SciAm 012023

JANUARY 2023 SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.
COM
The Universe Is Not
Locally Real
Dialogues with
the Dead
How Heavy
Elements
Were Forged
The New
Science of
Human
Metabolism
Research is correcting myths and
confusion about how we burn energy
© 2022 Scientific American

Ja n ua ry 2 0 2 3
VO LU M E 3 2 8 , N U M B E R 1
38
E VO L U T I O N Q UA N T U M P H Y S I C S
24 The Human Engine 48 The Universe Is
Studies of metabolism reveal Not Locally Real
surprising insights into how Experiments with entangled
we burn calories—and how light have revealed a profound
cooperative food production mystery at the heart of reality.
helped Homo sapiens fl ourish. By Daniel Garisto
By Herman Pontzer
A STROPHYSIC S
NATURE OUTLOOK
30 Cosmic Alchemy
New evidence is elucidating S 1 The Circular Economy
the origins of the heaviest This special report explores
chemical elements in the universe. the progress and barriers facing O N THE C OVE R
By Sanjana Curtis sustainable economies, in Until recently, scientists had little hard data
about how the human body burns calories
which materials and products
A N T H R O P O LO G Y from food. New research provides key insights,
have multiple iterations.
38 Dialogues with the Dead overturning received wisdom about how
The waste of one process loops metabolism changes over the course of a
An Indigenous spiritual tradition
back and becomes the input lifetime. Related work has illuminated how we
speaks to the fragility of theological for another. evolved to meet our considerable energy needs.
diversity. By Piers Vitebsky Illustration by Eva Vázquez.
Photograph by Harsha Vadlamani January 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 1

4 From the Editor
6 Letters
8 Science Agenda
The new year will be another big one for science. Here’s
some of what we think will make a splash. By the Editors
9 Forum
Biden’s climate plan needs good data, and Landsat
satellites will help provide them. By Deb Haaland
U.S. Geological Survey

10 Advances
Decoding rare creatures’ microbiomes. A robot
morphs for land or sea. Playful bumblebees.
9 The electric countdown that brings spores to life.
22 Meter
How humans stack up to Earth’s other biomass,
in poetic form. By Barbara Ungar
23 The Science of Health
Surprising findings on diet and supplements for
stronger bones. B
y Claudia Wallis
55 Mind Matters
Stephen Belcher/Minden Pictures
For transgender people, voice training can be a lifesaver.

By Z Paige Lerario
56 The Universe
A bright flash of light in space was the closest
gamma-ray burst ever observed. B y Phil Plait
10
58 Reviews
Terraforming a new Earth. Biotech ambition and
greed. Tales of Antarctica. Climate crisis and activism.
Revisiting a single reality. B
y Amy Brady
60 Observatory
NASA/Swift/A. Beardmore (University of Leicester)
Mountaineer and climate advocate Hilaree Nelson

was an inspiration. By Naomi Oreskes
61 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago
By Mark Fischetti
62 Graphic Science
A visualization illustrates a new list of
the world’s largest glaciers.
56 By Theo Nicitopoulos and Amanda Montañez
Scientific American (ISSN 0036-8733), Volume 328, Number 1, January 2023, published monthly with a combined issue in July/August by Scientific American, a division of Springer Nature America, Inc., 1 New York Plaza,
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2 Scientific American, January 2023

FROM
THE EDITOR Laura Helmuth is editor in chief of Scientific American.
Follow her on Twitter @laurahelmuth
Burning Energy observation of a heavy element being forged. Nuclear astrophys

icist Sanjana Curtis explains on page 30 how the heaviest ele
ments are made and why it’s no exaggeration to say that we are
A lot of people h ave made a lot of money spreading myths and made of stardust.
misinformation about metabolism. Nutritional supplement ads, One of our features in this issue is about death and grief and
diet books and pseudoscientific health websites claim they can the extinction of languages and cultural traditions ... but trust
help you boost your metabolism. Sometimes part of the pitch is me, it’s a pleasure to read. On page 38, anthropologist Piers Viteb
that metabolism, which is just how your body uses energy, slows sky shares his life’s work among the Sora Indigenous people, who
down in middle age or that women have a slower metabolism live in highlands of eastern India. He started documenting their
than men. The myths are persistent in part because the diet and language and religious practices in the 1970s and has witnessed
supplement industries are so profitable and so poorly regulated. massive cultural changes as young Sora convert to more domi
But misinformation also sneaks in because metabolism is really nant religions. The traditional mourning rituals he describes are
hard to study. Now, as evolutionary anthropologist Herman Pont among the most elaborate and psychologically astute rites any
zer writes in our cover story, starting on page 24, scientists have religion has come up with. He uses the term “theodiversity” to
figured out that much of what people think they know about describe what’s being lost as people abandon long-held beliefs
metabolism isn’t true. It doesn’t slow down in middle age, for about the origins of the world and the nature of life and death.
starters, and there aren’t sex differences. He and his colleagues The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics went to three scientists who
have also traced the evolution of human metabolism—we use a helped to prove that the universe is not locally real. Really. Their
good deal more energy than other great apes—and provide even work in quantum physics has advanced quantum computing and
more evidence that what makes humans human is cooperation. expanded human knowledge, and it is undoubtedly very impor
Astronomers recently witnessed the synthesis of heavy ele tant, but it’s also kind of unnerving. Things aren’t “real” unless
ments for the first time. It all started when a distant star explod someone observes them. “Local” refers to the idea that things can
ed and its core turned into a dense neutron star. Then its part be influenced only by their environment, but it turns out that
ner in a binary star system did the same. The two neutron stars they can be influenced in bizarre and extremely long-distance
spiraled into each other in a ripping crash that spilled neutrons ways. Science journalist Daniel Garisto chronicles on page 48
into atoms of iron or other lighter elements. The spectacular col how quantum physics went from crackpottery to a hot field and
lision set off gravitational waves that traveled 130 million light- spells out why quantum entanglement could be both mind-bend
years to Earth, accompanied by light with a spectrum that showed ing and useful. We hope you enjoy what he calls “one of the more
the presence of the heavy element strontium, the first direct unsettling discoveries in the past half a century.”
BOARD OF ADVISERS
Robin E. Bell Jonathan Foley John Maeda
Research Professor, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Executive Director, Project Drawdown Chief Technology Officer, Everbridge
Columbia University Jennifer A. Francis Satyajit Mayor

Senior Scientist and Acting Deputy Director, Senior Professor, National Center for Biological Sciences,
Emery N. Brown
Woodwell Climate Research Center Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering
Carlos Gershenson John P. Moore
and of Computational Neuroscience, M.I.T., Research Professor, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology,
and Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia, Harvard Medical School and Visiting Scholar, Santa Fe Institute Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Vinton G. Cerf Alison Gopnik Priyamvada Natarajan
Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor Professor of Astronomy and Physics, Yale University
Chief Internet Evangelist, Google
of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley
Emmanuelle Charpentier Donna J. Nelson
Lene Vestergaard Hau
Professor of Chemistry, University of Oklahoma
Scientific Director, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics,
Lisa Randall
and Founding and Acting Director, Max Planck Unit for the Harvard University
Professor of Physics, Harvard University
Science of Pathogens Hopi E. Hoekstra
Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Curator of Mammals,
Martin Rees
Rita Colwell Astronomer Royal and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and
Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University
Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland College Park Astrophysics, Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Co-founder, Urban Ocean Lab, and Daniela Rus
Co-founder, The All We Can Save Project Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering
Kate Crawford
and Computer Science and Director, CSAIL, M.I.T.
Research Professor, University of Southern California Annenberg, Christof Koch
Chief Scientist, MindScope Program, Allen Institute for Brain Science Meg Urry
and Co-founder, AI Now Institute, New York University
Meg Lowman Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Director,
Nita A. Farahany Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Yale University
Director and Founder, TREE Foundation, Rachel Carson Fellow,
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, January 2023 Illustration by Nick Higgins

LETTERS
[email protected]
“Perhaps the entific paper with itself as the subject. As I

read the article, it came back to my mind
universe is not only that, in the 1980s, a colleague of mine
stranger than we wrote a toy program: with half a dozen ran-
domly chosen words as input, it produced
understand; it may a text that was syntactically correct. He had
be stranger than named the program “bullshit generator.”
Pier Giorgio Innocenti
we c an u
nderstand.” Grand-Saconnex, Switzerland
barry maletzky portland, ore.
I have been reading Scientific American
and other noted science magazines for de-
something requires interacting with it, and cades, and Thunström’s article about
by definition, we cannot receive signals GPT-3 writing an academic paper about
from beyond our event horizon. This is why itself was among the most fascinating be-
some of us find the potential nonlocal con- cause it raises new issues that many of us
nections between the two sides of an event have never considered before. Certainly
horizon so intriguing: we will be able to ac- the ethical issue of nonsentient author-
September 2022 cess what was once thought of as forever lost. ship is the most absorbing. And of course,
the impact on who gets credit for what
PRESERVING INFORMATION will occupy the minds of some scientists
HORIZONTAL VIEWS Thank you for “Paradox Resolved,” George because academia is so competitive.
In “A Tale of Two Horizons,” Edgar Shag- Musser’s article on the black hole informa- Use of this algorithm might begin to
houlian provides an intriguing alternative tion paradox. I have questions that look change everything about how we value
view of black holes and our entire cosmos not forward toward the principle used to creators of ideas, not just papers. I am also
as well. Especially of interest is his state- crack that paradox but rather backward: impressed with how GPT-3’s use of lan-
ment that “we must find a way to look at As Musser describes, the laws of physics guage was so human-sounding. It seems
the cosmic horizon from the outside.” Yet require that the information needed to re- like it could pass the Turing test.
that assumes there is an outside. Moreover, verse anything that happens in the physi- Robert Walty S tephens City, Va.
if one does exist, what is outside of that? cal world is always preserved. Does this
I am afraid we anthropomorphize the information preservation principle imply NOVEL EXPERIENCE
universe when attempting to describe it in that all information was already in exis- Thanks for including works of fiction in
familiar terms such as in the holographic tence in the big bang singularity? And if your book reviews. I see the September
principle. Our observations require an ob- information has only been created after column has an appreciation of a reissued
server—us. We use our senses and employ the big bang, does such an information in- classic by Octavia E. Butler in “A Time
instruments whose measurements must ul- crease then reduce entropy? Traveler’s Legacy” [Reviews]. But I have
timately also depend on our interpreta- G. Rhine P hiladelphia noticed fairly regular fiction reviews over
tions. Perhaps it is human hubris, which the past year or so—something I don’t re-
knows no bounds. Our species evolved in MUSSER REPLIES: This is an extremely call in many issues over the past 50-odd
order to survive on Earth, not to under- perceptive question. Information preser- years. (Is my memory playing tricks on me,
stand the cosmos. Perhaps the universe is vation is a synonym for determinism. All or did Scientific American include a re-
not only stranger than we understand; it that happens now was set at the big bang— view of Thomas Pynchon’s G ravity’s Rain-
may be stranger than we can u nderstand. or indeed at any other moment (there is no bow i n 1973?) As an old English major with
Barry Maletzky P ortland, Ore. reason to assume it must be in the past). a curious layperson’s interest in science, I
This comes with the important caveat that appreciate this broadening of the kinds of
SHAGHOULIAN REPLIES: I am a perenni- the information we’re talking about is the books you recommend to your readers.
al optimist: our ability to understand quan- global quantum state, which evolves ac- James Yarnall P isgah Forest, N.C.
tum mechanics and Einstein’s general theo- cording to the Schrödinger equation. But
ry of relativity far beyond what is needed any subsystem of the universe will see in- THE EDITORS REPLY: Y arnall’s memory
evolutionarily gives me hope that we will formation generation or destruction. is sound: our longtime book review editor
understand the cosmos as well. Whether Philip Morrison wrote about Gravity’s
there is really an “outside” of the cosmic ho- THE TURING TEST LIVES Rainbow in our October 1973 issue.
rizon is a tricky question. The equations In “AI Writes about Itself,” Almira Osma-
suggest that it’s there. But historically, it novic Thunström describes how she and ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE
has sometimes been argued to be metaphys- her colleagues instructed the artificial-in- It is misleading for the Editors to say the
ical because measuring the existence of telligence algorithm GPT-3 to write a sci- time is right for “Electrifying Everything”

ESTABLISHED 1845
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Laura Helmuth
MANAGING EDITOR Jeanna Bryner COPY DIRECTOR Maria-Christina Keller CREATIVE DIRECTOR Michael Mrak
[Science Agenda; July 2022]. Currently our
EDITORIAL
electricity sources are only fractionally re- CHIEF FEATURES EDITOR Seth Fletcher CHIEF NEWS EDITOR Dean Visser CHIEF OPINION EDITOR Megha Satyanarayana
newable. A higher priority is reducing the FEATURES
SENIOR EDITOR, SUSTAINABILITY Mark Fischetti SENIOR EDITOR, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY Madhusree Mukerjee
carbon content of the grid while improv- 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
ing its reliability.
NEWS
As we move to more renewables, we are SENIOR EDITOR, MIND / BRAIN Gary Stix ASSOCIATE EDITOR, TECHNOLOGY Sophie Bushwick
SENIOR EDITOR, SPACE / PHYSICS Lee Billings ASSOCIATE EDITOR, SUSTAINABILITY Andrea Thompson
going to need technology for storing ener- SENIOR EDITOR, HEALTH AND MEDICINE Tanya Lewis ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR Sarah Lewin Frasier
gy. Batteries are great for some things, but MULTIMEDIA
CHIEF MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Jeffery DelViscio SENIOR EDITOR, AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT Sunya Bhutta
nature stores energy in chemical form. We SENIOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Tulika Bose CHIEF NEWSLETTER EDITOR Andrea Gawrylewski
have biofuels and hydrogen now, and tech- ART

SENIOR GRAPHICS EDITOR Jen Christiansen PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR Monica Bradley ART DIRECTOR, ONLINE Ryan Reid
nology has to advance only a little for mak- ASSOCIATE GRAPHICS EDITOR Amanda Montañez ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITOR Liz Tormes
ing renewable methane—which could be COPY & PRODUCTION

SENIOR COPY EDITORS Angelique Rondeau, Aaron Shattuck
used perfectly in existing natural gas infra- MANAGING PRODUCTION EDITOR Richard Hunt PREPRESS AND QUALITY MANAGER Silvia De Santis
structure and serve as a bridge to an actu- CONTRIBUTOR S
EDITORS EMERITI Mariette DiChristina, John Rennie
al all-electric future. EDITORIAL Amy Brady, Katherine Harmon Courage, Lydia Denworth, Ferris Jabr,
Max Sherman R etired senior scientist, Anna Kuchment, Michael D. Lemonick, Robin Lloyd,
Steve Mirsky, Melinda Wenner Moyer, George Musser, Ricki L. Rusting,
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Dava Sobel, Claudia Wallis, Daisy Yuhas
ART Edward Bell, Violet Isabelle Frances, Lawrence R. Gendron, Nick Higgins, Kim Hubbard, Katie Peek, Beatrix Mahd Soltani
EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT SUPERVISOR Maya Harty SENIOR EDITORIAL COORDINATOR Brianne Kane
CONTINENTAL COINCIDENCE
I noticed an artful and odd coincidence in SCIENTIFIC A MERIC AN CUS TOM MEDIA
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Cliff Ransom CREATIVE DIRECTOR Wojtek Urbanek
“Dynamic Seas,” by Mark Fischetti, Kelly J. CHIEF MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Kris Fatsy SENIOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Ben Gershman SENIOR EDITOR Dan Ferber
Benoit-Bird, Skye Morét and Jen Christian- SENIOR ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Dharmesh Patel SENIOR PUBLISHING MANAGER Samantha Lubey
sen [Discoveries from the Deep; August PRESIDENT

2022]: At the center of the “Conveyor Belt” Kimberly Lau
infographic is Antarctica. The continent is PUBLISHER AND VICE PRESIDENT Jeremy A. Abbate
VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCT AND TECHNOLOGY Dan Benjamin
surrounded by all the world’s oceans, with VICE PRESIDENT, COMMERCIAL Andrew Douglas
VICE PRESIDENT, CONTENT SERVICES Stephen Pincock
red and blue lines showing warm and cold
CLIENT MEDIA SOLUTIONS
major ocean currents. The layout of the HEAD, PUBLISHING STRATEGY Suzanne Fromm
DIRECTORS, INTEGRATED MEDIA Matt Bondlow, Stan Schmidt
world’s oceans resembles a surprising rep- PROGRAMMATIC PRODUCT MANAGER Zoya Lysak
lica of the shape of Antarctica itself. DIGITAL ADVERTISING OPERATIONS MANAGER Lizzie Ng
Duncan Clark v ia e-mail PRODUC T & TECHNOLOGY

Jason Goldstein
ENGINEERING DIRECTOR
Ian Kelly
GROUP PRODUCT DIRECTOR
ASSOCIATE PRODUCT MANAGERMiguel Olivares
ERRATA SENIOR WEB PRODUCER Jessica Ramirez
“Protecting Kids’ Mental Health,” by Mitch SENIOR WEB DEVELOPERS Stephen Tang, Haronil Estevez
WEB DEVELOPER Kenneth Abad
Prinstein and Kathleen A. Ethier [Forum],
CONSUMER MARKETING
should have said that in 2019 about one in HEAD, MARKETING Christopher Monello
SENIOR COMMERCIAL OPERATIONS COORDINATOR Christine Kaelin
five high school students surveyed seri- MARKETING COORDINATOR Justin Camera
ously considered suicide and that about ANCILL ARY PRODUC TS
ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Diane McGarvey
one in 11 attempted suicide, not that about CUSTOM PUBLISHING EDITOR Lisa Pallatroni
one in five seriously considered or at- C O R P O R AT E
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PRINT PRODUC TION
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Alastair Philip Wiper [October 2022],
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January 2023, 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
What Science With abortion rights curtailed, we will

keep covering the science behind the pro-
May Bring in 2023 cedure, documenting how abortion bans or

restrictions can harm pregnant people, es-
pecially those with limited access to health
We share what we are watching in the new year care. We will also continue to report on
By the Editors transgender health, the science of gender,
and the effects of legislation on children
For the editors at S
cientific American, a new year is a chance to look ahead and pre- and families seeking gender-affirming care.
dict what might unfold in the world of science and health. In 2022 we covered both
inspiring and disturbing news—exquisite images from space telescopes, massively MENTAL HEALTH
reduced reproductive rights in the U.S., efforts to dismantle environmental regulation, In the long search for new psychiatric
a war that laid bare our energy co-dependencies, a Nobel Prize for our Neandertal drugs, psychedelics hold promise. The
ancestry, and much more. Here’s some of what we’re paying attention to as 2023 arrives. Food and Drug Administration may ap-
prove MDMA for post-traumatic stress dis-
THE UNIVERSE It’s very likely 2023 will be a big year for order this year. Spravato (esketamine) was
Massive satellite constellations are clut- recovery after storms, floods, droughts and approved in 2019 as an antidepressant, and
tering the night sky, two crewed space sta- wildfires, magnified by the ongoing glob- psilocybin is being tested to treat major de-
tions are operational, and nations are al climate emergency. Part of that recov- pression. These chemicals are gaining le-
fielding new military capabilities in orbit. ery will require officials to make decisions gitimacy, but they aren’t a panacea: three
Governments in 2023 may see Earth’s or- on whether to rebuild and, if so, how to do experts at the Johns Hopkins University
bital regions as in urgent need of stron- it in a way that helps us withstand climate School of Medicine recently warned these
ger international protections. change and avoid entrenching inequities. treatments suffer from a “hype bubble.”
If the first orbital flight of SpaceX’s Star- One question is whether adaptation mech-
ship vehicle is successful, it could usher in anisms will be distorted by the powerful ANCIENT LIFE
a new era of exploration, space science and at the expense of fair and just action. DNA sequencing has revolutionized the
commerce because it will offer a less ex- study of ancient organisms, but genetic ma-
pensive way of getting cargo and crews off TECHNOLOGY terial deteriorates relatively quickly—the
Earth. We also think 2023 will advance the With Twitter in new hands and other social oldest DNA sequenced so far is about 1.2 mil
search for life beyond Earth, whether the media sites downplaying their very real part lion years old. Proteins survive longer
James Webb Space Telescope tells us about in spreading misinformation, in 2023 we than DNA molecules, and paleoproteomics
biosignatures on a distant exoplanet or will need to modify how we as consumers has been gaining steam as a technique to
we discover fossils in the rocks of Mars’s of news decide what to believe and how help place extinct species in the tree of life.
Jezero Crater, where nasa’s Perseverance we navigate the “infodemic.” The federal The coming year could be an important one
rover is currently gathering samples. government is starting to pay attention to for a research tool that recently helped illu
privacy and antitrust issues, as well as the minate the evolutionary history of a 23-mil
CLIMATE ACTION health consequences of the constant use of lion-year-old relative of the rhinoceros.
We still use a tremendous amount of fos- social media, all of which could dampen the The sciences of our ancient world—pa-
sil fuels, and European leaders, facing tech sector. Tech firms that thrived during leontology and archaeology—as well as
high costs and possible shortages because the pandemic are suffering, with major com- ecology and anthropology are undergo-
of the Ukraine War, will have to make se- panies such as Meta, Stripe and Lyft laying ing a massive reckoning around the role
rious decisions about energy infrastruc- people off. A tech slump could transpire. of colonialism in scientific exploration.
ture. We’ll be watching what they decide For one, racist species names are on no-
to build, particularly for renewable ener- HEALTH tice. For another, a new generation of sci-
gy and transportation of fossil fuels, as Public interest in C
OVID and funds for re- entists is fighting against extractive prac-
well as what existing structures they keep searching it are decreasing. But people tices that take specimens from develop-
online. The recently elected U.S. govern- are still dying of the disease or are suffering nations to the Western world without
ment could determine future climate- ing from long COVID—which medical ex- consideration of local knowledge or with-
related financial support and regulation. perts are just starting to investigate. The out any benefit to the communities from
Simultaneously, science is revealing how SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to evolve, which the items were taken.
much death and damage climate change and more vaccines and treatments are in
is causing. We are hopeful that this bur- the works. Outbreaks of other viruses,
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E
geoning evidence will convince more peo- such as monkeypox, emphasize our need Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
ple worldwide that we have to act now. for better pandemic preparedness. or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]

FORUM
C OMM E N TA RY O N S C IE N C E IN
Deb Haaland is secretary of the U.S. Department T H E N E W S FR OM T H E E X PE R T S
of the Interior and a 35th-generation New Mexican.
Satellites Can
Help Us Fight
Climate Change
Landsat data will shape the Biden
administration’s climate change plans
By Deb Haaland
At the beginning of 2021, President Joe Biden exclaimed that Images from Landsat 9,
“science is back” as we continued our efforts to address the such as this false-color one
of the Sagavanirktok River
COVID emergency. That phrase continues to ring true across
in Alaska, can help the
the federal government. Science and its applications are being U.S. government under-
used at every agency—to identify public health challenges, build stand climate change.
new transportation infrastructure, inform policy decisions and
tackle the climate crisis. All around the globe, scientists are using Landsat and other
At the Department of the Interior, using the best available imagery to interpret what is happening on Earth today and to
science is a necessity for everything we do. Particularly note- compare it with the 50 years’ worth of data the Landsat pro-
worthy are the images of Earth from outer space that our scien- gram has collected.
tists share with the public. But as exciting as that is, the forecast is grim. The images
Recently the Interior Department’s U.S. Geological Survey show the changes to our water resources, increased wildfire
assumed operations of Landsat 9 from nasa, which built and damage, amplified coral reef degradation, diminishing glaciers
launched it in 2021. This satellite is designed to monitor Earth’s and ice shelves, and rapid tropical deforestation. As I travel
land, water and other natural resources. Landsat missions sup- across the U.S., I meet with communities who feel those changes.
port environmental sustainability and climate resilience Water allocations are at historic lows across the nation, cre-
through higher-resolution satellite imaging. The Landsat pro- ating an urgent need to minimize the effects of drought and
gram, which launched in July 1972, has helped us understand develop long-term plans to facilitate conservation and eco-
our planet and the changes that are occurring on it. That part- nomic growth. Sea-level rise is submerging coastal commun
nership has propelled research and observation forward ities, displacing and endangering residents. Wildfire seasons
through the launch of successive Landsat satellites, each replac- are longer and longer, threatening homes and businesses. The
ing its predecessors and working in tandem with new capabili- stunning Landsat images can help us better support environ-
ties and strengths. mental sustainability, climate change resilience and economic
I come from people who were among the first Earth observ- growth—all while expanding an unparalleled record of Earth’s
ers, biologists and agriculturalists. Through generations of changing landscapes.
studying the cycles of the seasons and the flow of the waters and This science-based program and those like it across federal
observing their environments, Indigenous peoples built complex agencies are powerful tools in our efforts to responsibly manage
communities to manage Earth’s natural resources. They mapped our resources. Their prioritization helps to demonstrate the
the stars and watched the moon to understand when to plant Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to lead with science.
and harvest. They practiced conservation as the first stewards of So, too, the resources provided through the president’s Biparti-
our lands and waters. The incredible possibilities that lie ahead san Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act will be key
for the Landsat program are an extension of my history and our to the development of longer-term sustainability measures as we
history as a nation. What the satellites have shown us is that cli- respond to climate change, including building more resilient
mate change’s effects on the U.S. are undeniable. communities and protecting our natural environment.
I attended the historic launch of Landsat 9 in California. It Landsat NEXT is the upcoming mission we will develop with
was nothing short of amazing. I toured the mission control cen- nasa to power better science and decision-making for the next 50
ter and met a young scientist from the Navajo Nation living far years. Science is indeed setting us on a path to a brighter future.
U.S. Geological Survey
away from home. She uses Landsat imaging to see her home
from many miles away, and with such data, she enables her
community to manage water resources in the face of a changing Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
climate. This is the power and beauty of science at work. or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]

ADVANCES
Researchers are investigating the

bacterial communities within rare
creatures, such as the kākāpō.

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
• Cats pay attention to owners’ special speech

• Light could guide tiny motors through the cell
• A human super-smeller inspires swab tests
for Parkinson’s disease
• Bacteria and fungi team up to crawl across
human teeth
E C O LO G Y
The Wild
Microbiome
Rare animals’ gut bacteria harbor
survival secrets
New Zealand’s c ritically endangered kākāpō, the world’s
heaviest parrot, is flightless and nocturnal, with fragrant
moss-green feathers, an odd, whiskery face, up to a
90-year life span—and a gut microbiome made almost
entirely of the bacterium Escherichia coli. L ike humans,
other animals carry trillions of bacteria, viruses, archaea
and fungi in their digestive tracts, on their skin, and else-
where: internal ecosystems that help them extract nutri-
ents from food, fight pathogens and develop immunity.
Now, as genetic sequencing becomes cheaper and more
advanced, scientists are examining endangered animals’
distinctive microbiomes, delivering insights that may
help stave off extinctions.
Such research has revealed that kākāpō are bizarre
inside as well as out, says University of Auckland microbial
ecologist Annie West: “Their microbiome is pretty weird—
like everything else about them.” About 250 kākāpō
remain on five remote, predator-free islands, where they
are intensively managed by New Zealand wildlife officials.
In 2019 government staff and volunteers collected fresh,
brownish-green droppings and nest material from
67 growing chicks and sent the samples to West for
DNA analysis.
E. coli is pervasive in the human digestive system, but
it makes up just a small percentage of the bacteria that
live there. Previous research had shown this microbe
dominates adult kākāpō guts; the proportion varies con-
siderably between individuals, and in some cases it
makes up 99 percent of the entire microbiome. West
and her colleagues’ new study, reported in Animal Micro-
biome, f ound that shortly after a kākāpō hatches, E . coli
Stephen Belcher/Minden Pictures
already forms the microbial majority in its gut. And this

dominance only increases as the chick grows up.
“It’s very unusual. If you’d seen it in a human, you’d
be worried,” West says. It’s not yet clear if it’s bad for
kākāpō, but a microbiome so homogeneous can be
cause for concern because it may not carry out all the
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ADVANCES
A N I M A L B E H AV I O R
functions a species needs. “If you’ve lost difficult for many microbes. But emerging
diversity, you’ve potentially lost some
functionality of the microbiome,” West
robotic technology promises to hasten
the process, letting scientists observe how Kitty Talk
adds. The researchers also found that each microbe acts in concert with others. Cats recognize owners’ speech
when they fed kākāpō chicks supplemen- A few researchers are already experi-
tal baby-parrot feed, a different bacte- menting with microbiome engineering. As any cat owner w ill tell you, talking to
rium took over their microbiome instead. For example, corals’ mucus microbiomes your cat is totally normal. And even though
The kākāpō’s simplified microbiome are sensitive to temperature and pollu- feline friends may seem indifferent to the
may be explained partly by the bird’s tion; overly warm seas can prompt corals adoring chatter, a new study in Animal Cog-
extreme rarity. Other studies have shown to eject the symbiotic microalgae they nition s uggests they really are listening.
that when animal populations shrink rely on, causing bleaching. In Australia, Researchers in France subjected house
or become fragmented, some of the Dinsdale says, scientists are testing cats to recordings of their owner or a
microbes they host are lost as well, says whether they can climate-proof corals by stranger saying various phrases in cat- or
Lifeng Zhu, an ecologist at China’s Nan- treating them with “a sort of microbial human-directed speech. Much like baby
jing Normal University, who was not elixir” of bacteria that are more accus- talk, cat-directed speech is typically higher
involved in the new work. “As well as tomed to fluctuating temperatures. Other pitched and may have short, repetitive
ecosystem and species diversity, we need ecologists in Australia have shown it’s phrases. The team found that felines reacted
to also conserve the microbiome diversity possible to alter koala microbiomes with distinctively to their owner speaking in cat-
inside animals’ bodies,” Zhu says. Climate fecal transplants so the iconic marsupials directed speech—but not to their owner
change, degraded habitats, contact with can digest different species of eucalyptus. speaking in adult tones or to a stranger
humans and time in captivity can all dras- In the U.S., Valerie J. McKenzie’s lab using either adult- or cat-directed speech.
tically alter an animal’s microbiome, he at the University of Colorado Boulder is Previous research had shown similar find-
explains—and when humans start inter- using probiotics to try to save boreal ings in dogs, but much less is known when it
vening to save endangered species, we toads from chytrid fungal disease. comes to cats. “There are still some people
can have unintended effects on the min- Amphibians have a rich microbiome on who consider cats independent—that you
iature worlds within. their mucus-covered skin, which is where cannot have a real relationship with cats,”
Zhu’s own research has shown that the devastating fungus B atrachochytrium says lead study author Charlotte de Mouzon,
giant pandas held in breeding facilities dendrobatidis attacks. McKenzie’s team an ethologist and cat behaviorist then at the
harbor completely different microbes identified a strongly antifungal bacterium University of Paris Nanterre. Some people
than wild pandas do, mainly because they that is naturally found in the endangered might be embarrassed about using a spe-
eat different food. When captive pandas toads’ Rocky Mountain habitat and in cial tone for cats, she says, but this research
are released, their microbiome must small quantities on their skin. The group shows “people shouldn’t be ashamed.”
undergo a yearlong transformation, dur- showed in the lab that dousing toads in De Mouzon and her team recorded
ing which they are more likely to get sick. this probiotic microbe raised their ability 16 cat owners uttering phrases such as
“We realized pandas need wildness of to survive fungal infection by 40 percent. “Do you want to play?” or “Do you want a
their gut microbiome,” Zhu says, “not Next, McKenzie and her colleagues treat?” in cat- and human-directed speech.
just wildness of their behavior.” captured young wild toads and put them The researchers then filmed each cat
Biologists are still cataloging which up in spa-like “water hotels” to bathe in before, during and after playing it a series
microbes live on and inside most endan- the probiotic for 24 hours before release. of recordings of its owner and other own-
gered species, and how those communi- “You have to hit them in the perfect ers’ speech. The researchers used soft-
ties change over time, says Flinders Uni- developmental time window” for the ware to rate the magnitude of the cats’
versity marine biologist Elizabeth Dinsdale, treatment to work, McKenzie says. When reactions to a speech sound.
who dives with sharks to collect samples the treated toads were recaptured, they “Although cats have a reputation for
of their skin microbes. Roughly 90 percent had less disease compared with controls. ignoring their owners, a growing body
of the microorganisms she has found are West hopes her microbiome research of research indicates that cats pay close
new to science, and her team has identi- will one day lead to similar treatments for attention to humans,” says Kristyn Vitale,
fied different populations of whale sharks kākāpō. At the very least, she says, now a cat behavior scientist at Unity College
by their typical skin microbiomes. that the birds’ typical gut makeup is known, in Maine, who was not involved in the
The next big question is exactly what routinely analyzing kākāpō poop could study. “Cats can very much learn that spe-
all these microorganisms do for their hosts. give conservation managers early warn- cific vocalizations have certain meanings,”
Whole-genome sequencing can provide ings of disease. “The idea is that instead Vitale says. She notes that the study was
hints by revealing the genes that make of taking invasive samples, you could use small and that future work could expand
proteins for tasks such as digesting fiber, microbiome profiling to identify when an the research to other cat populations.
tolerating salinity and handling heavy animal might be sick, even if you don’t Even if cats understand what we’re say-
metals. Culturing colonies in the labora- see any visible symptoms yet,” West says. ing, de Mouzon says, “they have a right to
tory, which helps to confirm a microorgan- “And that starts to have big implications for choose if they don’t want to interact.”
ism’s role, is currently slow, expensive and conservation programs.” —Kate Evans — Tanya Lewis

