Quantum Navigation

APRIL 2022 SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.
COM Searching the Sky

for Dark Matter
Resurrecting
Rivers
Discovering
Jerusalem’s
History
QUANTUM
NAVIGATION
New research is revealing
the biophysical basis
of birds’ incredible
migration skills
A pr il 2 0 2 2
VO LU M E 3 2 6 , N U M B E R 4
B I O P H Y S I C A L C H E M I S T RY discovery of neurons and the

40
26 The Quantum Nature origins of modern brain science.
of Bird Migration By Benjamin Ehrlich
Migratory birds travel vast distances
A STROPHYSIC S
between their breeding and
wintering grounds. New research 58 Scanning the Cosmos
hints at the biophysical under for Dark Matter
pinnings of their internal naviga Signals from space may point the
tion system. By Peter J. Hore and way to the universe’s hidden realm.
Henrik Mouritsen By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
A S T R O N O MY A R C H A E O LO G Y
32 Women Take On the Stars 66 The New Archaeology
A new wave of astronomers are of Jerusalem
leading a revolution in scientific
Even as biblical archaeology gets
culture. By Ann Finkbeiner
a high-tech makeover, a new gener
ENVIRONMENT
ation of scholars remain haunted
40 Creek Revival by ancient scripture and riven by
Radical reconstruction in Seattle
modern politics. By Andrew Lawler
is bringing nearly dead urban ON THE C OVE R
streams back to productive life. P S YC H O LO G Y Every year billions of birds travel long distances
between their breeding and wintering grounds.
By Erica Gies 74 Nap Like a Genius Scientists have known for a while that they use
H I S TO RY O F S C I E N C E Thomas Edison jolted himself from the sun and stars to navigate. But birds also
the edge of sleep to boost creativity. use Earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves.
50 Mysterious Butterflies New research suggests that their magnetic
of the Soul His method can work for the rest of compass relies on quantum physics.
Santiago RamÓn y Cajal, the us, research indicates. By Bret Stetka Illustration by Kyle Bean.
Photograph by Jelle Wagenaar April 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 1

4 From the Editor
6 Letters
8 Science Agenda
Protecting voting rights boosts suffrage, not fraud.
By the Editors
11 Forum
Oxygen levels in the oceans are the next great casualty
of climate change. B
y Nathalie Goodkin and Julie Pullen
12 Advances
A tiny beetle’s supercharged flight. A mummy reunited
11 with her intricate coffins. DNA antennas to test new
drugs. Archaeology on the International Space Station.
24 Meter
The poetic musings of Schrödinger’s Cat.
By Peggy Landsman
25 The Science of Health

Local oncologists get help offering the latest cancer
treatments to patients. By Claudia Wallis
78 Mind Matters
Personality and politics combine to make people
share fake news.
By Asher Lawson and Hemant Kakkar
12 80 Recommended
Pandemic grief in future worlds. Blurring the
boundaries of memory. Saving coral reefs.
The fraught beginnings of scientific publishing.
By Amy Brady
82 Observatory
In 60 years, the warnings of S
ilent Spring h
ave not
prompted enough action. By Naomi Oreskes
83 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago

By Mark Fischetti
84 Graphic Science
How rich countries dominate fossil research.
82 By Clara Moskowitz and Youyou Zhou
Scientific American (ISSN 0036-8733), Volume 326, Number 4, April 2022, published monthly by Scientific American, a division of Springer Nature America, Inc., 1 New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New York, N.Y. 10004-
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2 Scientific American, April 2022

FROM
THE EDITOR Laura Helmuth is editor in chief of Scientific American.
Follow her on Twitter @laurahelmuth
Magnetic Vision a-decade planning project endorse dark matter probes as a top
scientific priority. (We hope they do.)
The culture of astronomy has been transformed by a wave of
While we sleep this spring, billions of birds will be flying through women entering the field (including Scientific American adviso-
the night from their wintering grounds to their breeding territory board member Meg Urry), as writer Ann Finkbeiner observes
ries. Bird migration is a mind-bendingly astonishing phenome- on page 32. She is admired in science writing circles for inspiring
non: these tiny creatures fly thousands of kilometers with enough the “Finkbeiner test,” a guide to avoiding sexist clichés when talk-
precision to return to the same nesting site year after year. They ing about women in science. Now she realizes we are in a new era,
use three types of compass, guided by the stars, sun and, most when women are proudly themselves and determined to make
mysteriously, Earth’s magnetic field. In this issue’s cover story on science more welcoming to all.
page 26, scientists Peter J. Hore and Henrik Mouritsen explain Biblical archaeology is another field being transformed, albe-
how some birds are able to “see” Earth’s magnetic field using quan- it fitfully. Researchers using modern analytical methods are trying
tum effects in exquisitely photosensitive molecules in their eyes. to add some rigor to excavations in Jerusalem, which have been
We hope this article will add to the enjoyment of seeing migrato- guided by scripture rather than science. On page 66, author Andrew
ry birds return to your neighborhoods after a long winter. Lawler shows how religious and international conflicts add to phys-
I’ve been looking at streams with more appreciation after read- ical constraints (the land is very crumbly) to make this one of the
ing about their “hyporheic zone,” the area of streambed extend- most challenging places in the world to unearth true history.
ing below the water and to the sides of a waterway. This hidden Modern neuroscience began with Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s
layer of sand and gravel, where the groundwater and stream mix, careful observations of neurons and how they interact. Author
is home to small animals and larvae and microbes. As author Eri- Benjamin Ehrlich, on page 50, details how revolutionary Cajal’s
ca Gies describes on page 40, it’s known as the “liver of the river” ideas were and how they changed the way we think about the brain.
because of how it keeps a waterway healthy. People who are restor- The painstakingly drawn illustrations are indeed wondrous.
ing drained or dying streams are using new knowledge about the In 1889 S cientific American s hared some of Thomas Edison’s
hyporheic zone to bring back thriving habitats. thoughts on sleep. He was against it. But he did appreciate nap-
Looking up from streams and beyond the birds, astronomers ping—or at least the half-asleep state that led to many of his inspi-
are planning ambitious projects to seek the source of dark mat- rations. Starting on page 74, you can learn how to follow his advice
ter, the invisible stuff in the universe that moves stars and galax- to extract creativity from a snooze. Writer Bret Stetka tells the tale.
ies (page 58). Theoretical physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein We’re introducing a print column this month called Mind Mat-
presents the best ideas for how to look for dark matter, some of ters (page 78), in which experts will share recent interesting insights
which could get a boost this year if physicists involved in a once- from social science. Enjoy, and let us know what you think.
BOARD OF ADVISERS
Robin E. Bell Jonathan Foley John Maeda
Research Professor, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Executive Director, Project Drawdown Global Head, Computational Design + Inclusion, Automattic, Inc.
Columbia University Jennifer A. Francis Satyajit Mayor
Emery N. Brown Senior Scientist and Acting Deputy Director, Senior Professor, National Center for Biological Sciences,
Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering Woodwell Climate Research Center Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
and of Computational Neuroscience, M.I.T., Carlos Gershenson John P. Moore

and Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia, Harvard Medical School Research Professor, National Autonomous University of Mexico Professor of Microbiology and Immunology,
Alison Gopnik Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Vinton G. Cerf
Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor Priyamvada Natarajan
Chief Internet Evangelist, Google
of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley Professor of Astronomy and Physics, Yale University
Emmanuelle Charpentier
Lene Vestergaard Hau Donna J. Nelson
Scientific Director, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology,
Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics, Professor of Chemistry, University of Oklahoma
and Founding and Acting Director, Max Planck Unit for the
Harvard University Lisa Randall
Science of Pathogens
Hopi E. Hoekstra Professor of Physics, Harvard University
Rita Colwell
Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Harvard University Martin Rees
Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland College Park
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Astronomer Royal and Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics,
and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge
Co-founder, Urban Ocean Lab, and
Kate Crawford Co-founder, The All We Can Save Project Daniela Rus
Director of Research and Co-founder, AI Now Institute, Christof Koch Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering
and Distinguished Research Professor, New York University, Chief Scientist, MindScope Program, Allen Institute for Brain Science and Computer Science and Director, CSAIL, M.I.T.
and Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research New York City Meg Urry
Meg Lowman
Nita A. Farahany Director and Founder, TREE Foundation, Rachel Carson Fellow, Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Yale University
Professor of Law and Philosophy, Director, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, and Research Professor, Amie Wilkinson
Duke Initiative for Science & Society, Duke University University of Science Malaysia Professor of Mathematics, University of Chicago
4 Scientific American, April 2022 Illustration by Nick Higgins

LETTERS
[email protected]
“I continue to be Dark matter makes up the vast majority of

all matter but reveals itself only through
angered by the ways gravity. Merger models routinely incorpo-
women in science rate simple models of dark matter distribu-
tion, which greatly improves their ability to
are treated.” reproduce observed properties of galactic
virgil miller mergers, for example, by absorbing much of
m adison area technical college the orbital energy during the collision.
Regarding Rothstein’s question: Stars
are powered by fusion reactions in their
on Your Emotions,” John McQuaid’s article core. The sun derives its energy by fusing
on companies using artificial intelligence to hydrogen into helium. Stellar collisions can
analyze people’s feelings. As an autistic per- increase the mass of the remnant star, and
son, I am hyperaware of the discrimination more massive stars burn brighter and hot-
autistic individuals face in the workforce for ter, producing more energy. This happens
what are, in essence, cultural differences be- in dense stellar clusters and could also be
tween them and their neurotypical counter- enhanced in a galactic merger. Yet these
parts. The emotion-reading technology de- rare collisions would be energetically insig-
December 2021 scribed sounds like it will reinforce the nificant, compared with the energy generat-
deep, if often unconscious, prejudices ed by the nuclear starburst—or by a rapid-
against autistic people that already exist. ly accreting supermassive black hole that
MISOGYNY’S COLD SHOULDER Lack of eye contact is a common autis- just received a supply of fuel from the galac-
In “Women on Ice” [Observatory], Naomi tic trait that most neurotypical people be- tic merger. Both phenomena can easily sur-
Oreskes describes how she applied to a ge- lieve indicates a lack of trustworthiness. pass 100 billion times the sun’s luminosity.
ologist position at the British Antarctic The article did not allay my concerns when
Survey (BAS) in 1981 and was rejected be- researcher Rosalind Picard related an anec- WORKING GROUP NEEDED
cause she was a woman. I applied to the dote about a colleague who disagreed with In “IPCC, Your Job Is Partly Done” [Obser-
BAS in 1972, when they were looking for her and, to illustrate cluelessness, said that vatory, November 2021], Naomi Oreskes
meteorological observers. I received a re- person “looked at my feet the whole time.” calls for the closure of the physical science
sponse similar to Oreskes’s. There was no Michael A. Levine via e-mail Working Group I (WGI) of the Intergovern-
mention of tents, but the letter essentially mental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
said, “It is not that we are misogynists, but MERGING GALAXIES She argues that because human influence
we do not have facilities for women.” Ah, “Cosmic Crashes,” by Aaron S. Evans and on global temperature is now clear, WGI’s
well. I went off and did something else! Lee Armus, shows a simulation of the job is finished. We could not disagree more.
Christine Vibert J ersey, British Isles Milky Way and Andromeda colliding. No The world has just been surprised by a
mention is made of dark matter, but it must series of extreme climate events. Quantify-
I continue to be angered by the ways wom- have a significant effect on the dynamics of ing the human role in global heating is the
en in science are treated. I am reminded of galaxy mergers. Do we know enough about beginning rather than the end of evaluating
a former student’s experience with her male it to make such detailed merger models? current and future risks to communities.
high school guidance counselor: When she Paul Colbourne O ttawa The physical science evaluation of those
told him she intended to study biochemis- risks is a cornerstone for societal action.
try at a university and then head to medi- Until now, I had not considered that galac- The IPCC’s primary function is the as-
cal school to pursue a career in research, he tic “collisions” only minimally involve com- sessment of scientific information that is
shrugged and asked, “Wouldn’t it just be ponent stars. As Evans and Armus explain, sorely needed to make progress within the
easier to be a nurse?” Although I teach in “most stars just pass right by one another international United Nations Framework
the humanities, I will forever champion during the event.” I’m curious about those Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
young women in whatever direction their other poor stars that don’t simply pass by. and its policy instruments, particularly the
dreams take them. I heard from my former What effect do they have on the event? Paris Agreement. Closing WGI would be a
student several years later: she was prepar- Philip Jan Rothstein Brookfield, Conn. serious mistake and counterproductive in
ing to graduate from medical school and to confronting the problem for three reasons.
receive a Ph.D. in biochemistry. THE AUTHORS REPLY: T o answer Col- First, attribution studies have evolved
Virgil Miller bourne: There is still a lot about dark mat- from global indicators to regional and local
Madison Area Technical College ter that is unknown, but it is thought that extreme climate events. These findings are
galaxies are surrounded by dark matter extremely relevant to policy in the discus-
AI AND PREJUDICE halos that explain the motion of their stars sion of loss and damages at the level of the
I became concerned when reading “Spying and of galaxies in groups and clusters. UNFCCC and beyond. Second, emerging ki-

ESTABLISHED 1845
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Laura Helmuth
MANAGING EDITOR Curtis Brainard COPY DIRECTOR Maria-Christina Keller CREATIVE DIRECTOR Michael Mrak
lometer-scale global and regional climate
EDITORIAL
models have not yet been assessed, but they CHIEF FEATURES EDITOR Seth Fletcher CHIEF NEWS EDITOR Dean Visser CHIEF OPINION EDITOR Megha Satyanarayana
are a prerequisite for the next generation of FEATURES
SENIOR EDITOR, SUSTAINABILITY Mark Fischetti SENIOR EDITOR, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY Madhusree Mukerjee
the WGI Interactive Atlas on regional cli- SENIOR EDITOR, MEDICINE / SCIENCE POLICY Josh Fischman SENIOR EDITOR, TECHNOLOGY / MIND Jen Schwartz
SENIOR EDITOR, SPACE / PHYSICS Clara Moskowitz SENIOR EDITOR, EVOLUTION / ECOLOGY Kate Wong
mate change, a key instrument for policy
NEWS
makers. Third, quantifiable information to SENIOR EDITOR, MIND / BRAIN Gary Stix ASSOCIATE EDITOR, TECHNOLOGY Sophie Bushwick
SENIOR EDITOR, SPACE / PHYSICS Lee Billings ASSOCIATE EDITOR, SUSTAINABILITY Andrea Thompson
evaluate adaptation and mitigation options SENIOR EDITOR, HEALTH AND MEDICINE Tanya Lewis ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR Sarah Lewin Frasier
requires the combination of physical and MULTIMEDIA
CHIEF MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Jeffery DelViscio
impact models. If vulnerable countries ask, SENIOR EDITOR, AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT Sunya Bhutta SENIOR EDITOR, COLLECTIONS Andrea Gawrylewski
for example, how their water resources will ART
SENIOR GRAPHICS EDITOR Jen Christiansen Monica Bradley Ryan Reid
change in the coming decades, only careful- ASSOCIATE GRAPHICS EDITOR
PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR
Amanda Montañez
ART DIRECTOR, ONLINE
ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITOR Liz Tormes
ly evaluated climate model information can COPY AND PRODUC TION
deliver the key numbers on which policies SENIOR COPY EDITORS Angelique Rondeau, Aaron Shattuck
MANAGING PRODUCTION EDITOR Richard Hunt PREPRESS AND QUALITY MANAGER Silvia De Santis
should be based. The presence of a WGI
CONTRIBUTOR S
community within the IPCC, providing this EDITORS EMERITI Mariette DiChristina, John Rennie
basis, remains indispensable for Working Amy Brady, Katherine Harmon Courage, Lydia Denworth, Ferris Jabr,

EDITORIAL
Anna Kuchment, Michael D. Lemonick, Robin Lloyd,
Groups II and III to fulfill their tasks. Steve Mirsky, Melinda Wenner Moyer, George Musser, Ricki L. Rusting,
Dava Sobel, Claudia Wallis, Daisy Yuhas
The burden on the WGI scientists should ART Edward Bell, Zoë Christie, Lawrence R. Gendron, Nick Higgins, Kim Hubbard, Katie Peek, Beatrix Mahd Soltani
indeed be reduced so that they can focus on EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT SUPERVISOR Maya Harty SENIOR EDITORIAL COORDINATOR Brianne Kane
the physical understanding needed to best
support these policy needs with confidence. SCIENTIFIC A MERIC AN CUS TOM MEDIA
In our view, the problem is the proliferation EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, CONTENT SERVICES Cliff Ransom CREATIVE DIRECTOR Wojtek Urbanek
MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Kris Fatsy MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Ben Gershman
of scenarios and the expectation that they ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Dharmesh Patel ACCOUNT MANAGER Samantha Lubey
be used with the latest and most expensive
climate models. Since the fourth IPCC as- PRESIDENT
sessment cycle, this has created an unnec- Kimberly Lau
essary spiral in which valuable resources EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT Michael Florek VICE PRESIDENT, COMMERCIAL Andrew Douglas
PUBLISHER AND VICE PRESIDENT Jeremy A. Abbate VICE PRESIDENT, CONTENT SERVICES Stephen Pincock
have been wasted. But comprehensive sci-
CLIENT MARKE TING SOLUTIONS
entific assessments, including the physical MARKETING DIRECTOR, INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERSHIPS AND CUSTOMER DEVELOPMENT Jessica Cole
PROGRAMMATIC PRODUCT MANAGER Zoya Lysak
science basis, will continue to clarify and DIRECTOR, INTEGRATED MEDIA Matt Bondlow
inform and help to build the political will BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Stan Schmidt
HEAD, PUBLISHING STRATEGY Suzanne Fromm
required to face this global challenge.
CONSUMER MARKETING & PRODUC T
Thomas F. Stocker DEVELOPMENT TEAM LEAD Raja Abdulhaq
HEAD, MARKETING Christopher Monello
University of Bern and co-chair, SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER Ian Kelly
WGI, Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), IPCC SENIOR WEB PRODUCER Jessica Ramirez
SENIOR COMMERCIAL OPERATIONS COORDINATOR Christine Kaelin
Susan Solomon M assachusetts Institute MARKETING & CUSTOMER SERVICE ASSISTANT Justin Camera
of Technology and co-chair, WGI, Fourth ANCILL ARY PRODUC TS

ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Diane McGarvey
Assessment Report (AR4), IPCC CUSTOM PUBLISHING EDITOR Lisa Pallatroni
Qin Dahe C O R P O R AT E
HEAD, COMMUNICATIONS, USA Rachel Scheer
China Meteorological Administration PRESS MANAGER Sarah Hausman
and co-chair, WGI, AR4 and AR5, IPCC PRINT PRODUC TION
PRODUCTION CONTROLLER Madelyn Keyes-Milch ADVERTISING PRODUCTION MANAGER Michael Broomes
Valerie Masson-Delmotte
University of Paris-Saclay and co-chair,
LE T TER S TO THE EDITOR
WGI, Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), IPCC
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April 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 7

SCIENCE AGENDA
O PINI O N A N D A N A LYS I S FR OM
S C IENTIFIC A MERIC AN ’ S B OA R D O F E D ITO R S
Protect
Voting Rights
They boost suffrage, not fraud
By the Editors
In 2021 Republican legislatures in 19 states passed 34 laws that

restricted access to voting in more than a dozen different ways. And
those are just the bills that succeeded; hundreds of other provisions,
some still under consideration, were introduced nationwide.
“The momentum around this legislation continues,” the Bren-
nan Center for Justice, which tracks these efforts, wrote on its Web
site. At least 165 restrictive voting bills were already on the dock-
et for this year by mid-January. “These early indicators—coupled
with the ongoing mobilization around the Big Lie (the same false
rhetoric about voter fraud that drove [last] year’s unprecedented
wave of vote suppression bills)—suggest that efforts to restrict and
undermine the vote will continue to be a serious threat in 2022.” the Fair Housing Act and the equal employment opportunity pro-
The GOP has justified voting restrictions by saying that it is visions of the Civil Rights Act—the Voting Rights Act was the most
safeguarding elections against fraud and that certain protections successful in promoting equality. Its success depended largely on
against electoral bias are no longer necessary. Evidence belies this what the researchers called group-centered effects, which focus on
ploy to seize power by disenfranchising voters, especially mi systemic disadvantage rather than individual harm, discriminato-
norities, who tend to vote Democratic. Voter fraud is exceedingly ry consequences rather than intent, and remedial group results
rare in the U.S. and hasn’t increased since the 1965 Voting Rights rather than justice for individual victims or wrongdoers. Remov-
Act. But minority suffrage has grown tremendously, and the ben- ing that statutory framework produces the opposite effect, Stryk-
efits of federal oversight have persisted. Alarmed by this trend, er says: highly effective, systematic suppression of minority votes.
conservative legislators and jurists began chipping away at codi- In January the Democrats’ best efforts to date to repel the cur-
fied voting rights decades ago. They stand to gain even more rent onslaught of voting restrictions—the Freedom to Vote Act and
ground during this year’s midterm elections if left unchecked. the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—failed in the
While odious lies about a stolen election propelled the current Senate. The former would have established nationwide standards
wave of restrictions, the path that led to this point was laid back for ballot access and hindered other forms of electoral prejudice
in 2013. In the case of Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court such as gerrymandering. The latter would have reversed the 2013
dismantled a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act called “preclear- Supreme Court ruling on preclearance as well as another one last
ance,” which required jurisdictions with a history of discrimina- year, which made it harder to challenge electoral rules in court on
tion to get Justice Department or federal court approval for any the grounds of discrimination. The bills contained the type of
planned changes to electoral rules. Arguing that patterns of dis- broad-based, preventive strategies that have been so effective at
crimination had changed, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the fostering racial equality at the very core of our democratic system.
majority opinion that Congress should not use “a formula based Ang and Stryker lamented their demise and conceded that it’s dif-
on 40-year-old facts having no logical relation to the present day.” ficult not to despair in the face of intense political polarization.
Desmond Ang, an expert in public policy and race at Harvard For decades the Voting Rights Act enjoyed bipartisan support.
University, disagrees, saying that preclearance is as essential to civ- No longer. Yet we must restore and expand federal oversight and ju-
il rights today as it ever has been. According to an analysis he pub- risdiction of biased electoral rules. Until then, it is incumbent on so-
lished in 2019, that critical provision of the Voting Rights Act alone cial justice movements and everyone who cares about the most fun-
“continued to bolster enfranchisement over four decades later,” es- damental of democratic rights to keep the pressure on. As sociolo-
pecially among minorities. So enduring were the benefits, he wrote, gist Aldon Morris wrote for us in February 2021, “when President
that “broad preventative oversight encompassing the universe of Lyndon B. Johnson formally ended the Jim Crow era by signing the
potential voting changes may be the most effective means of curb- Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, he did
ing discrimination in settings like the United States, where elec- so because massive protests raging in the streets had forced it.”
toral rulemaking is highly decentralized and opaque.”
In a similar vein, sociologists Nicholas Pedriana and Robin
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E
Stryker concluded in a 2017 comparative analysis that of three sem- Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
inal civil rights laws passed in the 1960s—the Voting Rights Act, or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]
8 Scientific American, April 2022 Illustration by Martin Gee

Nathalie Goodkin is a chemical oceanographer
and an associate curator at the American
FORUM
C OMM E N TA RY O N S C IE N C E IN
Museum of Natural History. Julie Pullen T H E N E W S FR OM T H E E X PE R T S
leads initiatives in climate risk and climate
solutions. She is an adjunct research scientist
at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.
Let Oceans
Breathe
Marine oxygen levels are the next
great casualty of climate change
By Nathalie Goodkin and Julie Pullen
Last summer, in an unseasonal event, m ore than 100 miles of
Florida’s coast around Tampa Bay became an oxygen-depleted
dead zone littered with fish along the nearby shoreline. In the
Northwest, Dungeness crabs were washing onto Oregon’s beach-
es, unable to escape from water that has, in dramatic episodes,
become seasonally depleted of oxygen over the past two decades.
Much of the conversation around our climate crisis highlights
the emission of greenhouse gases and their effect on warming, pre-
cipitation, sea-level rise and ocean acidification. We hear little about
the effect of climate change on oxygen levels, particularly in oceans
and lakes. But water without adequate oxygen cannot support life,
and for the three billion people who depend on coastal fisheries for Fish die-off at Madeira
income, declining ocean oxygen levels are catastrophic. Beach, Fla., July 2021
As ocean and atmospheric scientists focused on climate, we
believe that oceanic oxygen levels are the next big casualty of glob- tilization, we run the risk of exacerbating oxygen loss. We need
al warming. To stop the situation from worsening, we need to to evaluate potential unintended consequences of climate solu-
expand our attention to include the perilous state of oceanic oxy- tions for the full life-support system.
gen levels—the life-support system of our planet. We need to accel- Beyond enhanced monitoring of oxygen and the establish-
erate ocean-based climate solutions that boost oxygen, including ment of an oxygen-accounting system, such an agenda encom-
nature-based solutions such as those discussed at the 2021 Unit- passes fully valuing the ecosystem co-benefits of carbon seques-
ed Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) held in Glasgow. tration by our ocean’s seaweed, seagrasses, mangroves and other
As the amount of carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, wetlands. These so-called blue carbon nature-based solutions are
not only does it warm air by trapping radiation, it warms water. also remarkable at oxygenating our planet through photosynthe-
The interplay between oceans and the atmosphere is complex, but sis. At COP26 we saw a lot of primarily terrestrial initiatives and
to put it simply, oceans have taken up about 90 percent of the excess commitments, such as for forestry management, that are excel-
heat created by climate change during the Anthropocene. Bodies lent steps forward. We hope the 2021 climate conference and this
of water can also absorb CO2 and oxygen but only up to a limit: year’s COP27 meeting help oceanic nature-based solutions to
warmer water holds less oxygen. This decrease in oxygen content, come into their own, propelled by the U.N. Ocean Decade.
coupled with a large-scale die-off of oxygen-generating phytoplank- Putting oxygen into the climate story motivates us to do the
ton resulting not just from climate change but from plastic pollu- work to understand the deep systemic changes happening in our
tion and industrial runoff, compromises ecosystems, asphyxiating complex atmospheric and oceanic systems. Even as we celebrated
marine life and leading to further die-offs. Large swaths of the the return of humpback whales in recent years to an increasingly
oceans have lost 10 to 40 percent of their oxygen, and that loss is clean New York Harbor and Hudson River, dead fish clogged the
expected to accelerate with climate change. Hudson in the summer as warmer waters carried less oxygen. Eco-
The dramatic loss of oxygen from our bodies of water is com- system changes connected to physical and chemical systems-level
pounding climate-related feedback mechanisms described by sci- data may point the way to new approaches to climate solutions—
entists in many fields, hundreds of whom signed the 2018 Kiel ones that encompass an enhanced understanding of the life-sup-
Declaration on Ocean Deoxygenation. This declaration has cul- port system of our planet and complement our understanding of
minated in the new Global Ocean Oxygen Decade, a project under drawdown to reduce emissions of CO2. Roughly 40 percent of the
the U.N. Ocean Decade (2021–2030). Yet despite years of research world’s people depend on the ocean for their livelihoods. If we do
Octavio Jones/Getty Images
into climate change and its effect on temperature, we know com- not save marine life from oxygen starvation, we starve ourselves.
paratively little about its effect on oxygen levels and what falling
oxygen levels, in turn, may do to the wider earth system.
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ADVANCES
The tiny featherwing beetle uses

an unusual flying pattern to
keep pace with bigger species.

