Superheavy

Elements

Treating
Adolescent
Anxiety

Near-Death
Experiences

A Grizzly
Question
Should people restore
the apex predators
to their old territories?

June 2024
ScientificAmerican.com
© 2024 Scientific American
CONTENTS
June 2024 VOLUME 330, NUMBER 6

FEATURES

C ONSERVATION
24 A
 GRIZZLY QUESTION
A reintroduction plan in the
North Cascades reveals a deep fear
of human-bear conflict.
BY BENJAMIN CASSIDY

NEUROSCIENCE
34 B EYOND THE VEIL
What near-death experiences
tell us about human consciousness.
BY RACHEL NUWER

B IOLOGY
40 T HE NEW CODE OF LIFE
Scientists have recently discovered
thousands of active RNA molecules,
produced by our genome, that can
control the human body.
BY PHILIP BALL
P SYCHOLOGY
48 T REATING
THE ANXIOUS TEEN
Research on the developing brain
points to new approaches for
help­­­­­ing young people with common
anxiety disorders.
BY BJ CASEY AND HEIDI MEYER
C HEMISTRY
54 S UPERHEAVIES
Extreme atoms are pushing the bounds
of physics and chemistry.
BY STEPHANIE PAPPAS
ECOLOGY
62 A NTHROPOGENIC EVOLUTION
Humans are changing more than just
the environments species inhabit.
We are changing the species themselves.
BY LEE ALAN DUGATKIN

ON THE COVER
For thousands of years grizzly bears coexisted with
people in the North Cascades mountains in what is
today Washington State. Hunters, not habitat loss,
tanked the population in the 19th and 20th cen­
turies; the last time a grizzly was spotted was in
1996. Now there’s a plan to reintroduce the species
to the ecosystem, which could easily support about
280 bears. But a lot of people are terrified.

Photographs on the cover and on this page

by Brooke Bartleson.

J u ne 2 02 4 Sc i en t i f ic A m er ican.com 1
© 2024 Scientific American
CONTENTS
June 2024 VOLUME 330, NUMBER 6

4 F ROM THE EDITOR

6 C ONTRIBUTORS
8 LETTERS
12 A DVANCES
The science of cicadas’ regular emergence. Beer
by-product lives on in metal recycling. Ice bubbles’
revealing shapes. Like particles that attract.
70 S CIENCE AGENDA
There are few safeguards in place to ensure either
the safety of homeschooled children or the quality
of education they receive. BY THE EDITORS
71 F ORUM
Human anatomy is fascinating. Consider that
our bodies are bags inside bags inside more bags.
BY BETHANY BROOKSHIRE

72 T HE SCIENCE OF HEALTH
Patients fare better when palliative care starts
sooner, not later. BY LYDIA DENWORTH
74 M
 ATH
Why your friends are more popular than you.
BY JACK MURTAGH

76 M IND MATTERS
The aha! moment when babies realize they can
influence the world.
BY ALIZA SLOAN AND SCOTT KELSO

77 T HE UNIVERSE
The vastness of space boggles the mind.
BY PHIL PLAIT

80 Q &A

Orbon Alija/Getty Images

Should we trust AI in scientific research?
BY LAUREN LEFFER

82 O BSERVATORY
The harms of asbestos have been known for more
than a century. Why did the U.S. take so long
to ban it? BY NAOMI ORESKES 74

83 M ETER
The poetry of a caterpillar’s metamorphosis.
BY MICHAEL SIMMS
Scientific American (ISSN 0036-8733), Volume 330, Number 6, June 2024, published monthly, except for a July/August issue,
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BY GARY STIX AND IMMY SMITH

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific
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BY MARK FISCHETTI to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

2 SCI E N TIFIC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
© 2024 Scientific American
FROM THE EDITOR

Science Is Lee Alan Dugatkin shows on page 62 how animals today are chang-
ing their migrations, vocalizations, activity patterns, and more.

Never Finished
A bold experiment to undo some of the damage people have
done to wildlife will likely start soon in Washington State. The
U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service announced this
spring that they want to move forward with a plan to reintroduce

O
grizzly bears in the North Cascades mountain range. On page 24,
NE OF THE BEST THINGS about being an editor at S  cien- journalist Benjamin Cassidy reports on how this controversial plan
tific American i s hearing from people whose careers were began and what we’ve learned about grizzlies in other recovery
transformed by our publication. I recently read the auto- areas as they have begun to come back after being eliminated from
biography of Joe Coulombe, who founded Trader Joe’s, much of the U.S. The fabulous photography is by Brooke Bartle-
and he cited three occasions when a S  cientific American son; read more about her in our Contributors column (page 6).
article (having to do with demographics, the biosphere and comput- Chemistry gets weird at the far end of the periodic table. The
ers, respectively) gave him a brilliant idea that helped him build his elements with atomic numbers 104 through 118 do not exist in
grocery chain. At a recent Innovators in Science awards event spon- nature as far as we know, and they only fleetingly exist in high-
sored by Takeda and the New York Academy of Sciences, several power physics laboratories. But as science journalist Stephanie
people told me about articles that inspired them to take on a career Pappas explains on page 54, new research at the “uncharted
in research. One person made a great observation: textbooks make coastline of chemistry” reveals that these oddities are even odder
science seem like it’s finished, like everything is already known. But than expected, with relativistic forces acting within their atoms
Scientific American s hows people that science is alive. There is al- that are similar to those that govern objects around a black hole.
ways more to learn, and there are plenty of opportunities for people It’s another great case of the very small helping us grasp the very
to participate in science themselves or appreciate new discoveries. large, with implications for what happens in a supernova.
Not to pick on textbooks too much, but you probably learned Some people who recover from a cardiac arrest or another ma-
from them that DNA is transcribed by RNA into proteins that cre- jor medical trauma report having had a “near-death experience.”
ate and sustain our bodies. True enough—but that’s not at all the They may remember a sense of transcendence and transforma-
full story. On page 40, author Philip Ball invites us into the ongoing tion and visions of lost loved ones. Author Rachel Nuwer de-
RNA revolution. RNAs that don’t produce proteins can still influ- scribes on page 34 how scientists have started studying these
ence physiology in huge ways, and new ones are being discovered experiences to understand the almost-dying brain and what al-
all the time. They may be extremely short, extremely long or cir- tered states of consciousness can tell us about the mind.
cular; they may work alone but often work in different combina- Anxiety disorders are be­­com­ing more common in teens. They
tions for a more versatile response to the environment. are undertreated, and existing therapies don’t help everyone. On
“Anthropogenic evolution” is a relatively new term describing page 48, neuroscientists BJ Casey and Heidi Meyer discuss treat-
adaptations in plant and animal species prompted by changes peo- ments that could enable young people to
ple have made to the environment. A classic example is the peppered control distressing fears, memories and
Laura Helmuth
moth, which evolved to have darker coloring to blend into soot-­ is editor in chief thoughts. Please enjoy this issue and spread
blackened habitats in industrial revolution–era England. Biolo­­­­gist of Scientific American. the word that science is never done.