EEN
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minutes. The
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robotic limbslimbs attach
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incorporate three
robotic shoulder
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electronic SCIENCE
Morpher motors so
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so ART
as well
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well as
can “crawl”
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robotics gives ART its transforming ability, ability,
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best mobility
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awk- Join now or get a FREE trial
heaters warm
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around the
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—Sophie Bushwick
Morphogenesis,”
Adaptive Morphogenesis,”
Call 1-800-335-4021
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2022 ((reference
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et al.,
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Robert Baines
FFRF is a 501(c)(3) educational charity.

by Robert
Source:
Deductible for income tax purposes.

by
Graphic by
Graphic by Brown
Brown Bird
Bird Design
Design January 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 13
ADVANCES
C H E M I S T RY ANIMAL COGNITION
Tiny Glow Bee-Ball

A molecule-size motor flashes and spins Playful bees raise questions about
invertebrates’ inner lives
One of nature’s best s trategies for movement at the cellular scale
involves powerful molecular motors: complex molecules that transform Ball-rolling bumblebees h ave become the first insects
chemical energy into mechanical energy to complete tasks such as known to “play” with inanimate objects, manipulating
transporting components within the cell, contracting muscle fibers and wood balls again and again in a series of new experiments.
snipping apart strands of DNA. When animals repeatedly engage in behavior that
Since 1999 chemists have been designing synthetic molecules that does not provide them with food, shelter or another
rotate 360 degrees in response to light or chemical stimuli. These single- immediate benefit, researchers consider the behavior
function motors can generate forces on a surface, shuttle cargo to sen- play. Play with objects is widely observed in animals,
sors and power nanoscale devices. But researchers cannot easily control although most examples come from mammals and birds.
or track them when they’re placed within opaque biological tissue. Such behavior is one piece of the puzzle when deter-
A newly designed molecular motor tackles both these challenges by mining whether a group of animals is sentient—whether
switching between rotation and fluorescence when hit by different light its members have inner feelings and experiences. Scien-
wavelengths, according to a study published in S cience Advances. “ Not tists consider mammals, birds, and possibly even cepha-
many compounds show two different responses to light, and this is the lopods and fish to be sentient beings. “Eventually this
very first motor to show this property,” says Maxim Pshenichnikov, a can tell us something more about whether [insects] are
spectroscopist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and sentient,” says Samadi Galpayage, a graduate student
co-author of the new study. in Lars Chittka’s laboratory at Queen Mary University
Pshenichnikov and his colleagues, under of London and lead author of the new bumblebee study,
the guidance of Groningen organic published in Animal Behaviour.
chemist and 2016 Nobel Prize winner For a paper published in 2017, Chittka and other scien-
Ben Feringa, created the double- tists taught bumblebees to roll balls in exchange for a
function molecule by attaching a sugary prize. For their new investigation to determine
chemical called triphenylamine to whether ball rolling could be a form of play, Galpayage,
a basic molecular motor. This let Chittka and their colleagues took away the reward. First,
the motor respond to different light they set up an unobstructed path for a new cohort of bees
energies in different ways. Low- to access a feeding area’s sucrose solution. Along the
energy light gave the motor just path’s sides, the researchers placed small wood balls of
enough power to rotate, whereas
higher-energy light overexcited it,
leading it to dispose of excess energy by B E H AV I O R A L E C O LO G Y
Storm Chasers
emitting photons: it fluoresced. Additionally,
unlike typical molecular motors driven by tissue-
damaging ultraviolet light, this new compound responded to shades
of infrared that can penetrate deeper under the skin without damage. Seabird species finds safety
A motor like this one could aid applications that require precise pin- deep within a hurricane
pointing. For example, a fluorescent motor could interact with different
cellular structures and light up for tracking while delivering and activat- Like big-wave surfers o r daring meteorologists, shear-
ing a drug. “How cool would it be if we could really follow the motor’s waters in the Sea of Japan deliberately head toward
motion in cells and use it for mechanical interference, [drug] delivery powerful (and dangerous) storms.
and detection?” Feringa says. When hurricanes strike, most birds either evacuate
Salma Kassem, a chemist at the City University of New York, who was or take shelter. After all, these storms can cause massive
not involved in the study, says the design is an important step toward light- avian mortality. But after analyzing wind data and GPS-
driven pharmacology: “It’s challenging to combine self-reporting and func- tracking information from 75 streaked shearwaters,
tionality in one small molecule without the two properties interfering with British and Japanese researchers found that the seabirds
each other. This work achieves role separation in a simple and elegant way.” sometimes navigate toward the center of hurricanes—
The researchers intend to apply the technology to a motor with and remain there tailing the eye for up to eight hours.
a biological function, such as binding to certain cell receptors. Then, The researchers propose in the Proceedings of the
they will test its performance in live cells or tissues. Study lead author National Academy of Sciences USA that shearwaters do
Lukas Pfeifer, an organic chemist at the Swiss Federal Institute of this so they’re not blown ashore, where they are vulner-
Technology in Lausanne, says that this technique’s success “gives me able to crash landings and predation. The team also
hope that we can easily transfer it to motors made with different chemi- found that adult shearwaters handle storms better than
cal compounds.” —Rachel Berkowitz juveniles, which lack a “map sense” of where land is.
14 Scientific American, January 2023 Illustrations by Thomas Fuchs

A tracked bumblebee interacts
with multicolored balls.
varying colors, some fastened in place and gleaning pleasure from the play, for instance,
some loose. Bees could access the sucrose investigators would need to analyze which
without interacting with the balls at all. neurotransmitters activate during ball rolling.
Over 54 hours the team observed each Olli Loukola, a behavioral ecologist at
of the experiment’s 45 bees contributing the University of Oulu in Finland, who led
to a total of 910 ball-rolling actions; the 2017 ball-rolling study and was not
younger and male bees were especially involved in the new work, suggests the
interested in rolling the balls. Feeding and interest in moving objects could be moti-
ball-rolling activities happened at different vated by an “innate need to develop
times and frequencies, indicating that the motor skills.”
bees had different motivations for the two Regardless of the play’s function, such
actions. In a later experiment, scientists studies give hints about the organisms’
trained the bees to associate ball rolling inner lives, says Heather Browning, an ani-
with a certain chamber color. The bees mal welfare expert and philosopher at the
then preferentially chose to enter that University
U niversity of Southampton in England.
color chamber even when it was empty. Evidence
E vidence for many different characteristics,
Although these results suggest play such as play behavior, complex brain
Rickitt
Richard Rickitt
behavior in the bees, Galpayage says, the structure and learning ability, she says,
research does not point to any specific moti- “raise the probability of sentience.”
Richard
vation. To determine whether the insects are —G

— Grace
race van Deelen
instead headed right toward the storm’s

eye, passing through some of its fastest
winds. “Large waves and high winds are
not a problem for these birds,” says Josh
Adams, a biologist with the U.S. Geological
Survey’s Western Ecological Research
Center, who was not involved in the study.
Scientists had previously tracked indi-
vidual albatrosses moving through cyclones,
Swansea University biologist Emily but this is the first time researchers have
Shepard, a co-author on the paper, says documented birds appearing to enter
she’s in “awe” of these master fliers—which, storms purposefully and strategically. DeDe-
like their albatross relatives, use long, thin spite weighing only as much as a pint of
wings to soar across vast stretches of wind- milk, streaked shearwaters “have an inbuilt
swept ocean. (A Manx shearwater once ability to cope with the strongest storms
traversed the entire Atlantic Ocean in that Japan’s seen,” Shepard says. “It’s
12 days, and sooty shearwaters in the amazing to think” that even during hurri-
Pictures
Pacific cover up to 40,000 miles a year.)

Holmes/Minden Pictures
canes, which are projected to increase in

Shepard’s team found that streaked intensity because of climate change,
John Holmes/Minden
shear
shearwaters
waters circumnavigated storms “there will be shearwaters out there.”
when far out at sea. But when sandwiched Other bird species, meanwhile, must
between a large storm and land—and flee the scene or risk drowning.
John
therefore at risk of being beached—several —Jesse

— Jesse Greenspan

Scientific American is a registered trademark of Springer Nature America, Inc.
ADVANCES
MEDICINE
The researchers are now working with
Smell Detective local hospitals to ascertain whether their

sebum-based test can also be conducted
A super sense of smell inspires a skin-swab test for Parkinson's in clinical laboratories—a key step toward
determining whether it would work as a
A Scottish woman n amed Joy Milne ple with and 71 people without the illness, diagnostic tool. Ultimately, Barran says,
made headlines in 2015 for an unusual tal- the team zeroed in on a set of large lipids. the researchers hope to use the test to
ent: her ability to sniff out people with Par- These compounds could be spotted in a help secure a faster diagnosis for individu-
kinson’s disease, a progressive neurode- matter of minutes using a special type of als with suspected Parkinson’s who have
generative illness that is estimated to mass spectrometry in which technicians been referred to neurologists by a general
affect about 10 million people worldwide. use a piece of paper to rapidly transfer practitioner. Thousands of such people are
Since then, scientists in the U.K. have been substances from a swab to an analyzer. currently waiting to see neurologists in the
working with Milne to pinpoint the mole- “I think it’s a very promising set of U.K.’s National Health Service, for
cules that give Parkinson’s its distinct biomarkers,” says Blaine Roberts, a bio- instance, and it will take an estimated two
olfactory signature. They have now chemist at Emory University, who wasn’t years to clear that list, Barran says. The
zeroed in on a set of molecules specific to involved in the work. He adds that one of new tool could let those patients mail in
the disease—and created a simple skin- the big open questions is how exacting skin swabs to be analyzed in a hospital lab,
swab-based test to detect them. this test can be. The authors of the new pinpointing those who need help most
Milne, a 72-year-old retired nurse from study reported the detailed chemical urgently. Barran’s research team is
Perth, has hereditary hyperosmia, a con- approaching people on the waiting list to
dition that gives her hypersensitivity to see if they are willing to take part in a trial
smell. She discovered that she could smell of this triage process.
Parkinson’s after noticing her husband, Barran and her colleagues are also col-
Les, was emitting a new, musky odor. laborating with researchers at Harvard
When he was diagnosed with Parkin- University to determine whether sebum-
son’s many years later, she linked based biomarkers are detectable in
this change in scent to the disease. people who have unexplained consti-
Les died in 2015. pation, a reduced sense of smell or
In 2012 Milne met University of other possible early signs of Parkinson’s
Edinburgh neuroscientist Tilo Kunath but have not yet received a diagnosis.
at an event organized by the research Milne has also inspired other scien-
and support charity Parkinson’s UK. tists to search for biomarkers based on
Though skeptical at first, Kunath and his the disease’s olfactory signature. Last
colleagues put Milne’s claims to the test. year investigators in China published a
They had her smell 12 T-shirts, six from paper describing an electronic nose—an
people with Parkinson’s and six from non- artificial-intelligence-based sensor mod-
affected individuals. She correctly identi- eled after the olfactory system—that sniffs
fied the disease in all six cases—and the profile of the unique Parkinson’s signature, out a set of nonlipid molecules present in
one T-shirt from a healthy person she cat- but they did not include an assessment the sebum of patients with Parkinson’s.
egorized as having Parkinson’s belonged of accuracy. According to Barran, as Other groups in China, the U.K. and else-
to someone who was diagnosed with the yet unpublished data suggest that their where have been training dogs to sniff out
disease less than a year later. test may be more than 90 percent accu- the disease.
Kunath, along with University of Man- rate in determining whether a person And Parkinson’s may not be the only
chester chemist Perdita Barran and their has Parkinson’s. disease Milne has a nose for. She has also
colleagues, subsequently used mass spec- Tiago Outeiro, a neuroscientist at the reported noticing unique smells in people
trometry to examine sebum (an oily sub- University of Göttingen in Germany, who with Alzheimer’s, cancer and tuberculosis,
stance found on the surface of the skin) was not involved with the research, says and she is working with scientists to see
from people diagnosed with Parkinson’s. the sebum-based swab test is novel. He whether specific olfactory signatures of
They found molecular changes suggesting adds that one clear advantage it has over those diseases can be identified.
alterations in the metabolism of fatty mol- other methods—such as blood tests— Milne says she hopes this research will
ecules known as lipids. that probe for Parkinson’s biomarkers is ultimately benefit patients with these con-
In Barran's latest study, published in the ease of sample collection. Outeiro ditions. “My husband suffered from [Par-
the American Chemical Society journal wonders whether people with diseases kinson’s] for 21 years after his diagnosis,
JACS Au, s he and her colleagues devel- that share symptoms and pathologies but he had it many years before that,”
oped a simple skin-swab-based test to with Parkinson’s, including multiple sys- Milne told Scientific American in 2015.
detect Parkinson’s molecular signature. By tem atrophy, also have similar chemi- “I would like to see that people don’t suffer
comparing sebum samples from 79 peo- cal markers. the way he suffered.” —Diana Kwon

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oneThirdNB.indd 11 9/23/19 12:11 PM
ADVANCES
B I O M I M I C RY
Science
in Images
By Maddie Bender
The concentric circles or eyespots on butterfly and

moth wings—like those seen on this Suraka silk
moth—not only look like real eyes but may also
appear to glare directly at predators from many
directions, scientists have found. This optical illusion,
called the “Mona Lisa effect,” could scare would-be
attackers and buy the insects enough time to escape.
Scientists suspect that eyespots, with dark
“pupils” in the center surrounded by lighter “irises,”
look like real eyes to predators. Hannah Rowland,
an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemi-
cal Ecology in Jena, Germany, wanted to see if the
direction of this fake gaze contributed to the effect.
Her study results were published recently in Fron-
tiers in Ecology and Evolution.
First, Rowland and her co-author trained chicks
to attack a mealworm hidden behind a paper print-
out of two eyespots at the end of a runway. When
the eyespots’ pupils were specifically pointed in the
chicks’ direction, the birds repeatedly ran toward
the paper and then backed away, and they waited
a few minutes before attacking—signs of wariness.
But when the pupils instead appeared to look away
from the direction of the chicks’ approach, the
birds attacked in seconds. Centrally located pupils,
though not as effective as ones that peered directly
toward the chicks, resulted in longer delays than
pupils that looked the other way.
“This suggests that they really are paying atten-
tion to the direction of the pupils in the eyespots
and are perceiving them as eyelike stimuli,” Row-
land says. The concentric eyespots found most
often in the insect world, she adds, may seem to
the chicks like a pair of eyes that follow them, irre-
spective of approach angle.
National University of Singapore evolutionary
biologist Antonia Monteiro, who was not involved
in the research, says the study is a “cool” demon-
stration of an evolutionary theory for eyespots.
“These butterflies can be encountered from all
angles, so having the pupil centrally located ends
up being pretty good,” Monteiro says. Still, she
Mitsuhiko Imamori/Minden Pictures
says, the eyespots used in the study were several

millimeters larger than even the largest commonly
found in nature, raising the possibility that the
chicks may have been extra frightened by the size
of the paper eyes.
To see more, visit ScientificAmerican.com/science-in-images

ADVANCES
H E A LT H
N E W S A R O U N D T H E WO R L D Larger, rod-shaped fungal cells joined
Quick Hits The Walking on the outside as moving “limbs” that

propelled the structure forward as it grew.
By Daniel Leonard Dental The front limbs sometimes appeared to walk
or even jump ahead, with the assemblage
CANADA Bacteria and fungi glom together rapidly expanding in one direction as its
Narwhals seem to be migrating later to crawl across our teeth, hind limbs remained on the ground. If two
such groupings were near each other, they
every year as ice-coverage patterns spreading decay
change in Arctic waters. The unicornlike would sometimes reach out in a “handshake”
whales were thought to be particularly and then merge.
vulnerable to climate change because of Most of us w ould rather not think about Microbes in the mouth “are like a com
their 100-year life spans and slow evolu- the cavity-causing microbes infesting our munity trying to expand their territory,”
tion, so this behavioral shift bodes well mouths. They coat our teeth, eat the same gaining new land and sugary resources, says
for their adaptability. sugars we do and excrete acids that carve Zhi Ren, a postdoctoral fellow in Koo’s labo-
holes in our enamel. And the complete ratory and co-lead author on the study. The
MALDIVES
picture is even grosser. team found that bacterial-fungal partner-
Researchers have identified a new type
A new study published in the Proceedings ships grew faster and were more resistant to
of ecosystem, which they have named the
of the National Academy of Sciences USA removal by mechanical force or antimicro-
“trapping zone,” in the Indian Ocean. In it,
shows that conglomerations of fungi and bial chemicals than fungi or bacteria alone.
swarms of tiny traveling animals get stuck
bacteria can work together to “walk” and “What this paper really adds is the
among rocks and reefs, becoming easy
“leap” across the surface of teeth, spreading spatial-temporal aspect of these structures’
prey for sharks and other large predators.
decay much faster than either organ behavior,” says Judith Behnsen, a microbiol-
PAPUA NEW GUINEA ism alone. ogist at the University of Illinois at Chicago,
Scientists found evidence that a giant “The knowledge in the past was that it who was not involved in the new research.
kangaroo species that walked on all was just bacteria accumulating one by one She says most microscopy researchers
fours lived in New Guinea until 20,000 and causing cavities,” says study co-author examine microbes suspended in place by
years ago, thousands of years after most Hyun (Michel) Koo, a microbiologist and a preservative chemical, but this study
megafauna went extinct in neighboring dentist at the University of Pennsylvania. followed living, moving organisms: “When
Australia. The researchers suspect giant His team collected saliva samples from I saw the images in the paper, I was
mammals lasted longer on the island toddlers with severe tooth decay and found blown away.”
because far fewer humans lived there. natural assemblages of Streptococcus mutans Future research could determine who is
SAUDI ARABIA bacteria and C andida albicans f ungi, which most at risk of developing bacterial-fungal
Drone footage suggests the Saudi weren’t present in saliva from children with assemblages and the best way to treat
government has begun constructing healthier teeth. Viewing these masses under them, Ren says. Tooth decay is extremely
a city that officials have claimed will be a microscope revealed a surprise: they common and dangerous globally, he adds—
105 miles long and 0.1 mile wide—and appeared to be capable of complex motion. and studying the interactions between
enclosed within giant mirrors to blend Small bacterial cells tended to cluster bacteria and fungi can help us defend
with the landscape. The city is designed around the core of each clump, forming a against their territorial expansion.
to be traversable by foot or rail, with sticky binding that held everything together. — Daniel Leonard
a low carbon footprint.
SPAIN
Neandertal teeth recovered from Gabasa
indicate these ancient human relatives
were primarily carnivores. The teeth have
low zinc 66, consistent with a meaty diet—
which challenges prior work suggesting
Neandertals were more omnivorous.
ZAMBIA
A study of chimpanzees at the Chimfunshi
Wildlife Orphanage Trust shows the ani-
mals instinctively synchronize their steps
when walking next to each other. This
behavior is also seen in humans, suggest-
ing that the unthinking coordination of
basic motions is a shared ancestral trait.
Fungi (in blue) propel bacteria
Zhi Ren
For more details, visit www.ScientificAmerican.

com/jan2023/advances (in green) in a leaping motion.

METER Barbara Ungar’s forthcoming collection of poems is After Naming
the Animals. Her other published collections include Save Our Ship;
Edited by Dava Sobel Immortal Medusa; Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life; and The
Origin of the Milky Way. She is a professor of English at the College
of St. Rose in Albany, N.Y.
Weight
1. HOMO SAPIENS
We think the world belongs to us
but scientists have weighed life
on Earth, which turns out to be
mostly trees. Only one hundredth

of the living swim the seven seas.
One-eighth are buried: bacteria.
Underground bacteria weigh more

than a thousand times more than us.
Even worms outweigh us, three to one.
So does the lowly virus.

Humans comprise a mere hundredth
of a hundredth of the living, .01%.
Yet we have paved the earth with chicken bones.

Weep into your soup: under a third of birds
fly free—the rest, poultry.
Garden turned feedlot

and slaughterhouse—we, H omo sapiens,
one-third of all mammals, keep
almost two-thirds to eat, mostly cow

and pig. Only four percent left
for all wild animals, elephant to shrew.
Half of Earth’s creatures

have vanished in the last half-century
while we’ve redoubled.
Even half-gone, plants outweigh us

seventy-five hundred to one.
2. THE OTHER FOUR PERCENT

I let the cat out—
I felt the cat
hunkered in her fur
eyes bright in the dark

amidst all the wild things
crouched in their night
tygers to mice
the tiny remnant left
Christian Ziegler/Minden Pictures
each one fighting for its life.
Author’s Note: Proportions are based on percentages of biomass, not numbers of creatures.
Source: “The Biomass Distribution on Earth,” by Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips and Ron Milo, in PNAS; J une 19, 2018.

Claudia Wallis is an award-winning science journalist
THE SCIENCE
whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Time, OF HEALTH
Fortune a nd the New Republic. S he was science editor
at Time a nd managing editor of S cientific American Mind.
A Diet
for Better
Bones
Surprising findings on
the roles of vitamin D,
coffee and alcohol
By Claudia Wallis
Among my friends, many of whom are
women of a certain age, one topic seems to
dominate our conversations about health:
bones. It makes sense, given that 20 percent
of American women ages 50 and older have
osteoporosis and that more than half have
detectable bone loss (osteopenia). For men, the respective fig- What does help maintain strong bones for all of us? The
ures are lower: 4 percent and a third. Worldwide, one out of three easy answer is foods that are high in calcium, such as dairy
women over age 50 and one out of five older men will develop products, sardines and tofu. Health authorities recommend
an osteoporotic fracture—a hip, a wrist, a vertebra or two. a lot more calcium than most of us routinely get: 1,300 daily
Another reason for the endless jawboning about bones is mass milligrams for kids ages nine through 18 who are building
confusion over how best to strengthen your skeleton and bone density for a lifetime, 1,000 daily mg from age 19 to 50
whether diet and supplements really make a difference. and 1,200 mg for women after 50 and men after 70. Federal
Diet research is always messy, and study results on nutri- surveys indicate that only 61 percent of Americans and just
tion and bone health have been wildly inconsistent. But gradu- half of children hit these targets, which, admittedly, takes some
ally some clarity is emerging. As we draw up resolutions for effort. For example, you would need to eat at least three daily
what to eat in the coming year, it’s useful to look at new data on cups of plain yogurt or nearly nine cups of cottage cheese to get
vitamin D, as well as recent research on coffee and other foods. 1,200 mg of calcium. Getting it from food is best, LeBoff says,
Bone is a dynamic tissue, constantly replenished with new “because there are so many other nutrients, and you have a
cells. Calcium is the key nutrient for building bone, and vita- more continuous absorption than with a pill.”
min D enables the gut to absorb calcium from the food we eat, For those of us who like to start our day with coffee, modest
so doctors often recommend D supplements to counteract age- consumption may help our bones. Although very high levels of
related bone loss. Today more than a third of American adults caffeine—say, six to eight cups of coffee—cause calcium to be
ages 60 and older pop this vitamin. lost in urine, one or two cups seems to have a beneficial effect.
But to the surprise of many, a huge study published this A study led by Ching-Lung Cheung of Hong Kong University
past summer in the N ew England Journal of Medicine f ound linked three digestive by-products of coffee with greater bone
that taking vitamin D for five years did not reduce the rate of density at the lumbar spine or upper thigh bone. “Coffee intake,
fractures in healthy adults ages 50 and older. That result built on if not excessive, should be safe for bone,” he says, “and if you
earlier findings, led by the same team, that D supplements do still have concerns, add milk!”
not improve bone density (or, for that matter, lower the risk of Alcohol, too, is best in moderation. Excessive drinking can
cancer or heart disease). An editorial accompanying the fracture disrupt the body’s production of vitamin D and interfere with
study declared that it’s time for medical professionals to stop hormones that promote bone health. On the other hand, fizzy
pushing these pills and quit ordering so many blood tests for water has been wrongly maligned: it does not weaken bones,
vitamin D levels. although evidence suggests that cola and soda pop may do so.
“Food and incidental sun exposure likely provide enough The other key element of skeletal health involves calories
vitamin D for healthy adults,” says endocrinologist Meryl out rather than calories in. Weight-bearing exercise stimulates
LeBoff of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who led bone formation throughout life. And you don’t have to heft
the study. But LeBoff puts an emphasis on “healthy” adults. The dumbbells. Just supporting your own weight while walking,
study did not focus on those who already have osteoporosis running or jumping does the trick. So while boning up on bet-
and/or take medications for it. Such people would be wise to ter nutritional choices, add more exercise to your menu of New
remain on extra vitamin D and calcium, she advises. Year’s resolutions.
Illustration by Jay Bendt January 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 23

THE
E VOLUTION
HUMAN
ENGINE
Studies of metabolism reveal surprising insights into how
we burn calories—and how cooperative food production
helped H omo sapiens fl
ourish
By Herman Pontzer
Illustration by Eva Vázquez

I
Herman Pontzer is a professor of evolutionary anthropology
at Duke University. He studies how evolution has shaped
human physiology and health. He is author of B urn: New
Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Stay
Healthy, and Lose Weight ( Avery, 2021).
t was my daughter Clara’s seventh birthday party, a scene at once familiar and
bizarre. The celebration was an American take on a classic script: a shared meal
of pizza and picnic food, a few close C
OVID-compliant friends and family, a
beaming kid blowing out candles on a heavily iced cake. With roughly 380,000
boys and girls around the world turning seven each day, it was a ritual no doubt
repeated by many, the world’s most prolific primate singing “Happy Birthday”
in an unbroken global chorus.
Such a wholesome setting seems an unlikely place for ram- large game and cook their food. They built hearths and homes
pant rule breaking. But as an evolutionary anthropologist, I can’t and began changing the landscape, developing an ecological mas-
help but notice the blatant disregard our species shows for the tery that led eventually to farming.
natural order. Nearly every aspect of our modern lives marks a These evolutionary shifts reverberate today. The cooperative
cheerfully outrageous departure from the laws that govern every foraging that pushed our hunting, gathering and farming ances-
other species on the planet, and this birthday party was no excep- tors to flout long-established ecological rules didn’t just change
tion. Aside from the fresh veggies left wilting in the sun, none of the foods we eat. It altered fundamental aspects of our biology,
the food was recognizable as a product of nature. The cake was a including our metabolism. The same unlikely series of events that
heat-treated amalgam of pulverized grass seed, chicken eggs, cow gave us birthday cake has also shaped the way we eat it—and how
milk and extracted beet sugar. The raw materials for the snacks we use the calories.
and drinks would take a forensic chemist years to reconstruct. It For all the talk about metabolism in the exercise and dieting
was a calorie bonanza that animals foraging in the wild could worlds, you would think the science was settled. In reality, we’ve
only dream about, and we were giving it away to people who been embarrassingly short on hard data about the calories we
didn’t even share our genes. All this to celebrate some obscure as- burn each day and how we evolved to obtain them. But recently
tronomical alignment, the moment our planet swept through the my colleagues and I have made important strides in understand-
same position relative to its star as on the day my daughter was ing how our bodies use energy. Our findings have overturned
born. At seven years old, most mammals are grandparents if much of the received wisdom about the ways human energy re-
they’re lucky enough to be alive. Clara was still a kid, dependent quirements change over the course of a lifetime. And, as we’ve
on us for food and shelter and years away from independence. discovered in a parallel effort, our energy needs are deeply inter-
Humans weren’t always such scofflaws. We come from a good twined with the evolution of our food-production strategies: for-
Family. The living apes, our closest relatives, are well-behaved pri- aging and farming. Together these studies provide the clearest
mates, eating fruit and leaves straight from the tree and nibbling picture yet of the inner workings of the human engine—and how
on the occasional meal of insects or small game. Like every other our strategy for earning, burning and sharing calories underpins
mammal, apes learn early to fend for themselves, foraging on their our extraordinary success as a species.
own as soon as they’re weaned, and they know better than to give
their hard-earned food away. Fossils from deep in the human lin- E NERGY BUDGETS
eage, the first four million years after we broke from the other apes, Our bodies a re wonders of coordinated chaos. Every second of ev-
indicate our early ancestors played by the same ecological rules. ery day, each of your 37 trillion cells is hard at work, pulling in
Around 2.5 million years ago things took an unlikely turn. Ear- nutrients, building new proteins and doing the myriad other tasks
ly populations of the genus Homo stumbled onto a new way of that keep you alive. All of this work takes energy. Our metabo-
making a living, something unprecedented in the history of life. lism is the energy we expend (or the calories we burn) each day.
Instead of pursuing a career as a plant eater, carnivore or gener- That energy comes from the food we eat, and so our metabolism
alist, they tried a strange, dual strategy: some would hunt, oth- also sets our energy requirements. Calories in, calories out.
ers would gather, and they’d share whatever they acquired. This Evolutionary biologists often think about metabolism as an
cooperative approach placed a premium on intelligence, and over organism’s energy budget. Life’s essential tasks, including growth,
millennia brain size began to increase. Our Paleolithic ancestors reproduction and bodily maintenance, require energy. And ev-
learned to knap delicate blades from round stone cobbles, hunt ery organism must balance its books.

