, Adam
anhydrohexitol nucleic acid (HNA)
animals
extinct, cloning
migration of
sensing of magnetic fields by
Antikythera mechanism
antioxidants
appendix (internal organ)

409
aptitude tests
Arctic terns, migration of
Aristotle
artificial limbs
Asimov, Isaac
asteroids, deflection of
atoms
aurora borealis
Australians, aboriginal
avian malaria

B
B612 Foundation
Bacon, Francis
bacteria
appendix and
on Mars
ball lightning
Barrett, Deirdre
baryonic matter
bees, disappearance of
Bell Burnell, Jocelyn
BICEP2 telescope

410
Big Bang
Big Crunch
Big Freeze
Big Rip
Binet, Alfred
bird pox
birds, v-formation flight of
Black, Donald
black holes
bottom of
star explosions and
Blackburn, Elizabeth
blushing
boomerangs
Borge, Victor
Bostrom, Nick
brain
consciousness and
déjà vu and
dreaming and
emotion and
intelligence and
laughter and

411
 love and
memory and
of men and women, compared
percentage used
plasticity of
sleeping and
sneezing and
uploading to computer
workings of
“bubble fusion” reaction
Burnett, Royal

C
calorie intake
carbon atoms
Carman, Christián
carrier pigeons
Cash, Webster
Cassini spacecraft
cats, purring of
cellphone theory
cells
death of

412
 longevity and
noise from
cerebellum
Chaput, John
chondrites
chromosomes
cloning extinct animals
coccyx
cochlear implants
cockroaches
cold fusion
cold water, freezing of
combustion, human
computer, uploading brain to
condensation
consciousness
convergent boundaries
core of Earth
Cowley, Steve
Crab Nebula
crust of Earth
cryptochromes
Curiosity rover

413
D
da Vinci, Leonardo
Däniken, Erich von
dark energy
end of universe and
general explanation of
shape of universe and
dark matter
Dark Sector Lab (DSL)
Darvill, Timothy
Darwin, Charles
Dawkins, Richard
de Jong, Peter
death
Debrègeas, Georges
déjà vu
deoxyribonucleic acid. See DNA
(deoxyribonucleic acid)
Descartes, René
Diamond, Jared
dieting
diffraction

414
dinosaurs
destruction of
water and
dirt, age of
disc galaxies
disease
dissolved gases
Ditzen, Beate
divided attention
DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). See also
genes
alternative to
cloning extinct animals using
longevity and
origin of life and
Doomsday Argument
dopamine
Doppler Effect
dreaming
Drebbel, Cornelius
DTI scan
ducks, color of feet of

415
E
Earth
core of
life on, origin of
life on, supernova’s effect on
magnetic poles on, flipping of
water on, origin of
earthquakes
inability to predict
light flashes before
Easter Island statues
Ebbinghaus illusion
Egyptian pyramids
Einstein, Albert
black holes and
empty space concept and
general relativity theory of
gravity and
special relativity theory of
elevator to space
Eliot, T.S.
elk, migration of

416
embarrassment
emotion
empty space
end of universe
energy, dark. See dark energy
Energy Catalyser (E-Cat)
Ennos, Roland
Esser, John “Ernie,”
Evans, James
evaporation
event horizon
Everett, Hugh
expansion of universe
extinction
cloning extinct animals
of humankind
of megafauna
of Neanderthals
extraterrestrial life
Eyjafjallajökull volcano

F
Faherty, Michael

417
faster-than-light travel (FLT)
feelings
Fermi bubbles
fingerprints
fire tornadoes
Fischer, John
Fisher, Helen
Fishman, Charles
Fleischmann, Martin
Flynn effect
food, effects on descendants’ genes
Fornax constellation
Foster, Susan
free radicals
Freeth, Tony
freezing of water
Freud, Sigmund
Freund, Friedemann
friction, fingerprints and
frontal lobe, of brain
frost
Frost, Robert
fur, lack of on humans