BOARD OF ADVISERS

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

4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J une 2 02 4
© 2024 Scientific American
CONTRIBUTORS

BJ CASEY T  REATING THE STEPHANIE PAPPAS

ANXIOUS TEEN, PAGE 48 S UPERHEAVIES, PAGE 54
As a postdoc at the National Stephanie Pappas’s home state
Institutes of Mental Health has an element named in its
in the early 1990s, BJ Casey honor: tennessine, atomic num­
became one of the first people ber 117. It’s one of several
to have their brain scanned “superheavy” elements, which
using functional magnetic reso­ don’t exist in nature, and it was
nance imaging, or fMRI. The first synthesized in 2010 thanks
scanning room “looked like an to the contributions of laborato­
old nasa project,” she recalls. ries in the region. For this
“The magnet was just huge.” issue’s feature on these exotic
Casey volunteered to be a elements, Pappas, a science
guinea pig because she knew journalist based in Colorado,
the technology had “tremen­ explored the frontier of the
dous” potential—it allowed periodic table to learn how
neuroscientists to noninvasively scientists are giving shape to
observe the brain in action for matter that bends the rules of
the first time. Ever since that chemistry. “All of this happens
experience, Casey, who is now at this atomic level. You can’t
a neuroscience professor at see any of it; you can’t feel any BROOKE BARTLESON A  GRIZZLY QUESTION, P  AGE 24
Barnard College, has used the of it,” she says. As a teenager in New Jersey, Brooke Bartleson encountered
technique in her work to under­ Yet the story of so-called a black bear and her two cubs while running along the side
stand the adolescent brain. superheavies is about human of a road. She was petrified, until a driver in a pickup truck pulled
In this article Casey co-­ ingenuity and perseverance over and assured her that the mama bear did not seem agitated.
wrote with neuroscientist Heidi just as much as it is about pro­ Then he gave her a can of bear spray. That experience turned
Meyer of Boston University, she tons and neutrons. So Pappas Bartleson into a bear aficionado, which led to a career in wildlife
de­­­scribes the way changes in traveled to Lawrence Berkeley photography. “Bears are like the chocolate cake—they’re the des­
how different brain regions talk National Laboratory in Califor­ sert that I want really badly,” she says. “And the photography is
to one another can make teens nia, where scientists have been the spoon to bring it into my mouth.”
more sensitive to threats—and creating these strange, short- Bartleson is constantly on the move in her “super retro” RV,
vulnerable to anxiety. lived atoms since the 1960s. but she often stays near Lake Clark National Park. There her
While reading through her In the control room, which “has ursine neighbors have an abundance of food in the natural envi­
own teenage diaries, Casey stuff in there from the ’60s,” ronment—“like a buffet at the Ritz Carlton”—making them more
realized she had no memories she was struck by the history relaxed than populations in other regions. These circumstances
of the emotions she had written and creativity on display. The allow Bartleson to get extraordinarily close to her subjects.
about so intensely. “There’s so researchers were “patching This issue’s cover story, written by journalist Benjamin Cassidy
much passion” in adolescence, things together and making it on a grizzly reintroduction program in Washington State, features
she says, and adults often for­ work.” They were also “often some of Bartleson’s favorite photos. She loves all bears but is es­­
get what this tumultuous yet finishing each other’s sen­ pecially fond of grizzlies, partly because “their habitat is my pre­
beautiful time was like. So “just tences,” she says. “You could ferred habitat as well.” Grizzly territory in North America once
as we tell teens, ‘take a deep tell they had been working stretched from the West Coast to the Mississippi River. Now the
breath,’ parents need to do closely for a while.” bears exist mostly in remote areas in Alaska, Canada and pockets of
that, too—to [take] a moment the lower 48. These “aren’t necessarily the habitats they evolved in,”
and just listen to their child.” she says, but “they’re making the best out of what they have left.”

IMMY SMITH G  RAPHIC SCIENCE, P  AGE 86

Every other day Immy Smith wakes up just after dawn to check the moth trap. The light in their backyard in southern England draws
in these insects overnight, and Smith photographs them and logs the finds in a community science database for researchers to use. For
this issue’s column, written by senior editor Gary Stix, they illustrated how moths get drawn toward light sources. “It’s the kind of thing
you take for granted—that moths fly toward the light,” Smith says. But new research shows that they’re flying orthogonal to the light and
getting trapped, and “it’s really fascinating.”
Smith is a pharmacologist as well as an artist, although these days they’re more focused on their art, which has depicted everything
from plants to brain tumors—and, of course, insects. As a kid, “I used to bring all of the insects into the house and just unleash them.”
While working on a project about lichen symbiosis, Smith learned that many moth species blend in with lichen—such as the Merveille
du Jour moth, which is now tattooed on their forearm. “I ended up completely falling in love with moths” and even describes themself as
“moths in a human suit.”
Tara Julie

These underappreciated four-winged insects aren’t just fun to draw; they’re also important pollinators and a critical food source for many
birds. For anyone still on the fence about these creatures, Smith has a message: “If you like birds, you like moths. I don’t make the rules!”

6 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
© 2024 Scientific American
LETTERS
E [email protected]

MILKY WAY BACKSTORY ing of cellular memory can remove some

I thoroughly enjoyed “Our Turbulent of the stigma and inform more advances
Galaxy,” Ann Finkbeiner’s article on how in treating trauma and mental illness.
recent star maps have revealed more JERRY BARRAX S
 HERMAN, TEX.
about the events that led to the Milky
Way’s current state. But some questions Jacobsen’s article suggests that human
remain. When in the timeline did our intelligence and cognition might be
galaxy acquire its central supermassive exceptional in degree but not in kind.
black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*)? And As the article notes, “People are just
how did Sgr A* come to be? Did the other another animal species. But real cogni-
galaxies that merged with the Milky Way tion—that was supposed to set us apart.”
also have black holes? This topic was by far the most significant
JOHN SOLTESZ L
 OGANDALE, NEV. in the February issue.
TOM WELCHEL C
 HARLOTTE, N.C.
How can random collisions of galaxies
February 2024
result in an orderly spiral like the Milky PREDICTIVE PRIORITIES
Way? I had thought the common result “Quantum-Proof Secrets,” by Kelsey
was an elliptical galaxy. For example, that The information about how bioelectric Houston-Edwards, has a problem that
is expected to be the case when Androm- cellular activity in plants allows them to occurs in a number of other articles in
eda and the Milky Way eventually collide sense and respond to their environment Scientific American a nd other outlets.
to form Milkomeda. was truly astounding. And although the Houston-Edwards asks us to imagine
K. CYRUS ROBINSON T
 AMPA BAY, FLA. information about cellular intelligence in the future as a technological race: When
the animal kingdom was just as enlighten- people manage to develop a powerful
FINKBEINER REPLIES: S  oltesz asks lovely ing, I received it with the joy that comes quantum computer, it will crack codes
questions. The answers are hard to find, but from seeing new discoveries that shed that are routinely used for encryption.
in theory, Sgr A* would have formed during light on old mysteries. Meanwhile other people seek to develop
the gravitational collapse of the primordial As anyone who’s been paying attention effective encryption methods that will
gas cloud that created our galaxy around to the field of psychotherapy and to be secure even from quantum computers.
13 billion years ago. Regarding the mergers treat­ment for post-traumatic stress We must remember that while this race
in the Milky Way’s history: If galaxies that disorder knows, many recent develop- is going on, we are also dealing with the
merged with ours were dwarf galaxies, the ments in counseling have focused on the effects of global warming, overpopula-
formation of supermassive central black growing awareness that trauma is stored tion, and all the results of poisoning and
holes like Sgr A* would have been unlikely not just in our minds but in our bodies as tinkering with Earth’s ecology. We must
but not impossible. If the mergers involved well. My wife and I have experienced this not forget the much greater risks we face,
globular clusters, any black holes were dynamic firsthand. We are well acquaint­ed and we must not console ourselves by
probably star-sized. with traditional approaches to mental imagining a future where things are
Robinson asks another lovely question. health. But the healing modalities we’ve humming along much as they do now
I think the idea of two large spiral galaxies found most beneficial all include some except for the effects of quantum
merging to form an elliptical one comes mechanism for releasing trauma stored computers on decryption.
mainly from theories and simulations of in the physical body. TOBIAS D. ROBISON P
 RINCETON, N.J.
galaxy evolution. But the dwarf galaxies The reported findings about the be­­­hav­
or globular clusters that collided with the i­or of planaria and slime molds provide ROOT OF RUST
Milky Way were a fraction of its size and the first hard scientific underpinning In “Rusting Rivers” [ January], Alec
eventually just merged into the spiral. I’ve seen for these approaches to trauma Luhn describes how streams in Alaska
When I asked astronomers this question, therapy. I hope someone thinks to start are turning orange with iron and sulfuric
they said that even the bean-shaped batch an interdisciplinary dialogue with the acid. I grew up in south-central Alaska.
of stars called the Gaia-Enceladus Sausage psychiatric profession so this understand- As a child, when I lived in the state’s city
was not massive enough to perturb the
Milky Way for long.
“We must not console ourselves
COGNITION AND TRAUMA
I read “Minds Everywhere,” Rowan by imagining a future where things are
Jacobsen’s article on how simple cells
show basic cognitive abilities, with a mix
humming along much as they do now.”
of astonishment and confirmation bias. TOBIAS D. ROBISON PRINCETON, N.J.
8 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4