Measuring Metabolism
The first comprehensive study investigating the effects of age increase with body size, as expected. But they are not inherently
and body size on daily energy expenditure has upended much of different in men and women, nor do they decline with middle
the conventional wisdom about metabolism. Metabolic rates age, among other revelations from this research.
The greatest predictor of metabolism is fat-free mass. Metabolism skyrockets over the first year of life. Daily energy
Larger bodies generally burn more calories. expenditures hold remarkably steady from age 20 to 60.
25 200
Total Daily Energy Expenditure (megajoules per day)
Relative Total Daily Energy Expenditure (percent)

100% indicates a person’s metabolic
rate matches precisely what’s expected
Juveniles (pink) for their body size and percent fat.
175
20 cluster above the
A value of 150% indicates metabolic
regression line,
rates 50% greater than expected.
reflecting their 125
elevated daily
15 expenditures.
150
Regression line
100
10
75
5 Neonates (Up to 1 year old)
Juveniles (1 to 20) 50
Male (mean)
Adults (20 to 60)
Female (mean)
Older Adults (60+)
0 25
0 20 40 60 80 100 0 20 40 60 80 100
Fat-Free Mass (kilograms) Age (years)
Humans are a striking example of this evolutionary book- more than a century, with some evidence for faster metabolism
keeping in action. The traits that distinguish us from the other in children and slower metabolism among the elderly. Yet rest-
apes, including our huge brains, big babies and long lives, all re- ing metabolism accounts for only 60 percent or so of the calories
quire a lot of energy. We pay for some of these costs by spending we burn over 24 hours and doesn’t include the energy we spend
less on our digestive system, having evolved a shorter intestinal on exercise and other physical activity. Online calorie calculators
tract and smaller liver. But we have also increased our metabol- purport to include activity costs, but they’re really just a guess
ic rate and the size of our energy budget. For our body size, hu- based on your self-reported weight and physical activity. In the
mans consume and burn more calories each day than any of the absence of solid evidence, a kind of folk wisdom has developed,
other apes. Our cells have evolved to work harder. cheered on and cultivated by charismatic hucksters selling met-
The work our bodies do changes as we age, the activities of abolic boosters and other snake oil. We’re often told our metab-
Source: “Daily Energy Expenditure through the Human Life Course,” by Herman Pontzer et al.,
our cells waxing and waning in a choreographed dance from olism speeds up at puberty and slows down in middle age, par-
growth to adulthood to senescence. Tracking those changes ticularly with menopause, and that men have faster metabolisms
through our metabolism could provide a better understanding than women. None of these claims is based on real science.
of the work our cells do at each age as well as our changing calo-
in Science, Vol. 373; August 2021 (reference); restyled by Jen Christiansen
rie needs. But a clear audit of our metabolism over the human A METABOLIC DATABASE
life span has been hard to obtain. My colleagues a nd I have begun to fill that gap in scientific under-
It’s obvious that adults need more calories than infants—big- standing. In 2014 John Speakman, a researcher in metabolism with
ger people have more cells doing more work, so they burn more laboratories at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and the Chi-
energy. We also know that elderly people tend to eat less, although nese Academy of Sciences in Shenzhen, organized an internation-
that’s often accompanied by a loss of body weight, particularly al effort to develop a large metabolic database. Crucially, this da-
muscle mass. But if we want to know how active our cells are and tabase would focus on total daily energy expenditure measured
whether metabolism gets faster or slower as we grow up and grow using the doubly labeled water method, an isotope-tracking tech-
old, we need to separate the effects of age and size, which is not nique that measures the carbon dioxide produced by the body (and
easy. You need a large sample with people of all ages, measured thus the calories burned) over one to two weeks. Doubly labeled
with the same methods. Ideally, you’d want measures of total dai- water is the gold standard for measuring daily energy expendi-
ly energy expenditure, a full tally of the calories used each day. tures, but it’s expensive, and you need a specialized lab for the iso-
Researchers have been measuring metabolic rates at rest for tope analyses. So even though this technique has been around for

decades, studies are typically small. Led by Speakman, my lab diminished muscle mass, compounds the decline in expenditure.
joined a dozen others around the world in pooling decades of data. As with all age groups, there’s a good amount of individual vari-
We ended up with more than 6,400 measurements of people rang- ability. Maintaining a younger, faster metabolism into old age
ing from babies just eight days old to men and women in their 90s. might be a sign of aging well, or perhaps it is even protective
In 2021, after years of collaborative effort, we published the against heart disease, dementia and other age-related disease.
first comprehensive study investigating the effects of age and We can now start to investigate these connections. Guided by our
body size on daily energy expenditure. As expected, we found that metabolic road map, we have a new world of research ahead of us.
metabolic rates increase with body size: bigger people burn more What is already apparent, however, is that a bite of birthday
calories. In particular, fat-free mass (the muscles and other or- cake does different things for a seven-year-old girl, her middle-
gans) is the single strongest predictor of daily energy expendi- aged dad and her elderly grandmother. Clara’s bite is likely to be
ture. This makes good sense. Fat cells aren’t as active as those in gobbled up by busy cells, fueling development. Mine might go to
maintenance, repairing all the little bits of dam-
age accrued through the course of the day. As for
The results were a revelation, the Grandma, her aging cells might be slow to use the
calories at all, storing them instead as glycogen
first clear road map of metabolism or fat. Indeed, for any of us, the cake will end up
over the human life span. as fat if we eat more calories than we burn.
The road map also highlights a major conun-
drum of the human condition. Whether they’re
the liver, brain, or other tissues, and they don’t contribute much born into a hunter-gatherer camp, a farming village or an indus-
to your daily expenditure. More important, with the relation be- trial megacity, human youngsters need a lot of help getting food.
tween mass and metabolic rate clearly established from thou- Other apes learn to forage for themselves by the time they stop
sands of measurements, we could finally test whether metabo- nursing, around the age of three or four. Our children are wholly
lism at each age was faster or slower than we’d expect from size. dependent on others for food for years and aren’t self-sufficient un-
The results were a revelation, the first clear road map of me- til their teens. And those least able to fend for themselves have the
tabolism over the human life span. We found that, metabolical- greatest energy needs. Not only has our species evolved a faster
ly, babies are born like tiny adults, reflecting their development metabolic rate and greater energy demands than other apes, but
as part of their mom’s energy budget. But metabolism skyrock- we must also provision each costly offspring for more than a de-
ets over the first year of life, so that by their first birthday chil- cade. Where do we get all those calories? Recently my colleagues
dren are burning 50 percent more energy than we’d expect for and I worked out this part of the human energy equation, too.
their size. Their cells are far busier than adults’ cells, hard at work
on growth and development. Earlier studies measuring glucose C OSTLY KIDS
uptake in the brain during childhood suggest some of this work The question of calories looms largest in hunter-gatherer and
is neuronal growth and synapse development. Maturation in oth- farming communities, where daily life revolves around food pro-
er systems no doubt contributes as well. Metabolism stays elevat- duction. For most of our species’ history, as for most species, there
ed through childhood, slowly decelerating through adolescence was no other line of work. Every kid knew what they were going
to land at adult levels around age 20. Boys decline more slowly to be when they grew up. As late as the mid-1800s, more than half
than girls, consistent with boys’ slower development, but there’s of the American workforce was made up of farmers.
no bump at puberty in males or females. For the past decade I’ve been working with colleagues to un-
Perhaps the biggest surprise was the stability of our metabo- derstand the calorie economy in the Hadza community of north-
lism through middle age. Daily energy expenditures hold remark- ern Tanzania. The Hadza are a small population of 1,000 or so,
ably steady from age 20 to 60. No middle age slowdown, no change and about half of them maintain a traditional hunting-and-gath-
with menopause. The weight gain so many of us experience in ering way of life, foraging on the savanna landscape they call
adulthood cannot be blamed on a declining metabolism. As a man home. No population alive today is a perfect model of the past,
in my 40s, I had sort of believed the folk wisdom that metabolism but groups like the Hadza, who continue these traditions, pro-
slowed as we aged. My body definitely feels different than it did vide a living example of how these systems work. Men spend most
10 or 20 years ago. But like hunting some metabolic Sasquatch, days hunting with bow and arrow or chopping into hollow tree
when you actually look there’s nothing there. Same for the much limbs to pillage honey from beehives. Women gather berries and
touted metabolic differences between men and women. Women other plant foods or dig for wild tubers in the rocky soil. Hadza
have lower daily energy expenditures on average, but that is only camps, small collections of grass houses tucked among the aca-
because women tend to be smaller and carry more of their weight cia trees, are alive all day with kids being kids, running around,
as fat. Compare men and women with the same body weight and laughing, playing—and waiting for adults to bring them food.
body fat percentage, and the metabolic difference disappears. We’ve measured Hadza energy budgets using doubly labeled
We did find a decline in metabolism with age, but it doesn’t water, giving us a clear idea of the calories men and women con-
kick in until we hit 60. After 60, metabolism slows by around sume and expend each day. We’ve also lugged portable respirom-
7 percent per decade. By the time men and women are in their etry equipment into the bush, a metabolic lab in a briefcase, to
90s, their daily expenditures are 20 to 25 percent lower, on aver- measure the energy costs of foraging activities such as walking,
age, than those of adults in their 50s. That’s after we account for climbing, digging tubers and chopping trees. And we’ve got years
body size and composition. Weight loss with old age, especially of careful observation recording the hours spent each day on dif-

ferent foraging tasks and the amount of food acquired. After more as their energy staple, they produce nearly twice as many calories
than a decade of work, we’ve got a complete accounting of the an hour as the Hadza. They’re more energy-efficient as well, get-
Hadza energy economy: the calories spent to get food, the calo- ting more food from every calorie they spend foraging and farming.
ries acquired, the proportions shared and consumed. Those extra calories are embodied in the children running
Tom Kraft of the University of Utah led our team’s effort to around Tsimane villages. More food and faster production mean
compare the energy budgets of the Hadza population with sim a lighter workload for mothers because others in the communi-
ilar data from other human groups and from other species of ty can more easily share the time and energy costs of caring for
apes. It was a massive project, poring over old ethnographic ac- kids. As with many subsistence farming communities, Tsimane
counts of hunter-gatherer and farming groups and combing families tend to be large. Women have an average of nine chil-
through ecological studies and doubly labeled water measure- dren over the course of their lives. Compare that with the aver-
ments in apes to reconstruct their foraging economies. But when age fertility rate of six children per mother in the Hadza commu-
we were finished, what emerged was a new understanding of the nity, and the impact of that extra energy is inescapable. And it’s
energetic foundation for our species’ success. We could finally see not just the Tsimane. Farming communities tend to have higher
where all those calories come from, the energy needed to fuel ex- fertility rates than hunter-gatherer communities. Increased fer-
pensive human metabolisms and provision helpless kids. tility is an important reason farming overtook hunting and gath-
ering in the Neolithic age, the time spanning roughly 12,000 to
C LEVER COOPERATORS 6,500 years ago. Archaeological sites across Eurasia and the
It turns out h umans’ unique, cooperative foraging strategy, com- Americas document a rising tide of children and adolescents fol-
bined with our clever brains and tools, makes hunting and gath- lowing the development of agriculture.
ering extremely productive. Even in the harsh, dry savanna of
northern Tanzania, Hadza men and women acquire 500 to 1,000 H AVING OUR CAKE
kilocalories of food an hour, on average. Ethnographic records From this perspective, a kid’s birthday party is more than a per-
from other groups around the world suggest these rates are typ- sonal milestone. It’s a celebration of our improbable evolutionary
ical for hunter-gatherers. Five hours of hunting and gathering story. There’s the food, of course. We get the flour and sugar for
can reliably bring in 3,000 to 5,000 kilocalories of food, enough the cake from our farming ancestors, the fire to bake it from the
to meet a forager’s daily needs and provision the camps’ children. Paleolithic era. The milk and eggs come from animals that we’ve
It’s the positive feedback engine that propelled the human spe- completely transformed from species we once hunted, shaped to
cies to new heights. Hunting and gathering is so productive that it our will over generations of careful husbandry. And there’s the cal-
creates an energy surplus. Those extra calories are channeled to endar we use to mark our days and measure our years, an inven-
offspring, meaning they can take longer to develop, learning skills tion of agriculturalists who needed to know precisely when to reap
that make them effective foragers. Reaching adulthood, they’ll do and sow. Hunter-gatherers track the seasons and lunar cycles but
just as their parents did, acquiring extra food and plowing those have little use for accurate annual calendars. There are no birth-
calories into the next generation. Over evolutionary time childhood days in a Hadza camp.
grows longer as foraging strategies grow more complex. Life spans But the key element of any celebration is the community of
get extended, too, with natural selection favoring additional years friends and relatives, multiple generations gathering to eat and
of productive foraging to support children and grandchildren. laugh and sing. Our evolved social contract—to hunt, gather and
Grandparents, once rare, become a fixture of the social network. farm collectively—tied us together, gave us our childhood and ex-
Apes in the wild are not nearly as productive in gathering food. tended our golden years. Cooperative foraging also helped to fuel
A forensic accounting of the energy budgets for chimpanzees, go- the cultural complexity and innovation that make birthdays and
rillas and orangutans shows that males and females get around 200 other rituals so fantastical and diverse. And at the center of it all
to 300 kilocalories an hour. It takes them seven hours of foraging is the universal commitment to share.
just to meet their own needs each day. No wonder they don’t share. With eight billion humans on the planet today, one might be-
Our hyperproductive foraging isn’t cheap. People in hunter- gin to worry that we’ve taken things a bit too far. We’ve learned to
gatherer communities expend more than twice as much energy to turbocharge our energy budgets by tapping into climate-chang-
acquire food as apes in the wild. Surprisingly, human technology ing fossil fuels and flooding our world with cheap food. Calories
and smarts don’t make us very energy-efficient. Hadza men and are so easy to produce that very few of us spend our days forag-
women achieve the same paltry ratio of energy acquired to ener- ing, a first in the history of life. This massive shift has been a boon
gy expended that we find in wild apes. Cooperation and culture to our collective creativity, enabling many to spend their lives as
enable human foragers to be incredibly time-efficient, acquiring artists, doctors, teachers, scientists—a range of careers outside of
lots of calories an hour, but our unique foraging strategies are still food production. Having carved out our own strange niche, far re-
energetically demanding. Hunting and gathering is hard work. moved from the laws that govern the rest of the natural world, we
Farming isn’t any easier, but our analyses found it can be even have only ourselves to look to for guidance. With a little luck and
more productive. When we compared the energy budgets for the a lot of cooperation, we just might secure the human lineage an-
Hadza and other hunter-gatherer populations with those of tradi- other couple million birthdays. Make a wish.
tional farming groups, we found that farmers typically produce
far more calories an hour. The Tsimane community, a population
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
in the Amazonian rain forest of Bolivia, provides a useful point of
Evolved to Exercise. Herman Pontzer; January 2019.
comparison. The Tsimane get most of their calories from farming,
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
but they also hunt, fish and collect wild plants. With farmed foods

TWO NEUTRON STARS s piral toward an
explosive collision. Recent evidence supports
the theory that many of the periodic table’s
heavier elements form through such crashes.

Cosmic
ASTROPHYSIC S
Alchemy
New evidence is elucidating the origins of the
heaviest chemical elements in the universe
By Sanjana Curtis
Illustration by Ron Miller

Sanjana Curtis is a nuclear astrophysicist interested in the
origin of elements and in multimessenger astronomy. She
is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago’s
department of astronomy and astrophysics.
B its of the Stars are all around us, and in us, too. About Half of the Abundance
of elements heavier than iron originates in some of the most violent explosions
in the cosmos. As the universe churns and new stars and planets form out of
old gas and dust, these elements eventually make their way to Earth and other
worlds. After 3.7 billion years of evolution on our planet, humans and many
other species have come to rely on them in our bodies and our lives. Iodine, for
instance, is a component of hormones we need to control our brain develop-
ment and regulate our metabolism. Ocean microplankton called Acantharea use the element stron-
tium to create intricate mineral skeletons. Gallium is critical for the chips in our smartphones and
our laptop screens. And the mirrors of the JWST are gilded with gold, an element useful for its
unreactive nature and ability to reflect infrared light (not to mention its popularity in jewelry).
Scientists have long had a basic idea of how these ele-
ments come to be, but for many years the details were
a quiet part of the Milky Way about 130 million light-
years away, was home to the dinosaurs. The ripples in
hazy and fiercely debated. That changed recently when spacetime, called gravitational waves, began making
astronomers observed, for the first time, heavy-element their way across the cosmos, and in the time it took them
synthesis in action. The process, the evidence suggests, to cover the vast distance to Earth, life on the planet
went something like this. changed beyond recognition. New species evolved and
Eons ago a star more than 10 times as massive as our went extinct, civilizations rose and fell, and curious
sun died in a spectacular explosion, giving birth to one humans began looking up at the sky, developing instru-
of the strangest objects in the universe: a neutron star. ments that could do incredible things such as measure
This newborn star was a remnant of the stellar core com- minute distortions in spacetime. Eventually the gravita-
pressed to extreme densities where matter can take forms tional waves (traveling at light speed) and the light from
we do not understand. The neutron star might have the merger reached Earth together. Astrophysicists rec-
cooled forever in the depths of space, and that would ognized a distinctive glow that showed the presence of
have been the end of its story. But most massive stars live new elements. Humanity had just witnessed heavy-ele-
in binary systems with a twin, and the same fate that ment production.
befell our first star eventually came for its partner, leav- As an expert in cosmic cataclysms, I’m enthralled by
ing two neutron stars circling each other. In a dance that both the science and the romance of this story—the cre-
went on for millennia, the stars spiraled in, slowly at first ation of something new and enduring, even precious,
and then rapidly. As they drew closer together, tidal from an ancient remnant of a once luminous star. And
forces began to rip them apart, flinging neutron-rich mat- I’m thrilled that we finally get to see it happening. The
ter into space at velocities approaching one-third the discovery has answered several long-standing questions
speed of light. At last the stars merged, sending ripples in astrophysics while also raising entirely new questions.
through spacetime and setting off cosmic fireworks But I and many scientists are energized. Our newfound
across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. ability to detect gravitational waves, as well as light from
At the time of the crash, our own pale blue planet, in the same cosmic source, promises to help us understand

astrophysical explosions and the synthesis of elements into a highly unstable isotope, going all the way up to
in a way that was previously impossible. what’s called the neutron drip line—the absolute limit
of the neutron-to-proton ratio allowed by nature inside
WE ARE STARDUST a nucleus. The extremely heavy nucleus will then con-
The quest t o understand heavy-element formation is part vert many of its neutrons to protons via beta decays or
of a larger scientific effort to answer a fundamental ques- even break into smaller nuclei, ultimately producing a
tion: Where did everything come from? The cosmic his- range of stable heavy elements. Many details about how
tory of the elements of the periodic table extends from a this plays out are unclear. After a nucleus absorbs extra
few minutes after the big bang to the present. The syn- neutrons, for instance, but before it becomes stable,
thesis of the first elements—hydrogen, helium and lith- exotic nuclei arise that scientists don’t understand.
ium—occurred roughly three minutes after the birth of These in-between nuclei have properties that push the
the universe. From these ingredients, the first stars bounds of physics, and measuring them in a laboratory
formed, shining bright and fusing new elements in their is difficult and sometimes even impossible.
cores during both their lives and their explosive deaths. Over the years scientists proposed many places in the
The next generation of stars was born from the debris of universe where the r-process might occur, but the truth
these blasts, enriched with the elements formed by the remained a mystery—among the greatest in nuclear
first stars. This process continues today and accounts for astrophysics—for more than six decades. For a long time
all the elements from helium on the light end, with two they thought core-collapse supernovae—explosive deaths
protons per atom, all the way up to iron, which has 26
Over the years scientists proposed

protons in its atomic nucleus. The heaviest elements,
such as tennessine with 117 protons, aren’t created by
nature at all. But physicists can force them into being
inside particle accelerators, where they typically last for
many places in the universe
mere thousandths of a second before decaying. where the r-process might occur,
Several decades ago scientists theorized that about
half of the elements heavier than iron are produced but the truth remained a mystery.
through a process called rapid neutron capture, or the
r-process. The rest are thought to originate through slow of stars more than eight to 10 times the mass of our sun—
neutron capture, or the s-process—a relatively well- might host the r-process. But simulations of typical core-
understood sequence of reactions that occurs in long- collapse supernovae couldn’t reproduce the neutron
lived, low-mass stars. richness and thermodynamic conditions needed except,
Both the r-process and the s-process involve adding perhaps, in the case of rare explosions driven by strong
one or more neutrons to an atomic nucleus. Adding neu- magnetic fields. In 1974 James M. Lattimer and David N.
trons, however, does not produce a new element, because Schramm suggested that decompressing neutron star
elements are defined by the number of protons in their matter could provide the ingredients for the r-process.
nucleus. What we do get is a heavier isotope of the same A neutron star is born when a massive star runs out
element—a nucleus containing the same number of proof nuclear fuel and its gravity causes the core to collapse
tons but a different number of neutrons. This heavy iso- inward. The overwhelming force of the star’s mass on
tope is often unstable and radioactive. Through what’s the core compresses it to extremely high densities, caus-
called beta-minus decay, a neutron will transform into a ing electrons and protons to fuse together to become
proton, spitting out an electron and another subatomic neutrons. While the rest of the star gets expelled in the
particle called a neutrino in the process. In this way, the supernova, the neutron star remains intact—a compact
number of protons in an atom’s nucleus increases, and remnant containing the densest matter known in the
a new element is born. universe. Neutron stars more massive than a certain
The key difference between the s-process and the limit further collapse into black holes, but we don’t
r-process is speed. In the s-process, atoms capture neu- know the exact point of this transition, nor do we know
trons slowly, and there is plenty of time for the newly how “squishy” they are. The inner structure of neutron
added neutron to decay into a proton, creating the next stars is an open question. They might contain mostly
stable element in the periodic table—with just one pro- neutrons and a small fraction of protons inside a crust
ton more—before another neutron comes along to be of heavier nuclei at their surfaces. But their interiors
captured. This happens over thousands of years because could be even weirder than that. Deep inside the neu-
there are only small numbers of extra neutrons lying tron star, matter may take on truly bizarre forms, rang-
around in the stars that host the s-process, so atoms are ing from a soup of quarks and gluons—the particles that
able to capture new neutrons only occasionally. make up normal matter—to a sea of “hyperons,” which
The r-process, in contrast, can produce the entire are made of so-called strange quarks.
range of heavy elements in one spectacular flash of cre- Lattimer and Schramm proposed that neutron-rich
ation that barely lasts a second. In this scenario, neutrons matter is ejected when a neutron star collides with a
are plentiful and slam into nuclei one after another before black hole. But by 1982 scientists favored a scenario
they have time to decay. A nucleus can rapidly balloon involving two neutron stars smashing together. While

How Heavy Elements Are Made
That ring on your finger m ade of platinum or gold contains a secret that
has been at the center of a cosmic mystery. Scientists have been combing
the galaxy to figure out where these so-called heavy elements come from.
Lighter elements—everything from helium, with its two protons per atom,
on up to iron, which has 26 protons in each nucleus—are better understood. 3 The r-process requires seed nuclei,
Most of these form through nuclear fusion inside stars. But our knowledge such as that of iron, the heaviest
element that can be formed from
gets fuzzy after iron. Gold, which has 79 protons in each atom, can’t be
fusion inside stars. The iron nucleus
made that way. The same goes for platinum, xenon, radon and many rare begins with 26 protons and usually
Earth elements. has around 30 neutrons. When
For decades scientists debated where these heavy metals came from and bombarded with free neutrons,
how they arrived on Earth. The leading idea—the so-called rapid neutron- the nucleus captures many of them
capture process triggered by an extremely violent cosmic event—is described in a matter of milliseconds.
below. Until recently, this was a theory with no observational backup. That
changed a few years ago, when scientists detected gravitational waves from
a neutron star collision and saw light at the same time. This light held the Iron nucleus
(26 protons, 30 neutrons)
chemical signatures of these heavy elements—offering the first evidence sup-
porting the theory of where they came from. It also helped scientists fill in
some of the details about how the process might work. Proton
Free neutron
2 A neutron star collision emits

light, gravitational waves, and
a lot of free neutrons. Up to a
gram of neutrons spills into every
cubic centimeter of space. These
rare conditions ignite what’s
called the rapid neutron-capture
process, otherwise known as
r-process for short.
Neutrons
Neutron star
1 Neutron stars are the densest Light waves

things in the universe except
for black holes. They are born
when heavy stars die and their
cores collapse. The incredible Neutron star
gravitational pressure squishes Gravitational waves
the atoms together, and
protons and electrons merge,
leaving behind a star made
almost entirely of neutrons.
34 Scientific American, January 2023 Graphic by Jason Drakeford

Just think—every time you wear a ring
4 The new nucleus is extremely made of gold or platinum, you are holding
radioactive because of its lopsided a piece of the cosmos in your hand.
number of neutrons.
Radioactive iron nucleus

with a large number of neutrons
Gold nucleus
(79 protons, 118 neutrons)
Beta particles
6 The result is a new element—in this

case, gold, which has 79 protons.
Beta particles
5 Some of the neutrons will decay into

protons. This is a normal process
called beta decay, and it allows a
neutron to transform into a proton
by changing the flavor of one of its
constituent quarks from down to up
and releasing an electron and an
antineutrino at the same time. The
cycle of neutron captures and beta
decays continues, producing heavier
and heavier nuclei.
DIRECT EVIDENCE Expected curve based on temperature

Scientists collected the first hard (white line) * *
Strong
Intensity of Incoming Light
data supporting the r-process

theory when gravitational waves
and light from a neutron star
collision were detected on Earth
at the same time.
The light spectrum held the
chemical signature of strontium
(another heavy element),
This dip—
confirming that a heavy element
a deviation from
was present in connection
the expected
with the event that triggered
curve—suggested
Light waves the gravitational waves.
that strontium
was present.
* Some wavelengths, including a few
bands on the far right, are subject Weak
to known equipment calibration
Gravitational waves issues or atmospheric interference.
400 500 600 800 1,000 1,200 1,500 1,900
Source: “Identification of Strontium in the
Merger of Two Neutron Stars,” by Darach Ultraviolet Visible spectrum Infrared
Watson et al., arXiv:1910.10510; October 2019
(c hart reference) Wavelength of Incoming Light (nanometers)

R-Process Elements The highlighted elements,
when found in the solar system,
The periodic table’s elements come from a variety of sources. are believed to originate in part
Hydrogen, helium and a bit of lithium were formed shortly after through the r-process.
H He
the big bang, and other lighter elements are forged by stars.
But the elements in yellow are too heavy to form this way. They
Li Be originate, in part or entirely, through the r-process, where lighter B C N O F Ne
atoms quickly gain neutrons that decay into protons.

Na Mg Al Si P S Cl Ar
K Ca Sc Ti V Cr Mn Fe Co Ni Cu Zn Gallium German- Arsenic Selenium Bromine Krypton

ium
Rubid- Stront- Yttrium Zircon- Niobium Molyb- Tc Ruthen- Rhodium Palladium Silver Cadmium Indium Tin Antimony Tellurium Iodine Xenon
ium ium ium denum ium
Cesium Barium Hafnium Tantalum Tungsten Rhenium Osmium Iridium Platinum Gold Mercury Thallium Lead Bismuth Po At Rn
Fr Ra Rf Db Sg Bh Hs Mt Ds Rg Cn Nh Fl Mc Lv Ts Og
Lanth- Cerium Praseo- Neo- Pm Samar- Europium Gadolin- Terbium Dyspro- Holmium Erbium Thulium Ytterb- Lutetium
anum dymium dymium ium ium sium ium
Ac Thorium Pa Uranium Np Pluton- Am Cm Bk Cf Es Fm Md No Lr

ium
some researchers were working to understand how these I learned that neutron star mergers produce less energy
crashes could synthesize new elements, others were try- than black hole mergers, so they are more difficult to
“Neutron-Capture Elements in the Early Galaxy,” by Christopher Sneden et al., in Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Vol. 46; 2008 (reference)
ing to predict what kind of light we would expect to see detect. But I and other scientists held out hope that soon
from a neutron star merger. Some people suggested a the experiment would find them as well.
connection between neutron star collisions and gamma- A couple of years passed, and L IGO and its sibling
Sources: “Populating the Periodic Table: Nucleosynthesis of the Elements,” by Jennifer A. Johnson, in Science, Vol. 363; February 2019;
ray bursts—highly energetic explosions in space that emit observatory Virgo detected more binary black hole col-
a flash of gamma rays. And because r-process nuclei lisions. Yet neutron star mergers remained elusive. Then,
would be unstable and undergo radioactive decay, they in the fall of 2017, I heard rumors that LIGO-Virgo had
should be able to heat up the material surrounding them seen a neutron star collision for the first time. The rumors
and power an electromagnetic flare that would carry sig- hinted that in addition to the gravitational-wave signal,
natures of the elements produced. In 2010 Brian Metzger astronomers had observed a short gamma-ray burst and
and his collaborators introduced the term “kilonova” to something that looked a lot like a kilonova. The excite-
refer to such flares (first proposed in 1998) after deter- ment among physicists was intense.
mining that they would be approximately 1,000 times Soon enough, I was watching scientists from LIGO
brighter than a regular flash of light called a nova. and various telescopes around the world announce the
Despite this intense theoretical development, there gravitational-wave observation, called G W170817, and the
was little direct confirmation until just a few years ago, associated electromagnetic signals. I was awed by the
when one remarkable set of observations saw straight amount of new knowledge these observations had
into the heart of a neutron star merger. already generated. The very next day there were almost
70 new papers about GW170817 on arXiv.org, a website
A COSMIC SYMPHONY where researchers can publish early, unreviewed versions
In 2015 t he Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Obser- of their papers. The event forecasted the promise of mul-
vatory (LIGO) did something extraordinary: it made the timessenger astronomy—the ability to see cosmic phe-
first observation of gravitational waves, which were gen- nomena through different “messengers” and combine
erated by two black holes spiraling toward each other and the information to achieve a fuller understanding of the
merging. The detection was designated GW150914. At the event. This was the first time astronomers saw gravita-
time I was a graduate student at North Carolina State Uni- tional waves and light—including radio, optical, x-ray and
versity. I remember watching the announcement along gamma-ray light—coming from the same celestial source.
with the entire physics department in the common area The gravitational waves seen by LIGO-Virgo origi-
of our building, feeling deeply moved. I tried to absorb nated in the crash of a pair of neutron stars about 130
everything I could about this new window to our universe. million light-years from Earth. This may seem far, but it’s
36 Scientific American, January 2023 Graphic by Jen Christiansen

actually close for a gravitational-wave source. The details The mechanism that produces short gamma-ray bursts
of the signal, such as how the waves’ frequency and in mergers is still unclear. Properties of matter ejected in
strength changed with time, allowed researchers to esti- a merger are also changed in important ways by neutri-
mate that each neutron star had weighed about 1.17 to nos. Careful tracking of these particles and their interac-
1.6 times the mass of our sun and had a radius of roughly tions in theoretical models is necessary but challenging
11 to 12 kilometers. and often requires a prohibitively large amount of com-
As soon as the gravitational-wave signal arrived, putational power. We also don’t know what object was
astronomers followed up with conventional telescopes. created when the neutron stars merged. It could have
Working together, LIGO and Virgo narrowed the loca- been another neutron star, a neutron star on its way to
tion range for G W170817 to a much smaller region of the becoming a black hole, or a black hole. Finally, although
sky than in previous gravitational-wave events. Roughly we now know that neutron star mergers can host the
1.7 seconds after the gravitational waves came in, gamma- r-process, they are not the only places where it happens.
ray telescopes Fermi-GBM and I NTEGRAL detected a Observations of very old stars containing r-process
faint burst of gamma rays lasting only a couple of sec- elements suggest other possibilities, which include rare
onds that came from the same direction as G W170817. supernovae and collisions of neutron stars with black
This discovery definitively linked neutron star mergers holes. We will not be able to uncover the origin of heavy
with short gamma-ray bursts for the first time. But there elements with any one observation, no matter how
was more! Images taken with the Henrietta Swopes one- extraordinary. GW170817 is just the beginning.
meter telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in
Chile showed a new source of light located in the old but NEW OPPORTUNITIES
bright galaxy NGC 4993. By breaking up the light into We can’t expect all kilonovae to look the same as the one
its constituent colors and examining its spectrum, associated with GW170817. We suspect they come in
astronomers concluded that the signal was consistent many forms, each with distinctive features, and we’re in
with the idea that heavy elements were being forged for a lot of surprises. In fact, astronomers at Northwest-
there. We were looking at a true kilonova. ern University recently discovered a kilonova along with
The way the kilonova’s spectrum changed over time a long gamma-ray burst—an interesting combination
was interesting. Shorter wavelengths of light, which are suggesting that mergers can spawn gamma-ray bursts
bluer, peaked early, and longer, red wavelengths became with longer light curves, too.
predominant later. These peaks can be explained by the To understand the r-process, experts in several disci-
composition and velocity of the material ejected from plines will have to work together: observational astron-
the merger. A blue kilonova can be produced by fast- omers studying stars both old and new, gravitational-
moving ejecta made mainly of lighter heavy elements wave astronomers measuring distortions in spacetime,
without any “lanthanides”—the metallic periodic ele- nuclear theorists constructing models of nuclear struc-
ments from lanthanum to lutetium, which are highly tures and of the matter inside neutron stars, experimen-
opaque to blue light. A red kilonova, in contrast, requires tal nuclear physicists tracking down the properties of
slow-moving ejecta containing lots of heavy elements, unstable neutron-rich nuclei, and computational astro-
including lanthanides. physicists simulating events such as neutron star merg-
How does the merger generate these distinct compo- ers by solving equations that take months to process on
nents? This question puts us in uncertain territory, the some of the largest computers in the world.
realm of theory and simulations. Researchers are still As existing gravitational-wave observatories become
trying to understand how the collision ejects material, increasingly sensitive, new telescopes will come online
what the material is made of and how the resulting kilo- to collect light from the transient sky. New projects such
nova unfolds. Kilonova spectra are very difficult to dis- as the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, which opened in
entangle. Because the material is moving so fast, the fin- May 2022 at Michigan State University, will measure the
gerprints of various elements get smeared and blended nuclear properties of rare nuclei. Proposed gravitational-
together. We also lack reliable atomic data for many of wave observatories such as the ground-based Einstein
the heavier elements, so it’s hard to predict what their Telescope are currently being planned in Europe.
spectral signatures look like. The only plausible detec- Decades of progress in many fields have brought us
tion of an individual element in the GW170817 kilonova to a point where we can investigate the origin of heavy
spectrum so far is of strontium. This is enough, though, elements in ways that were inaccessible just a few years
to show that the r-process took place. ago. We are finally poised to put all the pieces together.
The discovery of this singular event has confirmed Every isotope of every element in the periodic table has
decades of theoretical predictions. Astrophysicists have the potential to tell us something about the nuclear his-
finally established a connection between neutron star tory of the universe.
mergers and short gamma-ray bursts. The kilonova spec-
trum carries signatures of heavy elements, confirming
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
that neutron star mergers are at least one site where
The Inner Lives of Neutron Stars. Clara Moskowitz; March 2019.
r-process elements are produced.
But a lot remains to be understood and discovered.