418
fusion
cold
nuclear

G
Gallup, Andrew
gamma rays
causes of bursts from
destruction of life by
Fermi bubbles and
Gardner, Peter
gases, dissolved
Gauss, Carl Friedrich
Geary, David
geese, v-formation flight of
general relativity, theory of
genes
and cell death
and food’s effect on descendants
geodynamo
Gimzewski, Jim
Glatzmaier, Gary
global warming

419
glyptodons
Goldilocks Zone
gomphotheres
Graves, Jenny A. Marshall
gravitons
gravity
dark matter and
on Mars
shape of universe and
Great Red spot, on Jupiter
greenhouse gases
Greider, Carol
gyroscopic precession

H
habitable planets
Haier, Richard
hallucinations
Hansen, James A.
Harris, Judith Rich
Hawking, Stephen
Hess, Christian
Hewish, Antony

420
hiccuping
hippocampus
Hirst, K. Kris
Hobson, Allan
Holocene period
holodecks
hologram theory
Homo neanderthalensis
hormones, love and
hot water, freezing of
hottest temperature
Hubble, Edwin
Hughes, Jennifer
human body. See also brain; DNA
aging
appendages, “useless,”
appendix, purpose of
blushing
cells, noise from
death
déjà vu
dreaming
emotion

421
 fingerprints
food’s effects on descendants’ genes
fur lacking on
hiccuping
laughter
longevity
memory
parts of, replacement of
peanut allergies
sleeping
sneezing from sunlight
tickling
Y chromosome
yawning
human combustion, spontaneous
humpback whales
Hunt, Terry
Hunter, Sandra
Huygens, Christiaan
hypernovas

I
ice age, next

422
icicles, formation under water
IllumiRoom
immune system
inflation theory
integrated information theory
intelligence
International Asteroid Warning Network
International Thermonuclear Experimental
Reaction (ITER)
The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud)
IQ tests

J
Jeng, Monwhea
Jimenez, Raul
Jones, Alexander
Jung, Rex
Jupiter, Great Red spot on

K
Kijk, Corine
Knoll, Andrew
koalas

423
L
language
Lanza, Robert
laughter
life, origin of
light
particle theory of
speed of
lightning
ball lightning
volcanic
Lightspace
limbic system
limbs, artificial
Lipo, Carl
lithosphere
loggerhead sea turtles
longevity
love
low-energy nuclear reactions (LENRs)
Lu, Chensheng
Lu, Ed

424
Lyons, Leslie

M
magnetic fields, sensing of
magnetic poles, flipping of
magnetoception
maladaptive brain plasticity
male nipple
Malhi, Yadvinder
Malkin, Tamar
mammoths
mantle of Earth
Marcus, Philip
Marine Isotope Stage 19c
Mars
bacteria on
gravity on
humans habitation of
length of day on
soil of
temperature on
water on
Martin, David

425
massive astrophysical halo objects
(MACHOs)
maximum temperature
Mayan civilization
McCarley, Robert
McGinn, Colin
megafauna
megalodons
Melosh, Jay
memory
messenger pigeons
meteorites
migration of animals
Milankovitch, Milutin
Milankovitch cycles
Milky Way galaxy, shape of
Miller, Stanley
mind uploading
moai
moon illusion
moons, not orbited by other moons
mountain ranges
Mpemba, Erasto

426
Mpemba effect
Muller, Richard A.
multiverses
Muñoz-Furlong, Anne
muoncatalyzed fusion
Musk, Elon

N
National Ignition Facility (NIF)
Neanderthals
near-death experiences (NDEs)
neonicotinoids
neurons, in brain
neurotransmitters
neutrinos
neutron stars
Newton, Isaac
Nickell, Joe
nipple, male
noise, made by cells
nuclear fusion
nuclear holocaust

427
O
ocean, icicle formation on floor of
omnidirectional treadmill
Opportunity, rover
optogenetics
organs, replacement of
Ornland, Kevin
oxidative damage
oxygen free radicals
oxytocin