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of Kenai during the early 1990s, I often EDITOR IN CHIEF Laura Helmuth

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large patch of muskeg riddled with kettle EDITORIAL

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EDITORS EMERITI Mariette DiChristina, John Rennie
I appreciated the excellent history that EDITORIAL Rebecca Boyle, Amy Brady, Katherine Harmon Courage, Lydia Denworth, Ferris Jabr,
highlighted how claims of vitamin D’s Lauren Leffer, Michael D. Lemonick, Robin Lloyd, Maryn McKenna, Steve Mirsky, Melinda Wenner Moyer,
George Musser, Sarah Scoles, Dava Sobel, Claudia Wallis, Daisy Yuhas
superhealing powers have been over- ART Edward Bell, Violet Isabelle Frances, Lawrence R. Gendron,
Nick Higgins, Kim Hubbard, Katie Peek, Beatrix Mahd Soltani
stated. I especially appreciated her
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 BIOLOGY

Keeping
Time
How cicadas count down
to their big emergence

THE YEAR WAS 2011. B

 arack Obama was
president, nasa’s space shuttles were re-
tiring and Taylor Swift was on her second
tour—and across a huge swath of the
southeastern U.S., billions of tiny new-
born cicadas rained down from tree
branches to burrow into the soil.
This spring those same cicadas, now
grown, will venture above­ground for the
first time in 13 years. It’s a marvel of syn-
chronization that allows them to thrive de-
spite the vast range of animals that feast on
the tasty, defenseless bugs. But how do pe-
riodical cicadas like these manage to coor-
dinate their ear-rattling emergence every
13—or, for some species, 17—years? After
all, cicadas aren’t equipped with an alarm
clock or a calendar, and they spend more
than a decade underground.
“Seventeen [years] is just an inordi-
nately long time to keep track of anything,”
says John Lill, an insect ecologist at George
Washington University. “I can’t keep track
of five years, let alone 17, myself—so how
an insect does it is pretty remarkable.”
In 2024 two different periodical cicada
groups will emerge: the 13-­year Brood
XIX, which will blanket much of the
south­east­ern U.S., and the 17-­year Brood
XIII, which will be concentrated in north-
ern Illinois. There will also be some strag-
glers from other broods. When they do
make mistakes, cicadas most commonly
mistime their emergence by either one or of time. Instead periodical cicadas have a year as a tree buds and blossoms, its xylem
four years—and next year another mas- hack: they tally the growth cycles of the is briefly richer in amino acids, leading one
sive cohort of 17-­year cicadas, Brood XIV, trees that they feed on. team of researchers to call it “spring elixir.”
is due across parts of the East Coast and During their long stint underground, Cicadas appear to count each flush of
the Ohio River Basin. the insects sip at xylem sap, the nutri- spring elixir: when those researchers took
Levon Biss

But none of these insects, whether ent-poor but water-rich liquid that moves 15-year-old cicadas from a 17-year brood
punctual or early, are marking the passage from a tree’s root tips up to its canopy. Each and manipulated the insects’ food trees so

1 2 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
© 2024 Scientific American
WHAT IS THE EVIDENCE ON SCIENTISTS TEST HOW BELUGA WHALES MOVE
COLD-WATER SWIMMING SYNCOPATION MAKES EXPRESSIVE “MELON”
AND HEALTH? P. 16 US DANCE P. 18 TO COMMUNICATE P. 19

DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE

This cicada species, M agicicada septendecim,

is one of seven whose members will burst
from the ground this spring and summer.

that they grew leaves twice in one year, University. “We don’t really understand in the U.S. are dubbed “annual cicadas” be-
voilà—the cicadas emerged a year early, how they’re keeping track of it.” cause some of them emerge every year. But
having tallied the required 17 leaf growths. The seven periodical cicada species in scientists don’t yet know exactly how long
“We know that’s what they count. Where the U.S. are particularly flashy and well these insects live or whether they carry an
they’re putting their little chalk marks on known because of their synchronized internal counter like the 13- and 17-year ci-
the wall, we don’t know,” says Martha emergences, but the nation is home to about cadas clearly do, says John Cooley, a biolo-
Weiss, an insect ecologist at Georgetown 150 species, all told. Nonperiodical species gist at the University of Connecticut who

J u ne 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 13
© 2024 Scientific American
ADVANCES

studies cicadas. “They’re out every sum- ables, evolved in the first place, Cooley things are always the hardest things to
mer, so they’re hard to track, and under- says. One hypothesis connects the periodic study,” he says. “We can’t tell you why this
ground it’s all kind of a mess,” he says of behavior to the glaciers that once blan- evolved; we just know it has to be some
annual varieties. keted much of cicadas’ current territory; special collection of circumstances.”
Cooley says that discovering a counter, other scientists point to the way the tactic So this spring and summer, if you live in
at least in the periodical cicadas, would be helps the bugs avoid their predators. or travel to the eastern U.S., try to revel in
a comparatively straightforward en- But although neither a glacial history the mysteriousness of periodical cicadas,
deavor—albeit a very expensive one. Re- nor a bevy of predators is rare, periodical no matter how loud they get. This emer-
searchers could simply analyze enough cicadas certainly are—just nine of the gence “really is one of the seven biological
cicadas at stages from hatchling to adult roughly 3,400 cicada species known world- wonders of the world. There is nowhere
and look for a pattern in the insects’ inter- wide synchronize periodical emergences— else in the entire world where you can see so
nal states, he says. so something else is going on, Cooley ar- many periodical cicada species,” Cooley
More challenging than finding the mys- gues. “Whatever the circumstances are says. “It’s something that really nobody else
terious counter is understanding how the that lead to the evolution of this life-his- in the world gets the privilege of seeing.”
mechanism, and the bizarre lifestyle it en- tory pattern, they are rare, and the rare — Meghan Bartels

