Scientific American - July-August 2023

JULY/AUGUST 2023 SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.
COM
The New
Tornado Alley
Insect
Sentience
Bringing
Asteroid
Bits Back
to Earth
WHY
PAR
ARE
ROTS
TAKING
OVER THE
WORLD
J U LY/AU G U S T 2 0 2 3
VO LU M E 3 2 9, N U M B E R 1
26
A N I M A L B E H AV I O R C L I M AT E C H A N G E
26 The Inner Lives of Insects 64 Dangerous Discomfort
Bees and other insects are far more cogni- Extreme heat kills more people in the U.S.
tively complex than previously thought— than hurricanes, flash floods and tornadoes
a revelation that has wide-ranging ethical combined. But people don’t tend to believe
implications. By Lars Chittka it puts them at risk. By Terri Adams-Fuller
P L A N E TA RY S C I E N C E W E AT H E R
34 Asteroid Delivery 70 The New Tornado Alley
A spacecraft will soon return to Earth Tornado outbreaks are migrating eastward
with tiny bits of a space rock. Could these from Texas and Oklahoma toward Tennessee
samples rewrite our solar system’s history? and Kentucky, where people may not be
By Clara Moskowitz prepared. By Mark Fischetti,
E C O LO G Y Matthew Twombly and Daniel P. Huffman
40 Parrot Invasions P U B L I C H E A LT H
These smart, social birds are thriving ON THE COVER
76 Clues, Controversies Parrots such as the Sul-
in cities around the world. and COVID Origins phur-crested Cockatoo
By Ryan F. Mandelbaum Animals and the COVID-causing virus both are flourishing in cities
were at a market in China in early 2020. all over the globe. At
NEUROSCIENCE
least 60 parrot species
50 Synchronized Minds Could that have started the pandemic? have populations well
The brains of social species are By Tanya Lewis outside their natural
strikingly resonant. B
y Lydia Denworth geographical ranges,
S U S TA I N A B I L I T Y
having been introduced
RESOURCES 82 Shake, Chill, Froth, Dilute, Discard to these locations by
58 Undersea Aquifers Two hundred years ago the ice trade humans. For better
Researchers are discovering giant deposits launched America’s cocktail culture. or for worse, these
smart, social birds
of fresh water below the coastal seafloor Today a craft concoction might be
are highly adaptable.
that might someday save dry regions the least sustainable item on the menu. Photograph
from drought. B y Rob L. Evans By Amy Brady by Leila Jeffreys.
Photograph by Levon Biss July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 1

Samantha Cristoforetti/ESA/NASA
Thomas Fuchs
Wenjia Tang
7 8 88
3 From the Editor 22 The Science 92 Reviews

of Health A new history of the deep sea.
4 Letters Adjusting your body’s daily Rediscovering math. Aliens
6 Science Agenda rhythms may reduce cancer risk. claiming self-identity. Tensions
To improve kids’ health, we must By Lydia Denworth on the Russian taiga. The future
invest in better and safer places of water. Glitchy time travel.
24 Q&A
to play. B
y the Editors By Amy Brady
How mathematics can predict
7 Forum and prevent the next pandemic. 96 Observatory
ChatGPT is a wonderful test By Rachel Crowell
Hope will not prevent
taker, but it can’t answer some gun violence.
88 Mind Matters
IQ questions. B y Eka Roivainen
For people with functional By Naomi Oreskes
8 Advances neurological disorder,
care and compassion can 97 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago
Searching for sources of Earth’s
be powerful medicine. By Mark Fischetti
water. A robot hand that works
by touch. The rise of zombie fires. By Z Paige L’Erario
98 Graphic Science
Matter that “freezes” when warmed.
90 The Universe Which countries emit more
20 Meter Our sun may have been born than their fair share of carbon?
The poetic beauty of the in a cluster far, far from here. By Andrea Thompson and
Southern Lights. B
y Paul Brooke By Phil Plait Amanda Montañez
Scientific American (ISSN 0036-8733), Volume 329, Number 1, July/August 2023, published monthly, except for a combined July/August issue, by Scientific American, a division of Springer Nature America, Inc.,
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2 Scientific American, July/August 2023

FROM
Laura Helmuth is editor in chief of Scientific American. THE EDITOR
Follow her on Twitter @laurahelmuth
The Minds by Daniel P. Huffman, shows us how, where and why tornadoes
form and who is most at risk. Turn to page 70.
of Others When you feel “in sync” with someone, that may reflect literal
synchronized patterns in your brains. A new field of collective neu-
roscience is finding surprising similarities in people’s brains as
Have you ever seen a parrot in a strange place? If you hear a they interact, especially in pairs who have a close relationship or
flock of squawky, large and colorful birds and wonder if you’re see- between effective teachers and their students. Our Science of
ing things, you’re not. Various species of parrots have escaped from Health columnist and contributing editor Lydia Denworth partic-
the pet trade and have established thriving colonies in cities around ipated in a brain-scanning experiment to find out more (page 50).
the world—Sarasota, Fla.; New York City; Surprise, Ariz.; Singa- We’ll probably never know exactly how the COVID-causing
pore; Amsterdam; Tel Aviv—they’re everywhere. It’s hard not to virus SARS-CoV-2 began circulating among people, but our health
anthropomorphize. As science writer Ryan F. Mandelbaum explains editor Tanya Lewis on page 76 recaps the evidence for the leading
on page 40, they’re smart, social, adaptable and assertive. They eat theory—a spillover from an infected animal, possibly in a Wuhan
anything and breed anywhere. They’re basically us with wings. market in China—as well as the possibility of a lab leak.
We’re eagerly awaiting the return of nasa’s OSIRIS-REx space- What’s it like to be a bee? Researchers have found that some in
craft in September. If all goes well, it will release its sample canis- sects are surprisingly intelligent. They can count, learn and teach,
ter to blaze through the atmosphere, open a parachute and land even feel pleasure and pain. Behavioral ecologist Lars Chittka on
in Utah carrying a scoop of material from the asteroid Bennu. Our page 26 explores the implications of these intriguing discoveries.
space and physics editor Clara Moskowitz on page 34 narrates how Extreme heat events are the deadliest weather-related disas-
the seven-year mission has progressed and what to expect next. ters in the U.S., but we tend to underestimate the risk. Researcher
Scientists are finding treasure under the seafloor—unexpect- Terri Adams-Fuller on page 64 is experimenting with ways to warn
ed, widespread aquifers of fresh water off coastlines worldwide. and protect people, especially in urban heat island environments
As coastal populations grow and stress existing water supplies, where temperatures rise much higher than in the suburbs.
these deposits could be a good source of drinkable water. Geophys- In a delightful history of how ice inspired the modern cocktail,
icist Rob L. Evans on page 58 shares how he helped to identify these Amy Brady, our Reviews editor, describes how bartenders are now
aquifers and what we know about them so far. trying to change how they make and use ice. We hope you can read
Deadly tornado clusters are becoming more common in the the article on page 82 sipping a refreshing cocktail or mocktail.
U.S., and Tornado Alley is moving eastward. Our sustainability edi- And please enjoy this extra-long summer issue for July and August.
tor Mark Fischetti, with graphics by Matthew Twombly and a map Good luck staying cool and hydrated!
BOARD OF ADVISERS
Robin E. Bell Jennifer A. Francis John Maeda
Research Professor, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Senior Scientist and Acting Deputy Director, Chief Technology Officer, Everbridge
Columbia University Woodwell Climate Research Center Satyajit Mayor
Emery N. Brown Carlos Gershenson Senior Professor, National Center for Biological Sciences,
Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering Research Professor, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
and of Computational Neuroscience, M.I.T., and Visiting Scholar, Santa Fe Institute John P. Moore
and Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia, Harvard Medical School Professor of Microbiology and Immunology,
Alison Gopnik
Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Vinton G. Cerf Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor
Chief Internet Evangelist, Google of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley Priyamvada Natarajan
Professor of Astronomy and Physics, Yale University
Emmanuelle Charpentier Lene Vestergaard Hau
Donna J. Nelson
Scientific Director, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics,
Professor of Chemistry, University of Oklahoma
and Founding and Acting Director, Max Planck Unit for the Harvard University
Lisa Randall
Science of Pathogens Hopi E. Hoekstra
Professor of Physics, Harvard University
Rita Colwell Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Curator of Mammals,
Martin Rees
Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland College Park Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University
Astronomer Royal and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and
and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Astrophysics, Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge
Kate Crawford Co-founder, Urban Ocean Lab, and Co-founder,
Daniela Rus
Research Professor, University of Southern California Annenberg, The All We Can Save Project Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering
and Co-founder, AI Now Institute, New York University Christof Koch and Computer Science and Director, CSAIL, M.I.T.
Nita A. Farahany Chief Scientist, MindScope Program, Allen Institute for Brain Science Meg Urry
Professor of Law and Philosophy, Director, Meg Lowman Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Director,
Duke Initiative for Science & Society, Duke University Director and Founder, TREE Foundation, Rachel Carson Fellow, Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Yale University
Jonathan Foley Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, and Research Professor, Amie Wilkinson
Executive Director, Project Drawdown University of Science Malaysia Professor of Mathematics, University of Chicago
Illustration by Nick Higgins July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 3

LETTERS
[email protected]
“This is one of the flaws of the cornucopians:

they focus on benefits of innovations
enjoyed by some while overlooking negatives
experienced elsewhere.”
richard “dick” fahlman tla’amin nation, british columbia
In my own past research with young I would like to offer a point of confirma-
children, it seemed to me that their think- tion that cornucopianism is misguided. On
ing about numbers was more closely relat- CBC Radio, I recently heard an interview
ed to Giuseppe Peano’s basic concept of describing the catastrophic effects of find-
“successor” than cardinality or quantity. For ing cobalt, a rare mineral needed for batter-
example, if a kindergartener responded ies, in the Democratic Republic of the Con-
“five” to the question “How old are you?” the go. To me, this illustrates one of the flaws of
child would certainly not be able to remem- the cornucopians: they focus on benefits of
ber far back enough to be conscious of their innovations enjoyed by some while con-
March 2023 four birthdays prior to their fifth. To that sciously or unconsciously overlooking neg-
child, the most important thing about “five” atives experienced elsewhere. This is a log-
is that it is the successor of “four.” ical progression of the phenomenon of the
COUNTER ARGUMENTS George E. Gullen III S outhgate, Mich. past several centuries: global capitalism.
In “Born to Count,” Sam Clarke and Jacob Richard “Dick” Fahlman
Beck present several experiments that they THE AUTHORS REPLY: Arguments that Tla’amin Nation, British Columbia
assert demonstrate that humans are born seek to debunk the innate number sense are
with an innate “number sense.” But not one tempting, but they struggle to fully explain NATURAL CAPITAL IDEA
of them indicates that the concept of, say, the evidence. Sanet and Klieber propose In “Use Nature as Infrastructure” [Science
“eightness” is innate. What they instead that young children merely represent in- Agenda, April], the editors lay out the rea-
show is that there is an innate inequality equality and order, respectively, not num- sons why policy makers should be putting
sense, an ability to distinguish which of two ber. Yet neither proposal can explain young nature on the nation’s balance sheet. The
quantities is larger, provided that the dif- children’s ability to add and multiply, as Biden-Harris administration wholeheart-
ference between them is large enough. described in our article. Meanwhile Gullen edly agrees. In January we released the N a-
Joel Sanet v ia e-mail proposes that children merely represent tional Strategy to Develop Statistics for En-
generalized quantity. We were at pains to vironmental-Economic Decisions, a histor-
The various experiments Clarke and Beck explain that the number sense is sensitive ic effort to account for America’s natural
describe demonstrate that young children to properties that are unique to number, assets in our national economic statistics.
have a concept of order. That is, they can however—for instance, the description rel- We’re currently working to quantify
put the elements of a set in order by some ativity isolated by Gottlob Frege. the economic value of our natural capital,
criterion. For example, a child may be able Gullen observes that when children including the ocean and rivers that sup-
to put a golf ball, baseball, softball and soc- learn to use number words such as “one, two, port our recreation and fishing industries,
cer ball in order by size. The experiments three,” they gain a novel appreciation for the the forests that clean our air and water,
do not show that these children can count. successor relation. We agree. But it is a non the minerals that power our technology
Eric Klieber v ia e-mail sequitur to conclude that children don’t rep- economy and drive the electric vehicle
resent number beforehand. Just as you can revolution, and much more. By expanding
It seems that the property of thought that see how far away a tree is (thereby repre- the national economic accounting system
the article describes might better be called senting distance) before you learn to mea- to include natural capital and by includ-
“generalized quantity,” “comparative quan- sure distance precisely with a ruler, you can ing services from ecosystems in benefit-
tity” or “generalized cardinality.” The term see how many trees there are (thereby repre- cost and regulatory analyses, we will more
“number” doesn’t seem appropriate for resenting number) before you learn to count. accurately capture the links between na-
search on young children before they have ture and the economy—which will help
developed either the ability to use a sys- INEQUITABLE INNOVATION guide policy and business decisions.
tem of symbols or words associated with In “The Eight-Billion-Person Bomb” [Ob- Both the Inflation Reduction Act and
specific quantities or cardinalities—or at servatory], Naomi Oreskes argues against the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law include
least before they know the sequence of cornucopianism, a theoretical framework funding for nature-based solutions to cli-
number words “one, two, three . . .” or that asserts that human ingenuity can over- mate change, such as protecting forests
something equivalent. come limited natural resources. and restoring marshes to reduce green-

ESTABLISHED 1845
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Laura Helmuth
MANAGING EDITOR Jeanna Bryner COPY DIRECTOR Maria-Christina Keller CREATIVE DIRECTOR Michael Mrak
house gas emissions, remove carbon from
EDITORIAL
the atmosphere and lower the risks to peo- CHIEF FEATURES EDITOR Seth Fletcher CHIEF NEWS EDITOR Dean Visser CHIEF OPINION EDITOR Megha Satyanarayana
ple from extreme weather. President Joe FEATURES
SENIOR EDITOR, SUSTAINABILITY Mark Fischetti SENIOR EDITOR, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY Madhusree Mukerjee
Biden has taken additional action by sign- 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 executive orders that create a Nation-
NEWS AND OPINION
al Nature Assessment to better under- SENIOR EDITOR, SPACE / PHYSICS Lee Billings ASSOCIATE EDITOR, TECHNOLOGY Sophie Bushwick
SENIOR EDITOR, HEALTH AND MEDICINE Tanya Lewis ASSOCIATE EDITOR, SUSTAINABILITY Andrea Thompson
stand how nature is changing in the U.S.; SENIOR EDITOR, MIND / BRAIN Gary Stix ASSOCIATE EDITOR, HEALTH AND MEDICINE Lauren J. Young
quantify the impacts of climate change in SENIOR OPINION EDITOR Dan Vergano ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR Sarah Lewin Frasier
NEWS REPORTER Meghan Bartels
the federal budget; and promote environ- MULTIMEDIA
mental services and opportunities for lo- CHIEF MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Jeffery DelViscio CHIEF NEWSLETTER EDITOR Andrea Gawrylewski
SENIOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Tulika Bose CHIEF AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Sunya Bhutta
cal economies across the country. MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Kelso Harper ASSOCIATE ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Arminda Downey-Mavromatis
The Biden-Harris administration is ART

SENIOR GRAPHICS EDITOR Jen Christiansen PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR Monica Bradley ART DIRECTOR, ONLINE Ryan Reid
working hard to maintain and invest ASSOCIATE GRAPHICS EDITOR Amanda Montañez ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITOR Liz Tormes
in natural infrastructure. We’re making COPY & PRODUCTION
sure that ecosystem services are con SENIOR COPY EDITORS Angelique Rondeau, Aaron Shattuck ASSOCIATE COPY EDITOR Emily Makowski
MANAGING PRODUCTION EDITOR Richard Hunt PREPRESS AND QUALITY MANAGER Silvia De Santis
sidered at every level of government CONTRIBUTOR S
decision-making. Mariette DiChristina, John Rennie
EDITORS EMERITI
EDITORIAL Rebecca Boyle, Amy Brady, Katherine Harmon Courage, Lydia Denworth, Ferris Jabr,
Eli Fenichel, Heather Tallis, Anna Kuchment, Michael D. Lemonick, Robin Lloyd, Steve Mirsky, Melinda Wenner Moyer,
Solomon Hsiang and Jane Lubchenco George Musser, Ricki L. Rusting, Dava Sobel, Claudia Wallis, Daisy Yuhas
ART Edward Bell, Violet Isabelle Frances, Lawrence R. Gendron, Nick Higgins, Kim Hubbard, Katie Peek, Beatrix Mahd Soltani
White House Office of Science and EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT SUPERVISOR Maya Harty SENIOR EDITORIAL COORDINATOR Brianne Kane
Technology Policy
EDITOR’S NOTE: F enichel was at OSTP SCIENTIFIC A MERIC AN CUS TOM MEDIA
when this letter was submitted. He is now EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Cliff Ransom CREATIVE DIRECTOR Wojtek Urbanek
CHIEF MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Kris Fatsy SENIOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Ben Gershman SENIOR EDITOR Dan Ferber
at Yale University. SENIOR ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Dharmesh Patel SENIOR PUBLISHING MANAGERSamantha Lubey
FUNDAMENTALLY WEIRD PRESIDENT

Kimberly Lau
British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane (1892–
PUBLISHER AND VICE PRESIDENT Jeremy A. Abbate VICE PRESIDENT, COMMERCIAL Andrew Douglas
1964) would have been delighted to read VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCT AND TECHNOLOGY Dan Benjamin VICE PRESIDENT, CONTENT SERVICES Stephen Pincock
“Primordial Soup,” by Clara Moskowitz. It CLIENT MEDIA SOLUTIONS
raises the question of why the universe is HEAD, PUBLISHING STRATEGY Suzanne Fromm MARKETING PROGRAM MANAGER Leeor Cohen
DIRECTORS, INTEGRATED MEDIA Matt Bondlow, Stan Schmidt PROGRAMMATIC PRODUCT MANAGER Zoya Lysak
so floridly strange and weird at all scales. DIRECTOR, CONTENT PARTNERSHIPS Marlene Stewart DIGITAL ADVERTISING OPERATIONS MANAGER Lizzie Ng
At large scales, we see stars, galaxies, PRODUC T & TECHNOLOGY
DIRECTORS Jason Goldstein, Mike Howsden Kenneth Abad, Ruben Del Rio, Haronil Estevez,
ENGINEERS
supernovae and black holes; at medium PRODUCT MANAGERS Ian Kelly, Miguel Olivares Michael Gale, Akwa Grembowski, Stephen Tang
scale, we see molecules, DNA, proteins, DIGITAL PRODUCER Isabella Bruni DATA ANALYST Jackie Clark
molecular machinery and life itself. CONSUMER MARKETING

HEAD, MARKETING Christopher Monello
And now the tiny, pristine sphere of SENIOR COMMERCIAL OPERATIONS COORDINATOR Christine Kaelin
MARKETING COORDINATOR Justin Camera
positive charge of my physics education
ANCILL ARY PRODUC TS
has become a sea of quarks and anti- ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Diane McGarvey
quarks with three valence quarks bobbing CUSTOM PUBLISHING EDITOR Lisa Pallatroni
C O R P O R AT E
on its surface, all held together by gluons.
SENIOR COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER Sarah Hausman
I, too, am delighted. PRINT PRODUC TION
John Coenraads PRODUCTION CONTROLLER Madelyn Keyes-Milch ADVERTISING PRODUCTION MANAGER Michael Broomes
Victoria, British Columbia ADVERTISING PRODUCTION CONTROLLER Michael Revis-Williams
LE T TER S TO THE EDITOR

ERRATA
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“A Hidden Variable behind Entanglement,” Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that we cannot answer each one.
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July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 5

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
Kids Need Better they can move and run around, climb and jump, ride and skate.
Moving more may not prevent a child from becoming over-
Places to Play
weight, but studies show clearly that it helps both physical and men-
tal health. In 2020 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
found, unsurprisingly, that kids’ sports participation increases with
To get children moving more, we must their parents’ incomes: about 70 percent of kids whose families earn
invest in safe areas for outdoor fun more than $105,000 a year participate in sports, but only 51 per-
cent of middle-class kids and 31 percent of children at or below the
By the Editors poverty line do. This disparity hurts people of color the most. More
than 60 percent of white children, for instance, participate in ath-
The rate of childhood obesity in the U.S. has tripled over the letics, but only 42 percent of Black children and 47 percent of His-
past 50 years. But what this trend means for children’s long-term panic children do. Experts blame these problems on the privatiza-
health, and what to do about it (if anything), is not so clear. tion of sports—as public investment in school-based athletics dwin-
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) made waves this dles, expensive private leagues have grown, leaving many kids out.
year by recommending that doctors put obese kids as young as two According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Ser-
years old on intensive, family-oriented lifestyle and behavior plans. vices’ Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, children between
It also suggested prescribing weight-loss drugs to children 12 and ages six and 17 should get at least an hour of moderate to intense
older and surgery to teens 13 and older. This advice marks a shift physical activity every day. Yet only 21 to 28 percent of U.S. kids
meet this target, two government-sponsored surveys
found. The nonprofit Active Healthy Kids Global Alli-
ance evaluates physical activity in American children,
and in 2022 the group gave the U.S. a grade of D–.
Why is it so hard to get kids moving? In addition to
fewer opportunities at school, researchers cite increased
screen time, changing norms around letting kids play
outdoors unsupervised, and a lack of safe places for them
to play outside the home.
New York City, for example, had 2,067 public play-
grounds as of 2019—a “meager” amount for its large pop-
ulation, according to a report from the city comptroller—
and inspectors found hazardous equipment at one quar-
ter of them. In Los Angeles in 2015, only 33 percent of
youths lived within walking distance of a park, accord-
ing to the L.A. Neighborhood Land Trust. Lower-income
neighborhoods tend to have the fewest public play spac-
es, despite often having a high population density. And
although rural areas have more undeveloped outdoor
from the organization’s previous stance of “watch and wait,” and space, they often lack playgrounds, tracks and exercise facilities.
it reflects the AAP’s belief that obesity is a disease and the group’s Kids everywhere need more places to play: trails, skate parks
adoption of a more proactive position on childhood obesity. and climbing walls, gardens and ball fields, bike paths and bas-
Yet the lifestyle programs the AAP recommends are expensive, ketball courts. Robust public funding to build and keep up these
inaccessible to most children and hard to maintain—and the guide- areas is crucial, but other options such as shared-use agreements
lines acknowledge these barriers. Few weight-loss drugs have been can make unused spaces available to the public. Only 10 percent
approved for older children, although many are used off-label. of U.S. schools let people into their playgrounds and schoolyards
They have significant side effects for both kids and adults. And sur- when school’s out, the Trust for Public Land found, and opening
gery, while becoming more common, has inherent risks and few up these spaces would give 5.2 million more children access. “Play
long-term safety data—it could, for instance, cause nutritional def- streets”—residential streets or parking lots that are temporarily
icits in growing children. Furthermore, it’s not clear whether inter- closed for activities—are another affordable way to give kids more
ventions in youngsters help to improve health or merely add to chances to run around.
the stigma overweight kids face from a fat-phobic society. This stig- These opportunities aren’t primarily about changing children’s
ma can lead to mental health problems and eating disorders. waistlines—they’re how we keep childhood healthy and fun.
Rather than fixating on numbers on a scale, the U.S. and coun-
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E
tries with similar trends should focus on an underlying truth: we Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
need to invest in more and safer places for children to play where or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]
6 Scientific American, July/August 2023 Illustration by Luisa Jung

Eka Roivainen is an assessment psychologist at Oulu
FORUM
C OMM E N TA RY O N S C IE N C E IN
University Hospital in Finland. His research interests T H E N E W S FR OM T H E E X PE R T S
include cognitive and personality psychology and the
validity of psychological testing.
AI’s IQ
ChatGPT aced a test but
showed that intelligence cannot
be measured by IQ alone
By Eka Roivainen
ChatGPT is the first nonhuman subject I have ever tested in my

work as a clinical psychologist. I assess the cognitive skills of
humans by administering standardized intelligence tests. After
reading recent articles describing ChatGPT as having impres-
sive, humanlike skills—writing academic essays and fairy tales,
telling jokes, explaining scientific concepts, and composing com-
puter code—I was curious to see how smart ChatGPT was by
human standards.
The text-generating AI system was almost an ideal test tak-
er. It didn’t show test anxiety, poor concentration or a lack of
effort. Nor did it express uninvited, skeptical comments about
intelligence tests and testers like me.
I used the third edition of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence
Scale (WAIS-III) and selected five of its six verbal IQ subtests to college-educated Americans is 113; only 5 percent score 132 or
estimate ChatGPT’s IQ. I started with the WAIS Vocabulary sub- higher. I myself was tested by a peer and did not quite reach the
test because I expected it to be easy for the chatbot, which is level of ChatGPT, mainly because my brief answers lacked detail.
trained on vast amounts of online text. This subtest measures Does this mean the jobs of clinical psychologists and other
word knowledge and verbal concept formation. A typical instruc- professionals threatened by AI? Not yet. Despite its high IQ,
tion might read, “Tell me what ‘gadget’ means.” The test taker ChatGPT fails at tasks that require real humanlike reasoning or
would receive one point for a basic answer such as “a thing like an understanding of the physical and social world. It flubs obvi-
my phone” and two points for something more detailed—for ous answers to riddles such as “What is the first name of the
example, “a small device or tool for a specific task.” ChatGPT aced father of Sebastian’s children?” Its response this past March was:
the subtest, receiving the full two points on each question. “I’m sorry, I cannot answer this question as I do not have enough
The chatbot also earned the maximum score on the Informa- context to identify which Sebastian you are referring to.” Chat-
tion subtest, which covers general knowledge and examines the GPT seemed unable to reason logically and tried to rely on its
subject’s intellectual curiosity, level of education, and ability to vast database of “Sebastian” facts derived from online texts.
learn and remember facts. A typical question in this section might “Intelligence is what intelligence tests measure” is a classical
be, “What is the capital of Ukraine?” And ChatGPT breezed definition by a pioneer of cognitive psychology, Edwin G. Boring.
through the Similarities subtest, which measures abstract reason- This definition is based on the observation that skills needed for
ing and concept-formation skills with questions such as, “In what seemingly diverse tasks such as solving puzzles, defining words,
way are Harry Potter and Bugs Bunny alike?” In this subtest, the doing arithmetic problems and spotting missing items in pictures
chatbot’s tendency to give very detailed, show-offy answers start- are highly correlated. Psychologist Charles Spearman, developer
ed to irritate me. For this question there was no need for Chat of a statistical method called factor analysis, concluded that a gen-
GPT to go beyond the fact that they are both fictional characters, eral factor of intelligence, called a g f actor, must underlie the con-
but it delivered their complete histories of adventures, friends cordance of measurements for various human cognitive skills. IQ
and enemies. Here the “stop generating response” button of the tests such as WAIS are based on this hypothesis.
test software interface turned out to be useful. The combination of ChatGPT’s very high verbal IQ and its
On the Comprehension section, ChatGPT correctly answered amusing failures, however, means trouble for Boring’s definition
questions such as, “If your TV set catches fire, what should you and indicates there are aspects of intelligence that cannot be
do?” And as expected, the chatbot solved all the problems it measured by IQ tests alone. Perhaps my test-skeptic patients
received in the Arithmetic portion, sailing through questions have been right all along.
that required, say, taking the average of three numbers.
So what did it score? On five subtests the verbal IQ of ChatGPT
was 155—better than 99.9 percent of the test takers who make up Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
the U.S. WAIS-III standardization sample. The mean score among or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]
Illustration by Thomas Fuchs July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 7

ADVANCES
Earth’s abundant water makes

an impression from space, but its
origins are not fully understood.