SORA SHAMAN LOKAMI
( c enter) channels a person who
died three months earlier and
now speaks through her with
his relatives. Their offerings to
him include the chicken and
the clothes on her shoulder.

ANTHROPOLOGY
An Indigenous spiritual tradition speaks

to the fragility of theological diversity
Dialogues
Dead
with the
By Piers Vitebsky
Photographs by Harsha Vadlamani

Piers Vitebsky studies religion and ecology among
Indigenous peoples of India and Siberia. He is emeritus
head of anthropology and Russian northern studies at
the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of
Cambridge and author of several books, including Living
without the Dead ( University of Chicago Press, 2017).
A t the core of religious

wonder lies the mystery of
life and death, and the world
contains more understand-
ings of this mystery than we
can ever know. When I first
stayed with the Sora Indige-
nous (or Adivasi) people in the highlands of
Odisha, eastern India, as a graduate student in
the 1970s, they engaged daily in conversations
with their dead, who spoke through the mouths
of shamans who were in a trance. Surrounded
by shouting, drinking, and laughing dancers
and musicians, living and dead Sora would gos-
sip, cry and argue together for hours on end.
As a young Englishman clutching my notebook and tape
recorder, I’d never imagined anything like it. What were the liv-
ing and the dead saying to one another? What kind of magician
was my new friend Ononti, the shaman with a spirit husband and
children in the underworld—her relationship with them so
intense that her marriage among the living had collapsed? What
manner of skill enabled her to personify those the community
had loved, the mourners embracing her stiff, entranced form in
their desire to hold people who no longer had bodies of their own?
What did she feel as she “became” one dead person after another?
And what function did this elaborate ceremony serve? which act like specialized ecological niches. This specificity gives
My long, immersive visits over succeeding decades gradually them depth but also makes them vulnerable to uprooting and
revealed a worldview of extraordinary complexity, manifested in withering—a loss of what I call theodiversity as dramatic and
one of the most elaborate processes of grieving ever documented. potentially irreversible as any loss of biodiversity.
The Sora religion I witnessed constituted not only a spiritual tra- I was so engrossed in decoding the Sora worldview that I ini-
dition but also a sophisticated system of psychotherapy and social tially failed to notice that a new generation of Sora children, the
regulation that consoled the bereaved, softened generational ten- first to attend school and become literate, was turning away from
sions, and subordinated ideological conflict to debate and com- their ancestral religion toward Christian or, in some villages,
promise. Such Indigenous wisdoms around the world constitute Hindu sects. Young Sora, educated in a mainstream regional lan-
a spiritual gene bank to fall back on as we become increasingly guage, expressed contempt for the “backwardness” of their par-
limited to the hegemonic belief systems of the present time. ents and grandparents—a contempt that often extended to me,
I learned, too, that Indigenous cultures and spiritual tradi- as a sympathizer with the old religion. Now, almost half a cen-
tions are tightly adapted to local social and historical conditions, tury since I began my research, the traditional funeral rites are

largely forgotten. Almost all the Sora who died during the COVID AFTER THE TRANCE, Lokami and the mourners sit outside the
pandemic were given a Christian or Hindu funeral. house where the ritual took place, stitching leaves from a sacred
Our current age of mass extinction extends to a loss of cul- Sal tree into bowls for a sacrificial feast of chicken and rice.
tural and religious diversity. These multiple, simultaneous losses
are consequences of a monochromatic worldview that favors sim-
ple, overarching solutions over complex, multifaceted ones: that diversity of forms in general enables adaptability and sur-
monocrop plantations, economies based on single commodities, vival. The extinction of traditional Sora thought constitutes the
a global financial system, the imposition of majority languages loss of yet another species of theodiversity, a major resource for
in school and the rise of religious fundamentalisms. These par- future-proofing a planet racked by contested histories, degraded
allels make it more pressing than ever for scholars to explore the environments, irresponsible governments and perpetual war.
diversity of human thinking, much of it among remote minority In the new millennium, I was forced to turn my quest for
peoples, which is difficult to access and document, demands spe- understanding in an entirely new direction. If the world of the
cialized research and is still largely unknown. Biology teaches us Sora shamans was as fulfilling as I had thought, why were so

many younger Sora rejecting it so totally? The Sora, too, are eral shamans, who specialized in various divinations, healings
reflecting on this change. Some of them are now asking for my and funeral rites. Ononti, a small, forceful older woman, was one
field notes, photographs and tape recordings from the 1970s as of the greatest. Sitting on the floor with legs outstretched, she
heritage documentation of a culture they never experienced would sing a rhythmic chant invoking her spirit husband and
themselves, but the after-image of which continues to define their previous shamans—“Clasping hands, grandmothers, along the
ethnic identity. And in accordance with the last wishes of my impossible tightrope path”—then enter a trance state as her soul
elderly Sora friend, Monosi, a Baptist modernizer who died in descended to the underworld. This left her body “vacant” for 10
2017, I am compiling a dictionary of the Sora language to present or 20 dead villagers to come up in succession to speak, each swig-
to the younger Sora, many of whom speak only Odia, the region’s ging palm wine through her mouth, discussing their family affairs
dominant language. and reproducing their own distinctive speech habits. I tried var-
ious tricks to test the extent to which shamans were consciously
A CONSCIOUS WORLD guiding these conversations, but they always remained in char-
AT school, I studied ancient Greek language and mythology, and I acter. Despite decades of study, I never really understood the state
was fascinated by the ancient gods and spirits of the landscape. of mind involved in a Sora shaman’s trance—with its dreamlike
Living in modern Europe and surrounded by Christian and secu- nature, its blend of beauty and terror in the underworld, and the
lar belief systems, I wondered: What would it feel like to live in an theatrical aspect of assuming one identity after another.
animistic world, where features of the envi- How could a people care so much about
ronment like trees and rivers are believed what happens to those they love after
to have humanlike consciousness? I could death? I wondered. And what induced
not live with the ancient Greeks, so I re them to come up with this particular solu-
trained as an anthropologist and searched tion to the problem of death—the concern
the literature for surviving animistic cul- of all religions? I came to realize that what
tures. I found an account of the Sora from my Sora friends feared most about death
the 1940s. These Adivasi communities lived was not annihilation but separation from
Sora people
by shifting cultivation of millets and other loved ones. In their view, a person who died
subsistence crops, as well as rice cultiva- didn’t simply vanish but continued to exist
tion, in forested mountains of eastern and to feel—though not in any of the ways
India. They numbered some 400,000, spoke I’d ever thought about. The grief of this sep-
a language of the Austroasiatic family— aration was felt equally keenly by both the
unlike India’s mainstream Indo-European living and the dead. So intense was this
and Dravidian languages—and lay largely mutual attachment that the dead passed on
outside the Hindu world. In January 1975, the symptoms from which they themselves
after three days’ cycling from the regional THE SORA Indigenous people live in the had suffered, bringing the living as close to
capital and a further two days’ walk along highlands of eastern India (red). Like them as they could. Indeed, for Sora, the
precarious mountain paths, I arrived in many other Adivasis of the region, they only possible cause of illness and death was
Rajingtal, a Sora village of about 600 people. speak an Austroasiatic language. other dead people, in a literal interpreta-
The Sora received me cautiously. Why tion of the consuming power of memory
should they welcome a stranger from a distant land who couldn’t and grief. Physical and emotional pain were not separate—each
even speak their language? After two weeks I was able to join a illness was a reminder of your attachment to someone close to you
band of men in their sessions of drinking the mildly fermented who was now pulling you toward them by eating your soul.
sap of the fishtail palm (Caryota urens). Eventually, after more And yet the living wanted to stay alive. The response to an
weeks of testing and teasing, my first Sora friend, Inama, invited illness was to give the dead the soul of a sacrificial animal as a
me to live with his family. He later gave me a separate house, but substitute for your own and to engage the dead in conversation
concerned that I’d be lonely, he also sent his little boy, Paranto, as they used the shaman’s voice to explain their feelings in graphic
to keep me company. Paranto was often joined by his friends for detail. Here is Amboni, a young girl who died days earlier of lep-
a sleepover. The children’s chatter hastened my learning of the rosy, addressing, through the mouth of a shaman, her living
Sora language while giving me inside access to village gossip. mother, Rungkudi, and aunt, Sindi, in terms that surely aimed to
Fieldwork in anthropology is like detective work: tactfully give expression to their own feelings of guilt:
exploratory conversations, the dogged pursuit of clues, connec-
tions and patterns, the false starts and wonderful moments of Amboni (arriving from the underworld, faintly): Mummy,
illumination. Rajingtal’s villagers helped me generously with where are my gold nose rings?
food, water and firewood, and I joined in work parties and squat- Sindi: They must have burned up in the pyre, darling. We
ted among the people surrounding Ononti, observing her trances looked but couldn’t find them.
and her training of her designated successors: the teenage Tar- Amboni (petulantly): Why don’t you show me my nose rings?
anti and the child Lokami. (Most Sora shamans were women, and Sindi: They were so tiny. If I’d found them, of course I’d
their training began while they were little girls.) My quest was show them to you. Oh, my love, my darling, don’t cause
not just to learn about my Sora hosts but to learn something your own illness in others. Can you say that your mother
about the human condition f rom t hem. and father didn’t do enough sacrifices for you? They didn’t
I later lived in other Sora communities. Each village had sev- turn their backs or refuse to help you, did they?...
42 Scientific American, January 2023 Map by Mapping Specialists

Amboni (addressing her silently weeping mother): Mummy, DRINKING PALM WINE in the jungle at nightfall, Sora men
you were horrid to me, you scolded me, you called me Scar- dip a gourd into a communal pot and pass it from hand to hand.
Girl, you called me Leper-Girl. You said, “You’re a big girl now, A thin stream of wine issues from a bamboo tube and a peacock
why should I feed you when you sit around doing nothing?” quill and has to be aimed at the mouth.
Sindi: She didn’t mean it; she couldn’t help saying it. You
were growing up, and there were such a lot of chores to do.
Amboni (sulkily): I want my necklaces. Why can’t I have of their death and lead them into the company of their ancestors
my nose rings? I have to go digging, shoveling and level- in the underworld.
ing fields in the underworld, all without my nose rings. Dialogues allowed the living and the dead to explore their
I came out in scars all over; my fingers started dropping shared life and now their separation and to heal each other’s loss
off. That illness was passed on to me, that’s how I got ill. and resentments in a mutual bereavement therapy. This ancient
Sindi: But don’t you pass it on. Don’t give it to your mother recognition of the ambivalent feelings in any close relationship
and little sisters! finds a striking echo in Sigmund’s Freud’s theory of bereavement,
Amboni: If I grab them, I grab them. If I touch them, where a mourner may suffer from the same emotional condition
I touch them. If I pass it on, I pass it on: that’s how it goes. as the deceased. But there is a crucial difference. Freud’s psycho-
Sindi: Your cough, your choking, your scars, your wounds, logical theory is individualistic: the memory of the dead person
don’t pass them on! exists only in the mourner’s mind. In contrast, the Sora conceived
Amboni (calling back as she returns to the underworld): their dead as existing autonomously and reaching out to the living
My Mummy doesn’t care enough about me! in a drama where relationships and feelings were not shut away
in people’s psyches but were performed in public for all to hear, see
In the first sessions after someone died, the dead person’s feel- and debate. Death was not a lonely event; it was a shared condition.
ing of victimhood prevailed, making them not only pitiable but In this highly social worldview, people are understood not so
also aggressive and dangerous. Over several years the living much as individuals as through their involvement with others. What
mourners persuaded the deceased into a less aggrieved state of we call the environment, too, is a socialized concept. The world was
mind. At successive stages of the funeral, the shaman’s male assis- created in a mythic time by various local deities. Although the dead
tants would sing and dance in the persona of the ancestors to reside in an underworld, they are also distributed across the nearby
“redeem” the newly dead person from the particular symptoms landscape, where they infuse their soul force into the crops of their

descendants, reciprocating and recycling the vitality of the ani- assistants singing the songs that supported the shamans’ trances.
mal blood sacrificed to them by the living. This is not an exploita- By now I had learned to transcribe and translate dialogues between
tion of the earth, not even an ecologist’s idea of stewardship; it is the living and dead and noticed an evolution in their emotional
a cycle of total mutual nourishment and dependency. In this view, tone. These dialogues were a method for crafting the disordered
there is no impersonal “nature.” Rather the very notion of envi- and distressing fading of memory into a structured and healthy
ronment is fully humanized through the dynamics of the mem- forgetting. Conversations with people who had died recently were
ory traces that humans leave behind to be processed by shamans. full of intense anguish, of love and longing mixed with guilt, as the
I also saw how the underworld reflected and inverted the power dead accused the living of neglect while the living defended them-
hierarchy in this world. My Sora friends were living at the tail end selves. As the tone became more relaxed over the years, the grief
of a feudal regime that placed them in unremitting poverty and diminished on both sides and the dead person became less likely
humiliation. Unable to read or to speak Odia, the Sora were forced to be diagnosed as the cause of illness or death. Eventually, as they
to communicate with Odia-speaking police and other officials evolved from predator into protector, the dead gave their personal
through a special caste of interpreters. Sora had no idea what was name back to a baby among their living relatives.
being said on their behalf or what officials were replying, and they And finally, as I worked out by tracing genealogies, when
were easy prey for systemic extortion, intimidation and fraud. nobody was left alive to remember them, the dead person turned
It turned out that the Sora shamans’ spirit husbands, who into a butterfly, a memory without a rememberer. This was the
enabled their entire technique of entering a trance, were them- true end of the person, the final resolution of their suffering and
selves non-Adivasi police and government officers in the under- that of those attached to them.
world! They were fantasy counterparts of the very people who
oppressed the Sora aboveground, but within this fantasy they G LOBAL RELIGIONS
were domesticated by the shamans through marriage. The sha- My youthful research w as completed by the 1980s and encapsu-
mans’ spirit husbands could speak Odia as they “wrote down” the lated in my first book on the Sora, but I continued to visit my
names of the ancestors of the shamans’ clients. They commanded friends. The shamanic tradition was fading as mainstream reli-
the mysterious and powerful technique of writing but used it not gions advanced. But what I saw as loss, young Sora were seeing
to persecute the Sora but to open a channel to their ancestors. as liberation. Canadian Baptist missionaries had been offering
Two years after my first encounter with Ononti, and by then Christianity to the local populace for decades, moving up from
living in a neighboring village, Sogad, I became one of these funeral an original base in the plains to one on the other side of the Sora

hills from Rajingtal and Sogad. The foreign missionaries left MAINSTREAM RELIGIONS, in particular, Hinduism and
under government pressure in the 1970s, but their vigorous core Christianity, are replacing the Sora belief system. Sora men
of Sora converts continued to advance their religion into the build a chariot to the Hindu god Jagannath (left); Sora women
remotest uphill villages. The church adapted the Roman alphabet pray in a Baptist church to a distant god (right).
to introduce literacy in the Sora language, and in the 1980s a flood
of government schools, roads, employment and development cash
introduced speaking and writing in Odia, too. Between them, Now, under the pressure of their repeated shaming, she’d lost her
church and school completely undid the Sora’s previous exploita- confidence. I felt for my friend’s anguish and wondered all the
tion and created a more confident and prosperous new generation. more about the reason for young people’s conversion. As a social
The great shaman Ononti gave up trancing in the early 1990s, scientist, I couldn’t simply accept the Christians’ own explana-
heartbroken by the death of Maianti, a dear friend and colleague, tion: because they are right. I had to find a social interpretation.
and shocked by the disrespect of some Sora youths, who had torn All religions acknowledge suffering as an inherent and unavoid-
off her gold necklace. She died in 2005. able part of the human condition, and all offer some form of hope
One chilly December night a few months after Ononti’s death, and liberation. But a new religion also changes one’s fundamental
five women shamans, including Ononti’s former pupils Lokami understanding of the universe. The underworld of the dead was
and Taranti, sat side by side and started to enter a trance, their now counterbalanced by a new idea of heaven. “I don’t know if I’ll
souls descending into the underworld to meet their spirit hus- go to the sky or the underworld when I die,” one old man told me.
bands and children, and to bring up a succession of ancestors to “But I prefer the underworld—the company’s better there!”
talk with their descendants and mourners. The spirit of Ononti To my understanding, the deepest change was in the relation-
came back to greet me through Lokami’s mouth and joke about ship between living and dead. For Sora Baptists, death comes about
our adventures together. But suddenly, Taranti fell out of her through the “will of God”—a motivation they still find hard to
trance—something I’d never seen before—and started weeping, explain. Lengthy shamanic dialogues, which reinforced attachment
“Why can’t I do it? I was terrified on the path, I came back, I woke to the dead, are now replaced by a brief, final funeral and an attach-
up. Will I never see my family in the underworld again?” ment of a new kind, to a new and distant deity and his son Jesus.
I knew Taranti’s children in the world of the living. They had Whereas prolonged interaction with the dead brought animists
become officials in the Baptist Church, and her profession—witch- solace, Sora Baptists feel better by severing all contact. “Remem-
craft, to Baptist eyes—was damaging their chances of promotion. bering makes you ill,” a young Christian told me simply. Indeed,

AN EARTH SPIRIT l ives in the rock where Lokami stands.
Earth spirits symbolize water and the principle of wholeness,
reuniting ancestors split apart by diverse experiences of death.
local Baptist ideology aims for complete rupture not only with the several years later. “It was as if we were meeting in waking life:
dead but also with the old religion, which, the Sora pastors insist,
must be abandoned entirely. And although younger people feel ‘You’ve died—where have you come from?’ I asked.
liberated as they become literate in both Sora and Odia and give ‘I’m not dead,’ my father said. ‘I remain, I exist.’
up subsistence agriculture and “primitive” customs to join the “I got up and looked around: it was the middle of the
mainstream competition for jobs, older Sora with the traditional night—there was nobody there! I cried. I was very sad.
worldview have a new reason to fear death: “You’ve seen how I ‘I thought you were dead!’ I said. I met him on the way to
talk to my dead parents, but after I die, will my children talk to me?” his favorite drinking place. ‘Ai! Where are you going?’
One can be caught between these worldviews. My old friend ‘I’m just wandering around.’ He looked just as he had
Inama died around 1992. His son Paranto, now an adult and Bap- when he was healthy.
tist convert, gave him a minimalist Christian funeral. But Paranto ‘But how come your body was so sick, and now you’re
had started life as an animist and now had difficulty finding a way healthy again?’
to mourn his dead father. “I met my father in a dream,” he told me ‘It’s all right. I’m fine now.’

interests. But one day in 1977 I asked him to help me understand
a tape of chants by Ononti’s young apprentice Taranti. Monosi
became enchanted with an exquisite incantation she’d sung while
in trance in the persona of a peacock spirit, naming each place as
it flew across the landscape. This epiphany changed Monosi’s life.
He begged me to bring him more tapes and started accompany-
ing me to rituals, his eyes opened to a world he had once rejected—
thereby earning severe disapproval from the Sora Baptist pastors.
Over 30 years later, in a mood of partial regret, Monosi collab-
orated with me in 2011 to compile shamanic texts and archival
photos, to document the culture he had done so much to change.
Now avidly read by young Sora, this book about their own ances-
tral history is the main book available in Sora apart from the Bible.
If, as these encounters suggested, Christianity did not offer a
more comforting view of life, death and suffering, what did it offer
that was so attractive to the younger Sora? One clue was that Sora
in some other areas were also converting—but to orthodox
strands of Hinduism, influenced by Hindu missionaries who
claim that India’s Adivasis are really Hindus who lost contact with
proper Hinduism in the jungle. These missionaries don’t reject
Adivasi religions but seek to clean them up by abolishing “bad”
habits such as animal sacrifice. But even though Christianity seeks
rupture and Hinduism seeks reform, sociologically they are func-
tional equivalents: both offer a similar pathway for coming out
of isolation and reinforce the impact of schools, roads and jobs
by drawing the Sora more directly into the Indian mainstream.
These new religions are more appropriate to the new circum-
stances in which younger Sora find themselves. As they abandon
jungle slopes with their subsistence crops, newly literate Sora are
streaming downhill to integrate into the Indian nation-state and
the wider global world. The geographies of Christianity and Hin-
duism are not oriented to features of the local environment but
to biblical Israel, where no Sora has ever been, or the sacred sites
of Hindu nationalism. In abandoning their ancestors and turn-
ing to Jesus or Krishna, young Sora are not so much converting
to new religious forms but rather a way from their previous iso-
lation and poverty.
History recounts many instances of conversion from local to
world religions. In Europe, this transition from “paganism” took
many centuries and has never been fully completed. My life with
the Sora has shown me the dislocation and pain that these stream-
lined accounts mask. At the same time as young Sora are achiev-
ing political and economic emancipation, they pay a high psycho-
logical price as they lose intimate bonds with their ancestors and
environment. Taranti’s sundering from her beloved spirit family
and Paranto’s inability to speak to his dead father in waking life
“I looked around; there was nobody. He didn’t harm me. are just single moments of personal drama in a vast historical shift.
We just talked and cried together.” It is true that the Sora are now less exploited and impoverished
than before. But they are also more likely to be drawn into the cul-
Through this dream, Paranto received a reassurance about his ture wars grounded in depersonalized, delocalized ideologies that
father’s well-being that the old religion had offered but Christi- are ripping the world apart, in India as much as in Euro-America.
anity cannot give. He was forbidden to speak with his dead father Taranti’s tears at her lost world, Monosi’s theological agonizing,
through a shaman, but the dream subverted this prohibition by and Paranto’s comforting dream should concern us all.
re-creating an entire dialogue between them.
Even fervent converts can find themselves conflicted. My
friend Monosi had become one of the very first Sora Baptists in FROM OUR ARCHIVES
the 1940s. He traveled throughout India on church business and Designing for Life. C arolina Schneider Comandulli; May 2022.
helped with Bible translation. In the mid-1970s I hesitated to
approach him because I assumed he would disapprove of my

The
Unıverse
Is
Not
Locally
Real

Q UANT UM PHYS IC S
Experiments with
entangled light have
revealed a profound
mystery at the
heart of reality
By Daniel Garisto

Daniel Garisto is a freelance science journalist
covering advances in physics and other natural
sciences. He is based in New York.
O
ne of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half a century
is that the universe is not locally real. In this context, “real” means that
objects have definite properties independent of observation—an apple
can be red even when no one is looking. “Local” means that objects can
be influenced only by their surroundings and that any influence cannot
travel faster than light. Investigations at the frontiers of quantum phys-
ics have found that these things cannot both be true. Instead the evi-
dence shows that objects are n ot influenced solely by their surroundings, and they m ay also
lack definite properties prior to measurement.
This is, of course, deeply contrary to our everyday eminent quantum researcher at IBM. “Each year I
experiences. As Albert Einstein once bemoaned to a thought, ‘Oh, maybe this is the year,’ ” says David Kai-
friend, “Do you really believe the moon is not there ser, a physicist and historian at the Massachusetts Insti-
when you are not looking at it?” To adapt a phrase from tute of Technology. “This year it really was. It was very
author Douglas Adams, the demise of local realism has emotional—and very thrilling.”
made a lot of people very angry and has been widely The journey from fringe to favor was a long one.
regarded as a bad move. From about 1940 until as late as 1990, studies of so-
Blame for this achievement has now been laid squarely called quantum foundations were often treated as phi-
on the shoulders of three physicists: John Clauser, Alain losophy at best and crackpottery at worst. Many scien-
Aspect and Anton Zeilinger. They equally split the 2022 tific journals refused to publish papers on the topic,
Nobel Prize in Physics “for experiments with entangled and academic positions indulging such investigations
photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities were nearly impossible to come by. In 1985 Popescu’s
and pioneering quantum information science.” (“Bell adviser warned him against a Ph.D. in the subject. “He
inequalities” refers to the pioneering work of Northern said, ‘Look, if you do that, you will have fun for five
Ireland physicist John Stewart Bell, who laid the foun- years, and then you will be jobless,’ ” Popescu says.
Athul Satheesh/500px/Getty Images (p receding pages)
dations for the 2022 Physics Nobel in the early 1960s.) Today quantum information science is among the
Colleagues agreed that the trio had it coming, deserv- most vibrant subfields in all of physics. It links Ein-
ing this reckoning for overthrowing reality as we know stein’s general theory of relativity with quantum
it. “It was long overdue,” says Sandu Popescu, a quan- mechanics via the still mysterious behavior of black
tum physicist at the University of Bristol in England. holes. It dictates the design and function of quantum
“Without any doubt, the prize is well deserved.” sensors, which are increasingly being used to study
“The experiments beginning with the earliest one everything from earthquakes to dark matter. And it
of Clauser and continuing along show that this stuff clarifies the often confusing nature of quantum entan-
isn’t just philosophical, it’s real—and like other real glement, a phenomenon that is pivotal to modern
things, potentially useful,” says Charles Bennett, an materials science and that lies at the heart of quantum

computing. “What even makes a quantum computer the theory can break—or at least deliver nonsensical JOHN STEW-
‘quantum?’ ” Nicole Yunger Halpern, a National Insti- results that conflict with our deepest assumptions ART BELL’S
tute of Standards and Technology physicist, asks rhe- about reality. work in
torically. “One of the most popular answers is entan- A simplified and modernized version of EPR goes the 1960s
glement, and the main reason why we understand something like this: Pairs of particles are sent off in dif- sparked a
entanglement is the grand work participated in by Bell ferent directions from a common source, targeted for quiet revolution
and these Nobel Prize winners. Without that under- two observers, Alice and Bob, each stationed at oppo- in quantum
standing of entanglement, we probably wouldn’t be site ends of the solar system. Quantum mechanics dic- physics.
able to realize quantum computers.” tates that it is impossible to know the spin, a quantum
property of individual particles, prior to measurement.
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS Once Alice measures one of her particles, she finds its
The trouble with quantum mechanics was never that it spin to be either “up” or “down. ” Her results are ran-
made the wrong predictions—in fact, the theory dom, and yet when she measures up, she instantly
described the microscopic world splendidly right from knows that Bob’s corresponding particle—which had a
the start when physicists devised it in the opening random, indefinite spin—must now be down. At first
decades of the 20th century. What Einstein, Boris Podol- glance, this is not so odd. Maybe the particles are like
sky and Nathan Rosen took issue with, as they explained a pair of socks—if Alice gets the right sock, Bob must
Peter Menzel/Science Source
in their iconic 1935 paper, was the theory’s uncomfort- have the left.
able implications for reality. Their analysis, known by But under quantum mechanics, particles are not
their initials EPR, centered on a thought experiment like socks, and only when measured do they settle on
meant to illustrate the absurdity of quantum mechan- a spin of up or down. This is EPR’s key conundrum: If
ics. The goal was to show how under certain conditions Alice’s particles lack a spin until measurement, then

how (as they whiz past Neptune) do they know what a triumph of rigorous thinking, Bell concocted a theo-
Bob’s particles will do as they fly out of the solar sys- rem that dragged the question of local hidden variables
tem in the other direction? Each time Alice measures, from its metaphysical quagmire onto the concrete
she quizzes her particle on what Bob will get if he flips ground of experiment.
a coin: up or down? The odds of correctly predicting Typically local hidden variable theories and quan-
this even 200 times in a row are one in 10 60—a num- tum mechanics predict indistinguishable experimen-
ber greater than all the atoms in the solar system. Yet tal outcomes. What Bell realized is that under precise
despite the billions of kilometers that separate the par- circumstances, an empirical discrepancy between the
ticle pairs, quantum mechanics says Alice’s particles two can emerge. In the eponymous Bell test (an evolu-
can keep correctly predicting, as though they were tele- tion of the EPR thought experiment), Alice and Bob
pathically connected to Bob’s particles. receive the same paired particles, but now they each
Designed to reveal the incompleteness of quan- have two different detector settings—A and a, B and b.
tum mechanics, EPR eventually led to experimental These detector settings are an additional trick to throw
results that instead reinforce the theory’s most mind- off Alice and Bob’s apparent telepathy. In local hidden
boggling tenets. Under quantum mechanics, nature is variable theories, one particle cannot know which
not locally real: particles may lack properties such as question the other is asked. Their correlation is secretly
spin up or spin down prior to measurement, and they set ahead of time and is not sensitive to updated detec-
seem to talk to one another no matter the distance. tor settings. But according to quantum mechanics,
(Because the outcomes of measurements are random, when Alice and Bob use the same settings (both upper-
these correlations cannot be used for faster-than- case or both lowercase), each particle is aware of the
light communication.) question the other is posed, and the two will correlate
Physicists skeptical of quantum mechanics pro- perfectly—in sync in a way no local theory can account
posed that this puzzle could be explained by hidden for. They are, in a word, entangled.
variables, factors that existed in some imperceptible Measuring the correlation multiple times for many
level of reality, beneath the subatomic realm, that con- particle pairs, therefore, could prove which theory was
tained information about a particle’s future state. They correct. If the correlation remained below a limit
hoped that in hidden variable theories, nature could derived from Bell’s theorem, this would suggest hidden
recover the local realism denied it by quantum mechan- variables were real; if it exceeded Bell’s limit, then the
ics. “One would have thought that the arguments of mind-boggling tenets of quantum mechanics would
Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen would produce a revolu- reign supreme. And yet, in spite of its potential to help
tion at that moment, and everybody would have started determine the nature of reality, Bell’s theorem lan-
working on hidden variables,” Popescu says. guished unnoticed in a relatively obscure journal
Einstein’s “attack” on quantum mechanics, however, for years.
did not catch on among physicists, who by and large
accepted quantum mechanics as is. This was less a THE BELL TOLLS FOR THEE
thoughtful embrace of nonlocal reality than a desire In 1967, a graduate student a t Columbia University
not to think too hard—a head-in-the-sand sentiment named John Clauser accidentally stumbled across a
later summarized by American physicist N. David Mer- library copy of Bell’s paper and became enthralled by
min as a demand to “shut up and calculate.” The lack the possibility of proving hidden variable theories cor-
of interest was driven in part because John von Neu- rect. When Clauser wrote to Bell two years later, ask-
mann, a highly regarded scientist, had in 1932 pub- ing if anyone had performed the test, it was among the
lished a mathematical proof ruling out hidden variable first feedback Bell had received.
theories. Von Neumann’s proof, it must be said, was Three years after that, with Bell’s encouragement,
refuted just three years later by a young female math- Clauser and his graduate student Stuart Freedman per-
ematician, Grete Hermann, but at the time no one formed the first Bell test. Clauser had secured permis-
seemed to notice. sion from his supervisors but little in the way of funds,
The problem of nonlocal realism would languish for so he became, as he said in a later interview, adept at
another three decades before being shattered by Bell. “dumpster diving” to secure equipment—some of
From the start of his career, Bell was bothered by quan- which he and Freedman then duct-taped together. In
tum orthodoxy and sympathetic toward hidden vari- Clauser’s setup—a kayak-sized apparatus requiring
able theories. Inspiration struck him in 1952, when he careful tuning by hand—pairs of photons were sent in
learned that American physicist David Bohm had for- opposite directions toward detectors that could mea-
mulated a viable nonlocal hidden variable interpreta- sure their state, or polarization.
tion of quantum mechanics—something von Neumann Unfortunately for Clauser and his infatuation with
had claimed was impossible. hidden variables, once he and Freedman completed
Bell mulled the ideas for years, as a side project to their analysis, they had to conclude that they had found
his job working as a particle physicist at CERN near strong evidence against them. Still, the result was
Geneva. In 1964 he rediscovered the same flaws in von hardly conclusive because of various “loopholes” in the
Neumann’s argument that Hermann had. And then, in experiment that conceivably could allow the influence