GENETICS processes create toxic by-products. Some insects have evolved

relationships with symbiotic bacteria that recycle usable nitrogen
Lucky Genes from this waste.
The new study suggests whiteflies were able to leave this part-
Stolen bacterial DNA helped whiteflies nership millions of years ago by incorporating two nitrogen-
recycling genes from such bacteria into their own DNA. Ted Turl-
to become the ultimate pests ings, a chemical ecologist at Switzerland’s University of Neuchâ-
tel and one of the study’s senior authors, says viruses—which are
TINY, SAP-EATING whiteflies wreak agricultural havoc by spread- known experts in transferring DNA—most likely took those
ing multiple plant viruses and secreting sticky, mold-attracting genes from bacteria and happened to deposit them in a nearby
goo on the 500-odd plant species they eat. Now a study in S  cience insect genome. This process is called horizontal gene transfer.
Advances r eveals one secret to their outsize clout. Scientists led by The “in-house” genes now help whiteflies convert more amino
Youjun Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences acids into waste when they have too much nitrogen in their bod-
found that these persistent pests have acquired bacterial genes ies, then recycle that waste back into amino acids when they don’t
that let them process nitrogen with incredible efficiency. have enough. Plants vary a lot in amino acid content; the captured
“Nitrogen makes the world go round,” as Harvard University genes may be what lets these pests thrive on such a wide variety of
evolutionary biologist Naomi Pierce puts it. Animals use nitro- them, the study authors say.
gen-containing amino acids to make proteins and DNA, but those Cooperating with bacteria to recycle nitrogen would be more
energetically expensive for the flies than cutting out the middle-
man and just doing it themselves. And it takes still more energy
to make sure the relationship doesn’t turn parasitic, Pierce says:
“If you have a symbiont living in your body, you need to have ways
to control it. Otherwise, it could end up controlling you.”
The transferred genes may be a helpful survival tactic for
whiteflies, but Turlings says they could also be an Achilles’ heel.
Because these genes are particular to whiteflies, pest-control
strategies such as modifying plants to disrupt the flies’ genes will
not harm other organisms. “This is as close to perfect as you can
get in terms of specificity,” he says.
Whiteflies’ acquisition history goes beyond this case; they are
Nigel Cattlin/Alamy Stock Photo

also known to have gained plant genes that let them neutralize the
plants’ defensive toxins, says University of Amsterdam’s Petra
Bleeker, who studies plant-insect interactions. “It seems that
horizontal gene transfer is not uncommon in insects,” she says,
“but whiteflies appear to be champions.”
Whiteflies
 —Rohini Subrahmanyam

14 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
© 2024 Scientific American
 Ensure Reason Prevails
Help shore up the
beleaguered wall of
separation between
state and church
Learning personas
personas for
acteristics
for each
acteristics and
each chosen
chosen face,
and identities
identities they
face, giving
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they disliked
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to opponents.
opponents.
images of of each
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face set
set in
alongside
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landscape or
alongside aa common
common household
or other
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household object,
background
object, as as ifif
Join the nation’s
built to learn the
the person
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person were
the object.
were “showing”
object. Later,
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Later, the the participants
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participant
participants tried tried toto
largest association
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may divide us match
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COGNITIVE
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polarized and and increasing-
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learning
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processes. “What“What we we ly
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bias could
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explain how
how people
people de- de- learning
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with real-world
real-world events.events. “This“This could
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views.
participants first
first chose
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their like
like or
or dislike
dislike views,”
views,” he he says.
says. “There’s
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fodder FFRF is a 501(c)(3) educational charity.
of
of the
the faces.
faces. Then
Then they
they created
created imaginary
imaginary moving
moving forward.”
forward.”  — —Kate
Kate Graham-Shaw
Graham-Shaw Deductible for income tax purposes.

Illustrationsby
Illustrations byThomas
ThomasFuchs
Fuchs
© 2024 Scientific American
ADVANCES

Cold-water bathers have also reported Still, science doesn’t simply throw cold
HEALTH
pain relief from musculoskeletal injuries water on the perceived benefits. Although

Taking and decreased symptoms of depression, as

well as feeling more alert and attentive over-
more research is needed, rigorous studies
have suggested that regular cold-water ex-

the Plunge
all. In one study, they reported improve- posure might combat obesity, cardiovascu-
ments in mood after just one dip. lar disease, inflammation, muscle soreness
“You never find anybody who’s doing and diabetes, and it may also prepare the
Tallying the benefits this activity who says it isn’t great,” says body to cope with other stressors. Mental
of cold-water swimming James B. Mercer, an emeritus physiologist at health improvements have been largely
UiT the Arctic University of Norway and anecdotal; one 2018 case study followed a
lead author of a scientific review of 104 young woman who weaned herself off anti­
COLD-WATER SWIMMING is surging in studies on cold-­water immersion. “They all de­pres­sants with a cold-­water-­swimming
popularity, particularly in northern Eu- swear by it. They think it’s the most wonder- regimen. Recruiting is currently underway
rope, where groups such as the Bluetits ful thing in the world.” for a randomized, controlled trial on out-
Chill Swimmers eschew tropical beach va- But Mercer adds that the health claims door swimming and depression.
cations in favor of frigid winter dips. Ce- about cold-water swimming have been Cold-water swimming does carry risks:
lebrity practitioners, including actors Kate “quite difficult” to assess, partly because it can cause hypothermia, drowning and
Winslet and Bradley Cooper, have en- most studies on the subject have been cardiac arrhythmia, and experts caution
hanced this icy pastime’s cachet. small, with generally healthy participants that people with health conditions should
As far back as 400 b.c.e., Hippocrates and widely varying water temperatures consult their doctors before trying a polar
claimed that cold-water swimming re- and salinity levels. Researchers have strug- bear plunge. They also suggest easing in
lieves fatigue. Aficionados have since gled to tease out whether the cold water it- slowly when possible and not going alone.
credited it with benefits ranging from im- self is helpful or whether the benefits come Adherents insist there’s no replace-
proved sleep to enhanced libido. from, say, having an active lifestyle and so- ment for “that feeling of euphoria and
In a recent survey of 1,114 female cold-­ cializing with friends. then peace,” says University College Lon-
water swimmers, published in Post Repro- “Most claims have no or very weak evi- don reproductive researcher Joyce C.
ductive Health, m  ore than one third re- dence,” says Heather Massey, a physiolo- Harper, lead author of the menstrual and
ported that their hobby eased mood gist at the University of Portsmouth. Be- menopause survey.
mihtiander/Getty Images

swings associated with menstruation and sides co-­authoring several cold-water-im- “I recently swam in a semifrozen lake,
menopause. Among menopausal respon- mersion papers, Massey has swum the and I was overcome with uncontrollable
dents, 47 percent said it reduced anxiety, English Channel and dabbled in competi- laughter,” Harper says. When water’s too
30 percent said it reduced hot flashes, and tive “ice swimming” (in water colder than warm, she adds, it “loses some of its buzz.”
20 percent said it reduced night sweats. 41 degrees Fahrenheit).  —Jesse Greenspan