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
• A bandage sparks healing with electricity

• Mathematical tile conundrum finds
a surprising solution
• A full-body experience may make
paintings feel like art
• Primates—including humans—love
to spin around
P L A N E TA RY S C I E N C E
Aqua Earth
Exploring where
Earth got its water
In the last hours o f the last day of Febru-

ary 2021, a 29-pound chunk of space rock
ripped into Earth’s upper atmosphere at
roughly 8.5 miles per second. As it streaked
through the stratosphere, the heat and fric-
tion of entry charred its exterior a deep
black. Bits of soft rock sloughed off in the
blaze, and a huge fireball briefly flared like
a torch in the night sky.
By the time the largest piece of debris
landed abruptly in a driveway in Winch-
combe, England, it weighed only 11.3 ounces.
Scientists snagged the rocky, powdery mate-
rial within 12 hours, making it among the
freshest meteorites ever studied. “It’s pretty
much as pristine as we’re going to get,” says
Ashley King, a planetary scientist at the Nat-
ural History Museum in London.
The Winchcombe meteorite belongs to
a rare class of space rocks known as carbo-
naceous chondrites. These volatile bodies
are helping researchers piece together one
of the biggest puzzles on Earth: where our
planet’s water came from. Researchers think
some may have arrived on meteorites, but
how much is hotly debated. Some argue
that meteorites made it rain; others say their
contribution may have been more like a
drop in the bucket.
Before Earth was a planet, it was a cloud
of dust orbiting the young sun. Through
Samantha Cristoforetti/ESA/NASA
a process called accretion, this dust con-

densed to form pebbles that collided and
stuck together. The impacts produced
increasingly large rocks, which eventually
snowballed into a whole planet.
Early Earth was not the “pale blue dot” of
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter

ADVANCES
today; its temperatures spiked to 3,600 still came from beyond our atmosphere. water surfed into our atmosphere on the solar
degrees Fahrenheit, more than enough to “There’s so much evidence,” Shahar says. wind, which pushes free-range hydrogen and
boil any surface water off into space. Scien- “We can’t argue against it.” oxygen molecules from space toward Earth.
tists once believed this meant the planet The “smoking gun,” King says, is hidden Many scientists maintain, however, that these
would have been bone-dry in its infancy, but in Earth’s hydrogen. Hydrogen exists on molecules’ deuterium ratio is far too low. “It’s
recent research published in N aturesuggests Earth in two stable “flavors,” called isotopes: hard to explain the water budget from those
it might have been significantly wetter. After regular hydrogen, which has a single proton sources,” says Megan E. Newcombe, a petrol-
noting that numerous Earth-like exoplanets for its nucleus, and deuterium, whose ogist at the University of Maryland.
were blanketed with a hydrogen-rich atmo- nucleus is made of one proton and one neu- So where was the Goldilocks isotope
sphere as they accreted, study co-author tron. Water found in the mantle has about ratio? Researchers finally hit the jackpot with
Anat Shahar, a geochemist at the Carnegie 15 percent less deuterium than seawater; asteroids—specifically, raw asteroid chunks
Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., that extra seawater deuterium most likely called chondrites. Carbonaceous chondrites,
and her colleagues simulated Earth’s forma- came from somewhere else. which are named for their carbon content,
tion with such an atmosphere added. They Astronomers initially theorized that deu- are up to 20 percent water. “This doesn’t
discovered that, contrary to previous hypoth- terium-rich water traveled to Earth on com- mean that when you touch the meteorite,
eses, lots of water endured in the virtual ets. Because they exist in the solar system’s it’s wet,” says Maria Valdes, a geologist at
planet’s atmosphere and became encased cold outer reaches, comets are extremely icy; the Field Museum in Chicago. Instead they
inside its rocky mantle, even as magma rivers up to 80 percent of their mass may be water. carry the atomic ingredients for water: a 2:1
flowed freely across the outer crust. But in 2014 data from the European Space hydrogen-to-oxygen ratio.
Although this model suggests that con- Agency’s Rosetta mission showed that many For a 2022 paper in S cience Advances,
siderable water could have been here since comets’ isotopic ratio is way off—they have King and his colleagues analyzed the Winch-
the planet formed, planetary geologists far more deuterium than terrestrial water combe meteorite using spectroscopy.
remain confident that a significant portion does. Scientists proposed another hypothesis: They found that the meteorite’s deuterium-
TECH
signals open up new opportunities because
Electric you’re able to really probe what’s happening
on a molecular level,” Jiang says. “That’s the
Healing key novelty here.” Gao and his colleagues
also added an electroactive gel that releases
New bandage zaps and an anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial drug
medicates chronic wounds when stimulated by an electrode. Another
electrode stimulates the wound directly.
Some wounds won’t heal b y themselves. The team tested the bandage on rodents
These lesions, which include certain dia- with diabetic wounds and found that it
betic ulcers, burns and surgical injuries, condition. The patch can carry out con- accurately detected changes in inflamma-
cause long-term suffering and can linger trolled delivery of two treatments: a drug tory and metabolic states at different stages
indefinitely if not successfully treated. and an electric current. of wound healing. The bandage’s combined
They sometimes become infected and in The bandage builds on previous efforts treatments fully healed rodent wounds
extreme cases turn fatal. to promote healing with electricity. This in two weeks. Each individual treatment
Current chronic wound therapies often process, called electrotherapy, works both achieved at least partial healing within that
require surgery or lead to overuse of anti by attracting immune cells and skin cells time, and untreated animals did not heal.
biotics, which can worsen the problem to the wound and by boosting cell growth Researchers still need to investigate the
of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. “Chronic and division. A study published last year led bandage’s biosensor durability in human
wounds affect tens of millions of people,” says by engineer Yuanwen Jiang, now at the patients’ chronic wounds. “Requirements
California Institute of Technology biomedical University of Pennsylvania, described a for the lifetime of the device are very differ-
engineer Wei Gao. “There’s an urgent need bandage that monitored temperature and ent between rodents and human subjects,”
for personalized wound treatment.” conductivity, using the collected data to Jiang says. “Stability over that extended
For a study published in S cience Advances, control delivery of electrotherapy. period has not been tested yet.”
Gao and his colleagues used rodents to test The new research adds biochemical sens- As they head toward human testing,
California Institute of Technology
a “smart bandage” that could make chronic ing capabilities. In addition to temperature the team is working to improve accuracy
wound healing easier and faster. It consists and pH, the bandage’s biosensor monitors and stability. “We hope to apply this smart
of a stretchable polymer patch that adheres levels of ammonium, glucose, lactate and bandage technology in humans in the next
to the skin, containing medication and a uric acid; together these measurements year,” Gao says. “Hopefully the information
thin layer of electronics that monitors and provide information about inflammation, we get can really benefit people with
wirelessly transmits data about the wound’s infection and stage of healing. “Biochemical chronic wounds.” —Simon Makin

In SCIENCE
We Trust
to-hydrogen
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Deductible for income tax purposes.
ADVANCES
R O B OT I C S
you capture different aspects of the object,” University’s Lerrel Pinto, who studies robots’
Sight Unseen Wang says. In this case, the robot’s task was
to rotate items placed in its palm.
interactions with the real world.
Digging into what the robot hand per-
The researchers first ran simulations to ceives, Wang and his colleagues found that
Robot rotates complex objects
collect a large volume of touch data as a it can re-create the entire object’s form from
using only touch virtual robot hand practiced rotating objects, touch data, informing its actions. “This shows
including balls, irregular cuboids and cylin- that there’s sufficient information from touch-
Many robots t rack objects by “sight” as ders. Using binary contact information ing that allows reconstructing the object
they work with them, but optical sensors (“touch” or “no touch”) from each sensor, shape,” Wang says. He and his team are set
can’t take in an item’s entire shape when the team built a computer model that to present their handiwork in July at an inter-
it’s in the dark or partially blocked from determines an object’s position at every national conference called Robotics: Science
view. Now a new low-cost technique lets step of the handling process and moves and Systems.
a robotic hand “feel” an unfamiliar object’s the fingers to rotate it smoothly and stably. Pinto wonders whether the system
form—and deftly handle it based on this Next they transferred this capability to would falter at more intricate tasks. “During
information alone. operate a real robot hand, which success- our experiments with tactile sensors,” he
University of California, San Diego, robot- fully manipulated previously unencountered says, “we found that tasks like unstacking
icist Xiaolong Wang and his team wanted objects such as apples, tomatoes, soup cans cups and opening a bottle cap were signifi-
to find out if complex coordination could be and rubber ducks. Transferring the com- cantly harder—and perhaps more useful—
achieved in robotics using only simple touch puter model to the real world was relatively than rotating objects.”
data. The researchers attached 16 contact easy because the binary sensor data were Wang’s group aims to tackle more com-
sensors, each costing about $12, to the palm so simple; the model didn’t rely on accu- plex movements in future work as well as to
and fingers of a four-fingered robot hand. rately simulated physics or exact measure- add sensors in places such as the sides of
These sensors simply indicate if an object is ments. “This is important since modeling the fingers. The researchers will also try
touching the hand or not. “While one sensor high-resolution tactile sensors in simulation adding vision to complement touch data for
doesn’t catch much, a lot of them can help is still an open problem,” says New York handling complicated shapes. —Ananya
Binghao Huang
Robot hand manipulates an unfamiliar

object using simple touch sensors.

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mathematicians would have predicted.
Simply Smith e-mailed Craig Kaplan, a com-
puter scientist at the University of Water- Scan to learn more
Infinite
Infinite loo in Ontario, who recognized the shape’s
potential. Although the mosaic it created
New “einstein” tile intrigues seemed not to have a repeating pattern,
the math world the duo needed to mathematically prove it
never would—even if the mosaic were infi infi--
David Smith, a math hobbyist in York- nitely large. They enlisted software devel-
shire, England, has discovered a 13-sided oper Joseph Samuel Myers and University
shape that eluded mathematicians for of Arkansas mathematician Chaim Good-
decades. The craggy, hatlike shape is man-Strauss, who had both worked with
called an “einstein,” based on the German tiling and combinatorics in the past.
for “one stone.” If you used einstein- The researchers used two methods
shaped tiles to cover your bathroom flfloor— oor— to prove they had a genuine einstein on
or any flflat
at surface, even if infiinfinitely
nitely large— their hands. First, they showed that the hat-
they would fifitt together perfectly but never like tiles, when arranged together, formed
form a repeating pattern. For decades specificc kinds of shapes. Adding more
four specifi
mathematicians have been hunting for tile tiles forms even bigger versions of those
shapes like these that can form only non- same shapes, or “supertiles;” the more tiles
repeating arrangements, called aperiodic added, the bigger the supertiles become.
tilings. They started with sets of many Mathematicians have proved that this hier-
different
diff erent tiles: the fifirst
rst set, discovered in archical structure means the tiling can’t be
1964, required 20,426 distinct tiles, which split into repeating sections and thus must
simplified
was later simplifi ed to 103. By 1974 mathe- be aperiodic. For the second proof, the
matician Roger Penrose had found two tile team invented a new method that could
shapes that, when combined in a mosaic, compare the hat tilings with the nonperi-
David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan and Chaim Goodman-Strauss (CC BY-SA 4.0)
never formed a repeating pattern. odic tilings of better-known shapes called

But was it possible to form an aperi- polyiamonds. In the process, the team also
odic tiling with tiles of only one o
neshape— showed that one could make an infi infinite
nite
the hypothetical einstein? Doris Schatt- Schatt number of similar einsteins by tweaking
schneider, a retired mathematician affi affili-
li- some of the sides’ lengths.
ated with Moravian University with exper- Even with these proofs, mathematicians
tise in tessellations, had been skeptical haven’t yet formulated a broader theory
about the likelihood of a true einstein ever for what makes this simple hat shape so
being discovered. “That’s why it was so special. “This is still very mysterious,” says
startling that not only was this found, but mathematician Rachel Greenfeld of the
it’s such a simple tile,” she says. “To me, it’s Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,
a total anomaly.” The tile Smith discovered N.J. There may be more classes of einstein
in November 2022, while he was experi- tiles out there, waiting to be discovered, but
menting with diff different
erent shapes using a soft- the geometric hat isn’t revealing any clues,
ware called PolyForm Puzzle Solver, was says Marjorie Senechal, a retired mathema-
astonishing in its elegance. Made up affiliated
tician affi liated with Smith College: “These Scientific American is a registered trademark
of right-angled kites, it was nothing like the things you stumble upon.” of Springer Nature America, Inc.
gnarly, complicated kind of shape many Manon Bischoff
—Manon
— Bischoff and Allison Parshall
July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com

oneThirdNBTemplate.indd Scientifi
20 cAmerican.com 13 9:38 AM
2/28/23
ADVANCES
S U S TA I N A B I L I T Y Food Loss and Waste by Country
Waste Not The chart below shows how much food was lost and wasted in 2017 in a sampling of countries.
Million Tons
0 500 1,000 1,500 2,000 2,500 3,000 3,500 4,000
How food waste
threatens the planet Nigeria
India Nigeria, India, the U.S. and Brazil
are among the top producers of
Around a third o f human-generated U.S.
food waste. China is also a major
greenhouse gas emissions comes from the Brazil contributor but is not shown
global food system, and lost or wasted because of data collection issues.
Russia
food is known to contribute some
amount—but it has never been clear to South Africa
exactly what degree. Now, by following Portugal
specific foods through their entire life Poland
cycle, researchers have determined just
Netherlands The Netherlands and Malaysia both fall around the
how much this wasted food adds to emis- middle of the range between the maximum and
sions through phases such as harvest, Malaysia median of all countries for which data are available.
transportation and disposal. Burkina Faso
For a study in N ature Food, X
unchang Dominican
Fei of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological Republic
Bolivia In Bolivia and Malawi, food loss and waste values are around the median among
University and his colleagues used 164 all countries for which data are available. Many of the countries with smaller
countries’ food supply data from 2001 to Malawi values are island nations and others with relatively small populations.
2017 to estimate emissions across 54 food
commodities and four categories: cereals Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Food Type
and pulses; meat and animal products; veg- The chart below shows how much greenhouse gas is produced on average during each step of the food supply
etables and fruits; and root and oil crops. chain for each category of food commodity. These values apply to the food supply chain as a whole and are not
Roughly a third of food is lost during specific to food loss and waste.
harvest, storage and transportation or is 140 Meat and The activities involved in processing animal products are extremely
Kilograms of CO2 Equivalent per Kilogram of Food
wasted by consumers. The team found this animal products energy intensive. For example, processing beef creates 13 times more
food was responsible for greenhouse gases carbon emissions than processing tomatoes does.
equivalent to 9.3 billion metric tons of car- Consumer Much of consumer-based emissions could be avoided if people bought
120
bon dioxide—about half the global food and served smaller quantities of food and produced less waste.
system’s total emissions—in 2017. Four
Retail
countries (China, the U.S., India and Brazil)
contributed 44.3 percent, mainly owing to 100
their dietary habits and large populations. Wholesale
Of the four food categories, meat and ani-
Source: “Cradle-to-Grave Emissions from Food Loss and Waste Represent Half of Total Greenhouse Gas
mal products were the source of almost 80 Processing Storage, processing, wholesale and retail-based emissions primarily
three quarters of emissions that occurred come from electricity used for cooling, lighting and ventilation.
Emissions from Food Systems,” by Jingyu Zhu et al., in Nature Food, Vol. 4; March 2023 (data)
during the supply-chain phase for food that
was ultimately lost. Traders Most of the emissions associated with harvest and transport come
60
from fuel consumption.
The study considered emissions across
nine postfarming stages, which vary among Transport Roots and
regions—for instance, developed countries’ oil crops
40
advanced waste-treatment technologies Storage
can create fewer emissions. Such intricate Other foods
details show how “different countries should Cereals and
20 Producer
set different targets for [food loss and waste] pulses
reductions,” Fei says—such as reducing Vegetables
Harvest and fruits
meat production in some areas, and switch-
ing from landfills to anaerobic digestion or 0
composting processes in others.
Food systems expert Prajal Pradhan of years—which Pradhan says wouldn’t be carded by consumers, and low- and mid-
the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact enough to limit global warming but would dle-income countries could prioritize avoid-
Research in Germany notes that the United be a start. Based on this study, he says, ing food loss during harvesting, processing,
Nations Sustainable Development Goals emissions could decrease if “high-income storage and transport.”
aim to halve food waste in the coming countries could focus on saving food dis- — Deepa Padmanaban
14 Scientific American, July/August 2023 Graphics by Jade Khatib

Emboldening
the Mind
Since 1845
Unlimited Discoveries.
Unlimited Knowledge.
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P S YC H O LO G Y
“touching” and “moving” experiences—and
Feeling It to a participant categorizing a work as art.
“Even the thrills from a haunted house are
“Art” may be in the ultimately experienced as positive, as we
body of the beholder experience our hearts racing while we know
we are safe,” says study lead author Lauri
If you feel d
eeply stirred by Edward Hop-
deeply Nummenmaa, a researcher at the University
Nighthawks but
per’s painting Nighthawks ut unmoved
b of Turku in Finland. “Art likely exploits similar
passing by a real-world diner late at night, it mechanisms for making us feel good. It acti-
may be because of what’s happening inside vates our autonomic nervous system, and
your body. New research published in C og-
Cog- in the peace and quiet of an art gallery this
nition and Emotion ssuggests
uggests that bodily sen- increased bodily activity feels good to us.”
sations aren’t just a by-product of art’s emo- The researchers also found the strength
tional impact but a key pathway for experi- of both bodily sensations and emotion was
encing something as “art” in the first place. highest for artworks depicting people, dove-
In a study involving 1,186 participants and tailing with the theory that seeing others’
336 visual art pieces, researchers found that actions may trigger sensorimotor mirroring
the strength of emotional experience trig- effects. Although the study used only subjec-
gered by an artwork correlated with the tive reports and didn’t measure objective
strength of bodily sensations reported while physiological changes in the body, the data
viewing it. Emotions were measured using suggest that art perception is an interocep-
subjective reports, and viewers separately tive process: it involves awareness of the
marked on a virtual human figure where and body’s internal state. Art may “get under our
how they felt physical sensations. Eye track- skin” to shift perception.
ing and participant surveys, meanwhile, “Some forms of art may help subtly shift
gauged viewers’ interest in the paintings and attention to our bodies, depending on the
whether they considered them to be art. artistic scene or subject, even to specific
Bodily feelings’ magnitude correlated regions like the chest or heart,” says neurosci-
with both the strength of emotional experi- entist Jennifer MacCormack, who leads Uni-
ence and the evaluation of a piece as art. versity of Virginia’s Affect & Interoception Lab.
Sensations were most prominent when par- This could then influence how much we
ticipants said they felt empathy (the most incorporate the body into our emotional
B. O’Kane/Alamy Stock Photo
commonly reported positive emotion) and experience, she adds. Previous research has
when they cited “touching” and “moving” linked aesthetic perception of art to the
emotional experiences. brain’s insular cortex, which mediates intero- Scientific American is a registered trademark
of Springer Nature America, Inc.
Negative emotions were uncommon, but ception. Art may be in the whole body—not
reports of “sadness” were also linked to just the eye—of the beholder. — —SSaga
aga Briggs

ADVANCES
A N I M A L B E H AV I O R
Why We Spin
Primates may play with reality
by twirling around
In 2011 M arcus Perlman saw a YouTube

video of a gorilla named Zola spinning in
circles while playing in a water puddle at
the Calgary Zoo in Alberta, Canada. In
2017 he noticed Zola again, this time in
a viral video from the Dallas Zoo in Texas.
Zola whirled in a blue plastic kiddie pool
as the water splashed up around him.
Young mountain
Perlman, a lecturer in English language
gorilla hangs on a vine.
and linguistics at the University of Birming-
ham in England, had researched communi- movement disrupts humans’ vestibular sys- come to a stop, Hobaiter says—but we
cative gesturing, and the videos sparked his tem, which senses changes in motion, ori- don’t know whether they enjoy and seek
curiosity about this form of great ape be- entation, position and body speed. We out that feeling.
havior. He went on to find around 400 more might feel dizzy or light-headed, get a head And as Annika Paukner, a comparative
clips of spinning apes. “They spin pirouettes rush, and act elated or giggly. Perhaps for psychologist at Nottingham Trent University
on their feet; they do backflips; they roll on this reason, spinning is a staple of children’s in England, notes, “even if spinning leads to
their side; they do somersaults forward; they play. Human children indulge in spinner altered mental states in humans, that doesn’t
roll down hills, spin on ropes,” Perlman says. bowls at playgrounds and flock to merry- mean that apes will experience the same
Adriano Lameira, a primatologist and go-rounds and carnival rides that spin them kind of altered mental states.” Dogs, horses
evolutionary psychologist at England’s Uni- through the air. For many autistic people, and some birds also spin, she points out, and
versity of Warwick, was also fascinated by on- spinning serves as self-stimulation. In some by focusing only on great apes, we could be
line videos of apes spinning. He and Perlman orders of Sufism, a branch of Islam, dervish- missing other explanations for this behavior.
co-authored a paper in Primates that focuses es spin in a form of religious dancing that in- The researchers say their next steps could
on rope twirls. In the films they analyzed, duces a spiritual and trancelike state. “Spin- evaluate whether spinning is more common
orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bono- ning is proactively tapped for rapture,” La- in gorillas compared with other apes and in-
bos hung by their hands from ropes or vines meira and Perlman write in their study. vestigate twirling preferences by sex or age.
and turned through the air at dizzying speeds. The speed of the apes’ rope spinning was They are also intrigued by the origins of spin-
At first glance, such spinning might look comparable to that of pirouettes in profes- ning. “I can imagine this being sort of elabo-
like a stereotypy: repetitive movement that sional ballet, the turning of Ukrainian hopak rated over millennia and over the course of
some animals engage in when bored. But to dancers, Sufi dervishes and suspended spin- human evolution,” Perlman says. “That basic
Lameira, the apparent playfulness made it ning-rope acts by circus artists. The apes drive to seek altered perception and altered
seem instead like an enriching and creative spun at 1.43 revolutions per second on aver- mental states could be common to our pri-
activity. The apes seemed to lose themselves age, and the fastest speed they reached was mate cousins.” Many primate species eat
in their movements. They would let go of the 3.3 turns per second. These are speeds that fermented foods, and it’s possible they get
rope and topple over from unsteadiness— can induce physiological “highs” in humans. a bit soused, researchers have documented.
and then get up and spin again and again. Humans seek out altered mental states to Both spinning and consuming ferment-
Cat Hobaiter, a primatologist at the Uni- lose their senses of self and time, says Marc ed fruit relate to larger questions about how
versity of St. Andrews in Scotland, who Wittmann, a psychologist at the Institute for animals amuse themselves and what their
wasn’t involved in the study, says she has Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental pastimes might say about what it’s like to
encountered plenty of spinning in wild Health in Germany and author of the 2018 be a gorilla or a chimp. Seeing apes spin
chimpanzees and gorillas. “It’s one of their book A ltered States of Consciousness: Experi- raises the possibility that nonhuman pri-
favorite kinds of play when they’re young,” ences Out of Time and Self. “When we are mates might indulge in the delight of ma-
she says. Gorillas in particular “literally spin present-oriented, without past and future nipulating their normal perceptual states,
Ibrahim Suha Derbent/Getty Images
themselves until they kind of drop and fall rumination, we feel much better.” similarly to humans who change conscious-
over from dizziness,” Hobaiter adds. But Perlman says it’s a big jump to ness through drugs or physical activities. “It
In their paper, Lameira and Perlman imagine gorillas experiencing a psychedelic highlights the subjectivity of experience,”
document the spinning and speculate about or spiritual experience, even if we share Perlman says, “and it opens up that maybe
what that drive to spin means in our closest physiology suggestive of similar physical there are different perspectives on reality—
animal relatives. Spinning turns the world effects. The world probably keeps spinning not that they are necessarily thinking deeply
into a blur for apes—including humans. The around these primates when they finally about this difference.” —Shayla Love

E C O LO G Y
Laurier University “In terms of emissions
Zombie Fires and her colleagues

used these data to
and ecological impact,”
Baltzer says, “it may
An unexpected culprit keeps choose nine overwin- be a relatively good-
ter sites for a closer news story.”
wildfires alive belowground
look at the soil and veg- Still, researchers don’t
etation involved. yet know how zombie fires
Some wildfires just won’t die—even Their results, presented affect global emissions. “If it
though they’re buried. Although tempera- at the General Assembly of the burns underground in part of a tree,
tures and shortening days limit wildfire European Geosciences Union in April, it’s not releasing ancient carbon,” says
activity at the end of the Northern Hemi- were a surprise. Contrary to the hypothesis Thomas Smith, who studies environmental
sphere’s summer, “zombie” fires can smol- that overwinter fires sustain themselves geography at the London School of Econom-
der underground all winter and reemerge in carbon-rich, organic soil layers known as ics and Political Science and was not involved
in spring. In what investigators say is the first peat, the researchers learned that most of in the study. But he notes that peat fires burn-
field study to examine how this phenome- them had burned in drier, upland sites with ing long-buried carbon do, worryingly, exist
non works and its ecological impacts, they dense tree populations; the find suggested elsewhere, including Siberia. There, smoke
found that the stealthy flames draw nourish- fires had instead smoldered underground rising from the snow in winter has evoked
ment from a surprising subterranean source. in woody tree roots. “This is not what we concern about peat-driven zombie fires.
A satellite-based study published in 2021 were expecting,” Baltzer says. The hot, dry conditions that lead to big
revealed that zombie or “overwinter” fires The discovery means carbon emissions wildfire seasons also support overwinter
are becoming more common in Arctic for- from these underground fires may be lower fires. And such fires may themselves be part
ests, probably because of climate change. than previously thought, and they may also of a positive-feedback cycle, reigniting to
It also demonstrated that sites of overwinter have less of an effect on soil health and create even more fires in the next year.
fires in Alaska and northern Canada could be plant regeneration. Additionally, because Closely examining more sites will help scien-
identified via visual clues in satellite images these fires did not reach the forest canopy— tists determine what conditions support
(the locations were later confirmed by fire- instead felling trees by burning their roots— zombie fires, supporting efforts toward more
fighters on the ground). For the new research, less plant material overall combusted than reliable detection and effective firefighting,
biologist Jennifer Baltzer of Canada’s Wilfrid in many single-season fires the team visited. the researchers say. —Rachel Berkowitz
COGNITION tion: one with a hard limit on the fine numer-
Seeing
ical differences people can perceive and one
without. They found their data fit better with
the limitless model, suggesting that even with
Numbers numbers as high as 100 versus 101, the task
would become harder but not impossible.
Where is the line between The implications go far beyond number
knowing and guessing? Which has 50 dots, and which has 51? sense, Sanford says, because the study
400 participants pairs of dot groups for just builds on a theory describing perception
At a quick glance, could you tell the dif- one second. On easy practice trials such as across many different stimuli: the work sug-
ference between a group of 20 dots and 30 versus 20 dots, participants chose the gests that when deciding which of two cir-
a group of 30? What about 20 and 21? larger group correctly almost every time. For cles has a larger area, for example, a person
It seems like there must be a point at 20 versus 21 dots, they were right nearly wouldn’t be truly guessing unless the circles
which you’d simply be guessing, but recent 60 percent of the time. And even in the hard- were exactly the same size.
research suggests otherwise. est comparison—50 versus 51 dots—partici- This theory predicts that with enough
Given enough opportunities, people pants consistently answered correctly on 51.3 trials, an individual will perform above
consistently perform better than chance percent of trials. It’s a small but statistically chance on even the hardest perceptual
Emily M. Sanford/University of California, Berkeley
on this kind of task even when the numeri- significant difference, the researchers say. tasks. But there is intuitive appeal, even
cal difference is extremely small, according “If you are asked to make a judgment among some scientists in the field, to the
to a study published in the J ournal of about which of two groups contains more idea that humans have a perceptual limit.
Numerical Cognition. stuff, and you have a little bit of intuitive feel- “We can’t tell that 51 is greater than 50, so
“It’s a very simple question with a really ing that one of them is more than the other, we sort of forget that the perceptual system
interesting answer,” says University of you should trust your gut,” says study lead is doing that,” Yousif says. “I see it as a land-
Pennsylvania psychologist Sami Yousif, author Emily M. Sanford, a cognitive scientist mark paper in the sense that it really lays
who was not involved in the study. “I love now at the University of California, Berkeley. bare some of the assumptions that have,
very elegant, very simple results like this.” The researchers tested two mathemati- in my opinion, plagued this literature for
The research team showed more than cal frameworks for thinking about this situa- a while.” —Nora Bradford
Illustration by Thomas Fuchs July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 17

ADVANCES
NEUROSCIENCE
individual activated neurons clearly visible. For decades scientists have mapped
The more detailed a brain connection neurons by observing fruit flies with inserted
Science map (called a connectome) is, the better it

helps scientists understand how nervous
genes that produce a yeast protein called
Gal4 when neurons carry out certain
in Images systems work. “The brain is a giant neural

circuit,” says Geoffrey Meissner, a Howard
processes. Gal4 activates another added
gene that can produce pigment proteins
By Jordan Kinard Hughes researcher and lead author of the visible by microscope—letting researchers
new mapping study in e Life. I f you want to see what brain parts are involved when
know how the brain works, he says, “you the organism does anything from flying
Everybody wants t o get inside a fruit fly’s have to know the map of the circuit.” to tasting food. Unfortunately, it’s hard
head. These insects’ simple brains are But even in a 200,000-neuron fly brain— to discern individual cells when a slew
invaluable to neuroscientists studying compared with a human’s 86 billion to 120 of neurons activate at once.
information processing and task manage- billion neurons—it can be difficult to get The FlyLight researchers developed a
ment, and a new, unprecedentedly de images of single brain cells and their method they named MultiColor FlpOut, in
tailed map of fruit fly brain connections shapes. Lewis & Clark College biologist which various inserted pigment-producing
now makes that easier. After years of Tamily Weissman-Unni, whose work genes interact with an enzyme called Flp to
work on their FlyLight initiative, research focuses on cataloging brain circuits, notes label activated neurons with different colors
ers at the Howard Hughes Medical Insti- that a neuron’s individual shape holds key and levels of pigmentation. Scientists then
tute in New York have compiled photo- information about the kinds of input it assembled these samples like a puzzle to
Geoffrey Meissner/FlyLight
graphs of more than 74,000 fruit fly receives and the role it plays. Likening this map the respective chains of individual
brains—detailed down to the individual to examining a freeway system, she says, cells that activate during certain activities—
neuron—from flies in over 5,000 geneti- “We know where the big, huge pathways and to build their impressive new database.
cally modified lineages. This image shows are, but your question might be about what To see more, visit scientificamerican.com/
one such fly brain, with brain lobes and an individual car does on that freeway.” science-in-images

Q UA N T U M P H Y S I C S
but they additionally have orderly, rippled N E W S A R O U N D T H E WO R L D
Reverse structures, says study co-author Fran

cesca Ferlaino, an experimental physicist Quick Hits
Freeze at the University of Innsbruck and the
Institute for Quantum Optics and Quan-
By Allison Parshall
Quantum fluid freezes tum Information, both in Austria.