of hidden variables to slip through undetected. The results. If Alice shakes Bob’s hand prior to departing on
most concerning of these was the locality loophole: if a spaceship, they share a past. It is seemingly implausible
either the photon source or the detectors could have that a local hidden variable theory would exploit these
somehow shared information (which was plausible loopholes, but it was still possible.
within an object the size of a kayak), the resulting mea- In 2016 a team that included Kaiser and Zeilinger
sured correlations could still emerge from hidden vari- performed a cosmic Bell test. Using telescopes in the
ables. As David Kaiser explained, if Alice tweets at Bob Canary Islands, the researchers sourced its random
to tell him her detector setting, that interference makes decisions for detector settings from stars sufficiently
ruling out hidden variables impossible. far apart in the sky that light from one would not reach
Closing the locality loophole is easier said than the other for hundreds of years, ensuring a centuries-
done. The detector setting must be quickly changed spanning gap in their shared cosmic past. Yet even
while photons are on the fly—“quickly” meaning in a then, quantum mechanics again proved triumphant.
matter of mere nanoseconds. In 1976 a young French One of the principal difficulties in explaining the
expert in optics, Alain Aspect, proposed a way for doing importance of Bell tests to the public—as well as to
this ultra-speedy switch. His group’s experimental re skeptical physicists—is the perception that the veracity
sults, published in 1982, only bolstered Clauser’s re of quantum mechanics was a foregone conclusion. After
sults: local hidden variables looked extremely unlikely.
“Perhaps Nature is not so queer as quantum mechan-
ics,” Bell wrote in response to Aspect’s test. “But the
experimental situation is not very encouraging from
Today quantum information
this point of view.” science is among the most
vibrant subfields in all of physics.
Other loopholes remained, however, and Bell died
in 1990 without witnessing their closure. Even
Aspect’s experiment hadn’t fully ruled out local
effects, because it took place over too small a dis-
tance. Similarly, as Clauser and others had realized, if all, researchers have measured many key aspects of
Alice and Bob detected an unrepresentative sample of quantum mechanics to a precision of greater than 10
particles—like a survey that contacted only right- parts in a billion. “I actually didn’t want to work on it,”
handed people—their experiments could reach the Giustina says. “I thought, like, ‘Come on, this is old
wrong conclusions. physics. We all know what’s going to happen.’ ” But the
No one pounced to close these loopholes with more accuracy of quantum mechanics could not rule out the
gusto than Anton Zeilinger, an ambitious, gregarious possibility of local hidden variables; only Bell tests
Austrian physicist. In 1997 he and his team improved could do that.
on Aspect’s earlier work by conducting a Bell test over “What drew each of these Nobel recipients to the
a then unprecedented distance of nearly half a kilome- topic, and what drew John Bell himself to the topic,
ter. The era of divining reality’s nonlocality from kayak- was indeed [the question], ‘Can the world work that
sized experiments had drawn to a close. Finally, in 2013, way?’ ” Kaiser says. “And how do we really know with
Zeilinger’s group took the next logical step, tackling confidence?” What Bell tests allow physicists to do is
multiple loopholes at the same time. remove the bias of anthropocentric aesthetic judg-
“Before quantum mechanics, I actually was inter- ments from the equation. They purge from their work
ested in engineering. I like building things with my the parts of human cognition that recoil at the possi-
hands,” says Marissa Giustina, a quantum researcher bility of eerily inexplicable entanglement or that scoff
at Google who worked with Zeilinger. “In retrospect, a at hidden variable theories as just more debates over
loophole-free Bell experiment is a giant systems-engi- how many angels may dance on the head of a pin.
neering project.” One requirement for creating an The award honors Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger, but
experiment closing multiple loopholes was finding a it is testament to all the researchers who were unsat-
perfectly straight, unoccupied 60-meter tunnel with isfied with superficial explanations about quantum
access to fiber-optic cables. As it turned out, the dun- mechanics and who asked their questions even when
geon of Vienna’s Hofburg palace was an almost ideal doing so was unpopular. “Bell tests,” Giustina con-
setting—aside from being caked with a century’s worth cludes, “are a very useful way of looking at reality.”
of dust. Their results, published in 2015, coincided with
similar tests from two other groups that also found
quantum mechanics as flawless as ever. FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Spooky Action. Ronald Hanson and Krister Shalm; December 2018.

BELL’S TEST REACHES THE STARS AI Designs Quantum Physics Experiments beyond What Any Human Has Conceived.
Anil Ananthaswamy; ScientificAmerican.com, July 2, 2021.
One great final loophole r emained to be closed—or at
Researchers Use Quantum “Telepathy” to Win an “Impossible” Game. P hilip Ball;
least narrowed. Any prior physical connection between ScientificAmerican.com, October 25, 2022.
components, no matter how distant in the past, has the
possibility of interfering with the validity of a Bell test’s

outlook
The circular economy
Produced with support from:

Charting a path towards
material sustainability
S1
outlook
For more on circular
economy visit nature.
com/collections/
circular-economy-
outlook
A
Editorial t a family gathering in August, I gave a brief tribute to my Contents
Herb Brody, Richard Hodson, mother on the occasion of her 90th birthday. As the guests
Joanna Beckett, Jenny Rooke, S2 WASTE
sipped their coffee in the warm summer air, I ticked off a dozen
Richard Lim, Sarah Archibald Plastic’s messy end-game
or so pieces of wisdom that she has imparted to her family over
Art & Design the decades. One insight that I credited to her was an aversion S6 OPINION
Mohamed Ashour, Andrea Duffy to waste. In our household, items such as clothes and toys would have Path to sustainability
Production multiple lives before being thrown out, and leftover food would be
S7 OPINION
Nick Bruni, Karl Smart, Ian Pope, transformed into tomorrow’s lunch. In other words, my mother was an Don’t discount recycling
Kay Lewis early advocate of the circular economy, in which materials and products
have multiple iterations, and the waste of one process loops back and S8 GADGET GARBAGE
Sponsorship Upgrading the electronics
Stephen Brown, Beth MacNamara becomes the input for another.
ecosystem
For people of her generation, these are commonly held values. But
Marketing younger generations have largely strayed from these ideas, opting S12 THE LIQUID OF LIFE
Helen Burgess Smarter ways with water
instead to produce and consume more and more. Some of the waste
Project Manager is recycled, but that only goes so far towards addressing the problem S15 AGRICULTURE
Rebecca Jones that the planet has limited resources to offer. The biofuel course correction
The finiteness of this supply distinguishes materials from energy.
Creative Director S18 CONSTRUCTION
Wojtek Urbanek There’s little doubt that in the future we will be able to capture more solar
Greener buildings
power and even build nuclear fusion reactors to abolish energy scarcity
Publisher forever. But for material resources, no such technology is in view. S20 TEXTILES
Richard Hughes New yarn from old clothes
That’s what makes the research reported in this Outlook so impor-
VP, Editorial tant. As the world sets out to put its economies on a sustainable foot-
Stephen Pincock ing, this Outlook looks at the progress and barriers to the sustainable
Managing Editor
use and re-use of plastics (see page S2); electronic devices such as
David Payne mobile phones (S8); building materials (S18); and clothing and other
textiles (S20). It also examines the transition of biofuels to a more
Magazine Editor environmentally friendly form that will foster less soil-depleting and
Richard Webb
carbon-producing agriculture (S15), and the urgent need to become
Editor-in-Chief better stewards of Earth’s water resources (S12). Two researchers also
Magdalena Skipper debate whether plastic recycling is central to the advancement of the
circular economy (S7), or a counterproductive distraction from the
need for more fundamental change (S6).
We are pleased to acknowledge the financial support of Google in
producing this Outlook. As always, Nature retains sole responsibility
for all editorial content.
Herb Brody
Chief supplements editor
About Nature Outlooks available free online at go.nature.

Nature Outlooks are supplements com/outlook
to Nature supported by external
funding. They aim to stimulate How to cite our supplements
interest and debate around a subject Articles should be cited as part of a
of particularly strong current supplement to Nature. For example:
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in a form that is also accessible to Sxx–Sxx (2021).
policymakers and the broader public. Contact us
Nature has sole responsibility for [email protected]
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On the cover topic of the supplement, but have visit go.nature.com/partner
The circular economy minimizes no influence on reporting thereafter
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Credit: Jan Kallwejt Nature Outlook supplements are Ltd. All rights reserved.
S1
outlook
PLASTIC’S
A circular plastic
economy will require
a coordinated effort
MESSY
of increased recycling,
better product design, a
shift towards renewable
resources and an end
END-GAME
to the production of
single-use plastics.
By Sarah DeWeerdt
ILLUSTRATION BY JAN KALLWEJT
T
here’s a soap dish for sale at a beauty storage. But a biotechnology company called mere nurdle-sized amount of the estimated
products shop in São Paulo, Brazil. Mango Materials in Redwood City, California, 400 million tonnes of plastic produced every
An off-white disc with a smooth, uses P3HB as a raw material, harvesting granules year. Plastic can be found in food packaging,
rounded shape like a river stone, it of it from the bacteria and manufacturing them building materials, electronics, clothing and
is just one of millions of plastic soap into lentil-sized pellets called nurdles. These a host of other aspects of modern life.
dishes on offer in shops around the nurdles, the common currency of the plastics The plastics industry depends on non-
world. But, although most plastics industry, then became the soap dish. renewable resources. More than 90% of global
are made from petroleum, some of the plastic Mango Materials is part of a growing effort plastic production consists of primary plas-
in this dish started out as methane generated among scientists, non-governmental organ- tics — which are newly manufactured, rather
by a water-treatment facility in California. izations and companies large and small to than recycled — made from petroleum prod-
Inside a 10-metre-tall bioreactor at the facil- make plastics more sustainable. “We have ucts. This reliance requires a huge amount
ity, ancient bacteria known as methanotrophs a long, long way to go,” says Molly Morse, a of energy and produces greenhouse-gas
transformed the methane into a molecule called biopolymers engineer and chief executive emissions. By 2050, emissions from plastic
poly(3-hydroxybutyrate), or P3HB. The bacteria of Mango Materials. The company produces production could amount to 15% of the esti-
use P3HB as a kind of internal battery for energy less than 45 tonnes of P3HB annually, a mated carbon budget needed to keep global
S2
warming below 1.5 °C (ref. 1). machines at large-scale recycling facilities. Several compatibilizers that can aid mixing of
Plastics also create a massive waste man- These facilities typically target the most specific types of plastic are now commercially
agement issue. “The sheer volume of waste commonly used plastic types, especially available, and Robertson is working to develop
that’s created is unlike any other supply polyethylene terephthalate (PET, used to make a more flexible compatibilizer that could be
chain,” says Katherine Locock, a polymer fizzy drink and water bottles), high-density pol- applied to diverse mixes of polymers.
chemist at the Commonwealth Scientific and yethylene (HDPE, found in milk and shampoo Other efforts aim to improve sorting to
Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in bottles), and sometimes low-density polyeth- ensure a purer, more uniform stream of
Melbourne, Australia. ylene (LDPE, used for plastic carrier bags) and plastic entering the recycling process. The
Roughly 70% of the plastics that have ever polypropylene (bottle caps and crisp packets). HolyGrail 2.0 project — a collaboration between
been produced have already been discarded2. Even with diligent sorting, recycled plastic more than 160 companies and organizations
Single-use plastic, especially packaging, makes is almost always of lower quality than primary involved in plastic packaging, facilitated by the
up around 40% of plastic production in Europe3. plastic. More than 10,000 different additives European Brands Association and funded in
Yet the most widely used plastics persist in land- can be used to give plastics different colours large part by the Alliance to End Plastic Waste
fill sites or the environment for decades or even and technical properties. Plastics of the same — is piloting the use of digital watermarks in
centuries after being thrown away. type often contain different combinations of Europe. These are codes embedded in plas-
In theory, many commonly used plastics can additives, resulting in recycled material with tic packaging that can be read by specialized
be recycled. But only about one-tenth of the unpredictable and often suboptimal additive cameras in recycling facilities and contain
plastics that have ever been produced have combinations. Plus, the long polymer chains information about the attributes of a piece of
been recycled once, and only about 1% have that make up these materials become slightly plastic waste, such as the additives it contains.
been recycled twice4. “It is cheaper to just make shorter each time they are melted down. Another approach is known as aligned design,
a new plastic product than to collect it and which calls on plastics manufacturers to coor-
recycle it or reuse it,” says Kristian Syberg, who dinate to make products with fewer types of
studies plastic pollution at Roskilde University plastic and use the same set of additives. Then
in Denmark. “That’s a systemic problem.” recycling facilities would receive a larger vol-
Changing that picture will require action
on multiple fronts: scaling up established THE SHEER VOLUME OF ume of similar plastics, in turn yielding higher
quality recycled plastics. “An easy win would be
recycling technologies, rolling them out
WASTE THAT’S CREATED to simplify things a little bit more,” Cook says.
IS UNLIKE ANY OTHER

across the world, developing technologies to Some companies are starting to take these
deal with hard-to-recycle plastics, leveraging ideas on board. In August, the Coca-Cola Com-
SUPPLY CHAIN.”
insights from nature to aid both production pany based in Atlanta, Georgia, began packaging
and disposal of plastics, and reining in the pro- Sprite, its lemon-lime carbonated drink, in clear
duction of single-use plastics. But the results plastic bottles in North America, rather than
could have benefits for the circular economy All these factors mean that plastic recycling the iconic green bottles it has used for 60 years.
more broadly. “There’s a lot we can learn from usually amounts to downcycling — creating The goal, the company says, is to aid the recy-
what’s happening in the plastic space, which products with less stringent technical or cling of its bottles back into bottles, rather than
is incredibly active, to apply to other sectors,” aesthetic qualities. For example, a food-grade into other products that are harder to recycle.
says Sarah King, a circular economy researcher plastic beverage bottle becomes a fleece That, in turn, will help Coca-Cola to meet its own
at Swinburne University of Technology in garment, or components for a park bench. pledge to increase the amount of recycled con-
Melbourne, Australia. Because manufacturers can’t make many tent in its packaging. The move highlights what
products with recycled plastic, the market for researchers say is key to increasing recycling
A better sort it is limited, says Magdalena Klotz, a graduate rates: boosting market demand for second-
Studies show that to make plastics more student of ecological systems design at the ary plastics. “We really could solve this waste
sustainable, recycling needs to be massively Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) problem of plastics if the people making plas-
scaled up worldwide. Most of the plastic in Zurich, Switzerland. Klotz and her collabo- tics need this waste as a feedstock,” says André
recycling that occurs today is a type known rators have shown that even if 80% of plastic Bardow, a chemical engineer at ETH Zurich. “And
as mechanical recycling. Plastic waste is col- in Switzerland was collected for recycling, at that makes me hopeful.”
lected, cleaned, sorted, shredded and then most only about 20% of it would wind up in
melted down and formed into pellets to be recycled plastic products5. “It’s not sufficient Global improvisation
sold to producers of recycled plastic products. if we only collect more,” she says. Without Plastic is cheap to produce, an accessible and
The process sounds straightforward but it other changes to the plastic system, “we get practical material for people living in informal
is far from simple in practice. “With plastics, secondary material which cannot be utilized”. and remote settlements with little access to
the problem is there’s so many different types,” To streamline mechanical recycling and refrigeration and sanitation. Additionally, its
says Ed Cook, who studies waste plastics as improve the quality of secondary plastics, light weight makes it less energy intensive to
part of the circular economy at the University some researchers are working to develop transport than other food and beverage pack-
of Leeds, UK. Different types of plastic don’t chemicals called compatibilizers, which help aging materials. As a result, these products
mix well when they are melted down and small different types of plastic to mix together are found everywhere in the world, even in the
amounts of the wrong type can degrade the evenly when they are melted down. “This remotest places, says Costas Velis, a sustaina-
quality of a whole batch, so plastic has to be is an old field, but the idea of applying it to bility scientist at the University of Leeds.
carefully sorted first. recycling has gained a lot of traction more And there’s the catch: because waste plastic
In high-income countries, this sorting recently,” says Megan Robertson, a chemical has so little value, there’s no economic incen-
usually happens with the help of high-tech engineer at the University of Houston in Texas. tive to collect it from those isolated locations.
S3
outlook
Left: A prototype sorting unit tested by the smart-packaging initiative HolyGrail 2.0 could improve the separation of plastic waste.
Indeed, plastic waste is pervasive through many even value for money because they don’t have eventually allow recycling of plastic types and
L TO R: DIGITAL WATERMARKS INITIATIVE HOLYGRAIL 2.0; JUNI KRISWANTO/GETTY; TSVIBRAV/GETTY

low- and middle-income countries, where for- the power to bargain”, Oduro-Appiah says. But products that can’t be mechanically recycled.
mal recycling programmes are rare. In fact, an that’s beginning to change. Recognition of the One such method is pyrolysis, a procedure
estimated two billion people worldwide lack waste pickers’ contributions and concern for in which plastics are heated to high temper-
access to regular waste-management services6. their working conditions is prompting efforts to atures in the absence of oxygen. This causes
Most of the estimated 13 million tonnes of plas- include them in waste-management planning, the polymer chains to break down into smaller
tic that enters the oceans annually comes from such as in Ghana’s National Action Roadmap for components. Pyrolysis can be used for mixed
areas with inadequate waste management. plastic waste that launched in 2021. plastic waste — potentially enabling the recy-
Nevertheless, a surprising amount of plastic cling of various products composed of multi-
recycling happens in low- and middle-income ple layers of different plastics.
countries. In these places, recycling tends to So far, most research on pyrolysis has
be part of the informal economy. Waste pickers focused on turning plastic into fuel — an
sift through landfill sites and bins and collect
plastic from the environment. Research by a WASTE PICKERS ARE energy-intensive process that results in the
carbon contained in the plastic being emitted
team including Velis and Cook has shown that
BEHIND MORE PLASTICS into the atmosphere. But in theory, the smaller
RECYCLING THAN THE

these people’s efforts add up: “The waste pick- molecules that pyrolysis yields could be reas-
ers are behind more plastics recycling globally sembled back into plastics.
FORMAL INDUSTRY.”
than the formal industry,” Velis says. Another advanced recycling approach is
These informal workers are often entre- to break down plastic molecules into their
preneurial and adaptable. In Ghana, waste individual subunits. These could then be
collectors have begun going door-to-door Some of the plastic collected by waste pickers reassembled into polymers, circumventing the
purchasing some of the most desirable plas- ends up at recycling plants in larger countries shortening chains and degradation of quality
tics such as HDPE for recycling, says Kwaku such as Brazil and Indonesia, which have local that happens with mechanical recycling. This
Oduro-Appiah, a waste-management scientist plastics industries. Some is shipped abroad for could aid the recycling of thermosets — a class
at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana. In recycling. Some is recycled locally by small- of polymers that cannot be melted down, and
turn, Oduro-Appiah says, “some householders scale businesses, with workers turning to therefore cannot be mechanically recycled.
are now seeing some value and would not want YouTube videos to learn and share skills. “These These polymers are used to produce materi-
to add [plastic] directly to the waste”. Other are very small-scale operations without any als such as bakelite, melamine and the epoxy
waste collectors go to events such as weddings environmental and public-health protection,” resins used in wind-turbine blades.
and collect the disposable plastics used there, Velis says. Still, “there’s a lot of improvisation Chemical recycling also opens up the
realizing that the cleaner plastic will fetch a across the global south”, he adds. possibility of upcycling: making chemical
higher price than items that have been picked products from the monomers that are more
out of a landfill, he says. Advanced breakdown valuable than plastics, and difficult to produce
However, waste pickers and collectors in Although efforts continue to boost established by other means. “Usually these are not large
Ghana and other low- and middle-income recycling approaches around the world, the scale chemicals,” Bardow says, but some still
countries tend to be living in poverty, often past decade has also seen increasing research have key roles in certain industries, such as
come from marginalized communities and attention turn to advanced recycling technol- 3-hydroxy-γ-butyrolactone, which is used to
their waste-collection activities are sometimes ogies, sometimes called chemical recycling. produce cholesterol-lowering statin drugs.
criminalized. Their work can be hazardous, These methods have not yet been employed The high value of these compounds could
especially in landfill sites, and “they don’t get widely on a commercial scale, but they could provide a financial push to develop chemical
S4
Centre: A worker sorts plastic bottles in Surabaya, Indonesia. Right: Birds can be easily trapped in discarded plastic netting.
recycling technology, Bardow says. these bioplastics still only account for a small items. “If we just turn from making oil-based
A huge barrier to chemical recycling is that fraction of plastics produced today, and if that single-use plastic products to renewable-based
plastic polymers are very stable — which is were to scale up significantly it could create single-use plastic products, then we haven’t
what makes plastics so useful in such a wide pressure on agricultural lands and water sup- gotten very far,” says Syberg (see page S6).
variety of applications — so it takes a lot of plies. These concerns inspired Mango Materi- So far, research that could support this tran-
energy to break them apart. Researchers are als to produce its P3HB from methane, a potent sition is scarce. Syberg and his team analysed
looking for enzymes and catalysts that could greenhouse gas that is a product of wastewater plastic research relevant to Europe, and found
reduce the energy required. “That’s really treatment plants, landfill sites and agricultural that most studies focus on recycling and the
where the game is right now for chemical facilities. Methane is cheaper than other renew- waste phase of plastics, with little attention to
recycling,” Robertson says. able feedstocks — and plastic is a more valuable other parts of product life cycles8. Similarly, King
material than other products that can be made and Locock conducted a comprehensive review
Natural inspiration from methane, Morse explains. of circular-plastic-economy research world-
To look for the enzymes and catalysts that could But there are downsides to bioplastics. wide, and found that more than one-quarter of
aid chemical recycling, “we can go to places “They’re typically different polymers” than studies focused on recycling, but less than 10%
where they’re already present in nature”, says those made from fossil fuels, Syberg says. on topics such as repair and reuse9.
Craig Criddle, who specializes in microbial bio- “So they don’t fit very well into the recycling Efforts to improve plastic circularity con-
technology at Stanford University in California. systems that we have at the moment.” Take tinue. Mango Materials is seeking a location for
(Criddle was a PhD co-adviser to Morse; some P3HB: the technology exists to recycle it, but a facility that could produce up to 2,300 tonnes
of the approaches Mango Materials uses came the facilities do not, because so little of it is of P3HB per year — an order of magnitude leap
out of work from his laboratory.) Polymers of currently produced. (P3HB is also biodegrad- in capability, although still just a tiny fraction
various sorts are common in the biological able in home compost piles, providing another of overall global plastics production. “It’s fun
world, and sometimes organisms’ solutions disposal solution.) to try and be part of the solution,” Morse says.
for breaking down natural polymers can be har- “But it’s also very daunting.”
nessed to disassemble human-created ones, he Beyond recycling
says. Criddle’s research focuses on mealworms By 2050, global plastic demand is projected Sarah DeWeerdt is a science writer based in
(Tenebrio molitor), which he dubs “tiny little to nearly triple to 1,100 million tonnes per Seattle, Washington.
bioreactors”. These invertebrates can digest year1. In an analysis released earlier this year7,
multiple plastics with the help of their gut Bardow and his team found that scaling up 1. Zibunas, C., Meys, R., Kätelhön, A. & Bardow, A. Comput.
Chem. Eng. 162, 107798 (2022).
microbial community. Other researchers have recycling, relying more on renewable feed- 2. Geyer, R., Jambeck, J. R. & Law, K. L. Sci. Adv. 3, e1700782
identified bacteria that can break down multi- stocks and implementing other strategies to (2017).
ple types of plastic into the same end product, make the plastic industry more circular could 3. Lange, J.-P. ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 9, 15722–15738
(2021).
more evidence that specific microbes — or mol- keep the current level of plastic production 4. Tiso, T. et al. Metab. Eng. 71, 77–98 (2022).
ecules derived from them — could help with within “planetary boundaries”. But if plastic 5. Klotz, M., Haupt, M. & Hellweg, S. Waste Manag. 141,
recycling mixed plastic-waste streams. production continues to grow at the predicted 251–270 (2022).
6. Wilson, D. C. & Velis, C. A. Waste Manag. Res. 33,
Researchers are looking to the natural world pace, then options greatly diminish — and by
1049–1051 (2015).
to make other aspects of the plastics industry 2050, Bardow says, there will be no sustainable 7. Bardow, A. et al. Preprint at Research Square https://doi.
more sustainable and circular as well. There has solution “even with all the tricks that chemists org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1788256/v1 (2022).
8. Johansen, M. R., Christensen, T. B., Ramos, T. M. & Syberg,
been a surge of interest in plastics produced and chemical engineers can pull”.
K. J. Environ. Manag. 302, 113975 (2022).
from renewable feedstocks such as sugar The findings highlight the need to reduce 9. King, S. & Locock, K. E. S. J. Clean. Prod. 364, 132503
and corn rather than fossil fuels. However, overall use of plastic, especially single-use (2022).
S5
outlook
Path to
The idea of recycling being the optimal solution is built on
the thinking that a near-perfect closed-loop system can be
achieved, and that if materials are kept in the circular value
sustainability chain we can use them indefinitely. This is unfortunately far

from the truth. According to the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development, only 15% of plastic waste
is collected for recycling, and, of that, 40% is discarded
Recycling can only get us so far, from the recycling process on account of its low quality.
says Kristian Syberg. The real As a result, actual plastic recycling rates are as low as 9%.
Moreover, most plastic sent for recycling, especially that
solution to transforming the collected from households, is downcycled — that is, the
plastic economy lies in making recycled product is of a lower quality than the original —
on account of its heterogeneous nature. To avoid any loss
less in the first place. in quality during the recycling process, waste fractions
P
must be kept uniform, with fractions typically consisting
of single polymers without additives such as pigments.
lastic pollution is recognized as being one of the New and better recycling technologies will improve this,
major global environmental challenges today, with but it is unrealistic to expect a near-perfect system to be
a worldwide reach that is affecting essential Earth achieved in the near future.
systems such as the climate and biodiversity. As a
result, in March the United Nations Environment Don’t create dependence
Programme declared its intention to develop a treaty by Massive investments in recycling infrastructure could
2024 to “end plastic pollution”. However, although the lead to a ‘lock-in’ situation, whereby we build a sector with
EMIL ASMUSSEN
declaration lays out overall aims for reducing plastic pol- infrastructure that makes us dependent on the recycling
lution, it does not mention any specific policy measures of most plastics — even if that is not the optimal solution.
(see go.nature.com/3rgujfc). An efficient and ambitious Such a scenario has resulted in some countries making
treaty has the potential to facilitate the much-needed tran- “It is major investments in incineration plants that facilitate
sition to a circular plastic economy, and mark the begin- the continuous burning of waste to produce energy. In
ning of a reduction in the rate of plastic pollution. But to
unrealistic Denmark, where massive past investments were made in
achieve this, it is paramount that the new treaty does not to expect a such plants, waste now needs to be imported to ensure that
become a doctrine for recycling at the expense of provid- near-perfect these incinerators meet their energy production targets.
ing a legal foundation for reducing plastic consumption. It is therefore essential that the UN plastic treaty aims
For many years, the transition to a circular plastic econ-
system to to not merely increase recycling rates, but also to reduce
omy has been understood to require a combination of be achieved the consumption of both plastic and the other resources
efforts, often summarized by the mantra ‘reduce, reuse, in the near that plastic enables us to consume. It should be noted that
recycle’. The principles are based on the top three levels of there is also a need for the treaty to develop waste-handling
future.”
the waste hierarchy, whereby reducing is better than reusing, systems in parts of the world where this is currently poorly
which is, in turn, more favourable than recycling. In practice, managed, but that is not, in itself, a long-term remedy. The
however, attention has primarily been focused on recycling, solution to ending plastic pollution — the resolution’s aim—
owing to an assumption that a massive improvement in recy- lies in providing incentives to a transition that builds on
cling rates will be crucial for the circular transition. reducing non-essential plastics use and making products
that last for as long as possible.
Adjust the focus Policymaking will be at the centre of this transition, and
A document published by the European Commission in inspiration can be found in both prior experiences and
2018, outlining how the plastic economy should be trans- current processes. Ireland, for example, was one of the first
formed, serves as a good example of this tendency (see countries in Europe to put a levy on plastic bags. This policy
go.nature.com/3clrqdq). The word ‘recycle’ and its deriv- resulted in a 90% drop in consumption and the generation
atives appear 144 times, whereas words rooted in ‘reuse’ of more than US$9 million for a green public fund. Mean-
and ‘reduce’ occur only 12 and 18 times (and most mentions while, the trend in EU policy is shifting slightly towards
of the latter relate to reducing environmental litter, not promoting better design and longer-lasting products. The
plastic consumption). Of the nine specific targets listed new EU Ecodesign Directive, for example, will outline spe-
as part of the European Union’s ‘vision’ for a new plastics cific measures that could serve as an inspiration for how
economy, seven relate exclusively to recycling. policies can promote sustainable production.
The focus on recycling had two implications. First, it is Such efforts are important steps in the transition to a
likely to result in member states implementing measures Kristian Syberg is circular plastic economy — and should guide the writers of
to increase recycling — and therefore not actively working an environmental the UN plastic treaty in their efforts. In the end, that treaty
towards any reduction targets. Second, it could actually risk researcher at will become a key component in the circular transition of
deter states from setting reduction targets because such Roskilde University in the plastic economy only if it guides policymakers to put
targets could make it harder to meet recycling demands, Denmark. in place far-sighted measures that make it worthwhile for
owing to an overlap between the plastic that could easily e-mail: ksyberg@ manufacturers to make long-lasting products. That is the
be collected for recycling and that which could be reduced. ruc.dk key to a sustainable plastic future.
S6
outlook
Don’t discount
to recycling pathways in 2018 when, similarly to other
high-income nations, the country could no longer export
waste (including plastic and paper recycling) to China.
recycling This resulted in recycling being directed to landfill for a

short period. For plastics alone, Australia required a 150%
increase in domestic plastics-recycling capacity and this
highlighted a need to adopt a range of circular economy
Although often dismissed strategies.
as insufficient, the process The transition to a circular economy will need further
cross-sector collaboration and investment in initiatives
remains key to quickly bringing that improve recovery rates while minimizing the con-
sumption of raw materials, extending product life and
about a circular economy, says increasing the use of renewable resources. An example
Sarah King. is so-called right to repair legislation, which requires
E
manufacturers to modify product design and make parts
available to allow consumers to mend products. The right
vidence of the economic opportunities that a to repair is being adopted in Europe for electronic goods
circular economy could bring is mounting. The but could be applied to other products. Another example
potential environmental impact is also clear. The is the United Kingdom’s £200 (US$226) per tonne tax on
move to a circular economy — a system that aims to plastic packaging that doesn’t include at least 30% recy-
reduce, reuse and recycle materials — could address cled plastic. This approach is driving up market demand
COURTESY OF SARAH KING
70% of global greenhouse emissions1. As the benefits stack for recycled content and encourages companies to adopt
up, this transition is becoming a key focus for policymakers recycled plastic solutions.
around the world. But there remains much confusion about The Australian government has also implemented a
what a circular economy is, and how it might be achieved. waste export ban for key materials — including tyres,
One common misunderstanding is the notion that it is plastics, glass, paper and cardboard — and announced an
simply a rebrand of recycling — the recovery and repro- “Recycling investment of AU$1 billion (roughly US$620 million) into
cessing of waste materials for use in new products. This infrastructure to enhance the country’s ability to recover
perception is reinforced because recycling is the most
remains a and remanufacture waste materials. Product stewardship
common component of almost 80% of circular economy fundamental schemes, whether government mandated or voluntary,
definitions2. But, although recycling is an important strategy would require manufacturers and consumers to be respon-
element, there are many others. Before recycling comes sible for a product throughout its life cycle, including its
into play there are several steps in a product’s life cycle
to extract end-of-life stage. This initiative encourages companies to
that should be addressed, such as redesigning products value from ensure their products can be recycled, such as by improv-
and processes so that they use less virgin material, and resources.” ing their design, or by implementing collection and recy-
re-using items rather than discarding them. New business cling solutions if none already exists.
models such as sharing and repairing can be adopted3. Ultimately, we need to break traditional boundaries
These approaches prioritize smart designs that extend a between brand owners, manufacturers and those in the
product’s useful life, before reaching the stage of recycling. business of waste management and resource recovery, and
These steps are consistent with the central aim of a circular instead stimulate collaborative partnerships. For example,
economy: to provide economic productivity by eliminating nine companies joined forces to create a circular supply chain
the concept of waste. in which they captured soft plastic waste and converted it to
Recycling is often criticized as insufficient compared a Nestlé KitKat wrapper using Australian-designed advanced
with earlier interventions such as reuse or reduce. And it recycling technology. This process converts waste plastic to
is true that a circular economy requires a great deal more food-grade plastic, in a continuous loop.
than recycling. But recycling remains a fundamental strat- Innovation — on both the technological and societal
egy to extract value from resources, as evidenced by its fronts — is essential in the transition to a circular econ-
current contribution to 8.6% global circularity1. omy. Such shifts are needed to eliminate the concept of
To improve recycling rates, we need to recognize that the waste, by reducing consumption, and an increase in reuse
waste and resource recovery sector is positioned at the end and recycling. Local and global collaborations between
of the supply chain, often known as end of life. This sector government, industry, not-for-profit organizations and
has limited influence over the materials and resources they research agencies will help to address particularly nasty
collect. Recycling could improve if more effective changes waste problems, such as plastics in the ocean.
are made upstream, such as in product design, material use, Sarah King is a It’s certainly true that a circular economy is much more
manufacturing, collection infrastructure and consumer circular economy than just recycling. But increased focus on this essential
behaviours. researcher at process is an effective strategy to achieve the larger goal.
Many countries, institutions and organizations need Swinburne University
to increase resource recovery and shift away from the of Technology in 1. Circle Economy. The Circularity Gap Report 2022 1–64 (2022).
2. Kirchherr, J., Reike, D. & Hekkert, M. Resour. Conserv. Recycl. 127,
cheapest waste-management solutions such as landfill Melbourne, Australia.
221–232 (2017).
and incineration. This is a key barrier to realizing a circular e-mail: sarahking@ 3. Kadner, S. et al. Circular Economy Roadmap for Germany
economy. In Australia, there was significant disruption swin.edu.au (Circular Economy Initiative Deutschland, 2021).
S7
outlook
Upgrading the electronics ecosystem

There are no quick or easy fixes for the continuing global electronic-waste
crisis, but a combination of technological and policy solutions could help
to limit the damage. By Michael Eisenstein
JEFF FITLOW, RICE UNIV.