16 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
© 2024 Scientific American
 Fundamentals
First Fund
An ETF
Like-Charge Attraction Symbol KNOW
Team pins down a bizarre chemical act Your money
Carefully managed
Abstract
CHEMISTRY
The fact that like charges re-
r e- nearby protons onto each particle’s surface, The Fundamentals First Fund, an ETF, is part
pel and opposites attract is reducing the particles’ negative charge. owner of approximately 100 publicly traded
basic electromagnetism. But for decades sci- That then weakens their repulsion from the worthy companies, and it owns publicly
entists have occasionally made a counterin- water’s oxygen atoms, too, a phenomenon traded debt. These worldwide companies are
vital, important, useful, or just plain nice to
tuitive, and controversial, observation: simi- that intensifies as the silica particles move
have around, and most have been pursuing
larly charged particles can sometimes also toward one another. This change draws the their business course for decades. We
attract one another when dispersed in a liq- silica particles together from about a mi- individually select these companies with
uid solvent such as water or alcohol. cron away. care and in a manner as to spread our risk
Researchers now propose in N Nature
ature Nan- The team observed the opposite effect so that no single company event can cause
otechnology tthat
hat this phenomenon arises in alcohol, because its molecules prefer to more than a bruise. Mason Capital has
from the solvent’s molecular nature. The steer the other way at a particle’s surface: managed money this way for more than
team observed that negatively charged silica positively charged particles suspended in three decades. If you are more specifically
interested in who we are, how we do it, and
particles pulled together and formed hexag- alcohol pull together instead. A solvent’s
how you might participate, read on.
onal clusters in water, and positively charged acidity also influences charge and thus
www.FundamentalsFirstFund.com
silica variants were mutually attracted in al- whether particles in it form clusters.
cohol. Modeling water molecules’ behavior Scientists were long uncertain whether
near charged particles helped to reveal why. such strange attraction was an experimen-
In previous experiments, researchers tal artifact or a real physical phenomenon,
considered a fluid to be one continuous sub- Krishnan says. Critics have disputed previ- Investors should consider the investment objectives, risks,
charges and expenses carefully before investing. For a
stance, but this ignores the influence of its ous observations of this effect citing optical prospectus or summary prospectus with this and other
tiny atomic building blocks. Water, for in- distortions, weak particle attraction, or hy- information about the Fund, please call 617-228-5190 or visit
our website at www.fundamentalsfirstfund.com
stance, is made up of individual molecules drodynamic forces causing particles to drift Investments involve risk. Principal loss is possible.
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that are dipoles—you can think of them as together. “This paper solves a mystery that
having more charge on one side than on the has been out there for 20-plus years,” says
other, like a battery, says University of Oxford Jay T. Groves, a chemist at the University of
chemist and study co-author Madhavi Krish- California, Berkeley. “It’s very thorough, and
nan. And water molecules prefer to bond with I think [it’s] indisputable that this effect is a
other water molecules, so when they’re near property of the solvent.”
a suspended particle they tend to point their This finding’s potential uses are “limited
two slightly positive hydrogen atoms toward
the rest of the liquid and their slightly nega-
to one’s own creativity,” Krishnan says. The
team’s future work will investigate particle
Support Science
tive oxygen atom toward the particle.
As negatively charged silica particles in
behavior in other solvents, as well as appli-
cations to fields such as biology: how mol-
Journalism
water approach one another, they experi- ecules—many of which carry lots of electri- Become a
ence an effect called charge regulation, cal charge—organize themselves in cells.  Digital subscriber to
whereby the repulsion between them pulls — —Lori
Lori Youmshajekian
Scientific American.

Scientific American is a registered trademark

of Springer Nature America, Inc.

© 2024 Scientific American

ADVANCES

NEUROSCIENCE than 60 participants, cognitive neurosci- activity in 29 people using magnetoen-

entist Benjamin Morillon of France’s Aix-­ cephalography, a process that measures
Feel the Beat Marseille University and his team exam-
ined how syncopation relates to the groove
magnetic fields produced by the brain, as
the participants listened to music. Analy-
Why the brain grooves experience. In one test, they played 12 dif- sis showed that the brain’s auditory cor-
ferent melodies. The main beat was always tex—the main region for processing audi-
to syncopated sounds two hertz, or roughly two events per sec- tory stimuli—primarily follows the melo-
ond. But the melody’s rhythmic shifts var- dy’s rhythm. Meanwhile the dorsal
EXPERTS HAVE GAINED deeper insight ied so that each tune was played with three auditory pathway, the brain area that con-
into why people spontaneously dance to different degrees of syncopation. Partici- nects the auditory cortex with movement
music. New research suggests the impulse pants then rated how much they wanted to areas, is where the rhythm apparently
to bop to the beat—what some scientists dance to each track. matches the basic beat. It’s therefore likely
call the “groove experience”—depends on As Morillon and his colleagues report that the impulse to dance arises in this
the music’s degree of syncopation, a feature in Science Advances, a medium degree of pathway and is then passed on to the mo-
that affects how predictable the rhythm is. syncopation triggered a strong desire to tor areas as a movement impulse.
The work reveals “why we cannot resist move to the music. In contrast, neither The researchers also modeled their find-
moving in sync with the beat when we lis- very high nor low degrees of syncopation ings mathematically with a quadratic rela-
ten to music with an optimal level of syn- had that same result. In other words, peo- tionship; this produced an inverted
copation,” says Benoît Bardy, a movement-­ ple didn’t particularly want to dance to an U-curve in which the highest desire to move
science researcher at the University of entirely predictable rhythm or a highly came at a medium level of syncopation.
Montpellier in France. Bardy, who was not surprising one. That modeling, Morillon says, suggests
involved in the new study, describes it as “a In addition, the groove experience that with a moderate level of syncopation,
very innovative piece of science.” seems to be all about finding the music’s our brain “can still extract the periodic beat
Syncopations are rhythmic patterns in underlying pulse, the study shows. When from the melodies.” Putting the evidence
which accented or unaccented beats in a a group of participants had to tap their fin- together, he and his colleagues contend that
melody appear in surprising places rela- ger to imagined dance steps, they did so the brain is essentially trying to anticipate
tive to the standard beat. The more synco- almost exclusively to the basic 2-Hz beat, upcoming beats amid a melody’s syncopa-
pation a piece of music contains, the less not to the melody’s rhythm. tion. The result is the impulse to dance.
accurately you can guess the rhythm of the To better understand how the brain de- “For a long time music and dance have
next few bars as you listen. rives these movements from the tune, Mo- been studied separately [in the brain],”
In a series of experiments with more rillon and his colleagues measured brain says Constantina Theofanopoulou, a neu-
roscientist at the Rockefeller University
and director of the school’s Neurobiology
of Social Communication Lab. Theo-
fanopoulou, who did not contribute to the
new study, explains that much research to
date has focused on either auditory per-
ception in music or motor production in
dance, and “this study takes a step toward
bridging the gap between the two.” She
adds that the complexity of coordinating
and integrating brain areas may help elu-
cidate why some people have impaired
rhythmic movement.
Morillon, meanwhile, explains that a key
motivator for his work is understanding
how people make sense of time—and how
the motor system helps us recognize tempo-
ral patterns and anticipate future events.
Flashpop/Getty Images

“What I find fascinating is our lack of a ded-

icated sense of time,” he says. “We have spe-
cialized systems for processing sound and
light, but time perception remains elusive.”
— Anna Von Hopffgarten and Daisy Yuhas

18 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
© 2024 Scientific American
 ANIMAL COMMUNICATION
Melon Shapes Melon