AUSTRALIA
when heated In 2021 Ferlaino and her team found
Officially the last known Tasmanian tiger, or thyla-
that warming an ultracool quantum fluid
cine, died in 1936, but the species’ potential survival
To melt a solid, heat it. To freeze a liquid, of the magnetic rare earth element dys-
has become an urban legend. By analyzing 271
cool it. It’s simple—except when it isn’t, prosium could solidify it into a supersol-
reported sightings deemed relatively credible,
because quantum mechanics can flip id’s distinctive peaks. But given such an
researchers found the marsupial might have lasted
even the intuitive logic of melting and unexpected result, “we had to convince
decades longer than previously thought—but is
freezing on its head. ourselves with the theory that this is
probably indeed extinct today.
Physicists recently showed in N ature actually something that makes sense,”
Communicationshow heating a quantum says study co-author Thomas Pohl of BRAZIL
fluid—in this case, a very cold gas of mag- Denmark’s Aarhus University. The endangered frog X enohyla truncatamay be the
netic atoms—can actually “freeze” it into The team now shows that this coun- first known amphibian pollinator. Most frogs are
an orderly state called a supersolid. This terintuitive behavior arises from a strange carnivores, but after finding plant matter in X
. trun-
unexpected behavior was first observed synergy between heat and the natural cata’s guts, researchers observed the frogs slurping
in 2021, but scientists couldn’t explain it tendency of magnetic atoms to pile up. nectar from milk fruit trees before hopping off cov-
until now. At the atomic level, temperature is ered in pollen.
“This paper manages to introduce motion: it measures the energy of parti- CANADA
some new theoretical description, which cles’ random movements. Heating some- A Manhattan-size mass of driftwood floating in the
now successfully describes experimental thing is thus a bit like shaking it, injecting Mackenzie River stores 3.1 million metric tons of car-
observations people didn’t understand random thermal fluctuations that in this bon, new research shows. Arctic conditions can pre-
before,” says physicist Tim Langen of case nudge atoms out of the quantum serve such buildups of dead trees for centuries, but
the University of Stuttgart, who was not fluid’s unified, blurred-together state. this process may be disrupted as permafrost thaws.
involved in the new study. Because they’re so magnetic, these break- CHAD
Quantum particles, which are both away particles interact strongly with the A trail camera revealed the first lion seen in 20
particles and waves, can be imagined as quantum fluid and encourage dysprosium years in Chad’s Sena Oura National Park. Poaching
clouds of probability. The odds of finding atoms’ inherent inclination to stack. This has wiped out lion populations, but this lioness
a particle at any point in the cloud at a influence changes the entire quantum flu- was healthy and in her prime, raising hope for the
given moment are linked to the particle’s id’s wave function, pushing it into a super- species’ survival in the region.
wave behavior, described by a formula solid state with regularly spaced peaks. FRENCH POLYNESIA
called a wave function. In a quantum fluid, “How weird and counterintuitive this Conservationists released 5,000 P artulatree snails
particles smear together into a single is—this is what I like finding as a physi- on the islands of Tahiti and Moorea, the largest
entity whose collective behavior is gov- cist,” says study co-author Juan Sánchez- release to date of an “extinct in the wild” species.
erned by just one wave function. Typically Baena of the Polytechnic University of The snails, which keep the forest healthy by eating
they are also “superfluids”—they flow Catalonia and Aarhus University. “If you decaying plants and fungi, were originally displaced
without friction. find all the things that you are expected by human introduction of predator species.
Supersolids have similar properties, to find, things get boring.” —Elise Cutts
PACIFIC OCEAN
Coastal animals such as jellyfish and sponges are
surviving and reproducing on plastic trash in the
northern Pacific Ocean’s Great Pacific Garbage
Patch, thousands of miles from shore, researchers
found. They worry the floating debris could carry
these organisms to new shores as invasive species.
UGANDA
As climate change threatens two of the world’s
most popular coffee varieties, a native Ugandan
Oliver Hoffmann/Alamy Stock Photo
type known as excelsa may offer an alternative. The

trees take longer to mature but are more heat-resis-
tant, and farmers are now exporting the aromatic
beans to the world.
For more details, visit www.ScientificAmerican.com/

jul2023/advances
This ferrofluid forms peaks remi-

niscent of a quantum “supersolid.” July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 19
METER
Edited by Dava Sobel
The Southern Lights

at –50° Fahrenheit
—a zeitgeber
When winds were bearable, we sought bliss,
sat, admired the aurora australis
as an escape from our blackest abyss.
We gazed up into rarefied air, clear
and pristine in every echelon,

an atmospheric phenomenon,
solar wind collisions of protons
and electrons high in the exosphere.
Who needs Parthenon or Birth of Venus

when blue lights swirl low, pink coronas kiss
clouds, neon greens arc, deep reds stripe across
stars. We invoke healing through kinesis.

Paul Brooke is a professor of English at Grand View University
in Des Moines, Iowa. His five books of poetry include Sirens and
Seriemas ( Brambleby, 2015). As a former biologist and naturalist,
he co-authored Jaguars of the Northern Pantanal: Panthera onca
at the Meeting of the Waters (Academic Press, 2020).
Lake Vostok
—a zeitgeber
Frantic call sent us to the Pole of Cold.
We maneuvered slowly, sought a controlled
approach through shifting drifts in our Hägglund.
At camp, they drilled to 4,000 meters
to contact a subglacial lake and wrangle

accretion ice and microbe samples,
millions and millions of years old, fragile.
After, we warmed ourselves near space heaters.
We could be on Europa, on untold

frozen moons; sort unique species; unfold
the quilt of the cosmos; piece blocks; hold
no bias; embrace the raw edge, uncontrolled.
Author’s Note: The rhyme scheme for this form that I invented
James Stone/Alamy Stock Photo
(based on the term “zeitgeber,” meaning an external cue that affects

the way the body is regulated by circadian rhythms or time cycles)
is aaabcccbaaaa and represents three months with sun above the
horizon, one month of twilight, three months of darkness, one month
of twilight, and four months of sun above the horizon.

THE SCIENCE Lydia Denworth is an award-winning science journalist and
OF HEALTH contributing editor for Scientific American. S he is author
of Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power
of Life’s Fundamental Bond ( W. W. Norton, 2020) and several
other books of popular science.
Cancer and the agency showing that shift work is a probable carcinogen.
Now there is even more evidence involving other types of
Our Body Clock

malignancies, including liver, lung and colorectal cancers, from a
spate of new studies. “We’re starting to understand the reasons
these things happen,” says Selma Masri, a circadian biologist at
Disrupting circadian rhythms is tied to the University of California, Irvine, who has shown how circadi-
cancer. Bolstering them might prevent it an disruption pushes colon cancer progression by interfering with
the way certain genes are expressed.
By Lydia Denworth The cancer connection comes about through several mecha-
nisms. Circadian disruption affects metabolic pathways, the chem-
I usually get up by 7 a.m. and am in bed by 10 p.m. I tend to eat ical reactions that produce energy in the body. It tampers with
meals at the same times of day, too. This may sound a little dull, immune function. It also compromises the fidelity of DNA repair
but it’s essential for my productivity. It’s also a schedule that rare- in cells. Adult human cells divide every 18 to 24 hours, and one
ly disrupts my body clock. And a steady clock, it turns out, just function of the circadian clock is to tell cells to do that at night
might help me and many other people avoid cancer and some oth- to avoid DNA damage from sunlight. “When the clock gets dis-
er diseases, according to new research. rupted, cells don’t know when to divide,” says circadian biologist
What I call a body clock really means circadian rhythms, from Satchidananda Panda of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
the Latin for “about” and “day.” These are the body’s internal bio- “They can divide faster and become a tumor.”
logical pacemakers, physiological fluctuations that help us adjust Circadian disruption doesn’t only occur in shift workers. It
to the phases of a 24-hour day by synchronizing with environmen- happens when we consistently don’t get a good night’s sleep—sci-
tal cues such as light, dark, temperature and food intake. These entists say this can mean waking up for two or three hours
rhythms affect sleeping and waking, feeding and fasting, endo- between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. at least once a week. Wakeful episodes
crine cycles, immune function, and cell growth. can be caused by jet lag, staying out late, or looking at blue-light-
For some time now epidemiological studies of night-shift work- emitting phone screens—which mimic daylight—at night. When
ers have linked disruptions in circadian rhythms to cancer and and what we eat also cues our rhythms, just as light and dark do,
other diseases. Much of the evidence concerned breast cancer and so add snacking at midnight to the list of things to avoid.
to a lesser extent prostate cancer. Duration of shift work made a The growing understanding of circadian rhythms also could
difference—nurses who worked night shifts for up to 30 years were offer help through what’s known as chronotherapy. Certain che-
at moderately increased risk for breast cancer compared with those motherapy treatments, for example, are more effective when giv-
who did shorter stints, and those who worked such shifts for more en in accordance with a patient’s rhythms. Now researchers are
than 30 years had the highest risk. In 2019 the World Health exploring differences in the timing of radiation therapy. Drugs
Organization reaffirmed and updated a research statement from that bolster natural rhythms are also under investigation.
Shift work is critical and not going away, says Katja
Lamia, a circadian biologist at Scripps Research, but
there might be ways of reducing its toll on the body. Her
research suggests that subtle increases in body temper-
ature might be an important factor in circadian disrup-
tion. If that turns out to be right, Lamia says, “we can use
noninvasive monitoring of body temperature in shift
workers to evaluate who’s at risk and take a personalized
scheduling approach.”
For those who don’t work at night, changing some
routines might be enough. A good night’s sleep should
be a priority. Eating habits can also play a role. Panda
and his colleagues are investigating a practice known as
time restricted eating (TRE) or intermittent fasting. That
might mean delaying breakfast by an hour or two until
cortisol levels drop and eating dinner at least three hours
before your habitual bedtime. In a 12-week study of fire-
fighters, TRE benefited their metabolic health and im
proved their sleep. In mice, it has been shown to reduce
the risk of cancer or to slow the growth of tumors.
Maybe, Panda says, respecting our circadian rhythms
can help protect our time-sensitive bodies.
22 Scientific American, July/August 2023 Illustration by Jay Bendt

Q&A
How Mathematics Can Predict—

and Help Prevent—the Next Pandemic
Mathematician Abba Gumel uses calculations and models to prepare
for future disease outbreaks
By Rachel Crowell
Predicting and understanding d isease outbreaks doesn’t just mathematical biologist at the University of Maryland, College
involve epidemiology. It takes math, too. For centuries mathema- Park. He was recently elected to the current class of fellows of
ticians have tackled questions related to epidemics and pandem- the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
ics, along with potential responses to them. For instance, 18th- Mathematicians such as him are indispensable to the mission
century Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli is credited with of identifying and averting the next pandemic. Succeeding in
developing the first mathematical epidemiology model, which this quest, however, requires that they unite with experts from
focused on analyzing the effects of smallpox inoculation on life other fields and work together to solve these multifaceted dis-
expectancy. Mathematicians have continued this work to the ease-transmission problems.
present day, including during the COVID pandemic. Gumel spoke to Scientific American about how he is using
One such researcher is Abba Gumel, a mathematician and mathematics to combat infectious diseases and about the ques
24 Scientific American, July/August 2023 Illustration by Irene Rinaldi

Rachel Crowell is a Midwest-
based writer covering science
and mathematics.
tions he hopes to address before the next making them widely available early in a need a lot of data at an individual level.
pandemic hits. new COVID-like pandemic can obviate the The type of model you choose de-
need to shut down the economy until a safe pends on the problem you want to solve,
[An edited transcript of the interview
and effective vaccine becomes available. the type of data you have and the quality
follows.]
I am interested in determining the im of the data.
pact of increases in global temperature
Tell me about a time that one of your caused by global warming on the popula- What does your selection as an AAAS
recent findings surprised you. tion and distribution of wild animal popu- Fellow mean to you?
We showed in our paper on COVID lock- lations and associated viral zoonotic diseas- It’s a huge honor. And the honor belongs
down measures that the number of cases, es and the likelihood of a spillover event. to the large number of people in my sup-
hospitalizations and mortality would have I am also interested in quantifying the port network.
been dramatically reduced if we had start- burden of a potential highly contagious This gives me an additional platform
ed community lockdowns a week or two and highly fatal pandemic of a contact- to multiply my efforts in community out-
earlier than we did. This means hitting the based disease such as Ebola viral disease. reach. I’ve been focused on Africa and
disease hard early, before it enters the ex- The world community thankfully averted other developing regions of the world to
ponential phase of transmission. It would such a catastrophe when we came togeth- provide opportunities for people to be the
have dramatically altered the course of the er and effectively contained the Ebola best they can become in STEM [science,
pandemic in the U.S. and perhaps saved outbreaks that took place in Guinea, Li- technology, engineering and mathemat-
hundreds of thousands of lives. beria and Sierra Leone in 2014–2016. ics]. I’m focused on young people, espe-
What role can mathematicians play

in preventing the next pandemic? “Sometimes when I talk about it, I cry because
What mathematicians are doing to help I see that if we had done the right thing, none
prevent the next one is basically working
on lessons we have learned. We have
of this would have happened.” —Abba Gumel
learned that masks worked from mathe-
matical analysis and modeling but also Before the COVID pandemic, you mainly cially women. I’m focused on getting a lot
from what happened in society. Societies focused on mosquito-borne diseases. Are more women in rural areas to get into
that have high coverage of masks and there fundamental differences in how you STEM and be among the best. I’m very
high-quality masks did well in reducing approach studying infectious diseases worried about gender inequity. I’m doing
cases and mortality. Vaccines work, we such as malaria that involve a vector? whatever I can to bridge that gap. Partic-
have shown clearly, if we raise the level of Yes, there’s a big difference. There’s no ularly, where I came from in Africa [Nige-
herd immunity required. For the next pan- direct human-to-human transmission. ria], we need a lot more women in STEM.
demic, if we have certain vaccines with Mosquitoes get infected by biting infec- We have a tremendous responsibility.
starting efficacies, we can predict the min- tious humans. If I’m infected and a mos- We need to make science accessible to
imum proportion we need to vaccinate to quito takes a blood meal from me, there’s everyone around the world. It doesn’t
achieve vaccine-induced herd immunity. some probability that the mosquito can work at all if only a few countries are sci-
We’re coming up with this bucket list of also get my Plasmodium p arasite and entifically advanced. Look at what’s hap-
things to do to prevent, we hope, the next become infected. So the modeling types pened. COVID started in China, but it be-
one but even if we do get hit—and we’re are different. came a problem for everyone.
going to get hit—to minimize the burden West Nile is transmitted by mosqui- We’re all vulnerable to what’s hap-
of the next one and to greatly suppress it toes not only to humans but also to other pening in faraway places—the same with
before it becomes a problem. These are hosts such as crows. But the birds fly long inequity in STEM, inequity in health
things we need to do to make sure the next distances, so we use spatial models. care, inequity in economics. If we’re do-
one doesn’t kill one million Americans. ing well, but our neighbor is not, it’s just
Sometimes when I talk about it, I cry What are some other factors that affect a matter of time before we also suffer. It’s
because I see that if we had done the right your modeling decisions? the same thing with viral things happen-
thing, none of this would have happened. The type of model you choose depends on ing in faraway places. We had better pay
the level of data you have. An agent- attention because it’s a plane ride away
What are some pressing open based model allows you to track each from coming to us.
questions you hope to address before individual: their risk of getting infected,
the next pandemic hits? what they do each day, and all that. J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E
I am interested in determining whether That’s very useful in determining who Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
stockpiling high-quality face masks and infected whom. But it’s data-hungry. You or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]

A N I M A L B E H AV I O R
Bees and other insects are far more

cognitively complex than previously
thought—a revelation that has
wide-ranging ethical implications
By Lars Chittka
Photographs by Levon Biss
THE
INNER
LIVES
OF
INSECTS
Lars Chittka is a professor of sensory and behavioral ecology
at Queen Mary University of London. His latest book
is T he Mind of a Bee ( Princeton University Press, 2022).
I n the early 1990s, when I was a Ph.D. student at the Free University
of Berlin modeling the evolution of bee color perception, I asked
a botany professor for some advice about flower pigments.
I wanted to know the degrees of freedom that flowers have in pro-
ducing colors to signal to bees. He replied, rather furiously, that
he was not going to engage in a discussion with me, because
I worked in a neurobiological laboratory where invasive proce-
dures on live honeybees were performed. The professor was convinced
that insects had the capacity to feel pain. I remember walking out of the
botanist’s office shaking my head, thinking the man had lost his mind.
Back then, my views were in line with the
mainstream. Pain is a conscious experience,
and many scholars then thought that con-
sciousness is unique to humans. But these days,
impressive social skills. For example, they can
infer the fighting strengths of other wasps rela-
tive to their own just by watching other wasps
fight among themselves. Ants rescue nest mates
after decades of researching the perception and buried under rubble, digging away only over
intelligence of bees, I am wondering if the Ber- trapped (and thus invisible) body parts, infer-
lin botany professor might have been right. ring the body dimension from those parts that
Researchers have since shown that bees and are visible above the surface. Flies immersed in
some other insects are capable of intelligent virtual reality display attention and awareness
behavior that no one thought possible when I was of the passing of time. Locusts can visually esti-
a student. Bees, for example, can count, grasp con- mate rung distances when walking on a ladder
cepts of sameness and difference, learn complex and then plan their step width accordingly
tasks by observing others, and know their own (even when the target is hidden from sight after
individual body dimensions, a capacity associated the movement is initiated).
with consciousness in humans. They also appear Given the substantial work on the sophisti-
to experience both pleasure and pain. In other cation of insect cognition, it might seem surpris-
words, it now looks like at least some species of ing that it took scientists so long to ask whether,
insects—and maybe all of them—are sentient. if some insects are that smart, perhaps they
These discoveries raise fascinating ques- could also be sentient, capable of feeling. Indeed,
tions about the origins of complex cognition. the question had been on my mind for decades.
They also have far-reaching ethical implica- Since the early 2000s I have used it in debates
tions for how we should treat insects in the lab- for undergraduate student group tutorials. I
oratory and in the wild. viewed it as a thought-provoking intellectual
exercise, but the discussions invariably ended
SIGNS OF INTELLIGENCE with the conclusion that the question is formally
The conventional wisdom about insects has unanswerable. We have no direct window into
been that they are automatons—unthinking, the inner world of an animal that cannot verbally
unfeeling creatures whose behavior is entirely communicate its thoughts and feelings—which
hardwired. But in the 1990s researchers began is to say, all nonhuman animals. The question of
making startling discoveries about insect minds. whether insects are sentient remained academic.
It’s not just the bees. Some species of wasps I began to think the issue had real-life rele-
recognize their nest mates’ faces and acquire vance when, 15 years ago, Thomas Ings, now at

BUMBLEBEES c an learn complex
tasks by observing other bees.
In one study, they learned to
pull strings attached to artificial
flowers out from under a plexi
glass plate to access a sugar
reward inside.

Anglia Ruskin University in England, and I performed an mind. This state, which was found to be related to the
experiment in which we asked whether bumblebees could neurotransmitter dopamine, made the bees more upbeat,
learn about predation threat. Certain spider species called if you will, about ambiguous stimuli—they approached
crab spiders perch on flowers to catch pollinating insects, it as they would the blue or green colors they were trained
including bees. We built a plastic spider model with a to associate with a reward. It also made them more resil-
mechanism that would briefly trap a bumblebee between ient toward aversive stimuli, as occurs in humans: bees
two sponges before releasing it. The bumblebees showed that were given a surprise dose of sugar recovered faster
a significant change in their behavior after being attacked when ambushed by a fake predator, taking less time to
by the robotic spider. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they learned reinitiate foraging than their peers that did not receive
to avoid spider-infested flowers and meticulously scanned sugar before the simulated attack.
every flower before landing. Curiously, however, they Other work suggests that bees can experience not only
sometimes even fled from imaginary threats, scanning optimism but also joy. Some years ago we trained bumble-
and then abandoning a perfectly safe, spider-free flower. bees to roll tiny balls to a goal area to obtain a nectar
This false-alarm behavior resembled symptoms of post- reward—a form of object manipulation equivalent to
traumatic stress disorder in humans. Although this inci- human usage of a coin in a vending machine. In the course
dental observation did not constitute formal evidence of of these experiments, we noticed that some bees rolled the
an emotionlike state, it did move the possibility of such balls around even when no sugar reward was being offered.
states in insects into the realm of possibility. We suspected that this might be a form of play behavior.
Other research hinted that insects might also have Recently we confirmed this hunch experimentally. We
positive states of mind. Many plants contain bitter sub- connected a bumblebee colony to an arena equipped with
stances such as nicotine and caffeine to deter herbivores, mobile balls on one side, immobile balls on the other, and
but these substances are also found in low concentrations an unobstructed path through the middle that led to a
in some floral nectars. Researchers wondered whether feeding station containing freely available sugar solution
pollinators might be deterred by such nectars, but they and pollen. Bees went out of their way to return again
discovered the opposite. Bees actively seek out drugs such and again to a “play area” where they rolled the mobile
as nicotine and caffeine when given the choice and even balls in all directions and often for extended periods with-
self-medicate with nicotine when sick. Male fruit flies out a sugar reward, even though plenty of food was pro-
stressed by being deprived of mating opportunities pre- vided nearby. There seemed to be something inherently
fer food containing alcohol (naturally present in ferment- enjoyable in the activity itself. In line with what other
ing fruit), and bees even show withdrawal symptoms researchers have observed in vertebrate creatures at play,
when weaned off an alcohol-rich diet. young bees engaged more often with the balls than older
Why would insects consume mind-altering substances ones. And males played more than females (male bum-
if there isn’t a mind to alter? But these suggestive hints blebees don’t work for the colony and therefore have a
of negative and positive mind states still fell short of what lot more time on their hands). These experiments are not
was needed to demonstrate that insects are sentient. merely cute—they provide further evidence of positive
emotionlike states in bees.
PLEASURE AND PAIN All this research raised the more uncomfortable ques-
I began to consider how one might more directly test emotion of whether bees might also be capable of experienc-
tionlike states in insects. So-called cognitive bias tests have ing pain. Investigating this issue experimentally presents
been developed to evaluate the psychological welfare of researchers with a moral dilemma: if results are positive,
animals such as rats that live in captivity. These tests are the research might lead to improved welfare of trillions
essentially versions of the proverbial glass that can be half- of wild and managed insects. But it would also involve
full or half-empty: optimistic humans might view the potential suffering for those animals that are tested to
ambiguous glass as nearly full, whereas pessimists would obtain the evidence. We decided to do an experiment with
judge the same glass as being nearly empty. My collabora- only moderately unpleasant stimuli, not injurious ones—
tors and I decided to develop a similar test for bees. and one in which bees could freely choose whether to
We trained one group of bees to associate the color experience these stimuli.
blue with a sugary reward and green with no reward, and We gave bees a choice between two types of artificial
another group of bees to make the opposite association. flowers. Some were heated to 55 degrees Celsius (lower
We then presented the bees with a turquoise color, a than your cup of coffee but still hot), and others were not.
shade intermediate between blue and green. A lucky sub- We varied the rewards given for visiting the flowers. Bees
set of bees received a surprise sugar treat right before see- clearly avoided the heat when rewards for both flower
ing the turquoise color; the other bees did not. The bees’ types were equal. On its own, such a reaction could be
response to the ambiguous stimulus depended on interpreted as resulting from a simple reflex, without an
whether they received a treat before the test: those that “ouch-like” experience. But a hallmark of pain in humans
got the pretest sugar approached the intermediate color is that it is not just an automatic, reflexlike response.
faster than those that didn’t. Instead one may opt to grit one’s teeth and bear the dis-
The results indicate that when the bees were surprised comfort—for example, if a reward is at stake. It turns out
with a reward, they experienced an optimistic state of that bees have just this kind of flexibility. When the

rewards at the heated flowers were high, the bees chose
to land on them. Apparently it was worth their while to
endure the discomfort. They did not have to rely on con-
current stimuli to make this trade-off. Even when heat
and reward were removed from the flowers, bees judged
the advantages and disadvantages of each flower type
from memory and were thus able to make comparisons
of the options in their minds.
This finding alone is not a decisive proof that bees
experience pain, but it is consistent with that notion, and
it is only one of several indicators. Bees and other insects
also form long-term memories about the conditions
under which they were hurt. And they have specialized
sensors that detect tissue damage and are connected to
brain regions that also process and store other sensory
stimuli. These creatures have the necessary neural equip-
ment to modulate pain experiences by top-down control.
That is, they are not constrained by simple reflex loops
when responding to noxious stimuli but display the flex-
ibility to modify their responses according to current cir-
cumstances, in the same way as we can choose to press a
hot door handle to escape a burning building.
Critics could argue that each of the behaviors de
scribed earlier could also be programmed into a noncon-
scious robot. But nature cannot afford to generate beings
that just pretend to be sentient. Although there is still no
universally accepted, single experimental proof for pain A QUEEN BUMBLEBEE and workers tend a nest. Open wax structures
experiences in any animal, common sense dictates that are honey or pollen pots; closed structures contain larvae.
as we accumulate ever more pieces of evidence that
insects can feel, the probability that they are indeed sen- instantaneous, such as when you slap the mosquito on
tient increases. For example, if a dog with an injured paw your skin, there is little room for suffering. Setting ants
whimpers, licks the wound, limps, lowers pressure on the alight with a magnifying glass, as children are some
paw while walking, learns to avoid the place where the times taught to do for fun, is a different matter.
injury happened and seeks out analgesics when offered, The treatment of insects in scientific laboratories also
we have reasonable grounds to assume that the dog is deserves consideration. Insects transmit some of the dead-
indeed experiencing something unpleasant. liest human diseases, so research into how they can be
Using a similar logic, my colleagues and I reviewed controlled is obviously important. In addition, we could
hundreds of studies from the literature across several develop remedies for a variety of human health disorders
orders of insects to search for evidence of a capacity to feel by studying their molecular genetic and neurobiological
pain. Our analysis revealed at least reasonably strong evi- underpinnings in insects such as fruit flies. Researchers
dence for this capacity in a number of taxa, including cock- are often encouraged by funding agencies to work on
roaches and fruit flies. Crucially we also found no evidence insects rather than vertebrates in part because there are
that any species convincingly failed any criterion for pain- supposedly no ethics to consider. But some of the meth-
like experiences. It appears that in many cases, scientists ods used to study them have the potential to cause intense
simply haven’t looked thoroughly enough for indications distress. Insects are sometimes embedded in hot wax after
that the insect species they study experience discomfort. their extremities are removed, their head capsules are
then opened and electrodes inserted into various parts of
AN ETHICAL OBLIGATION their brain—all done without anesthesia.
If at least some insects a re sentient and can feel pain, as Scientists with whom I have discussed the topic have
appears to be the case, what are the implications of that sometimes countered that we still haven’t delivered irre-
revelation? I sometimes get asked questions along the futable proof that insects can suffer. This is factually accu-
lines of “Does this mean that I can’t kill a mosquito that rate, but given what we now know about the plausibility
lands on my arm, even though it might infect me with a of pain experiences in some insects, wouldn’t we instead
life-threatening disease?” No, it does not mean that. The want to be reasonably certain that specific invasive treat-
insight that many conventional livestock animals are ments do not cause suffering? We urgently need more
probably sentient hasn’t stopped humans from killing research into this question and into the identification
them. But it has resulted in an awareness (and legisla- and development of suitable anesthetics.
tion in many countries) that this should be done in such Some of my colleagues are worried about the intro-
a way as to minimize distress and pain. If death is duction of vertebrate-style legislation and paperwork for

work on insects. I understand their concern. Politics has these are beneficial insects with an important utility for
a way of turning well-intentioned recommendations from us humans: they pollinate our crops and garden flowers.
scientists into bureaucratic nightmares, which can hob- But these pesticides also have the potential to cause mass
ble scientific progress while bringing about no apprecia- suffering in bees and other insects—another reason to
ble benefits for animal welfare. A potentially more valu- ban, or at least strongly limit, their use.
able approach would be if insect researchers themselves Bees in particular face additional stress from commer-
took the lead in considering how to minimize suffering, cial pollination operations. Mass production of raspberries,
to reduce numbers of insects tested or sacrificed when blueberries, apples, tomatoes, melons, avocados and many
possible, and to ensure that the severity of procedures is other kinds of produce is dependent on honeybees or bum-
proportional to knowledge gain in both curiosity-moti- blebees being commercially mass-reared, bred, farmed
vated and applied research. and shipped to distant locations to pollinate the crops.
Insects are used on a far grander scale in the feed-and- Almond milk, a popular alternative to dairy milk,
food industry. More than a trillion crickets, black soldier relies to a large extent on the California almond bloom,
flies, mealworms and other species are killed annually, and one of the biggest commercial pollination events in the
the sector is expanding rapidly. Often touted as a replace- world. Migratory beekeepers load more than half of
ment for some or all the vertebrate meat in people’s diets, North America’s honeybees (several dozen billion indi-
insect farming is considered an environmentally friendly viduals) on trucks to be shipped to 800,000 acres of
alternative to the conventional farming of livestock such almond tree monoculture in California during the flow-
as cattle or chickens. Another perceived advantage of ering period, then ship the bees back to their original
insect farming is that there are supposedly no ethical con- locations or other crop-flowering events.
cerns with insects like there are with cows and chicken. In The “colony collapse disorder” that you may have heard
fact, some insect-farming companies specifically promote about in the media is not just the result of some well-known
the notion that insects lack any capacity for pain. pathogens but also of honeybees being literally stressed to
This claim is demonstrably incorrect for all insect spe- death by ruthless beekeeping practices. Even brief shaking
cies tested so far. Science tells us that the methods used of bees induces a pessimistic emotionlike state. Now imag-
to kill farmed insects—including baking, boiling and ine the effects of intense and prolonged vibrations imposed
microwaving—have the potential to cause intense suffer- on bees when they are trucked across continents in sealed
ing. And it’s not like they’re being sacrificed for a great hives, sustained on artificial food and unable to defecate
cause. The bulk of the industry does not actually seek to outside the hive, then typically finding themselves in crop
replace human consumption of vertebrate meat with monocultures that lack the diversity of floral food bees nor-
insects. Instead most of the slaughtered insects go to mally require. Scientists have extensively studied the det-
feeding other animals that are farmed for human con- rimental effects of stress on the immune system in several
sumption, such as salmon or chicken. In other words, species, including insects. For invertebrate creatures such
farmed insects are being used to turbocharge, not replace, as insects, researchers have generally assumed the stress
the conventional livestock production. is strictly physiological, like a plant wilting when deprived
But even if replacing vertebrate meat was the goal, we of water. The possibility that in insects stress is at least
need scientific evidence for what constitutes humane partly psychological in nature deserves further exploration.
slaughtering methods and ethically defensible rearing To live, to eat, we almost inevitably kill other living
conditions for insects. It is possible that such evidence things, even if our labor division means that you person-
will reveal less capacity for suffering in some larval stages ally don’t do the killing. But to the extent that the affected
of some species, but until we have that evidence, we creatures are probably sentient, we have a moral obliga-
should err on the side of caution. tion to minimize their suffering—whether in research
Unfortunately, a vegetarian or vegan diet is not nec- labs, on feed-and-food farms, or in agricultural settings.
essarily free of ethical concerns for the welfare of insects The fact that to date there is no smoking-gun type of
either. Many insects share our taste for the leaves, roots, proof for any animal’s sentience does not mean we’re off
vegetables and fruits of the plants that we consume. As the hook. On the contrary, the reasonably strong psycho-
a result, several million metric tons of pesticides are de logical, pharmacological, neurobiological and hormonal
ployed every year worldwide to streamline the produc- indicators of sentience that we now have for many ani-
tion of cheap food for maximum profit. These pesticides mals, including some insects, mean that acquiring evi-
poison and kill countless insects (and many other ani- dence in the opposite direction is in order. We should
mals), often by slow processes lasting several days. demand reasonably strong evidence of the absence of sen-
The plant-eating insects are not the only ones affected. tience before subjecting them to interventions that have
The adverse effects of the insecticides known as neonic- the potential to cause intense distress.
otinoids on bees are well documented. Although their
concentration in flower nectar and pollen is typically too
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
low to kill instantly, these insecticides affect learning,
The Mind-Boggling Math of Migratory Beekeeping. Ferris Jabr;
navigation, foraging efficiency and reproductive success, ScientificAmerican.com, September 1, 2013.
severely impacting populations of wild bees. This collat-
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
eral damage to bees is viewed as concerning because

BEE JOY:
In another
experiment,
bees chose
to roll balls
around rather
than visiting
feeding stations—
a form of play.