D I S PATC H E S FR OM T H E FR O N TIE R S O F S C IE N C E , T E C H N O LO GY A N D M E D I C IN E IN S ID E
• Bacteria’s tangled system for controlling

genes explored
• Toxic algae plagued an ancient Maya city
• An ice shelf river reverses, carrying
seawater inward
• New charging technique repairs
crumbling battery component
A E R O DY N A M I C S
Flying Tiny
A speck-sized beetle turns flight
mechanics upside down
When it comes to insect flight, b igger is
usually better. As wings shrink, air friction
overwhelms flight power—that’s why
dragonflies soar as houseflies sputter. But
a beetle the size of a grain of sand flips this
ol. 602; February 3, 2022
maxim on its head.

The featherwing beetle (Paratuposa pla-
centis), less than half a millimeter long, is
smaller than some single-celled amoebas.
From “Novel Flight Style and Light Wings Boost Flight Performance of Tiny Beetles,” by Sergey E. Farisenkov et al., in N ature, V
At this scale air becomes syrupy, and sci-

entists once believed the beetles simply
drifted wherever the wind blew them. But
new research in Nature shows how they
wield lightweight wings to keep pace with
species three times their size.
As the name suggests, featherwing
beetles sport bristled, featherlike wings.
These porous appendages are light and
produce less friction than the typical mem-
brane-based wings that flies have, helping
the beetle generate lift. Multiple insect lin-
eages, including parasitic wasps, have
evolved similar wings as they downsized—
but these beetles use a previously un
known strategy to generate their outsized
flight prowess, according to the new
study’s authors.
In 2017 the research team collected
featherwing beetles from bits of fungi in
a Vietnam jungle. To record the insects’
infinitesimal flight patterns, experimenters
placed the creatures in a transparent cham-
ber and filmed them with two high-speed
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter

ADVANCES
M I C R O B I O LO G Y
cameras at nearly 4,000 frames
per second during a battery of
tests. They used these record-
Genes under Wraps
ings to construct 3-D models of An ancient molecule helps bacteria take control of their genome
the diminutive beetle and calcu-
late its aerodynamics. DNA has a knotty problem. T housands of biologist at the University of California,
The team found that instead times longer than the cell that contains it, this Santa Barbara.
of flapping their wings up and intricate strand of As, Ts, Gs and Cs must fold New studies by University of Michigan bio-
down, featherwing beetles itself into a compact package. But the thin dou- chemists Ursula Jakob and Peter Freddolino
loop them in a “remarkable” ble helix molecule can’t jam itself in any which reveal that interactions between DNA-binding
figure-eight pattern, says study way, lest it wind up horribly knotted. What’s proteins and an ancient molecule called poly-
co-author Dmitry Kolomenskiy, more, the cell needs certain segments of the phosphate help to switch bacteria’s genes on
a physicist studying fluid me strand—particular genes—to remain accessi- and off on a broad scale. Not only do these
chanics at Moscow’s Skolkovo ble to protein-making machinery while keep- findings tell scientists more about such organ-
Institute of Science and Tech- ing others tucked away and turned off. It’s like isms’ basic biology, but they could also help
nology. After the bristled wings playing Tetris with a tangled ball of yarn. researchers fine-tune genetically engineered
unfurl from their protective Nucleus-containing “eukaryotic” cells, the bacteria for biotechnology—and even contrib-
cases, known as elytra, they type found in humans, plants and animals, rely ute to new antibiotics.
mirror each other as they move, on complex interactions between chemical tags “Bacteria are carrying around the seeds
clapping together both in front and specialized proteins to provide instructions of their own destruction, and we might be able
of and behind the insect— about what genes to turn on and when—a sys- to remove the repression that’s keeping [those
Kolomenskiy says the motion tem called epigenetics. For decades scientists seeds] down,” Freddolino says.
is reminiscent of an extreme thought epigenetic regulation was unique to Eukaryotic cells have long been known to
version of swim strokes such eukaryotic cells and lacking in simpler ones, use multiple layers of regulation, controlling
as the butterfly. The elytra such as bacteria. But a series of newer findings which genes are active and how much of a
stabilize the beetle and its has challenged that idea. given protein each one makes. Bacterial DNA,
churning wings, preventing it “Bacteria are way more sophisticated than on the other hand, was typically portrayed in
from spinning. anyone realized,” says David Low, a micro textbooks as a long piece of inert string, wait-
The pattern’s resemblance
to swimming particularly
intrigues Arvind Santhanakrish-
nan, a mechanical engineer who
studies tiny insects’ aerodynam-
ics at Oklahoma State Univer-
sity. “Typically this type of pad-
dling is seen in small aquatic
crustaceans such as water
fleas,” says Santhanakrishnan,
who was not involved with the
study. “It was quite surprising
to see that a similar strategy
was used by the tiny feather-
wing beetles to generate lift.”
Kolomenskiy and his col-
leagues hope to illustrate the
flight patterns of other, simi-
larly minuscule insects. They
say their findings may influence
how engineers shrink flying
technology—although Kolo-
menskiy admits it would take
wangshin Kim/Science Source
a major engineering feat for a

drone to approach the propor-
tions of a featherwing beetle.
“Probably not as small,” he says.
“But that’s to be explored.”
— Jack Tamisiea Artificially colored view of E. coli

In
SCIENCE
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Deductible for income tax purposes.

ADVANCES
Pallas’s long-tongued bats were
more common in fine-corded nets. bat researchers, and they asked me, “How
on Earth were you able to capture so many
bats?” I showed them the nets, and they
were all very excited. That’s another point
that made me think maybe this should be
published, because a lot of people don’t
know about the availability of this other net.
What did you find when you specifi-

cally compared the two nets?
I think the differences were very noticeable.
The main thing is the species that we’re
getting: the regular nets are missing a lot
of the insectivorous bats that we normally
see very rarely. Untangling bats from a
monofilament net really is more challeng-
ing overall. The threads are difficult to see,
so if researchers are not careful they could
unintentionally pull a thread tangled
around soft tissues and hurt the bat.
RESEARCH METHODS
Another study recently compared dif-
Bat Inspection ferent net designs and found that very
fine nets were l ess successful. Why do
Switching equipment can dramatically alter scientific results you think that is?
The bats are good at chewing up the
Last year b iologist Gloriana Chaverri and her students confirmed a hunch about trapping monofilament net and getting released.
bats to study and release. They experimentally hung fine-corded monofilament nets in [The other research team] checked the
Costa Rican foliage, snagging 125 bats from 20 species. Meanwhile typical, thicker- nets as if they were regular nets, every 15
stranded nets captured only 90 of the flying mammals from 14 species. In R oyal Society or 20 minutes, [compared with our study’s]
Open Science, h er team from the University of Costa Rica and Smithsonian Tropical every two to five minutes. Sometimes you
Research Institute explores how equipment choice can influence what scientific expedi- don’t have enough field personnel to be
tions reveal. And Chaverri says that although the finer nets changed the researchers’ group checking the nets so often. I think the
dynamics—there was less chatting because they had to pay more attention to extract bats combination of our two papers shows the
from the tangle-prone web—monofilament nets are now a fixture in her tool kit. pros and cons of using the monofilament
Scientific American spoke with Chaverri about bat-catching protocols, elusive insecti- nets . . . and will allow a lot of people to
vores and what new takes on old technology can reveal about an ecosystem’s inhabitants. start thinking more about what equipment
— Leslie Nemo to use, based on the questions they have.
People place [traditional nets] and assume
How do you hang nets to catch bats tant to the bites from most species of bats, that whatever they’re getting is what’s out
in the wild? so we open up the nets and then keep visit- there. Of course, many studies show that’s
The best places are cluttered but not so ing them every 15 to 20 minutes. not true—but we still use them.
much so that the bats are not flying along
those routes. If the area is devoid of vege- What made you want to formally test How big a role do equipment choices
tation, then the bats will very easily detect the differences between the older, like these play in what you learn?
the net. The nets are always hanging close thicker nets and monofilament ones? Oof—yeah, they play a big role. [Papers
to the ground, and if you’re not experi- The first time I saw this type of net was suggest] we’re missing a big part of the bat
enced, stretching the nets takes a long in 2013 at a bat meeting in Costa Rica. assemblages that we have, for example,
time because you need to be very careful— I’m always up for trying new things, so in the Neotropics. . . . I think the monofila-
they get tangled in your clothes. I purchased one. I went out one time, ment nets are one of those instruments
The best time to open a net is right at I placed the net, and all of a sudden I was that we have to take advantage of, espe-
sunset because the bats are so hungry by capturing these species that I had never cially because they’re fairly cheap and easy
the end of the day that you get the majority captured before. I started thinking: to use. I keep telling everyone about these
phototrip/Getty Images
captured between six and eight [P.M.] here “Hmm—this is interesting.” nets. Whatever way I can help researchers
in Costa Rica. Usually we try to stay until I did a project a few years back in Uru- reach conclusions that are closer, more
midnight. For the regular nets people have guay, and we purchased only monofilament or less, to the truth, I think that’s definitely
been using for years, the threads are resis- nets. I was presenting the results to other a good thing for everyone.

ENVIRONMENT
Ancient Hazard
Toxic algae may have plagued Maya society
Maya civilization once stretched hundreds of miles across
Mesoamerica and the Yucatán Peninsula, with bustling cities,
a thriving economy, and a booming arts and culture scene. But
between the eighth and 10th centuries c.e., it endured sudden
population fluctuations, increased conflict and abandoned urban
Top of Nestawedjat’s
centers. Archaeologists and other researchers have considered
innermost coffin
landscape degradation, volcanoes and drought as possible drivers
of this dramatic instability throughout Maya society. A N T H R O P O LO G Y
For a recent study in the P roceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences USA, r esearchers probed a lake bed near the ancient
Maya city of Kaminaljuyú to investigate another possible stressor:
Mummy Match
harmful algae in the water supply. Chemicals called cyanotoxins, Forensic analysis connects an Egyptian woman
which make some algae blooms poisonous, were preserved in with her intricate resting place
sediments at the bottom of central Guatemala’s Lake Amititlán—
along with green pigments that record algae’s presence. Study A mysterious mummy’s artificial eyes—placed to help her see in the
lead author Matthew Waters, a limnologist at Auburn University, afterlife—would have shown her quite a lot over the past 2,700 years.
and his colleagues sampled a 5.5-meter core of lake-bed muck Researchers examining the mummy at the British Museum
and found a 2,100-year record of algae blooms, possibly caused by thought the remains were male after x-ray images from the 1960s
runoff from settlements and farms in the watershed. The findings revealed dense packing in its crotch area. But a potentially match-
suggest these toxic blooms would have rivaled their modern ing trio of beautifully detailed nesting wood coffins, acquired
counterparts. In Lake Amititlán (which frequently hosts harmful with the mummy as a set, bore hieroglyphics describing a female
algae blooms homemaker named Nestawedjat. She lived in what is today Luxor,
today), cyanotoxin in roughly 700 b.c.e. during Egypt’s 25th dynasty, when it was
concentrations ruled by Kushite pharaohs from Sudan.
rose throughout For a recent study in the Journal of Archaeological Science:
the period in which Reports, c urator Marie Vandenbeusch and her colleagues set out
Maya civilization to verify whether the mummy and coffins really belonged together.
reached—and Their first clue came from CT scans that revealed the mummy
then fell from—its was female, matching the coffins’ description. They then analyzed
Kaminaljuyú today zenith. A previous the chemical makeup of black embalming residue in the inner-
study showed most coffin’s left shoulder area. This substance’s ingredients—
ancient algae in a lake near the Maya city of Tikal, but Waters says mostly wax, oil and fat—had identical proportions to residue
his team’s is the first to provide definitive evidence of cyanotoxins. found on the mummy’s left shoulder.
The Maya were concerned about contaminated water reser- “It’s quite a lot of detective work to bring all that together”
voirs as early as c.e. 200, says Liwy Grazioso, an archaeologist and determine a mummy’s origin, Vandenbeusch says. She notes
at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala who was not that mummies are commonly found outside of coffins in old col-
Ton Koene/Alamy Stock Photo (left); South China Morning Post/Getty Images (right)
involved in the new study. “They knew from observing nature lections; this process could make them easier to test for potential
that there were episodes when the water did not have good qual- matches. (The study’s CT scans also spotted the mummy’s artifi-
ity,” she says, “so they brought in sand from 30 kilometers away cial eyes, made from two different materials that might be
to create a filtering system.” glass or stone.)
Today’s scientists are just beginning to grasp the extent of Ronald Beckett, a Quinnipiac University biomedical scientist
water-quality issues during the period of Maya instability. Because who was not involved in the study, says this “rigorous methodol-
that time span featured widespread droughts, Waters says, quan- ogy” using chemistry “adds clarity to the origins, identities and
tity of water has been studied more than quality. The blooms alone relationships among ancient remains.” Moreover, “the analysis
were likely not responsible for societal instability, he notes—but of the constituents of embalming concoctions contributes to
having toxic reservoirs amid the droughts could not have helped. our understanding of ancient methods of preparing the dead.”
Together with research on the makeup of ancient algae blooms, It is unclear why Nestawedjat was removed from her coffins,
Waters adds, the study “starts to build a case that water quality but Vandenbeusch’s archival research suggests that a British
and water potability need to be added to the list of environmental colonel acquired the remains in Egypt on his way to India in the
stressors” on Maya civilization. Lake Amititlán’s history provides mid-19th century. He died in India, but Nestawedjat ended up
a stark reminder to carefully manage land, as well as water, to in London—where she is now reunited with her coffins.
avoid pitfalls of the past. —Rebecca Dzombak — Joshua Rapp Learn

ADVANCES
B I OT E C H N O LO G Y
DNA Antennas
Nanoscale indicator may speed up drug design
Developing drugs c an be hit or miss, but now a tiny, DNA-based

sensor may help streamline the task. Acting as a “fluorescent
nanoantenna,” the sensor could flag in real time if a prospective
drug is binding to its target or reveal other cellular activity.
Cells use protein molecules to communicate with one another
and trigger functions throughout the body. When such a mes-
sage comes into contact with a cell’s surface protein, one of the Google Earth image that revealed
molecules involved changes shape like a lock opened by a key, a meltwater river’s backward flow
prompting a reaction. At just five nanometers across—one 200th G L AC I O LO G Y
the length of a typical bacterium—fluorescent nanoantennas can
bind to and interact with proteins on a molecular level. Each
nanoantenna can target a particular protein; when that protein
Rivers of Trouble
changes shape, the bound nanoantenna shifts as well and emits River reversals destabilize ice shelves
specific light when viewed under a fluorescence microscope.
For a study in Nature Methods, r esearchers put these new Columbia University glaciologist Alexandra Boghosian spent two
nanoantennas to work flagging when a particular digestive pro- years studying a meltwater river on Greenland’s Petermann Ice
tein executed five different activities in a solu- Shelf. She suspected the river ended in a waterfall like the one that
tion, such as reacting to antibodies and cascades off the Nansen Ice Shelf in Antarctica, potentially keeping
changing intestinal acidity. “It’s a nice water from accumulating in melt ponds that can damage the ice.
tool in our toolbox,” says the study’s Instead Boghosian and her team discovered a new phenomenon:
senior author Alexis Vallée-Bélisle, a deep-cut river channel that could contribute to future ice-calving
a nanotechnology researcher events and accelerate sea-level rise.
at the Université de Montréal. The team first spotted the phenomenon in 2018 using Google
Other researchers have built Earth; an overhead view showed sea ice floating in a river carving
nanoantennas from metals that into the ice shelf. Further work confirmed this river had cut so deep
attach to any protein encoun- its water actually flowed backward, from the sea up to half a mile
tered. But the new antennas’ into the channel. “We called it an ‘estuary’ because of the evidence
DNA-based structure can be proof this flow reversal that mixes fresh and salt water,” Boghosian says.
grammed to adhere to a specific She and her colleagues detailed their find in Nature Geoscience.
protein—or region on a protein—based The researchers also noticed ice fractures running parallel to the
on a sequence of building blocks called river along its backward-flowing section. “The type of fractures they
nucleotides. “They’re like Legos,” says Mina Yeşilyurt, a physicist found can really set up ice for failure because ocean water can get in
at the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology who was not there and erode them,” says Catherine Walker, a glaciologist at the
involved in the study. “You can create endless combinations.” Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who was not involved with
Sensing structural changes in specific molecules has big im the study. Such fractures can contribute to calving events, in which
plications for drug development, the study authors say. Vallée- large blocks crack off a shelf. With reduced mass, shelves cannot as
Bélisle uses the example of a protein involved in turning cells readily hold back advancing glaciers behind them, and more ice
cancerous. Researchers could introduce fluorescent nanoanten- flows into the ocean, raising sea levels faster. Increasing tempera-
nas to monitor whether a drug successfully blocks the cancer- tures from climate change could cause more of these rivers to run
causing protein from binding to a healthy cell analogue in the lab. for longer periods with more meltwater and cut too deep.
Fluorescent nanoantennas are still subject to many of the Relatively warm water flows in “upside-down rivers” underneath
same limitations as older techniques, such as false positives that some ice shelves, melting the bottom and letting surface ice settle
arise when proteins unfold because of interference from the to form depressions on top. Water flowing through such channels
antennas themselves. “There is no silver bullet that solves all of could also make shelves more prone to forming estuaries. “These
the problems in these things,” says Ahmet Ali Yanik, a nanoplas- linear features mean the river is going to form in the same place
monics engineer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who every year, allowing the water to incise deeper,” Boghosian says.
was not involved with the research. Most of the world’s ice shelves are in Antarctica and experience
But Yanik does think the approach will be useful—especially less meltwater than Greenland’s do, but climate change could lessen
given its relative affordability compared with other ways of mon- the gap. “I don’t think the volume of meltwater has been able to
itoring proteins, such as x-ray crystallography. “Every biology lab establish one of these estuaries in Antarctica,” Walker says, “but this
Google Earth
has a fluorescence microscope,” he says. “So it’s definitely a study is certainly forward-looking as to what could happen to
technique that can catch on.” —Joanna Thompson weaken those big ice shelves.” —Theo Nicitopoulos
18 Scientific American, April 2022 Illustration by Thomas Fuchs

IRELAND
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massive communal
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visit www.ScientificAmerican.com/apr2022/advances

ADVANCES
B I O LO G Y
Science
in Images
By Leslie Nemo
When Barry Webb is crawling around on the forest floor

with a flashlight, passersby understandably give him
strange looks. The U.K.-based photographer is hunting
for something others might struggle to see: slime mold
growths that stand less than a tenth of an inch high.
For scientists, classifying slime molds has proved as slip-
pery as the name suggests. These life-forms have previously
been labeled plants, fungi and even animals, but they are
actually lesser-known organisms called protists. Slime
molds coat wet and decaying surfaces, including dead trees,
leaf litter and dung, often functioning as a single cell with
many nuclei. Just before dying, they send up fruiting bodies
to reproduce, which Webb catches on camera.
Each of Webb’s images consists of 30 to 100 photo-
graphs taken with different focal points. When assembled,
the composite shows more detail than any one snapshot
could. Most specimens Webb captures are in the woods
near his home in England’s Buckinghamshire County, but
some grow on decaying logs he keeps in his garden to see
what might emerge. If you would like to try something
similar, it is easy to do—just beware of hungry slugs,
Webb warns.
1.Comatricha nigra grows on a fallen beech log just before

releasing its spores. Many slime molds, including those in
this genus, find the perfect place to settle down by scoot-
ing around via pseudopods—cellular extensions that shoot
forward for the rest of the cell to coalesce around. 1
2. Metatrichia floriformis’s sprouted casings crack open 4

as they dry out, allowing wind to lift away spores that
eventually form into amoebalike creatures. These organ-
isms can harden into a stationary cyst or grow a “tail”
and move around, depending on how wet their final
destination is.
3. Cribraria aurantiaca produces vivid fruiting bodies. Slime

molds such as C . aurantiaca always occupy new patches of
wet logs or other surfaces; they leave residue behind as they
move and avoid places already streaked with their goo.
4. Physarum leucophaeum line the edge of a beech leaf.

These slime molds are impressive problem solvers.
Researchers have plopped other members of the genus
Physarum into mazes and watched them find the shortest
Barry Webb (a ll images)
path through. P hysarum has even inspired a slime mold

algorithm that researchers deployed to map filaments of
dark matter connecting galaxies throughout the universe.
To see more, visit ScientificAmerican.com/science-in-images

C H E M I S T RY
Power Up
New technique puts crumbling batteries
back together
For electric cars t o run as long as possible between charges,
their batteries need to pack a punch. One option would be lith-
ium-metal batteries, which have a key component made of this
lightweight element. This gives them greater storage capacity
than widely used lithium-ion batteries, with the same compo-
nent made from graphite. Although lithium-metal batteries
can store more energy than lithium-ion batteries of the same
size, they also degrade faster, limiting how many times they
can charge and discharge. But researchers have found a new
charging technique that can actually restore the damaged
2 material, significantly extending the battery’s lifetime.
As a rechargeable lithium-based battery charges and dis-
3
charges, lithium ions move back and forth between the positively
charged cathode and the negatively charged anode. But over
time, small pieces of the reactive material fail to latch onto the
anode’s body. Within the battery, the lost chunks form tiny lith-
ium “islands” that most researchers had considered inactive—
until now. Stanford University researchers found that these iso-
lated bits could still respond electrically, physically moving back
and forth as the battery charged and discharged. Their discovery
was published in Nature.
The scientists found that the islands could wiggle around
enough to reestablish an electrical connection between the
isolated lithium and the anode. They realized they could coax
the material back together by immediately discharging a small
amount of electricity after the battery had been charged to
capacity. “That’s how we promote [the lost lithium’s] growth
toward the anode to reestablish the electrical connection,” says
the study’s lead author and Stanford materials scientist Fang
Liu. When a lithium-metal test battery was charged using this
protocol, it could perform more charging cycles, lasting 29 per-
cent longer than a battery that underwent standard charging.
Kelsey Hatzell, a Princeton University electrochemical and
materials scientist who was not involved in the study, says the
finding contributes to the fundamental understanding of lith-
ium-metal batteries. “Observing . . . the dynamics of isolated
lithium metal is very challenging,” she says, adding that the
researchers “have designed a lot of very intriguing experiments
to start to deconvolute the mechanisms.” She notes, however,
that practical applications may be far off; these batteries still
fall short of the thousands of charging cycles that rechargeable
batteries must endure.
The Stanford researchers hope to further develop their
charging method to maximize lithium-metal battery lifetime.
They are also working on a charging protocol that would extend
lithium-ion batteries’ usability. “I will consider [this study] as a
major discovery for the battery field—lithium-ion, lithium-metal,”
says senior author and Stanford materials scientist Yi Cui. “It can
be generalized, I think, to the whole battery field.”
—Sophie Bushwick