Shape-
Shifters NEUTRAL FLAT Neutral
shape
Emboldening
Belugas form expressions
with their forehead melon
the Mind
Since 1845.
THE BELUGA WHALE’S “MELON”
“MELON”—a
—a
techn
tech­ nical
ical term—is a mass of fat tissue on LIFT PRESS Unlimited
its forehead that helps to project sounds for
echolocation. And new research suggests Discoveries.
that despite whales’ seemingly stone-faced Unlimited
countenances, they shake, wiggle, thrust
and bump these bulbous blobs to convey Knowledge.
expressions.
something a little like facial ex­
pressions.
For a study in Animal
Animal Cognition, sscien-
 cien-
PUSH SHAKE
tists tracked four beluga whales at Con-
necticut’s Mystic Aquarium for more than
200 hours and observed roughly 2,500
instances of these mammals morphing
their melons. To investigate if the move-
ments might be intentional communica-
tion, the researchers carefully ob­ observed
served
whether they occurred in a social context
and within view of other whales. The team “But whether the beluga movements are
documented five five distinct melon morphs specific to all belugas or just that popula-
specific
(reference)
2024 (reference)

used repeatedly in various situations. tion, we don’t know that information yet.”
“We have known, intuitively, that they She adds, however, that the study’s melon
Changing
by Changing

do this,” says Justin Richard, the study’s shapes are the same as the ones she sees in
2, 2024

lead author and an animal scientist at captive belugas in San Antonio.

March 2,
7; March

the University of Rhode Island. “But first step at looking

The study “is a good first
Interactions by
Social Interactions

first time we have documented

this is the first at facial displays in a highly social species
No. 7;
27, No.

it rigorously.” that has been neglected in the communi-

Vol. 27,

Richard says scientists should be cau- field,” adds Simon W. Towns­

cation field,” Townseend,nd, an
Cognition, Vol.
during Social

tious about ascribing meaning to the animal-communication specialist at the

Animal Cognition,
Displays during

shapes at this stage—but he does note University of Zurich. Next, he’d like to see
some patterns. A jiggly “melon shake” ap­­ ap- whether other individuals respond to a
Facial Displays
in Animal

pears to be used primarily by males and to shape-shifting

shape-­ shifting melon. 
be directed toward females during court- —M Monique
onique Brouillette
al., in

—
Create Facial
et al.,

ship. An elongating “melon push” seems

Richard et
leucas) Create

A “melon shake”
T. Richard

to occur among both males and females

and may be a display of ag­­g gression,
ression, as it
(Delphinapterus leucas)

appears to be used
Justin T.
by Justin

makes the whales look larger. Researchers

primarily by males
“Belugas (Delphinapterus

are still investigating what might prompt

Melons,” by
Their Melons,”

the other three distinctive moves.

“I certainly think they are able to use
toward females during
courtship. A “melon
of Their

their melons in a communicative fashion,”

Source: “Belugas

push” seems to be a
Scientific American is a registered trademark
says comparative psychologist Heather
Shape of

of Springer Nature America, Inc.

the Shape

Hill, who researches marine mammal be­­ be-

Source:

havior at St. Mary’s University in Texas. display of aggression.

aggression.
the

Graphic by Amanda Montañez

© 2024 Scientific American
ADVANCES

SCIENCE IN IMAGES insights for glaciologists and engineers. elongate in the direction of freezing. The
As water freezes, most of its dissolved researchers found that an ice sample host-
Icy Secrets gases get expelled. But some tiny bubbles
near the freezing edge can get trapped in
ing many small, slightly elongated bubbles
suggests a high freezing rate and a high gas
Oddly shaped bubbles the solidifying ice, where they keep grow- concentration, whereas a sample with a
ing. Virgile Thiévenaz, who studies fluid few larger, longer pores froze more slowly.
tell a frozen story mechanics at Paris’s Industrial Physics and These variations are predictable mathe-
Chemistry Higher Education Institute, and matically: “We can match most bubbles
LOOK CLOSELY at an ice cube, and you Alban Sauret, a mechanical engineer at the with the same equation,” Thiévenaz says.
might spot minuscule bubbles shaped University of California, Santa Barbara, If you know a sample’s freezing rate, you
like teardrops, flattened eggs or even re-created this process in the laboratory to can work out the gas concentration, and
winding worms. Bubble patterns in Rus- tease apart the factors that affect growing vice versa. Their equation predicts that
Anton Petrus/Getty Images

sia’s Lake Baikal (shown here) are even bubbles’ shapes and sizes. long, cylindrical ice-bubble “worms” will
more vivid. Researchers have found that As Thiévenaz explained during a pre- sometimes grow unchecked, weakening
ice bubbles’ peculiar shapes can reveal sentation at an American Physical Society the surrounding structure.
how fast the water froze and how much meeting, the researchers observed that ice Environmental ice tells a story about the
gas was dissolved in it, providing key bubbles are never spherical but instead past, but determining past freezing condi-

20 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
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 MATERIALS SCIENCE
charge of sugar molecules on the yeast or-

Metal Brew ganisms’ surfaces; particular metals are

drawn to specific charges on the sugars, so
this process controlled which metals the
Yeast does double duty yeast attracted and bound. After each at-
processing electronic waste tempt, the scientists extracted the yeast
and soaked it in an acid bath to remove the
metals from it, leaving the yeast ready for
WHEN BREWER’S YEAST left over from another round.
beer making is mixed with the right sea- The four tested metals are relatively in-
sonings, it makes a bitter, earthy paste expensive, and most e-waste recyclers cur-
called Marmite that is especially popular rently prioritize recovering more valuable
in the U.K. Smeared on toast, it’s a snack ones such as gold, silver and platinum. But
that can be an acquired taste. But a study the study’s metals are still beneficial and
published recently in F  rontiers in Bioengi- widely used—which “justifies the recy-
neering and Biotechnology found that cling process,” says Treavor Boyer, an en-
re­­­sidual yeast sludge can also be used to vironmental engineer at Arizona State
bind to electronic-waste metals—a capa­­ University. Kerry Bloom, a biologist at the
bil­ity the research suggests could help re- University of North Carolina at Chapel
cycle the world’s growing mountains of Hill, adds that the yeast’s low price and
discarded gadgets. sheer abundance could make the tech-
When the study authors added brew- nique relatively feasible at a large scale if
er’s yeast, a single-cell fungus, to a watery e-waste recycling facilities prove willing to
solution of mixed metals, they noticed the invest in something new. “There are huge
yeast could isolate and take up specific vats of yeast that often have nowhere to go
metals—and be reused at least five times once brewers are done with them,” he says.
without losing binding strength. The team “So this is a fantastic source for it. It’s the
says this method offers a more environ- master recycler.”  —Riis Williams
mentally sustainable alternative to current
extraction techniques such as pyro­­
metallurgy, an energy-intensive melting
process that can release toxic fumes. And
even though brewer’s yeast may be tasty to
some, much of it still gets dumped, and it is
extremely cheap and plentiful.
“In Austria, we produce a lot of beer and
have a lot of brewer’s yeast that goes to
tions is tricky. Thiévenaz and Sauret say that waste,” says study lead author Anna Sieber,
making inferences based on bubble shape a graduate student at the University of Nat-
could be a boon for researchers studying ural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna.
lake ice and glacier cores. Erin Pettit, a gla- Knowing the yeast can bind to metals and
ciologist at Oregon State University, agrees. be used multiple times, she says, “we think
Science Photo Library/Steve Gschmeissner/Getty Images