P L A N E TA R Y S C I E N C E
A spacecraft will soon return to

Earth with tiny bits of a space rock.
Could these samples rewrite our
solar system’s history?
By Clara Moskowitz
Asteroid
Delivery
OSIRIS-REX’S SAMPLING ARM r eaches toward
the asteroid Bennu in this anaglyph double image.
Clara Moskowitz is a senior editor at S cientific American,
here she covers space and physics.
w
W
hat would it be like to hold a piece of outer space in your hand?
Some lucky scientists will find out soon when nasa’s OSIRIS-REx
spacecraft (shorthand for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource
Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) returns from its seven-
year mission. The probe will drop off a canister holding about a cup
of pebbles and dust from the surface of the near-Earth asteroid
Bennu. “Bennu is a time capsule of the early solar system, and we’re
cracking it open,” says Amy Hofmann, an isotope geochemist at nasa’s Jet Propulsion Labora-
tory, who is a co-investigator on the mission. “We get to be the first people to see what’s in there.
I’m getting goose bumps talking about this.”
Hofmann is one of around 200 scientists who will receive por- asteroid, briefly touching the surface with its Touch-and-Go Sam-
tions of the cargo OSIRIS-REx brings back. On September 24 the ple Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM), a robotic arm that fired a
probe is set to release its sample return capsule, which will bar- burst of nitrogen gas to stir up dust and rock, which it then funneled
rel through Earth’s atmosphere and make a parachute landing at into its collector head. “It looks like an air filter, except we brought
the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range. If all the air,” Lauretta says. Photographs taken during the collection
goes well, recovery teams will helicopter it to a portable clean process suggest the mission scooped up plenty of material. Some
room to remove its heat shield and back shell and then fly it to a extra bits of sample even got stuck to the outside of the TAGSAM.
specially prepared facility at the Johnson Space Center in Hous- After scientists open up the TAGSAM back on Earth, a quar-
ton. Scientists there will carefully open the inner container, han- ter of its haul will go to the OSIRIS-REx team, who will disperse
dling it inside a glove box to keep out all contaminants, to retrieve it from the Johnson Space Center to laboratories around the
some of the only pristine primordial bits of asteroid ever to reach world. Four percent of the sample will go to Canada, a contribu-
Earth’s surface. (Meteorites are great, too, but their unprotected tor to the mission, and at least 0.5 percent will be sent to Japan,
burn through our atmosphere alters them.) which carried out the two Hayabusa missions that brought back
The samples will reveal the state of the solar system when it the world’s first asteroid samples in 2010 and 2020. But 70 per-
was first forming, including which amino acids and other chem- cent of the stuff returned will remain untouched by anyone, at
ical compounds important for biology were present. “The ‘O’ in least for now. “Just like with Apollo, we want to preserve the vast
‘OSIRIS-REx’ is really for the origin of life,” says Dante S. Lauretta majority of the samples for future scientists,” says University of
of the University of Arizona, the mission’s principal investigator. Arizona planetary scientist Andrew Ryan, leader of the OSIRIS-
“We want to understand the role that these carbon-rich asteroids REx Sample Physical and Thermal Analysis Working Group. NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona (p receding pages a nd o pposite page)
played in delivering the precursors of life to Earth.” “We’ll have new questions, there will be future tools, and we want
OSIRIS-REx launched in 2016 and arrived at Bennu in 2018. It to make sure we haven’t burned through the whole sample.”
spent two years near the space rock, making measurements with Even the first scientific findings should significantly expand
its onboard cameras, spectrometers, and other instruments. Those our knowledge of asteroids like Bennu. Ryan’s team will measure
scans revealed a lot about Bennu, including that it’s more like a pile how much heat the material conducts, how much space there is
of loosely bound rubble than a solid object and that it holds water- between particles in each grain, and how strong the force is that
bearing minerals. But the real payoff will be the samples. “We have holds the pieces together. Comparing their findings with esti-
access to the absolute state-of-the-art technology here on Earth,” mates researchers made when the spacecraft was orbiting Bennu
says co-investigator Michelle Thompson, a planetary scientist at will help them better characterize other asteroids from remote
Purdue University. “Having time, having this huge team and the measurements—a potentially crucial ability if we need to deflect
ability to do coordinated analyses, to look at the same sample with an Earth-bound rock in the future.
multiple different techniques—there’s really nothing that can Hofmann will use a special kind of mass spectrometer called
replace that. Sample return is a cornerstone of planetary science.” an Orbitrap to identify specific organic molecules with different
In October 2020 the spacecraft made a close approach to the isotopic compositions within her samples and compare their

A MOSAIC IMAGE o f Bennu taken
by OSIRIS-REx from 24 kilometers
(15 miles) away
amounts. Measuring the extent to which multiple carbon 13 atoms state of our early solar system and how it became what it is today.
(a rare, stable form of carbon with an extra neutron) replace car- “The questions we’re going to answer are extremely diverse,” she
bon 12 (the most common form of carbon) in a particular mole- says. “[They cover] everything from understanding and character-
cule, for instance, can tell researchers about the temperature when izing the building blocks of the solar system to looking at the phys-
the compound formed. “These measurements weren’t even pos- ical characteristics of the material. We are going to come out of this
sible when OSIRIS-REx was first proposed,” Hofmann says. “It’s mission with a totally revolutionized understanding of these types
forensics for planetary science.” of bodies. Everyone should be very excited.”
Thompson will use electron microscopes to study how Bennu
has been weathered over time by impacts from other space rocks
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
and by energetic particles streaming off the sun. These measure- The Seven-Year Mission to Fetch 60 Grams of Asteroid. D
ante S. Lauretta; August 2016.
ments, combined with the findings of other experiments planned
for the samples, aim to provide a comprehensive picture of the

Bringing Bennu Back
The Origins, S
pectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-
Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft is preparing for a complicated
maneuver to deliver tiny pieces of the asteroid Bennu to scientists waiting back
on Earth. The probe briefly touched down on the space rock in 2020 to collect
the samples and will drop them off for a parachute landing on September 24.
SAMPLE COLLECTION AND STORAGE
Nightingale (TAG site)
Bennu
Approach maneuvers
REACH Sample return

APPROACH The spacecraft extended capsule (SRC)
After surveying Bennu a robotic arm equipped
from nearby for almost Asteroid Extended arm
with a round collection
two years, OSIRIS-REx rotation
tool, called the TAGSAM
prepared to make its first direction
(Touch-and-Go Sample
brief touchdown on the Acquisition Mechanism)
surface at a site called
Nightingale close to the TAGSAM head
De-orbit OSIRIS-REx
asteroid’s north pole.
maneuver orbit plane
Surface material
TOUCH TAGSAM head Pressurized Flap forced caught in outer mesh
During a 10-second direct cross section nitrogen gas open by gas collection ring
encounter with the surface,
the probe shot out a blast
of nitrogen gas to kick a cloud
of dust and pebbles up into
the collection chamber.
Material from Bennu’s surface
DEPART
With samples onboard,
OSIRIS-REx fired its thrusters STOW
to leave Bennu. The robotic arm deposited
the TAGSAM head into
SRC lid/
To Earth the sample return capsule,
heat shield
shook it to confirm it was
in open
safely locked in, and then
Stow sequence position
detached to be stowed
against the side of the
Escape spacecraft. The SRC TAGSAM
manuever was sealed for the long head
journey back.
38 Scientific American, July/August 2023 Graphic by Jen Christiansen

MISSION TIME LINE
OSIRIS-REx’s long-haul mission SAMPLE RETURN
won’t end when it drops off its
samples. The probe will travel next
Spacecraft’s
to the near-Earth asteroid Apophis, JOURNEY trajectory
where it will arrive in 2029. In 2021 OSIRIS-REx began making its way to
Earth again. When the spacecraft crosses Earth’s
orbit on September 24, it will release the SRC Earth
2016 and then fire its thrusters to move into orbit
around the sun. The detached capsule will begin
Sept. 8 its four-hour trip down to the ground.
Launch Divert
2017 OSIRIS-REx maneuver
orbit
Sample SRC release
Sept. 22 return
Earth flyby
2018 Sun
Capsule’s trajectory
Earth
orbit Spacecraft’s trajectory
Dec. 3
2019 Asteroid Bennu arrival
Orbits, surveys,
and rehearsals Drogue parachute
SRC
2020
Oct. 20
Successful Bennu
sample collection Main parachute
REENTRY
2021
“OSIRIS-REx: Sample Return from Asteroid (101955) Bennu,” by Dante S. Lauretta et al., in S pace Science Reviews, Vol. 212; August 2017 (p rimary references)
Apr. 7 The capsule’s heat shield

OSIRIS-REx completed will protect it during its
its last flyover of Bennu initial free fall through the
atmosphere. At the right
May 10 altitude and speed, the
2022
Journey back capsule will release its first
Sources: “OSIRIS-REx, Returning the Asteroid Sample,” by Thomas M. Ajluni et al. IEEE Aerospace Conference Paper, March 2015; and
to Earth began “drogue” parachute to

stabilize the craft, followed Heat shield
by its main parachute.
2023 Eventually the SRC will
Sept. 24 make a soft touchdown,
Sample capsule going 4.6 meters per
expected to be second, at the Utah Test
delivered to Earth and Training Range.
2024
Heat shield
RETRIEVAL
2025 A helicopter team will fly out to retrieve the SRC
and take it to a portable clean room nearby. There
technicians will remove the SRC’s heat shield and
back shell to reveal the sample canister and TAGSAM
head inside. Within 24 hours all these pieces will be
2026 flown to Houston, where scientists will open the
canister to retrieve their treasure in a specially
prepared clean room at the Johnson Space Center.
TAGSAM Utah Test and

2027 Open SRC head cross Training Range
section
2028 Johnson Space Center

(Houston)
Material from
Bennu’s surface
2029
Asteroid Apophis arrival

Parrot Inv
ECOLOGY

These smart, social birds
are thriving in cities
around the world
By Ryan F. Mandelbaum
Photographs by Ali Cherkis
MONK PARAKEETS n est atop

the entryway to Green-Wood
Cemetery in Brooklyn, N.Y.
nvasions
Ryan F. Mandelbaum is a science writer
and birder based in Brooklyn, N.Y.
A t brooklyn ’s Green-Wood Cemetery the living get as much

attention as the dead. Groundskeepers maintain the 478-acre
historic landmark as an arboretum and habitat for more than
200 breeding and migratory bird species. But many visiting
wildlife lovers aren’t interested in those native birds. They’re
at the entryway, their binoculars trained on the spire atop its
Gothic Revival arches. They’ve come to see the parrots.
The urban cemetery hosts dozens of long-tailed,
dove-size parrots, lime green with gray accents on
their foreheads and chests, called Monk Parakeets.
(Parrots and parakeets are part of the same family.)
These birds maintain barrel-size stick nests not just
at this cemetery but across the city. They live in
nearby Connecticut, too. Monk Parakeets and other
species of parrots are in Chicago, Miami, Tampa, New
Orleans, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio
and Austin. Red-masked Parakeets live on Telegraph
Hill in San Francisco. Rosy-faced Lovebirds decorate
the palm trees of Phoenix. Parrots are present in all of
Mexico’s 10 largest cities, as well as Barcelona, Amster-
ative and loud. “They’re animals that are really social,
and they live in cognitively complex social environ-
ments,” says Grace Smith-Vidaurre, a postdoctoral
fellow at the Rockefeller University and the Univer-
sity of Cincinnati, who studies the birds. “They’re like
humans in a lot of ways.”
The Brooklyn parrots’ story begins in South Amer-
ica. When Smith-Vidaurre started her research on the
origins and behavior of Monk Parakeets, she thought
it was important to visit the birds in their native
range, which extends across parts of central South
America, including Argentina and Uruguay. She
asked the scientist who sponsored her visit whether it
dam, Brussels, Rome and Athens. They’re in Tel Aviv. would be a challenge to find the birds. No, he said; he
And Singapore. All around the world, parrots are tak- could hear them outside his window—they’re as com-
ing over with a resounding SQUAWK!!! mon there as pigeons. They live in cities, feed on agri-
Today at least 60 of the world’s 380 or so parrot cultural crops and in gardens, and nest in exotic trees
species have a breeding population in a country out- and power lines.
side their natural geographical range. Each successful It’s not always clear what makes a specific parrot
transplant has its own story: some are benign, others species successful in habitats beyond their native
a threat to the local wildlife; some are abundant in ranges, Smith-Vidaurre explains. But you can get an
their home ranges, whereas others rely on cities as a idea of it with the Monk Parakeets. As early as 1839,
refuge from extinction. All are by-products of the pet Charles Darwin described this species as a major agri-
trade and animal trafficking around the world. cultural pest in South America. “These parrots always
Because they’re parrots, they’re smart, adaptable, cre- live in flocks, and commit great ravages on the corn-

NATIVE t o South
America, Monk
Parakeets have
made them
selves at home
in a number
of U.S. cities.

fields,” he wrote in his journal. “I was told that near
Colonia [del Sacramento, Uruguay,] 2500 were killed
in the course of one year.”
Monk Parakeets are one of the only parrot species
whose members build colonies of stick nests—elabo-
rate, multichambered structures that they maintain
cooperatively. These nests allow them to survive in
temperate regions of South America, where tempera-
tures regularly drop below 50 or even 40 degrees
Fahrenheit on cold winter days—and in New York
City with its even colder temperatures.
The Uruguayan government still considers the
bird a serious crop pest, and the country’s authorities
carry out regular culling. Uruguay also has been a top
exporter of the bird for the pet trade over the past
50 years.
The trading of wildlife, including parrots, is highly
regulated by local, national and international laws,
most notably the Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
CITES maintains lists of species whose trade either is
forbidden or requires permits, including many parrot
species. Monk Parakeets aren’t currently listed, but
some places, such as the state of California, ban them
as pets because of their invasive potential.
Our attraction to parrots has played a key role in
their rise to world domination. Humans have traded
and moved these birds around for millennia. Alexan-
der the Great kept parrots he brought back from India
in the fourth century b.c.e. The Romans, too, kept
exotic parrots as pets. In North America, archaeolo-
gists have carbon-dated Scarlet Macaw bones found North America once had its own parrot. The Carolina
in New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon—hundreds of miles Parakeet, a gregarious green parrot with a yellow
northwest of the parrots’ Central American range—to head, inhabited much of the eastern U.S. Its range is
the 10th century c.e. thought to have extended from Florida and the Atlan-
Parrots seem to have started establishing popula- tic Coast west to Texas and north to Illinois and even
tions outside their native ranges more recently. New York State—it probably lived in many of the
Research published in the Journal of Zoology d ocu- same places the Monk Parakeet is found in today. Like
ments parrots breeding in the U.K. as early as 1855. the Monk Parakeets, Carolina Parakeets regularly
But it wasn’t until the 1960s that demand for pet par- shared spaces with humans and were occasionally
rots spiked. As more birds were released by or escaped seen as crop pests. But unlike today’s urban Monk
from their owners, colonies started forming in cities Parakeets, Carolina Parakeets inhabited wet, old-
around the world. During that era, importers brought growth forest. They were declared extinct in 1939,
Monk Parakeets from South America into the U.S. by probably done in by a combination of deforestation,
the thousands. The birds were breeding in Illinois by competition with invasive species, introduced dis-
1968 and on Long Island by 1971. They were even eases and hunting. Perhaps the Monk Parakeet is tak-
reported to be breeding in North Dakota in the 1970s. ing up some of the niche vacated by the Carolina Par-
Newspapers and local governments in the U.S. akeet—but it’s also a different bird living in a trans-
were aware of the agricultural damage the birds were formed world, one brimming with opportunities for
doing in their native ranges and also feared they adaptable species.
would introduce diseases, says Ben Naddaff-Hafrey, Although people may have introduced Monk Para-
host of the history podcast T he Last Archive, which is keets to new locations, the birds themselves have
examining New York City’s Monk Parakeets in an epi- made the most of these novel circumstances. Juan
Lynn M. Stone/Minden Pictures
sode. Some pushed for the eradication of the parrots, Carlos Senar, who is head of research at the Natural
and by 1974 New York State declared the mission Science Museum of Barcelona, started studying the
accomplished. But more likely, Naddaff-Hafrey says, city’s Monk Parakeets out of curiosity. The museum
interest in eradication efforts waned as concerns hosted Monk Parakeet research in the 1970s as well,
about economic impacts faded and locals grew fond before the birds became worrisome. After all, it’s ob
of the birds. jectively interesting to see displaced parrots adapting

to different environments. Senar observed changes Senar emphasizes that he loves the species—he PARROT
in the birds’ behavior, such as how at first they bred enjoys watching them and makes a living studying SPECIES,
during the Northern Hemisphere winter, when it was them. But there’s a difference between enjoying a few including the
summer in the Southern Hemisphere, then they parakeets and dealing with thousands of them roam- Yellow-crested
changed their breeding timing as they got used to ing the city. He fears they’ll soon harm ecosystems Cockatoo (left),
their new environments. beyond the city limits if their population isn’t man- Sulphur-crested
Soon the little green parrots were adding new aged: “They’re very clever. If we wait too long, it will Cockatoo
color to the city’s tile work. In 2000 the Catalan gov- be nearly impossible to control them.” (center) and
ernment asked whether Senar and his team could Rose-ringed
A
undertake a formal census. The researchers found nother, equally adorable parrot species, the Parakeet (right),
that the birds’ population had exploded. They now Rose-ringed Parakeet (also known as the are flourishing
Martin Willis/Minden Pictures (left); imageBROKER/Ronald Wittek/Getty Images (right)
number in the thousands. Ring-necked Parakeet), illustrates how diffi- in urban set
The species’ impacts have become clear as its num- cult it can be to control these charismatic birds when tings around
bers have swelled. In the U.S., Monk Parakeets stick to they set up shop outside their normal range. Like the the world.
human habitats, where they aren’t directly competing Monk Parakeet, this species is successful in its native
with native wildlife for cavities to nest in like other home ranges in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa,
parrots have to do. But this choice means they somewhere it can thrive in human-altered habitats. A pop-
times end up in conflict with humans. Often they’ll ular caged bird since at least Victorian times, the
build their nests on utility poles—risking power out- green, pink-beaked, long-tailed parrot started escap-
ages and fires. ing increasingly often in the past few decades; before
In Barcelona, the birds cause more types of dam- long the Rose-ringed Parakeet established itself in cit-
age. One of Senar’s studies found that in an agricul- ies across Eurasia and beyond. But unlike Monk Para-
tural area outside the city, parrots caused a loss of keets, Rose-ringed Parakeets don’t build their own
28 percent of the corn crop, 36 percent of the plum nests. They rely on nest cavities, a limited resource for
crop and 37 percent of the pear crop, among other native wildlife—and they aren’t afraid to fight for
fruits and vegetables grown there. They also clip those spaces.
many branches from live trees for their nests and eat As the species began colonizing cities, scientists
food that other, native species rely on. organized to understand the birds and their impact.

In 2013 the European Cooperation in Science and
Technology funded ParrotNet, a five-year project,
headquartered at the University of Kent in England,
involving a network of scientists across Europe
tasked with monitoring parrots and communicating
their findings to local governments.
Emiliano Mori, a researcher at the Italian National
Research Council and former ParrotNet member, first
noticed the birds on a Mediterranean summer holi-
day and wondered how they were affecting the native
biodiversity. He began observing the parrots and the
outcomes of their invasion. Soon he found that Rose-
rings were taking nest sites from a small owl called
the Eurasian Scops Owl in Italy. The species wasn’t
directly reducing the owls’ population, but it was
pushing them out of their preferred spots.
Evidence of the negative consequences of Rose-
ringed Parakeets’ entry into new locales continues to
mount. Research has shown that they outcompete
birds at feeding stations in the U.K., and they regu-
larly kill competitors such as Blue Tits and black rats.
All the while their populations have been ballooning
in cities around the world.
“Their presence is not good,” Mori says. “We can’t
tell the complete scope of their impacts, but every
time we look, there’s something new to be discov-
ered.” The researchers continue to find new species
affected by the birds, he says.
ParrotNet produced policy briefs that were trans-
lated into various European languages. Spain has
begun removing parakeets. But culling programs are
running up against humans’ enduring fascination
with these birds.
The parrots’ cute factor continues to be a challenge
in efforts to control them, says biologist C. Jane Ander-
son, who specialized in charismatic invasive species
while she was an assistant professor at Texas A&M
University Kingsville. Anderson studied Rose-ringed
Parakeets on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where the
birds threaten local agriculture and native species.
She used culled samples to determine when the birds
bred and how to tell the difference between juvenile
and adult females—they look similar, but removing
(and euthanizing) the latter is more important for
population control.
Anderson can recall multiple anecdotes of public
protest hindering invasive-parrot management.
Humans are drawn to animals with babylike features,
called “baby schema ” in psychology: big eyes, big
heads and soft bodies. Culling snakes might not lead
to much outcry, but people like parrots. GREEN-WOOD
It’s important to remember how the birds arrived CEMETERY’S
in the first place, Anderson says. She doesn’t want to Monk Parakeets
demonize the parrots; rather she views controlling and other urban
them as undoing the damage humans caused. “The parrots are
truth is humans moved these animals around,” she by-products
says. “I understand why people would be excited to of the pet trade
see a parrot in Barcelona. But they shouldn’t be there.” and wildlife
It’s also important to understand that our cities trafficking.

are not sterile places devoid of wildlife that needs toos from their native Indonesia to Hong Kong, says
protection. Cities can be as ecologically valuable as Astrid Alex Andersson, a postdoctoral researcher at
the surrounding countryside—New York City is a the University of Hong Kong. Enough birds escaped
major migratory bird hotspot, for example. Perhaps captivity or were intentionally released by their own-
the most worrisome consequence of the Rose-ringed ers that they founded a colony in the city. Although
Parakeets is that they outcompete and kill a type of much of Hong Kong is forested, these birds prefer to
threatened bat called the greater noctule at the site of nest and feed in the ornamental trees found in the
their largest known colony in Europe—an urban park island’s urban areas and don’t seem to be outcompet-
in the Spanish city of Seville. ing any native species.
About 200 Yellow-crested Cockatoos live in Hong
T
he paradoxical truth of the matter is that cities Kong—approximately 10 percent of the bird’s remain-
can also serve as vital habitat for some parrot ing population, says Caroline Dingle of the University
species. Australian cities host several native of Hong Kong. Population decline from poaching pres-
parrots, including the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo. This sure in its native habitat led the International Union
big, white parrot, named for its sleek yellow mohawk, for Conservation of Nature to designate the species as
is a regular sight around gardens in Melbourne, Bris- critically endangered. Andersson is studying whether
bane, Sydney, and beyond. Although their population the species has found a useful refuge in the city, where
is in decline overall, they’re not listed as threatened, it’s not subject to poaching pressure. “It’s possible that
and they have found a way to survive successfully in these populations, if you do small things to support
cities. They’ve inhabited urban spaces as long as there them in cities, can function as species arks—backup
have been urban spaces, says Lucy Aplin of the Max populations for the wild ones,” she says.
Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Radolfzell, Ger- Nevertheless, city living isn’t all great for parrots.
many, and the Australian National University. “Parrots There’s predation: Mori says feral Rose-ringed Para-
have the potential, if given the opportunity, to exhibit keets regularly become prey for raptors, for example.
rapid adaptation to anthropogenic change.” Even for the endangered Yellow-crested Cockatoo, it’ll
In contrast to Monk and Rose-ringed Parakeets, take further work to determine whether the Hong
which start breeding between the ages of one and Kong populations can actually function as a genetic
three years and lay at least three eggs at a time, Sul- reservoir or whether city life has altered them too
phur-crested Cockatoos don’t generally breed until much to sustain the species. As part of her research,
they’re at least three or four years old, and they lay Andersson is investigating how the city cockatoos dif-
just two to three eggs per nesting season. They’re par- fer genetically from the native population.
ticular about where they nest, seeking out large cavi- A similar question preoccupies Smith-Vidaurre. In
ties in old trees. Yet they’ve been able to thrive in Aus- the U.S., she is looking at the complex vocalizations of
tralia’s major metropolitan areas. Monk Parakeets and how they differ between native
Certain traits of Sulphur-crested Cockatoos make and introduced individuals. Each parrot has its own
them quite well suited to city life. For one thing, they distinctive voice with changes in the frequency of its
are generalists, feeding on whatever food they can squawks. She found that the introduced parrots have
find—fruits, invertebrates or a discarded chicken bone. less complex calls than birds in the native ranges.
And they’re highly intelligent, social creatures capable “Something about their environment might be con-
of solving problems and teaching their solutions to straining their ability to produce or perceive these
others. These birds can build a culture around urban vocal signatures,” she says. How permanent are the
living, passing knowledge through social networks like changes, she wonders? Would an introduced parrot
humans do. Aplin studies a behavior that has emerged be able to return to its native range and thrive?
in Sydney’s Sulphur-crested Cockatoos: they’ve figured For better, for worse, and sometimes both, parrots
out how to open garbage bins. A group of the birds in have taken over our cities. Their ability to thrive in
southern Sydney first learned to open the bins, and our altered habitats is a testament to what makes
they transferred the knowledge to nearby cockatoo these species special and why we should work to con-
roosts. Birds outside the network don’t necessarily serve them in the wild while minding the potential
know how to do it. Aplin’s work has shown that birds impacts of introduced parrots. They’re innovators,
on opposite sides of the network have diverged into problem solvers, socializers and survivors. That’s how
subcultures, opening the bins in different ways. they earned our adoration in the first place. Some-
For some imperiled parrot species, cities may be times it’s a joy to stop and marvel at the parrots.
more than just another comfortable place to call
home—they can be a lifeline. Parrots whose native
populations are threatened with extinction are hold- FROM OUR ARCHIVES
ing on in some of the world’s largest cities. Consider
Cockatoos Work to Outsmart Humans in Escalating Garbage Bin Wars.
Hong Kong’s Yellow-crested Cockatoos. Darren Incorvaia; ScientificAmerican.com, September 12, 2022.
During the 1980s and into the 1990s, pet traders
exported tens of thousands of Yellow-crested Cocka-

NEUROSCIENCE
Synchronized
Minds
The brains of social species
are strikingly resonant
By Lydia Denworth
Illustration by Samantha Mash

Lydia Denworth is an award-winning science journalist and
contributing editor for Scientific American. S he is author
of Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power
of Life’s Fundamental Bond ( W. W. Norton, 2020) and several
other books of popular science.
N euroscientists usually investigate one brain at a time. They

observe how neurons fire as a person reads certain words, for
example, or plays a video game. As social animals, however,
those same scientists do much of their work together—brain-
storming hypotheses, puzzling over problems and fine-tuning
experimental designs. Increasingly, researchers are bringing
that reality into how they study brains.
Collective neuroscience, as some practitioners call
it, is a rapidly growing field of research. An early, con-
sistent finding is that when people converse or share an
experience, their brain waves synchronize. Neurons in
corresponding locations of the different brains fire at
the same time, creating matching patterns, like danc-
ers moving together. Auditory and visual areas respond
to shape, sound and movement in similar ways,
whereas higher-order brain areas seem to behave simi-
larly during more challenging tasks such as making
meaning out of something seen or heard. The experi-
same thing as someone else. But the newest research
suggests that synchrony is more than that—or can be.
Only by looking into the brains of all individuals in-
volved in an interaction, says neuroscientist Weizhe
Hong of the University of California, Los Angeles, can
we start to “fully understand what is going on.”
Researchers are discovering synchrony in humans
and other species, and they are mapping its choreogra-
phy—its rhythm, timing and undulations—to better
understand what benefits it may give us. They are find-
ing evidence that interbrain synchrony prepares peo-
ence of “being on the same wavelength” as another per- ple for interaction and beginning to understand it as a
son is real, and it is visible in the activity of the brain. marker of relationships. Given that synchronized ex-
Such work is beginning to reveal new levels of rich- periences are often enjoyable, researchers suspect this
ness and complexity in sociability. In classrooms where phenomenon is beneficial: it helps us interact and may
students are engaged with the teacher, for example, have facilitated the evolution of sociality. This new
their patterns of brain processing begin to align with kind of brain research might also illuminate why we
that teacher’s—and greater alignment may mean bet- don’t always “click” with someone or why social isola-
ter learning. Neural waves in certain brain regions of tion is so harmful to physical and mental health.
people listening to a musical performance match those
of the performer—the greater the synchrony, the RESONANCE
greater the enjoyment. Couples exhibit higher degrees Those tantalizing prospects are why, last December, I
of brain synchrony than nonromantic pairs, as do close put on a pair of hospital scrubs and lay in the tube of a
friends compared with more distant acquaintances. functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) ma-
But how does synchrony happen? Much about the chine at Harvard University. As instructed, I tried to
phenomenon remains mysterious—even scientists oc- keep as still as possible with my head in a cradle and
casionally use the word “magic” when talking about my left thumb poised on an emergency call button. It
it. One straightforward explanation could be that co- was as uncomfortable as I had been warned it would be.
herence between brains is a result of shared experi- “Are you okay?” asked a muffled voice from the
ence or simply a sign that we are hearing or seeing the control room next door.