ADVANCES
B I O LO G Y
Sheathed Blades
Subtle tweaks to common genetic patterns
explain key grass leaf structure
Picture a clump of grass—a spray of flat green blades that

converge into sturdy tubes near the ground. These tubes are
formed by the curled lower portion of the grass leaf, called
the sheath, which represents something of an evolutionary
triumph. It allows grass to grow from the base (instead of
the stem, like most other flowering plants) by protecting An archaeological “trench” in space marked by tape at the corners
new growth and holding mature blades upright so they can A R C H A E O LO G Y
compete for sunlight. This growth strategy helps to explain
why lawns survive mowing and how grasslands dominate
more than a quarter of Earth’s land area: by tolerating graz-
One Small Step
ing and wildfires better than stem-growing competitors. Space station archaeology digs into astronaut culture
Scientists have long debated the evolutionary origins
of the sheath, which is found in all grasses, including corn, nasa astronaut Kayla Barron fl oated into an International Space Station
wheat and bamboo. Now a new study in Science illustrates module in January with a roll of yellow tape and an unusual assignment:
how the novel structure of the grass leaf arose from the setting up the first of six “trenches” for an archaeological investigation.
same genetic pattern that governs other plants’ leaf devel- Back on Earth, archaeologists Alice Gorman of Flinders University in
opment. “It’s not that we got new things bolted on and Australia and Justin Walsh of Chapman University in California watched
added,” says the study’s lead author Annis Richardson, and offered feedback. They had previously mined existing video footage
a developmental geneticist at the University of Edinburgh. to study astronaut culture, but their Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages
“The connections were tweaked.” Research Experiment, dubbed SQuARE, marks the first real off-world “dig.”
Richardson and her colleagues started by taking 3-D In terrestrial archaeology, researchers often record every bone, pot-
images of corn seedlings as they matured, then re-creating tery fragment and stone tool found in small, well-defined trenches. Adapt-
the plant’s development using a computer model. The re ing that well-honed methodology, SQuARE had astronauts take daily pho-
searchers honed their model further by comparing it with tographs of one-meter squares marked off by tape. The researchers back
experimental observations, such as where certain genes on Earth then documented all objects entering and exiting those six spots
activate in plants and how genetic mutations affect leaf over 60 days, until the work wrapped up in March. “Every image is like a
shape. Then they turned to the sheath. layer of soil that we’re removing, revealing a new period and a new set of
In the 1800s botanists proposed that the sheath part activities that have happened in that area,” Walsh says. The sampled areas
of a grass leaf represented the evolutionary equivalent of included a workstation, a galley and the wall across from the U.S. toilet.
the petiole, the stalk that connects a typical plant’s leaf to its These trenches were full of artifacts, including scissors, wrenches, pens,
stem. Later, many scientists concluded based on vein pat- condiments and one of Gorman’s obsessions: Ziploc bags.
terns that beyond just the sheath, the entire grass leaf—or “Lots of people think of archaeology as gold masks and pyramids and
most of it—actually corresponded to this stalk. Richardson sculptures and things like that,” Gorman says—not the utensils, pots and
and her team tested both hypotheses in their model and other objects more often studied. “That’s the really fascinating stuff.” Amid
found that the older idea, linking only the sheath to the peti- the expensive, highly designed and irreplaceable components often found
ole, offered the simplest evolutionary path and required in spacecraft, mass-produced plastic bags affixed to surfaces are crucial as
only subtle changes in a common genetic blueprint. a form of what Gorman calls “portable gravity,” along with Velcro, cable
Aman Husbands, a developmental biologist at the Uni- ties, handholds and footholds that help items (and people) stay in place.
versity of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study, Better data on such artifacts’ use could influence future space habitat
NASA and International Space Station Archaeological Project
says the researchers tied together clues about the sheath design. And SQuARE has a historic preservation component, too: the
from other leaf studies and “put it all together into a model more than 20-year-old station is set to be decommissioned in 2030. “It’s
that actually explains it and really settles it.” really the direction that space archaeology should go,” says anthropologist
An improved understanding of what controls leaf Beth O’Leary, a pioneer in this burgeoning field and professor emerita at
shape could help scientists engineer better crops, Rich- New Mexico State University, who was not involved in the study. SQuARE
ardson says. Identifying the sheath’s origin also sheds data could illuminate how astronauts create subcultures in space, she adds.
light on grass evolution. Although grass’s unique struc- In earlier work, the team showed how Russian cosmonauts over sev-
ture had enormous consequences for Earth’s landscapes eral decades and multiple space stations informally passed down a way
and inhabitants—including humans, who get more than of using empty wall space to create shrines honoring heroes such as astro-
half their calories from domesticated grass grains—she naut Yuri Gagarin. “There seems to have been a transmission of what to
adds, “we now understand that that leaf shape wasn’t do,” Walsh says, “which is what culture is—it’s these traditional practices
that hard to develop.” —Julia Rosen that get developed, then reinforced and transformed.” —Megan I. Gannon

METER Peggy Landsman is a widely published and widely traveled poet
Edited by Dava Sobel who has taught English in the U.S., China, Japan and Hungary.
Her two chapbooks are Our Words, Our Worlds (2021) and To-wit
To-woo ( 2008). Read more at peggylandsman.wordpress.com
Schrödinger’s Cat
Schrödinger’s Cat Laments
Look at me in this box all alone.
Who’s to care if I don’t feel at home?
There’s just this device,
Which isn’t so nice,
To see that I live or get blown . . . . *
Schrödinger’s Cat Complains

Erwin’s cat caterwauls to her mate:
Verschränkung’s† controlling my fate.
Alive and quite dead,
I exist in his head,
A mere plaything of his mental state.
Schrödinger’s Cat Reconsiders

So, okay, I’ll exist in his head,
Both alive and impossibly dead.
I’ll welcome this feat
From my sweet catbird seat
For as long as he keeps me well fed.
Schrödinger’s Cat Explains

Though I’m only a thought in his mind,
It is taught I’m a curious kind.
Not here and not there,
I pop up everywhere
Demonstrating one cat’s double bind.
Ana Rocio Garcia Franco/Getty Images
*In a 1950 letter to Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein wrote of the cat “alive and blown to bits.”
Einstein’s original suggestion to Schrödinger in 1935 mentioned gunpowder, not a Geiger counter and poison.
† Verschränkung—“entanglement.” Schrödinger coined this term while developing the thought experiment.

Claudia Wallis is an award-winning science journalist
THE SCIENCE
whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Time, Fortune OF HEALTH
and the New Republic. S he was science editor at Time a nd
managing editor of Scientific American Mind.
Better Local
Cancer Care
Community oncologists get help keeping
up with a torrent of new treatments
By Claudia Wallis
New treatments for cancer a re being developed at a breathtak
ing pace. Novel drugs, immunotherapies that enhance the body’s
ability to attack tumors, and other innovations have been ap
proved at a rate of three or four a month. “Ten years ago it was
10 a year; today the pace is one a week,” marvels oncologist Tufia
Haddad, a breast cancer specialist at the Mayo Clinic. These ther
apies are not the decisive triumphs in the “war on cancer” that
politicians have promised since the 1970s. But they are smaller
wins, including the first treatments focused on the specific biol
ogy of small-cell lung cancer, metastatic melanoma and aggres
sive “triple-negative” breast cancer.
Many of the therapeutics target a gene mutation or protein
and are paired with diagnostic tests that probe tumor cells or
blood for these “biomarkers.” The influx of so many new tools pos
es both an opportunity and a challenge. Just keeping up with AccessHope. It pairs far-flung doctors with cancer center oncol
breast cancer is not easy, Haddad says: “My heart goes out to com ogists. “We are able to look at the most complex patients at the
munity oncologists who are taking care of all cancer patients.” time of initial therapy decision-making or time of relapse,” Alvar
Community oncologists—as opposed to subspecialists working nas explains, “and we remain a phone call away as things change
at top cancer centers—provide about 80 percent of cancer care in for that patient.” A 2021 study led by Alvarnas’s colleague How
the U.S., treating a wide variety of malignancies. “On any given day ard West found that in 28 percent of lung cancer cases, Access
they might see 30 different patients with 30 different diagnoses,” Hope experts recommended a different course of treatment than
says hematologist Joseph Alvarnas of the City of Hope Compre what was locally provided.
hensive Cancer Center in Duarte, Calif. “Incorporating this tor Ties to top cancer centers can also make it easier for commu
rential evolution of knowledge is an impossible, Sisyphean task.” nity oncologists to enroll their patients in clinical trials. Surgical
The information deluge is compounded by logistical obstacles. oncologist Monica Bertagnolli of Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Insti
Some of the biomarker tests have to be handled by specialized lab tute notes that half of the 117 sites in the Alliance for Clinical Trials
oratories, which can make them hard to access, says oncologist in Oncology, which she chairs, are community practices, including
Arif Kamal of Duke University. The drugs themselves can have single-doctor offices. “Doctors who do research are not only up on
stratospheric costs, and insurance companies may delay authori what’s current; they are also trying to develop new treatments.”
zation or require that patients try a cheaper drug first. Major can The difference made by the latest therapies can vary. For peo
cer centers have the resources to work around such barriers and ple with metastatic melanoma, they have raised the five-year sur
to offer patients greater access to clinical trials, which provide the vival rate from 10 to 50 percent. Even when a new drug provides
latest treatments for free. No one doubts that community oncolo just a two-month edge in median survival, Bertagnolli notes, “if
gists want the very best for their patients, but to make the newest it’s a new treatment pathway, you may be able to combine it with
therapies more available—particularly to rural populations and something else that makes a bigger difference.”
underserved communities of color—physicians may need strong Many experts foresee a day when artificial intelligence will help
partnerships with big cancer centers and smarter technology. guide such clinical decisions. “Ultimately we may be able to apply
Two key avenues for spreading knowledge are through the machine learning to the data in electronic health records, which
National Cancer Institute’s PDQ Web site and guidelines main should include all the biomarkers, pathology and characteristics
tained by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, an alli of the patient,” says William Cance, scientific director of the Amer
ance of 31 leading U.S. cancer centers. Expertise also expands ican Cancer Society. But there is a long way to go because health-
through partnerships between oncologists at smaller practices record systems are optimized for billing, not for tracking outcomes.
and comprehensive cancer centers. City of Hope, for example, Bertagnolli, a self-described “small-town girl from Wyoming,” says
together with three other centers, contracts with businesses to the community doctors in her research alliance are already work
provide cancer care to their employees through a service called ing to improve those systems: “These people are my heroes.”
Illustration by Fatinha Ramos April 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 25

Peter J. Hore is a chemist at the University of Oxford.
He works on the biophysical chemistry of electron and
nuclear spins and their effects on processes such as the
mechanisms of animal magnetoreception.
Henrik Mouritsen is a biologist at the University

of Oldenburg in Germany. He studies the mechanisms
of orientation and navigation in many different animals
with an emphasis on night-migrating songbirds.
The
BIOPHYSIC AL CHEMISTRY
Quantum
Nature
of Bırd
Mıgratıon
Migratory birds travel vast distances between their breeding
and wintering grounds. New research hints at the biophysical
underpinnings of their internal navigation system
By Peter J. Hore and Henrik Mouritsen
Illustration by Kyle Bean

I magine you are a young Bar-tailed Godwit, a large, leggy shorebird with a long, probing
bill hatched on the tundra of Alaska. As the days become shorter and the icy winter looms, you
feel the urge to embark on one of the most impressive migrations on Earth: a nonstop trans
equatorial flight lasting at least seven days and nights across the Pacific Ocean to New Zea-
land 12,000 kilometers away. It’s do or die. Every year tens of thousands of Bar-tailed Godwits
complete this journey successfully. Billions of other young birds, including warblers and fly-
catchers, terns and sandpipers, set out on similarly spectacular and dangerous migrations every
spring, skillfully navigating the night skies without any help from more experienced birds.
People have long puzzled over the seasonal appearances and
disappearances of birds. Aristotle thought that some birds such as
swallows hibernated in the colder months and that others trans-
formed into different species—redstarts turned into robins for the
generally unable to recover because they do not yet have a function-
ing map that would tell them where they are. This is one of the rea-
sons why only 30 percent of small songbirds survive their first mi-
grations to their wintering grounds and back again. During its first
winter, he proposed. Only in the past century or so, with the advent migration a bird builds up a map in its brain that, on subsequent
of bird banding, satellite tracking and more widespread field stud- journeys, will enable it to navigate with an ultimate precision of
ies, have researchers been able to connect bird populations that centimeters over thousands of kilometers. Some birds breed in the
winter in one area and nest in another and show that some travel same nest box and sleep on the same perch in their wintering range
vast distances between the two locales every year. Remarkably, even year after year. Equipped with this map, about 50 percent of adult
juvenile long-haul travelers know where to go, and birds often take songbirds make it back to their nesting site to breed every year.
the same routes year after year. How do they find their way? Migratory birds’ navigational input comes from several sens-
Migrating birds use celestial cues to navigate, much as sailors es—mainly sight, smell and magnetoreception. By observing the
of yore used the sun and stars to guide them. But unlike humans, apparent nighttime rotation of the stars around the North Star,
birds also detect the magnetic field generated by Earth’s molten the birds learn to locate north before they embark on their first
core and use it to determine their position and direction. Despite migration, and an internal 24-hour clock allows them to calibrate
more than 50 years of research into magnetoreception in birds, sci- their sun compass. Characteristic smells can help birds recognize
entists have been unable to work out exactly how they use this in- places they have visited before. Scientists know a great deal about
formation to stay on course. Recently we and others have made in- the detailed biophysical mechanisms of the birds’ senses of sight
roads into this enduring mystery. Our experimental evidence sug- and smell. But the inner workings of their magnetic compass have
gests something extraordinary: a bird’s compass relies on subtle, proved harder to understand.
fundamentally quantum effects in short-lived molecular fragments, The magnetic direction sense in small songbirds that migrate at
known as radical pairs, formed photochemically in its eyes. That night is remarkable in several important respects. First, observa-
is, the creatures appear to be able to “see” Earth’s magnetic field tions of caged birds exposed to carefully controlled magnetic fields
lines and use that information to chart a course between their show that their compass does not behave like the magnetized nee-
breeding and wintering grounds. dle in a ship’s compass. A bird detects the axis of the magnetic field
and the angle it makes with Earth’s surface, the so-called inclina-
A MYSTERIOUS SENSE tion compass. In laboratory experiments, inverting the magnetic
Migratory birds have an internal clock with an annual rhythm that field’s direction so that it points in exactly the opposite direction
tells them, among other things, when to migrate. They also inher- has no effect on the bird’s ability to orient correctly. Second, a bird’s
it from their parents the directions in which they need to fly in the perception of Earth’s magnetic field can be disrupted by extraordi-
autumn and spring, and if the parents each have different geneti- narily weak magnetic fields that reverse their direction several mil-
cally encoded directions, their offspring will end up with an inter- lion times per second. Last, even though songbirds fly at night un-
mediate direction. For example, if a southwest-migrating bird is der the dim light of the stars, their magnetic compass is light-
crossed with a southeast-migrating bird, their offspring will head dependent, hinting at a link between vision and magnetic sensing.
south when the time comes. But how do the young birds know In 1978, in an attempt to make sense of these features of avian
which direction is southwest or south or southeast? They have at magnetoreception, Klaus Schulten, then at the Max Planck Insti-
least three different compasses at their disposal: one allows them tute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, put forth a
to extract information from the position of the sun in the sky, an- remarkable idea: that the compass relies on magnetically sensitive
other uses the patterns of the stars at night, and the third is based chemical transformations. At first glance, this proposal seems pre-
on Earth’s ever present magnetic field. posterous because the energy available from Earth’s magnetic field
In their first autumn, young birds follow inherited instructions is millions of times too small to break, or even significantly weak-
such as “fly southwest for three weeks and then south-southeast for en, the bonds between atoms in molecules. But Schulten was in-
two weeks.” If they make a mistake or are blown off course, they are spired by the discovery 10 years previously that short-lived chem-

ical intermediates known as radical pairs
have unique properties that make their
chemistry sensitive to feeble magnetic in- The Compass
teractions. Over the past 40 years research-
ers have conducted hundreds of lab stud-
European
Robin
Mechanism
ies of radical-pair reactions that are affect-
Bird’s eye Studies suggest that the magnetic
ed by the application of magnetic fields.
compass of migratory birds relies
To appreciate why radical pairs are so
on quantum effects in short-lived
special, we need to talk about a quantum-
molecular fragments known as
mechanical property of the electron known Retina (gold layer) radical pairs that are formed photo-
as spin angular momentum, or “spin” for
chemically in the eyes. In this way,
short. Spin is a vector with a direction as
the birds can perceive Earth’s mag-
well as a magnitude, and it is often repre-
netic field lines and use that informa-
sented by an arrow, or , for example.
➞
➞
Trp molecule
tion to navigate their long-haul trips.
Particles with spin have magnetic moments,
FAD molecule
which is to say they behave like microscop- Cryptochrome
ic magnets. Most molecules have an even protein
number of electrons arranged in pairs with 1 Cryptochrome proteins—located in the
opposed spins ( ), which therefore can-
➞
retinal cells of the bird’s eye—include

➞
cel each other out. Radicals are molecules a flavin adenine dinucleotide molecule (FAD)
Ground state
that have lost or gained an electron, mean- and a tryptophan amino acid (Trp). In the
stable state, these molecules are electrically
ing that they contain an odd, unpaired, elec-
neutral, and a small section of the protein
tron and hence have a spin and a magnet- probably extends like a tail.
ic moment. When two radicals are created Blue photon
simultaneously by a chemical reaction (this
2 When a photon of blue light hits the
is what we mean by radical pair), the two cryptochrome, an electron jumps from the
unpaired electrons, one in each radical, can Trp onto the FAD. The resulting molecules—
have either antiparallel spins ( ) or par- each with an odd number of electrons—
➞ ➞
allel spins ( ), arrangements known as Singlet state are known as a radical pair. In this singlet
➞
➞
singlet and triplet states, respectively. state, the molecules’ unpaired electrons
spin in opposition.
Immediately after a radical pair is creat-
ed in a singlet state, internal magnetic fields
cause the two electronic spins to undergo a 3 The activated protein oscillates rapidly back
and forth between the singlet state and
complex quantum “waltz” in which singlet
the triplet state, in which the unpaired
turns into triplet and triplet turns back into electrons spin in parallel. Earth’s magnetic
singlet millions of times per second for pe- field influences the spin, impacting
riods of up to a few microseconds. Crucial- Triplet state the likelihood of each state dominating.
ly, under the right conditions, this dance
can be influenced by external magnetic 4 Both states can undergo chemical reactions
fields. Schulten suggested that this subtle that transform them into the “signaling
quantum effect could form the basis of a state”—in which a hydrogen ion has been
Uncharged added to the FAD radical—and the tail seems
magnetic compass sense that might re- to move closer to the body of the protein.
spond to environmental stimuli a million FAD
The singlet state can also simply return to the
times weaker than would normally be ground state. The proportion of outcomes
thought possible. Research that we and oth- depends on the bird’s orientation in Earth’s
ers have carried out in recent years has gen- magnetic field.
Signaling state
erated fresh support for this hypothesis. Optic
nerve Bird’s eye 5 The signaling state of the cryptochrome turns
A POSSIBLE MECHANISM (to the on a biochemical cascade that triggers the
brain) release of neurotransmitter molecules in
To be useful, h ypotheses need to explain
the retina. Signals continue to the bird’s brain,
known facts and make testable predictions. Retina where the magnetic information they contain
Two aspects of Schulten’s proposed com- is integrated with information from other
pass mechanism are consistent with what directional cues, informing the direction
is known about the birds’ compass: radical of the bird’s flight.
pairs are indifferent to exact external mag-
netic field reversals, and radical pairs are 6 Cryptochrome returns to its ground state,
often formed when molecules absorb light. and the process starts again (dashed arrow).
Given that the birds’ magnetic compass is
light-dependent, a prediction of Schulten’s
Graphic by Jillian Ditner (birds and eyes) and Jen Christiansen April 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 29
hypothesis is that their eyes play a part tures. Buried deep in the center of many
in the magnetic sensory system. About cryptochromes is a yellow molecule
10 years ago the research group of one of called flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD)
us (Mouritsen) at the University of Old- that, unlike the rest of the protein, ab-
enburg in Germany found that a brain sorbs blue light. Embedded among the
region called Cluster N, which receives 500 or so amino acids that make up a
and processes visual information, is by typical cryptochrome is a roughly linear
far the most active part of the brain chain of three or four tryptophan ami-
when certain night-migrating birds are no acids stretching from the FAD out to
using their magnetic compass. If Clus- the surface of the protein. Immediately
ter N is dysfunctional, research in migra- after the FAD absorbs a blue photon, an
tory European Robins showed, the birds electron from the nearest tryptophan
can still use their sun and star compass- hops onto the flavin portion of the FAD.
es, but they are incapable of orienting The first tryptophan then attracts an
using Earth’s magnetic field. From ex- electron from the second tryptophan
periments such as these, it is clear that and so on. In this way, the tryptophan
the magnetic compass sensors are locat- chain behaves like a molecular wire.
ed in the birds’ retinas. The net result is a radical pair made of
One early objection to the radical- a negatively charged FAD radical in the
pair hypothesis was that no one had center of the protein and, two nanome-
ever shown that magnetic fields as tiny ters away, a positively charged trypto-
as Earth’s, which are 10 to 100 times phan radical at the surface of the protein.
weaker than a fridge magnet, could af- In 2012 one of us (Hore), working
fect a chemical reaction. To address this with colleagues at Oxford, carried out
point, Christiane Timmel of the Univer- experiments to test the suitability of
sity of Oxford and her colleagues chose cryptochrome as a magnetic sensor.
a molecule chemically unlike anything The study used cryptochrome-1, a pro-
one would find inside a bird: one that tein found in A rabidopsis thaliana, the
contained an electron donor molecule plant in which cryptochromes had been
linked to an electron acceptor molecule discovered 20 years earlier. Using short
via a molecular bridge. Exposing the laser pulses to produce radical pairs in-
molecules to green light caused an elec- side the purified proteins, we found
tron to jump from the donor to the ac- that we could fine-tune their subse-
ceptor over a distance of about four quent reactions by applying magnetic
nanometers. The radical pair that fields. This was all very encouraging,
formed from this reaction was extreme- but, of course, plants don’t migrate.
EUROPEAN ROBIN ( top) and Bar-tailed Godwit
ly sensitive to weak magnetic interac- We had to wait almost a decade be-
(bottom) are among the many birds
tions, proving that it is indeed possible fore we could make similar measure-
that migrate long distances.
for a radical-pair reaction to be influ- ments on a cryptochrome from a migra-
enced by the presence of—and, more tory bird. The first challenge was to de-
important, the direction of—an Earth-strength magnetic field. cide which of the six bird cryptochromes to look at. We chose
Schulten’s hypothesis also predicts that there must be sensory cryptochrome-4a (Cry4a), partly because it binds FAD much more
molecules (magnetoreceptors) in the retina in which magnetical- strongly than do some of its siblings, and if there is no FAD in the
ly sensitive radical pairs can be created using the wavelengths birds protein, there will be no radical pairs and no magnetic sensitivi-
need for their compass to operate, which another line of research ty. Experiments in Oldenburg also showed that the levels of Cry4a Adrian Coleman/Getty Images; Imogen Warren/Getty Images (top and bottom)
had identified as light centered in the blue region of the spectrum. in migratory birds are higher during the spring and autumn mi-
In 2000 he suggested that the necessary photochemistry could take gratory seasons than they are during winter and summer when
place in a then recently discovered protein called cryptochrome. the birds do not migrate. Computer simulations performed by
Cryptochromes are found in plants, insects, fish, birds and hu- Ilia Solov’yov in Oldenburg showed that European Robin Cry4a
mans. They have a variety of functions, including light-depen- has a chain of four tryptophans—one more than the Cry1 from
dent control of plant growth and regulation of circadian clocks. Arabidopsis. N aturally, we wondered whether the extended chain
What makes them attractive as potential compass sensors is that had evolved to optimize magnetic sensing in migratory birds.
they are the only known naturally occurring photoreceptors in Our next challenge was to get large amounts of highly pure rob-
any vertebrate that form radical pairs when they absorb blue light. in Cry4a. Jingjing Xu, a Ph.D. student in Mouritsen’s lab, solved it.
Six types of cryptochromes have been found in the eyes of migra- After optimizing the experimental conditions, she was able to use
tory birds, and no other type of candidate magnetoreceptor mol- bacterial cell cultures to produce samples of the protein with the
ecule has emerged in the past 20 years. FAD correctly bound. She also prepared versions of the protein in
Like all other proteins, cryptochromes are composed of chains which each of the four tryptophans was replaced, one at a time, by
of amino acids folded up into complex three-dimensional struc- a different amino acid so as to block electron hopping at each of

the four positions along the chain. Working with these alternative These results are significant on several fronts. If the radio-fre-
versions of the protein would allow us to test whether the electrons quency fields affect the magnetic sensor and not, say, some com-
are really jumping all the way along the tryptophan chain. ponent of the signaling pathway that carries nerve impulses to the
We shipped these samples—the first purified cryptochromes brain, then they provide compelling evidence that a radical-pair
from any migratory animal—to Oxford, where Timmel and her hus- mechanism underpins the bird’s magnetic compass. The main com-
band, Stuart Mackenzie, studied them using the sensitive laser- peting hypothesis, for which there is currently much less support,
based techniques they had developed specifically for that purpose. proposes that magnetic iron–containing minerals are the sensors.
Their research groups found that both the third and fourth tryp- Any such particles that were large enough to align like a compass
tophan radicals at the end of the chain are magnetically sensitive needle in Earth’s magnetic field would be far too big to rotate in a
when paired with the FAD radical. We suspect that the tryptophans much weaker field that reversed its direction millions of times per
work cooperatively for efficient magnetic sensing, biochemical sig- second. Furthermore, the radio-frequency fields that upset the
naling and direction finding. We also speculate that the presence birds’ magnetic orientation are astonishingly weak, and we don’t
of the fourth tryptophan might enhance the initial steps of signal yet understand exactly how they could corrupt the directional in-
transduction, the process by which nerve impulses encoding the formation available from the much stronger magnetic field of Earth.
magnetic field direction are generated and ultimately sent along It is also remarkable that the birds in the Oldenburg lab were
the optic nerve to the brain. We are currently conducting experi- disoriented much more effectively by broadband radio-frequency
ments to identify the proteins that interact with Cry4a. noise (randomly fluctuating magnetic fields with a range of fre-
One more cryptochrome finding deserves mention here. We quencies) than by the single-frequency fields mostly used by Ritz
compared robin Cry4a with the extremely similar Cry4a proteins and his collaborators. We hope that by subjecting migratory song-
from two nonmigratory birds, pigeons and chickens. The robin birds to bands of radio-frequency noise with different frequencies
protein had the largest magnetic sensitivity, hinting that evolution we will be able to determine whether the sensors really are FAD-
might have optimized robin Cry4a for navigation. tryptophan radical pairs or whether, as some other investigators
have suggested, another radical pair might be involved.
O PEN QUESTIONS Many questions about the birds’ magnetic compass remain,
Although these experiments confirm that Cry4a has some of the including whether the magnetic field effects on robin Cry4a ob-
properties required of a magnetoreceptor, we are still a long way served in vitro also exist in vivo. We also want to see whether mi-
from proving how migratory birds perceive Earth’s magnetic field gratory birds with genetically suppressed Cry4a production are
lines. One crucial next step is to determine whether radical pairs prevented from orienting using their magnetic compass. If we
actually form in the eyes of migratory birds. can prove that a radical-pair mechanism is behind the magnetic
The most promising way to test for radical pairs inside the birds’ sense in vivo, then we will have shown that a biological sensory
eyes was inspired by the work of chemists and physicists who, in system can respond to stimuli several million times weaker than
the 1980s, showed that fluctuating magnetic fields alter the way previously thought possible. This insight would enhance our un-
radical-pair reactions respond to static magnetic fields. Their work derstanding of biological sensing and provide new ideas for ar-
predicted that a weak radio-frequency electromagnetic field, fluc- tificial sensors.
tuating with the same frequencies as the “singlet-triplet waltz,” Working to gain a full understanding of the inner navigation
might interfere with the birds’ ability to use their magnetic com- systems of migratory birds is not merely an intellectual pursuit.
pass. Thorsten Ritz of the University of California, Irvine, and his One consequence of the enormous distances migratory birds
colleagues were the first to confirm this prediction in 2004. travel is that they face more acute threats to their survival than
In 2007 Mouritsen began similar behavioral experiments in his most species that breed and overwinter in the same place. It is
lab in Oldenburg—with intriguingly different results. During the more difficult to protect them from the harmful effects of human
spring and fall, birds that travel between nesting and wintering activity, habitat destruction and climate change. Relocating mi-
grounds exhibit a behavior called Zugunruhe, or migratory rest- gratory individuals away from damaged habitats is rarely suc-
lessness, as if they are anxious to get on their way. When caged, cessful because the birds tend to instinctively return to those un-
these birds usually use their magnetic compass to instinctively ori- livable locales. We hope that by providing new and more mech-
ent themselves in the direction in which they would fly in the wild. anistic insights into the ways in which these extraordinary
Mouritsen found that European Robins tested in wooden huts on navigators find their way, conservationists will have a better
his university’s campus were unable to orient using their magnet- chance of “tricking” migrants into believing that a safer location
ic compass. He suspected that weak radio-frequency noise (some- really is their new home.
times called electrosmog) generated by electrical equipment in the When you next see a small songbird, pause for a moment to
nearby labs was interfering with the birds’ magnetic compass. consider that it might recently have flown thousands of kilo
To confirm that electrosmog was the source of the problem, meters, navigating with great skill using a brain weighing no more
Mouritsen and his team lined the huts with aluminum sheets to than a gram. The fact that quantum spin dynamics may have played
block the stray radio frequencies. On nights when the shields were a crucial part in its journey only compounds the awe and won-
grounded and functioned properly, the birds oriented well in Earth’s der with which we should regard these extraordinary creatures.
magnetic field. On nights when the grounding was disconnected,
the birds jumped in random directions. When tested in an un-
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
shielded wooden shelter typically used for horses some kilometers The Big Day. Kate Wong; October 2021.
outside the city and well away from electrical equipment, the same
s c i e n t if i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a zi n e /s a
birds had no trouble detecting the direction of the magnetic field.