“I’ve always been puzzled by the wormy this method could actually help limit both
bubbles in pockets of refreezing water the yeast and electronic-waste streams.”
within glaciers,” she says. “It’s exciting to The researchers rinsed, froze, dried and
see the physics behind their formation.” ground up 20 liters of residue with inactive
Additionally, many engineers favor po- yeast from a brewery. Next they added
rous solids for certain applications because some of the yeast to solutions containing a
of their light weight. By controlling gas laboratory-made mix of aluminum, cop-
concentration and freezing speed, scien- per, nickel and zinc, then added some to
tists could theoretically dictate a material’s solutions with those same metals leached
pore shape, leading to strong and light directly from scrapped printed circuit
metals, glasses and ceramics, the research- boards. The researchers adjusted the mix-
ers suggest.  —Rachel Berkowitz tures’ acidity and temperature to alter the Microscopic view of brewer’s yeast

J u n e 2 02 4 Sc i e n t i f ic A m er ic a n.com 21
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ADVANCES

ENGINEERING

A Logging
Robot
How a software-equipped
vehicle could work in
the forest

THE FIRST AUTONOMOUS LOGGING ma-

chine rumbled down a Swedish forest
path and scanned for stacked logs to
transport. It then scooped them up with a
crane and loaded them onto its trailer. A
new study of the truck-size robot, called a
forwarder, suggests it could help forest
workers with at least some deadly jobs.
“It’s the first trial for us to see that the
machine we built is perhaps capable of do-
ing what we were dreaming it could do,”
says Pedro La Hera, a roboticist at the
Swedish University of Agricultural Sci-
ences and lead author of the study, pub-
lished in the Journal of Field Robotics.
Logging jobs are often demanding, re-
quiring operators to multitask and endure
nearly constant vibration while operating
logging vehicles. Fatigued foresters don’t al-
ways pay attention to other foliage in the
area, the researchers say, and can damage
the ecosystems around them. Logging is
also dangerous; in the U.S., it has one of the
highest fatality rates of any industry.
Roboticists, software engineers and
forestry scholars in Sweden set out to au-
tomate some onerous logging tasks. They
used GPS to set a path in a clear-cut area
and equipped the vehicle with a computer ited to Sweden, where nearly all forests account the fuller range of where it’s oper-
vision system to help it identify, pick up are managed for commercial logging, ating, whether it includes wildlife, other
and release cut logs. The predetermined paths are well identified, and satellites contaminants or bugs that come with the
task sequence demonstrates how, in a con- provide information on logged areas. Log- logs to avoid any infestations, and its sen-
trolled environment, a machine with little gers in the U.S., in contrast, harvest trees sitivity to the terrain.”
to no human oversight could operate. both in plantations and in natural stands Since the experiments took place, engi-
“It’s definitely an advancement,” says where self-piloted machinery would face neers have already improved the machine’s
Thomas Douglass, a logger who owns more challenges. maneuvering capabilities. The researchers
Thomas Logging and Forestry in Guilford, Still, the research highlights aspects of are also pursuing other autonomous ef-
Maine. “I, along with other contractors in autonomous machinery that are worth de- forts such as planting seedlings. Although
Michael Hall/Getty Images

this area, have problems getting help veloping further, says Dalia Abbas, a for- logging may always need human over-
working in the woods, so I can see why at ester who has investigated the effects of sight, automating certain steps could
least making the forwarder an automated logging operations in environmentally make the process safer and more efficient,
process would be helpful.” sensitive areas. Eventually, Abbas says, she benefiting both workers and the environ-
For now these vehicles’ use may be lim- “would definitely hope that it takes into ment, La Hera says.  —Susan Cosier

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A
Grizzly

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 CONSERVATION

A reintroduction plan in the North Cascades

reveals a deep fear of human-bear conflict
BY BENJAMIN CASSIDY
Photographs by BROOKE BARTLESON

Question

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S COTT SCHUYLER KNEW IT WAS GOING to
be a tense evening in
Newhalem, where a few dozen scientists, officials and residents
had gathered at the community center to talk about living among
apex predators. This remote village adjacent to North Cascades
National Park is a tiny company town owned and operated by
Seattle City Light—a utility that long ago built a succession of dams on the neighboring
Skagit River to generate power for Washington State’s largest city.
Schuyler, an Upper Skagit Indian Tribe Elder and
policy representative, had already spent years fighting
the utility company for impeding salmon runs on his
tribe’s ancestral land. He’d witnessed the dams imperil
all five Pacific species of the fish found in the river; the
tribe’s chum salmon fishery had disappeared entirely.
cades within 60 to 100 years. One course of action
would treat them as a threatened species under the
Endangered Species Act; another, which the agencies
listed as their preferred alternative, would less con-
ventionally designate them as a “nonessential exper-
imental population” under a little-­known rule in the
That November night another spiritual relative of the act. This would allow authorities greater latitude to
Upper Skagit—one who’d been missing for a long catch or kill bears to stop conflicts between the animals
time—was on his mind. and humans. Crucially, it would also allow landowners
For millennia grizzly bears roamed this vast stretch in some areas to obtain a permit to kill a grizzly under
of wilderness in north-­central Washington. Fur trap- specific circumstances. (A third “no action” alterna-
pers and hunters killed thousands of them during the tive would involve no bear movement at all.)
19th century, essentially eliminating them from the In a handful of comment sessions held around the
landscape. The last official observation of a grizzly in this region and virtually, the public was now weighing in
ecosystem was in 1996. But in the fall of 2023 federal on how these various plans would affect the environ-
agencies had released a plan to reintroduce grizzly bears ment and the residents’ lives. At another meeting two
to the U.S. portion of the North Cascades Ecosystem— days earlier in a valley east of the North Cascades,
a mountainous region roughly the size of Vermont, scores of ranchers and other locals had vehemently
located within a couple hours’ drive from coastal cities, opposed any plans to reintroduce the bears. Backed by
including Seattle and Bellingham. It’s part of a broader a local congressional representative, they saw such an
recovery effort across the American West that was fi- action as a threat to their livestock and to the commu-
nally getting traction here after decades of bureau- nity at large. Some speakers blew past their two-­
cratic starts and stops. minute limits; one man gripped a pitchfork with a
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National cutout of a bear claw that read “NO.”
Park Service had presented three scenarios. Two of As Newhalem’s first speaker, Schuyler began in a
Benjamin Cassidy them would aim to create an initial group of 25 bears conciliatory tone. “We respect everybody’s right to
is an award-winning over a five- to 10-­year span. These bears would arrive their opinions,” he said, before sharing that the history
journalist based in
the Pacific Northwest.
by helicopter and trucks from other regions in the U.S. of his tribe had been intertwined with the history of
This is his first story and British Columbia, with the long-­term goal of gen- the grizzly bear for 10,000 years. “I hope it’s not a sur-
for S
 cientific American. erating a population of 200 grizzlies in the North Cas- prise to folks,” he said, “that we’re going to support