What Is Brain Synchrony?
When people are not interacting socially, Scientists call this phenomenon interbrain The extent of synchrony indicates the
their individual brain waves are quite synchrony. Neurons in the different brains strength of a relationship, with brain-
different (left). But when they think, feel fire simultaneously—and as the interaction wave patterns matching particularly
and act in response to others, patterns continues, the timing and location of well between close friends or an effective
of activity in their brains align (right). brain activity become more and more alike. teacher and their students.
Neurons
in the
brain
1 2 3 1 2 3
Separate social Neuronal activity Shared social Neuronal activity Interacting

environments environment individuals
1 2 3 1 2 3
Time Time
“I’m good,” I lied. The story Sid and I told together wasn’t terribly
Then a new, louder voice sounded in my earbuds: original. My solo effort, about a kid who got in trouble,
“Can you hear me?” was even less so. But one thing stood out: I found it far
This was Sid. He was going to be my conversation more fun to work together than alone—so much so I
partner for the next hour. forgot about my discomfort. When I met Sid in person
We introduced ourselves. I said I was a science the next day at Dartmouth, he agreed. He, too, had en-
journalist. He said he worked in a social neuroscience joyed telling a story with me more than telling his
laboratory at Dartmouth College. Sid and I were com- own tale.
municating via the Internet as we lay in separate That seemed fitting to Dartmouth neuroscientist
brain-imaging machines 130 miles apart. Thalia Wheatley, who had enlisted us in this pioneer-
Instructions flashed on the screens above each of ing study. While Sid and I did our thing, Wheatley, her
us. Our task was to tell a story together in alternating postdoctoral researcher JD Knotts and Adam Boncz of
turns of 30 seconds each. I was to go first using this the Research Center for Natural Sciences in Budapest
prompt: “A group of children encounters aliens.” listened and watched from control rooms at Harvard
I launched into a story about children on a school and Dartmouth while multiple computers recorded
field trip who went for a walk in a park with their teach- what Sid and I said, when we said it and what our
ers and stumbled on the dramatic landing—loud noise, brains were doing at the time. The fMRI machines we
bright lights—of an alien spaceship. Sid had some of were in tracked changes in blood flow throughout the
the braver children venture closer, led by a boy named brain, which correlate tightly with changes in neural
Kevin. I added a girl named Annabel who reached out a activity. The results of such imaging highlight, albeit
finger to touch one of the creatures. Sid threw in some indirectly, where in the brain things are happening.
hints of ancient connections between the two worlds. For instance, the auditory cortex should be active
Eventually the counter on the monitor above me while a person is listening, but so should areas in the
flashed: 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . time was up. New instruc- temporal lobe that process language and meaning.
tions appeared. Now we each had to build our own Later the research team would pore over the volu-
story in 30-second increments. Between our own in- minous data generated, hoping to see the ways two
crements, we were to listen to the other person’s evolv- brains, together, change as they interact and might
ing tale. When that was done, we both had to retell all even make something new. “When we’re talking to
three stories: our joint creation and the ones we in- each other, we kind of create a single überbrain that
vented separately. isn’t reducible to the sum of its parts,” Wheatley says.
Graphics by Now Medical Studios July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 53

Scientists are hoping to see and theta depending on their oscillation rate, signify
different states of the brain. At 0.5 to four hertz (one
the ways in which two brains hertz is a full oscillation per second), delta waves usu-
ally represent deep, restful sleep. Other waves are fast
in conversation change as and choppy—awake and conscious activity is typically
associated with beta (13 to 30 Hz) and gamma waves
they interact and might even (roughly 30 to 100 Hz).
New studies similar to Wheatley’s aim to go beyond
make something new. the early findings and ask, for example, whether story-
telling pairs who build better stories show more tightly
coupled brain activity than those whose efforts fall a lit-
tle flat. For the findings to count as “extra” during the
“Like oxygen and hydrogen combine to make water, it joint storytelling condition, correlations between brains
creates something special that isn’t reducible to oxy- “should not be linked simply to people speaking or lis-
gen and hydrogen independently.” tening and understanding each other on a linguistic
At least that is the idea. To see whether they can level,” says Boncz, who is a co-lead on the study I took
pinpoint that “something special,” the researchers will part in. “It should be something more.”
compare the activity in my and Sid’s brains, and the To establish the neural underpinnings of interact-
brains of all the other pairs in the study, second by sec- ing brains, neuroscientists are also turning to other
ond, voxel by voxel over the course of our storytelling species in which they can investigate at deeper levels
session, looking for signs of coherence. They will also of neurobiological detail than in humans. Among the
consider the questionnaires and reports about the ex- social mammals they are studying, some of the most
perience we and other participants filled out after we intriguing—and surprising—are squabbling, snug-
emerged from the machines (using questions such as gling, swooping bats.
“How much did you like the story you created with
your partner?”). Such studies take time, but in a year BAT-BRAINED
or so, if all goes according to plan, they will publish It is not hard to find Michael Yartsev’s lab at the Uni-
their first results. versity of California, Berkeley. Small, black, plastic bat
The initial “hyperscanning” study—two people, wings are pinned to the wall by his nameplate as if
two fMRIs—took place at the Baylor College of Medi- they were fluttering around his door. Here it is always
cine in Houston. Neuroscientist Read Montague, now Halloween. And it was here, in 2019, that Yartsev and
at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, postdoctoral researcher Wujie Zhang were the first to
put two people in separate fMRI scanners and re- show that bat brains synchronize just as human
corded their brain activity as they engaged in a simple brains do. Although scientists have long studied col-
competitive game. The relatively limited goals of that lective behavior in animals from insects to mammals,
experiment were to demonstrate the feasibility of fol- they had never reached the level of the brain in
lowing simultaneous activity in two brains and to this way.
identify technical hurdles. The results were published Yartsev’s groundbreaking study showed what is
in 2002. Since then, the field has gotten better at hy- probably the simplest of the multiple levels of meaning
perscanning with fMRI and expanded to other kinds synchrony carries: it is a strong signal of social interac-
of technology. tion. In bats, it is present only when they are together.
Like fMRI, functional near-infrared spectroscopy The bats live downstairs, in what Yartsev, who is
(fNIRS) tracks changes in oxygen levels in blood flow; both a neuroscientist and an engineer, affectionately
because oxygenation increases with energy demands, calls the “bat cave.” He houses around 300 fruit bats in
scientists can use the method to track brain activity. two colonies, one for males, the other females. The
Employing just a cap of lights and sensors—oxygen- walls of the colony rooms are black, and in each there
rich blood interacts with light differently than less are mesh panels attached to the ceiling and netting
oxygenated blood does—fNIRS is cheaper and less de- spread throughout the room. Upside-down fruit ke-
manding to administer than fMRI. It is, however, also babs of cantaloupe and apple hang from the ceiling, as
more limited because it reaches only the upper levels do blue plastic structures for the bats to play in.
of the brain. Yartsev was drawn to the study of fruit bats be-
Electroencephalography (EEG), another type of cause of their vocal learning and communication
scan, zeroes in on timing, recording the speed and se- skills, but he quickly realized they offered a window
quence of brain activity—focusing on the w hen m
ore into sociality, too. Standing in the doorway of a colony
than the w here revealed by fMRI. EEG also reflects the room and watching the bats hang out together, it’s not
relative pace of different types of brain waves or oscil- hard to see why. Although they have plenty of room to
lations. Like waves in water, waves in the brain rise spread out, the brown-gray mammals, each six to
and fall in cycles fast and slow. The five common eight inches long, usually huddle in clusters, clinging
brain-wave types, named alpha, beta, gamma, delta to the netting or hanging from the mesh.

In the wild, these highly social fruit bats spend correlations fell apart. There was no synchrony in the
their nights foraging for food and much of the day bats’ brain activity, even when the researchers piped in
sleeping in big, crowded colonies in caves or trees— the sound of other bats calling. And there were more
sometimes with hundreds or thousands of other bats. intriguing details. In social situations, the correlations
While packed in tightly, they squabble over food, increased as bats interacted more. And increases in
sleeping space and mating attempts. correlation between brains preceded increases in so-
Down the hall from the colony rooms at Berkeley, cial interaction—a reflection of the fact that each inter-
there’s a large “flight room” for experiments. While action is a series of decisions, suggesting that brain
Yartsev and I watch, graduate students carry in two correlation facilitates interaction.
plastic containers with lids and release a group of bats. Yartsev and Zhang concluded that there is some-
From the control room next door, the animals show up thing special about social interaction. Synchrony may
as dots on the computer monitors, looking like re- be a sign of shared cognitive processing, which is the
mote-control Ping-Pong balls zinging around the room chemical and electrical signaling in the brain that al-
and occasionally coming to rest in odd corners. lows individuals to comprehend their environment,
Studying free-flying bats as Yartsev does is an exer- communicate and learn.
cise in technical precision. Because the bats spend so
much time huddled together and fly so quickly, it can NEURON BY NEURON
be hard to identify them or figure out which bat vocal- Looking at synchrony between bands of brain waves is
ized. To track location, behavior and brain activity, the one way of understanding what’s going on between in-
scientists outfitted the flight room with 16 cameras teracting brains. Another is to look at the activity of
and multiple antennas hidden in small white boxes. specific neurons. “Ultimately our brains are not a soup
Tiny transponders hanging around each bat’s neck of averages. They consist of individual neurons that do
have microphones that help the team detect which bat different things, and they may do opposite things,”
is vocalizing, and the cameras detect their locations at U.C.L.A.’s Hong says. Hong and his colleagues were
resolutions of a centimeter or less. Brain activity is among the first to go looking for this level of detail
monitored separately via electrodes recording from a and study interacting brains neuron by neuron. What
variety of brain regions and feeding neural data into they found revealed even more complexity.
tiny, lightweight loggers attached to each bat’s head. Like Yartsev, Hong first doubted that the interbrain
When the experiment is done, the information from synchrony he and his team observed in animals—in
each logger is uploaded and analyzed. their case, mice—was real. He hadn’t yet read the liter-
In Yartsev and Zhang’s 2019 synchrony experi- ature on synchrony in humans and told Lyle Kings-
ment, they used wireless electrophysiology and other bury—at the time a student of Hong’s and the lead sci-
technology to track bats’ behavior and brain activity entist on the research and now a postdoctoral fellow
for about 100 minutes at a time. They saw that the at Harvard University—that there must be something
bats’ behavior was roughly correlated—they tended to wrong. There wasn’t. Using a technology called micro-
rest at the same time and be active at the same time. endoscopic calcium imaging, which measures changes
Their active periods included social and nonsocial be- in induced fluorescence in individual neurons, they
haviors such as fighting or grooming themselves or looked at hundreds of neurons at the same time. In
one another. pairs of interacting mice, they established that syn-
To compare brain activity, the scientists analyzed a chrony appeared during an ongoing social interaction.
spectrogram of all brain-wave activity. What stood out Further, synchrony in mouse brains arose from sepa-
in the bats was that high-frequency bands (from 30 to rate populations of cells in the prefrontal cortex,
150 Hz) had more power, or prominence, during peri- which Hong calls “self cells” and “other cells.” The for-
ods of active behavior, and low-frequency bands (1 to mer encodes one’s own behavior, the latter the behav-
29 Hz) had more power during rest. It was also imme- ior of another individual. “The sum of activity of both
diately obvious—strikingly so—that there were very self and other cells is similar to or correlated with the
high levels of interbrain synchrony among the bats, es- sum of activity in the other brain,” Hong says.
pecially at high frequencies. The patterns were so simi- What they are seeing goes well beyond previous re-
lar that the researchers initially didn’t believe what search on so-called mirror neurons, which represent
they were seeing, but the data convinced them. “Here’s both the self and another. (When I watch you throw a
signal number one, and here’s signal number two,” ball, it activates a set of mirror neurons in my brain
Yartsev says. “Just do the correlation between them. It that would also be activated if I were doing the same
was so incredibly robust, which was very reassuring thing myself.) In contrast, the self and other cells
because it suggested we were looking at something Hong and Kingsbury discovered encode only the be-
real. We would see it every single time when they were havior of one individual or the other. All three kinds of
socially interacting.” cells—mirror, self and other—were present and align-
When Yartsev and Zhang repeated the experiment ing in the mouse brains.
by letting the bats fly freely in identical separate cham- The mouse study suggested another level of mean-
bers rather than in the same social environment, the ing for synchrony: it predicts the outcomes of future

Coupled Bat Brains
Bats are social animals, a
nd when together, their brain waves synchronize. Investigators at the University of California, Berkeley,
recorded neuronal activity from four Egyptian fruit bats as they freely interacted—flying, squabbling and resting. Synchrony
was strongest among “friend” bats that hung out together. The data also revealed which neurons coded for which individual bat.
When one bat emits a call, it induces collective brain coupling among all The calls also activated a separate set of neurons, depending on which
listening bats. Scientists found the synchrony to be strongest among bats bat in the group was calling. These neurons encoded identity, with some
that tended to hang close together. representing the self and others representing the caller.
Listener
Data logger
Caller-
listener Listener
coupling
Caller Listener-
listener
Forebrain coupling
Out-of- Weaker Activated Neurons encoding

group caller correlation “self” neuron other individuals Activated “caller” neuron
interactions. Like bats, mice enjoy the company of It’s not entirely clear how hierarchical bats are, but
other mice and sleep huddled together, but they are a they do have preferred companions. Yartsev and his
hierarchical species, with some animals more domi- team noticed that most of their bats tended to cluster
nant than others. To take advantage of that, Hong and together, but there were a few that spent their time a lit-
Kingsbury used a standard experiment called a tube tle off to the side. The researchers set out to see whether
test that is much like watching two football teams try there were differences in levels of correlation when “in-
to reach each other’s end zones. The researchers placed cluster” and “out-of-cluster” bats vocalized. This time,
two animals in a tube, one at each end, and watched in addition to recording brain activity at the level of fre-
them advance toward each other. They wanted to see quency bands, they also recorded the activity of individ-
which mouse gained the most ground on its opponent. ual neurons in the brains of four bats simultaneously as Source: “Cortical Representation of Group Social Communication in Bats,”
The one who got farther was deemed dominant. they flew in groups of four, five and eight. A 2021 study ol. 374; October 22, 2021 (reference)
Surprisingly, there were higher levels of synchrony led by Maimon Rose and Boaz Styr, then both members
between mice who were further apart in social sta- of Yartsev’s lab, revealed that when one bat emits a call,
tus—one dominant and one submissive—and lower it induces collective brain coupling among all listening
levels between mice closer in rank. (Researchers in bats. And as in the mice, separate sets of neurons be-
China found something similar in human leaders and came active depending on which bat in the group vocal-
followers. In a 2015 study, neural synchronization was ized, meaning individual neurons in the bats’ brains en-
by Maimon C. Rose et al., in S cience, V
higher between leaders and followers than between coded identity, with some representing the self and
followers and followers.) Once they recognized the others representing other individuals. The signals were
role of social status in their experiment, Hong and so distinct that the scientists could tell which bat was
Kingsbury could use the levels of synchrony they ob- calling just by looking at the recordings of neural activ-
served to predict within a few minutes of a 15-minute ity. Correlation among brains was visible in all the bats,
interaction whether one mouse would dominate and but it was strongest when calls came from “friendlier”
how much more progress it would make. bats—those that clustered together more often.

The bat and mouse studies were technically very
different, but “the two stories are surprisingly simi- Synchrony may help people
lar,” Hong says. “This is the exciting part of science
when you see someone else’s work support the conclu- teach and learn, forge friendships
sions we have [made] independently.”
and romances, cooperate and
The goal o
BEYOND SYNCHRONY
f the latest human studies, such as the one
converse, and even maintain
Wheatley invited me to join, is not just to explore syn-
chrony more deeply but to go beyond it. Wheatley, who
emotional stability.
with four other Dartmouth scientists is establishing
the college’s Consortium for Interacting Minds, be-
lieves that asking when we are in sync with someone again, as well as new video from the same movies. Af-
else is “a pretty limited way to think about two minds ter further discussion that reached consensus, patterns
coming together.” More interesting, Boncz says, would of brain processing aligned across participants as they
be to see whether brains can align at the level of under- watched the second round of videos. Members of a
standing. “We think there could be synchrony, for ex- conversational group had the same brain activity at the
ample, when people understand perhaps even differ- same time in brain areas handling vision, memory and
ent stimuli the same way, if they have some sort of language comprehension. The people who listened and
higher-level meaning that they share.” worked hardest to seek consensus—and not those who
The preliminary evidence from the study in which talked most—were the ones whose brains synchro-
I participated shows synchrony between interacting nized with others first and who drove synchrony in the
brains and, more intriguingly, that correlations in larger group. “By talking together and coming to con-
some brain regions are greater between people while sensus as a group,” Sievers said in a video describing
they are telling a joint story than during the indepen- the study, “participants aligned their brains.”
dent stories, particularly in the parietal cortex. “That Taken together, these findings are an intriguing
area is active for memory and narrative construction,” way of understanding how our brains facilitate the so-
Wheatley says. “It seems to fit.” cial interaction that is so critical to human life. With-
But the group is also asking whether the content of out synchrony and the deeper forms of connection
the stories changes levels of alignment and whether that lie beyond it, we may be at greater risk for mental
each pair’s relative enjoyment of the process is linked instability and poor physical health. With synchrony
to a greater or lesser degree of synchrony. Like Sid and and other levels of neural interaction, humans teach
me, most people reported preferring the joint story- and learn, forge friendships and romances, and coop-
telling exercise to the individual tales, but that wasn’t erate and converse. We are driven to connect, and syn-
true for everyone. Are synchronized brains more cre- chrony is one way our brains help us do it.
ative? Or do they just have more fun? The answers will Cooperating and conversing are what Sid and I
have to wait for further analysis. were doing in our separate scanners as we created a
One of the challenges of this study is making sense story together. More impressive than our effort,
of the mountain of data it generates. Like early astron- though, was that of the pair who came before us. Cait-
omers mapping constellations in a star-filled sky for lyn Lee, a graduate student in Wheatley’s lab, was
the first time, the scientists have to find order in seem- working with Lorie Loeb, a computer science profes-
ing chaos by making sense of it mathematically. Mea- sor at Dartmouth. They set their story not in a park,
suring synchrony is relatively straightforward, Wheat- like ours, but in an unfamiliar landscape. During one
ley says, because “we know how to do that math.” The of her turns, Lee said, “The trees [the children] were
researchers calculate linear correlations between sub- climbing on looked really weird; the ground was start-
jects to determine the degree to which parts of their ing to rise.” Then her turn cut off, and Loeb picked the
brains respond in the same way over time—are they in story up, saying, “It felt like the creature took a
lockstep? Does their activity ebb and flow together? breath.” It was exactly what Lee had been thinking:
The hyperscanning study is only one way Wheatley that the children were walking on the alien itself. “It
is approaching synchrony. In a forthcoming study, really felt like we were on the same page,” Lee says.
available as a preprint, she and Beau Sievers, who is As we listened to Lee’s retelling, Wheatley turned
currently working as both a research associate at to me. “At some level,” she said, “I think it has to be
Harvard and a postdoc at Stanford University, show the synchrony.”
the power of conversation to synchronize brain pat-
terns. Forty-nine participants watched unfamiliar si-
lent movie clips, then split into small groups of about FROM OUR ARCHIVES
four people to discuss the clips. Each group was asked All Together Now. M
arta Zaraska; October 2020.
to reach a consensus on what the movies were about.
After the conversations, the groups watched the clips

RESOURCES
Researchers are
discovering giant
deposits of fresh water
below the coastal seafloor
that might someday save
dry regions from drought
By Rob L. Evans
Illustration by Sam Falconer
Undersea
Aquifers

O
Rob L. Evans is a geophysicist and a senior scientist at the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where he has worked
for 29 years. He has sailed on more than 30 research cruises,
spending more than two years at sea.
n a clear September day in 2015, after 10 years of working to get

funding, my colleague Kerry Key and I stepped aboard the R/V
Langseth, a research ship docked at the Woods Hole Oceano-
graphic Institution in Massachusetts. We were about to lead a
10-day expedition to map a deposit of fresh water, size unknown,
hidden 100 meters (about 330 feet) under the rocky seafloor.
Back in the 1960s the U.S. Geological Survey had drilled a and help irrigate dry crops? Do such reservoirs exist around the
series of vertical boreholes off the New Jersey coast, looking for world in places where water scarcity is already a huge challenge?
sand deposits and other resources. They unexpectedly struck If so, could we tap these surprising deposits safely and econom-
fresh water, which was baffling. Years later researchers obtained ically? Our discovery prompted further studies, including recent
water samples from the same location and analyzed the chem- surveys off San Diego, Hawaii, New Zealand and Malta that are
istry, finding to their surprise that the liquid was a mix of recent starting to provide answers.
rainwater and seawater. Rainwater, 65 kilometers (40 miles) out
to sea—under the seafloor? B URIED AT SEA
That’s where we were headed. Once the R/V L angseth w as in Records of fresh water being found offshore go as far back as
position, we spooled out a long, floating line that held a special the 1800s. Fishers off Florida have occasionally reported “boils”
transmitter. It sent electromagnetic fields hundreds of meters of water on the ocean’s surface, which they assume leaked
down through the ocean and into the seabed. The fields passed upward from below. In some cases, they sampled the water and
through the seafloor and created secondary, return signals cap- it did not taste salty; fresh water is less dense than seawater,
tured by other sensors on the line. We slowly towed the array for so it rises.
130 kilometers over the region where drilling had been done. We In 1996, two years after I started at Woods Hole, I was on a
also dropped instruments that sank to the bottom and recorded small chartered research vessel with six colleagues offshore of
the signals from our transmitter, as well as naturally occurring Eureka, Calif., the coastline still visible in the distance. We were
electromagnetic fields. We could use all these readings to create using a new seafloor-surveying system that had been built at the
an image of what was underneath the seafloor. Once we had com- Pacific Geoscience Center in Canada to map sediments. Our study
pleted the survey off New Jersey, we sailed up toward Martha’s was part of a large program looking at how flooding rivers that
Vineyard—where researchers had suggested there might also be flow to the shoreline disperse sediment into the sea, and our
fresh water—and ran a long sensing profile there, too. equipment was measuring the amount of seawater in sediment
It took us months to process all the data. When we published to depths of about 30 meters. It used electromagnetic sensing, a
our results in 2019, we made a stir. One media headline summed technique that was on the fringes of marine geophysics.
up the excitement: “Mysterious Freshwater Reservoir Found Hid- In one area where all other data made us think we should see
den beneath the Ocean.” True. But how big was it? How did it get fine-grained, muddy sediments with high saltwater content, we
there? And how common are these offshore underground depos- saw a signal that insinuated the opposite: the reading suggested
its? We didn’t know. fresh water that extended for about 50 square kilometers, a sign
Other questions nagged us. Only about 2.5 percent of all the that groundwater might be leaking from below the shore and
surface water on this ocean planet is fresh. As the global popu- oozing through cracks and faults extending into the seafloor. The
lation grows toward an estimated 10 billion people by 2100, the discovery made us realize that electromagnetic sensing could
stresses on our water supply will increase—especially in coastal detect fresh water hiding anywhere under the sea.
regions, where 30 percent of the U.S. population now lives. Cli- A continent does not stop at its shoreline; it extends well off-
mate change is also altering rainfall patterns, pollution is com- shore as a rocky underwater shelf. The shelf ends at a steep slope
promising extant bodies of water, and agriculture and develop- that transitions sharply to deep oceanic seafloor. The rock and sed-
ment are sucking underground reservoirs dry. Could large, hid- iments that make up the world’s continental shelves are not dry.
den reservoirs only a few dozen kilometers out to sea save lives Some rocks crack, allowing seawater to penetrate. And most

shelves are covered by layers of sedimentary rock, which are like across the shoreline and eventually out to the seabed. For this
hard sponges with small, interconnected, water-filled pores. long-distance flow to occur and for the water to remain fresh,
Sediments at or just below the seafloor are typically 40 to there needs to be a cap over the marine aquifer—a layer that is
50 percent porous. The weight of the ocean above pushes water not permeable, usually of compacted clay-rich sediment. Clay is
down into the sediment as far as it can go. Geoscientists still debate paradoxical: it can hold a lot of water when loose, but when it is
the maximum depth, but it can be at least several kilometers, compacted it becomes almost impervious. This cap prevents the
although the seepage decreases rapidly with depth as the increased less dense fresh water from rising up to the seafloor.
pressure closes up cracks and pore spaces. The rock’s permeabil- An entirely different mechanism could also leave fresh water
ity—the ease with which water can flow through it—depends on under the seafloor. During past ice ages, giant ice sheets and gla-
how extensively its various pores are interconnected. ciers grew, soaking up large volumes of ocean water. Sea level
Because the shelf is a continuation of the continent, models was much lower, and long sections of continental shelves were
of groundwater flow in land along the northeastern U.S. coast exposed as land open to the elements. During the last ice age,
suggest there could be substantial amounts of fresh water hid- roughly between 12,000 and 20,000 years ago, rain falling on
den within the rocks and sediments below the continental slope’s these areas could have percolated down into the subsurface, just
seafloor. But there are competing hypotheses about how such as it does onshore today. If that water flowed underneath a cap,
water might get there—and remain there. it could have remained trapped as the ice sheets later melted and
On land, subsurface water is stored in geologic layers of water- sea levels rose again. Yet another model posits that the great
bearing rock called aquifers. Some aquifers are shallow and can weight of the ice sheets pushed fresh water deep into the sub-
be replenished by rainfall. Others are much deeper and hold water surface and below caps.
that has been in place for thousands of years, perhaps left there
by glaciers during the last ice age. The composition of aquifers var- F RESH OR SALTY
ies across regions, from limestone layers below Florida to more Figuring out how a specific reservoir formed—whether it is con-
sedimentary layers in the Northeast. Groundwater—the fresh nected to aquifers on land and how extensive it may be—requires
water contained in aquifers—makes up roughly 90 percent of the a lot of sensing. Drilling provides samples, but it is expensive and
total available fresh water in the U.S., even when we factor in riv- limited to isolated spots. What had been missing until our cruise
ers and lakes. About 25 percent of the water consumed in the U.S. on the R/V L angseth was a relatively inexpensive, easy-to-use
is pumped from aquifers through private or municipal wells. technique that could cover large areas of seafloor.
Off the U.S. East Coast the continental shelf extends anywhere In the 1970s and 1980s researchers began developing electro-
from close to shore to more than 300 kilometers out to sea. Per- magnetic instruments to measure properties of the seafloor,
haps not surprisingly, the geologic layers that form aquifers motivated in part by the U.S. Navy’s interest in long-distance sub-
under land do not stop at the shoreline; they often extend out- marine communications. Through the 1980s and 1990s “con-
ward as part of the shelf. trolled source electromagnetic” (CSEM) sensing slowly became
When rain falls on coastal land, it can percolate down into an more sophisticated. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the petro-
aquifer and through highly permeable rocks, traveling under and leum industry began using the technology to detect subsurface
Finding Wet Treasure

Electromagnetic fields t ransmitted from a ship down into the seabed travel within the rocky substrate, generating a return signal
picked up by floating receivers. The signal varies, with salt water in rock cracks and pores conducting electric current better than
fresh water, revealing where fresh water is lurking. Sensors on the seafloor aid the process.
Transmitter Towed receiver

1,400 meters
Porous rock Sediment Sensor Transmitted electromagnetic fields Fresh water Salt water Return electromagnetic fields
Graphics by Julia Ditto July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 61

oil, which drove significant improvements in the instrumenta-
tion available to researchers.
How Water Seeps CSEM sensing basically measures how well the seafloor con-
into the Seabed ducts electric current. In the continental shelf, electrical con-
ductivity is controlled by the amount of seawater in pores and
Fresh water m ay become trapped under the seafloor in several cracks, as well as the salinity and temperature of that seawater.
ways. It might be trickling out there today from underground The sodium and chloride ions in salt are charge carriers that
aquifers on shore (top), or it might have accumulated millennia enhance conductivity, so salt water conducts better than fresh
ago during past ice ages (middle and b ottom). In each case, water. A section of ocean floor infused with seawater will con-
a layer of cap rock separates it from ocean water percolating duct current better than a section infused with less saline water.
down from above. CSEM can measure the differences with fairly high precision.
During our cruise the four receivers on the tow line were
600 to 1,400 meters behind the ship. They measured the elec-
Subsurface Connections from Shore
tric field generated by the transmitter near the ship, as well as
Fresh water in underground aquifers on land can seep through
fissures and porous rock that extend out under the seafloor.
an induced electric field that was detected as it returned from
Impervious cap rock prevents salt water from intruding. the seafloor substructure. The farther back the receiver, the
deeper it could look into the subsurface. That information,
Sediment Cap rock along with data about Earth’s naturally occurring electric and
magnetic fields from the instruments we dropped on the sea-
floor, allowed us to clearly show that there are submarine fresh-
water aquifers off New Jersey and Martha’s Vineyard.
We still have no good idea about the extent or volume of
fresh water, however. Although CSEM conductivity measure-
ments are sensitive to the salinity of pore water, they are also
affected by the porosity of the seafloor—how much water is
present in a given volume. A rock with high porosity that is less
Bedrock Fresh water Salt water conductive (fresher water) can have the same reading as a rock
Porous rock Fresh-salt water interface with low porosity that conducts current well (saltier water).
For our CSEM surveys off New Jersey, we used samples of sed-
iment from the drill holes and samples of the pore water to cal-
Rainfall during Low-Sea-Level Period
ibrate our models. Salinity is expressed in grams of dissolved
When sea level was low during ice ages, rain may have fallen
on exposed seafloor sediment and filtered down through gaps salts per liter. The salinity of seawater is around 35. Water with
in the cap rock, into porous rock below. salinity between 1 and 10 is considered brackish. Anything less
than 1 is considered fresh. Pore water salinities off New Jersey
and Martha’s Vineyard range between 0.2 and 9.0.
Sea level in past
We have no data for the seafloor between those places, so
we do not know whether the two hidden bodies of water are
connected or, if so, how. We think there might be fresh water
underneath the entire New England shelf, based on surveys
and models of aquifers onshore. The water off Martha’s Vine-
Gaps in cap rock yard may have been left there by glaciers more than 12,000
years ago. The water off New Jersey seems to originate in part
Source: “Origin and Extent of Fresh Paleowaters on the Atlantic Continental Shelf, USA,”
from rainfall on land. A large team is making plans for scien-
by Denis Cohen et al., in Ground Water, Vol. 48; January-February, 2010 (reference)
tific drilling off Martha’s Vineyard next year, and that work will
Ice-Sheet Pressure during provide chemical analyses that could help us figure out how
Low-Sea-Level Period long the water has been hiding there.
When sea level was low, the tremendous weight of ice sheets Farther south along the Eastern Seaboard, the coastal geol-
onshore may have forced groundwater down into porous rock
that extended out to sea.
ogy transitions to mostly limestone; the movement of under-
ground water there may be different again. To decipher what
Weight of ice forces groundwater
down into porous rock is happening, we would need much more CSEM surveying, per-
haps augmented by drilling in select locations, which would be
Sea level in past
Ice sheet a costly undertaking. Surveying the transition from land to
sea—to find possible water flows from land aquifers to ocean
deposits—is challenging. It would require towing a long array
in shallow coastal waters with heavy surf and busy boat traf-
fic, as well as data collection with similar sensors on shoreline
Groundwater land. Although the U.S. East Coast is not under significant
water stress compared with other parts of the world, the region
is relatively well studied and offers perhaps the best opportu-

nity to understand the various processes involved in offshore
groundwater transport and storage. One million cubic kilometers
As I mentioned earlier, other experiments have been con-
ducted since our cruise—some in places that have very different
of fresh water may be stored
geologic settings. A 2018 survey off Hawaii, using much the same within 150 kilometers of
equipment as we used, found clear evidence of rock containing
fresh water several hundred meters under the seafloor. Unlike
seashores worldwide. New
New Jersey, Hawaii is built from volcanic rock, which has rela- York City consumes about
tively high permeability. The assumption, not proved yet, is that
the submarine aquifers are created by underground runoff from 1.4 cubic kilometers a year.
places on land. Hawaii depends on precipitation for its water
supply, so understanding how its water may be lost to the ocean
through subsurface routes is important. seem less worthwhile. The U.S. West Coast has many geologic
faults that could channel groundwater offshore but that could
T EMPTATION TO TAP also allow saltwater intrusion onshore if there were excessive
Interest in finding offshore freshwater deposits has risen signif- pumping. This would seem to be the case for San Diego.
icantly in the past few years, notably in regions where freshwa- All municipalities have a water-supply strategy, usually
ter supplies are scarce. Our best guess at how much is trapped involving a range of potable water sources, as well as conserva-
within roughly 150 kilometers of seashores worldwide is about tion. Some water-stressed regions, including some entire coun-
one million cubic kilometers. For reference, New York City con- tries, are already desalinating seawater. The process is expensive
sumes about 1.4 cubic kilometers a year. Our guess is based and, if the machinery is powered by fossil fuels, emits greenhouse
mostly on extrapolation from onshore drill holes, as well as on gases. Before a locality considered drilling for submarine fresh
the few offshore surveys so far. water, it might consider groundwater that had been dismissed
No one has designed a detailed system to tap a submarine in the past because it was brackish; it might be less salty than
aquifer. Tor Bakken of SINTEF Energy Research in Norway and the submarine aquifer. San Diego and El Paso, Tex., are already
his colleagues described a general system based on oil-drilling desalinating brackish groundwater. Another issue could be which
technology. A jack-up rig (basically a platform on legs) or a barge country has the right to draw from an offshore aquifer that lies
would be anchored above a submarine freshwater aquifer. Engi- across an ocean boundary between two adjacent nations.
neers would drill into the reservoir, and water would flow Conservation is also important. Everything on Earth’s conti-
through a pipeline on the seafloor to a processing plant onshore. nents and oceans is connected. Onshore groundwater that flows
The plant would desalinate the water, probably using reverse through the subsurface and offshore brings nutrients and chem-
osmosis, a common filtering technique. Bakken estimated that icals that sustain delicate marine communities in places along
this process would be slightly cheaper than desalination of sea- the continental slope. We cannot yet predict the environmental
water, depending on how salty the “fresh water” is. The desali- consequences of using offshore groundwater as a resource.
nation, which is energy-intensive, would account for a much Scientists have confirmed only a small number of submarine
larger percentage of the total cost than drilling or pumping the freshwater aquifers. There could be many more—small, large,
water along the pipeline. refreshed by groundwater or isolated by ice ages. Community
To decide whether to exploit any given offshore water supply, efforts are springing up, particularly in Europe, to explore the
we would need to understand how groundwater finds its way possibilities. More surveys will gradually solve the mystery—and
into that patch of seafloor to begin with. Imagine a submarine reveal more surprises. Mapping in 2022 in the Mediterranean
aquifer that isn’t connected to any water-conducting structures Sea around Malta showed an offshore reservoir probably fed by
under the shoreland. The fresh water is surrounded by sediments onshore groundwater. The data and modeling concluded that
containing seawater. As soon as someone started pumping the there may be one cubic kilometer of fresh water offshore, enough
fresh water out, seawater could flow into the void, mixing with to supply the population of the Maltese Islands for 75 years. But
the remaining fresh water and raising its salinity. And once the the modeling also showed that climate change will lessen future
fresh water is extracted, it won’t get replenished. rainfall there, reducing offshore groundwater by 38 percent over
Pumping water from a submarine aquifer that is connected the next 80 years or so.
through a geologic formation to an onshore aquifer could also We have a lot to learn. Drilling south of Martha’s Vineyard
be risky. Any submarine aquifer would be at least slightly brack- next year will tell us much more about how stores of fresh water
ish, and pumping could mix the waters, which might reduce the under land and sea might connect. The more we investigate, the
freshness of the land aquifer. Modeling also suggests that exces- more we will understand about how these hidden treasures are
sive pumping of offshore reservoirs could drain the onshore formed, and the better we will be able to predict where we might
water supplying them and even lead to land subsidence. find them.
Between September 2019 and September 2020 researchers
using CSEM sensing showed that brackish groundwater within
the San Diego Formation, a big underground supply of water for FROM OUR ARCHIVES
the city, was connected to a submarine aquifer offshore by Coro- Every Inch of the Seafloor. Mark Fischetti; August 2022.
nado Island. Yet the geology of the region is complex, with a num-
ber of faults, which could make tapping a submarine aquifer