ASTROPHYSICIST E kta Patel,
a postdoctoral fellow at
the University of California,
Berkeley, studies satellite
galaxies around the Milky
Way and Andromeda.

WOMEN
A S TRONOMY
TAKE
ON THE
STARS
A new wave of astronomers are leading
a revolution in scientific culture
By Ann Finkbeiner
Photograph by Timothy Archibald

S
Ann Finkbeiner is a science writer based in Baltimore. She
specializes in writing about astronomy and cosmology, grief,
and the intersection of science and national security. She is
co-proprietor of the science blog The Last Word on Nothing.
ome years ago I made up a list of things I was tired of reading

in profiles of women scientists: how she was the first woman to be
hired, say, or to lead a group, or to win some important prize. I had
just been assigned a profile of a splendid woman astronomer, and
her “firsts” said nothing about the woman and everything about the
culture of astronomy: a hierarchy in which the highest ranks have
historically included only scientists who are male, white and pro-
tective of their prerogatives. My list evolved into the “Finkbeiner test,” and to abide by it, I pre-
tended we had suddenly leaped into a new world in which gender was irrelevant and could be
ignored. I would treat the person I was interviewing like she was just an astronomer.
Later, working on another story, I started hearing about a These women astronomers are scientifically and culturally ambi-
cohort of young women astronomers who were the ones to call tious, and they shine of their own light; they sparkle. Their world
if I wanted to talk to the field’s best. If the top of the scientific still has restrictions but not as many, and the women react to them
hierarchy now included large numbers of women, I wondered more defiantly. “We don’t want to change ourselves to fit the mold,”
whether they might live in a post–Finkbeiner test world—that is, says Ekta Patel, a Miller postdoctoral fellow at the University of
whether they were just astronomers, not “women astronomers.” California, Berkeley, who simulates the behavior of satellite gal-
I turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. True, they are at the top, axies. “I enjoy being a girl,” says Lia Medeiros, a National Science
but they are outspokenly women astronomers, and they are Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced
remaking astronomy. Study in Princeton, N.J., where she studies black holes. “And I’m
Earlier generations of women had worked against the restric- going to be a girl all over their physics. This is my world, too.”
tions of the hierarchical culture, but change was glacially grad-
ual, partly because the women were few. With time, however, women have been astronomers since forever, but they have
small changes in their numbers added up and then tipped over, needed to be made of iron. Vera C. Rubin, who got her Ph.D. in
creating a different world. This recent cohort of women, who 1954, was advised in school to stay away from science. She kept
earned doctoral degrees around 2010, wins prizes, fellowships going anyway by telling herself she was just different from other
and faculty positions; does not suffer foolishness; and goes out- people. She did her graduate studies where her husband’s job
side the established rules to make its own. “We create the cul- took them, raised children and then got a position where she was
ture we want,” says Heather Knutson, who won the Annie Jump the only woman. She discovered the first solid evidence of the
Cannon Award in 2013. She is a full professor at the California dark matter that, years later, is still one of cosmology’s biggest
Institute of Technology and studies the properties of exoplanets. mysteries. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences
“There are more of us now, and we have the power to shape it.” (NAS), won the National Medal of Science and, after she died in
One of the rules of their world is that it includes not only 2016, had an ambitious observatory named after her; one of its
women but also people who have been marginalized for other missions is to map dark matter.
reasons, that is, people of color, disabled people, LGBTQ+ peo- Back in 1965, Rubin confronted the Hale Telescope’s no-
ple and those who are nonbinary—people whose numbers in the women-allowed rule, ostensibly imposed because observing is an
field are still strikingly unrepresentative. all-night process and the observatory had no ladies’ room. Rubin

cut a piece of paper into the shape of a woman SARAH HÖRST, a planetary But in the 1960s and 1970s a series of court
with a skirt and pasted it on a bathroom door, scientist at Johns Hopkins decisions, affirmative-action policies, laws and
creating the Hale’s first ladies’ room. University, studies executive orders mandated that universities no
Rubin was extraordinary, but her work con- atmospheric chemistry. longer exclude women and minorities for either
ditions were dead standard. All women astron- study or employment. By the time Urry got her
omers in her world—those earning doctorates between the mid- Ph.D. in 1984, some constraints on Rubin’s world were illegal, and
1950s and the mid-1980s—had the same stories, which discon- others were publicly deplored.
certingly often mention bathrooms. The women were not By 1987 Urry was working at the Space Telescope Science Insti-
admitted, were not allowed, built careers around their families, tute (STScI) on active galactic nuclei, unusually bright objects
developed thick shells impervious to aggression and were almost accompanied by light-years-long jets. She found that a subset of
completely isolated. Their best bet was to blend in with the male these objects were the same creature, eventually shown to be a super-
culture of astronomy. Margaret Burbidge—Ph.D. 1943, co-discov- massive black hole embedded in a galaxy and sending out jets. STScI
erer of the formation of the universe’s chemical elements, was then only six years old, and of the first 60 scientists it hired, 59
awarded the National Medal of Science and elected to the NAS— were men. In 1992 Urry organized a series of conferences, eventu-
refused the women-only Annie Jump Cannon Award because she ally run by the American Astronomical Society (AAS), on women
thought women should be discriminated neither against nor for. in astronomy. That year’s meeting was held in Baltimore. The result-
A woman astronomer in Rubin’s world was so alone as to be vir- ing advisory, called the Baltimore Charter, pointed out that as long
tually s ui generis—one of the few of her kind. Meg Urry, Israel as women were in charge of familial life, their careers were going
Munson professor of physics and astronomy at Yale University, to look different from men’s. It recommended, among other things,
says that for her, Rubin was an “existence-proof.” “swift and substantial action” against sexual harassers and imple-
Photograph by Amanda Andrade-Rhodes April 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 35

mentation of the tenets of affirmative action— UNIVERSITY OF Eventually women’s increased numbers and
including, most radically, Urry says, that hiring WASHINGTON’S a stronomy reduced restrictions created widespread con-
shortlists should include at least one woman. department includes (from left) ditions for what I think of as sparkle. Sparkle
But the biggest impact of that first conference, Jessica Werk, Emily Levesque is a fireworkslike quality, noticeable in talks
Urry says, “was being in a room with 200 women and Sarah Tuttle. and conversations, that in earlier generations
astronomers. Before that you’d meet three of astronomers was most obvious in young
women in the ladies’ room, so this was a huge and shocking thing.” men: visible brilliance, intensity, easy confidence and a springy
Demographic surveys of Urry’s world—women who got their joy. Quantifying sparkle is tricky. Most of its metrics—time on
Ph.D.s roughly between 1985 and 2010—show that in the 1990s telescopes, named invited talks, citations for papers, leadership
women were just under 15 percent of the astronomy postdocs and of teams—are hard to define and count precisely. But some exam-
assistant and associate professors and around 5 percent of the ples illustrate the point. See, for instance, the fraction of prizes
full professors. Given their low numbers, women in this environ- given to women by either the Kavli Foundation or the AAS for
ment still thought it best to blend in with the established culture. general scientific contributions: from 2001 to 2005 it was 4 per-
“In Meg’s world,” says Nicolle Zellner, Ph.D. 2001, co-chair of the cent; 2006 to 2010, 12 percent; 2011 to 2015, 23 percent; 2016 to
AAS’s Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and a 2021, 30 percent. Or the fraction of panel seats granted to women
full professor at Albion College in Michigan, “women worked hard, for the NAS’s decadal surveys to decide the future course of
fit in and hoped to be rewarded.” astronomy: 1990, 8 percent; 2000, 15 percent; 2010, 27 percent;
Over time the number of women slowly went up to almost 2020, 43 percent. Or look at prestigious postdoctoral fellowships
enough. In 1999 women were about 16 percent of the assistant that award research money to be taken to whatever institution
and associate professors of astronomy; in 2013 they were around one chooses, including the Chandra, Sagan, Einstein and Hub-
22 percent. In 1999 women were 7 percent of the full professors; ble postdoctoral fellowships. From 1996 to 2010, between 24 and
in 2013 they were 14 percent. These changes in numbers, Urry 28 percent went to women; 2011 to 2015, 31 percent; 2016 to 2021,
says, drove changes in policy and practice. 45 percent. In 2021, of the now merged Sagan Einstein Hubble
Institutions and professional societies increasingly adopted the fellowships, awarded by nasa, women won 58 percent.
Baltimore Charter’s ideas, including offering affordable child care Notably, somewhere around 2015 the lines charting all three
and parental leave, adapting tenure deadlines to family circum- metrics took a fast turn to the northeast. Moreover, women in
stances and publishing codes of conduct. Prizes began to allow self- this post-2015 subcohort are visibly “badasses,” says Jessica Werk,
nomination, avoiding some of the bias of the nomination process. Ph.D. 2010, a Hubble fellow and associate professor at the Uni-
36 Scientific American, April 2022 Photograph by Annie Marie Musselman

versity of Washington who studies the gas in and around galax- When people in the audience at a presentation ask questions
ies: “They r eally don’t take people’s shit.” belligerently, Berg responds, “Do you feel better? Can I continue?”
Catherine Zucker—Ph.D. 2020, a Hubble fellow at STScI who
Caitlin Casey, Ph.D. 2010, w
as a Hubble fellow, won the AAS’s New- works on the interstellar medium—redirects: “I just say, ‘Let’s
ton Lacy Pierce Prize and is now an associate professor at the touch base afterward,’ and no one ever does.”
M
University of Texas at Austin. She studies the lives of early mas-
sive galaxies, best observed at many wavelengths and in enor- ost notably, the new generation of astronomers is not
mous surveys with teams of hundreds. She leads two teams, one being quiet about sexual harassment, which, in spite
surveying millions of galaxies using the major telescopes in space of great publicity and its breach of every code of con-
and on the ground and the other for an upcoming survey, using duct at every institution, is still common: a 2018 NAS report
the James Webb Space Telescope, to look back to a billion years found that 58 percent of women in STEM academia had been
after the beginning of time for young galaxies. sexually harassed, and only 6 percent of them reported it. But a
When she was a postdoctoral researcher, Casey heard advice discontinuity may have occurred in 2015 when an ongoing sex-
from senior scientists about navigating academia: “Work extra ual harassment case involving prominent astronomer Geoffrey
hard. Take telecons at 4 a.m. Put your head down until you’re Marcy was reported by BuzzFeed and then many other major
safe.” She and her friends, also in junior positions, thought the publications. Women now file harassment cases more often and
advice was bad. They told one another, “That’s a load of crap. name names, not only in the old whisper networks but also in
Why don’t we do our own thing and see if we get hired?” She was the news and social media.
hired. As a new faculty member, she was again advised against Emily Martin, Ph.D. 2018, a 51 Pegasi b fellow at the University
activism before tenure. “I worried about that, but I decided to of California, Santa Cruz, who builds instruments to study exo-
ignore it,” she says. “I got tenure.” Every time she gets similarly planets, was a graduate student when her lab’s married deputy
bad advice, she says, “I muster the presence of these other women.” director repeatedly said he had feelings for her. When she did not
The sparkly cohort knows that its backbone is based on the reciprocate, he confronted her. Nearing the end of her doctorate
presence of other women. Sarah Tuttle, Ph.D. 2010, an assistant and feeling safer from him, she filed for a formal investigation
professor at the University of Washington, builds instruments to with the Title IX office in charge of enforcing the university’s sex-
study nearby galaxies. “When there are three of us,” she says, “we ual harassment policies. The office concluded that his behavior
can spread out the work; there’s more room to throw elbows.” did not break policy by hindering her, because she had finished
Laura Chomiuk, Ph.D. 2010, a Jansky fellow and associate pro- her degree and obtained a postdoctoral position. So she wrote an
fessor at Michigan State University who studies novae, adds, “I account for the Web site Medium, naming him.
do feel like I have allies. I can always find an ally.” They either Hörst reported a man who sexually harassed her to her univer-
join networks or start their own. They have lunches, meet at con- sity, but officials claimed he had done nothing wrong. She had been
ferences, buttonhole departmental women visitors, set up pri- told that the same man had harassed other women, and because
vate Facebook pages and Slack channels, and are all over Twitter. the others, worried about his vindictiveness, did not want to make
“Every university I’ve been at has had a women’s group,” says Dan- his name public, Hörst agreed not to name him. She has suggested
ielle Berg, Ph.D. 2013, an assistant professor at the University of to conference organizers that the orientation of poster rows in
Texas at Austin who studies the evolution of star-forming galaxies. meeting rooms should be changed so that presenters standing by
If you feel a group has your back, you are freer to be your own theirs are always publicly visible and cannot be cornered.
individual self. “I don’t want to be a blank-faced robot astrono- Kathryne Daniel, Ph.D. 2015, an assistant professor at Bryn
mer,” says Sinclaire Manning, Ph.D. 2021, a Hubble fellow at the Mawr College who works on theoretical galactic dynamics, says
University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies brilliant dusty when she is sexually harassed, “I let them pretend it didn’t hap-
young galaxies. “I can’t not be a Black woman, and I would never pen, [or] I say, ‘You must be so embarrassed.’ There are no robust
hide that I am.” Berg had purple hair and wore a bright green ways of reporting that protect the reporter.”
suit to a job interview, and, she says, “they decided that was a Chomiuk has not been harassed, but when a proposed faculty
good thing.” With backing, you are also free, like Casey’s friends, visitor turned out to be an astronomer who was then on leave
to disagree with established culture. Sarah Hörst, Ph.D. 2011, an without pay from Caltech for sexual harassment, she argued
associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, studies atmo- against the appointment. This “led to drama,” she says. Others
spheres around planets and moons. She told me, “My first year apologized for him; people told Chomiuk “he says he didn’t do
here I thought, if I have to sit through this for seven more years it” and “we’d bring him in for the science.” But in the end the
[until tenure], what I will be at the end of it is not going to be department agreed with her. “I could have just let it go,” she says,
someone who changes things. If I had to sit quietly during fac- “but aaargh, I couldn’t.”
ulty meetings, I’d have quit.” Uncertainty about whether your career will go up in flames,
Some of what they are not sitting quietly through is astrono- cynicism about institutional responses, advocacy on behalf
my’s traditionally sexist, aggressive culture—people on commit- of others and worry about the harassers’ next targets are all
tees saying things like, “Sure, she’s pretty enough to hire,” remem- standard responses to sexual harassment. In spite of the
bers Laura Lopez, Ph.D. 2011, who was both a Hubble and an Ein- difficulties, young women increasingly do not let it go. Casey
stein fellow and is now an associate professor at Ohio State wrote a chain of tweets listing her own experiences and added,
University studying the lives and deaths of stars. “In the Zoom “To all the young folks out there: document abuse. If you don’t
era, I can immediately message the department chair and say, want to share it now, one day you’ll be in a position of greater
‘Speak up right now,’ and he does.” power/freedom.”

MEG URRY is
director of the
Yale Center for
Astronomy and
Astrophysics.

T he other issue t hat young women astronomers speak up skills but that are also about vulnerability and emotions, “how
about is bias, the deep cultural belief that, for instance, we know when we need to tend to our boundaries or to take bet-
women are good at certain things, and science is not one ter care of other people.” Others run programs and workshops
of them. Like sexual harassment, bias, both unconscious and on the entire constellation of bias issues. They offer classes for
explicit, is widely acknowledged and is covered in every code of children interested in science. They serve on their institutions’
conduct. Where it was once endemic and obvious, it now is slightly Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) committees, and they note
less endemic and operates just below the visible level. Urry has that the DEI work tends to be done mostly by women and minor-
been on hiring and promotion committees for the past 30 years ities. “I’m trying to think of a woman who is not an activist,”
and says she still sometimes sees a man presented as a genius Medeiros says. Their activism in the past 10 or so years has par-
when he has not quite “done his genius thing yet,” whereas peo- ticularly focused on the demographic populations whose num-
ple question whether a woman with comparable accomplishments bers in the field are still too low: “Things are better for us,” Knut-
did the work on her own. Melodie Kao—Ph.D. 2017, a former Hub- son says, “but ‘us’ is still white”: white people make up 60.1 per-
ble fellow and current Heising-Simons 51 Pegasi b fellow at the cent of the U.S. population and 82 percent of astronomers.
University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies the magnetic Astronomy’s demographics are disturbing: 18.5 percent of Amer-
fields of planets and low-mass stars—says she herself has had to icans are Hispanic or Latino, but 5 percent of astronomers are;
actively resist being harder on women’s proposals. 13.4 percent of Americans are Black, but 2 percent of astrono-
A partial solution, beginning in 2018, has been to implement mers are. A recent NAS report called the numbers of people of
a system of “dual-anonymous” proposal review, that is, one in color in astronomy “abysmally low.”
which neither the reviewers nor the proposers know the other “I’m a first-generation woman of color who has to learn a com-
group’s identities. The major funding agencies and observato- pletely new world,” says Melinda Soares-Furtado, Ph.D. 2020, a
ries now use dual-anonymity, and although the results are based Hubble fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who stud-
on a small sample, the success rates of women’s proposals seem ies stars with odd chemical abundances. “I can code-switch, but
to have gone up, albeit not dramatically. “We’re moving from con- it’s exhausting.” Kao is first-generation Taiwanese-American:
scious, overt, unapologetic discrimination to unconscious bias,” “From day one I’ve struggled to belong in the space I’m in. Half the
says Laura Kreidberg, Ph.D. 2016, who won the Annie Jump Can- time I want to change my name.” Lopez says, “I’m Mexican-Amer-
non Award and is the founding director of the department of ican and have cerebral palsy, so that’s another set of hurdles.” She
atmospheric physics of exoplanets at the Max Planck Institute once went to a meeting with maybe 40 people whose sexual ori-
for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. “For now it’s strong, but entation and race or ethnicity were something other than straight
I have a huge amount of hope of getting rid of it.” and white, and she was shocked at “how many of us had encoun-
Because bias and sexual harassment seem to have deep, tered the [assumption that] our advisers had done our work.”
perennial roots, a few young women say that they initially The restrictions that people at these intersections deal with
wanted to burn the whole system down. But then they thought resemble the barriers of Rubin’s world: being the only one like
that rather than destroy a culture, they could make their own. you in the room means sometimes wondering whether you should
“We’ve come to know each other in enough numbers,” Daniel says, even be in that room, and it means the other people in the room
“[that] we can start to make sure a woman is in every decision- sometimes think you are incapable of doing what you have just
making room.” done. “I’m never the only woman there, but for sure I’m the only
Kreidberg is creating a wholly new department at her insti- Black woman,” Manning says. “Isolation is weird—some days it’s
tution. She wants thinking to be more collaborative, “done at a ‘Why don’t I go where I’m not being looked at like this,’ and some
blackboard,” she says. “I want juniors to speak up and ask ques- days it’s ‘No, I need to be here so someone else can see me.’ ”
tions. And I want people to not have so many responsibilities When I started talking to this bunch of young and sparkly
they can’t be creative—there’s no way around long hours at the women, I thought they might describe themselves as just astron-
cost of other things, but I have a family, I’m a runner, I tango, and omers, not women astronomers. What they have done is more
without these breaks, I run out of ideas.” Berg leads a 50-person interesting: they have reframed “astronomy” to necessarily
team: “Everyone knows what’s going on; no cliques, and no cut- include “women”—they have merged “women” into “astronomy.”
ting people out.” Casey co-leads a group of more than 200 peo- For instance, those of them offered the Annie Jump Cannon
ple whose rules are, “Don’t worry about papers that disagree, Award that Burbidge rejected have accepted it with pleasure and
address it in a future paper, and don’t be a dick. Respect the not as a prize for people who would not otherwise win prizes.
human, let the science happen, and it’ll work itself out.” The point, they say, is that they are women; they cannot escape
This young cohort of women astronomers is exquisitely aware it, and they might as well go ahead and have green hair, wear
of earlier generations’ generosity and of its own responsibility to dresses to conferences and win women’s prizes. They have been
future scientists. “We recognize the generations of women who intelligent, creative and hardworking all along, but now they are
reached down and pulled us up, and a lot of us think now we need also conspicuous; they have made themselves, as Manning says,
to do the same,” Werk says. Urry estimates that she has spent seen. They are like Vera Rubin, slapping the lady-shaped icon on
roughly a quarter to a third of her career changing the conditions the door and telling the rest of their world to get used to it.
for women. “You have to stay in the field to change things,” Hörst
says. “If it had been intolerable for Meg [Urry], I wouldn’t be here.”
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Most of these young women mentor undergraduate and grad- How to Fix Science. October 2018.  
uate students who are not necessarily their assigned advisees.
Kao teaches workshops that she markets as being on early-career
Photograph by Kholood Eid April 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 39

CREEK
REVIVAL
ENVIRONMENT
Radical reconstruction in
Seattle is bringing nearly
dead urban streams
back to productive life
By Erica Gies
Photographs by Jelle Wagenaar
STREAM TEAM l ed by biologist Katherine Lynch