Flash Joule heating is a process that extracts valuable rare-earth elements from electronic waste.
Y
our smartphone begins life neatly Monitor, a project backed by the United Nations Montréal in Canada. But making electronics
packed into a well-designed box. Institute for Training and Research, people dis- more sustainable will also require a more radical
Chances are it will end its days in a more posed of 53.6 million metric tonnes of e-waste evolution of the industry as a whole, as well as
ignominious manner. in 2019 — a quantity that is expected to increase the consumers who crave their products.
Assuming it doesn’t end up rattling by nearly 40% by 2030 (ref. 1).
around in a junk drawer, it will most likely go Oladele Ogunseitan, a public-health Swept under the carpet
to the same landfill as your other household researcher at the University of California, Irvine, E-waste is a category that comprises a diverse
waste, where it will slowly leach toxic chem- thinks things are starting to change. “We are array of electrical equipment, for which the
icals into the soil and water. Or worse, it making enough noise that the manufacturers material can vary as much as their form and
might be shipped to another country, where are not able to ignore it anymore,” he says. And function. One estimate suggests that as many
low-income workers will manually break the there are ample opportunities to circularize the as 69 different chemical elements might be
phone apart to recover anything of value and electronics industry. The precious and scarce found in e-waste1. “We looked at 10 different
burn or bury the rest, putting their health — metals these devices contain can be reused smartphone printed circuit boards, and found
and that of their wider community — at risk in near-indefinitely, and emerging technologies that the variation in material content was quite
the process. Meanwhile, miners continue to that make their recovery easier could drastically significant,” says Jeff Kettle, an electronics
plunder Earth for metals and minerals to feed reduce the need for mining. Parallel progress in engineer at the University of Glasgow, UK.
our unquenchable hunger for new gadgets. recyclable and biodegradable circuit boards Standard building blocks such as silicon, iron
The problem posed by electronic waste, or could eliminate the more toxic ingredients in and copper are typically joined by more exotic
e-waste, is only getting larger. “It’s the fastest electronics and allow consumers to bin defunct elements. These include highly conductive pre-
growing waste stream,” says Pablo Dias, an engi- devices without guilt. cious metals such as platinum and gold, as well
neer specializing in management of e-waste at “This is an opportunity to stop thinking of it as rare-earth elements such as neodymium,
the University of New South Wales in Sydney, as waste,” says Clara Santato, a chemist special- which possess unique magnetic and electrical
Australia. According to the Global E-waste izing in electroactive materials at Polytechnique properties. Although not geologically rare,
S8
these elements are logistically difficult to countries for further processing,” says Dias. ‘Mine is recycled, pay $10 more per kilogram to
obtain and mainly sourced from just a few The remainder is burned or just piled on the buy it,’” Nlebedim says. Fortunately, methods
countries — most notably, China. Some devices ground, creating a continuing public-health now in development — including a few that are
also contain heavy metals such as lead and catastrophe. A 2012 study revealed that inhab- on the verge of commercialization — could tip
cadmium that seriously threaten human and itants of a rural e-waste processing community the balance in favour of recycling.
environmental health. in China were 60% more likely to develop lung For example, James Tour, a synthetic chem-
E-waste contains these hard-to-find ele- cancer than were people living in the nearby ist at Rice University in Houston, Texas, has
ments in abundance. If the useful materials major city of Guangzhou3. This was due to inha- applied a technique known as flash Joule
can be efficiently separated from those that lation of toxic-waste by-products, which are heating to rapid, low-cost e-waste process-
are not, then waste could become a gold released into the air after incinerating e-waste. ing. Flash Joule heating subjects materials to
mine, both literally and figuratively. “When Several countries have successfully pushed an intense blast of energy, bringing them to
you find rare-earths in ores, they come in parts for change — between 2018 and 2021 China temperatures that vapourize the metals so
per million — when you have them in mag- moved to reject all imported solid waste after that only carbon is left behind in the cham-
nets, they come in percentages,” says Ikenna decades of damage. But this ultimately results ber. But unlike pyrometallurgy, the heating
Nlebedim, a materials scientist at the Ames in the waste being directed elsewhere, and the is incredibly brief — typically a few hundred
National Laboratory in Iowa. The quality of scope of the problem remains daunting. milliseconds. The resulting metal vapours
these recovered elements is also assured: they can then be extracted under vacuum and con-
have already been deemed suitable for use in Ripe for recovery densed by cooling. Flash Joule heating has a
electronics. Similarly, estimates suggest that A practice known as urban mining offers one clear economic appeal: it can be performed
precious metals might be up to 50 times more solution for improving the management of at a cost of roughly US$12 per tonne of waste,
abundant in e-waste than in mined ores. e-waste and incentivizing countries to retain with minimal energy and water use required.
The Global E-waste Monitor reports that, as and process their leftovers rather than burying, In an initial demonstration, this method
of 2019, only around 17% of the world’s e-waste burning or exporting them. This involves chem- recovered more than 80% of the precious
was being properly managed for recycling in ical or physical processes to separate precious metals, such as palladium and silver, that were
the countries that generate it1 (see ‘The digital metals or rare-earth elements present in e-waste present in an e-waste sample4, while also ena-
dumping ground’). The rest is nearly impossi- from materials that are toxic or of little value. bling easy isolation of toxic compounds such
ble to account for and presumably ends up in Two approaches currently predominate in as mercury and lead. “The remainder is clean
local landfills, wasting valuable materials and urban mining. Pyrometallurgy, in which pre- enough for agricultural soil, even by California
inflicting lasting environmental damage. But processed waste material is heated to extremely standards,” says Tour. He and his colleagues
a sizable fraction of this material is offloaded high temperatures — often upwards of 1,000 °C are now trying to license the technology to
onto countries in Asia, Africa and Latin Amer- — to burn away plastics and other unwanted companies for use in urban mining of e-waste.
ica. Robust numbers are hard to come by, but a materials and yield a mixed fraction of molten Nlebedim and colleagues have devel-
2016 monitoring study by the Basel Action Net- precious metals that can then be purified. “The oped an alternative, acid-free approach to
work, an environmental watchdog in Seattle, downside is that these approaches are energy hydrometallurgy for recovering rare-earth
Washington, found that up to 40% of e-waste intensive,” says Nlebedim. As an alternative, elements in the permanent magnets that are
thought to be slated for recycling from the some facilities use strong acids to dissolve commonly found in hard drives and motors5.
United States might be exported2. the metals present in e-waste. Although less The researchers identified reaction conditions
Ogunseitan sees several reasons why recy- energy intensive, Nlebedim notes that this in which the valuable magnetic components
cling hasn’t taken off in the United States. hydrometallurgic method has its own negative are selectively dissolved at neutral pH while
“Economically, it’s difficult to make a big environmental footprint, producing acid-laden leaving other materials intact, which means
profit, but also we have a lot of environmental toxic sludge and lots of waste water. that minimal processing is required before
laws that keep out factories that would easily recycling. The dissolved rare-earth elements
dismantle and smelt,” he says. Many regions “We are making can subsequently be purified from the solu-
also lack effective collection systems for tion, yielding material of sufficient quality for
recovering household and business e-waste.
enough noise that the reuse in electronics. This technology is being
And so this waste ends up in Ghana, Vietnam, manufacturers are not able commercialized by a manufacturing company
Brazil and other countries, where networks of to ignore it anymore.” called TdVib based in Boone, Iowa, which is
informal recyclers manually strip shiploads on track to have its first pilot plant fully oper-
of discarded electronics. E-waste export is ational by the end of 2022. “We are currently
heavily restricted by the Basel Convention, Urban-mining operations are currently running batches of 800 kilograms at a time
a United Nations treaty that took effect in active at a relatively small number of facilities and will be scaling up in the next few months to
1992. But the United States has never ratified worldwide. But the profit margins can be slim, batches of about 8,000 kilograms,” TdVib chief
the convention. There are also significant which has limited the growth of this sector. executive Daniel Bina said in late September.
loopholes — for example, some exporters “They require very big volumes to be able to be
misrepresent e-waste as donations. profitable, so it’s hard for another small player Waste not
Informal recycling has become an important, to come in and compete with them,” Dias says. Not everything can be readily recycled, but there
albeit dangerous, source of livelihood for some The costs associated with urban mining — such are opportunities to create ‘green electronics’
people in these countries. “People manually as preprocessing, metal purification and waste that can be produced and disposed of in a more
take out the things that are more valuable, such management — add up quickly, potentially environmentally friendly way. Rodrigo Martins,
as printed circuit boards, hard drives and mem- shifting the cost equation back in favour of a materials scientist at the New University of
ory, and send these back to the high-income traditional mining. “You can’t tell somebody, Lisbon, is confident that many of the functions
S9
outlook
performed by modern silicon-based devices THE DIGITAL DUMPING GROUND their IT infrastructure current. “Server farms
could one day be replicated with Earth-friendly In 2019, there were clear regional differences in global are changing over every three years, and you
electronic waste output, but one pattern is consistent:
alternatives, eventually eliminating the need get mountains of printed circuit boards,” Tour
most e-waste was not disposed of properly.
for scarce metals, non-biodegradable plastics says. These facilities “don’t know what to do
20
or energy-intensive manufacturing. Generated e-waste Recycled e-waste
with all of this toxic waste”, he explains.
Conventional circuit boards are built But more-aggressive measures will proba-
Electronic waste (kg, per capita)
SOURCE: THE GLOBAL E-WASTE STATISTICS PARTNERSHIP

on fibreglass, which is non-biodegradable bly be necessary, including tighter regulations.
15
and typically laced with potentially toxic Dias thinks that strict bans on landfill depo-
fire-retardant compounds. Martins’ group is sition of e-waste is a crucial first step. “The
working on paper-based boards that could 10
biggest competitor for recycling is landfill,”
offer an environmentally friendlier alterna- he says. With this option off the table, the
tive. In 2011, Martins and his collaborator and competition will shift to delivering the most
wife, Elvira Fortunato, described a paper-based 5 cost-effective recycling service. Dias further
complementary metal-oxide semiconductor emphasizes that this step must also be coupled
(CMOS) device6 — a core component in modern with more-stringent monitoring and enforce-
integrated circuits. The conductive materials in 0 ment of export restrictions to prevent a massive
this device were based on zinc oxide rather than Europe Oceania Americas Asia Africa surge of e-waste from high-income nations onto
on silicon, which is typically used, and the use the shores of lower-income countries.
of this substance or other metal oxides could “GEOPIC is about developing biodegradable Manufacturers should also pursue practices
greatly reduce the cost and greenhouse-gas integrated circuits, biodegradable substrates, that promote circularity. “There needs to be a
footprint associated with manufacturing. biodegradable interconnects and so on,” says very clear policy for ‘end of life’, where the pro-
Martins’s team has continued to develop Kettle. This will not tackle every aspect of the ducer takes back the product,” says Santato. A
techniques for efficient and reproducible sustainability problem, but could lead to few device manufacturers are already doing
printing of paper-based devices, and is explor- greener manufacturing processes and far less this; for example, Amsterdam-based smart-
ing the use of alternative materials — including e-waste in the long term. phone manufacturer Fairphone reported
combinations of graphene with common How broadly these biodegradable compo- having recycled as many phones in 2021 as
metals such as bismuth and molybdenum. nents might overturn the circuit board status they have sold to consumers. Modular elec-
He notes that as their performance improves, quo in the near term remains an open question. tronic devices designed for easy disassembly
the devices get smaller, which confers an “You do have to compromise on performance,” and repair could also incentivize recycling by
additional edge. “It means the amount of raw says Kettle. Flexible and compostable sub- making it easier and cheaper to break down —
material that I’m consuming is, by far, less,” strates such as flax or paper are inherently or service — broken or obsolete devices.
says Martins. “And I can use materials which more susceptible to damage from moisture But consumers will also need to play their
are abundant and nontoxic.” or heat, and devices that use them must be part — particularly in high-income countries,
Other groups are exploring a variety of designed with this limitation in mind. Santato where it is more routine to replace high-end
alternative biodegradable circuit-board thinks that materials scientists are a long way electronic devices such as smartphones every
components. For example, Ogunseitan from finding eco-friendly replacements for few years. “We often think of recycling as this
and his long-time collaborator Johnny many scarce metals. “At the moment,” she silver bullet — it’s not,” says Dias. “Reducing
Lincoln who founded Axiom Materials, a says, “you cannot reach the conductivity of should be the overarching goal.” Planned
composite-materials manufacturer in Santa gold or platinum or palladium with organic obsolescence by manufacturers is part of the
Ana, California, are investigating the commer- or carbon-based conductors.” problem, but resolving this issue will also be
cial viability of circuit boards based on flax and However, recyclable or compostable a matter of public education and policies that
a linseed-oil-derived epoxy, which they first electronics could become invaluable in boost civic-mindedness and environmental
demonstrated in 2008 (ref. 7). And Santato’s devices intended for short-term use, or in consciousness. “We can have an amazing
team is looking at the possibility of replacing narrow-purpose devices such as wearables or device that lasts four or five years and still
silicon-based semiconductors with melanin, environmental sensors that don’t have to meet have a good life,” says Dias. “We’re not going
a naturally derived pigment that is capable of the same rigorous performance standards as to have to give up as much as we think we will.”
efficient electron transport. This year, Santato’s the processors found in smartphones. From
group has demonstrated that melanin-based Martins’s perspective, such electronics could Michael Eisenstein is a science writer based in
films can almost match the performance of be useful in contexts such as monitoring water Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
more-established organic semiconductors8. quality or food safety, or the manufacture
And although their current source of melanin is of low-cost displays, without meaningfully 1. Forti, V., Baldé, C. P., Kuehr, R. & Bel, G. The Global E-waste
Monitor 2020 (UNU/UNITAR, ITU & ISWA, 2020).
cuttlefish ink, Santato points out that she could adding to the planet’s e-waste burden. 2. Hopson, E. & Puckett, J. Scam Recycling: e-Dumping on
obtain the substance from food waste. Asia by US Recyclers (Basel Action Network, 2016).
This July saw the formal launch of the UK Creating a culture shift 3. Wang, J. et al. Environ. Sci. Technol. 46, 9745–9752 (2012).
4. Deng, B. et al. Nature Commun. 12, 5794 (2021).
Green Energy-Optimised Printed Transient Many researchers working on the e-waste
5. Prodius, D., Gandha, K., Mudring, A.-V. & Nlebedim, I. C.
Integrated Circuits (GEOPIC) initiative, a problem have been pleasantly surprised to ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 8, 1455–1463 (2020).
programme led by Ravinder Dahiya at the find enthusiastic partners in the commercial 6. Martins, R. et al. Adv. Mat. 23, 4491–4496 (2011).
University of Glasgow, for which Kettle is also sector. For example, Ogunseitan is conducting 7. Lincoln, J. D., Shapiro, A. A., Earthman, J. C.,
Saphores, J.-D. M. & Ogunseitan, O. A.
an investigator, that brings together academic, research funded by Microsoft, and Tour says he IEEE Trans. Electron. Packag. Manuf. 31, 211–220 (2008).
government and industry specialists to make is in regular contact with companies looking to 8. Camus, A. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 119,
circuit-board production more sustainable. minimize the impact associated with keeping e2200058119 (2022).
S10
outlook
ignores the complexity and interconnected-
ness of water’s relationships with rocks and
soil, microbes, plants and animals, including
humans, inevitably resulting in unintended
consequences.
Pumping out groundwater when rivers run
low further depletes surface water because
the two are linked. Erecting dams to provide
water to one group of people deprives other
people and ecosystems. Leveeing up rivers and
building on wetlands removes space for water
to slow, pushing flooding onto neighbouring
areas. Paving cities and whisking water away
creates localized scarcity.
Some corporations are making ‘water neu-
trality’ or ‘water positive’ pledges, which are a
big step forward but not enough, says Michael
Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Insti-
tute at the University of California, Berkeley’s
Center for Law, Energy and the Environment.
“If corporations are really serious about water
ERICA GIES
stewardship, they would throw their political
and financial heft behind reform of the gov-
Peru’s water utility companies are protecting peat bogs because of their ability to hold water. ernance systems that set up this extractive
economy around water,” Kiparsky says.
Smarter ways with water

More than 11,000 scientists from 153 coun-
tries agree that tweaks around the margins
are insufficient. In a 2019 letter in the journal
BioScience they called for “bold and drastic
transformations”, including a “shift from GDP
To address an onslaught of crises, people must tune growth and the pursuit of affluence toward
sustaining ecosystems and improving human
into natural ways to repair water cycles that human well-being”1. In February, the Intergovernmen-
development has severely disrupted. By Erica Gies tal Panel on Climate Change, agreed, calling
I
for integrating “natural, social and economic
sciences more strongly,” in part by conserving
n just a few months this year, abnormally water — ideally making more goods (and more 30–50% of Earth’s ecosystems (see go.nature.
low water levels in rivers led China to shut money) in the process. com/3sccm6h).
down factories and to floods in one-third of But the term has its roots in decades of A growing group of ecologists, hydrologists,
Pakistan, killing around 1,500 people and alternative economic theories — known vari- landscape architects, urban planners and
grinding the country to a halt. A dried-up ously as environmental economics, ecological environmental engineers — essentially water
Rhine River threatened to tip Germany’s econ- economics, doughnut economics and steady- detectives — are pursuing transformational
omy into recession, because cargo ships could state economics. These frameworks recog- change, starting from a place of respect for
not carry standard loads. And the Las Vegas nize that the mainstream economics’ goal of water’s agency and systems. Instead of asking
strip turned into a river and flooded casinos, eternal growth is impossible on a planet with only, ‘What do we want?’ They are also asking,
chasing customers away. It seems that such finite resources. ‘What does water want?’. When filled-in wet-
water disasters pepper the news daily now. These ideas are beginning to filter into the lands flood during events such as the torrential
Many businesses have long lobbied against mainstream, a mark of both the persuasiveness 2017 rains in Houston, Texas, researchers real-
changing their practices to safeguard the of advocates’ arguments and the declining state ized that, sooner or later, water always wins.
environment, by refusing to implement pol- of the natural world. But the economists and Rather than trying to control every molecule,
lution controls, take climate action or reduce scientists behind these principles say that some they are instead making space for water along
resource use. The costs are too high and would businesses and governments are engaging in its path, to reduce damage to people’s lives.
harm economic growth, they argue. Now we greenwashing — claiming their actions to pro- Broadly speaking, the detectives are discov-
are seeing the price of that inaction. tect the environment are more significant than ering that water wants the return of its slow
With mounting climate-fuelled weather dis- they really are — rather than making the kinds phases — wetlands, floodplains, grasslands,
asters, social inequality, species extinctions of fundamental change required to move the forests and meadows — that human develop-
and resource scarcity, some corporations global economy onto a truly sustainable path. ment has eradicated. People have destroyed
have adopted sustainability programmes. Because the dominant culture prioritizes 87% of the world’s wetlands since 1700 (ref. 2),
One term in this realm is ‘circular economy’, human demands, water is generally viewed as dammed almost two-thirds of the world’s larg-
in which practitioners aim to increase the either a commodity or a threat. That perspec- est rivers3, and doubled the area covered by cit-
efficiency and reuse of resources, including tive inspires single-focus problem solving that ies since 1992 (ref. 4). All these have drastically
S12
altered the water cycle. The water detectives’ of winter floods, says Kiparsky. The main weeks to months later from lower-altitude
projects — part of a global ‘slow water’ move- problem is that, despite the SGMA, legal leg- springs, where farmers tap it to irrigate crops.
ment — all restore space for water to slow on acies of the artificial divide between surface “If we plant the water, we can harvest the
land so it can move underground and repair water and groundwater linger. Colorado is water,” says Lucila Castillo Flores, a communal
the crucial surface–groundwater connection. managing this better, he says, because it has farmer in the Andes village of Huamantanga
Although the uses of slow-water approaches integrated the rights systems for groundwater above the Chillón River valley in Peru. Their
are unique to each place, they all reflect a and surface water. Connecting them legally culture of reciprocity, with the landscape
willingness to work with local landscapes, facilitates multipurpose projects such as and with each other, governs how commu-
climates and cultures rather than try to con- routing winter water to recharge ponds, which nal farmers care for the water and share the
trol or change them. Slow water is distributed provides habitats for birds and human recre- bounty. Because much of the water they use
throughout the landscape, not centralized. ation. The water infiltrates the ground and for irrigation seeps back underground, it
For instance, wetlands and floodplains are rejoins the river, effectively making that same eventually returns to rivers that supply Lima.
scattered across a watershed — an area of land water available to farmers later in the year. Hydrological engineer Boris Ochoa-Tocachi,
drained by a river and its tributaries — in con- Peru is also focused on the connection chief executive of the Ecuador-based envi-
trast to a dam and giant reservoir. Around the between surface water and groundwater. ronmental consultancy firm ATUK, and his
globe, water detectives are beginning to scale Almost two-thirds of its population live on co-researchers used dye tracers, weirs and sur-
up these projects. a desert coastal plain that receives less than veys of traditional knowledge to calculate the
2.5 centimetres of rain per year and relies on impact of restoring amunas throughout the
Slow water water from the Andes, including from melt- highlands. Lima already has 5% less water than
For most of California’s state history, ground- ing glaciers. In 2019, the World Bank predicted its consumers need. The researchers showed
water and surface water have been treated as that drought-management systems in Lima that restoring amunas throughout the largest
separate resources from both a legal and reg- — dams, reservoirs and under-city storage — watershed that supplies Lima could make up
ulatory perspective. But physically they are would be inadequate by 2030 (ref. 5). Over the that water deficit and give the capital an extra
linked — by gravity and hydraulic pressure. past decade, Peru has passed a series of laws 5%, extending availability into the dry season
When river levels run high and spill over into that recognize nature as part of water infra- by an average of 45 days8.
wetlands and floodplains, the flow slows down structure and require water utilities to invest a
and seeps underground, raising the water percentage of user fees in wetlands, grasslands Working with wildlife
table. Later, that groundwater feeds wetlands, and groundwater systems. Taking a holistic approach is also paying off in
springs and streams from below. “It is hydro- Washington state and in the United Kingdom,
logically ridiculous to treat groundwater and “If we plant the where people are allowing beavers space for
surface water differently,” says Kiparsky. “That their water needs. The rodents in turn protect
is as non-circular as you can get.”
water, we can people from droughts, wildfires and floods.
That legal separation has resulted in harvest the water.” Before people killed the majority of beavers,
overtaxing California’s water supply. The North America and Europe were much boggier,
state’s massive water infrastructure — huge thanks to beaver dams that slowed water on
dams, levees and long-distance aqueducts — One type of investment is the protection of the land, which gave the animals a wider area
prevents the great rivers of the Central Valley rare high-altitude wetlands called bofedales, to travel, safe from land predators. Before the
region from occupying their floodplains and or cushion bogs, which slow water runoff that arrival of the Europeans, 10% of North America
naturally recharging groundwater. Plus, when might otherwise cause flooding or landslides, was covered in beaver-created, ecologically
surface water is scarce, people aggressively and hold onto wet-season water, releasing it in diverse wetlands.
pump groundwater. But because the two are the dry season. Bofedales are peatlands, which Environmental scientist Benjamin Dittbren-
connected, that further decreases surface cover just 3% of global land area but store 10% ner, at Northeastern University in Boston,
water. This depletion means that people have of freshwater and 30% of land-based carbon6. Massachusetts, studied the work of beavers
to drill deeper, more expensive wells to reach Unfortunately, these bogs have been subject that were relocated from human-settled areas
water. It can also collapse the land, destroying to peat thievery for the nursery trade. Utility into wilder locations in Washington state. In
infrastructure. And pumping groundwater near investments are introducing surveillance to the first year after relocation, beaver ponds
the ocean can allow seawater to push salt inland. protect bofedales and restoring damaged created an average of 75 times more surface
Since passage of the 2014 Sustainable wetlands. Scientists have also studied a local and groundwater storage per 100 metres of
Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), practice of carving out more space for water stream than did the control site9. As snow-
California has prioritized recharging ground- in the landscape to expand the bofedales, and fall decreases with climate change, such
water by spreading excess winter water and found that these expansions can store similar beaver-enabled water storage will become
floodwater on land so it filters underground, quantities of water as the original bogs7. more important. Dittbrenner found that the
or injecting it underground through wells. Var- Peru’s water utilities are also investing beaver’s work would increase summer water
ious state programmes include incentives for in a practice innovated by the Wari people availability by 5% in historically snowy basins.
farmers to percolate water on fallow fields, 1,400 years ago. In a few Andean villages, Wari That’s about 15 million cubic metres in just one
flood management that sets back levees, descendants still build hand-cobbled canals basin, he estimates — almost one-quarter of
allowing floodplains to once again serve called amunas. The amunas route wet-season the capacity of the Tolt Reservoir that serves
their purpose, and a search for palaeo valleys flows from mountain creeks to natural infil- Seattle, Washington.
— special geological features that could rapidly tration basins, where the water sinks under- Beavers have fire-fighting skills too, says
move heavy water flows underground. ground and moves downslope much more Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California
But key hurdles remain to seize the bounty slowly than it would on the surface. It emerges State University Channel Islands in Camarillo.
S13
outlook
When beavers are allowed to repopulate evolution, and space to fulfil its ecosystem
stretches of stream, the widened wet zone can functions. The rights of nature movement
create an important fire break. Their ponds recognizes that healthy ecosystems make
raise the water table beyond the stream itself, everything work, and “people are part of that
making plants less flammable because they system and not separate from it”, says Costanza.
have increased access to water. States reforming century-old water rights,
And beavers can actually help to prevent utilities investing in wetlands and Indigenous
flooding. Their dams slow water, so it trickles techniques and scientists deploying beavers
out over an extended period of time, reducing for their engineering prowess are definitive
peak flows that have been increasingly inun- shifts from business as usual. “We’ve made a
dating streamside towns in England. Research- lot of progress integrating [natural capital]
TROY HARRISON/GETTY
ers from the University of Exeter, UK, found into the system, where it doesn’t get pushed
that during storms, peak flows were on average aside because other things are higher priority,”
30% lower in water leaving beaver dams than says Druckenmiller.
in sites without beaver dams10. These benefits But Costanza thinks much deeper change is
held even in saturated, midwinter conditions. needed. “A lot of the things that we’re talking
Beaver ponds also help to scrub pollutants Beavers help to protect people from floods. about with the circular economy — regener-
from the water and create habitats for other ating wetlands, planting forests, dealing with
animals. The value for these services is around Druckenmiller estimates the value of wetlands climate change — are difficult to implement
US$69,000 per square kilometre annually, says nationwide, just for flood absorption, to be because the underlying goal is still GDP growth,
Fairfax. “If you let them just go bananas”, a bea- $1.2 trillion to 2.9 trillion. And that is a con- and these things get in the way of that,” he says.
ver couple and their kits can engineer a mile of servative estimate, based on flood damage People applying slow-water approaches are
stream in a year, she says. Because beavers typi- data covering just around 30% of households doing what they can in the dominant economy.
cally live 10 to 12 years, the value of a lifetime of in floodplains. But Costanza says that people can better pro-
work for two beavers would be $1.7 million, she The overarching problem is that the main tect social capital and environmental systems
says. And if we returned to having 100 million to measure of economic health, GDP, has a nar- by switching from GDP to metrics such as the
400 million beavers in North America, she adds, row focus on market-based production and Genuine Progress Indicator or one of “literally
“then the numbers really start blowing up”. consumption and does not accurately measure hundreds” of alternatives, he says.
human well-being, Costanza asserts. “A circular Society’s fundamental goals might seem like
System change economy that similarly limits itself to produc- a high bar to set, but some of these metrics have
For the most part, mainstream economics tion will also fall short,” he says. If the goal is already been adopted by governments in Mary-
doesn’t take into account the many crucial ser- well-being, “the question becomes: should you land, Vermont, Bhutan and New Zealand. Such
vices provided by healthy, intact ecosystems: be producing and consuming all those things shifts move beyond greenwashed versions of a
water generation, pollution mitigation, food in the first place?”. Protecting and restoring circular economy and help to facilitate water
production, crop pollination, flood protection natural resources and rebuilding social capital, detectives’ work in caring for water systems
and more. he says, are more likely to achieve well-being. so that they can sustain human and other life.
Value calculations such as Fairfax’s are One way to do that is to put more natural
increasingly tabulated by scientists but usually ecosystems into a common asset trust, or ‘the Erica Gies is a journalist based in San
ignored by the market. One early effort to put commons’. Creating state or local parks, hunt- Francisco, California, and the author of Water
a monetary value on those services was a land- ing reserves, or wildlife refuges can restrict Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and
mark report11 in Nature in 1997, co-authored by development and provide significant benefits Deluge (Univ. Chicago Press, 2022).
Robert Costanza, an ecological economist at to the community, says Druckenmiller. Com-
the Institute for Global Prosperity at University munities that invest in protecting a wetland 1. Ripple, W. J., Wolf, C., Newsome, T. M., Barnard, P. &
Moomaw, W. R. BioScience 70, 8–12 (2020).
College London. At the time, global ecosystem to prevent flood damages will see the benefit 2. Davidson, N. C. Mar. Freshw. Res. 65, 934–941 (2014).
services were worth tens of trillions of dollars, of avoided costs quickly, she says, often with a 3. Grill, G. et al. Nature 569, 215–221 (2019).
more than global gross domestic product payback period of less than five years. 4. Brondízio, E. S., Settele, J., Díaz, S. & Ngo, H. T. Global
Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Science-
(GDP). In an updated paper published in 2014, Another strategy to protect the commons, Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service
the global economy had grown but ecosystem says Costanza, is the ‘rights of nature move- (IPBES, 2019).
services were still worth considerably more12. ment’, which began in the early 1970s and has 5. Groves, D. G., Bonzanigo, L., Syme, J., Engle, N. &
Rodriguez, I. Preparing for Future Droughts in Lima, Peru
Another problem: the degradation of those gained ground over the past 15 years. It includes (World Bank, 2019).
services is typically not counted against prof- enshrinements in the constitutions of Bolivia 6. Rezanezhad, F. et al. Chem. Geol. 429, 75–84 (2016).
its; instead, those costs are paid by the environ- and Ecuador, local government changes across 7. Monge-Salazar, M. J. et al. Sci. Total Environ. 838,
155968 (2022).
ment and people. Hannah Druckenmiller, an the United States, and personhood for the
8. Ochoa-Tocachi, B. F. et al. Nature Sustain. 2, 584–593
environmental economist and data scientist Whanganui River in New Zealand, the Ganges (2019).
at the non-profit organization Resources for River in India and the Magpie River in Canada. 9. Dittbrenner, B. J., Schilling, J. W., Torgersen, C. E. &
Lawler, J. J. Ecosphere 13, e4168 (2022).
the Future in Washington DC, has calculated That might sound unusual to some people, but
10. Puttock, A., Graham, H. A., Cunliffe, A. M., Elliott, M. &
that permitting development on one hectare in the United States, some corporations have Brazier, R. E. Sci. Total Environ. 576, 430–443 (2017).
of wetlands incurs property damages of more personhood. Granting personhood to a river 11. Costanza, R. et al. Nature 387, 253–260 (1997).
than $12,000 per year13. That’s because water enables people to argue in court on behalf of 12. Costanza, R. et al. Glob. Environ. Change 26,
152–158 (2014).
that has been displaced from an area that used its rights. A river’s rights can include freedom 13. Taylor, C. A. & Druckenmiller, H. Am. Econ. Rev. 112,
to absorb it floods surrounding communities. from pollution, protection of its cycles and 1334–1363 (2022).
S14
outlook
Standard found that the programme — which
requires that transportation fuel contain a
minimum volume of renewable fuel, and which
drives nearly half of global biofuel production
— has probably increased greenhouse-gas
emissions. That counter-intuitive outcome
is a result of farm operations involving
diesel-fuelled tractors and fertilizers made
from natural gas. The fertilizers release nitro-
gen oxide, a greenhouse gas that is nearly
300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Even farm soils can release stored carbon that
is essential to their resilience and fertility.
Worse still, the increase in demand for
biofuel crops has extended farming onto
marginal lands, damaged biodiversity and
increased water use and contamination, as
well as pushed up the price of agricultural
commodities and thereby exacerbated food
insecurity. The authors of the 2022 assess-
ment conclude that only “profound advances”
in practice and policy will make the US pro-
gramme sustainable.
Agronomists, crop geneticists and carbon
NUSEED
emission life-cycle scientists agree. To make