C L I M AT E C H A N G E
Dangerous
Discomfort

Extreme heat kills more people in the U.S.
than hurricanes, flash floods and tornadoes
combined. But people don’t tend to
believe it puts them at risk
By Terri Adams-Fuller
Illustration by Taylor Callery

Terri Adams-Fuller is a professor in the department of sociology
and criminology and interim director at the NOAA Cooperative
Science Center for Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
at Howard University. Her research interests include emergency
management, policing, gender studies, and how disasters affect
people and organizations.
O n June 25, 2022, Esteban Chavez, Jr., started his day like any other,
working his route in Pasadena, Calif., as a driver for UPS. But the city
was in the middle of an intense heat wave, and by midafternoon the
temperature was higher than 90 degrees Fahrenheit. After completing
his last delivery of the day, Chavez collapsed off his seat in the cab of
the truck. He went unnoticed for 20 minutes before the homeowner at his delivery location saw
him and sought medical assistance. Chavez’s family said he died from heatstroke as a result of
heat exhaustion. He was 24 years old.
Chavez didn’t seem like someone at risk for the health
effects of extreme heat. But such unfortunate deaths are
increasingly common. The number of heat-related ill-
nesses and fatalities in the U.S. has been going up since
Extreme heat is the number-one weather-related
cause of death in the U.S., and it kills more people most
years than hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined.
Yet research shows that compared with their thinking
the 1980s—a direct result of the rise in Earth’s tempera- about dramatic events such as storm surges and wild-
tures. Approximately 1,300 people die in the U.S. every fires, people tend to feel more uncertain about what to
year from exposure to extreme heat, according to the do under the threat of extreme heat and don’t perceive
Environmental Protection Agency, and that figure that as much personal risk. This mismatch between the real-
will almost certainly increase with the accelerating ity of the danger and the actions people take to protect
effects of climate change. This phenomenon is, of course, themselves extends beyond individual perception to the
not exclusive to the U.S.; a study published in 2021 by the policy level. Heat risks to human health are not often
Lancet r eports that 356,000 people in nine countries— prioritized in climate mitigation and adaptation plans—
about half the population of Vermont—died from ill- if they are factored in at all.
nesses related to extreme heat in 2019.
Exposure to extreme heat can damage the central ner- DISCRIMINATORY POLICIES
vous system, the brain and other vital organs, and the AND URBAN HOTSPOTS
effects can set in with terrifying speed, resulting in heat Between 1880, when precise recordkeeping began, and
exhaustion, heat cramps or heatstroke. It also exacer- 1980, average temperatures worldwide rose by about 0.13
bates existing medical conditions such as hypertension degree F every 10 years. Since 1981 the rate of increase
and heart disease and is especially perilous for people has more than doubled, and for the past 40 years global
who suffer from chronic diseases. The older population annual temperatures have increased by 0.32 degree F per
is at high risk, and children, who may not be able to decade. Although the pace of the increase might seem rel-
regulate their body temperatures as effectively as atively slow, it signals a dramatic shift, and the cumula-
adults in extreme conditions, are also vulnerable. But tive effects on the planet are huge. The 10 hottest years
people of all ages can be endangered. Studies show that on record have occurred since 2010. The summer of 2022
outdoor workers regardless of age are most likely to was the hottest in known history for segments of the U.S.
experience the consequences of extreme heat exposure. Temperatures soared to 127 degrees F in Death Valley,

Deaths from Extreme Heat
Extreme heat is the number-one weather-related cause of death more and more people move to densely developed urban cen-
in the U.S. Worldwide, the number of fatalities is expected ters. Yet research has shown that some people have difficulty
to rise as climate change makes heat waves even hotter and as recognizing the personal risks to their health and safety.
A Clear Surge in Deaths Mortality Rate During the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave (Cook County)
During a week in July 1995, a heat wave hit
500
Chicago. Daytime temperatures surged to Average daily deaths, 1990–2000
more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and night 400 (June 1–August 31) Daily deaths, 1995 (June 1–August 31)
time temperatures didn’t drop low enough 300
to give people a reprieve. There were about
700 excess deaths between July 11 and July 27 200
compared with the same period in an average 100
year. The number of deaths classified as “heat
related” over this time was 465, suggesting 0
June 1 July 13 August 31
that potentially hundreds of deaths belonging
in this category went uncounted. This is one
challenge of connecting extreme heat with its
true cost in lives. Daily High Temperature, 1995 58˚ Fahrenheit 104˚ F
All 10,527 Heat-Related Deaths (U.S., 2004–2018), Broken Down by Age, Sex, Race/Ethnicity, and Location Some People Are
Sex Age Group (years) Race/Ethnicity Level of Urbanization More Vulnerable
Not stated
Than Others
Not stated Noncore
Up to 1 People older than 65 tend to
Asian/Pacific Islander (3 per mil.)
1-4 1,349 be especially susceptible to the
3,186 Female (1 per mil.) Micropolitan effects of excessive heat; they
5–14
(1 per 15–24 American Indian/Alaska Native (2 per mil.) are several times more likely
million*) 25–34 1,965 (6 per mil.) Small metro to die from heat-related car
1,774 35–44 1,764 (2 per mil.) diovascular disease than the
Hispanic (2 per mil.)
45–54
Sources: EPA’s Climate Change Indicators in the United States, https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heat-related-deaths
general population. Those who

Black Medium metro
55–64 live and work in a densely
(C hicago heat-wave reference, with data from CDC and NOAA) ; “Heat-Related Deaths, United States, 2004–2018,” by Ambarish Vaidyanathan et al.,
Male (3 per mil.) 1,607 (2 per mil.)

1,919 (3 per mil.) developed inner city without
(3 per
in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: M orbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Vol. 69. No. 24; June 19, 2020 (h eat-related death data)
mil.) Large fringe metro much green space—areas

7,341 65–74
6,602 White (1 per mil.) known as urban heat islands—
1,636 (4 per mil.)
(2 per mil.) are also vulnerable. The urban
*Crude rate 75–84 4,402 Large central metro
normalized
heat island effect can increase
1,435 (7 per mil.) (3 per mil.) temperatures by 18 to 27
against Those identified as Hispanic
population 85 and up may be of any race. All other degrees F during the day
size (11 per mil.) groups are non-Hispanic. compared with rural areas.
Calif., where extremes are expected. But record highs top of environmental changes compounds stressors on
were also reached across the U.S. in cities that aren’t human health, infrastructure, socioeconomic systems,
accustomed to severe heat, such as Bonners Ferry, Idaho and essential resources such as energy and water.
(108 degrees F), and Omak, Wash. (117 degrees F). Urban centers tend to have a high density of build-
Extreme heat is a danger to all segments of society, ings, paved roads and parking lots—all of which absorb
but people in dense urban environments suffer the most and retain heat. Green spaces such as parks and golf
severely. The connection between urbanization and heat courses, in contrast, reduce heat levels in neighborhoods
risks will become more urgent as more people around by lowering surface and air temperatures through
the world move to urban areas. According to the United evapotranspiration. Mature trees and other natural fea-
Nations Population Division, 68 percent of the planet’s tures provide shade, deflect the sun’s radiation and
population will live in urban areas by 2050, up from release moisture into the atmosphere. As heat waves
55 percent in 2018. The rate of global urbanization, how- become more frequent and intense, cities are experienc-
ever, hides differences across nations: 82 percent of peo- ing higher nighttime and mean temperatures compared
ple in North America already live in urban environments with areas that have a lot of green space. This is com-
compared with 65 percent in China and 43 percent in monly called the heat island effect.
Africa. In the U.S., the rate of urbanization (people mov- Within these heat islands are especially hot hotspots,
ing from rural areas to cities) increased from 50 percent or intraurban heat islands, which tend to have the least
in the 1950s to 83 percent in 2020. This rapid growth on green space. Recent studies have shown that “extreme
Graphics by Jen Christiansen July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 67

dent Franklin D. Roosevelt’s federally funded New Deal,
which enforced segregation practices. The Federal Hous-
Overlap between Heat ing Administration, for instance, refused to insure the
and Historically homes of Black and other nonwhite families or homes

owned by white people that were considered too close to
Redlined Neighborhoods Black neighborhoods. Local governments that practiced

“benign neglect” created isolated zones devoid of
Within a single city such as Baltimore (shown here), urban heat island resources and opportunities.
effects can vary greatly based on hyperlocal infrastructure. This heat Today’s hotspot communities often suffer from the
map shows temperatures collected by citizen scientists across the city long-term effects of these discriminatory urban-plan-
at 3 p.m. on August 29, 2018. The outlined zones are historically red- ning policies, including inadequate access to parks and
lined neighborhoods, where discriminatory policies led to poor urban green spaces. And for people who live in these areas,
planning. They overlap with some of today’s extreme hotspots. central air-conditioning may not be an affordable solu-
tion, if it’s even an available option. Many older build-
Temperature at 3 P.M. on August 29, 2018 ings have never been retrofitted to accommodate cen-
Thick lines tral air—a common situation in the inner city in places
show approximate
87˚ Fahrenheit 95˚ F 103˚ F such as New York, Detroit and Baltimore—leaving peo-
neighborhoods classified as
“Fourth Grade” (lowest level) ple reliant on smaller, portable window units and fans.
in a “Residential Security Map” Regardless of the cooling technology used, low-
published by the income households in America spend 8.1 percent of their
Home Owner’s Loan income on energy costs compared with 2.3 percent for
Corporation non-low-income households, according to a 2020 report
in 1937.
from the American Council for an Energy Efficient
Economy. The ability to reduce energy costs (by updat-
ing house insulation and switching to efficient electric
appliances, for instance) is largely out of the control of
renters and may be unaffordable for lower-income
homeowners. Thus, the most vulnerable people in the
prepared by Home Owner’s Loan Corporation Division of Research & Statistics, with cooperation of the Appraisal Department, May 29, 1937, courtesy Baltimore
hottest hot zones must face decisions that pit the high
Sources: NOAA Climate.gov (m ap) ; Portland State SUPR Lab (d ata) ; Redlined zones added by Jen Christiansen using Residential Security Map of Baltimore Md.,
City Sheet Maps Collection, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University, https://jhir.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/32621 (reference for redlined zones)
energy cost of staying cool and safe against providing
for other necessities of life. As a result, they may be more
at risk for heat-related illness and death because of both
overexposure to high temperatures where they live and
the lack of resources to mitigate the effects of that heat.
BETTER RISK ASSESSMENT

In the past the heat island effect had little connection to
global climate trends, but recent research findings sug-
gest that, on average, urban heat island warming will be
equivalent to about half the warming caused by green-
house gas emissions by the year 2050. In other words,
cities get a double punch: both climate change and
urban development that swaps green space for pave-
ment are warming metropolitan areas, influencing the
chemistry of the atmosphere and intensifying urban air
pollution. Currently global temperatures are predicted
heat exposure is highly unequal and severely impacts the to increase by 3.8 to 6.3 degrees F by 2100—resulting in
urban poor,” as stated in a 2021 paper in the P
roceedings intolerable heat thresholds for urban environments.
of the National Academy of Sciences USA. The link Given the scope of the problem, how can we lessen
between vulnerable populations and the lack of green the negative effects of extreme heat events on histori-
space in the neighborhoods where they live results from cally vulnerable urban communities? At Howard Uni-
cascading issues; among them are policies designed to versity’s NOAA Cooperative Science Center for Atmo-
restrict the upward mobility of certain groups, such as spheric Sciences and Meteorology, my colleagues and I
redlining practices that date back to the 1930s. are interested in understanding how people process risk
The term “redlining” denotes the assignment of grades associated with extreme heat and respond to heat advi-
to residential areas based on their racial composition; the sories. As scholars from disciplines spanning atmo-
lower-graded neighborhoods were less likely to receive spheric sciences, communications, computer science
investments, and people living in them had a harder time and sociology, we want to learn how to inform better
obtaining loans. The redlining practice grew from Presi- decision-making in communities so we can help them

make useful and realistic plans for both the short and thing [because I’m] from the Caribbean. Like, some-
the long term. times it is 100, 105.” Interestingly, our study’s older par-
Our current work is taking place in Baltimore, which ticipants, considered by health professionals as high
ranks among the U.S. cities with the most intense urban risk for the dangerous effects of heat exposure, did not
heat island effects. A 2020 study led by Jeremy Hoff- think of themselves as especially at risk.
man of the Center for Environmental Studies at Vir- This summer the Howard University team is distrib-
ginia Commonwealth University showed that in Balti- uting air monitors, Internet hotspots and cell phones (for
more neighborhoods where a history of redlining prac- those who do not currently own one) to community
tices has blocked investment, summer temperatures are members who elected to participate in the study. These
nearly six degrees F hotter than the citywide average. tools will collect data at no cost to the participants, who
The research project uses an integrative citizen science will receive $200 for taking part in the project over three
approach, giving us an excellent opportunity to learn months. The real-time indoor weather data will enable us
from members of communities experiencing some of to monitor heat exposure. As temperatures rise, the study
the worst effects. To assess people’s responses to participants will be alerted to the onset of an extreme
weather forecasts and heat events in Baltimore, we heat event or heat wave via an app or, when appropriate,
developed an app that merges weather data, risk com- phone calls and e-mail. They will be reminded to use the
munication and behavioral health information to push app to access information on the heat index, as well as
messages to study participants. The app also collects the risk of extreme heat exposure and suggested protec-
behavioral responses to extreme heat alerts. tive actions. The types of help and resources recom-
Some early research activities involved talking with mended by the app will be personalized for the study par-
city residents to discern how they perceive and respond ticipants based on their individual risk factors.
to extreme heat events. As part of this, we asked about Subsequent alerts will be tailored to the needs of the
their awareness of warnings and potential impacts of target population, with particular attention to message
exposure. We conducted interaction-based interviews framing. This approach will include a clear and easy-
with focus groups, which allowed us to observe conver- to-digest explanation of the levels of risk uncertainty to
sations among participants and hear both individual help people understand why they should take action
and collective responses. even if some parts of the forecast don’t come to fruition.
When asked about their level of awareness concern- We think people need more information to best man-
ing heat advisories, many focus group participants age their expectations, not just to make good decisions.
appeared to have general knowledge about the topic: they It’s important for them to do so because the National
reported being aware of heat advisory warnings, and the Weather Service is increasingly incorporating the lan-
majority said they modified their behavior in response to guage and visuals of uncertainty into public discussions
those warnings by trying to drink more water and delay- that reflect the estimates in forecast models. After data
ing physical activities until later in the day. Most people, have been collected, study participants will be surveyed
however, were unsure of the meanings behind the differ- for insights on how the messaging influenced their self-
ent threat levels, which are typically presented as part of protective actions and help-seeking behaviors.
a weather forecast, and were confused about how to inter- Although there is no fail-safe approach to address-
pret them. For instance, some people were not aware of ing the risks associated with high heat exposure, talking
the difference between a heat “watch” (be prepared) and more about what’s at stake is a good start. The potential
a heat “warning” (take action now to protect yourself). dangers of excessive heat extend beyond physiological
We also found that people have very limited knowl- health to facets of life such as increased rates of domes-
edge of the “heat index”—a measure that factors in rel- tic violence and crime. There are economic conse-
ative humidity to estimate how a given day’s tempera- quences, too: according to the Atlantic Council, the U.S.
ture actually feels to the human body. This data point could lose some $100 billion annually because of
is superior to temperature alone for alerting the public extreme heat effects.
to especially dangerous types of heat. It became clear The hope is that increased awareness of the gap
to us that people would additionally benefit from between risk and protective actions will force policy
greater awareness of the effects of climate change in makers to take these issues more seriously and factor
general, so they would know to expect heat-related them into climate-preparedness plans. Opening cooling
problems to get worse over time. centers during a heat wave might not be enough to pre-
One of our essential findings is that knowledge of vent unnecessary deaths if people don’t think they need
general heat risks does not necessarily lead to an accu- to go. More effective communication is one critical tool
rate perception of one’s own risk. Several study partic- for reducing the harmful consequences of extreme heat
ipants indicated that they were aware of the different on human health.
ways people could protect themselves from heat, but
this knowledge did not translate into their personally
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
taking protective actions. Some participants said they Why Extreme Heat Is So Deadly. Tanya Lewis; ScientificAmerican.com, July 22, 2021.
do not believe they are at direct risk. As one person put
it: “To me, it being 90 degrees did not really say any-

W E AT H E R
THE NEW
TORNADO
ALLEY
Tornado outbreaks are migrating eastward
from Texas and Oklahoma toward Tennessee and Kentucky,
where people may not be prepared
By Mark Fischetti
Graphic by Matthew Twombly
Map by Daniel P. Huffman
R
oughly 1,200 tornadoes strike the U.S. during an
average year. They’re prevalent in the U.S.—far more
so than anywhere else in the world—because its
geography sets up the perfect conditions, especially
in spring and summer. Westerly winds from the
Pacific Ocean drop their moisture when they push
up over the Rocky Mountains, becoming high, dry and cool as
they move farther east. Similar winds may descend from Can-
ada. Meanwhile low, warm, humid air streams northward from
the Gulf of Mexico. Flat terrain along these paths allows the
winds to move relatively uninterrupted, at contrasting altitudes,
until they run into one another. The angles at which they col-
lide tend to create unstable air and wind shear, two big factors
that favor tornado formation. Although somewhat similar
Continued on page 74

How Tornadoes
Form Cool,
dry air In these conditions,
warm air can rise,
Tornadoes are violent vortexes that can rip
forming a thunderstorm,
apart anything they encounter. They usually which develops strong
form when the atmosphere is unstable— updrafts of air.
Warm, moist air
when there is warm, moist air near the
ground and cold, dry air high above and
when winds are mixing.
If winds are slow near the

If updrafts remain
surface, fast high above
strong they can bend
and are blowing in different
the tube upward,
directions, creating what’s
Updraft turning it into a vertical
known as vertical shear,
condensation funnel
they can form a tube of
that continues to rotate.
horizontally rotating air
within the storm.
This storm system Cool downdrafts can make the

is called a supercell. funnel narrower and cause it
Supercell to rotate faster. They also can
The supercell draws up draw a funnel at altitude down
even more warm, moist toward the ground.
air, which intensifies
the updrafts. Falling
precipitation creates
cooler downdrafts.
Condensation
funnel
Precipitation
A funnel on the ground is called a tornado. Twisters are Tornado

ranked on the Enhanced Fujita Scale; an EF-1 or EF-2 event
has winds from 86 to 135 mph. Typical storms may be
500 to 1,500 feet across and usually don’t move along the
ground for more than a mile or two. The most violent
twisters, EF-5, have wind speeds faster than 200 mph Debris field
and can shred the ground for more than 100 miles.

A TWISTER f ormed
by a supercell nears
its final stage, known
as a “rope out” when
it takes this shape.
Mitch Dobrowner
Continued from page 70 when the local atmosphere is unstable, “and
a ir masses do clash in other places, such warming increases instability,” says Zuo-
as Uruguay and Bangladesh, the forces
are much more powerful over the U.S.
hao Cao, a tornado expert at Environment
and Climate Change Canada, who co-led a
Tornado Alley
Canada ranks second worldwide with 100 recent study on storm touchdown loca- Shifts Eastward
twisters a year. tions. Climate change is warming the Gulf
Although tornadoes touch down in of Mexico as well, which can send generous Large tornado outbreaks—when numer-
many places across the eastern half of the amounts of water vapor into the south- ous twisters touch down in the same
country, from the 1950s through the eastern U.S. region on the same day—are happening
1990s they struck most often in Tornado Research suggests that the so-called more frequently in the U.S. From 1950 to SD
Alley, an oval area centered on northeast- dry line is also shifting eastward. The 1980, large outbreaks occurred most often
ern Texas and south-central Oklahoma. imaginary line runs north from the U.S.- in a roughly oval-shaped region encom-
More recently, that focus has shifted east- Mexico border up to Canada, dividing the passing northeastern Texas, eastern Okla-
ward by 400 to 500 miles. In the past de- wetter eastern U.S. from the drier west- homa, and western Arkansas and Missouri
cade or so tornadoes have become preva- ern U.S. (To the east, thirsty crops such as (darker yellow contours). Between 1989 and
lent in eastern Missouri and Arkansas, corn predominate; to the west, drought- 2019, the locus shifted eastward, covering
western Tennessee and Kentucky, and tolerant wheat prevails.) The line, which western Kentucky and Tennessee plus
northern Mississippi and Alabama—a for centuries has fallen roughly along the northern Mississippi and Alabama (darker
new region of concentrated storms. 100th meridian, has moved east by about blue contours). The area experiencing the
Tornado activity in early 2023 epito- 140 miles since the late 1800s. The dry highest concentration (darkest yellow and
mized the trend. A violent twister with line “can be a boundary for convection— blue) has also gotten smaller—an even
wind speeds of 170 miles per hour struck the rising of warm air and sinking of cold- more dangerous tornado alley.
Rolling Fork, Miss., on March 24, killing er air that can fuel storms,” wrote Ernest
Density of large tornado outbreaks
at least 26 people. A week later storms in Agee, professor emeritus of atmospheric
the new tornado alley killed more than 30 science at Purdue University, in the Con- 1950–1980
people, and another group on April 4 versation in 2022. 1989–2019
damaged more than 80 structures in Bol- Climate change may extend the typi-
Moderate High
linger County, Missouri. Those events cal tornado season as well. Milder winters
happened in just the run-up to peak sea- mean the unstable air masses that can
Tornado touchdowns
son in April and May. create supercells may become more like- during a large outbreak*
Data gathered in the past two years ly in March or even earlier in the south-
1950–1980
show that in addition to solo storms, large eastern U.S.
tornado outbreaks—multiple twisters Tornado Alley moving eastward is 1989–2019
spawned by a single weather system—are more than a meteorological curiosity. The
*A large outbreak is defined as a day
shifting even more definitively to the east. shift is serious: Tornado shelters are com- when eight or more counties experience
tornadoes of strength EF-2 or higher.
The swarms are clustering in a tighter geo- mon in Texas and Oklahoma but less so
graphical area than in the old Tornado Al- elsewhere. The Southeast is more dense-
ley, too. And outbreaks may be getting fierc- ly populated, and mobile homes, which
er and more frequent. “It looks as if we may fare poorly in windstorms, are much more
be having fewer days in the U.S. with just common. Tornadoes in the Southeast also
one tornado and more days when there are occur at night more often than they do
multiple tornadoes,” says Naresh Devine- farther west, in part because winds can
ni, an associate professor at City Universi- bring ample moisture from the Gulf after
ty of New York, who co-led a 2021 geograph- dark. Studies show that tornadoes that
ical analysis of large tornado outbreaks. strike at night are 2.5 times more likely to
Why is this shift happening now? Most cause fatalities.
often tornadoes are created by a supercell— Local and state governments in the
T
a strong thunderstorm with a rotating up- new bull’s-eye region might want to im-
draft of air. Supercells tend to form when prove community shelters and warning
warm, humid, low-level air interacts with systems, strengthen building codes, bet-
cool, dry, upper-level air, and climate ter equip emergency responders, and ed-
change is generating warmer, moister air. ucate residents about what to do—and not
Tornadoes also are more likely to develop to do—if a tornado is headed their way. San Anto
FROM OUR ARCHIVES Source: “Examining the Changes in the Spatial Manifestation and
the Rate of Arrival of Large Tornado Outbreaks,” by Niloufar Nouri
Building a Weather-Smart Grid. P eter Fairley; July 2018. and Naresh Devineni, in E nvironmental Research Communications,
Vol. 4; February 2022 (d ata)

Bismarck
ND
MN Ottaw
SD
Minneapolis
D Pierre
WI Toronto
MI
Buffalo
Milwaukee
Detroit
IA
NE Chicago Cleveland
Des Moines
Omaha Cleveland PA
PA
Pittsburgh Ph
Pittsburgh
OH
IL IN M
Washington
Cincinnati
KS St. Louis WV
MO
VA
KY N
VA
Ralei
Nashville NC NC
Oklahoma City
TN
OK Memphis
AR
SC
SC
Atlanta
Dallas MS
AL GA
Jackson
TX
TX LA
onio Houston
New Orleans FL
San Antonio
Tampa