(foreground) revived Thornton Creek by rebuilding
its gut—a thick layer of wet earth, rich in microbes,
hidden underneath the streambed.
Erica Gies is author of W
ater Always Wins: Thriving
in an Age of Drought and Deluge ( University of
Chicago Press, 2022). She wrote our December 2018
article “Sponge Cities” about restoring natural water
resources in urban areas.
S
almon are so elemental to Indigenous peoples who live along North America’s
northwestern coast that for generations several nations have called themselves the
“Salmon People.” But when settlers came, their forms of agricultural and urban devel-
opment devastated the mighty fish. The new inhabitants cut down streamside veg-
etation that once slowed and absorbed rains, causing floods. They straightened curvy
creeks to try to speed floodwater off the land and armored the sides to prevent ero-
sion, but the faster flow gouged the riverbed. Later, urban planners and engineers
funneled streams into buried pipes so they could build more city on top, disconnecting waterways
from soil, plants and animals. The cumulative impact of these injuries led to flash floods, unsta-
ble banks, heavy pollution and waning life. The hallowed salmon all but disappeared.
Across North America and the world, cities have bulldozed their down, creating spaces for water to mix underground. Microbes
waterways into submission. Seattle was as guilty as any until 1999, proliferate throughout the zone. Water welling up from below
when the U.S. Department of the Interior listed Chinook salmon brings oxygen to salmon eggs laid in the riverbed. Lynch realized
as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. That legally obli- that few people trying to restore Seattle’s streams were thinking
gated the city to help the salmon when undertaking any new cap- about the hyporheic zone, or that the channelizing of streams
ital project that would affect the fish. Engineers trying to improve scours it away, or that putting streams in pipes disconnects the
Seattle’s ailing streams began to reintroduce some curves, and zone from the stream water above.
insert boulders and tree trunks, to create more natural habitat, yet The meeting concerned Seattle’s Thornton Creek, which origi-
by and large, salmon did not return. Flooding also remained a haz- nally wove through rich lowland rain forest, draining an 11.6-square-
ard because rain rushed off the hardened cityscape into the still mile watershed before emptying into Lake Washington. Develop-
mostly inflexible channels, which overflowed. ers had straightened it and armored it with rocks or concrete,
In 2004 biologist Katherine Lynch was sitting through yet squeezing it into channels only a few feet wide in some places. Its
another meeting on how to solve these problems—this one held by 15-mile course ran along a highway for a while and carved through
her employer, Seattle Public Utilities—when she had an epiphany. hundreds of backyards. Some houses were so close to the narrowed
Maybe restoration projects were failing because they were over- stream that their decks overhung the water. Thornton had a repu-
looking a little-known feature damaged by urbanization: the tation as the most degraded creek in the city—and as a dangerous
stream’s “gut.” one: it flooded a major road nearly every year, blocking access to
A stream is a system. It includes not just the water coursing schools, a community center, hospitals, businesses and bus routes.
between the banks but the earth, life and water around and under At times homes and a high school flanking the creek also flooded.
it. Lynch had been tracking discoveries about a layer of wet sedi- Talk at the meeting centered on the best practices of the time:
ment, small stones and tiny creatures just below the streambed reconnecting the stream with some of its floodplains by reclaim-
called the hyporheic zone—a term from the Greek hypo, meaning ing adjacent property, removing armoring and reintroducing native
“under,” and rheos, meaning “flow.” Stream water filters down into plants along the banks. Lynch boldly told the group the project
this dynamic layer, mixing with the groundwater pushing up. Water should go further: rebuild the missing hyporheic zone. That would
in the hyporheic zone flows downstream like the surface water mean reclaiming space u nder t he stream, filling it with sand and
above it but orders of magnitude more slowly. gravel and potentially bringing back the zone’s tiny inhabitants.
For a large river the hyporheic zone can be dozens of feet deep As far as Lynch knew, no one had tried to rebuild a missing
and can extend up to a mile laterally beyond the banks. It keeps hyporheic zone in an urban stream. She hoped that restoring the
the waterway healthy by regulating critical physical, biological and stream’s gut would help Thornton Creek better maintain itself,
chemical processes, including riverbed aeration, water oxygen- reducing the need for ongoing, expensive human assistance. She
ation, temperature moderation, pollution cleanup and food cre- also argued that if the revolutionary approach succeeded, it would
ation. Some biologists compare the hyporheic zone to the human set a new standard for urban stream restoration at a time when
gut, complete with a microbiome. Others call it the liver of the river. flooding around the world was routinely costing human lives and
A healthy hyporheic zone is full of life. Crustaceans, worms and billions of dollars in damages. Cities everywhere had confined and
aquatic insects constantly move between the zone and surface flow. subsumed many thousands of streams, erasing them from public
Nematodes, copepods, rotifers and tardigrades also dig up and memory. One study found that Philadelphia had buried 73 percent

LYNCH’S VISION h as
brought salmon back
to Seattle’s most
degraded creek and
reduced urban flooding.
of its streams. Another study counted 66 percent buried in Balti- LIFE IN THE ZONE
more. Globally many streams that remained on the surface were The hyporheic zone i s a vibrant place. Its water chemistry, temper-
sick or dying. Restoring Thornton Creek’s hyporheic zone could ature and life-forms differ from those in the stream above and the
create a blueprint for enhancing biodiversity while also reducing groundwater below. These kinds of in-between ecosystems are
urban flooding and drought. called ecotones—liminal spaces that can harbor great biodiversity
Fellow scientists at the meeting were enthusiastic about Lynch’s because species from neighboring environments mingle there,
radical proposal. But at subsequent meetings she quickly encoun- along with microbes and other critters that reside only in that space.
tered a basic hurdle among the other decision-makers. “People,” The tiny beings in the hyporheic zone function as ecosystem
she says, “had no idea what I was talking about.” engineers, metabolizing inorganic compounds into food for plants

and bugs. They move organic matter and nutrients between the of the project for another seven years. That time line is typical of
zone and riverbed sediments and play a pivotal role in nitrogen, city projects, Lynch says, which require funding; coordination
phosphorus and carbon cycles. The hyporheic also helps to regu- among landowners, community groups and multiple agencies; and
late a stream’s temperature, bringing in comparatively cooler assessments of social justice and equality.
underground water in the hot summer and warmer underground Lynch’s supervisor asked that the work include stream moni-
water in the cold winter. toring so scientists could provide data to inform subsequent proj-
Scientists have shown how wide and deep a hyporheic zone can ects. Paul Bakke, then a geomorphologist at the U.S. Fish and Wild-
reach by mapping aquatic insects and fish embryos found in soil life Service, did baseline measurements, which confirmed that
beyond a waterway’s banks. For an urban creek such as Thornton, Thornton Creek’s hyporheic zone had been almost completely
that lateral reach might extend 30 feet from the stream channel. scraped away. The utility hired Seattle-based Natural Systems
The depth might be three feet below the streambed. Design, a science and engineering firm that restores waterways.
Straightening a stream and building over its floodplain can Lynch teamed Bakke with the firm’s lead engineer, Mike Hracho-
destroy the hyporheic zone. It also compounds problems: Rain that vec, to create the innovative design.
falls on pavement and rooftops cannot soak into soil and instead The restoration was personal for Bakke, who had grown up in
races off these hard surfaces, picking up fine dirt and pollutants as the 1960s and 1970s along Thornton Creek, fishing for cutthroat
it rushes into the stream. These flows, which ecologists call “flashy,” trout and playing with water skeeters. Just before he entered high
create a firehose effect that scours the riverbed and the hyporheic school, the city issued permits for condos along the creek’s edge,
material underneath it, laid down over centuries. Eventually what cutting off his access to the water. “These old haunts that I really
remains is the impermeable underbelly, such as shale or granite. loved, that were my sort of wilderness ... were suddenly not just
And a straight, armored river channel often cannot contain the blocked but being paved over,” he says. “It was very upsetting.”
flashy runoff; water overflows the banks, flooding the area. Hrachovec also frequented streams in his youth, in South Dako-
Thriving floodplains absorb potential floodwater. They also slow ta’s Black Hills. Nevertheless, when Lynch paired them up to rede-
water, dissipating its energy and reducing erosion. Slow water more sign Thornton Creek, the two men found collaboration rough going.
readily sinks underground, where some of it will return to the In one battle, Bakke wanted to put larger gravel on the streambed
stream over time via the hyporheic, supplying water in dry times. so water could move more easily into the hyporheic. Otherwise, he
Natural streams with a stablehyporheic have a more balanced flow feared, urban dust washing into the creek could plug up the down-
between winter and summer, helping to maintain water in streams ward flow. Hrachovec worried that large gravel might convey too
year-round, even in drought-prone areas. much water underground, drying out the surface stream in sum-
All these processes enable a stream to maintain itself. If the mer and killing fish. This kind of uncertainty is one reason it can
hyporheic zone is stripped away, a stream’s biological gut disap- be hard to get a city to try something new.
pears, and the waterway has little hope of staying healthy—akin to Stream shape, gradient, water speed and debris also influence
when humans develop serious digestive tract issues because their flow into and out of the hyporheic zone. To sort things out, the team
gut microbiome has been distressed. ran tests using computer simulations and in a large sandbox, mod-
eling stream dynamics and trying different rock aggregates, curves
HYPORHEIC REBUILD and wood placement to drive water underground. Satisfied at last,
Lynch first learned a bout the hyporheic zone in 2000 at the Uni- and with other city requirements in place, Seattle put out a call for
versity of Washington, but she did not appreciate how extensive bids in early 2014. Then, in May 2014, just before construction was
the zone is until a 2004 field trip into a forest with geomorpholo- due to begin, the Seattle Public Utilities project manager raised
gist and visiting lecturer Tim Abbe. She was amazed when they budget concerns because another project was running over. “In
stopped walking and he pointed out that the ground they were on front of my eyes,” Lynch recounts with incredulity, “he says, ‘What’s
overlaid a hyporheic zone for a nearby stream. “I’m looking around this hyporheic thing?’ And he just cut it.”
at trees and ferns,” she recalls, “thinking, How is that possible?” Lynch told the manager how crucial the zone was and argued
Born and raised in Nova Scotia, Lynch had moved to the U.S. that the hyporheic elements accounted for only $300,000 of the
Pacific Northwest and ended up working for Seattle Public Utili- two sites’ combined $10.5-million budget. She told him the invest-
ties, focusing on stream restoration. The two stretches of Thorn- ment—for excavation and materials such as boulders, gravel and
ton Creek slated for revitalization and discussed at the 2004 meet- finer sediment—was likely to pay off quickly. Her team had deter-
ing were called Confluence and Kingfisher. They totaled 1,600 feet mined that rebuilding the zone would reduce the need to spend
in length. The team chose these spans because they were origi- $1 million a year on average dredging sediment from a nearby
nally floodplains, and allowing overflow there could greatly reduce stormwater pond built to absorb heavy runoff.
problematic flooding along the stream’s longer route. The Seattle She also reminded the manager that the monitoring would pro-
Parks Department had already been buying out willing homeown- vide lessons on how to reconstruct urban streams to something
ers whose houses flooded along those stretches—five at Conflu- closer to their full complexity, making Seattle a leader in this work
ence and six at Kingfisher—so some of the creek’s stolen elbow worldwide. In the end, they negotiated. Lynch was able to keep the
room could be restored. Confluence hyporheic restoration intact; the Kingfisher reach was
Lynch knew that getting decision-makers to try something new shortened by 25 percent.
would be hard. Urban stream restorations have big price tags and In summer 2014 the bulldozers moved in. Hrachovec and his
high stakes—namely, ensuring that people’s properties do not flood. team scooped out generous curves in the spaces reclaimed from
By 2007, after much discussion, the design plans included hypo- the houses, in spots widening the creek from four or eight feet to
rheic restoration—although it was not approved as a formal part 25 or 30 feet. To bring the creek bed to its former elevation and

Liver of the River
The hyporheic zone—little known or appreciated—is a watery layer of stones and sediment rich with
tiny creatures that lies underneath a river, stream or creek bed and extends beyond the banks. It supplies
a waterway with nutrients and cleanses pollutants, akin to a human’s gut or liver. In cities, straightening
a stream and hardening its banks often cripple the hyporheic zone, leaving the stream ill or dying.
Stream water from above

pushes down into the hypo
rheic zone, merging with
groundwater pushing up from
below. The mix flows down
stream—though much more
slowly than the surface water—
and moderates extreme cold
and warm stream tempera
tures. Rainfall, and occasional
Stream flow flooding outside the banks,
can help recharge groundwater
and the zone.
Streambed
Hyporheic flow
Hyporheic zone
Fish fry
Groundwater Small Caddisflies,

crustaceans mayflies,
stoneflies
Streambed
Copepods
A healthy hyporheic Many small animals live in the hyporheic zone. They dig around, Tardigrades
zone provides helping water and oxygen flow through the creek bed, and provide
the concentrated food for crustaceans, fish and other creek dwellers. Microbes
oxygen that fish eggs break down pollutants and help move nutrients such as nitrogen,
need to develop. phosphorus and carbon.
Nematodes
Microbes
URBAN
STREAM Rotifers
SYNDROME
Cities often straighten
streams and harden banks,
harming the hyporheic zone.
A
A Rainfall runs off pavement and rooftops, instead of soaking
into the soil. It pours down impervious banks that have
no vegetation to slow the flow and into the channel, carrying in
pollutants and filling the stream so it floods.
B
B Heavy runoff creates a fast, downstream flow that scours
Hyporheic zone out the hyporheic zone’s sediment, nutrients, tiny animals
and microbes, leaving it thin, bare and lifeless.
Graphic by 5W Infographics April 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 45

reintroduce material that would hold the hyporheic zone, they lay- four creeks with caddisflies, mayflies, stoneflies and other species.
ered in sediment and gravel nearly eight feet deep. Hrachovec and Some of them survived. In 2019 the Thornton Creek team tried
Bakke inserted logs of different sizes into the water at precise another groundbreaking move: inoculating the engineered hypo-
angles—some partly buried, some crisscrossing the streambed— rheic zone with life. In keeping with the human gut analogy, the
creating tiny waterfalls, plunge pools and pockets of nearly still procedure is somewhat like administering probiotics, or even a
water that create hydraulic pressure that can force water down into fecal transplant, to a person to restore their gut microbiome.
the zone. These meticulously placed logs and boulders, known as Enter Sarah Morley, a stream ecologist, and Linda Rhodes, a
“hyporheic structures,” also create eddies and pockets of slow water microbiologist, both with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
that provide safe havens for juvenile fish and bugs—all meant to Administration. They harvested wild microbes and invertebrates
emulate features of a natural stream. in small baskets placed in the healthier Cedar River watershed
The Kingfisher reconstruction was finished by that fall and the nearby. They took a few baskets back to the laboratory to docu-
Confluence by spring 2015. The creek’s flow slowed, so sediment ment captured species, and they buried the others in Thornton
dropped out of the water column and began refining the stream’s Creek’s restored hyporheic zones.
shape and bed. That action also reduced what had been rapid Invertebrates and microbes quickly colonized the areas. But
downstream sediment accumulation that the city had removed even though the number of individuals was high, the biodiversity
regularly at great expense. Over the next five years gravel and silt was relatively low. According to the duo’s 2021 paper in Water, a
gradually built up behind the wood barriers, creating gentler grades. few of the new species proliferated, but most of the other species
The monitoring allowed Bakke and Hrachovec to track water were similar to those in unrestored sections of the creek.
flow by sensing temperature and following tracers. They confirmed Morley and Rhodes are considering why more of their intro-
that water was indeed moving down and through the hyporheic duced species did not make it. Because this science is so new, they
zone. In a 2020 paper, they reported that water was mixing there at have not ruled out any potential explanations. The donor stream
89 times the preconstruction rate. Data analysis proved the stream may be too different, or the restored area too small, or water qual-
was working as Bakke and Hrachovec—and nature—intended. ity too poor. They might have inoculated the hyporheic too soon,
But was that flow also supporting life and reducing pollution? before small vegetation needed by some critters could grow. And
yet in the guts of some trout, Lynch found aquatic insects that had
BUGGING THE CREEK not been seen in Thornton Creek for at least 20 years. “The fish are
Restoring a stream’s natural shape c an encourage displaced plants better at sampling than we are,” she says. The scientists are now
and animals to move back in. In many cases, however, only some conducting another study with more sensitive monitoring.
species return. And because the gravel and sand the team installed Still, Morley and Rhodes did find that the microbes that began
were sterile territory, Bakke thought they might need a biologi- living in the restored stream sections were much more active than
cal jumpstart. those in nearby unrestored sections, indicating they were “getting
If a species is missing from an ecosystem, our instinct is simply goosed to do something,” Rhodes says—maybe build biofilms and
to reintroduce it. But ecologists are painfully aware of cautionary biomass, clean pollutants or break down organic material. The
tales such as stocking a desirable trout that inadvertently brings restored sections had seven times more hyporheic crustaceans,
pathogens along with it. Even bringing back a native plant can worms and insects, as well as much greater overall species diversity.
shake up a system that has adjusted to its absence.
Kate Macneale, an environmental scientist for King County, TRACKING CHEMICALS
where Seattle is located, understands this lesson. She monitors The final question about the Thornton Creek restoration was
insects as a measure of stream health, rating them on what she calls whether it was cleaning pollution that pours in with runoff during
the “bug score.” Macneale had found a clear correlation between storms, from lawn fertilizer to urban wastes. Lynch had to search
urbanization and lower bug scores; some species, she figured, were for three years to find a chemist who would conduct the research.
too sensitive to survive. “All of them said it could not be done,” she recalls. They said it was
A few years ago an experience made her rethink that conclu- too difficult to track how long water stayed in the hyporheic zone
sion. Vandals had destroyed an experiment she had set up in Seat- and to measure whether chemicals were removed while the water
tle’s Longfellow Creek, which released what had been captive bugs spent time underground.
into the “wild” of the urban stream. Two years later she was sam- Lynch eventually reached Skuyler Herzog, then an engineer at
pling fish there and found one of the bugs, a caddisfly, in a fish’s the Colorado School of Mines, who specializes in the hyporheic
gut. Caddisflies live only for a matter of weeks, so it could not have zone. “He took the next plane out here,” Lynch recounts with glee.
been an individual from the unintended release: it must have been After years of studying the hyporheic zone academically, he was
a “grandkid of that individual,” she says. “I couldn’t believe it.” thrilled to conduct tests on a real restoration. Lynch recruited Uni-
Macneale realized that some insects in reconstructed streams versity of Washington chemist Edward Kolodziej to help.
might be missing not because they cannot hack the conditions but The team sent tracer dyes into an engineered plunge pool that
because there were no nearby insects around to recolonize the pushed water into the hyporheic. They then monitored exit points
water. The idea that life will return to restored creeks relies on crit- seven and 15 feet downstream to determine how long a “packet”
ters migrating from healthy upstream habitats. But with Longfel- of water stayed under before rejoining surface flow; water stayed
low Creek, Macneale says, the headwater “is literally a Home Depot under for 30 minutes to three hours or more. They also collected
parking lot.” If organisms are to recolonize restored streams, she water samples from the stream and used mass spectrometry to
says, “we may need to help them out.” measure different pollutants from storm runoff. They counted
With that insight, she got permission from King County to seed nearly 1,900.

BENDINGthe creek has slowed stormwater flow,
safeguarding tiny creatures in the wet hyporheic
layer underlying the stone bed so they can keep
the water oxygenated and healthy.
The scientists sampled water packets before they entered the those short hyporheic stretches, the team thinks the pollutants
stretches of hyporheic and after they emerged and compared them mostly got stuck on sediments or biofilms rather than being bro-
with water flowing downstream above the stretches. The surface ken down immediately by microbes, although that decomposition
flow reduced the concentration of about 17 percent of the chemi- is common over longer time periods.
cals by at least half. The seven-foot stretch of the hyporheic reduced Hrachovec says it is “jaw-dropping” that such short hyporheic
the concentration of 59 percent of the chemicals by at least half, spans were able to reduce so much pollution. He adds it was
and the 15-foot stretch reduced the concentration of 78 percent of “astounding to contemplate how much good we could do if we had
the chemicals by at least half. Because water spent so little time in this more available.”

BOULDERS a nd tree trunks inserted into
Thornton Creek create protective eddies for
fish and bugs. They push water down into
the hyporheic zone, where it can be cleansed
of pollutants before reemerging down
stream. Beavers have returned close to
a city neighborhood in the background.

A NEW STANDARD?
The Thornton Creek findings are encouraging. The neighborhoods
around the creek have not flooded since the restorations were fin-
ished in 2015, even during large storms. The stream’s temperature
and flow are more consistent year-round. The city needs to dredge
less often, saving money, and neighbors love spending time in the
expanded green space. Yet the work also reveals how complex
nature’s systems are and how difficult it can be to restore them
once damaged. As cities and agencies increasingly turn to more
nature-based solutions, the Thornton Creek lessons can help
experts understand which steps work and which need improvement.
Success has helped Lynch convince Seattle Public Utilities and
other city decision-makers of the importance of a stream’s gut.
Hyporheic restoration has become a formal part of the utilities’
creek projects—not guaranteed but routinely considered. Taylor
Creek now has eight planned hyporheic reconstructions along a
1,200-foot stretch. Herzog is testing design improvements to in
crease water’s “residence time” in the hyporheic and is studying
how much that increases cleansing. Plans to restore the north
branch of Thornton Creek include hyporheic structures. Because
of the zone’s power to reduce pollution, the city will probably
include hyporheic structures in a restoration along Longfellow
Creek, which contains a chemical from vehicle tire particles that
Kolodziej has shown kills salmon; construction could begin by 2026.
Still, small restorations cannot fully compensate for insults to
long streams and rivers. “Stormwater runoff, biodiversity, flood-
ing—these are watershed-scale problems,” Bakke says. That is why
reconstructions need to be distributed in many places along a
stream or river. Abbe, the geomorphologist who inspired Lynch, is
now at Natural Systems Design. He has planned and overseen 14
hyporheic restorations in five other Washington State counties. In
2019 Abbe was walking along a project on Poison Creek in Chelan
County with Steve Kolk, an engineer with the U.S. Bureau of Rec-
lamation, an agency infamous in ecology circles for building giant
dams. As Abbe tells it, Kolk suddenly stopped walking and said,
“Ultimately you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of these
treatments to restore our watershed.” Abbe said, “Bingo.”
Finding space for more natural water flows in an established
city might seem difficult, but buildings are replaced more often
than people think, particularly when they flood regularly. Cities
can reclaim that land, as Seattle did. Even small projects in key
places can make a difference. By restoring the floodplains at Con-
fluence and Kingfisher, Seattle has relieved troublesome flooding
along Thornton Creek.
Most exciting for Lynch, the hyporheic innovations won the
ultimate stamp of approval in the fall of 2018, when Chinook
salmon swam in from Puget Sound and spawned in the creek’s
restored hyporheic zones.
“That was just really emotional,” Lynch recalls. “We had done
it. You c an r estore the hyporheic zone. You c an r estore natural pro-
cesses to the extent that we are actually attracting salmon to the
site to spawn.” If these two small restorations in an urban creek
can help restart a functioning ecosystem, she says, “I think there
really is hope for the future.”
FROM OUR ARCHIVES

The Origin and Evolution of Cities. Gideon Sjoberg; September 1965.

Mysterious
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
Butterflies
of the
Soul
Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the discovery of neurons
and the origins of modern brain science
By Benjamin Ehrlich
PURKINJE CELL drawn by Cajal

Excerpted from The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramón y from the human cerebellum at the
Cajal and the Story of the Neuron, b
y Benjamin Ehrlich. back of the head, which regulates
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. balance for walking and standing.

H
Benjamin Ehrlich is author of T he Dreams of Santiago
Ramón y Cajal, t he first English translation of Cajal’s dream
journals. His work has appeared in the New England Review,
Nautilus a nd the Paris Review Daily. His new book is The
Brain in Search of Itself (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022).
our after hour, year after year, Santiago Ramón y Cajal sat
alone in his home laboratory, head bowed and back hunched, his
black eyes staring down the barrel of a microscope, the sole object
tethering him to the outside world. His wide forehead and aqui-
line nose gave him the look of a distinguished, almost regal, gen-
tleman, although the crown of his head was as bald as a monk’s.
He had only a crowd of glass bottles for an audience, some short
and stout, some tall and thin, stopped with cork and filled with white powders and colored liquids;
the other chairs, piled high with journals and textbooks, left no room for anyone else to sit. Stained
with dye, ink and blood, the tablecloth was strewn with drawings of forms at once otherworldly and
natural. Colorful transparent slides, mounted with slivers of nervous tissue from sacrificed animals
still gummy to the touch from chemical treatments, lay scattered on the worktable.
With his left thumb and forefinger, Cajal adjusted the corners
of the slide as if it were a miniature picture frame under the lens
of his microscope. With his right hand, he turned the brass knob
on the side of the instrument, muttering to himself as he drew the
image into focus: brownish-black bodies resembling inkblots and
radiating threadlike appendages set against a transparent yellow
background. The wondrous landscape of the brain was finally
revealed to him, more real than he could have ever imagined.
In the late 19th century most scientists believed the brain was
composed of a continuous tangle of fibers as serpentine as a laby
rinth. Cajal produced the first clear evidence that the brain is
composed of individual cells, later termed neurons, that are fun-
Cajal Institute, Cajal Legacy, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid, Spain (all images)
damentally the same as those that make up the rest of the living
world. He believed that neurons served as storage units for men-
tal impressions such as thoughts and sensations, which com-
bined to form our experience of being alive: “To know the brain
is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and
will,” he wrote. The highest ideal for a biologist, he declared, is
to clarify the enigma of the self. In the structure of neurons, Cajal
thought he had found the home of consciousness itself.
Cajal is considered the founder of modern neuroscience. His-
torians have ranked him alongside Darwin and Pasteur as one of
the greatest biologists of the 19th century and among Copernicus,
Galileo and Newton as one of the greatest scientists of all time. His
masterpiece, Texture of the Nervous System of Man and the Verte-
brates, is a foundational text for neuroscience, comparable to
O
n the Origin of Species for evolutionary biology. Cajal was
awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his work on the structure of
neurons, whose birth, growth, decline and death he studied with
devotion and even a kind of compassion, almost as though they
were human beings. “The mysterious butterflies of the soul,” Cajal A YOUNG CAJAL a
ppears in an 1871 photographic portrait.