Carinata is a crop that produces an energy-rich oil and can help to sequester carbon. agriculture smarter, farmers need to pay close
attention to what crops work best where, and
The biofuel course

how those crops are grown. Embracing regen-
erative farming methods, such as reduced
tilling of the soil, can retain carbon and nutri-
correction
ents. So, too, can planting an emerging set of
winter oilseeds that can be grown seasonally
between food-crop rotations. This would gen-
erate revenues that could pay for a soil-saving
practice called cover cropping that few farm-
Refineries that convert biomass to energy are ers have embraced so far.
“We cover crop less than 2% of our land. If
expanding. Attention must be paid to how feedstock you go to 40–50%, you’re meeting this huge
crops change soil carbon. By Peter Fairley global demand for low-carbon feedstocks,”
R
says Glenn Johnston, referring to the process
of growing a crop to protect and improve the
ussia’s invasion of Ukraine is squeez- California, to convert it to exclusively process soil — a crop that, in this case, can also be used
ing global oil supplies and inflation bio-feedstocks. And, according to market to make biofuel. Johnston leads regulatory and
is jacking up prices at the pumps. analysts, US refinery expansions that have been sustainability programmes for agribusiness
Although petrol prices have started to announced could boost the demand from bio- firm Nuseed at its research centre near
fall in recent months, the situation has fuel manufacturers for soya bean oil beyond Sacramento, California.
delivered a powerful reminder of the world’s the country’s total supply. If filling fuel tanks Despite this promise, the new era of biofuels
dependence on fossil fuels. with these plant-derived liquids reduces carbon still poses environmental concerns. Research-
It also means biofuels are having a moment. emissions by decreasing the demand for fossil ers argue that regulation needs to be much
The corn-ethanol industry boasts that blend- fuels, it would help to tackle the climatic shifts improved to ensure that the industry arcs
ing its product into petrol is saving consumers that threaten humanity and biodiversity. towards sustainability. Tracking carbon is a
money and creating jobs in the farming com- In principle, the sustainability of biofuels complex process full of pitfalls. Get it wrong
munities that supply its distilleries. seems obvious. Carbon cycles in and out of the and biorefineries could end up as one more
Refiners producing renewable diesel fuels atmosphere as biofuel crops grow and vehi- environmental panacea that bites the dust.
for long-distance lorries are expanding as fast cles burn the fuel they produce. But claims by
as they can. Some are building biorefineries industry that biofuels deliver greener trans- Digging deeper
designed to process palm, soya and canola port have been battered by a relentless flow A decade ago, a transition to better biofu-
oils, whereas others are adding vegetable oils of reports. Indeed, the first-generation bio- els seemed imminent. A new generation of
and animal fat to their petroleum feedstocks. fuels that are the market leaders seem to be commercial-scale biorefineries was coming
Petrochemical producer Phillips 66 is invest- little better for the climate than fossil fuels. online in the United States, Brazil and Europe.
ing US$850 million in its refinery in Rodeo, A 2022 assessment1 of the US Renewable Fuel They were designed to make ethanol from
S15
outlook
fibrous cellulose-rich feedstocks such as agri- land as free, from a climate perspective,” says require an outright reduction in agricultural
cultural leftovers, grasses or fast-growing trees Tim Searchinger, the technical director of the land use. Expansion of biofuel production
that generally thrive on marginal farmlands food programme at Princeton University’s will, therefore, inevitably drive up food
and require less intensive cultivation than Center for Policy Research on Energy and the prices and worsen food insecurity, says Janet
corn or soya beans. By now, these cellulosic Environment in New Jersey. Ranganathan, who studies environmental
biofuels made from sustainable feedstocks The land-use and life-cycle studies required accounting and technology and oversees
were supposed to be gushing into the fuels to fully account for a biofuel’s carbon footprint research at the World Resources Institute. She
market, trimming transport emissions — the or saving are complex and expensive — and can doubts that future advances can secure more
fastest-growing source of CO2 worldwide. yield inconvenient results for biofuels produc- than a niche role for biofuels: “The prospects
Alas, the flow of cellulosic fuel is barely a ers. Furthermore, finding reliable data isn’t for improvement are limited unless the need
trickle. Processing equipment proved hard easy. Soil carbon, for example, varies greatly for dedicated land to grow them is eliminated.”
to operate, petrol prices fell and govern- across short distances. And variability over
ments eased mandates designed to force time means it can take up to a decade before Cover for carbon
the pricier cellulosic fuels into the market. sampling detects important changes in soil In spite of powerful headwinds, researchers
“Ultimately all of those facilities struggled. carbon. “It’s time-consuming and costly to continue working to improve biofuels’ sustain-
Most are either producing at very low levels do it right,” says Rebecca Rowe, who studies ability. “Short of returning land to a completely
today or not producing at all,” says John Field, soil carbon at the Centre for Ecology and wild state, we will always be balancing impacts
who studies the climate mitigation potential Hydrology in Lancaster, UK. against the needs of society,” says Rowe, whose
of bioenergy systems at Oak Ridge National That makes assessing biofuel sustainability work is helping the UK government to imple-
Laboratory in Tennessee. “daunting” according to Pedro Piris-Cabezas, ment plans to expand the planting of bioenergy
What didn’t stop were the generous incen- director for sustainable international trans- crops from close to nothing to about 3% of the
tives pushing food-based biofuels, and their port based in London at the Environmental UK’s land area by 2050.
shortcomings. Europe’s renewable energy Defense Fund. “It quickly becomes crazy,” And Field’s research suggests that biofuels
directive drove logging and slash burning of he says. But Piris-Cabezas thinks that tools still have the potential to be more than a neces-
tropical rainforests in Brazil, Indonesia and and methods exist to reliably cut through sary evil. In a 2020 paper3 he and his colleagues
elsewhere to make way for soya bean and the complexity, and these will show that showed through simulation that, under cer-
oil palm plantations, displacing Indigenous some biofuels do reduce carbon emissions tain conditions, cellulosic ethanol can rival
communities and wildlife and releasing the without degrading ecosystems and commu- or exceed the climate benefits of ecosystem
rainforests’ massive carbon stocks. And the nities. Piris-Cabezas has written a handbook restoration. The best results occurred for the
carbon does not only come from the trees; (see go.nature.com/3s6hco2) on tracking case of land use transitioning from food crops
even more can be released from soil as it methods that can ensure that alternatives to or pasture to the cultivation of switchgrass
heats up and dries. Indeed, soil holds roughly aviation fossil fuels have “high integrity”. (Panicum virgatum), a popular feedstock for
three-quarters of the organic carbon in Earth’s cellulosic biofuel. In those cases, Field and his
biosphere. “We will always be co-authors estimated that the carbon miti-
Newer programmes that tie biofuel gation potential was comparable to that for
incentives to their carbon intensity, such as
balancing impacts against reforestation. If crop yields and bioprocessing
California’s low-carbon fuel standard, still the needs of society.” technologies can be improved, and if CO2 from
fail to prevent unintended consequences biorefineries can be permanently sequestered
that can come from a change in land use, says deep underground, the researchers predict
Ben Lilliston, director of rural strategies and Piris-Cabezas is less confident, however, that that supplying cellulosic feedstocks could
climate change at the Institute for Agriculture such rigorous analysis will show that biofuels ultimately store up to four times more carbon
and Trade Policy in Minneapolis, Minnesota. can be produced sustainably at large scale. than does reforestation. “It’s aspirational, but
Demand for feedstocks can release carbon that And he is pessimistic about their economic these are areas where there’s a lot of research
is stored in forests and farm soils in ways that viability, thanks to an emerging challenge from and development attention right now,” says
regulators struggle to factor in. For instance, another class of alternative fuels: electrofuels, Field.
in the past five years or so, US biorefineries produced through renewable electricity and Companies are already developing CO2 pipe-
have bought a growing share of US soya bean hydrogen. Piris-Cabezas predicts that in the lines in North Dakota and Illinois, and they’re
harvests. This can indirectly bump up carbon next decade, the cost to avoid a tonne of CO2 in line for enhanced tax breaks under the US
releases because soya bean producers else- emissions through the use of electrofuels will Inflation Reduction Act that was passed in
where scale up to meet US soya demands. fall to about $70. Cutting a tonne of carbon August. Of course, these companies also face
The resulting carbon debt might never be using current biofuels costs $300–$400, he significant pushback, including from farmers
repaid. According to a 2020 study2, once land- says, and that cost is likely to rise. whose land might be in the pipelines’ path.
use impacts are taken into consideration, the The ultimate dilemma regarding biofuel is For the UK bioenergy crop scale-up, Rowe
carbon intensity of palm oil-derived biofuels intensified competition for finite land. The says Miscanthus (a crop akin to switchgrass)
is triple that of petroleum fuels. World Resources Institute, a sustainability and other perennial feedstocks are the pre-
Farming to supply biorefineries also think tank in Washington DC, projects a 56% ferred option. The UK government expects
imposes an opportunity cost because, in gap between food calories produced in 2010 that these crops will help to cut emissions
many cases, restoring the same land to forest and those needed in 2050 (see go.nature. from biorefineries by the 2030s — especially
or native grasses would offer greater net com/3tknoy3). At the same time, most mit- when coupled with deep sequestration. The
carbon reduction. “The typical analysis of igation pathways that limit global warming key, says Rowe, is to use the lessons learnt from
biofuels in effect ignores this cost — it treats in keeping with the Paris climate agreement biofuels development to work out the most
S16
progress towards emission reduction pledges
such as ‘net-zero by 2050’.
These offset markets, however, often ignore
the pitfalls associated with carbon accounting,
and lack the rigour required for accurate soil
carbon measurement. Many offset markets
stipulate that soil sampling needs to go to a
depth of only 30 centimetres, despite research
showing that reliable accounting requires sam-
pling across a crop’s full root zone, which could
extend down to one metre or more. Some mar-
kets also allow contracts requiring farmers to
maintain climate-positive practices for as little
as five years, after which it might not be clear
whether carbon stores have risen or fallen, let
STEVE PROEHL/GETTY
alone by how much.

One big concern is that the benefits of soil
carbon offsets, including those associated
with cover crop biofuel feedstocks, could turn
The petroleum company Phillips 66’s oil refinery in Rodeo, California. out to be illusory and thereby undermine the
integrity of net-zero targets. These offsets
sustainable places to cultivate. That generally States. Simulating application of carinata could also encourage lobbying for weaker
means avoiding high-carbon soils such as peat- every third year across southern Georgia, government rules as regulators catch up.
lands, biodiversity hotspots and high-value southern Alabama and northern Florida — a “People buying up cheap soil carbon offsets
agricultural croplands. few percent of US cropland — they project with questionable accounting methodologies
The best candidates for sustainability are the annual harvests exceeding 2 million tonnes. have a vested interest in making sure that
cover crops in development that seem to be a That’s enough seed to make about one billion tomorrow’s regulations don’t dissolve their
good response to arguments against dedicat- litres of aviation fuel. offsets’ value,” says Ranganathan.
ing land to biofuels. Soil in fallow fields tends Indeed, these markets might also help to
to compact, and is susceptible to erosion by The push for rigorous rules perpetuate the extractive culture that dom-
wind and rain. A cover crop puts roots down Nuseed started commercial planting in Argen- inates agriculture today. Farmers depend on
to secure the soil and its nutrients, and creates tina in 2019 and is sending enough oilseed to agribusiness giants and fossil-fuel providers
channels that help water to sink in rather than the French biofuels producer Saipol this year for products such as fuel, fertilizer and seed,
drain off. Farmers might be convinced to plant for the company to generate millions of litres and they struggle to make ends meet because
oilseed cover crops because the crop can pay of renewable fuel. Nuseed plans to expand to those big firms capture most of agriculture’s
for itself by producing oils that can be supplied the southeastern United States by the end of economic value. The balance could tilt even
to biorefineries. this year and to Brazil by 2024. It intends to further if farmers are also relying on those
Nuseed’s crop carinata — adapted from scale up fast thereafter, aided by a ten-year corporations’ offset programmes to recoup
Brassica carinata, a towering cousin of supply and market-development deal with the value of regenerative crop production.
rapeseed (Brassica napus) — produces an energy giant BP, and to be supporting billions Advocates for farming communities are
energy-rich, inedible oil. And it packs a punch: of litres of fuel production per year by 2030. instead calling for a complete overhaul of the
Johnston says carinata excels at storing carbon For carinata to occupy a larger role in the agricultural ecosystem that gives more back to
in soil and contains about 2.5 times more oil biofuels scene smarter policies are needed, these communities — a system that, as Lilliston
than soya beans, the dominant crop for renew- says Johnston. Government programmes for puts it, “circulates both natural and economic
able diesel. Most importantly, he says, carinata biofuels, he says, lack the breadth and specific- resources to create a more sustainable and
does not compete with food supplies or cause ity to recognize and reward the crop’s benefits. resilient system”.
climate-harming land-use changes. The lat- Lilliston concurs, in that refineries selling But a ground-up revamp for agriculture is a
ter advantage means that although land-use soya-derived fuels to California pay no pen- big ask. If the sustainability of biofuels depends
effects alone add an extra 4–26 grams of CO2 alty for soil carbon depletion caused by indus- on such fundamental changes, one has to won-
emissions per megajoule of energy delivered trial farming practices, he says. California and der whether another next-generation biofuels
from soya-based fuels, according to Field, other jurisdictions are planning more sophisti- failure isn’t the more likely outcome.
carinata cuts 9–13 grams of emissions per cated carbon accounting, but not fast enough
megajoule from fuels. “Land-use change goes for oilseed cover crop developers. Peter Fairley is a science and environmental
from being a highly uncertain but potentially What’s racing forwards instead are poorly journalist who splits his time between Victoria,
large liability to having a small-but-positive regulated markets for offsetting carbon — British Columbia, and San Francisco, California.
effect,” says Field, who is part of a consortium financial instruments that threaten to give
1. Lark, T. J. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 119, e2101084119
partnered with Nuseed on carinata research regenerative agriculture a bad name. Offsets (2022).
and development. pegged to soil carbon, created by brokers as 2. Xu, H., Lee, U. & Wang, M. Renew. Sust. Energ. Rev. 134,
110144 (2020).
A 2022 report4 by Field and his colleagues well as some agricultural giants, pay farmers
3. Field, J. L. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 117, 21968–21977
shows that carinata could support a major to adopt carbon-friendly practices. Corpo- (2020).
biofuels industry in the southeastern United rations purchase most of the offsets to claim 4. Field, J. L. et al. Front. Energy Res. 10, 837883 (2022).
S17
outlook
ILLUSTRATION BY JAN KALLWEJT

Greener buildings
The built environment provides a huge opportunity to move to a circular
economy. Standardization, along with smart design and implementation,
will be key to enabling the shift. By Katharine Sanderson
O
ur built environment — from houses human-made carbon emissions. Cement, Innovations in materials could help to make
to offices, schools and shops — is not more than four billion tonnes of which are concrete a more sustainable option. Adding
environmentally benign. Buildings made each year, is the biggest contributor. graphene— a 2D form of carbon — into the mix,
and the construction industry are, in Its production requires limestone (primarily for example, might improve the environmen-
fact, the world’s biggest consumer of composed of calcium carbonate) to be heated tal footprint by strengthening concrete and
raw materials and contribute 25–40% of global to yield lime (calcium oxide). The reaction thus reducing the amount needed for a par-
carbon dioxide emissions (F. Pomponi & A. J. releases CO2, and yet more CO2 is produced ticular application. Sprinkling it into concrete
Moncaster Clean. Prod. 143, 710–718; 2017). by fuel combustion to generate the heat. could bring enormous benefits, according to
Making buildings part of a circular economy Nationwide Engineering, a company based in
that minimizes the waste of materials could Buildings as a positive force Amesbury, UK, that developed this mixture,
therefore yield huge environmental rewards. Across the globe, engineers, construction com- called Concretene, in collaboration with
Conversely, failure on this front could have panies and architects are beginning to embrace researchers at the University of Manchester,
dire consequences. and apply the circular model. There are ample UK. The first building to benefit from Con-
“Buildings can, and must , work in a circular opportunities to improve the materials that cretene was a gym in Amesbury in May 2021,
way,” says Francesco Pomponi, who studies the are used in construction, to introduce circu- which had a new floor laid using the material.
built environment at Edinburgh Napier Uni- lar design principles so that those materials Concrete could even become a carbon sink.
versity, UK. “Otherwise, there’s no way out of can be properly repurposed, and — even more CarbonCure, a company based in Halifax,
the climate crisis.” ambitiously — to create buildings that make a Canada, has developed a technology that
Take concrete, made by mixing gravel, positive contribution to climate and biodiver- adds captured CO2 into concrete. The CO2
cement and water. It is the world’s most widely sity. But much work needs to be done if those reacts with the calcium in the mixture to
used building material, yet it is also a huge car- huge contributions to emissions are going to form calcium carbonate, a mineral that the
bon source, accounting for up to 8% of global come down. And come down they must — fast. company says adds strength to the concrete
S18
as well as locking in carbon. an insulating gas — a mixture of argon and the origin of the material. With all this data
Concrete is already commonly repurposed krypton. In addition, each pane was coated collated, the components become a useful
— waste concrete is crushed up to form recy- with a light-filtering clear film. These films, commodity at the end of that building’s life.
cled concrete aggregate (RCA), which can then developed by scientists at the Massachusetts A materials passport makes it easy to design
be used to make new aggregate. But RCA tends Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory a follow-up building, because the component
to be used in low-tech applications, such as in Lexington in the 1970s ( J. C. C. Fan et al. Appl. specifications are known exactly in advance.
filling in roads. This reduction in the quality Phys Lett. 25, 693; 1974), and now sold by the The passport, Jeffries says, “acknowledges that
and value of concrete doesn’t fit well with a Eastman Chemical Company, headquartered the material exists in a particular structure,
fully circular economy. in Kingsport, Tennessee, use nanometre-sized and then identifies the most useful future des-
CarbonCure is developing a new type of RCA metal particles to reflect heat. The refurbished tination”. He points to an example of a building
that can be used in buildings. Sean Monkman, windows resulted in the Empire State Building with such a passport that has already been dis-
who heads technology development at the consuming 40% less energy. Similar refits in mantled for reuse: the Temporary Courthouse
company, says that the same CO2-injecting other buildings will be crucial in a transition Amsterdam, which was moved to a business
technology, and subsequent mineralization, to circular construction, says Jeffries. park outside the city of Enschede in early 2022
can be applied to RCA as well as freshly made to become an office building.
concrete. Another company, Blue Planet Dismantling the problem
Systems, based in Los Gatos, California, has In a circular economy, Jeffries says, “Buildings Coordinated material tracing
developed an RCA made from recycled waste should be built like Lego. You should be able A number of start-ups are emerging to offer
concrete and incorporating captured CO2. to disassemble them and reuse the structural materials-passport services, but this could
At the Georgia Institute of Technology in elements.” lead to confusion in future. The LBC has a
Atlanta, the Kendeda Building for Innovative Pomponi agrees that design is key, and that vision that is broader than simply having a
Sustainable Design uses CO2-storing concrete applying existing techniques thoughtfully materials passport, says Arora. The LBC also
as one of a suite of sustainable innovations. can allow for buildings to incorporate such has a growing list of unsafe materials, the Red
The Kendeda project was built as part of the flexibility. For example, rather than welding List, that must be avoided, such as asbestos,
Living Building Challenge (LBC), a programme steel frames together to form the skeleton of formaldehyde and chlorinated polymers,
that allows the designation ‘living building’ to a building, bolts can be used instead. “This because they are damaging to human and
be applied to construction projects that meet enables much easier disassembly when the environmental health. To be permitted in an
a range of criteria, from responsible water use useful life comes to an end, and much easier LBC building, materials need to be listed and
to sourcing materials that eliminate waste. The reuse of the structural section,” Pomponi says. accounted for and also meet specific criteria.
programme aims to provide an incentive for “Even when materials with a low environ- Given the range of ongoing projects, ambi-
buildings to generate energy, produce their mental impact are used, a building can be tions and definitions around the circular
own water and give back to nature more than designed in a non-circular way,” says Caroline economy for buildings, its global adoption will
they take, says Kendeda Building director Shan Henrotay, a former coordinator of the take time. “I’m still figuring out who owns the
Arora. There are 83 certified Living Building Buildings as Materials Banks project (BAMB), circular-economy transition,” says Pomponi.
projects globally, with another 241 projects a Horizon 2020 innovation project funded by Wholesale take-up of circular-economy
registered to pursue certification. the European Union. If materials are, for exam- practices will require enough decision makers
In trying to meet the LBC criteria, the ple, glued together, Henrotay explains, “it will to think not only that such measures will help
Kendeda construction team salvaged mater- be more difficult to create clean fractions for the planet, but that they will be economi-
ials by using local labour to intercept them as high quality recycling at the end of life”. cally feasible. “We need everyone. We need
they were about to reach landfill sites, and then Such mechanical construction approaches the Apples, the Googles, the Microsofts of
turned them into suitable feedstock. “Dur- are key to Wikihouse, a BAMB-supported UK the world to prove that this can be done,”
ing the construction process, the Kendeda project that provides the open-source design Jeffries says. With more than 200 companies
Building diverted more waste from the landfill for blocks that can be cut locally from birch in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s network,
than it sent to the landfill,” says Arora. plywood, allowing buildings to be assembled Jeffries wants to see them move beyond the
The LBC project is hugely ambitious. “I view by slotting the pieces in place as in a jigsaw shorter-term goals. “We can go beyond doing
the LBC as a sort of holy grail for regenerative puzzle, and to be taken apart again easily. less harm,” he says, and progress to the more
building design,” says Nick Jeffries, who spe- The approach has been used to build places affirmative goal of “reducing the materials we
cializes in building innovations at the Ellen such as libraries across the globe and houses use, reducing emissions, reducing the waste
MacArthur Foundation, a charity based in in Almere, the Netherlands. generated, to buildings actively cleaning the
Cowes, UK, devoted to furthering the circu- This kind of reuse has an ancient legacy, says air, providing habitats for wildlife”.
lar economy. Jeffries. “The theatre of Marcellus [in Rome] is Such ambitious advances in building design
There are less ambitious, but still useful, still going after 2,000 years,” he says. “It was and construction will be essential to a sustain-
steps that can be taken alongside more holistic used even as a quarry to build local bridges and able global economy. Ultimately, the buildings
and demanding projects. In a rapidly warming roads. It was really a material bank for future that shelter and protect humanity will need to
climate, even windows can make a difference. buildings.” do more than offer a roof over our heads: by
In 2010, the iconic Empire State building in One modern-day tool to keep track of the embracing innovative methods and materi-
New York City underwent a radical refit, components of a building — and ensure that als, buildings could become a solution to the
including an upgrade to all of the skyscraper’s they can be reused in a meaningful way — is climate catastrophe that humans have invited.
6,514 windows. The existing panes, rather a ‘materials passport’. This document con-
than being ditched, were each taken out, and tains a detailed inventory of what materials Katharine Sanderson is a science journalist
the gap in the double glazing was filled with were used, plus any data to do with safety or based in Cornwall, UK.
S19
outlook
Protection Agency estimated that, in the
United States in 2018, the average person
threw away 47 kilograms of textiles. About
three-quarters of that— 36 kg — is clothing
and footwear, while the rest is mostly towels,
bedding, furniture fabrics and carpets. Mean-
while, resources are expended to create virgin
material (see ‘Thread count’) — water and land
to grow more cotton, and petroleum to make
more polyesters (see ‘Recovering polyester’).
To counter all that waste, researchers and
start-up companies are developing methods
to recover and reuse the material. Similar to
Salmon, much of their focus is on chemical
recycling, in which the material is broken down
into its building blocks and used to create new
materials, including fibres that can be woven
into new clothes. The challenges lie in devel-
MIKKO RASKINEN
oping the processes for such treatment. They
have to be practical, but they also have to be
at least as cost-effective as simply making
Recycling cellulose involves producing a pulp that can then be used to make new fibres. new fibres.
New yarn from old clothes

Spinning new threads
In addition to the natural cellulose fibres from
cotton, some textiles include human-made
cellulosic fibres. These fibres are derived from
wood-pulp cellulose and can be used to make
Chemical processes could recycle the cellulose from materials such as viscose (rayon) and a similar
material called lyocell. Cellulosic fibres make
textile waste into renewed fibre for garment makers. up around 6% of all textile fibres produced,
By Neil Savage according to the Textile Exchange in Lamesa,
S
Texas — a non-profit organization that pro-
motes environmentally friendly materials.
onja Salmon is a big fan of cellulose, Her focus is on characterizing the material A variation on the lyocell-manufacturing
and that’s why she wants to destroy it. that comes out of the breakdown process process is being applied to the textile-waste
“I love cellulose,” she says. “I’m ripping and working out what it might best be used problem by Evrnu, a start-up in Seattle,
cellulose apart because I love it.” for. For example, the enzymes break down the Washington. One major change the company
She’s also pulling it apart because cellulose into glucose, which could be used has made to the process is it uses discarded
the polymer, which is found naturally in wood as a feedstock for making biofuel. They also textiles, instead of wood, as the source of its
and cotton, accounts for one-quarter of all the leave behind tiny chunks of cotton fibre that cellulose. Its also tweaked the process to pro-
fibres used in textile manufacturing. That could provide lightweight reinforcement for duce a fibre that the firm’s co-founder and
means any effort to recycle clothing and fabric concrete. “Even though the cotton fibre will no president Christopher Stanev says is supe-
to keep them part of the circular economy for longer be long enough to directly spin it back rior to both other cellulosics and to cotton,
as long as possible has to include ways to deal into a yarn, we think the material has value,” and that can be recycled more times. “We can
with all that cellulose. Salmon says. make much stronger fibre using cotton than
Salmon, a polymer scientist at Wilson This way of thinking is a big change from the one coming from wood pulp,” says Stanev,
College of Textiles, North Carolina State Uni- how old clothing and textiles, such as uphol- a textile engineer.
versity in Raleigh, is working on breaking down stery fabrics and carpeting, are currently In the same way as the standard lyocell
the cellulose from discarded textiles and reus- handled. Globally, only 13% of the material process, the raw material is treated with
ing it. Many clothing fabrics are a blend of half that goes into making clothing is recycled, N-methylmorpholine N-oxide (NMMO), an
polyester and half cotton — individual fibres according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, organic compound that dissolves cellulose.
of cotton and polyester are twisted tightly an organization in Cowes, UK, that promotes This produces a thick pulp that is then filtered.
around one another, creating a yarn that is the circular economy. Most textile waste — an At this point, the conventional process would
then woven or knitted into a garment. Taking estimated 92 million tonnes from the fashion involve the cellulose being extruded through
that structure apart mechanically is challeng- industry alone — produced each year winds up a device called a spinneret — first into air, and
ing, so instead Salmon treats it with cellulases, buried or incinerated. “We throw stuff away then into a coagulation bath of mostly water in
a group of enzymes that break up the cellulose. into landfill and we’re treating it like gar- which the material solidifies into fibre. Evrnu,
“We can chew it up into small enough mole- bage,” Salmon says. “We’re not looking upon however, turns the cellulose molecules into
cules and fragments that it will actually fall out it as something that is actually a raw material liquid crystals before they are extruded, allow-
of the rest of the fabric structure,” Salmon says. that could be reused.” The US Environmental ing them to align with each other and produce
S20
a more crystalline fibre structure. THREAD COUNT mechanical properties than cotton.
SOURCE: K. NIINIMÄKI ET AL. NATURE REV. EARTH ENVIRON. 1, 189–200 (2020).
“By doing that and having quite a crystalline Globally, clothing consumption, and, therefore, textile The Ioncell process can use wood pulp,
organization, you can increase the strength production, has increased since the 1970s. The rise in which Sixta says counts as part of a circular
polyester production has been the most marked.
and you can also engineer the performance economy because the raw material comes
Polyester Cotton Non-cotton cellulosics
of this fibre,” Stanev says. He says the fibre from Finland’s sustainable forests — these are
Polyamide Polypropylene Other
is about 20% stronger than standard lyocell, 100 managed in such a way that growth outpaces
which itself is stronger than cotton. the amount removed. “Our university has a
(million tonnes per year)