P U B L I C H E A LT H
CLUES,
CONTROVERSIES
AND
COVID
ORIGINS
Animals and the
COVID-causing virus
both were at a market
in China in early 2020.
Could that have started
the pandemic?
By Tanya Lewis
Illustration by Ellen Weinstein
T
Tanya Lewis is a senior editor covering health and
medicine for Scientific American.
he raccoon dog does not look particularly threatening. The small mammal
resembles those familiar masked trash bandits that inspired its name,
although it is most closely related to foxes. Raccoon dogs are native to the
forests of eastern Asia, and the furry omnivores eat rodents, insects, crus-
taceans and plants. In China, they are commonly sold for their meat and
fur. But recently the creature has become embroiled in the tense debate
over the origin of the virus that causes COVID.
Genetic evidence collected by Chinese researchers March, when scientists at the Chinese Center for Dis-
in January 2020—and finally made public earlier this ease Control and Prevention (CCDC) and their col-
year—puts raccoon dogs and other wild animals at a leagues uploaded genetic data from swabs taken at
market in Wuhan, China, that was the epicenter of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market to a scientific
many of the earliest human COVID cases. That same database. An international team of researchers led by
evidence puts the COVID-causing virus, SARS-CoV-2, Crits-Christoph found the overlapping genetic mate-
in many of those same market stalls. Experiments rial of animals and the virus at the same spots in the
have shown raccoon dogs can be infected with and market, a connection the Chinese researchers soon
transmit SARS-CoV-2. Taken together, many scien- confirmed with their own analysis in N ature.
tists say, these findings point to a scenario in which The proximity is key, says Angela Rasmussen, a
the virus jumped to people at the market. But other virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Orga-
researchers emphasize this is only circumstantial evi- nization–International Vaccine Center in Saskatche-
dence—although they agree it warrants further inves- wan and one of the collaborators on the international
tigation—and still leaves open the possibility of a “lab report. “It’s not a ‘smoking raccoon dog,’ but it is
leak” as the start of the pandemic. pretty indicative that in exactly the same part of the
There is no video footage of an infected raccoon market that our other analyses suggested we would
dog sneezing on a human and giving them the virus. find the animals, now we found them in that exact
Even if slam-dunk epidemiological evidence exists, spot—with the virus and without, importantly, much
Chinese authorities have not been forthcoming about human [DNA present],” Rasmussen says. The find-
it. But finding a susceptible animal at the same place ings confirm previous reports that live animals were
and around the same time that the first people caught sold at that market, and evolutionary biologist
COVID may be some of the best evidence we’ll get, Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney—a co-au-
says Alex Crits-Christoph, a senior scientist in compu- thor of the international team’s report—had photo-
tational biology at Cultivarium, a nonprofit microbiol- graphed live raccoon dogs there several years earlier.
ogy research organization. What the swab results don’t do is confirm that the
This twist to the origins search began in early raccoon dogs or other animals were actually infected

with the virus or that they were the animals that first sample, known as Q61, contained a lot of raccoon dog RACCOON
spread it to people. The leading alternative scenario is material but very little human material. The report’s DOGS (N ycte-
that the virus leaked from one of several virology labs authors also found genetic material from Amur reutes procyo-
in Wuhan that conduct research on coronaviruses. hedgehogs, Malayan porcupines, masked palm civets, noides) may
And although there is no direct evidence for this or Siberian weasels, hoary bamboo rats, and other ani- have transmit-
other theories, the new data cannot rule them out. mals. Any of these species may have served as an ted the COVID-
Such lingering uncertainty isn’t unusual: tracing intermediate host of the virus, which scientists be causing virus to
the origin of a new viral disease can take decades. For lieve likely originated in wild bats. Most of these other people, accord-
instance, masked palm civets sold at an animal mar- animals, however, have not been shown to be suscep- ing to a recent
ket in Guangdong, China, were identified as an inter- tible to SARS-CoV-2. Raccoon dogs have. genetic analysis.
mediate host of the SARS virus that caused an epi- “This is not conclusive evidence that an animal was
demic in 2002–2003, but it took another 15 years to infected, but it’s very consistent with that,” Crits-Chris-
trace the source of the virus to bats; the origin of the toph says. If the market were not the place where
Ebola virus, as well as those of many other viruses, SARS-CoV-2 crossed from animals into people but
has never been found. With SARS-CoV-2, the Chinese instead the site of a superspreader event caused by
government’s reticence to release all the data it has people who were already infected, “you’d have to ask,
collected has hampered the origins search—for exam- Why there?” Crits-Christoph says. “If humans brought
ple, the CCDC team first released a preprint of the it there, why did they bring it to the place in Wuhan
market data in 2022, two years after collecting them, with the most stalls selling wild animals?”
and they didn’t label the animal species present. Although the CCDC study in Nature c onfirms the
Many of the virus-positive samples were clustered genetic identification of animals sold at the market,
in the market’s southwestern corner, in the same it doesn’t draw the same conclusions about their
place where stalls selling live animals were previously role. Instead the authors write that “these environ-
prill/Getty Images
reported. Half a dozen virus-positive samples were mental samples cannot prove that the animals were
also positive for raccoon dog DNA or RNA, often at infected.” And even if animals did carry the virus at
higher amounts than human genetic material. One the time of the market sampling, the CCDC research-

IN WUHAN, ers add, it is quite possible they picked it up from came from the animals, and then there were two sep-
the Huanan people—not the other way around. arate spillovers.”
Seafood Whole- The international team’s animal findings, how- But the two-lineage interpretation has its critics.
sale Market ever, build on previous studies supporting the market They have pointed out that these lineages differ by
was the site as an early epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 and suggesting only two genetic mutations. Given how rapidly SARS-
of many early multiple zoonotic origins linked to the market. One CoV-2 evolves, it is possible that one lineage evolved
COVID cases. earlier research project was led by Jonathan Pekar, a into the other a fter p
eople brought it to the market,
doctoral student in biomedical informatics at the rather than requiring two separate human introduc-
University of California, San Diego, and a co-author of tion events. “I don’t think that the fact that, among
the newer report on the market swabs. Pekar’s group the early viruses, they can be split into these two
proposed that there were two lineages of the virus—A groups that differ by just two mutations really means
and B—circulating in Wuhan in the earliest days of that there had to be two introductions,” says Jesse
the pandemic and that both were connected to the Bloom, a computational biologist at the Fred Hutchin-
market. The B lineage is the first one believed to have son Cancer Center in Seattle, who has studied the evo-
infected humans. If the virus first jumped into people lution of the virus. “It’s also possible that one could
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as some people have evolved into the other in humans.”
believe, researchers would have had to introduce it to The animal evidence from the swabs does give sci-
the market twice, Rasmussen says. entists a better idea of where to look next for animals
“Is it possible that somebody working in the lab closer to the origin of the virus, Crits-Christoph says.
could have gotten infected with lineage B, showed up Researchers can now focus their efforts upstream of
Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images
at the market and didn’t infect anybody else on their the market, in the wildlife trade or on farms where
way there, even though it’s [about 10 miles away]— these animals may have been bred. If a genetic se
and then the next week the exact same thing hap- quence of the virus could be extracted from such an
pened with lineage A virus?” Rasmussen says. “It’s animal, Crits-Christoph says, it may be possible to tell
possible, but I don’t think it’s very plausible, com- whether a progenitor of the pandemic virus had been
pared to the alternative: that lineage A and lineage B evolving in an animal host.

But these newer findings from the market don’t raccoon dog material on these surfaces,” Chan says.
quite fit the time line of the pandemic, a problem that She notes that SARS-CoV-2 was found all over the
researchers critical of the wildlife spillover theory are market, not just at the animal stalls.
quick to point out. The samples were taken nearly a Bloom, however, points out that lab leak theories rely
month after symptoms appeared in the first con- just as much on circumstantial evidence as natural ori-
firmed COVID cases, around December 10, 2019—and gin theories do. The main argument for leaks, he says,
evolutionary genetic analyses suggest the virus began is proximity-based: “The outbreak started in Wuhan,
circulating in humans as early as mid-November of where there are labs that study SARS-like coronavi-
that year. It’s impossible to know if the same animals ruses. There’s definitely no direct evidence that any of
were at the market then or whether they had been the labs were studying a virus identical to SARS-CoV-2.”
infected prior to the first human cases. “I think the There are, Bloom thinks, four plausible scenarios
major limitation is that, unfortunately, the sampling by which the pandemic could have started. Two of
was being done in January 2020,” not the beginning them relate to a lab or a researcher: A scientist from
of December 2019, Bloom says. “It’s difficult to inter- one of the Wuhan Institute of Virology labs got
pret what the correspondence between the animal infected by a bat while doing fieldwork, or a scientist
and human content of these samples and the SARS- at one of the labs collected a virus sample from a bat
CoV-2 content means.” or other animal, brought the sample back to Wuhan
Bloom released a preprint of his own analysis of and became infected while working with it in the lab.
the CCDC’s data in late April 2023. It confirmed the The other two scenarios involve natural spillover: A
presence of numerous animals at the market, includ- raccoon dog or other intermediate animal host
ing raccoon dogs. But Bloom went on to quantify the directly infected a human in Wuhan or elsewhere, or
amount of DNA from different animals, and unlike a bat directly infected a person outside Wuhan, who
Crits-Christoph’s team, he included all animals with then brought the virus back to the city (the bats that
spinal cords (chordates), not just mammals. SARS- carry similar viruses aren’t found in Wuhan). “In my
CoV-2 is only known to affect mammals, but Bloom mind, honestly, all these things sort of remain possi-
included chordates as a control group. According to ble,” Bloom says. All these scenarios “are sufficiently
his analysis, very few of the SARS-CoV-2-positive sam- worrying that we should try to mitigate them.”
ples contained a significant amount of raccoon dog Chan adds what she claims is another possible sce-
DNA. In fact, the samples that contained the most nario for a lab-related origin: that the virus had been
virus also had the most genetic material from fish, brought to a lab and, in an attempt to learn about how
which are not thought to be susceptible to the virus. it mutates, was engineered to better infect human
“What I take this to mean overall is that the genetic cells—and somehow got out into the world. This notion
content of these samples—and the SARS-CoV-2 con- is highly controversial, and many scientists note that
tent of these samples—suggests that you can’t really there is really no evidence for it. Chan and others have
use that type of analysis to figure out if any animals pointed to an unusual feature of the virus called a furin
were infected,” Bloom says. “It does not prove that ani- cleavage site as an indication that it was engineered.
mals were never infected; it just indicates that from But such sites have also been found in other coronavi-
these samples, you can’t really conclude anything, ruses in nature, so this idea hasn’t convinced many
because the type of signal you’re looking for, you see it virologists and infectious disease specialists.
in things that clearly don’t make any sense at all.” At least eight U.S. intelligence agencies have con-
Crits-Christoph does not buy that objection. He ducted their own investigations of the virus’s origins.
points out that correlations are not an appropriate Four agencies concluded with “low confidence” that a
way to answer the question of which specific animal natural spillover from animals is most likely, two favor
shed the virus. The virus found in stalls selling sea- a lab leak with “low” or “moderate” confidence, and
food was almost certainly shed by sick humans. Of two are undecided. The U.S. government has ordered
course, Crits-Christoph’s own analysis is also based information related to COVID origins to be declassified.
on a correlation: SARS-CoV-2-susceptible animals A firm answer to the origins puzzle has been elu-
and parts of the market with positive virus samples. sive, but a hard puzzle is not an impossible one, Crits-
The difference, he says, is that he was merely using Christoph says. He thinks scientists will keep getting
the correlation to show that the animals were there, closer. “People keep betting that no new information
not that any specific animal was infected at the time. will come out, and new information keeps coming
Alina Chan, a scientific adviser at the Broad Insti- out,” he adds. “I would never make that bet. We’re
tute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and going to know more.”
Harvard University, who has been an outspoken advo-
cate of the lab leak hypothesis, has her own objec-
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
tions to the market stall data. The animal genetic
Why We Don’t Know the Animal Origins of the Coronavirus. Christine K. Johnson;
sequences simply confirm there were animals at the ScientificAmerican.com, June 9, 2021.
Wuhan market, something that was already known,
she says. “To me, it’s not shocking that you would find

COCKTAIL ICE
comes in many
shapes and
sizes—and
requires a lot
of water and
energy to make.

S U S TA I N A B I L I T Y
Shake,
Chill,
Froth,
Dilute,
Discard
Two hundred years ago the ice trade
launched America’s cocktail culture.
Today a craft concoction might be
the least sustainable item on the menu
By Amy Brady
Photographs by Lendon Flanagan

Amy Brady is executive director of Orion m agazine and
a contributing editor at Scientific American. S he is author
of I ce: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks—A Cool History
of a Hot Commodity ( G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2023).
I n the early 19th century, more than 100 years before electric refrigeration,
an entrepreneurial Bostonian named Frederic Tudor landed on an idea: He’d cut
blocks of ice from his Massachusetts lake and sell it to places where temperatures
were too warm for ice to form naturally. Potential financiers thought this plan was
too absurd to work. How would he ship the ice without it melting, they wondered,
and who would buy it when it could be harvested for free?
Ultimately Tudor not only succeeded at distributing
and selling ice—his trade revolutionized how Ameri-
cans thought of food. Having access to ice enabled peo-
ple to better preserve their meat and milk, reducing
instances of food poisoning and launching the concept
of leftovers. The initial desire for ice in warm places,
Sazerac, of course, in which the ingredients are stirred
with ice to temper the burn of the high-proof rye and
absinthe while melding the flavors. Henry Charles
Ramos created his eponymous gin fizz in 1888 by shak-
ing the liquids (including egg white and citrus) with
crushed ice for a full 12 minutes, “until there is not a
however, wasn’t driven by solutions to spoilage and ill- bubble left but the drink is smooth and snowy white
ness: it came from bartenders. Tudor sailed to Cuba in and the consistency of a good rich milk.” In essence, ice
1815, where he found his first receptive market in the transformed bartending from a mere job to a craft that
country’s ubiquitous café culture. Cubans trusted their involved creativity, chemistry and flourish.
local baristas, each of whom had their own twist on café Today even a moderately busy bar requires a lot of
Cubano or a proprietary recipe for mixing crushed fruit ice to get through a night. Bartenders are advised
with rum. Tudor demonstrated how to adapt those never to use the same cube twice when going through
drinks into iced versions, and any initial suspicion of the steps of making a single cocktail: chilling glass-
frozen-water chunks floating in glasses quickly turned ware, shaking or stirring, and serving the drink. It’s a
into frothy demand. Five years later, when Tudor intro- process that requires a significant amount of water Liza Jernow (styling); Okamoto Studio Custom Ice (ice) (preceding pages)
duced ice to the bartenders in New Orleans’s French and energy. For years the hospitality industry has
Quarter, the alluring taste of chilled alcohol gave birth seen diners clamoring for foods that prioritize cli-
to the American cocktail culture we have today. mate-friendly practices, such as local and seasonal in-
Ice not only cools cocktails; it changes their flavor, gredients that are grown or raised with carbon foot-
texture and balance. Shaking liquids with one-inch prints in mind. Yet cocktail culture hasn’t been hit
cubes, for example, aerates the alcohol and emphasizes with the same scrutiny. As the American West experi-
subtle flavors, and it can also produce thick foams nec- ences water scarcity and energy prices remain vola-
essary for drinks such as the whisky sour. Crushed ice, tile, the protocol for properly made cocktails doesn’t
meanwhile, dilutes cocktails quickly because of its high look sustainable. Is it possible to make satisfying
surface area, creating the refreshing, slushy consis- cocktails without so much ice?
tency found in juleps that would taste too cloying
otherwise. Bartenders in New Orleans went from serv- Ice was, and still is, one of the most critical elements
ing simple, lukewarm drinks to inventing some of in a cocktail. In L
iquid Intelligence: The Art and Sci-
the country’s most famous cocktails. There was the ence of the Perfect Cocktail, food scientist Dave Arnold

explains how melting ice absorbs energy. In a cocktail, 2,000 watts of power on average. This amount is ICE was
“there is no external heat source to supply the heat roughly the maximum load that can be safely drawn originally
needed to melt ice, so the heat is drawn from the sys- from a typical American home’s electric outlet. “There’s harvested
tem itself,” Arnold writes. “As a consequence, the no real other way to . . . extract that much heat from in large
Historic Collection/Alamy Stock Photo
entire system chills.” something as quickly,” Arnold said. blocks from

As any bartender will tell you, a cocktail flung back How much ice does an average bar use? According frozen lakes,
and forth over ice inside a shaker gets cold very fast. to Todd Bell, senior energy analyst at energy-efficiency then shipped
“The amount of energy you get from melting ice is phe- consulting group Frontier Energy, the amount “really to areas with
nomenal,” Arnold told me. Calculator in hand, he depends on the operation.” It might be between 200 hotter climates.
explained that if you shake three and a half ounces of and 300 pounds a night or far more.
tempered ice for 12 seconds, you’ll generate about “The ice-making procedure in bars is crazy waste-

ful,” Arnold says. “It’s kind of just built into the way
[bars] operate things.” Energy wasted from ice is
largely because of in-house ice machines, which
many—if not most—bars and restaurants use to main-
tain their steady ice supply. Ice machines run continu-
ally until they are full, potentially for several hours at
a time. The machines vary widely in terms of the
amount of energy they draw, however, depending on
whether they are air- or water-cooled.
As the names suggest, air-cooled machines use air
to transfer heat out of their systems, and water-cooled
machines use water to do this. Well-maintained water-
cooled machines are on average more energy efficient
than those cooled by air, but they require much more
water to produce ice. In nature, it takes only about 12
gallons of water to make 100 pounds of ice, Bell says.
But water-cooled ice machines can require up to 100
gallons to produce 100 pounds, an amount so egre-
gious that the U.S. Department of Energy’s Federal
Energy Management Program now restricts the instal-
lation of water-cooled ice machines except in buildings
with cooling towers. Although air-cooled machines
waste less water, many on the market still require more
than 12 gallons of water to make 100 pounds of ice. In
most cases, any unused water or ice at the end of the
night is left to run down a drain.
M
ost bars aren’t likely to give up ice altogether
anytime soon. And cocktails aren’t unsus-
tainable just because of all the ice and water
they require; they also tend to rely on ingredients that
are shipped from far away, such as lemons and limes
and liquors from around the world. But some bartend-
ers are reimagining how ice and other ingredients can
be used more sustainably. At Eve Bar in London, a new
zero-waste menu includes cocktails made with leftover
ingredients from its partner restaurant, Frog. The
Bone Yard martini, for instance, uses vodka redistilled MAKING understand the role that dilution plays in drinks,” she
with venison bones to add a “bone marrow flavor” sim- a cocktail says, “you can control it in different ways.” One
ilar to what’s found in some versions of the Bloody requires lots method of eco-friendly cooling that she would never
Mary. The technique is called a fat-wash because it of ice. A mixing consider is whiskey stones, those small cube-shaped
lends the drink a savory flavor. “Whenever a dish [at glass (left) is rocks made of soapstone or stainless steel that are sold
Frog] changes, a cocktail [at Eve] changes,” says Adam filled with ice for as ice alternatives. “Whiskey stones are so stupid,” she
Handling, the chef and owner of Eve Bar. diluting and says. “You can make the stones cold, and you can put
To mitigate its waste, Eve Bar forgoes an ice-mak- chilling liquids; them in your whiskey, but [because they don’t melt]
ing machine for 55-pound blocks of ice, which are deliv- a rocks glass there is so little thermal transfer of energy that your
ered to the bar by a local ice company. Eve’s bartend- (center) is whiskey won’t get cold.”
ers precut the block ice to “fit perfectly” in every type prechilled with To achieve dilution without ice, Colliau would mea-
of glass used, he says, so that no ice gets wasted. For ice water. All sure a precise volume of water and add it to bottles of
cocktails that traditionally call for the use of crushed that ice will be prebatched drinks that don’t require fresh juice, such
ice, such as tiki drinks, the bar uses liquid nitrogen in dumped out and as martinis or manhattans. Juice will “oxidize over
stead. “We don’t use crushed ice at all,” Handling says. replaced with a time,” she says, and “start to taste nasty.” This ap
Jennifer Colliau is a sustainability-focused “cock- fresh, large cube proach ensured consistency across her preassembled
tail nerd” who designed a bar menu that used as little (right) to serve cocktails and eliminated the practice of throwing ice
ice as possible at The Perennial, a restaurant in San the drink. down the drain after shaking or stirring. Similarly,
Francisco that closed in 2019. Colliau read about what Re-, a bar in Sydney, Australia, serves most of its cock-
Arnold has called the “science of shaking” and the “sci- tail classics prediluted. “We never throw ice away,” co-
ence of stirring” to devise ways to use less ice without owner Matt Whiley says. The bar’s machine is set to
affecting the taste and texture of cocktails. “Once you create only what’s needed, “so it’s empty at the end of

the night,” Whiley explains. Their drinks are made ents lend themselves well to the dirty dump technique.
from food ingredients that tend to go to waste, includ- Such resourceful approaches to bartending might
ing bread, dairy, bananas, rice and root vegetables. To signal the start of a shift—particularly for the U.S.,
serve those cocktails, Whiley uses ice carved from “off where the ice trade was larger than anywhere else in the
cuts”—slightly deformed blocks that his local ice-deliv- world. When Tudor launched his business more than
ery company probably couldn’t sell otherwise and 200 years ago, he probably never anticipated how con-
would just let melt away. sumed America would become with ice. Perhaps that’s
When the same ice that is used to shake or stir a one reason ice is still somewhat rare in international
drink is used to serve the drink, it’s called a “dirty cocktails. Consider the French Kir Royale, which con-
dump,” explains Camper English, author of T he Ice sists of just black currant liqueur and champagne—it’s
Book: Cool Cubes, Clear Spheres, and Other Chill Cock- almost always served neat. Or Hungary’s Fröccs, which
tail Crafts. “It’s not a common move,” he says, because is made with soda water and wine and is “always served
it can send bits of herbs or fruit into the drink, causing chilled” but “never over ice,” according to A far m
aga-
it to look “frothy, cloudier and chaotic in the glass.” The zine. Drinks in this style—refreshing but not frigid;
move should also be avoided with any drink requiring based in spirits, liqueurs or wines made from local fruits
fizzy liquids such as soda water because “smaller ice and herbs—could be front-runners in an energy-effi-
fragments provide more nucleation points that flatten cient, climate-conscious cocktail movement.
the [liquid’s] carbonation and block the surface of the
cocktail,” which prevents the tiny bubbles from rising FROM OUR ARCHIVES
out of the glass. But English actually prefers some drinks The Ice Trade. October 28, 1868.
served this way, such as a mai tai or a margarita on the
rocks, whose aesthetics and noncarbonated ingredi-

MIND MATTERS
Edited by Daisy Yuhas
An Elusive is actually one of the most common conditions that I and other
neurologists encounter. In it, abnormal brain functioning causes
Brain Disorder
physical symptoms to appear. FND comes in many forms, with
symptoms that can include seizures, inability to move a limb and
movement disorders. People may lose consciousness or their
ability to move or walk, or they may experience abnormal trem-
Medical compassion is essential for ors or tics. The ailment can be highly disabling and just as costly
treating functional neurological disorders as neurological conditions with structural origins such as amy-
otrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease),
By Z Paige L’Erario multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.
Although men can develop FND, young to middle-aged women
Imagine your daughter h as lost the ability to walk, and so you receive this diagnosis most frequently. During the first two years
take her to the emergency room. How would you feel if you then of the COVID pandemic, FND briefly made international head-
overheard the doctor who saw your child laughing at her situa- lines when vocal and motor tics such as repeating words or clap-
tion with colleagues? This scenario may sound absurd, but it’s ping uncontrollably spread with social media usage, particularly
based on a true story. among adolescent girls.
In 2021 researchers published several anecdotes from real So why would a medical professional accuse someone who
cases involving functional neurological disorder (FND). What the has lost control of their limbs or has experienced a seizure of fak-
vignettes reveal is that medical professionals, including nurses, ing their symptoms? Unfortunately, many such professionals
ambulance drivers and physicians, sometimes treat this condi- have a poor or outdated understanding of FND, despite the fre-
tion without concern, as though patients were simply faking their quency with which they encounter it. Because nothing is struc-
behavior. In my own experience as a neurologist, I have over- turally wrong with the patient’s brain—clinical testing reveals no
heard doctors dismiss and laugh at their patients’ FND symp- obvious injury—physicians may write symptoms off as “all in
toms when they are behind closed doors. their head” or dismiss them as psychological. That response, re-
Although the disorder is not well known to the public, FND cent research shows, can harm a person who is already suffer-
88 Scientific American, July/August 2023 Illustration by Wenjia Tang

Z Paige L’Erario is a board-certified neurologist and
transgender activist. They are currently a graduate student
of social service at Fordham University and vice chair of the
LGBTQI Section of the American Academy of Neurology.
ing. Fortunately, there is another path forward, rooted in sensi- tional brain abnormalities. These emphasize characteristic “pos-
tivity, respect and new evidence-based approaches. itive,” or “rule-in,” findings based on a neurologist’s physical ex-
Historically FND was called conversion disorder. The term amination, which can predict FND as the basis for a patient’s
came from the belief that traumatic stress was “converted” into symptoms. For example, a FND patient’s symptoms may be in-
functional neurological symptoms via psychological mechanisms. consistent or change when distracted with another task. A com-
We now know that this understanding is incomplete. Stress and bination of a thorough neurological examination, EEG, brain im-
trauma can play a part. In fact, some researchers believe the aging and lab testing can show whether a person’s symptoms are
unique global stressors our society faced during the COVID pan- consistent with a structural brain pathology—for instance, a
demic increased some people’s susceptibility to the condition. But stroke or a brain tumor—or a functional condition such as FND.
not every person with FND has experienced a traumatic event. Together these advances in the diagnosis and understanding
New research suggests that biological susceptibility and exposure of FND mean doctors are in a better position than ever to iden-
to stressful events over a lifetime may make a person more vulner- tify and understand this disorder. Nevertheless, many patients
able to developing FND. In fact, relatively minor stressful events still have the disorienting, distressing experience of being treated
such as work-related stress, a viral infection or a small physical ac- with dismissal or disbelief by medical professionals.
cident often precede the onset of FND symptoms. This reaction has damaging consequences. In January a collab-
Recent advances in brain imaging indicate that FND is caused oration of researchers at the University of Sheffield in England,
by abnormalities in the functioning of brain networks. Some ex- Arizona State University and the New York–based Northeast Re-
perts use the analogy that the brain’s hardware (or structure) is gional Epilepsy Group laid out case studies and other evidence
fine, but the software (or processing) is malfunctioning. For ex- that clinicians’ unsupportive responses to their patients may con-
ample, studies suggest that in FND, several networks of electri- tribute to a sense of shame in people who are already suffering
cal and chemical signaling pathways between groups of neurons psychologically from their functional symptoms. In fact, being
or larger brain regions are not working together as typically ex- prone to shame may itself be an additional risk factor for FND.
pected. These networks include structures of the limbic system, This connection to shame and stigma takes on an even greater
such as the amygdala, that are important in our brain’s process- weight when we consider that marginalized groups such as mem-
ing of emotions or stress. Among people with FND, the amygdala bers of the LGBTQ+ community may be at increased risk for
is more active when subjected to sad or fearful stimuli. Other functional disorders. A person experiencing stressors such as
brain functions involved in FND include how we plan and inter- discrimination, bias and stigma because of their identity can in-
pret sensations in response to our movements, as well as our ternalize feelings of shame when their psychosocial support sys-
abilities to pay attention, be aware of our body and experience tems and coping mechanisms are inadequate or overwhelmed.
the feeling of control over our person. If someone in this situation has FND, receiving treatment from
Neuroimaging underscores that people with FND are not a doctor who lacks empathy or a current understanding of the
“faking” anything. Scientists have found decreased activity in condition only makes things worse. Telling a patient their con-
supplementary motor areas and the right temporoparietal junc- dition is “in their head” contributes to medical misinformation
tion, which influence whether a patient’s symptoms feel under and further stigmatizes people with these disorders.
their control. There are also abnormalities in the connections But this problem can be addressed. Researchers have found
between brain areas responsible for interpreting internal phys- that how empathetically a doctor informs their patient about an
ical sensations and motor planning. These differences in brain FND diagnosis influences that patient’s likelihood of accepting
activity may help explain one key way that FND differs from the diagnosis and successfully completing treatment. And ap-
other disorders that feature tics, such as the structural neuro- propriate treatment works. Therapy may combine psychoeduca-
logical condition Tourette’s syndrome. As a research team at the tion, medication for any coexisting mental health conditions,
University of Calgary in Canada explored in a paper published psychotherapy and physiotherapy. Outcomes for people who re-
last November, people with Tourette’s report some degree of ceive sensitive and appropriate care are actually very good.
control in suppressing their tics. In contrast, the symptoms of This year my colleagues and I will publish our observations
FND feel entirely involuntary. on the treatment of LGBTQ+ people with FND. Our preliminary
Clinicians are also finding better ways to diagnose FND. In findings are promising. Most patients had improvement or com-
the past, neurologists considered conversion disorder to be a di- plete resolution of their functional symptoms after treatment. In
agnosis of exclusion, meaning a diagnosis was made after physi- some of our patients, these results can be quite important. We
cians had ruled out structural neurological abnormality through have treated people with functional blindness who then re-
examination, radiological imaging, laboratory studies and neu- gained the ability to see, and we have watched those in wheel-
rophysiological testing such as electroencephalography (EEG). chairs regain the ability to walk. In short, care and compassion
As a result, many patients with FND felt their doctor had told can be powerful medicine.
them what they didn’t have, not what they did have.
But in the past decade neurologists have developed diagnos- Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
tic criteria to determine which symptoms are linked to func- or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]

THE UNIVERSE
Our Sun
Was Born Far,
Far from Here
New clues suggest our nearest star
has a complex origin story
By Phil Plait
Is the sun an only child? Or was it born into a (very, v ery) big
family?
The answer would tell us more than just how awkward holi-
day family reunions can be (if you think yours are bad, imagine
how much worse they would be with a few thousand sibling
rivals). After all, the sun’s origin story is, ultimately, our own.
We’ve seen tremendous leaps in our understanding of how stars
form, but, ironically, we still have some pretty fundamental
questions about our nearest and dearest one—such as whether
the sun was born solo or along with a huge passel of other stars.
Despite the sun being close enough that we can almost
touch it, the details of its inception have remained a mystery.
The biggest problem is its age. Born 4.6 billion years ago, our
star is well into midlife and has wandered far from its ancestral
home—some nameless, now vanished “stellar nursery” of gas
that long ago dispersed or consolidated into stars.
We can’t find that nursery, but we can still learn about it. We
have some evidence of it in the perhaps surprising form of
meteorites, some of which still carry clues about their gesta-
tional environment during the birth of the solar system. For
example, isotopes of elements such as potassium inside mete-
orites have told us where those objects formed in presolar cos-
mic clouds called nebulae, and variations between meteorites A photograph shows our sun from data taken by nasa’s
can be used to help determine a nebula’s condition well before Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and
the emergence of any planets. Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
With data from meteorites in hand and aided by state-of-
the-art computer simulations, an international team of astron- favorite objects: an eerie, pitch-black ghostly mass that utterly
omers investigated the likely natal environment of the sun. Its blocks light from stars behind it like an opaque hole in the sky.
results were published in March in the Monthly Notices of the Only half a light-year across (just about three trillion miles),
Royal Astronomical Society. U sing a clever line of reasoning, it has barely enough material in it to make a single star slightly
the group suggests the sun not only had many siblings but was heftier than the sun. Most likely it’s in the middle of that pro-
spawned in a rather metropolitan neighborhood. cess now and could transmogrify into a star in as little as
Stars are born in nebulae when a cloud’s interior collapses 200,000 years.
onto a central pilelike point that becomes the nascent star. On the other end of the scale we have the Orion molecular
Nebulae come in many shapes and sizes, from small, dark glob- cloud complex, a truly enormous site of active star formation
ules to immense molecular clouds. How a star forms in any that’s more than 1,000 light-years away and many hundreds of
NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC
given nebula is much more a story of nature than of nurture. light-years across. It’s beefy enough to make a staggering num-
For example, the nebula Barnard 68 is a dark clot of cold ber of stars—at least 100,000 like the sun. The iconic Orion
gas and dust—tiny grains of silicates (rocky material) and com- nebula, visible to the naked eye and the birthplace of hundreds
plex carbon molecules similar to soot—relatively close to us in of stars, is only one small part of this gigantic stellar factory.
space at only a few hundred light-years away. It’s one of my Giant clouds like Orion are relatively rare but crank out

Phil Plait is a professional astronomer and science communicator
in Colorado. He writes the Bad Astronomy Newsletter. Follow him
on Twitter @BadAstronomer
lar: aluminum 26 and iron 60. Aluminum 26 is created inside

massive stars and blown out in their winds, whereas iron 60 is
forged in the thermonuclear hell of an exploding star. Both ele-
ments are radioactive, decaying into magnesium and cobalt,
respectively. By carefully measuring the amounts of their
daughter elements in pristine samples from the earliest days of
the solar system—from meteorites, that is—we can learn about
the environment in which the sun formed.
For their analysis, the scientists used the physics of nebulae
and star formation to simulate a sunlike star’s birth in a variety
of environments, from nebulae containing very few stars (rep-
resenting smaller clouds) to large ones with many thousands.
Next they calculated the elemental composition of the proxy
proto-presolar disk that emerged in each one and compared
It’s probable that the sun was more

of a downtown city kid than a rural
small-town star. Of course, with
its nebular nursery gone, we can’t
confirm this hypothesis easily.
these virtual yields with what’s actually measured in meteorites.