NERVE ENDINGS t hat Cajal drew
from a section of mouse thalamus,
a key neural signal relay point.
ASTROCYTES,
support cells for
neurons, surround
a blood vessel.

called them, “whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the
secrets of the mind.” He produced thousands of drawings of neu-
rons, as beautiful as they are complex, which are still printed in
neuroanatomy textbooks and exhibited in art museums. More
than 100 years after he received his Nobel Prize, we are indebted
to Cajal for our knowledge of what the nervous system looks like.
Some scientists even have Cajal’s drawings of neurons tattooed on
their bodies. “Only true artists are attracted to science,” he said.
A NEW TRUTH
In Cajal’s day, the most advanced method for visualizing cells was
histology, an intricate and temperamental process of staining dis-
sected tissue with chemicals whose molecules clung to the subtle
architecture of the cells, rendering them miraculously visible
through a light microscope. With the primitive stains available,
researchers across Europe tried and failed to clarify the question of
what lies inside the brain, believed to be the organ of the mind. Then,
in 1873, in the kitchen of his apartment in Abbiategrasso, outside
Milan, Italian researcher Camillo Golgi, through some combination
of luck and skill, hit on a new technique that revolutionized neuro-
anatomy. “I have obtained magnificent results and hope to do even
better in the future,” Golgi wrote in a letter to a friend, touting his
method as so powerful that it could reveal the structure of nervous
tissue “even to the blind.” He called it the black reaction. One of Gol-
gi’s students recognized “the marvelous beauty of the black reac-
tion ... [which] allows even the layman to appreciate the images in
which the cell silhouette stands out as if it had been drawn by Leon-
ardo.” Cajal, who first saw the technique in the home of a colleague
who had recently returned from studying in Paris, was absolutely
smitten. “On the perfectly translucent yellow background,” Cajal
recalled, “sparse black filaments appeared that were smooth and
thin or thorny and thick, as well as black triangular stellate or fusi-
form bodies! One would have thought that they were designs in Chi-
nese ink on transparent Japanese paper ... Here everything was sim-
ple, clear, and unconfused ... The amazed eye could not be removed
from this contemplation. The dream technique is a reality!”
Although the black reaction dramatically reduced the num-
ber of nerve elements visible on a microscope slide, those ele-
ments were still so densely packed that their fibers appeared
inextricable from one another. Traditionally, researchers stud-
ied nervous tissue from adult humans who had died naturally
after a normal life span. The problem was that in the adult ner-
vous system, the fibers were already fully grown and therefore
extremely structurally complex. Looking for a solution to this
problem, Cajal turned to embryology—also known as ontogeny—
which he had first read about in a college textbook. “If we view
the natural sequence in reverse,” Cajal explained, “we should
hardly be surprised to find that many structural complexities of
the nervous system gradually disappear.” In the nervous systems
of younger specimens, cell bodies would in theory be simpler,
fibers shorter and less numerous, and the relationships among
them easier to discern. The nervous system was also well suited
to the embryological method because as axons grow, they develop
myelin sheaths—insulating layers of fat and protein—which repel
the silver microcrystals, preventing the enclosed fibers from
being stained. Younger axons without thick sheaths more fully
absorb the stain. In addition, mature axons, which sometimes
grow to be a few feet long, are more likely to get chopped off dur-
ing sectioning. “Since the full-grown forest turns out to be impen-

LAYERS OF CELLS f rom the retina. Cajal made
studies of sections of retina from different
animals, noting their structural similarities.
etrable and indefinable,” he wrote, “why not revert to the study both a symbol and an instrument of imperial power. Around that
of the young wood in the nursery stage, as we might say?” time, perhaps influenced by the predominant metaphor, German
At the age of 36, Cajal found himself incubating eggs, just as he anatomist Joseph von Gerlach looked at nervous tissue through
had loved doing when he was a child. This time, instead of waiting his microscope and saw the tangle of fibers—a reticulum.
to witness “the metamorphosis of the newly born,” Cajal cut into Cajal, who grew up in the preindustrial countryside, saw in
the eggshell after a few days and removed the embryo. Embryonic the nervous system the natural images of his childhood. “Is there
tissue was too delicate to withstand pressure from the clasp of a in our parks any tree more elegant and leafy than the Purkinje
microtome. So, holding the block of tissue between the thumb and corpuscle of the cerebellum or the psychic cell, in other words,
forefinger of his left hand, he cut sections with a razor blade, apply- the famous cerebral pyramid?” he asked. He observed branchlets
ing his training as a barber during the hated apprenticeships of his of axons “in the manner of moss or brambles on a wall,” often-
youth, in a fashion that he could never have foreseen. A private stu- times supported by “a short, delicate stem like a flower”; a year
dent of Cajal’s in Barcelona who worked in the laboratory with him later he settled on the term “mossy fibers.” These fibers, he found,
attested that his hand-cut sections—often between 15 and 20 end in “rosettes” that approach the dendrites of other cells but,
microns thick—were as perfect as those cut with any machine. again, do not touch them. There are “nest endings” and “climb-
In April 1888 Cajal prepared samples from the cerebellum of ing fibers,” which cling “like ivy or vines to the trunk of a tree.”
a three-day-old pigeon embryo. Through the microscope, he fixed Above all, the cells seemed to connect like “a forest of out-
his gaze on a clear, fine axon as it arced downward from its base— stretched trees.” Gray matter was an “orchard”; pyramidal cells
a soft, conical bulge on the cell body—and followed the black line, were packed into an “inextricable grove.” Cajal hit on the embry-
transfixed, as if he were still a boy following the course of a river. ological method for studying the nervous system, he said, while
The axon curved, running alongside the layer of cells below it reflecting on the difference in complexity between the “full-grown
until it started to branch. In Cajal’s eyes, the Purkinje cell stained forest” and the “young wood.” The cerebral cortex, impenetrable
with the black reaction resembled the “most elegant and leafy and wild, was a “terrifying jungle,” as intimidating as the one in
tree.” He traced a branch from the cell’s central “pearlike” body Cuba, where he had fought in the Ten Years’ War. By force of will,
all the way to its end, where it approached other cells, known as Cajal believed, human beings can transform “the tangled jungle
stellate cells, each forming a kind of “basket” shape. Though inti- of nerve cells” into “an orderly and delightful garden.” Cajal always
mately related, the “pear” of one cell and the “basket” of another feared that the backwardness of his environment had stunted his
never touched. Cajal sensed a “new truth” arising in his mind: intellectual growth. “I regret that I did not first see the light in a
nerve cells ended freely. They were distinct individuals. great city,” he wrote in his autobiography. But the undeveloped
landscape of his childhood became the rich ground that nourished
THE TANGLED JUNGLE an understanding that was distinct from that of his contemporaries.
Since researchers first began to study the nervous system in Although he evoked the telegraph from time to time, in an
ancient times, they have tended to compare its structure to con- address written by him and read in his absence at the 1894 Inter-
temporary technologies. The ancient Egyptians saw in the exte- national Medical Congress in Rome, Cajal fundamentally rejected
rior casing of the brain, with its fissures and convolutions, the the metaphor. His opposition was rooted in both his anatomical
corrugated slag left over from smelting ore. The ancient Greeks findings and his observations of his own mind. “A continuous pre-
thought the brain functioned like a catapult. René Descartes established net—like the lattice of telegraphic wires in which no
believed that animal spirits flowed from the brain through hol- new stations or new lines can be created—somehow rigid, immu-
low nerves and inflated the muscles, just as hydraulic fluid trav- table, incapable of being modified,” he said, “goes against the con-
eled through machines in the royal gardens at Saint-Germain. cept that we all hold of the organ of thought: that within certain
In the 19th century, a new era of transportation, anatomist Otto limits, it is malleable and capable of being perfected by means of
Deiters, among many others, conceived of the nervous system as well-directed mental gymnastics.” He knew, in other words, that
a railroad, with junctions at which traffic could be routed. he could change his own mind. That was why he could not toler-
In the mid-19th century the railway metaphor for the nervous ate the reticulum, whose structure was fixed. The nervous system
system gave way to another transformative technological advance: must have the capacity to change, and that capacity, he argued, is
the telegraph. The German biophysical school, headed by Her- crucial to an organism’s survival. Cajal relied on a variety of terms
mann von Helmholtz and Emil du Bois-Reymond, led the charge. to express this concept: “dynamism,” “force of internal differenti-
“The wonder of our time, electrical telegraphy, was long ago mod- ation,” “adaptation [of neurons] to the conditions of the environ-
eled in the animal,” du Bois-Reymond said in an 1851 speech. He ment”—and, most consequentially, “plasticity.”
argued that the similarity between the nervous system and the Cajal was not the first to use the term “plasticity,” although
electrical telegraph ran far deeper. “It is more than similarity,” he his Rome address, delivered before a broad international audi-
wrote. “It is a kinship between the two, an agreement not merely ence, was probably responsible for its popularization. The con-
of the effects, but also perhaps of the causes.” In turn, engineers cept remains one of Cajal’s most enduring contributions to sci-
who designed telegraph networks, such as Samuel Morse and ence, inspired by his unique and unconventional worldview.
Werner von Siemens, looked to the biological nervous system as
a model of centralization and organization. With people travel-
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
ing across countries for the first time and communicating with
The Art of Neuroscience. S arah Chodosh and Liz Tormes; Scientific American Mind,
one another across the world, interconnectedness became a social November 2016.
ideal. When Germany finally unified in 1871, its telegraph net-
work, centered in Berlin and reaching all its territories, became

ASTROPHYSIC S
Scanning
the Cosmos
for Dark Matter
Signals from space may point the way to the universe’s hidden realm
By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Illustration by Mondolithic Studios

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a theoretical physicist. She is
an assistant professor of physics and a core faculty member in
women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire.
She is author of T he Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark
Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred ( Bold Type Books, 2021).
H
ow do you think the dark matter problem is solved?” Vera C. Rubin urgently
asked me, within minutes of being introduced at a 2009 Women in Astronomy
conference. To this day, I can’t remember what I said in response. I was awe-
struck: the famed astronomer who had won the National Medal of Science for
her work finding the first conclusive evidence for dark matter’s existence was
asking m
e, a twentysomething Ph.D. student, for my opinion. I am certain that
whatever I came up with was not very good because it was a problem that I had,
until that moment, given no serious thought to. Until Rubin asked me my opinion, it had never
occurred to me that I was entitled to have an opinion on the question at all.
If I disappointed her with my answer, she didn’t Collider near Geneva, take the opposite approach,
show it. Instead she asked me to sit down to lunch with smashing two regular particles together with the hope
her and some other women astronomers, including for- of producing dark matter particles. Meanwhile “indi-
mer nasa administrator Nancy Grace Roman. Rubin rect detection” experiments look for evidence of dark
then proceeded to fangirl over Roman, who is often matter interacting with itself, with the resulting colli-
referred to as “the mother of the Hubble Space Tele- sion producing observable particles.
scope.” It was quite a moment for me, to watch an So far none of these strategies has turned up the
elderly woman who had uncovered one of the greatest missing matter. We still don’t know if dark matter can
scientific mysteries of our time excitedly introduce us talk to regular matter in any way beyond gravity. It may
to her own hero. be impossible to produce in the accelerators we can
Rubin cemented her legacy in the 1960s, when she build or to detect in the experiments we can construct.
studied stars inside galaxies and found something odd: For this reason, astronomical observations—cosmic
stars on the outskirts of galaxies were moving faster probes of dark matter—are one of our best hopes. These
than they were supposed to, as if there was an invisi- probes allow us to look for signatures of dark matter in
ble matter there contributing a gravitational pull. Her environments that are difficult for us to produce on
work echoed findings from galaxy cluster studies in the Earth—for example, inside neutron stars. More broadly,
early 1930s by Fritz Zwicky, which had led him to sug- such searches look at dark matter’s behavior under
gest the existence of D
unkle Materie, G
erman for “dark gravity in a variety of locations.
matter.” Throughout the 1970s Rubin and astronomer Despite the promise of this approach for studying
Kent Ford published data consistent with this conclu- dark matter, it has sometimes been caught in the mid-
sion, and by the early 1980s scientists were in wide- dle between the astronomy and physics communities.
spread agreement that physics had a dark mat- Physicists tend to emphasize colliders and laboratory
ter problem. experiments and don’t always prioritize links to astro-
Most attempts to track down dark matter in the lab- physical work. Astronomers tend to write dark matter
oratory have fallen into three categories. So-called off as a particle physics problem. This disconnect has
direct detection experiments look for evidence of dark implications for funding. In 2022 we have an opportu-
matter particles interacting with particles of normal nity to change that. The start of the 2020s marked the
matter—for instance, the element xenon—through one beginning of an important process known as the Snow-
of the nongravitational fundamental forces, the weak mass Particle Physics Community Planning Exercise.
force, as well as through hypothesized new forces. Col- This project, which takes place about once a decade,
lider experiments, such as those at the Large Hadron brings physicists together to explain prospective scien-

The Dark Matter Hunt
Scientists know the matter w e can see is not all that is there.
But so far attempts to find dark matter and discover its
identity have not been successful. The search continues.
FOUR WAYS TO LOOK

FOR DARK MATTER
Direct detection experiments, such as the
Xenon1T detector in Italy, look for signs of PARTICLE COLLIDERS
dark matter particles interacting via the weak
force with regular matter. Particle colliders,
such as the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva,
search for dark matter particles among the
debris created when normal particles smash
together. Indirect detection experiments, INDIRECT
including astrophysical searches such as the
DETECTION
High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS)
DIRECT EXPERIMENTS
in Namibia, look for signs of dark matter
interacting with itself, producing normal DETECTION
matter in the process. Indirect detections EXPERIMENTS
often involve looking for the aftermath
of cosmic particles interacting with the
atmosphere. All of these methods require
dark matter to interact with traditional
particles in some way besides gravity.
If it does not, observations of astrophysical
objects may be the only way to find the
ASTROPHYSICAL SIGNALS
hidden material.
Centers of Galaxies Galaxy Clusters The CMB Gravitational Lensing Neutron Stars
If dark matter is its own The same phenomenon— The cosmic microwave Scientists can look at These dense spinning stars
antiparticle—a possibility WIMP particles destroying background (CMB) is how mass bends light as may produce axions—
under the weakly inter themselves—could be ancient light that pervades it travels through the one dark matter candidate—
acting massive particle evident in clusters of the universe. Patterns in the universe—a phenomenon inside their cores. If so,
(WIMP) model—it would galaxies, where dark frequency of this light reflect known as gravitational the axions could decay into
annihilate itself at the matter is also expected how much total mass was lensing—to study how photons telescopes could
centers of galaxies to create to be concentrated. present in the early cosmos, much mass dark matter see. They would also cause
an excess of gamma rays constraining different dark contributes and what neutron stars to lose heat in
that telescopes could see. matter candidates. it might be made of. a measurable way.
tific projects to a congressionally mandated panel that A UNIVERSE OF DARK MATTER CANDIDATES
will determine scientific priorities. For the first time, cos- There is still much we don’t know about dark matter,
mic probes of dark matter will be a distinct topic of con- but we have come a long way since Rubin’s work in the
sideration. Although Snowmass does not make formal 1970s and 1980s. We now have good evidence to suggest
policy recommendations, it is certainly the case that at that every galaxy lives in its own bubble of dark matter—
each stage of the organizational hierarchy, there will be called a dark matter halo—that extends well beyond the
decisions about what science to emphasize. visible part of the galaxy. The amount of dark matter in
Graphic by Matthew Twombly April 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 61

these galaxy-halo systems surpasses the amount of mat- looking for something interesting to work on. It was
ter in the stars and planets and gas. In other words, all there that Mark Hertzberg—at the time also a postdoc-
the particles that we have been able to identify in labs toral researcher at CTP—and I first started talking about
and colliders—referred to collectively as the Standard a debate that had erupted among physicists: Could
Model of particle physics—contribute only about 20 per- axions form an exotic state known from atomic physics
cent of the normally gravitating matter in the universe. called a Bose-Einstein condensate?
If we take into account dark energy and the fact that This possibility arises from a fundamental difference
matter and energy are fundamentally equivalent, we are between bosons and fermions. Fermions must obey the
down to understanding only about 4 percent of the cos- Pauli exclusion principle, which means two fermions
mos. The Standard Model is both a stunning achieve- cannot share the same quantum state. This rule is why
ment and a theory that is, apparently, deeply incomplete. electron orbitals in chemistry can be so complicated:
because the electrons orbiting an atom cannot occupy
Cosmic probes allow us to look the same quantum state, they must spread out in dif-
ferent patterns with different amounts of energy called
for signatures of dark matter orbitals. Axions, on the other hand, can share a quan-
in environments that are difficult tum state. This means that when we cool them enough
they can all enter the same low-energy state and act col-
for us to produce on Earth— lectively like one superparticle—a Bose-Einstein con-
densate. The possibility that this could happen natu-
for example, inside neutron stars. rally in space is, in my view, quite exciting.
Axions had been proposed in the 1970s by Hertz-
We need a new particle or particles to solve the problem. berg’s Ph.D. adviser at M.I.T., Frank Wilczek, one of the
Physicists now have an assortment of dark matter first to realize that one consequence of a model pro-
candidates. Most scientists favor candidates that are posed by Helen Quinn and the late Roberto Peccei was
“cold dark matter”—particles that move relatively slowly a particle, which Wilczek named “axion” after a brand
(meaning, at nonrelativistic speeds much slower than of laundry detergent. Thus, Hertzberg was already quite
that of light). Within the class of cold dark matter, one familiar with axions. I, on the other hand, was relatively
of the classic models is the weakly interacting massive new to this idea. I had spent most of my career focused
particle (WIMP). Scientists presume that WIMPs would on other questions, and I had to get up to speed. Along
have formed naturally in the early universe and pre- the way, I learned to distinguish between the traditional
dict that they have some kind of interaction with reg- axion and the class of particles that physicists have
ular matter through the weak force. The most popular come to loosely refer to as axionlike particles.
WIMP models fall into a category of particles called fer- The traditional axion arises from the Peccei-Quinn
mions—a class that includes electrons and quarks. extension to the theory of quantum chromodynamics
WIMPs were the most highly favored dark matter (QCD), which describes another of the four fundamen-
candidates for a long time, particularly in the U.S. tal forces, the strong force. Although QCD is a highly suc-
Opinions have shifted in recent years, though, as evi- cessful model, it also predicts phenomena we’ve never
dence for WIMPs has failed to show up at the Large observed. Peccei and Quinn’s work solves this problem,
Hadron Collider or in any of the direct and indirect while providing a mechanism for producing dark mat-
detection experiments. ter. But another idea called string theory also proposes
Recently the particle physics community has become a series of particles with the same mathematical struc-
excited about another hypothetical dark matter candi- ture as the original axion; these particles have come to
date: an axion. Axions are predicted to have smaller be called axionlike. The traditional QCD axion is usually
masses than WIMPs, and they are not fermions. Instead expected to have a mass of about 10–35 kilogram—sev-
axions belong to a class of particles called bosons—the eral orders of magnitude lighter than the electron—but
category that includes photons, or particles of light. As the larger class of axions from string theory can be much
bosons, axions have fundamentally different properties lighter, down to 10–63 kilogram.
than WIMPs, which opens the door to an intriguing pos- The work Hertzberg and I did together with our
sibility about the structures they could form. Axions are postdoctoral adviser Alan Guth led us to quibble with
what first drew me into the world of dark matter research. a popular view of how axions might form Bose-Einstein
condensates. A distinguished physicist, Pierre Sikivie
ALLURING ALTERNATIVES TO WIMPS of the University of Florida, had prompted much excite-
Five years passed between my conversation with Vera ment in 2009, when he proposed that QCD axions
Rubin and my first attempt at answering the question would form large condensates in the very early uni-
she had put to me. By then it was 2014, and I was a Dr. verse. His calculations suggested they would lead to
Martin Luther King, Jr., postdoctoral fellow at the Mas- ringlike galaxy halos rather than the spherical halos
sachusetts Institute of Technology, appointed first to that most astronomers expect and that WIMP models
the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research predict. If so, then we might be able to tell what dark
and then the Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP) and matter is made of just by looking at halo shapes.

Bosons or Fermions?
Popular Dark Matter Categories
Scientists have a plethora of theories f or what dark matter might be. Most suggest that the missing stuff is made of particles that
have not been discovered yet. These fall into two categories—fermions and bosons.
SONS
Fermions include many particles BO
CANDIDATES
familiar to us, such as the electrons
TER
and quarks found inside atoms. AT
M
These particles all have an odd half-
integer spin (such as 1⁄2 , 3⁄2 , and so on)
DA RK
Two popular dark matter candidates, Axions Photons
LD
sterile neutrinos and weakly

CO
interacting massive particles,

would also be fermions Bosons include
NS the known force-
(although there are IO carrying particles,
versions of WIMPs M Axionlike
Black holes such as photons,
R
that would not). WIMPs particles

FE
which carry the

electromagnetic force.
Electrons A hypothesized kind of
boson, called an axion, is another
Sterile popular dark matter candidate.
neutrinos In addition to the traditional axion,
scientists have conceived of variations
known as axionlike particles, with
Quarks slightly different properties.
Dark matter may turn out to be one of these candidates,

or none of them, or maybe even all of them. Or it may not
be particles at all but small black holes throughout space.
But when Mark, Alan and I sat down to check how observations could detect signs of the wavelike halo
Sikivie’s group had arrived at this prediction, we came structures we expect.
to a radically different conclusion. Although we agreed These days axions and axionlike particles stand
that axion Bose-Einstein condensates would form in along with WIMPs as some of our best guesses at what
the early universe, they would be much smaller—the dark matter could be. Another category that is grow-
size of asteroids. Our model also did not give any indi- ing in popularity is a model called self-interacting dark
cations, in the present-day universe, of what kind of matter (SIDM). This idea predicts fermion dark mat-
axion structures we might find billions of years in the ter particles that have some kind of interaction with
future. Trying to better model how—and whether—we one another—a self-interaction—beyond gravity. These
get from small asteroid-sized condensates to the galac- self-interactions could create more interesting shapes
tic-scale dark matter halos of today is still a significant and structures within a halo than a smooth, spherical
computational challenge. blob. The particulars of the structures are hard to pre-
The same year our paper came out, another group dict, though, and depend on the mass and other char-
was looking into other interesting implications of acteristics of the particles. Interestingly, axions may
axionlike particles. A team led by Hsi-Yu Schive of also interact with one another, though in different
National Taiwan University published computer sim- ways than self-interacting fermions.
ulations of certain axionlike particles that are often There is an alternative to WIMPs, axions and SIDM:
referred to as “ultralight axions” or “fuzzy dark matter,” neutrinos. Although Standard Model neutrinos are now
so named because they have a very low mass and would known to be too low in mass to explain all of the miss-
act like blurred-out waves rather than pointlike parti- ing matter, these neutrinos are real and hard to see,
cles. They showed that these particles could form wave- making them functionally a small component of the
like dark matter halos with Bose-Einstein condensates dark matter that we call the cosmic neutrino back-
at their cores. Schive’s paper generated new interest in ground. In addition, a new type of neutrino has been
ultralight axions and raised hopes that astrophysical hypothesized as a companion to the Standard Model
Graphic by Jen Christiansen April 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 63

BULLET CLUS
TER: O bserva
tions from the
Chandra x-ray
space telescope
show the loca
tion of normal
matter (in pink)
as two galaxy
clusters collide.
Gravitational-
lensing studies
revealed the
bulk of the mass
(in blue) was
separated from
the normal
matter, offering
strong evidence
for the existence
of dark matter.
neutrino: the sterile neutrino. Sterile neutrinos are dis- each other just as matter and antimatter do on contact.
tinct because they interact primarily gravitationally and These explosions should produce an abundance of
only mildly through Standard Model forces. In addition, gamma-ray light where there is dark matter, especially
they are perhaps the most popular warm—or at least at the cores of galaxies where dark matter is densest.
somewhere between hot and cold—dark matter proposal. In fact, the Fermi telescope does see an excess of
Another idea that theorists are just starting to gamma-ray light at the center of the Milky Way. These
explore is that rather than a single dark matter parti- observations have inspired passionate debate among
cle, there may be an entire sector. Perhaps dark matter observers and theorists. One interpretation is that these
is made of traditional axions, axionlike particles, fireworks result from dark matter colliding with itself.
WIMPs, sterile neutrinos and SIDM—all together. One Another possibility is that the signal comes from neutron
other tantalizing possibility is that dark matter actually stars near the center of the Milky Way that emit gamma-
comprises stellar-mass black holes that would have ray light through the typical course of their lives. Some
formed in the early universe. This option has become astrophysicists favor the more mundane neutron star
more popular since the 2017 detection of gravitational explanation, but others think the signal is dark matter.
waves indicated that black holes in this mass range are The fact that there is disagreement is normal, and even
more common than expected. I have a hard time deciding what I think. I am compelled
by physicists Tracy Slatyer and Rebecca Leane’s thought-
CLUES IN THE SKY ful research showing that a dark matter explanation is NASA/CXC/CfA/M. Markevitch (x-ray), NASA/STScI, Magellan/U. Arizona/
In astronomy w e are relatively passive observers. We sensible, but in the end, only analysis of more detailed
can choose our instruments, but we cannot design a observations will persuade the community about either
galaxy or a stellar process and watch it unfold. Cosmic idea. Future data from the Fermi telescope and proposed
D. Clowe (o ptical and lensing map), ESO WFI (l ensing map)
phenomena rarely happen on human-friendly time experiments such as nasa’s All-sky Medium Energy
scales—galaxy formation takes billions of years, and Gamma-ray Observatory eXplorer (AMEGO-X for short)
the cosmic processes that might emit dark matter par- have the potential to settle the debate.
ticles do so over tens to hundreds of years. Scientists have also used the Fermi telescope to look
Even so, astrophysical probes of dark matter can tell for evidence of axions. Theories predict that when axions
us a lot. For instance, the nasa Fermi Gamma-ray Space encounter magnetic fields, they occasionally decay into
Telescope has functioned as a dark matter experiment photons. We hope that by looking over long distances, we
by looking for gamma-ray signatures that could be might see signs of this light, offering proof that axions
explained only by dark matter. WIMPs, for instance, are exist. And neutron stars—the potential confounding sig-
predicted to be their own antimatter partners, mean- nal at the Milky Way’s center—are actually a good place
ing that if two WIMPs collided, they would annihilate to look for dark matter on their own. Some theories sug-

gest that these dense spinning stars produce axions when tational lensing and participating in the dark matter
protons and neutrons collide in their cores. We might be working group. Within the group, we are discussing
able to observe these axions as they decay into photons observations that will capture more detailed informa-
and escape from the stars. And as neutron stars release tion about dark matter halos that can then be com-
the dark matter over tens to hundreds of years, they pared with computer simulations of proposed dark
would cool down in a pattern that we may be able to mea- matter candidates. Similarly, Roman telescope surveys
sure—if we look long enough. Another hot topic of study of large-scale structure will provide insight into dark
right now is whether nonaxion dark matter collects in matter’s behavior on cosmic scales.
neutron stars, affecting the structure of the star. As a In the future, proposed x-ray observatories such as
member of the nasa Neutron Star Interior Composition the nasa Spectroscopic Time-Resolving Observatory
Explorer (NICER) collaboration, I am leading a research for Broadband Energy X-rays (STROBE-X) can help us
project that is using data from NICER, a little telescope
on the International Space Station that is up for renewal
later this year. Our project is looking for evidence that
Doing science is never just about
dark matter is inside or enveloping neutron stars. calculations, observations and
We can also learn more about the nature of dark
matter by studying the best evidence we have for its experiments; it is also about
existence so far—the cosmic microwave background
(CMB) radiation. This light is a radio signal that origi-
working collaboratively with other
nated in the early universe, and it is inescapably every- people, including policy makers.
where, all around us. It provides a snapshot of a
moment early in cosmic history, and the patterns we take a closer look at neutron star structure in ways that
see in the frequencies of its light reflect the makeup of will enhance our understanding of dark matter’s pos-
the universe when it was created. It turns out that we sible properties. Other proposed future projects such
can only explain the patterns we see in the CMB by as nasa’s All-sky Medium Energy Gamma-ray Obser-
assuming that dark matter was present—if there were vatory, or AMEGO (not to be mistaken for AMEGO-X),
no dark matter, the CMB data would make no sense. will do the same in a different wavelength.
The patterns in the data tell us what fraction of the total I will be an active participant not just as a scientist
mass and energy dark matter contributed; they even but as one of three conveners, alongside Alex Drlica-
help constrain the possible masses of the dark matter Wagner and Hai-Bo Yu, for the Snowmass Cosmic Fron-
particles. As I write, the CMB-Stage 4 collaboration is tier’s topic Dark Matter: Cosmic Probes. It is our respon-
preparing to use a collection of telescopes in Chile’s sibility to describe the excitement and possibilities of
Atacama Desert and at the South Pole to take the most astrophysical searches for dark matter to the funding
detailed measurements yet of the CMB. decision-makers. The document I will help produce may
influence guidance that is given to the National Science
ON THE HORIZON Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy about
Since that 2009 W
omen in Astronomy conference, Rubin what research we conduct over the next decade.
and Roman have both passed away, but their legacies live Coincidentally, the astronomy community just
on through projects that will seek to better understand recently completed a similar process known as the
our universe. The nasa Nancy Grace Roman Space Tele- 2020 Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics.
scope will launch in the mid-2020s, and although it is The resulting report sidestepped substantively address-
primarily focused on studying cosmic acceleration (the ing the dark matter problem, but it still offered strong
“dark energy problem”) and exoplanets, it will also pro- support for efforts to better map the CMB, instruments
vide insight into dark matter. At the same time, here on to study neutron stars and x-ray observatories—three
Earth, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the Atacama Des- goals that will help us understand dark matter.
ert will support research on many questions, including Doing science is never just about calculations, obser-
the search for the dark matter that made Rubin famous. vations and experiments; it is also about working col-
In other words, we have lots to look forward to in laboratively with other people, including policy mak-
the coming years. One reason is that almost any large- ers. How much progress we make will depend in part
scale astronomical observation has something to tell on what kind of support we get from lawmakers. Of
us about dark matter. For example, a team in Mexico course, this is stressful to think about. The good news
led in part by Alma X. Gonzalez-Morales and Luis is that there is a universe to wonder about, and trying
Arturo Ureña-López showed that we can use the phe- to understand dark matter is a great distraction.
nomenon of gravitational lensing, where large masses
bend spacetime so much that it acts like a fun-house
mirror, to place constraints on the mass of fuzzy dark FROM OUR ARCHIVES
matter. Gonzalez-Morales and Ureña-López are both Dark Matter’s Last Stand. Clara Moskowitz; April 2021.
active participants in the Rubin Observatory's Legacy
Survey of Space and Time program, working on gravi-