P
Page, David
Pagel, Mark
parasites
parietal lobe, of brain
Parker, William
Parnia, Sam
particle theory of light
Pavich, Milan
Payne, Roger
peanut allergies
Pearce, Steven

428
Pelling, Andrew
Perlmutter, Saul
pesticides
Peters, Madelon
phantom limb syndrome
phenomenon colony collapse disorder
(CCD)
photic sneeze reflex (PSR)
photoelectric effect
piezoelectric effect
pigeons
pinky toe
Piran, Tsvi
Planck temperature
planets, habitable
plasticity of brain
plate tectonics
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
Pons, Stanley
Ponzo illusion
Portugal, Steven
prefrontal cortex
prosthetics

429
protons, durability of
Provine, Robert R.
Ptácek, Louis J.
pulsars
Purcell, Chris
pyramids

Q
quantum physics

R
radiation exposure
radioisotopes
Raichle, Marcus
Rapa Nui
recombination
relativity theory
general
special
rhinoceros, woolly
RNA (ribonucleic acid)
Roberts, Paul
Roche, Edouard

430
Rocky Mountain elk, migration of
Roggeveen, Jacob
Rosetta space probe
Rossi, Andrea
Rothenberg, David

S
Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy
Saladin, Kenneth
Saturn, rings of
Schinner, Andreas
Schmidt, Brian
sea turtles, migration of
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
(SETI) Institute
senescence
Sentinel telescope
Shostak, Seth
Simon, Theodore
singing, by whales
Skinner, Luke
Skunkworks
sleeping

431
sneezing, from sunlight
Snook, Richard
space elevator
SpaceX (company)
special theory of relativity
Spergel, David N.
spontaneous human combustion (SHC)
stars, explosion of. See also supernovas
Stonehenge
subduction zones
Sullivan, Andrew
sunlight, sneezing from
supernovas
causes of
dark energy and
destruction of life on Earth by
synapses
Szostak, Jack

T
tailbone
Taleyarkhan, Rusi
Tan, Darren

432
Taylor, Doris
telomeres
temperature
hottest
on Mars
temporal lobe, of brain
theory of general relativity
Thériault, Robert
thermodynamics
Thomas, Henry
Thurber, Andrew
tickling
time travel
Toon, Brian
tornadoes, fire
Tuki, Suri
Turner, Michael S.
Tutankhamen

U
universe
alternative universes
end of

433
 expansion of
freezing of
shape of

V
virtual reality
virulent infectious diseases
volcanic lightning
vortices
Voynich, Wilfrid
Voynich Manuscript

W
Wainwright, Geoff
water
as dinosaur urine
hot freezing faster than cold
on Mars
origin of
wave, whether light is
wave-particle duality
weakly interacting massive particles
(WIMPS)

434
Weinberger, Norman
whales, singing of
wick effect
Wilde, David
Wood, Robert
woolly mammoths
woolly rhinoceros
wormholes

X
XNAs (xenonucleic acids)

Y
Y chromosome
yawning

Z
Zwicky, Fritz

435
436
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437
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Cover design by Scott Erwert.

442
Table of Contents
Title Page 2
Contents 3
PHYSICAL MATTER AND
11
FORCES
Is Light a Wave or a Particle? 12
What Makes a Boomerang Come
17
Back?
Is the Mpemba Effect Real? 19
What Is the Hottest Temperature
24
Possible?
Is Cold Fusion Possible? 26
Do Atoms Last Forever? 30
Can We Travel Through Time? 33
Will We Ever Be Able to Harness
38
Nuclear Fusion?
Does Spontaneous Human
Combustion Ever Happen—and 42
How?
SPACE 46
What Are Fermi Bubbles? 47