Their results indicate that as it formed in its natal disk, the
early sun was probably pummeled by powerful winds and
supernovae explosions—both arising from massive stars. That
means the solar nursery was more like the Orion complex than
Barnard 68.
By coincidence, in late 2022 a different team of scientists
published a paper in the journal A stronomy & Astrophysics
investigating a similar question. The researchers reason that at
least one supernova must have exploded near the still-forming
solar system to create the radioactive elements seen in ancient
stars on an industrial scale, whereas the smaller clouds are less meteorites, so—because of the relative rarity of such events—
fecund but litter the galaxy. It’s not possible to discern the ori- they conclude the sun’s birth cluster must have been very large
gin of the sun just by looking at these statistics, though; it to ensure, statistically, that this could occur.
could have come from either kind of stellar nursery. In other words, it’s probable that the sun was more of a
These nebular environments are vastly different, which downtown city kid than a rural small-town star. Of course, with
affects the stars they create. Massive stars found in a nebula its nebular nursery gone, we can’t confirm this hypothesis eas-
have a big influence on their gestating siblings. They can blast ily. After all, you can’t go home again.
out fierce winds of subatomic particles—like the solar wind but And what of the sun’s siblings—the thousands of other stars
ramped up way past 11. These winds can seed forming stars in its extended family? They once nestled together like a litter
with heavy elements such as aluminum and magnesium. Later, of puppies but wandered out on their own eons ago and are
when they explode as supernovae, they fling a different mix of now orphans scattered across the galaxy. Still, astronomers do
elements such as iron and cobalt a very long way. look for stars with the same age and composition as ours so we
Massive stars, however, are rare. Maybe one out of 100 stars can discover more about our sun.
is big enough to hold this kind of sway, and small nebulae sim- A reunion is pretty unlikely. So if we want to see a family
ply don’t make them. That means that in principle, looking at album, we’ll just have to put it together ourselves.
the chemical composition of the early solar system could tell us
in what kind of nursery the sun was born.
This idea was the focus of the international team’s recent Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
research. The astronomers looked at two elements in particu- or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]

REVIEWS
Edited by Amy Brady
Happily, not everyone harbors such

antibenthic prejudice. This is Casey’s fourth
marine-themed book. In The Wave ( 2010),
she chases gargantuan swells that swallow
ships and enrapture surfers; other books
sent her in pursuit of dolphins and great
white sharks. Those works, however, were
set entirely in the ocean’s upper strata;
meanwhile the deep sea—everything be-
low 650 feet—constitutes 95 percent of
Earth’s habitable space.
In T he Underworld, C asey introduces
a cast of explorers who have unraveled
oceanic mysteries over the past two cen-
turies. First came the dredgers, the scien-
tists who dragged giant shovels behind
sailing ships and picked through the bio-
logical rubble. Most notable among them
was Charles Wyville Thomson, a Scotsman
who in the 1860s hauled up glass sponges,
sea spiders, and other curiosities—thus
debunking a theory that the deep ocean
was lifeless. Later came Beebe and other
NONFIC TION pilots, who took unproven crafts to pres-
surized depths.
Exploring, and Exploiting, Although none of Casey’s personae dra-

matis h ave Neil Armstrong’s name recogni-
the Ocean’s Depths tion, their journeys have taught us much

about how Earth functions. The study of
hydrothermal vents has revealed wondrous
A new history of the deep sea—and the forces that threaten it ecosystems, powered by hydrogen sulfide
Review by Ben Goldfarb rather than light, that may hint at life’s ori-
gins. The investigation of crustal spreading
The first bathysphere made its initial Nearly a century after the bathy- and subduction zones has unveiled the
descent off an island in Bermuda on June 6, sphere’s voyage, it’s often said that we movements of tectonic plates and offered
1930, lowered into the Atlantic Ocean by know more about deep space than about insight into the genesis of dangerous earth-
a shipboard winch. The vessel was a crude the depths of our own planet. We’ve named quakes. Far from being barren and dull,
metal sphere pocked with tiny quartz win- practically every large moon crater yet Casey declares, “the deep is the red-hot
dows, akin to finger holes in a bowling ball. thoroughly charted just 25 percent of the center of creation.”
The plunge was terrifying: leaks could seafloor. The ocean isn’t less accessible than Casey isn’t the first author to fixate on
spring, air could dwindle, portholes could space; we simply haven’t prioritized it. For the deep. In 2021 B elow the Edge of Darkness
collapse. A broken cable would send the every dollar the federal government shells and The Brilliant Abyss, b y biologists Edith
bathysphere plummeting into oblivion. out on ocean exploration, it gives hundreds Widder and Helen Scales, respectively, cov-
Yet the people inside it—naturalist to nasa. The U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carri- ered similar territory. Widder focused large-
William Beebe and engineer Otis Barton— ers but not one submersible capable of ac- ly on bioluminescence, the “living light” that
were as enchanted as they were fright- cessing the ocean’s deepest spots. creatures deploy to feed, find mates and de-
ened. The vividness of the blue light tran- Casey posits that the roots of humani- ter enemies, whereas Scales concentrated
scended language: “more like an emotion ty’s aversion run, well, deep. Venturing into on commercial fishing and other industries
than a color,” writes Susan Casey in The The space offers “the illusion of expansion” that imperil deep-sea ecosystems.
Underworld, her entertaining account of Underworld: into a limitless cosmos, whereas our ocean In contrast to those writers, who re-
the technologies and scientists who have Journeys to sloshes across a planet we feel we’ve al- gard the deep with unadulterated awe,
shaped deep-sea exploration. The deep the Depths ready conquered. It’s also just plain creepy. Casey spikes her reverence with levity: one
was a realm both inhospitable and lively, of the Ocean The deep sea is Earth’s “haunted base- citadel of hydrothermal chimneys reminds
a place where fear and awe coexisted— by Susan Casey. ment—sinister, shrouded in blackness, her of “Gaudí on an acid trip.” Although
“an ungovernable territory,” as Casey puts Doubleday, spewing molten rock and poisonous gases, there is no shortage of biological wonders
it, “that begins where the sunlight stops.” 2023 ($32) a den of freaky beings and hoary specters.” in The Underworld, its author seems most
92 Scientific American, July/August 2023 Illustration by London Ladd

fascinated by how humans have explored The abyssal plains are strewn with mineral NONFIC TION
a place so hostile to them. This is a book
about vampire squid, yes, but also about
nodules that coalesce around biotic seeds
such as sharks’ teeth, accumulating cobalt In Math, No
the technologies that have revealed these
creatures, such as sonar platforms and
and other metals integral to lithium-ion
batteries. Per one mining executive, these Question Is Dumb
manipulator arms. troves “literally lie on the ocean floor like You can find many truths through
And the mechanics of exploration are golf balls,” but acquiring them won’t be a
changing fast. As with space—increasingly benign process. After companies grind up
creative problem-solving
a playground for the likes of Bezos, Branson the nodules (and the creatures that adhere You’re likely to identify a s either “a math person” or “not a math
and Musk—the ocean has become the hab- to them), Casey explains in one chapter, person,” a decisive label you probably received as a child based
itat of the ultrawealthy. Casey shadows “the remains will be fire-hosed back into on your experiences (and grades) in school. Society’s persistent
the Five Deeps expedition, the brainchild the deep,” forming a sediment plume that assignment of people into—or exclusion of them from—the arti-
of Victor Vescovo, a private equity investor may smother sensitive life. It’s a timely ficial category of “math person” is the constant worry of mathe-
and former navy officer who reminds even warning: the International Seabed Authori- matician and author Eugenia Cheng, whose latest book attempts
his friends of a Bond villain. In 2019 Vescovo ty was given until July 2023 to craft the to show that math isn’t about tedious rigidity that’s accessible
became the first person to visit the deepest rules that will regulate the nascent industry. only to certain people. Rather it’s about “increasingly nuanced
point in all five ocean basins, a feat he com- Mining’s potential impacts are all the worlds in which we can explore different things being true.”
pleted in a custom-built submersible— more alarming given how little we know Cheng narrates in a gently instructive first-person voice, in-
dubbed the Limiting Factor in homage to about what we stand to lose. The deep viting readers back into the world of mathematics. In individual
a spaceship in Iain M. Banks’s science sea’s cryptic menagerie features every- chapters, subsections explain the many ways to approach an in-
fiction—that resembles a “padded brief- thing from charismatic megafauna such as troductory topic such as multiplication. By walking us through
case” or a “chubby alien’s face.” sixgill sharks to sprawling mats of chemo- five creative ways to solve 6 × 8, for example, Cheng successful-
Whether you consider Five Deeps a synthetic bacteria. Casey excels at conjur- ly demonstrates that “having different
heroic act of derring-do or a sad testament ing the “marvelous weirdos” that glide ways to think about something consti-
to how poorly the federal government through submersibles’ beams. Dragonfish tutes a deeper understanding.” Eventu-
funds ocean research is perhaps a matter have “luminous barbels swinging from ally she leads us toward more abstract
of personal taste. Although the Five Deeps their chins”; a Pacific sleeper shark pos- concepts such as the polar coordinate
was certainly not without scientific value— sesses “a body as brindled as old granite.” system, a graphical approach to defin-
Vescovo invited biologists, geologists, and The deep sea remains, for now, the planet’s ing a point using distance and angle, as
other academics, who documented new grandest wildlife preserve. well as irrational numbers and decimals
species and donated maps to the United At The Underworld’s climax, Casey final- that repeat infinitely. Despite the com- Is Math Real?
Nations—its whiff of machismo and its ly tours this sanctuary herself when she and plexity of these latter ideas, her use of How Simple
leader’s insistence on doing many dives Vescovo plummet more than 16,000 feet to diagrams and figures helps to reinforce
Questions
solo rankled some observers. On Twitter, the base of a Hawaiian volcano. Like Beebe their approachability—although in
Julie Huber, an oceanographer at the in his bathysphere, Casey is captivated, and some cases their incommensurate sim-
Lead Us to
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, she ably describes the scene for so many of plicity feels unsatisfying.
Mathematics’
lamented Vescovo’s “little technical exper- us who will never experience it: “Everything Readers familiar with Cheng’s 2020 Deepest
tise & general disregard for safety.” shimmered with a languid beauty, an un- book X + Y: A Mathematician’s Manifesto Truths
Vescovo’s conversations with Casey canny gentleness, an amniotic calm.” for Rethinking Gender w ill be accus- by Eugenia Cheng.
won’t dispel a reader’s suspicion that he’s Although shrimp and jellies abound, tomed to her tendency to draw parallels Basic Books, 2023
fueled by ego: “I can do whatever I want ... Casey is most struck by what she doesn’t between mathematical concepts and so- ($30)
I’m having a blast!” Vescovo tells the writer find, chiefly those elements that we feeble cial issues. For instance, Cheng describes
when they meet aboard his ship en route surface dwellers consider intrinsic to life. logarithmic and exponential trends to condemn the denial of
to the Tonga Trench. Although Casey There’s no light, no air, no weather, no COVID-19. She demonstrates how axis manipulation can visually
pays lip service to Vescovo’s critics, The time. Yet there’s a more profound absence, distort infection trends and laments that “far too many people
Underworld would have benefited from too: an absence of control, of human su- thought [scientists] were fearmongering.” This deliberate choice
a more thorough examination of ocean premacy, of ego (save, perhaps, for the to enter the political fray by injecting her opinions on white privi-
exploration’s politics and power dynamics. centimillionaire in the pilot’s chair). The lege, gender roles, “they/them” pronouns and fat shaming invites
In the 21st century, must our most cele- deep, Casey writes, is where “you lose your controversy—and admiration for her conviction.
brated adventurers remain impossibly rich bearings and you find yourself.” As the final chapters unfold, Cheng connects her beloved
white guys? field of category theory—an advanced branch of math that ex-
The vainglorious financiers will soon Ben Goldfarb is author of Eager: The plores relations between objects—with countless personal phi-
Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why
have company—namely, deep-sea mining losophies, literary references and historic events. Although these
They Matter (Chelsea Green, 2018) and
companies seeking to capitalize on soci- Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping ambitious sections would have benefited from more explicit tran-
ety’s surging demand for electric vehicles the Future of Our Planet ( W. W. Norton, sitions, Cheng’s affable style carries her central message through
and other ostensibly “green” technologies. forthcoming in September 2023). to the end: “You didn’t fail math. Math failed you.” —Sam Miller

REVIEWS
FIC TION
Alien
Agendas
The interstellar stakes
of self-identity
“I had begun to think that maybe it would

be nice to have a gender.” So declares one
of the three protagonists of Ann Leckie’s
latest brain-bending, genre-crossing space
opera. Leckie won nearly all of science fic-
tion’s major awards for A ncillary Justice, h er
2013 novel about an “ancillary,” a fragment section, learns of evidence that he might not galaxy-shaking, as the outcome could shred
of a spaceship’s artificial consciousness have been born as human. That revelation, the treaty that protects humanity from the
housed in and controlling a human body. and Reet’s insistence that he’s certainly hu- mysterious and terrifying Presger, aliens
It is seeking revenge against the ruler of man now, sparks a gripping intergalactic legal known for “eating” and “copying” the be-
the Radch Empire, whose own split con- drama in which all parties, from aliens to AIs, ings unfortunate enough to meet them.
sciousness is waging explosive war against have complex competing agendas. Just as in This novel, though a stand-alone story,
itself. Translation State stands as her richest, our world, the identities individuals claim for is the fifth set in the A ncillary Justice u ni-
most surprising novel since that jewel. themselves are perceived by some as threat- verse, and readers new to Leckie may find it
Deeply concerned with what it means ening to the very foundations of society. challenging to keep up with the unfamiliar
to choose one’s own identity, from gender to More immediately beguiling are the third pronouns, cultures, alien species and poli-
species, Leckie’s new book opens with three protagonist’s chapters: dispatches from the tics. Starting with the earlier titles is re-
engaging narrative strands (chapters alter- upbringing of a truly alien mind, bred for warding but not absolutely necessary be-
nate among the perspectives). Two are rela- mysterious purposes in a fascinating incuba- cause for all her dazzling speculative inven-
tively conventional in outline but surprising in tor-cum-schoolyard. It’s this character, Qven, tions, Leckie’s work is consistently inviting.
their particulars: Enae, a shut-in caretaker, is who after meeting Reet becomes curious Her true genre is uplifting, forward-think-
motivated after her grandmother’s death to Translation about the possibility of gender—and discov- ing, character-driven science fiction: cozy
investigate a two-century-old cold case no- State ers something like love (and the pleasures page-turners attuned to diplomacy, tea
body expects her to crack, and space station by Ann Leckie. of binge-watching TV shows). The stakes drinking, alien minds and the urgent power
worker Reet, who dreams occasionally of vivi- Orbit, 2023 ($29) of Reet’s case are both deeply personal and of self-definition. —Alan Scherstuhl
IN BRIEF
Lost Believers The Three Ages of Water: A Second Chance for Yesterday
by Irina Zhorov. Scribner, 2023 ($28) Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, by RA Sinn. Solaris, 2023 ($24.99)
and a Hope for the Future
Deep in the Russian taiga, Agafia’s by Peter Gleick.PublicAffairs, 2023 ($30) RA Sinn (a pseudonym for siblings
days revolve around coaxing Rachel Hope Cleves and Aram
survival from the land and practic- Peter Gleick, author of more than Sinnreich) provides a perceptive,
ing her faith free of the religious a dozen books on water, orchestrates mesmerizing time-travel tale of self-
persecution that her parents fled. a voyage through the history of this revelation and redemption. Program-
Her father’s choice to stay in the wilderness precious and finite commodity, subdi- mer Nev Bourne executes the alpha test of Save-
protects them from the sinful influences of the viding a rich timeline into three eras. Point 2.0, a prefrontal cortex implant that uses loop
outside world—until their lives are upended by During the first age, humans innovated to prevail quantum gravity to let users leap five seconds back
Rick Guidice/NASA Ames Research Center
an encounter with a geologist named Galina, over a seemingly fickle cycle of floods and droughts. in time. But an error in the software propels Bourne
who is surveying the area for a new mine. Author The second era, which Gleick says is “our age,” back a full day at a time to each preceding yesterday.
Irina Zhorov deftly explores the landscape of brought with it the control of nature in exchange for She exchanges code with a notorious hacker to undo
the two women’s lives and the choices they must environmental ransacking, conflict and poverty. He the glitch—and takes time to mend relationships.
make as their worlds converge, mapping the weaves together themes from archaeology, politics Sinn’s intricately plotted infusion of quantum entan-
forces of faith and fate, progress and preservation and environmental science to show both the need glements and human empathy shows that paying it
onto the backdrop of 1970s Soviet life. for and the attainable possibility of a sustainable, backward is as valuable as paying it forward.
— Dana Dunham third age of water in the future. —Maddie Bender — Lorraine Savage

OBSERVATORY Naomi Oreskes i s a professor of the history of science at
K E E PIN G A N E Y E O N S C IE N C E
Harvard University. She is author of Why Trust Science?
(Princeton University Press, 2019) and co-author of T he Big Myth
(Bloomsbury, 2023).
Furious about
Firearms
Outrage, not hope, will move us
to prevent gun violence
By Naomi Oreskes
At my public speaking events, the most common ques-

tion I get these days is, “What gives you hope?” In the
face of multiple, cascading crises in American life, the
pressure is on to be optimistic. To be sure, despair offers
little motivation for action. But there can be fine lines
between hope, wishful thinking and denial. And some-
times anger and outrage are more appropriate senti-
ments than optimism and hope.
Consider gun violence, which is now an everyday
occurrence in the U.S. In March six people—including
three nine-year-old children—were killed in yet another
school shooting, this one in Nashville, Tenn. Two weeks later five been part of American reality and mythology, the easy availabili-
more were killed in Louisville, Ky. In the aftermath of these trag- ty of assault rifles is a relatively recent phenomenon. According to
ic events, politicians unwilling to confront the cause of these deaths the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, in the 1980s con-
predictably called for prayers and hope. Tennessee governor Bill sumer demand for guns was declining. In response, the gun indus-
Lee spoke of “the desperate need for hope” after the shooting in try began to make and market military-style weapons. The feder-
his state. The problem with hope is that in asking us to imagine a al assault weapons ban of 1994 made the transfer and possession
different future, it can distract us from taking meaningful action of many of these weapons—along with large-capacity magazines—
in the present, such as working to prevent gun violence. mostly illegal. But the law expired in 2004, and since then there
It’s no mystery why so many Americans die every year from has been no federal regulation of these ultradeadly devices.
guns: it’s because so many Americans have guns, including ex They really are ultradeadly. Peer-reviewed studies have shown
traordinarily powerful, military-style guns that have no justifiable that mass-shooting-related homicides in the U.S. were substantial-
use in civilian life. It’s a simple fact that in countries where peo- ly reduced between 1994 and 2004, when the federal assault weap-
ple have fewer guns, fewer gun deaths occur. ons ban was active. One study led by Charles J. DiMaggio, a pro-
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fessor of surgery and an injury epidemiologist at New York
48,830 Americans died from firearm injuries in 2021—more than University Grossman School of Medicine, found that fatalities from
died in the entire Korean War. For comparison, the gun death rate mass shootings were 70 percent less likely to occur during the fed-
across the border in Canada is about 800 a year. Canada has a eral ban. Another study, by the nonprofit Police Executive Research
smaller population, of course, but if it had as many people as the Forum, found that 38 percent of police departments reported a
U.S., the equivalent number would be about 7,000. significant increase in criminal use of semiautomatic assault weap-
Canada is no exception: in wealthy countries across the globe, ons with high-capacity magazines after the ban expired. And that
deaths by firearms are far less frequent than in the U.S., and these led to increased injury and death because, with rare exceptions,
lower death rates correlate with stricter gun regulation and low- someone with a knife or even a hunting rifle just can’t do as much
er rates of gun ownership. In the U.S., the rate of gun ownership damage as someone using an assault weapon.
per 100 inhabitants is 120.5; in France, it is 19.6. Switzerland has Sure, we can hope that something will be done about gun vio-
relatively high gun ownership rates for a European country—one lence. We can remember a time when parents sent their children
estimate places it as high as 41 per 100—but all guns must be per- to school without worrying that they would be shot, and we can
mitted, and no one with a history of mental health problems can imagine a time when that will be true again. Or we can act to
get one. The Swiss have not had a mass shooting—defined as one change the laws that have created carnage. In the face of this prob-
resulting in more than four deaths—since 2001. lem with a known solution, the alternative to hope is not despair
Overall, 134 people die from firearms in the U.S. every day. In but rather the galvanizing feeling of factually justified outrage.
the European Union, which has more than half again as many
people, the number was eight as of 2010. Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
It wasn’t always this way in the U.S. Although guns have long or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]
96 Scientific American, July/August 2023 Illustration by Izhar Cohen

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 U LY/A U G U S T
1973 Crater Mystery

Explained
“Why is the earth not covered with
liquid gases, with which he was
experimenting. The use that his
‘Dewar tube’ is now mostly put to
in. If we could all talk something
like this: ‘El ye ni cikno uq zad faz
ov riceler al kiwap ov temeler ap
meteorite-impact craters as the came as an afterthought. It is true azod ro,’ how much sweeter life
moon is? Presumably, most of the that Dewar used his invention him- would be! But folks won’t. The fact
craters formed in the past have self for such purposes, but had no is, another ‘Ro’ is being built now.
been obliterated by erosion and intention of commercializing it. He The world is turning more and
the dynamic processes of the earth’s was later able to liquefy hydrogen 1973 more to it as a language of business
crust. There are nonetheless at and he froze it at minus 438 degrees and commerce: English. There will
least 14 good-sized craters on the Fahrenheit. He also isolated hydro- be a ‘universal language,’ not so per-
Canadian Shield, some of them dat- gen, helium and neon from the air.” fect, not so mathematically con-
ing back nearly 600 million years. structed as Ro. But it will not be Ro.”
According to a hypothesis put for- Ro: A Universal Language
ward by Brian Dent of Stanford
University, the reason these craters
have survived is that they were
“Ro is a language, but there is no
Land of Ro. It is a tongue made up
out of whole cloth. With a knowl-
1873 First Underground
Railway Is In . . .
“The city of Baltimore now boasts
made in ancient material that was edge of it, the world would become 1923 a splendid underground railway,
subsequently covered by sediments, one nation, for language is a barrier the first ever constructed in the U.S.
which were then planed off by gla- that begets many misunderstand- Two distinct lines of tunnels have
ciation in comparatively recent ings between peoples. If Ro, or any been made, at an expense of some
times to expose the craters anew.” other of the several machine-made five million dollars, whereby nearly
tongues, could be ‘put over’ in a all of the various railways now
1923 Mosquito
Menace
“Using minnows as mosquito police-
day—if we could all go to bed say-
ing ‘Good Night’ and wake up say-
ing ‘Good Morning’ in Ro—this
entering in the city have their
tracks united. The Underground
Railway consists of the Baltimore
men, digging huge drainage ditches, would soon be a better world to live 1873 and Potomac tunnel, under some
fighting the minute parasitic pests twenty-nine streets and avenues.
with oil and Statewide cleanup The Union Tunnel extends under
activities, mobilizing every agency some thirteen streets and avenues.”
of modern science to eliminate a
menace and peril which jeopardize Bunsen’s Burner
the rapid settlement of the land “In 1852 Robert Wilhelm Bunsen
of our last frontier—these are the was nominated professor of chem-
effective measures that the Florida istry in the University of Heidelberg,
State Board of Health and manifold which position he still holds. We
civic and private concerns are exer- owe to him important contributions
cising most vigorously in freeing relative to the combustion and dif-
Florida of one of her most unwel- fusion of gases. He is the discoverer
come guests, the objectionable, of the galvanic battery which bears
omnipresent mosquito, the minute his name, and which is now most
musketeer of the insect world who commonly in use. He is also the
delights in poking its prickly bayo- inventor of that wonderful instru-
net into human flesh. Floridans ment known as Bunsen’s burner.
[sic] have now arisen and united Herr Bunsen, although now in his
resources in the most determined 62nd year, enjoys excellent health
campaign against the pestiferous and is still unceasing in the pursuit
S cientific American, Vol. XXIX, No. 4; July 26, 1873
‘bloodsuckers’ ever waged in Dixie.” of his investigations. His style of

lecturing is very happy, and has
The Accidental Thermos always attracted a large audience.”
“Sir James Dewar, whose death was Bunsen died at the age of 88 in 1899.
recently announced, is popularly
1873, Aerial Ship: “We must give attention to the most perfect of aerial machines yet
known as the inventor of the ther- constructed—the aerostat in France. Hydrogen gas is employed. The plane of movement
mos bottle. However, he was not is under control of the aeronaut by rotating a shaft attached to a two-bladed screw.
consciously working for that, but Its recent ascent took place from the Fort Neuf of Vincennes; the descent was commenced
rather for something to preserve at 2 hours 35 minutes, [about 100 kilometers away] at Mondecourt, near Noyon.”

GRAPHIC SCIENCE
Text by Andrea Thompson | Graphic by Amanda Montañez
A Fair Share Global Total
of Carbon
Emissions Emissions
Some countries are using too much from land- from fossil-
of the world’s CO2 budget use change fuel sources
To have a 50–50 chance of keeping global temperatures from

rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial times,
Earth’s nations need to limit carbon dioxide emissions to about 500
gigatons between 2020 and 2030. With the world currently putting
out roughly 40 gigatons of CO 2 per year and emissions continuing
to rise, we will easily exceed that budget and keep emitting past 2030.
But countries have not contributed to emissions equitably.
A new analysis of the national carbon budgets of a select group
of countries shows that the collective European Union and
nations such as the U.S. and Russia have produced far more than
their fair share, whereas countries that have industrialized more
recently, such as India, have not come close to theirs. Developing Carbon budget:
countries cannot emit their allotment of carbon without world- 2,890 gigatons
wide temperature goals being overshot. Therefore, developed of CO2 (GtCO2)
nations need to cut their emissions much more aggressively and Total emissions
provide financial and technological support for renewable ener- to date: 2,479 GtCO2
To limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the
gy in the developing world, experts say.
total remaining budget as of 2022 is 411 GtCO2
Highest Emitters Overall
Sources: C limate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis: Working Group I Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental
U.S. The U.S. has already exceeded China Although China currently emits the most carbon of any country
ns
issio its carbon budget by
(e missions data) ; World Bank (c ountry populations and per capita emissions data) ; Data analysis by Amanda Montañez and Piers Forster
annually, its cumulative total is still lower than that of the U.S.
Panel on Climate Change. I PCC, 2021 (c arbon budget) ; S upplemental Data of the Global Carbon Budget 2022. Global Carbon Project, 2022
em about 346 GtCO2
on
Brazil Indonesia
rb
Ca
get
bud
on
b
Car
The majority of Brazil’s carbon footprint

is attributed to land-use change—namely,
deforestation for agricultural development
Russia
Lowest Emitters per Capita

E.U. Democratic Republic Somalia Burundi
India of the Congo
India’s low historical

emissions reflect its Highest Emitters per Capita
status as a recently
Qatar Bahrain Kuwait
industrialized nation,
whereas its carbon
budget is calculated As petrochemical states, these nations have the
based on its huge highest emissions per capita, but their contributions
current population to the global total are relatively small

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JULY/AUGUST 2023 SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.

Photograph by Levon Biss July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 1

3 From the Editor 22 The Science 92 Reviews

2 Scientific American, July/August 2023

Illustration by Nick Higgins July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 3

“This is one of the flaws of the cornucopians:

4 Scientific American, July/August 2023

The Biden-Harris administration is ART

FUNDAMENTALLY WEIRD PRESIDENT

“Primordial Soup,” by Clara Moskowitz. It CLIENT MEDIA SOLUTIONS

molecular machinery and life itself. CONSUMER MARKETING

LE T TER S TO THE EDITOR

July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 5

6 Scientific American, July/August 2023 Illustration by Luisa Jung

ChatGPT is the first nonhuman subject I have ever tested in my

Illustration by Thomas Fuchs July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 7

Earth’s abundant water makes

8 Scientific American, July/August 2023

• A bandage sparks healing with electricity

In the last hours o f the last day of Febru-

a process called accretion, this dust con-

J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter

10 Scientific American, July/August 2023

Robot hand manipulates an unfamiliar

12 Scientific American, July/August 2023

never formed a repeating pattern. odic tilings of better-known shapes called

July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com

14 Scientific American, July/August 2023 Graphics by Jade Khatib

Scan to learn more

July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 15

In 2011 M arcus Perlman saw a YouTube

16 Scientific American, July/August 2023

Zombie Fires and her colleagues

COGNITION tion: one with a hard limit on the fine numer-

Illustration by Thomas Fuchs July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 17

Science map (called a connectome) is, the better it

in Images systems work. “The brain is a giant neural

18 Scientific American, July/August 2023

Reverse structures, says study co-author Fran­

Quantum fluid freezes tum Information, both in Austria.

type known as excelsa may offer an alternative. The

For more details, visit www.ScientificAmerican.com/

This ferrofluid forms peaks remi-

The Southern Lights

We gazed up into rarefied air, clear

and pristine in every echelon,

and electrons high in the exosphere.

Who needs Parthenon or Birth of Venus

20 Scientific American, July/August 2023

At camp, they drilled to 4,000 meters

to contact a subglacial lake and wrangle

After, we warmed ourselves near space heaters.

We could be on Europa, on untold

(based on the term “zeitgeber,” meaning an external cue that affects

July/August 2023, ScientificAmerican.com 21

Our Body Clock

22 Scientific American, July/August 2023 Illustration by Jay Bendt

How Mathematics Can Predict—

24 Scientific American, July/August 2023 Illustration by Irene Rinaldi

What role can mathematicians play

JULY/AUGUST 2023 SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.

Reverse structures, says study co-author Fran

to Earth began “drogue” parachute to