That quality translates into a longer lifetime 80 large group in textile design, so we can treat
Fibre production
for a fabric made from the fibre, as well as a wood, produce pulp, convert it to fibres, con-
fibre that can be reconstituted several times. 60 vert it to yarns, convert it to fabrics, design
Every time the molecules are run through the clothing, and show the clothing in fashion
40
recycling process, they become shorter and shows,” Sixta says. The process can also accept
thinner. But because they start out stronger, textile waste, turning old clothing into new
20
Stanev says, the same material should be able garments. Ioncell has built a pilot plant, with
to be reconstituted at least five times before it 0 the goal of evaluating how well its process
becomes weaker than virgin cotton fibre; some 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2018 works in the real world in about two years.
tests in the company’s laboratory show that the
material can be recycled up to ten times. That’s A Finnish company, however, is working A matter of cost
more than is possible for paper, which can be with an ionic liquid developed by one of its Although technical challenges abound, the
recycled 5–7 times before the fibres become founders, physical chemist Herbert Sixta at main barrier to widespread textile recycling
too short to make a viable new product. Aalto University in Espoo, Finland. The liquid might be economic, says materials engineer
Evrnu is running a pilot project at partner used by Ioncell — the name of both the com- Youjiang Wang at the Georgia Institute of Tech-
companies in Germany and elsewhere in the pany and the process — is a superbase, a highly nology in Atlanta. “Most of the materials are
United States to show that its process can pro- alkaline substance that breaks the hydrogen not that valuable,” Wang says. It’s so cheap to
duce fabric. It hopes that a larger textile com- bonds in the cellulose molecules. In the same produce polyester, cotton and other fabrics
pany will then want to license the technology. way as when using NMMO, that process creates that there’s little profit margin unless the recy-
For now, it is using NMMO because the com- a pulp that can be fed through a spinneret to cling processes are very inexpensive.
pound is readily available, but Stanev hopes to make a new cellulose fibre. NMMO tends to be There’s also a lack of infrastructure for
eventually switch to an ionic liquid — a salt that unstable and requires the addition of buffer collecting and sorting used textiles, beyond
is liquid below 100 °C — which is more chemi- solutions, but the ionic liquid does not. Sixta a few private clothing-donation groups. And
cally stable than NMMO and more tolerant of says his ionic liquid is also completely recy- the complex mixture of materials in a piece
contaminants. The firm has not yet optimized clable, making the process environmentally of clothing — not just different natural and
any such liquids for the production process. friendly as well as producing fibres with better synthetic fibres, but also dyes and chemical
coatings, buttons and zips, and any non-woven
RECOVERING additions such as leather or latex — must be

separated for individual components to
POLYESTER be processed.
Policymakers should consider recycling that
Cellulose isn’t the only polymer into new polymers. Starting with waste PET, turns used clothing not into new clothes but
researchers want to reuse — they also have Sonja Salmon, a polymer scientist at North into other useful — if lower value — products,
polyester in their sights. Carolina State University in Raleigh, says, it’s Wang argues. Fibres might be shredded for
possible to create what is essentially a virgin use as soil stabilizers, for instance, or cellulose
Polyester is a generic term for a range of material — one that is indistinguishable from broken down into glucose that can be turned
polymers derived from petroleum, but it PET made from petroleum. PET is extremely into fuel. Even burning polyester for energy is
mainly refers to polyethylene terephthalate stable, however, so reducing it to monomers preferable to pulling more petroleum out of
(PET). Globally, PET polyester makes up is difficult. the ground to produce power. “That doesn’t
around half of all fibre in all textiles. Cotton Some scientists are developing enzymes sound very high tech, but overall, you do get
comprises another one-quarter and the rest that might be able to tackle these molecules. considerable benefit from that,” Wang says.
consists of other plant-based fibres, such as In 2016, a team discovered a bacterium The circular economy should be viewed as
linen and hemp; animal products, such as that could break down PET (S. Yoshida et al. a way to reduce as much as possible the crea-
wool and alpaca; other synthetics, including Science 351, 1196–1199; 2016), and scientists tion of virgin material when other products
acrylic and nylon; and human-made have since developed other enzymes to can be reused, Wang says. “If you really want
cellulosic fibres. degrade it (J. Egan & S. Salmon SN Appl. to make recycling better for the environment,
Like cotton, PET polyester can be spun Sci. 4, 22; 2022). Christopher Stanev, not just for the sake of publicity, then we need
into new fibres, but the re-spun fibres co-founder of Evrnu in Seattle, Washington, to develop more technologies so that you can
become shorter and weaker with repeated says alongside its main focus of breaking use as much of what you collect as possible,”
cycles. Unlike cotton, however, the polymer down cellulose, the start-up is also working he says. “That would make the overall circle
could be broken down into the simpler on processes to break down PET and more circular.”
molecules that make it up and those polyurethane, and to separate polyester–
monomers could then be reconstituted cotton blends. Neil Savage is a freelance writer based in
Lowell, Massachusetts.
S21
outlook
nature.com/collections/
circular-economy-outlook
Nature 17 November 2022
S22
Z Paige Lerario is a board-certified neurologist and transgender
activist. They are currently a graduate student of social service
MIND MATTERS
at Fordham University and vice chair of the LGBTQI Section of
Edited by Daisy Yuhas
the American Academy of Neurology. Their blog can be followed
at https://blogs.neurology.org/author/mackenzie-p-lerario
Voice Training and resonance from the throat and chest seem masculine. And dif
ferent brain areas appear to process the voices of masculine ver
for Transgender sus feminine speakers. When people are unsure about a speaker’s
gender—as when experimenters manipulate audio to produce
People
ambiguous voices—listeners show distinct brain activity as well.
Often a person’s perceptions of voice and gender reflect long-
standing beliefs learned over many years through social and cul
tural upbringing. For example, because many have been taught
Speech therapy and language strategies that gender is only male or female, their ability to describe voices
can help save lives that are more gender-ambiguous is limited. Nonbinary individu
als are more likely to correctly identify speakers with such voices.
By Z Paige Lerario But this history, and the associations in the brain, does not
mean these judgments are unchangeable. Learned behaviors can
Calling customer service is a situation we all know and dread. be unlearned or relearned. For example, my colleagues and I pub
We navigate a maze of automated voice commands, hoping to lished a study looking at how language influences gender percep
speak with a real live person. For some that live connection is a tion when hearing someone’s voice for the first time. We recorded
relief—but not for everyone. 24 transgender and cisgender people repeating a range of short
Within seconds the customer service agent uses cues from some words. Then 105 people of diverse genders from across the U.S. lis
one’s voice—pitch, for instance—to decide to describe the caller as tened to these recordings and rated the gender of the speaker along
“sir” or “ma’am.” For many who are transgender, that language is one of several different scales. We found that the terms used in
distressing when they are identified by the wrong gender pronoun each scale could influence how listeners rated the gender of a
or title. When we do not affirm a transgender person’s identity, speaker’s voice. A scale that included binary “male” and “female”
that person’s risk for anxiety, depression and suicide can increase. options led to more extreme results, rating speakers at one end or
I am an openly transgender neurologist and activist. My re the other. But more graded “masculine” versus “feminine” scales
search and that of others in this field point to two key ways we can led to rankings closer to the center, which allowed for individuals
support transgender people whose voice and gender identity do with an ambiguous or intermediate gender to be better repre
not align. First, small changes in language can help cisgender peo sented. So a relatively small change in language could help reduce
ple (those whose gender aligns to traditional male and female cat the odds of misgendering others.
egories assigned at birth) be more sensitive and accurate in the More directly, voice therapies, both nonsurgical and surgical,
words they use. Second, gender-affirming voice treatments can be can help a transgender person change their vocal characteristics,
effective medical care, giving transgender people a valuable tool aligning them with their gender identity. Voice training is less costly
to express their identity to the outside world. and invasive than a throat operation, making it a more common
Many people perceive specific vocal traits as either masculine starting point. Through sessions with a licensed speech-language
or feminine. For example, high pitch and vocal resonance from the pathologist, transgender people learn to control pitch, resonance,
face and mouth are often linked to a feminine identity. Low pitch word choice and other vocal behaviors. Studies have found that
most transgender people who undergo this train
ing are satisfied with their results. Such training
can improve quality of life, reduce voice-related
disability and boost self-confidence.
Despite its benefits, many public and private
health-care insurers in the U.S. do not cover voice
training for transgender people. With several U.S.
states now trying to ban gender-affirming health
care for transgender adolescents, the situation
will likely get worse. Many in the transgender
community pursue self-training, without profes
sional supervision. This increases their risk of
learning unhealthy speech patterns that can dam
age vocal tissue.
We should recognize voice training and gender-
affirming surgeries as medical necessities, which
should be covered by insurance. Like puberty
blockers and gender-affirming hormones, these
interventions save lives.
Illustration by Ada Buchholc January 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 55

THE UNIVERSE
A Flash
in the Night
The death of a massive star across
the universe affected lightning on Earth
By Phil Plait
In early October 2022 a wave of high-energy radiation swept

over Earth from a gamma-ray burst, one of the most singularly
catastrophic and violent events the cosmos has to offer. Astron-
omers quickly determined its distance and found it was the clos-
est such burst ever seen: a mere two billion light-years from
Earth. Or, if you prefer, 20 billion trillion kilometers away from
us, a decent fraction of the size of the observable universe.
To astronomers, “close” means something different. This one
was so close, cosmically speaking, that it was detected by a fleet
of observatories both on and above Earth, and it is already yield-
ing a trove of scientific treasure. But even from this immense
distance in human terms, it was the brightest such event ever
seen in x-rays and gamma rays, bright enough for people to spot
its visible-light emission in smaller amateur telescopes, and was
even able to physically affect our upper atmosphere. Despite
that, this gamma-ray burst poses no danger to us. Either way,
1
I’m glad they keep their distance.
Gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs, are intense blasts of gamma
rays—the highest-energy form of light—that typically last from A blast of light called GRB 221009A, detected in October 2022,
a fraction of a second to a few minutes in length. Gamma-ray was initially so bright it outshone our own galaxy. The glow
bursts have been a puzzle to astronomers since the cold war, was observed in gamma rays by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space
when the first one was discovered in the 1960s by orbiting Telescope (1). Images taken just an hour after the first flare by
detectors looking for nuclear weapons tested on or above Earth. the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory show rings of x-ray light
More than 1,700 have been observed since then. Still, it took scattered by dust inside our Milky Way galaxy (2) . The afterglow
decades to pin any of them down well enough in the sky to from the burst was seen in infrared light (3) five days after the
observe them with more conventional telescopes and to under- initial blast by the huge Gemini South telescope in Chile.
stand better what they were. Even then it was difficult, as each
GRB has idiosyncrasies, making them complicated to under- from their tight focus; these thin beams concentrate the explo-
stand as a group. sive energy in a very narrow direction. If the beam happens to
Nevertheless, we do have a decent grasp of their basic nature. be pointed your way, you see a flash of gamma rays bright
Short-duration bursts—generally a few seconds long at most— enough to be detected even from many billions of light-years
come from two superdense neutron stars colliding and blasting distant. Outside the path you see a more typical supernova.
out fierce energy, whereas long-duration ones—lasting several Despite their power, most bursts are at such a vast distance
minutes—come from massive stars exploding at the ends of from us that their light is dimmed dramatically, and a telescope
their lives. The core of the star collapses, forming a black hole. is needed to see them at all.
A swirling disk of material that wasn’t immediately swallowed Dubbed GRB 221009A—for the first gamma-ray burst seen
NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration (1 )
by the black hole rapidly forms around it, funneling twin beams on October 9—its initial flash was first detected by sensors on
of intense energy out into space, one pointing up and the other the orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, designed spe-
down, away from the disk. These eat their way through the cifically to detect and rapidly find the locations of GRBs. Even
dying star and erupt outward while the rest of the star explodes for a long-duration burst, it was unusually extended. Another
as a very powerful supernova. blast of gamma rays was spotted by the Neil Gehrels Swift
The energy in gamma-ray bursts is almost incomprehensi- Observatory, another orbiting set of telescopes designed
ble: In a few seconds they can emit as much energy as the sun to observe bursts. That second peak happened nearly an hour
will over its entire 12-billion-year life span. Their power comes later, much later than usual for such events, indicating

Phil Plait is a professional astronomer and science communicator
in Colorado. He writes the Bad Astronomy Newsletter. Follow him
on Twitter @BadAstronomer
2 3
just how much power this particular GRB had at its disposal. saw expanding rings of x-ray light centered on the GRB’s location,
Swift immediately sent out an automated alert to astrono- caused by dust clouds in the Milky Way located roughly 600 to
mers all over the world, who responded by pointing their own 12,000 light-years from Earth. These “light echoes” happen when
telescopes toward the burst. The fading glow of visible light, light hits dust clouds just off our line of sight to the GRB—so we
AURA/B. O’Connor (UMD/GWU) and J. Rastinejad and W. Fong (Northwestern University); Image processing: T.A. Rector
(University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), J. Miller, M. Zamani and D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab) (CC BY 4.0) (3 )
caused by the beams slamming into matter surrounding the see them to the side, next to the bright point in the sky. Because
dying star, revealed its distance via cosmic redshift (a redden- of the short amount of extra time it takes light from the blast to
ing of light caused by the expansion of the universe itself ) and reach those dust clouds and be scattered toward us, we see rings
NASA/Swift/A. Beardmore (University of Leicester) (2 ) ; International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/
indicated this was the closest GRB ever seen. of light moving outward from the center, their expansion rate
A tweet by astrophysicist Rami Mandow pointed out that related to their distance from us. Measuring these rings allowed
lightning detectors in India and Germany showed that the way astronomers to determine the distances to the clouds.
pulses of electromagnetic radiation from lightning propagated Although great strides have been made, especially since the
changed suddenly at the same time the GRB energy hit our 1990s when the first bursts were seen by optical telescopes and
planet. These pulses indicate conditions in Earth’s upper atmo- their distances were determined to be literally cosmic, there is
sphere changed, with electrons suddenly stripped from their much about them we have yet to understand. GRB 221009A is
host atoms. Gamma rays ionize atoms in this way, so it seems still being observed by telescopes around the world, and it may
very likely that this blast physically affected our planet’s atmo- prove to be a Rosetta stone for these wildly diverse, bizarre and
sphere, though only mildly and briefly. Still, from two billion powerful events.
light-years away, that’s an extraordinary phenomenon.
A GRB this close means that astronomers can analyze the ditor’s Note: This is the first of a new monthly column by
E
light they see from it in more ways than usual. Typically a astronomer and writer Phil Plait. Plait is a former Hubble Space
burst’s light isn’t bright enough to clearly reveal details about Telescope researcher and has written numerous books and arti-
the event that caused it. This specimen could help scientists cles about space, including for ScientificAmerican.com.
better understand the central black hole engine that forms dur-
ing a burst and the extraordinarily complex nature of the phys-
ics surrounding it. Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
It can also tell us about the Milky Way. The Swift observatory or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]

REVIEWS
Edited by Amy Brady
FIC TION plot skips across generations of people who
Future Imperfect
come after Destry—an appealingly diverse
cast of rangers, scientists, engineers and an
utterly endearing autonomous collective of
sentient flying trains. If the antagonists in Ne-
What kind of world would humanity build witz’s novel are thinly outlined, it is perhaps
with another chance to do it right? because the novel’s big “what if?” demands
Review by Siobhan Adcock some fairly broad strokes. Each character
plays a part in answering whether well-inten-
Great stories often start from a tantalizing the alien world is an early-stage planet called tioned people can save the best parts of Sask-
“what if?”—the more irresistibly original Sask-E, which has been modeled after the E from the worst depredations of runaway
the premise, the better. In The Terraformers, original Earth by a terraforming corporation consumer culture fostered by slimy corpo-
the new novel from i09 founder and former known as Verdance, and the first encounter is rate interests and lazy government.
Gizmodo editor in chief Annalee Newitz, between two very different versions of Homo As the story of Sask-E’s rise, ruin and
the central question points straight at our sapiens. One is a resource-plundering, trash- slow road to redemption unfolds over thou-
planet’s existential crisis: Given the painful talking, trash-generating, remotely operated sands of years, Newitz’s attention is on the
lessons we’ve learned about how not t o proxy, and the other is Destry, an Environ- complex symbiotic relation between tech-
build a sustainable, equitable future, what mental Rescue Team ranger who proceeds nologies and cultures, another classic trope
if people had a chance to create a cleaner, The to show what happens when someone tries of science fiction that they also explored in
fairer Earth 2.0? Could we succeed? Terraformers to mess with her boreal forest. their 2021 nonfiction book, F our Lost Cities:
It will surprise no one that the answer is by Annalee Newitz. Sask-E appears at first to be an Eden A Secret History of the Urban Age. The same
a resounding “well, maybe.” Newitz’s formi- Tor Books, of wild beauty and limitless potential. But as technological innovations that push a civiliza-
dable imagination can’t change the fact that 2023 ($28.99) the good-hearted Destry discovers, the de- tion to new heights of achievement can also
people are people. Yet the novel smartly velopers who created Sask-E—and who hold be complicit in that civilization’s undoing.
argues that people—particularly when the both her job and her life in their clutches— On Sask-E, however, technology has
term expands to include sentient forms far aren’t out to make a better world. Their true made possible an entirely new definition of
beyond humans—might just be a planet’s goal, not shockingly, is profit. The discovery personhood. Animals, robots, hybrids, and
best resource. Even if takes a millennium’s of an underground civilization on Sask-E even doors and worms are in communication
worth of creativity to offset rapacious corpo- forces Destry to choose sides in a conflict with the humans of the future. And thanks to
rations, unethical developers, ineffective that alters her beloved planet’s future. a galactic accord known as the Great Bar-
governments and standard-issue corruption. From here the novel takes running leaps gain, they all have a valid seat at the negotiat-
The novel’s first scene sends up a classic through time. Terraforming is a slow process ing table. Once the assumption that only
trope of science fiction, the “first contact,” in after all, and readers who get invested in humans are people is swept away, thorny
which representatives from two civilizations Destry’s character might be saddened to questions of natural resource allocation, rep-
meet on an alien world. Except in this case, learn that this isn’t really her story. Newitz’s resentative government, inclusive language
and sexual freedom are up for reevaluation.
(If you’ve ever wanted to know how a sen-
tient train can couple with a robot or a cat,
your answer is here. As one character re-
marks, “Where there’s desire, there’s data.”)
As messy as all this sounds, it opens up
thrilling new pathways of hope that Earth 2.0
might succeed. T he Terraformers, r efreshing-
ly, is the opposite of the dystopian, we’re-all-
doomed chiller that’s become so common in
climate fiction. Newitz’s mordant sense of
humor steers the story clear of starry-eyed
optimism, but it’s easy to imagine future gen-
erations studying this novel as a primer for
how to embrace solutions to the challenges
we all face. If we’re ever going to save our-
selves from ourselves, then maybe what we
need is a new way of thinking about self.
Siobhan Adcock is a writer and editor whose

most recent novel is T he Completionist.
58 Scientific American, January 2023 Illustration by London Ladd

NONFIC TION
Blood Money
A cinematic tour of
ambition, greed and
desperation in biotech
“Finding new therapies that target only
cancer cells and did not kill healthy cells
had become the holy grail of cancer drug
development,” writes Nathan Vardi, a
managing editor at MarketWatch and
former editor at F orbes. For Blood and
Money follows the path of one class of Red and white blood cells
such products (“targeted small-molecule from a leukemia patient
drugs” designed to fight blood cancers)
that ultimately pits two biotech compa- Vardi examines the fraught, infamously T he profits are astronomical, yet investors
nies against each other in a race to slow fda market-approval process, but still consider how much they’ve left “on
market—and to an unimaginable payday. the pacing of the book remains quick. the table.”
Readers are introduced to scientologists, With the focus on characters shifting from Still, there are meaningful collabora-
restless entrepreneurs, clinical experts chapter to chapter and a vast number tions, and many characters in the book
and the machinations of magnate finan- of names—people, companies, drugs— genuinely want to do right for patients
ciers searching for the next billion-dollar included for detail, it can feel at times that with deadly diseases. Readers remain
Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library/Getty Images
blockbuster. In the middle of that friction one needs a color-coded organizational distinctly aware of those who have bene-
of ambition and greed are the patients,
For Blood chart to keep up. fited (and continue to benefit) from these
desperate for cures and more time. and Money: In the quest for magic-bullet bio drugs. Yet the banks, investors and
The story begins with Pharmacyclics, Billionaires, pharma drugs, a particularly disquieting hedge funds leading the search under-
a small biotech company in California Biotech, and element is how powerful investors score an overall health-care system that
that is working on a drug to treat leuke the Quest for become drivers of medical strategy. feels skewed in its priorities.
mia. Along the way, we meet charismatic a Blockbuster The scientific search for cures often seems Vardi, who is clearly knowledgeable
and sometimes capricious executives and Drug overmatched by the outsized desire to about Wall Street and biopharma, depicts
investors, as well as revolving doors of by Nathan Vardi. be first and to reap the highest returns; the nuances of both in a vivid, cinematic
employees being hired, fired and starting W. W. Norton, one could be forgiven for wanting to fashion. One can already imagine the
new companies (and competitors). 2023 ($30) rename the book For Money and Blood. movie version. —Mandana Chaffa
IN BRIEF
The Land Beneath the Ice: The Deluge The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds
T he Pioneering Years of Radar by Stephen Markley. the Future of Physics
Exploration in Antarctica Simon & Schuster, 2023 ($27.99) by Heinrich Päs. Basic Books, 2023 ($32)
by David J. Drewry.
Princeton University Press, 2023 ($39.95) Stephen Markley’s e pic novel creates Which is more fundamental, the
a full-scale panorama of a world blud- many or the one? Author Heinrich Päs
Glaciologist D
avid J. Drewry takes geoned by climate change, even as it believes physics gestures at an under-
readers to the frigid research outposts magnifies the struggles of those caught lying unity simple enough to count
where he and his colleagues pioneered in its vast and unrelenting chaos. on one finger. If only physics would
the technique of radio-echo sounding Activist groups A Fierce Blue Fire and 6Degrees embrace monism, its deepest mysteries would yield
to plumb the depths of the Antarctic both attempt to provoke government and industry to that magic number. But monism was declared a
ice sheet. Drewry explains how this new technology into addressing the climate crisis, but their diver- heresy, first by the medieval Church and second, in
emerged to compensate for inadequacies of past gent philosophies take them down different paths Päs’s telling, by physicist Niels Bohr. Even if the con-
methods, then shares his own experiences mapping as society unravels. Markley’s dark depiction of the nections between ancient monism and modern sci-
invisible mountain ranges and, worryingly, lakes deep near future is filled with vivid descriptions of climate ence are a stretch and Bohr is reduced to caricature,
under the ice that are hastening melt. A peppering of catastrophes, but his intricate network of complex the history is thoroughly researched, the physics is
photographs and delightful personal anecdotes show characters balances precision with pathos, offering cutting edge and Päs’s larger point resonates: much,
the excitement and frustration that are inevitable a kaleidoscopic view of humanity’s fraught rela- or maybe all, of what we take for reality is an artifact
during scientific expeditions. —Fionna M. D. Samuels tionship with its changing planet. —Dana Dunham of our limited perspectives. —Amanda Gefter

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).
and mobilize them into ac tion.

Founded by world-class snowboard
er and businessperson Jeremy Jones,
POW brings athletes, such as Hila-
ree, to speak with students, commu-
nity groups, business leaders, the
U.S. Congress, and others about the
changes they are seeing around the
globe. As Hilaree wrote, “Climate
change is real. I know this because
I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”
In 2018 we appeared together at
two events at the World Economic
Forum in Davos, Switzerland. One
was a panel discussion; the other
featured Hilaree discussing her life’s
work and passion, including a star-
tlingly honest discussion of her mis-
takes, including some very costly
ones. She described a 2014 expedi
tion that she led in an attempt at
the first summit of Hkakabo Razi
The Inspiration
in Myanmar, where her team nearly
ran out of food. Hilaree told us how the team “broke,” how she
had struggled to finish the expedition, and how the experience
of Hilaree Nelson nearly broke her.

The World Economic Forum is populated by well-known,
influential and eloquent people—our panel included former U.S.
What great athletes and great scientists vice president Al Gore—but often audiences fidget. There’s a lot
have in common to take in. When Hilaree spoke, however, her listeners were rapt.
After the event, people swarmed her, eager to hear more, ask a
By Naomi Oreskes question, or just to say hello. When we dined later, a 14-year-old
girl came up to our table to ask Hilaree for her autograph.
A very sad piece of news in 2022 was the death of Hilaree Nel- I’ve thought a lot since then about what made Hilaree so
son at age 49. A premier ski mountaineer, Hilaree held numer- inspiring and also about what makes great scientists inspiring.
ous firsts, including the first ski descent from the summit of Great scientists may not put their lives at risk the way Hilaree
Lhotse (next door to Mount Everest), the first ski descent of Pap- did, but they also inspire awe, admiration and requests for auto-
sura in India (and known as the “peak of evil” because of its graphs. Athletes and scientists share one thing: the ability to do
exceptional danger), and the first person to ski the Five Holy things that other people simply can’t do. In theory, this could
Peaks of Mongolia. make us feel small and insignificant, but that’s not what I’ve
Hilaree helped to break the barrier of “women’s firsts.” When observed. Rather we are reminded that things that may seem
people spoke of her, they didn’t say she was one of the world’s impossible might not be.
great female mountaineers. They said she was one of the world’s Both great athletes and great scientists are blessed with con-
great mountaineers. In 2018 she succeeded Conrad Anker—who spicuous talent, but they also work hard and push themselves
had climbed Everest three times, twice without oxygen—as cap- in extraordinary ways. When we are around them, we can
tain of the North Face Global Athlete Team, cementing her posi- think—even if subconsciously—that maybe if we push our-
tion as one of the greatest adventurers ever. selves, we can do more than we thought possible, too. Most of
Tragically, after reaching the summit of the world’s eighth us will never climb Everest, much less ski it—and nor should
highest peak, Mount Manaslu in Nepal, with her life and ski we try—but we all have the capacity to do more than we have
partner Jim Morrison, Hilaree was caught in an avalanche and done before.
fell to her death.
I had met Hilaree through our mutual work with Protect Our
Winters (POW), a nonprofit advocacy group that works to edu- Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
cate the outdoors community and industry about climate change or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]
60 Scientific American, January 2023 Illustration by Irene Rinaldi

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
J a n u ary
1973 Hydrogen
Power
“The basic dilemma represented
papyri that fill a gap in history
from b.c. 309 to 246. This period
includes the reign of Ptolemy Phil-
efforts are to be redoubled, and
whatever influence, political or
pecuniary, that can be brought to
by what has been termed the adelphus, who was so successful bear will be unhesitatingly wielded
‘world energy crisis’ can be simply in levying heavy taxes with a mini- during the coming spring in one
stated: the earth’s nonrenewable mum of injury and dissatisfaction. last grand endeavor to force the
fossil-fuel reserves will inevitably As the manuscripts deal mainly job through the Forty-second
be exhausted, and in any event the with financial affairs, our own 1973 Congress. The patent, which has
natural environment of the earth Ptolemies may perhaps learn from already expired and on which
cannot readily assimilate the them how to create in us a nation a third term is asked, is for the ‘feed’
byproducts of fossil-fuel consump- of cheerful givers.” motion. The owners will, if the
tion at much higher rates without present measure be passed, again
suffering unacceptable levels of Heating with Shale Oil rule the entire sewing machine
pollution. Major energy-consump- “From Sweden comes the report trade. Thousands of inventors,
tion categories as transportation, that peat briquettes, which have who have devised improvements
space heating and heavy indus- been impregnated with shale oil, of great practical value, are subject
trial processes are primarily sup- make a very good substitute for 1923 to the mercy of this Ring, which
plied with fossil-fuel energy. If coal. The process of impregnation may drive them from the market
the ‘energy gap’ of the future is consists merely in mixing the and deprive the public of as good
to be filled with nuclear power in powdered peat with 10 percent machines at cheaper rates.”
the form of electricity, then the U.S. by weight of shale oil and then
will have gone a long way toward briquetting. The price of such bri- Alcohol from Moss
becoming an ‘all-electric economy.’ quettes is stated to be one-half “In the northern governments
A case can be made for utilizing that of anthracite coal.” of Russia, large quantities of alco-
the nuclear energy indirectly to hol are produced from the mosses
produce a synthetic secondary
fuel that would be delivered more
cheaply and would be easier to
1873 Sewing Machine
Monopoly
“The Sewing Machine Ring, com-
1873 and lichens growing there in enor-
mous quantities. This new indus-
try originated in Sweden, and
use than electricity in many large- posed of the Singer, Howe, Grover & was subsequently introduced in
scale applications: hydrogen gas.” Baker and Wheeler & Wilson Com- Finland. Several large distilleries
panies, failed to induce our last exhibited such alcohol at the
Classified Universities Congress to sanction their modest recent industrial exposition in
“Although the volume of secret attempt to fasten their overgrown Moscow, where German, French
Government research conducted and unjust monopoly for another and English manufacturers
in U.S. universities has declined seven years. Consequently their praised its quality highly.”
sharply in the past decade, in part
because of protests by students and
faculties, a number of large institu-
tions, chiefly state universities,
continue to undertake classified
projects. In fiscal year 1972 the
Department of Defense has at least
29 classified contracts with univer-
sities, not counting contracts for
work done at off-campus facilities.
Of the contracts, 12 are with two
S cientific American, Vol. 128, No. 1; January 1923
institutions: the University of Texas

and the University of Michigan.”
1923 Cheerful
Tax Givers
“At Thebes, the ancient capital of 1923, 3-D MOVIES: “Many attempts have been made to produce stereoscopic motion pictures that
Upper Egypt, archaeologists from have a third dimension, depth. The latest attempt is a simple electrical device through which an audience
Pennsylvania University have found member views the screen. In the device, a very light, thin aluminum plate spins continually at a high rate.
demotic, or common-language, The screen appears to vanish, while the characters move forward through the air to within close range.”

GRAPHIC SCIENCE
Text by Theo Nicitopoulos | Graphic by Amanda Montañez
World’s Largest
Glaciers
A new list highlights Earth’s
grandest flows of ice
Scientists recently created the first systematic ranking of
Earth’s largest glaciers. They started by comparing inconsis-
tent databases to select the forms that best fit the definition
of a glacier—a long-lasting, flowing mass of ice. Determining
the borders of individual glaciers, however, is challenging. Ice
caps, for example, move in multiple directions, so more than Alaska Shapes below indicate the largest
one glacier may be part of a single source. “Flow divides can Malaspina-Seward
glacier and glacier complex in each of
Glacier the 19 world regions shown on the map
be difficult to calculate,” says co-author Bruce Raup of the U.S.
Complex
National Snow and Ice Data Center (nsidc). Glacier complex
At lower elevations, glaciers can converge, making it Glacier
unclear whether they count as one or more bodies. Despite the
All glaciers and complexes
challenges, the results tabulate more than 200,000 glaciers
are shown to scale
and glacier complexes (glaciers that share a common border). Malaspina-
Seward 0 kilometers 250
Seller Glacier and the Antarctic Peninsula Ice Body top the list,
respectively. “The more accurately we can map glacier out- Glacier
0 miles 100 200
lines, the better we can track their melting due to climate
change,” says lead author Ann Windnagel of the nsidc.
Western Canada Arctic Canada South Arctic Canada North Iceland Greenland Periphery Svalbard and Jan Mayen
and U.S. Penny Ice Cap Northern Ellesmere Icefield Vatnajökull Ice Cap Flade Isblink Glacier Complex Asgardfonna/Balderfonna/
Klinaklini Olaf V Glacier Complex
Glacier Complex
Klinaklini Glacier Barnes Ice Cap Skeiðarárjökull

South Dome Tjalfe Glacier
North Slope Glacier Wykeham Glacier South
Russian Arctic
Central Europe Storstraumbreen
Severny Island Caucasus and Middle East
Northern Ice Cap Great Aletsch
Glacier Complex Bezengi Glacier Complex
North Asia
Scandinavia Tavan Bogd Icefield Bezengi Glacier Antarctica
Source: “Which Glaciers Are the Largest in the World?” by Ann Windnagel et al.,
Great Aletsch Glacier
Jostedalsbreen (sub-Antarctic
Icefield Potanin Glacier islands)
Moshnyj Low Latitudes Antarctica
Glacier (mainland)
in J ournal of Glaciology; 2 022 (g lacier shapes and map reference)
South Asia East Vilcanota Complex

Austerdalsisen
Yanong Glacier
Complex Jancapampa Glacier
Alexander
Central Asia South Asia West Island Glacier
Western Kunlun Siachen Glacier Complex Southern Andes Complex
Icefield Yanong Glacier Seller
Southern
Glacier
Patagonian
Icefield
Fedchenko New Zealand
Glacier Tasman Glacier Complex Pío XI Glacier
Siachen Glacier (Brüggen Glacier) Antarctic
Peninsula
Tasman Glacier Ice Body
Thurston Island Glacier No. 1


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JANUARY 2023 SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.

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