THE NEW
ARCHAEOLOGY
ARCHAEOL
OF JERUSA
JERUSALEM’S OLD CITY is home to key

holy sites for Judaism, Islam and Christianity,
including the Western Wall, the Dome of the
Rock, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

LOGY
ALEM
Even as biblical archaeology gets

a high-tech makeover, a new
generation of scholars remain
haunted by ancient scripture and
riven by modern politics
By Andrew Lawler
Andrew Lawler is a contributing writer for Science
and a contributing editor for Archaeology. His latest
book is U
nder Jerusalem: The Buried History of
the World’s Most Contested City ( Doubleday, 2021).
Read more at www.andrewlawler.com
ast fall the discovery of a 2,700-year-old toilet made headlines around the world.
Its significance had less to do with long-ago plumbing than with the site of its discovery:
Jerusalem. No place on Earth has seen so much digging for so long as this ancient Mid-
dle Eastern city; on any given day, a dozen or more excavations are underway in what is
now a fast-growing metropolis. And no place attracts as much media attention for its
archaeological finds, no matter how mundane. Only here would an ancient
latrine seize the imaginations of millions.
Since the 1830s treasure hunters, religious enthusiasts and grants no permits to Palestinian teams in the city and only rarely
scholars have flocked here to dig into the past of a place billions of approves them for foreigners. Fundamentalist Christian as well as
people hold sacred. Seeking tombs and riches, the early arrivals Jewish groups with overt religious agendas pour money into costly
created the field of biblical archaeology—the only discipline digs. Israeli leaders regularly cite archaeological finds to strengthen
founded on the idea that the tools of science can bolster rather than their claim to the Holy City, whereas a host of international orga-
undermine traditional faith. In time, they were largely replaced by nizations denounce any excavations—no matter how impeccable
secular academics who were less devoted to upholding scripture the scientific method—in areas considered occupied.
or finding treasure but who nonetheless considered the Bible to “Truth springs up from the Earth,” according to the part of the
be a tool as valuable as their spades. Bible that Christians and Jews call the Psalms and that Muslims
Yet despite more than a century and a half of study, Jerusalem call the Zabur. But the truth emerging from this city’s past,
has largely confounded researchers. Entire eras within its revealed by the latest analytical techniques, is as complicated by
5,000-year-long archaeological record were missing, from the the harsh realities of the present as it was when the first spade
chapters documenting its early Judean roots to the later periods struck into the ground. This is what makes Jerusalem a uniquely
of Persian, Hellenistic and Arab dominance. Scientists knew lit- challenging site for researchers. It is a rare crucible where reli-
tle about the health of the city’s inhabitants, what they ate, who gion, politics and science meet—sometimes to cooperate and
they traded with, or how they influenced—and were influenced sometimes to collide.
by—their neighbors.
The major culprit for these gaps in knowledge is the old fixa- A distinguished American classical scholar named Edward Robin-
tion by archaeologists on Hebrew scripture at the expense of mod- son started the biblical Gold Rush in the 1830s, at the dawn of
ernizing their approach to reconstructing the past. Only very modern archaeology. Robinson was a devoutly Protestant aca-
recently have they adopted techniques such as radiocarbon dat- demic who believed in the Bible’s inerrant truth. While on sabbat-
ing, long considered standard practice by researchers working in ical in Germany, he encountered the new fashion of biblical criti-
other parts of the world. Intent on finding storied remains of the cism, which sought to apply logic and reason to scripture. Morti-
biblical era, they have been slow to undertake the arduous work fied by what he considered to be heretical questioning of the truth
of sifting through garbage heaps to gain a fuller picture of every- contained in the holy text, Robinson wanted to counter this grow-
day life millennia ago. ing tide of religious skepticism and secularism in the West. He
Now Jerusalem scholars are racing to catch up with their col- would do this, he decided, by using scientific methods to show that
Simon Norfolk (a ll photographs)
leagues by embracing new analytical methods and goals. Yet 21st- the Bible accurately described real-world people, places and events.
century archaeology in a city shared by three faiths and contested Armed with the Good Book as his field guide and a thermometer,
by two peoples is as closely tied to religion and politics as it was in measuring tape, telescope and three compasses as his tools, he set
the 19th century—an arrangement that has cast a pall over the sci- out for Jerusalem to find what he called “indisputable remains of
ence. Excavations in Jerusalem today are firmly under the control Jewish antiquity.”
of the Israel Antiquities Authority, a government organization that Robinson began by attempting to tie the current-day names of

AN OPEN RESERVOIRbuilt in the first century
b .c .e. , the Struthion Pool was later covered under
the rule of Roman Emperor Hadrian and now sits
below a Christian convent.
villages, wells and streams in the region around Jerusalem to bib- the era between the arrival of the Israelites after 1000 b.c.e. and
lical texts to demonstrate the geographical accuracy of scripture. the Roman destruction of c.e. 70, a period encompassing much of
This marriage of data with faith proved irresistible to Western the action that takes place in both the Old and New Testaments.
Christians. The book that he published in 1841 with his collabora- They were particularly drawn to the first centuries of Judean con-
tor Eli Smith, bearing the weighty title of Biblical Researches in trol of the city. Overwhelmingly Protestant, these explorers had
Palestine and the Adjacent Regions, proved an unlikely best seller grown up hearing about David’s palace and Solomon’s temple,
on both sides of the Atlantic. With it, the men laid the foundation as well as sacred and valuable objects associated with Judaism.
for “an entire new scholarly, religious, and political enterprise in These included the Ark of the Covenant, a gilded box said to hold
the Holy Land,” writes historian Neil Asher Silberman. the Ten Commandments brought down from Mount Sinai by
It was an enterprise that would reshape the Middle East. In Israelite leader Moses and reputed to have magical powers. In
1863 the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul, who controlled Jerusalem Jerusalem, the desires for knowledge, wealth and sanctity were
and the surrounding region of Palestine, granted the city’s first hard to untangle.
official dig permit to a French explorer and senator. The sultan From the start, excavators faced a unique set of challenges.
was interested in neither the Bible nor science but in good rela- Unlike many other ancient Middle Eastern sites, Jerusalem is not
tions with the senator’s powerful confidante, Emperor Napo- a layer cake of a mound, with the old remains below and the new
leon III. Soon, British, German and Russian teams gained their above. Instead it was built on and from limestone, the product of
own permits and set out to measure, dig and analyze ancient sites a vast shallow sea that covered the region during the age of the
across Palestine. This was not just pious poking into the past. The dinosaurs. An ideal building material, Jerusalem’s particular vari-
Ottoman Empire covered an immense swath of territory stretch- ety of limestone is relatively soft when quarried, then hardens and
ing from Eastern Europe to the Horn of Africa, and European turns golden when left to weather. But complicating matters for
powers competed fiercely to influence and dominate it. With its archaeologists, a single stone hewn for an ancient Judean dwelling
important Christian shrines, Jerusalem provided an easy access may have been reused by Romans for a temple, collected by Arabs
point for Europeans eager to gather intelligence and expand their to complete an arch and robbed by Crusaders to build a church.
sway within the empire. Diplomats, military officers and spies Given the dearth of wood and other organic materials used in con-
accompanied the biblical scholars, and many were eager to find struction, modern dating methods such as dendrochronology and
treasure as well as expose the past. radiocarbon, which rely on such materials, can be of limited use for
Although Jerusalem has existed for 5,000 years, Westerners determining when any given structure was built—and by whom.
were focused on what might be called the city’s biblical millennium, The unstable nature of the ground itself poses further difficul-

EXCAVATIONin a former parking lot just south of the Old City Ever since, excavations there have periodically prompted dem-
reveals evidence from the sixth century B.C.E. to the early onstrations, sparked bloody riots and set off international crises,
Muslim period a millennium later (left), including a gold earring with participants getting assaulted and chased by mobs. Archae-
from the Hellenistic era in the third century B.C.E. (right). ology in Jerusalem is not for the faint of heart.
ties for investigators. Naturally crumbly, limestone landscapes har- At the end of World War I, O ttoman rule gave way to control by the
bor subterranean caves and streams. In Jerusalem, millennia of British, who in turn relinquished Palestine in 1948, leaving behind
quarrying and destruction have left behind tons of small chips. What warring Jewish and Arab factions to battle for command of the
seems like solid rock is actually a gravelly sediment called shingle region. In the aftermath, the new state of Israel’s capital was in
that can turn liquid in an instant. “The shingle would suddenly burst West Jerusalem. Jordanian forces controlled East Jerusalem, which
in like water, burying our tools and sometimes partially our work- included the Old City and most of the ancient sites and shrines. The
men,” one British excavator complained in the 1860s. Archaeolo- power structures changed again in the Six-Day War of 1967, when
gists have been complaining ever since. As recently as 2018, a col- Israel conquered East Jerusalem and incorporated it into its capi-
lapse brought down tons of rocky debris at one archaeological dig. tal, although most nations still consider this area occupied territory.
And then there are the threats from above. Unlike ancient sites For the first time, Jewish Israelis had a chance to probe under-
such as Babylon in Iraq, Jerusalem remains a living city crammed neath the city even as they reshaped it above. Unlike Robinson and
with shrines that draw a constant stream of Jewish, Christian and his mostly Christian successors, this new generation of biblical
Muslim pilgrims. Simply digging a hole can be viewed as an act of archaeologists was overwhelmingly made up of agnostics and athe-
disrespect or outright aggression. When the French senator con- ists with little interest in proving the truth of scripture. But they
ducted the first legal excavation at a Jewish tomb there in 1863, were also nationalists fascinated by the Jewish past and viewed the
there was an outcry in Jewish communities around the world. A few Bible as a foundational text of their new homeland. Benjamin
years later Muslims worried that British digs aimed to undermine Mazar, a famous archaeologist and president of Hebrew Univer-
the walls holding up the city’s acropolis, what Jews call the Temple sity in Jerusalem, was unapologetic about their bias. “Biblical
Mount and Muslims call the Haram al-Sharif. (This wasn’t as out- archaeology was part of Zionist idealism,” he said in a 1984 inter-
landish a fear as it might sound, given that the expedition leader view in B iblical Archaeology Review.
was using gunpowder to blast his way through the rock below.) Mazar and his colleagues found luxurious villas, grand avenues

and even the ancient world’s most impressive pedestrian overpass, ulously wealthy King Solomon, as detailed in the Bible. Although
all dating to the era of King Herod the Great and his successors, David and his famous son may have existed, Finkelstein and a
who ruled Judea under Rome’s authority in the century before and growing number of scholars saw them instead more akin to tribal
during the time of Jesus. When an internal civil war turned into chieftains of a hilltop town.
an uprising against the empire, Roman legions destroyed Jerusa- This claim infuriated many of the more traditional excavators,
lem in c.e. 70. These discoveries electrified the Jewish public by including Mazar’s granddaughter, the late Eilat Mazar. Like Rob-
bringing to light physical evidence of the time when it was a inson in the 1830s, she set out to counter what she saw as a kind
famous and prosperous Jewish city. “Israeli archaeologists, proof heresy. In 2005, while digging on the eastern side of a rocky spur
fessional and amateurs, are not merely digging for knowledge and of land south of the city’s acropolis, Mazar uncovered what she
objects, but for the reassurance of roots,” wrote Israeli author claimed was probably the palace of King David. Finkelstein and
Amos Elon in 1971. The finds also drew the attention of Israeli pol- others countered that her dating was faulty and that the structure
iticians, who were quick to cite the physical evidence to bolster might have been built by Canaanites—a mix of ethnic groups who
their controversial claim to the Holy City. inhabited the Levant 3,000 years ago—long before David was sup-
Palestinians decried such excavations as twisting science for posed to have lived.
political purposes, favoring the Jewish past at the expense of the
F
city’s ancient Canaanite and later Christian and Muslim heritage. ew were persuaded b y Mazar’s interpretation, but the dispute
“We were put in the freezer for 2,000 years,” says Nazmi Al Jubeh, had the effect of radically altering the way archaeologists in
a Palestinian archaeologist at Birzeit University, referring to the Jerusalem conducted fieldwork. The battle over the city’s past
lack of emphasis on the two millennia following the Roman shifted from interpreting biblical passages to arguing over hard
destruction. There were important exceptions, such as when Israeli data. Excavators began to sift through each bucket of dirt, metic-
archaeologist Meir Ben-Dov uncovered half a dozen huge palaces ulously counting fish bones, parsing seeds, and probing for tiny
dated to the seventh century c.e., shortly after the arrival of Arab bits of clay that might have been stamped with an administrative
Muslims in the city, and the discovery of a major and long-lost Byz- seal that could reveal clues to the nature of trade and governance.
antine Christian church. Yet there is no disputing that the Jerusa- At Tel Aviv University, Finkelstein pushed to set up facilities that
lem digs in the decade following the Six-Day War—and the media could handle an array of archaeological analyses, from determin-
coverage accompanying the resulting finds—were weighted heav- ing the nature of the residue in the bottom of a cup to studying
ily to the Jewish past. latrine samples to understand what illnesses plagued inhabitants.
Meanwhile archaeologists in Europe and North America were The showcase of that transformation is best seen at a former
embracing new research methods and technological advances. parking lot, located on the western side of the rocky spur of ridge
Rather than focusing on unearthing monumental buildings, where Mazar dug up her building. “The archaeological sciences are
museum-quality artifacts and evidence of long-dead kings, these important tools that have been completely underused here in Jeru-
excavators sought to know more about how ordinary people lived, salem,” Tel Aviv’s Yuval Gadot says. Since 2017 he and Yiftah Shalev
what trade routes tied disparate peoples together and what shifts of the Israel Antiquities Authority have been busy working their
in material culture revealed about societal changes. Using new way down through a city block–sized site that contains a rare cross
techniques, researchers could be far more precise in dating arti- section of Jerusalem from the sixth century b.c.e. until the first cen-
facts, and by sifting carefully through dirt, they could produce sam- turies of Arab Muslim control a millennium later.
ples that cast light on diet, disease, commerce and ritual. In one case, the excavators used a novel technique that charts
Researchers in Jerusalem remained deeply conservative in their changes in Earth’s geomagnetic field to determine the intensity
approach to studying the past, however. The continued quest to and speed of destruction of some of the site’s key structures. This
find the city conquered by the Bible’s King David and glorified by approach demonstrated that the burning and collapse of a major
his son King Solomon after 1000 b.c.e.—still missing after more administrative building from the sixth century b.c.e. was sudden,
than a century of digging—took precedence over questions about rather than the result of small conflagrations and decay. The evi-
diet and disease. Even those archaeological techniques in wide use dence of this dramatic event clearly aligns with the destruction of
elsewhere met with suspicion. Carbon 14 dating, for instance, was the Judean city by Babylonian forces in 586 b.c.e., described in
dismissed out of hand by researchers who contended that its mar- detail in the Bible.
gin of error allowed one to argue that the age of any given find was Yet until recently, researchers’ understanding of what took place
whatever one wanted it to be. in Jerusalem in the subsequent four centuries came almost entirely
The matter came to a head in the 1990s, when Tel Aviv Univer- from scripture because archaeologists had failed to find much
sity archaeologist Israel Finkelstein attacked academic and bibli- beyond a handful of potsherds from this time. That period extended
cal assumptions about the ages of sites around Israel, including from the rule of the Persian Empire—which conquered the Baby-
Jerusalem. After analyzing pottery from around the region, he con- lonians—to the Hellenistic successors of Alexander the Great, who
cluded that the archaeological “clock” previously used to date those in turn swallowed the Persian regime.
materials was off by a century. That meant buildings dated to By applying modern archaeological research methods, the park-
950 b.c.e. actually were built around 850 b.c.e. This might seem ing lot team has illuminated this largely unknown period. Meticu-
an academic detail, but the implications were dramatic. Indeed, lous sifting of the excavated sediments, for example, revealed the
they stood to “change the entire understanding of the history of presence of tiny bat bones in the debris of the destroyed building,
Israel,” Finkelstein wrote. showing that the site was abandoned for a time before refugees
The most dramatic implication was that Jerusalem had never crept back. The team also discovered that both before and after the
been the large and glorious center of a brief empire ruled by a fab- 586 b.c.e. calamity, Judeans were importing fish from the Nile.

A NIGHTTIME s ound and light show highlighting the ancient nician merchant, turned out to be fabricated in or near Jerusalem—
Judean past draws tourists to the City of David National Park, a sign that non-Judeans made their home in the city and brought
operated by a right-wing Jewish organization within a largely their own traditions with them.
Arab neighborhood. Nor are dietary taboos as defining of Judeans as scholars once
thought. A June 2021 paper in N ear Eastern Archaeology detailed
the discovery of an entire pig skeleton in what appears to be a
Those imports fell off much later, probably because warfare between Judean home, not far from the city’s acropolis that once supported
competing Hellenistic kingdoms following the death of Alexander the Jewish temple. The researchers concluded that not only was
the Great in the fourth century b.c.e. disrupted trade links. pork consumed in the heart of the city but that “pigs were raised
This level of detail was wholly missing from previous biblical for this purpose in the capital of Judah.” And although the park-
archaeology. “When you can have a good control of stratigraphy, ing lot dig is focused heavily on biblical times, researchers there
you can start dealing with food habits and things like this,” Gadot also are studying a Roman and Byzantine villa and taking samples
says. “Now we can excavate a home, analyze a family’s food habits from an eighth-century c.e. Arab latrine to determine the nature
and understand their connection with the wider world.” of parasites that debilitated inhabitants.
Biblical texts also paint an image of Judeans in this long era The new science-heavy approach to archaeology means that
turning inward, focusing on their temple cult that revolved around less of the work is done in the trenches and more is done in labs
a monotheistic deity and embracing strict dietary rules, as well as such as those in the basement of Tel Aviv’s archaeology department
taboos on animal and human images. But analysis of artifacts from building. This effort is also far more international than in the past,
the parking lot paints a more nuanced picture. Boxwood from dis- when the vast bulk of team members were Israeli Jews. Now Amer-
tant Anatolia showed that the city’s trade links were quite exten- ican and European graduate students participate in the investiga-
sive. And one Persian-period vessel with the face of an Egyptian tions in larger numbers, providing Israeli researchers with impor-
deity, presumed to be an import brought by an Egyptian or Phoe- tant links to the outside world. Israeli archaeologists also have

L
ast May, Eilat Mazar passed away, but the Bible continues to
exert an enormous influence over excavations in Jerusalem
and across Israel. As the recent toilet discovery demonstrates,
any find related to Jerusalem’s biblical millennium is sure to make
its way into Israeli newspapers and Web sites and often into
American and European outlets. This coverage, in turn, can elicit
vital donations for excavations that are, particularly in Jerusalem,
often complicated and expensive endeavors. Much of the support
for Mazar’s digs, for example, came from a New York Jewish phi-
lanthropist and an unaccredited Christian college in Oklahoma.
With Mazar’s passing, Hebrew University’s Yosef Garfinkel is
taking up her biblical standard. Six weeks before Mazar’s death,
she called him to her bedside and asked him to continue her exca-
vations at the City of David National Park where she found her
putative palace. He remains unconvinced that she clinched her
case but hopes to find the necessary evidence by restarting the
dig in the near future.
Garfinkel just completed a series of excavations outside the city
that he says uncovered Judean settlements dating to not long after
1000 b.c.e. “We found the historical kingdom of King David,” he
insists. “It had fortified cities, writing and administration.” Fin-
kelstein, for one, is unimpressed, noting that the settlements sur-
vived only a few decades and reveal nothing directly about the size
or status of Jerusalem itself. In recent years he and his opponents
had narrowed their differences over the dating of key sites in and
around Jerusalem down to a few decades, but Garfinkel’s work
has revived the old fight over what the city looked like when the
Israelites arrived.
The resurgence of what Finkelstein sees as a traditional form
of biblical archaeology leaves him troubled. He wants to put Jeru-
salem in the wider context of a fluid ancient Middle East and set
aside the fixation on proving the existence of this or that monarch.
But “the wave of conservative scholarship is becoming stronger
and stronger,” he says. “It is not just Eilat Mazar and Yosi Garfin-
kel. It is quite depressing. We are losing the battle.”
To combat this trend, Finkelstein launched a new archaeology
program at the University of Haifa last fall that will emphasize
partnered with the country’s Weizmann Institute of Science in cutting-edge science, international collaboration and museum
Rehovot to gather large numbers of radiocarbon samples to cali- studies with its own deep-pocketed supporters. “But of course,” he
brate a more accurate chronology of Jerusalem’s past. adds, “the battle is bigger than archaeology.” Israel, like the U.S.,
But the upgrade to Jerusalem archaeology does little to change is an increasingly polarized place, and those divisions are reflected
the controversy that accompanies every dig in and around the Old in research as well as in politics. Demonstrating the accuracy of
City. The parking lot effort prompted angry Arab homeowners to the Bible is not simply a matter of academic debate but part of a
take the project to court amid charges that the excavation was larger culture war.
endangering their homes that loom along two sides of the deep pit. Palestinians remain largely on the sidelines. Al Jubeh, the
And the pit itself will serve as the basement of a massive visitor’s Birzeit University archaeologist, pins the ultimate blame for their
center owned and operated by a controversial right-wing Jewish marginalization not on Jewish Zionists but on Western Christians
organization dedicated to settling more Jews in the area. “The such as Robinson who were obsessed with the Old Testament. As
whole use of archaeology as a legitimizer of the state has become a result, “Jerusalem is the most excavated site in the world, and it
a hallmark of Netanyahu,” says Tel Aviv’s Raphael Greenberg, refer- has come to tell an Israeli story,” he says. “I think in the end, how-
ring to the former long-reigning Israeli prime minister. ever, there is only one narrative—the narrative of science.”
Gadot insists that “Jerusalem should be explored just like Ath- In a world of alternative facts, it’s a comforting thought. Yet sep-
ens and Rome.” But unlike those two ancient capitals, this one arating science from the conflicts that cleave this city is clearly a
remains at the heart of one of the world’s most challenging—and task of biblical proportions.
violent—predicaments. Science-based archaeology may have
arrived to stay, but the religion and politics that are part and par-
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
cel of any major excavation here remain largely unchanged. “No Ancient Jerusalem. Kathleen M. Kenyon; July 1965.
amount of sieving, sherd counting, text criticism or ancient DNA
analysis can alter that equation,” Greenberg says.