443
Why Do Pulsars Pulse? 53
Does Alien Life Exist? 56
Why Don’t Moons Have Moons? 61
What Is the Moon Illusion? 65
What’s at the Bottom of a Black
69
Hole?
What Does Space Smell Like? 73
How Long Would It Take to Walk a
78
Light-Year?
What Causes Jupiter’s Red Storm? 80
Are There Habitable Planets Beyond
84
Our Solar System?
What Is Dark Energy? 89
How Will the Universe End? 94
What Is the Shape of the Universe? 98
Can We Deflect Asteroids? 103
Why Is the Milky Way a Spiral? 107
Will We Find Other Universes? 111
Could We Live on Mars? 116
What Is Dark Matter Made Of? 120
What Causes Gamma Ray Bursts? 124
Is a Space Elevator Possible? 128

444
 How Does Gravity Work? 133
How Do Stars Explode? 137
What Causes the Aurora Borealis? 142
Is a Holodeck Possible? 145
How Did Saturn Get Its Rings? 149
Could a Supernova Wipe Out Life on
152
Earth?
HUMAN BODY 156
Why Do We Blush? 157
What Is the Evolutionary Purpose of
161
Tickling?
Why Do We Yawn? 164
Why Are Peanut Allergies on the
168
Rise?
What Is a Memory? 171
Why Do We Dream? 174
Why Do We Laugh? 178
Do Cells Make Noise? 182
How Does the Brain Work? 188
What Is Emotion? 193
Is It True That You Use Only 10
198
Percent of Your Brain?

445
What Causes Déjà Vu? 201
Is the Y Chromosome Doomed? 206
Do Men and Women Have Different
210
Brains?
Why Do We Sleep? 214
Why Do We Hiccup? 218
Why Aren’t (Most) Humans Furry? 222
What Is the Science Behind Love? 225
Why Does Sunlight Make Some
231
People Sneeze?
What Is Consciousness? 233
Can the Food You Eat Affect Your
237
Descendants’ Genes?
Are Telomeres the Key to
240
Immortality?
Why Do We Have an Appendix? 244
Why Do We Have Fingerprints? 248
What Happens When You Die? 252
Is There an Alternative to DNA? 256
Why Do We Age? 259
When Will We Evolve Out of Our
262
Useless Appendages?
How Much of the Human Body Is 265

446
 Replaceable? 265

Why Do Amputees Sense a

269
“Phantom Limb”?
Can You Upload Your Brain to a
273
Computer?
What Is Intelligence? 278
EARTH 282
What Causes Volcanic Lightning? 283
Just How Old Is Dirt? 287
How Do Plate Tectonics Work? 289
How Big Would a Meteorite Have to
293
Beto Wipe Out All Human Life?
Are We Really Drinking Dinosaur
296
Pee?
How Do Fire Tornadoes Form? 299
When Is the Next Ice Age Due? 302
Are Earthquake Lights Real or
306
Illusory?
What Is Ball Lightning? 310
Why Can’t We Predict Earthquakes? 314
Where Did Earth’s Water Come
317
From?

447
 Why Do Earth’s Magnetic Poles 322
Flip?
How Do Icicles Form Under Water? 326
OTHER LIFE-FORMS 328
How Did Life Arise on Earth? 329
How Do Animals Sense Magnetic
333
Fields?
How Do Animals Migrate? 336
Why Do Cats Purr? 339
Why Do Ducks Have Orange Feet? 344
Will Disease Drive Us All to
347
Extinction?
What Do Whales Sing About? 351
Can We Clone Extinct Animals? 355
Could Cockroaches Survive a
358
Nuclear Holocaust?
What Caused the Extinction of the
360
Megafauna?
Why Are Bees Disappearing? 364
Why Do Geese Fly in a V
368
Formation?
HUMAN TRIUMPHS AND

448
 What Was the Purpose of
372
Stonehenge?
How Were the Easter Island Statues
378
Built?
What Happened to the Neanderthals? 383
Is the Doomsday Argument for Real? 387
Why Can’t the Voynich Manuscript
391
Be Deciphered?
Is the Antikythera Mechanism
395
theWorld’s First Analog Computer?
How Were the Pyramids Built? 403
What Caused the Decline of the
399
Mayan Civilization?
Index 407
Credits 436

449