THOMAS EDISON n aps under a tree in 1921, while U.S.
President Warren Harding (seated, right) reads a newspaper.
Nap
P S YC H O L O G Y
Like a
Genius
Thomas Edison jolted himself
from the edge of sleep
Everett Collection, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo
to boost creativity.
His method can work for
the rest of us,
research indicates
By Bret Stetka

T
Bret Stetka is a writer based in New York City and editorial director
of Medscape Neurology (a subsidiary of WebMD). His work has
appeared in Wired, N PR and the Atlantic. H
e graduated from the
University of Virginia School of Medicine in 2005.
homas Edison was famously opposed to sleeping. In an 1889 interview published in

Scientific American, t he ever energetic inventor of the lightbulb claimed he never
slept more than four hours a night. Sleep was, he thought, a waste of time.
Yet Edison may have relied on slumber to spur his creativity. The inventor is said
to have napped while holding a ball in each hand, presuming that, as he fell asleep,
the orbs would fall to the floor and wake him. This way he could remember the sorts
of thoughts that come to us as we are nodding off, which we often do not recall.
Sleep researchers now suggest that Edison might immediately. Rather it happened after many subse-
have been on to something. A study published recently quent attempts to solve the math problem, which is
in S cience Advances r eports that we have a brief period consistent with previous research on insight and sleep.
of creativity and insight in the semilucid state that It’s less clear that Edison’s technique of dropping
occurs just as we begin to drift into sleep, a sleep phase objects to ward off deeper sleep works. Of the 63 sub-
called N1, or nonrapid-eye-movement sleep stage 1. The jects who dropped the glass as they drowsed, 26 did so
findings imply that if we can harness that liminal haze after they had already passed through N1 sleep. Still,
between sleep and wakefulness—known as a hypnago- the findings suggest that we do have a creative window
gic state—we might recall our bright ideas more easily. just before falling asleep.
Inspired by Edison, Delphine Oudiette of the Paris Oudiette says that, like Edison, her personal expe-
Brain Institute and her colleagues presented 103 par- rience with sleep inspired the study. “I’ve always had a
ticipants with mathematical problems that had a hid- lot of hypnagogic experiences, dreamlike experiences
den rule that allowed them to be solved much faster. that have fascinated me for a long time,” she says. “I
The 16 people who cracked the clue right away were was quite surprised that almost no scientists have stud-
then excluded from the study. The rest were given a ied this period in the past two decades.”
20-minute break period and asked to relax in a reclined A study published in 2018 found that a brief period
position while holding a drinking glass in their right of “awake quiescence,” or quiet resting, increased the
hand. If it fell, they were then asked to report what they odds of discovering the same mathematical rule used
had been thinking prior to letting go. in Oudiette’s experiment. And psychologist Penny
Throughout the break, subjects underwent polysom- Lewis of Cardiff University in Wales suggests that
nography, a technology that monitors brain, eye and both rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep—the phase in
muscle activity to assess a person’s state of wakefulness. which our eyes dart back and forth and most dreams
This helped to determine which subjects were awake occur—and non-REM sleep work together to encour-
rather than in N1 or if they were in N2—the next, age problem-solving.
slightly deeper phase of our sleep. Yet for the most part, Oudiette is not aware of any
After the break, the study subjects were presented other research specifically looking at the influence of
with the math problems again. Those who had dozed sleep onset on creativity. She does, however, point to
into N1 were nearly three times more likely to crack plenty of historical examples of this phenomenon.
the hidden rule as others who had stayed awake “Alexander the Great and [Albert] Einstein poten-
throughout the experiment—and nearly six times more tially used Edison’s technique, or so the legend goes,” she
likely to do so as people who had slipped into N2. This says. “And some of the dreams that have inspired great
“eureka moment,” as the authors call it, did not occur discoveries could be hypnagogic experiences rather than

RESTING in his
laboratory in
New Jersey, Edison
took brief breaks
from work. But the
inventor did not
want to spend
much time asleep.
night dreams. One famous example is the chemist ments but not so far gone the material is lost,” he says.
August Kekulé finding the ring structure of benzene Despite its reputation as the brain’s period of “shut-
after seeing a snake biting its own tail in a ‘half-sleep’ ting off,” sleep is, neurologically speaking, an incredi-
period when he was up working late.” Surrealist painter bly active process. Brain cells fire by the billions, help
Salvador Dalí also used a variation of Edison’s method: to reactivate and store memories, and, it seems, allow
he held a key over a metal plate as he went to sleep, us to conjure our mental creations.
which clanged to wake him as he dropped it, supposedly Oudiette hopes not only to confirm her findings in
inspiring his artistic imagery. future research but also to determine if focusing on
“This study gives us simultaneous insight into con- our hypnagogic state might help solve real-world tasks
sciousness and creativity,” says Adam Haar Horowitz and problems by harnessing the creative potential of
of the M.I.T. Media Lab, who has devised technology that liminal period between sleep and wakefulness.
to interact with hypnagogic states but did not collab- Additionally, she and her group are considering the
orate with Oudiette’s team. “Importantly,” he adds, “it’s potential of brain-computer interfaces to precisely
the kind of study that you can go ahead and try at identify brain-wave patterns associated with the onset
home yourself. Grab a metal object, lie down, focus of sleep, allowing the precise identification of when
hard on a creative problem, and see what sort of eureka people should be woken up during their moments of
moments you can encounter.” putative insight.
For University of California, Santa Barbara, psy- “We could even teach people how to reach this cre-
chologist Jonathan Schooler, who also was not involved ative state at will,” Oudiette envisions. “Imagine play-
with the project, the study does not necessarily prove ing sounds when people are reaching the right state
that just anyone will be able to mine their creativity and other sounds when they are going too far into
during this early phase of somnolence. As he points sleep. Such a method could teach them how to recog-
out, “residing in the ‘sweet zone’ might have also sim- nize the creative state and how to reach it.”
ply refreshed the study participants, making it easier
for them to solve the problem later.” But Schooler
acknowledges there may be something very solid in FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Ford Foundation
the study’s findings. “The new results suggest there is With Mr. Edison on the Eiffel Tower. R . H. Sherard; September 14, 1889.
a creative sleep sweet spot during which individuals
are asleep enough to access otherwise inaccessible ele-

Asher Lawson is a graduate student
MIND MATTERS in Duke University’s Management and
Edited by Daisy Yuhas Organizations program.
Hemant Kakkar is an assistant professor
of management at Duke’s Fuqua School
of Business.
Fake-News What explains the exceptional tendency of LCCs to share fake

news? To explore this question, we gathered information about
Sharers
participants’ politics and personalities and administered ques
tionnaires to assess their need for chaos—the desire to disrupt
and destroy the existing political and social institutions—as well
Highly impulsive people who lean as their support of conservative issues, support for Donald
Trump, trust in mainstream media and time spent on social
conservative are most likely media. LCCs, we learned, expressed a general desire for chaos,
to pass along false news stories and this need may explain their proclivity to spread misinfor
mation. Other factors, including support for Trump, were not as
By Asher Lawson and Hemant Kakkar
strongly related.
Behavioral and political scientists h ave pointed fingers at polit Unfortunately, our work on this personality trait also sug
ical conservatives, as opposed to liberals, when it comes to spread gests that accuracy labels on news stories will not solve the prob
ing fake news stories. But not all conservatives do it, and sweep lem of misinformation. We ran a study where we explicitly stat
ing generalizations threaten to condemn everyone ed whether each news story in
who subscribes to conservative val question was false, using a “dis
ues. This approach risks even more puted” tag commonly seen on so
dangerous polarization. cial media, or true, using a “sup
Political leanings are far ported” tag. We found that the
from the only determinants supported tag increased the rate
of behavior. Personality is a at which real stories were shared
crucial influence, so our re among both liberals and conser
search on misinformation vatives. LCCs, however, continued
sharing has focused on that. to share misinformation at a great
One widely used psychological er rate despite the clear warnings
system for identifying per that the stories were false.
sonality traits organizes them We ran another study that in
into five categories: open volved explicitly telling participants
ness to experience, conscien that an article they wanted to share
tiousness, extroversion, agree was inaccurate. People then had the
ableness and neuroticism. (It is chance to change their choice. Not
called, unsurprisingly, the five-factor only did LCCs still share fake news at
theory.) We looked specifically at a higher rate than others in the study,
conscientiousness, which cap but they also were comparatively insensitive to
tures differences in people’s or direct warnings that the stories they wanted to share were false.
derliness, impulse control, conventionality and reliability. The poor effectiveness of warnings among LCCs is worrying
In a series of eight studies with a total of 4,642 participants, we because our research suggests these people are primary drivers
examined whether low-conscientiousness conservatives (LCCs) of fake-news proliferation. Social media networks therefore need
disseminate more misinformation than other conservatives or low- to find a different solution than just tagging stories with warn
conscientiousness liberals. First we determined people’s political ing labels. Interventions based on the assumption that truth
ideology and conscientiousness through assessments that asked matters to readers may be inadequate. Another option might
participants about their values and behaviors. We then showed involve social media companies monitoring fake news that has
the same people a series of real and fake news stories relating to the potential to hurt others, such as misinformation related
COVID and asked them to rate how accurate the stories were. to vaccines and elections, and actively removing such content
We also asked whether they would consider sharing each story. from their platforms.
Both liberals and conservatives sometimes saw false stories as Whatever the case, until these companies find an approach that
accurate. This error was likely driven in part by their w anting works, this problem will persist. In the interim, our society will pay
certain stories to be true because they aligned with their beliefs. the cost of spreading misinformation. The long, conspiratorial road
But actually sharing false news was markedly higher among that rioters followed to the January 2021 Capitol insurrection shows
LCCs compared with everyone else in the study, although some that this spread can have serious and damaging consequences.
people of all persuasions did it. There was no difference between
liberals and conservatives with high levels of conscientiousness.
Low-conscientiousness liberals did not share more misinforma Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
tion than their high-conscientiousness liberal counterparts. or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]
78 Scientific American, April 2022 Illustration by Ross MacDonald

RECOMMENDED
Edited by Amy Brady
FIC TION
Half-Lived
Years
A sci-fi novel where
the grief of pandemic
stasis transcends
time and space
Review by Omar El Akkad
Peel away the speculative skin of Emily

St. John Mandel’s latest novel—the time
travel, the moon colonies, the Möbius strip
of a plot that, against all odds, holds together
until the very last page—and what’s left is
something much more vulnerable: a story
about grief. In this moment of unbearable
negative space, of sputtering pandemic dis-
ruptions and mind-numbing stasis, Mandel
has written a eulogy for our half-lived years.
Sea of Tranquility, w
hich forms a loose
triptych alongside Mandel’s two most
recent novels, T he Glass Hotel a nd Station
Eleven, o pens with a scene of exile: It is
1912, and Edwin St. John St. Andrew, the
recently banished son of a well-to-do
British family, is “hauling the weight of his
double-sainted name across the Atlantic
by steamship.” His destination is the east-
ern coast of Canada. He has no concrete
plans, no real sense of purpose, and even-
tually he will find himself on the other side
of the country, wandering through a forest
in British Columbia, where, in a flash of
weirdness, the first hints of this novel’s named Olive Llewellyn, who when we first is really disguised memoir but rather for
true scope in space and time are revealed. meet her has temporarily left her family the pitch-perfect descriptions of the writ-
In subsequent chapters the narrative behind on one of the moon colonies to ing life, both before and during COVID.
hops from Edwin’s story to almost present- come to Earth for a book tour on the eve The past few months have seen the
day New York City (where Mandel wrote of a new global pandemic. To her credit, birth of what might be called the first full
this novel during the COVID pandemic, the Mandel makes no effort at coyness—it is generation of pandemic-era novels—
sound of ambulance sirens surely at times pretty clear that many of Olive’s experi- books such as Neal Stephenson’s Ter
a near-constant companion), then to a ences mirror her own, from having to grind mination Shock, Hanya Yanagihara’s
future moon colony, with multiple stops through countless bizarre interview ques- To Paradise a nd Sequoia Nagamatsu’s
along the way. At first all that holds these tions (“What’s your favorite alibi?” one How High We Go in the Dark. W hether
disparate threads together is the sense interviewer enthusiastically asks Olive, these books were written before the
that something is off, an almost impercep- as though we all carry one around in our COVID era or not, they are now destined
tible tear in the fabric of time. Eventually back pocket in case of emergencies) to the to be read in the shadow of the present
the threads begin crossing, and it becomes Sea of crushing weight of days spent on the road moment, just as any novel released
impossible not to keep reading to see how Tranquility and the simple desire to just go back home. between 2017 and 2021 that touched even
these story lines will converge. by Emily St. John These passages alone are worth the price tangentially on authoritarianism was inevi-
The most visceral and immediate of the Mandel. of admission, not so much for voyeuristic tably read in the shadow of Trump.
novel’s narrative threads concerns a writer Knopf, 2022 ($25) extrapolation about how much of this book In some cases, the plagues that haunt
80 Scientific American, April 2022 Illustration by London Ladd

this new crop of books are little more than scenery, virtual lecture to a room full of holograms, every human connection: what we are to one another—
a kind of wry nod to the low-grade fear many of us reader will be reminded of their last Zoom meeting and what we should be.
have that maybe this is just what the future will look and the vaguely dehumanizing sense of being ush- Midway through the book a pandemic tears
like: one vicious contagion after another. Sometimes ered into a cheap facsimile of the world. through the population, both on Earth and in the
they are a means to critique the maddening vulner- Many of Mandel’s signature moves are here: distant colonies, and several of Mandel’s characters
ability of individual-centric societies struggling the interweaving plotlines, the quietly dystopian are forced into numbingly inward lives as depleted
against calamities that require, more than anything, setting and, of course, the deadly pandemic as and fear-lacquered as so many of ours these past
a communal response. In stories such as Lawrence narrative device. But perhaps more than all these couple of years. It is the small details of this self-
Wright’s The End of October, t hey are action-movie things, the most common and powerful motif in imposed cocooning, these hollowed-out moments,
fodder: pathogens cast in the role of supervillains. Mandel’s fiction is the adherence to the idea that that cut deepest. The novel’s most crushing scene,
only a few lines long and told in passing, involves
a young child deep into pandemic lockdown having
Emily St. John Mandel’s characters might a conversation with an inanimate object, trying to
suffer from a great many maladies but none

make friends. I have loved every one of Mandel’s
books (full disclosure: she was kind enough to blurb
more unendurable than grayscale lives. my first novel), but none has hit a nerve quite the
way this one did.
Despite this heaviness, S ea of Tranquility is
Mandel’s work occupies the decidedly intro- art and beauty are necessary. Her characters a brisk read. At a line level, the verbs do much of
spective end of this spectrum. As with her previous might suffer from a great many maladies but none the heavy lifting, and the overarching plot, which
novels, there is no hard sci-fi in Sea of Tranquility, n o more soul-draining than aesthetic poverty, none involves a vast time-travel bureaucracy, is deli-
detailed explanations of the biomechanics of disease more unendurable than grayscale lives. ciously and just a little disconcertingly addictive.
or the physics of time travel. Occasionally a tracking Art seeps in through every seam of this story. There is constant movement both within scenes
device might make an appearance out of narrative As soon as Edwin arrives in Canada, he takes up and in the grand sweep of the novel. As the pan-
necessity, or a character may briefly note the rules painting classes. Violin notes echo through the demic rages still through the real world, some
of the game before slipping through time, but all centuries, as do the words of a novel within the of the scenes will feel a little too close. But after
these descriptions are firmly subservient. It is the novel. The work of Shakespeare makes a cameo, so much time spent away from one another,
emotional and psychological consequences of these as it has before in Mandel’s books. Art is the after so much distancing, the closeness is in its
technologies and calamities with which the novel is means by which characters decipher the secrets own way a balm, a reminder that we were, even
chiefly concerned. When Olive sits on an airship of their own existence, in some parts of the novel in our aloneness, together.
with three masks over her face, terrified of bringing quite literally.
a new illness home to her husband and daughter, it Perhaps this is why S ea of Tranquility, f or all Omar El Akkad is a Canadian-Egyptian journalist
is only tangential that the airship is traveling to the its narrative cleverness and sci-fi inventions, is and author of the novels What Strange Paradise
moon. When she trudges through yet another at its core an emotionally devastating novel about (2021) and A merican War (2017).
I N B R I E F
The Candy House Life on the Rocks: Loath to Print: The Reluctant
by Jennifer Egan. B uilding a Future for Coral Reefs Scientific Author, 1500–1750
Scribner, 2022 ($28) by Juli Berwald. Riverhead Books, 2022 ($28) by Nicole Howard.
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022 ($55)
Like its prequel, the 2011 Pulitzer-win- Ocean scientist J uli Berwald is ada-
ning A Visit from the Goon Squad, J enni- mant that L ife on the Rocks is not an The arrival of the printing press was
fer Egan’s newest book reads not quite obituary. The threats to coral reefs are a complicated milestone for scientific
like a novel or a short story collection daunting and multilayered, but so, too, communication. Wary of intellectual-
but like a fragmentary work of fiction are the solutions. Berwald goes be property theft, information overload
with many perspectives and styles. This time a tech- yond the usual methods (preservation, reef-safe and underprepared readers (Des-
nology called Own Your Unconscious—a headset sunscreen) to describe unlikely efforts by special- cartes decried “the cavils of ignorant contradiction-
that lets people revisit their memories or see some- ops veterans turned reef doctors, marine scientists mongers”), early scientists sought to embrace
one else’s—is the conceit that brings old and new and a conglomerate candy company. One idea in print’s possibilities while avoiding its pitfalls: Huy-
characters together in New York, Chicago, the Amer- volves nebulizing seawater into clouds over reefs to gens published his discovery of Saturn’s rings in an
ican Southwest, and elsewhere as they navigate grief, reflect more of the sun’s radiation. Each highly read- anagram; Galileo strategically distributed review
love, parenthood, sex, addiction and trauma. Funny, able chapter leans toward optimism, but key ques- copies of his work, elevating him to Medici court
heartfelt and cerebral, T he Candy House a sks compel- tions go unresolved. Are corals resilient enough to mathematician. History professor Nicole Howard’s
ling questions about authenticity and privacy in the withstand warming oceans, or are these “success analysis offers startling glimpses behind the scenes
era of surveillance capitalism. —Adam Morgan stories” death rattles in disguise? —Maddie Bender of foundational scientific texts. —Dana Dunham

OBSERVATORY Naomi Oreskes i s a professor of the history of science
K E E PIN G A N E Y E O N S C IE N C E
at Harvard University. She is author of Why Trust Science?
(Princeton University Press, 2019) and co-author
of D
iscerning Experts (University of Chicago, 2019).
Paths to a Less neither have birds. In 2019 a major study, led by Cornell Univer-
sity ornithologist Kenneth V. Rosenberg, showed that 29 percent
Silent Spring
of North American birds have vanished since 1970. The study was
notable because of its sweep: it integrated data across scores of
species and the different biomes birds live in, and it used a vari-
We can still act on Rachel Carson’s pleas ety of approaches to validate its counts; an article published by
the Audubon Society called the result “a sobering picture” of wide-
to save biodiversity spread avian decline. Grasslands were the hardest hit, with a doc-
By Naomi Oreskes umented loss of more than 700 million breeding individuals—a
decline of more than 50 percent. But major declines occurred in
Rachel Carson’s classic best seller about ecological threats, S
ilent every biome save one and in nearly every species. The net toll
Spring, started a wave of American environmentalism. It played amounted to nearly three billion individual birds, a figure that
a direct role in the 1972 decision by the newly formed U.S. Envi- sparked a campaign with tips on what people can do to save them.
ronmental Protection Agency to ban use of the pesticide DDT. (Top two: add decals to windows and keep cats inside.)
Ernest Gruening, one of the first two U.S. senators from Alaska, Given these data, it is tempting to conclude that despite the
said Carson’s writings had “altered the course of history.” It will brilliance of her writing, Carson did not succeed in protecting
be 60 years ago this June that the public was introduced to Car- birds. Moreover, the avian decline is part of a tremendous loss of
son’s arguments, as her book chapters were serialized in the New global biodiversity driven by human activity. According to the
Yorker m agazine. The coming anniversary makes this a good time Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and
to consider whether the book achieved one of her major goals: Ecosystem Services (IPBES), more than 40 percent of amphibian
protecting wildlife and, in particular, birds. species, almost 33 percent of reef-forming corals and more than
Carson took a complex technical subject—the damaging effects a third of all marine mammals are threatened. In all, biologists
of persistent pesticides—and expressed it in one simple, poetic estimate that more than a million species are at risk. This also
image: a spring in which no birds sang. She asked us to imagine endangers human well-being, and the group notes that “we are
what it would be like to awaken in the morning to a world with- eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food
out these songs. She wrote with grace, and she made us feel the security, health and quality of life worldwide.”
loss. But how well have we acted on Carson’s warnings? Still, the 2019 bird study, despite its grim results, also suggests
With some exceptions, we haven’t been very successful, and that protecting biodiversity (and thereby ourselves) is not a lost
cause. One important exception in the otherwise bleak picture its
scientists painted is wetlands (and the waterfowl that inhabit
them). There bird abundance increased 13 percent. What distin-
guishes wetlands from other ecological areas? One answer is that
wetlands have been especially shielded from excessive industrial
activity for a long time. The areas have been under a host of legal
protections on the federal, state and tribal level. Some of these
laws, such as Massachusetts’s powerful Wetlands Protection Act,
prioritized wetlands for their diverse ecological value. Others safe-
guarded such areas because they are important to navigation and
commerce, fisheries, flood control and water supplies. The 1899
Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act, for instance, secured wet-
lands as parts of navigable waterways.
The other encouraging exception in the bird study was raptors,
a group that includes the majestic bald eagle. Raptor numbers have
increased by 15 million individuals. Bald eagles were on the verge
of extinction at the time Carson wrote, but they recovered in large
part as a result of the ban on DDT. A news story published by the
Audubon Society notes that “the numbers show that taking steps
like wildlife management, habitat restoration and political action
can be effective to save species.” Scientists have documented the
current threat to biodiversity. Their data also show that if we act
on this information, we can change the outcome.
Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]
82 Scientific American, April 2022 Illustration by Yifan Wu

S cienti f ic A m erican O N L I N E
FIND ORIGINAL ARTICLES AND IMAGES
50, 100 & 150 YEARS AGO
IN THE Scientific American ARCHIVES AT IN N OVATI O N A N D D I S C OV E RY A S C H R O NI C L E D IN S c ientific A meric an
scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa Compiled by Mark Fischetti
April
Your Ad Here
Although advertisements are meant to sell products, they can also
provide insight into the state of science and technology at a given time.
In 1872 lard oil was in demand for various uses. In 1922 consumers
were eager for asbestos. What will people think 100 years from now
1872
about the goods and services being marketed today: credit cards,
1972
Facebook, smartphones that don’t continuously assess all your bodily
functions and cribs unable to teach babies multiple languages?
1922
1922
S cientific American, Vol. XXVI, No. 16; April 13, 1872 (l ard oil); S cientific American, Vol. 126, No. 4; April 1922 (l oudspeaker, asbestos, tires); S cientific American, Vol. 226, No. 4; April 1972 (c ar, slide rule)
1872
1972
1972
1922
1922

GRAPHIC SCIENCE
Text by Clara Moskowitz | Graphic by Youyou Zhou
Seventy-one percent of paleontology researchers who published papers Location of the Researcher’s Affiliated Institution
between 1990 and 2019 were from institutions in Europe or North America.
Europe Americas Asia Africa Oceania
They dominated fossil data collection, both at home and abroad.
Published Research on Fossils Collected in Europe Published Research on Fossils Collected in the Americas
Eastern Northern Southern Western (Europe) North America South Central
Where
researchers A higher
are from share of fossil
data in North
America are
collected by
researchers
from Europe
than those from
Where fossil South America.
data are
collected Eastern Northern Southern Western (Europe) North America South Central
Published Research on Fossils Collected in Asia Published Research on Fossils Collected in Africa
Central Asia Eastern Other regions in Asia Eastern Africa Northern Southern
48% of the
Researchers fossil data in
from Europe Africa are
collect the collected by
majority of researchers
fossil data in from Europe.
Central Asia.
Central Eastern Asia S.E. S. W. Eastern Middle Northern Africa Southern Western
Colonialism Shadows Fossil Science

Paleontologists from a small number of countries control much of the world’s fossil data
Rich countries o
verwhelmingly dominate paleontology research, on fossils from Tanzania; and 10 percent of studies on South Afri-
even when the fossils do not originate there, a new study shows. can and Egyptian fossils were conducted by British investigators.
Researchers analyzed 26,409 paleobiology papers from 1990 to “This was very eye-opening,” says Nussaïbah B. Raja-Schoob,
2020 and found that scientists in high- or upper-middle-income a paleontologist at the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlan-
countries contributed to 97 percent of fossil research. And those gen–Nuremberg in Germany, who co-led the study, published in
from former colonial powers disproportionately controlled fossils Nature Ecology & Evolution. “With colonialism, certain countries
Source: “Colonial History and Global Economics Distort Our Understanding of Deep-Time
from their former colonies. For example, French researchers con- already had an advantage. After independence, the knowledge
ussaïbah B. Raja et al., in Nature Ecology & Evolution; February 2022

ducted a quarter of all paleontology studies in Morocco, Tunisia wasn’t transferred back, so a lot of countries had to start from
and Algeria; German scientists carried out 17 percent of research scratch and with less money.”
Notable Collaboration Patterns Publications on Fossil Samples Collected in the Country by:
Number of Publications
(shown as three-year averages)
90 Domestic researcher alone More than 100

Domestic researcher with foreign collaborators publications per
60 Foreign only year 2017–2019
Argentina Brazil France Myanmar
30
0
1990 2000 2010 2019 1990 2000 2010 2019 1990 2000 2010 2019 1990 2000 2010 2019
Biodiversity,” by N
Paleontology is a long-established discipline in Argentina and Brazil, the top two an increase in local research with foreign collaborators. There has been an
research destinations in South America, where most domestic research is carried increasing interest in fossils from Myanmar, especially organisms preserved
out by local researchers. France, the chief research destination in Europe, has seen in amber, from foreign researchers since 2015.

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