26 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
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restoration.” Many speakers agreed, making com- bers supported reintroduction. A campground owner In Alaska’s Lake Clark
ments along the lines of one from Brenda Cunning- explained that tourists already fret about encountering region, a grizzly bear
searches for salmon
ham, a retired biologist: “I’m willing to camp with care black bears and suggested that recreationalists might
in a river. Grizzlies
in these places because I feel we need to share the wil- be dissuaded from visiting the North Cascades if they haven’t been spotted
derness with all the species in the ecosystem,” she said. thought grizzlies were around. in Washington’s North
“The notion that we need to have completely safe ex- As the months-­long process played out, debate over Cascades since 1996.
periences in the wildest areas of this incredible country human-­bear conflict revealed a surprising range of
seems very selfish to me.” views about what it means to belong to an ecosystem.
But fear of the grizzlies was palpable. Of the six des- It also invited a fundamental question: What, exactly,
ignated recovery zones in the U.S., this one is closest to were the grizzlies supposed to bring back?
a major city—the Seattle metropolitan area is home to
more than four million people. And the rural commu- For thousands of years p  eople who lived in the
nities near the proposed release areas could, according North Cascades coexisted with grizzly bears. They re-
to the plan, experience “adverse” effects such as “dep- vered the massive creatures for their hunting skill; ac-
redation of livestock or agriculture.” A local farm-­ cording to Upper Skagit lore, the bears could im­­bue
bureau president said none of the organization’s mem- humans with their hunting prowess. The Stetattle Val-

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 Some people fear a grizzly bear ley, which is part of Upper Skagit ancestral land, draws
reintroduction in Washington its name from the Lushootseed word for “grizzly bear.”
could harm salmon populations— In the 19th century Upper Skagit bands resisted
but dams are a much bigger white settlers’ attempts to drive them onto distant res-
threat to the fish.
ervations. But their four-­legged neighbors gradually
disappeared as grizzlies became targets for hunters and
fur trappers. Between 1820 and 1860 Hudson’s Bay
Company reported that nearly 4,000 grizzly hides
were shipped from trading posts in the area.
Throughout the central and western U.S., hunting
and habitat loss caused by new settlements destroyed
a population that once stretched from Mexico to the
Arctic. Even as the grizzly bear came to symbolize the
power of the wilderness, that power, for some, still
manifested as a risk to be “managed,” and Ursus arctos
horribilis l argely vanished from the landscape. In 1975
grizzlies were listed as threatened in the lower 48 states
under the Endangered Species Act. By then, an esti-
mated population of 50,000 bears in the contiguous
U.S. prior to 1800 had plummeted to fewer than 1,000.
In the early 1980s a government effort was started to
recover the animals in habitat zones across Montana,
Idaho, Wyoming and Washington. That initiative even-
tually included the North Cascades Ecosystem. In the
Cabinet-­Yaak Ecosystem, which runs across northwest-
ern Montana and northern Idaho, the federal agencies
started translocating grizzlies from Canada, where pop-
ulations were healthy. For the first time in the U.S., peo-
ple were moving grizzlies for a recovery effort.
Wayne Kasworm, a wildlife biologist with the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service’s Grizzly Bear Recovery Pro-
gram, can still remember the skepticism from locals
when the feds explained they were going to capture
bears from the British Columbia backcountry and re-
lease them around the Cabinet Mountains, where there
were, at most, 15 grizzlies at the time. In part to pacify
those pushing back, the program began as an experi-
ment: From 1990 to 1994 they’d capture four young
females using foot snares, culvert traps and dart guns
and truck them across the border and set them free in
remote areas. Then they would see if the bears pro-
duced any cubs.
It would take a while to render a verdict. Among
North American mammals, only musk oxen reproduce
less than grizzlies over the course of a lifetime. Finally,
in the early 2000s, DNA analyses from hair-­­snagging
snares helped to prove that one of the bears had pro-
duced a number of offspring. Land managers are now
seeing the third generation of descendants from that
bear, whom they named Irene. Today the ecosystem has
probably somewhere between 60 and 65 grizzlies after
introducing 26 translocated bears. “Overall, it’s gone
better than expected,” Kasworm says of the recovery
program. The government plans to add a bear or two to
the Cabinet-­Yaak every year for the foreseeable future.
The Cabinet-­Yaak recovery has served, in many re-
spects, as a template for the North Cascades, Kasworm
says. One major difference between them, however, is
that the Cabinet-­Yaak augmentation region had a small

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30 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
© 2024 Scientific American
grizzly population when the program began. “Starting on the environmental impact statement of the federal A mature female grizzly
from either no bears or very few bears,” Kasworm says, plans, but they had a significantly different message. stands tall to investigate
an approaching bear.
“is possibly a lot tougher than starting with some bears “The bear is definitely a big part of our culture here
This behavior is a sign
to get a population going.” in Indian country, as all the animals are,” said Yanity, a of curiosity, but people
To establish an initial population of 25 grizzlies in former chair of the Stillaguamish Tribe of Indians. sometimes misinterpret
the North Cascades, the reintroduction plan calls for “But as time has moved on, things have changed.” Spe- it as aggression.
the capture of three to seven bears a year for up to a cifically, he worried the bears would endanger some of
decade from the wilds of British Columbia; the Greater their food and economic resources. “We face declining
Yellowstone Ecosystem; and the Northern Continental salmon,” he said. (Research in the government’s plan
Divide Ecosystem, which includes Glacier National shows that the bears aren’t expected to endanger the
Park, in northwest Montana. Crews would deploy cul- fish population.) Lenon, a member of the Sauk-­Suiattle
vert traps or, where feasible, shoot tranquilizers from Indian Tribal Council, echoed Yanity’s concern about
helicopters to capture the bears. (In some instances, the salmon and said his people would hunt the bears if
they may also use snares.) they were reintroduced. He then stated a belief seem-
If a trapped bear met the criteria for being a ingly shared by many in the room: “These people,” he
founder—between two and five years old, with no cubs said, referring to the federal officials in attendance,
or history of conflict with humans—they’d transport “don’t give two cents about any of your human lives.
it by air and truck to remote public land in the North Because I’ve told them already, you’re going get people
Cascades, tracking the animal via a GPS collar. Other killed in the North Cascades.”
trapped bears would be let go. One by one, people raised concerns about their com-
Mortalities during grizzly captures and transloca- munity’s safety. Some cited what has happened in Mon-
tions are rare; between 1980 and 2009 less than 3 per- tana, where conservation efforts raised the grizzly pop-
cent of known grizzly deaths in the lower 48 states ulation in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem from 136
could be traced to scientific research or conservation, bears in 1975 to 965 bears in 2022. The area in and
according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The around Glacier National Park now counts the largest
bigger uncertainty is what will happen once they’ve grizzly population in the lower 48 states. The bears have
arrived in the North Cascades. A study of 110 grizzly extended their range between these ecosystems, mi-
bear translocations in Alberta, Canada, found that grating into plains and valleys and encountering more
these efforts failed 70 percent of the time. In the failure humans along the way. Montana, Idaho and Wyoming
cases, bears were killed both legally and illegally; en- have all recently petitioned the federal government to
gaged in repeated conflicts; or wandered back toward delist the bears from the Endangered Species Act be-
their original capture area. cause of the rising number of bears.
Dana Johnson, policy director with the national Data on conflicts haven’t quite caught up to the
nonprofit Wilderness Watch, worries about both the bears’ increasing sprawl. In Yellowstone National Park,
mechanics of translocation—an estimated 144 heli- though, the National Park Service reports just 44 visi-
copter landings to release, handle and recollar the griz- tors injured by grizzlies since 1979, or one for every
zlies could disturb surrounding mammals and birds— 2.7 million visits. Grizzlies have killed seven visitors
and the potential disorientation of the founders since the park was established in 1872—two more than
themselves. “They have established home ranges. have been struck and killed by lightning during that
They have established social structures. They know time. Generally speaking, U.S. Forest Service regional
where their favorite food sources are,” says Johnson, wildlife ecologist Andrea Lyons says, “you’re more
who clarified she does support reintroduction. “These likely to die driving to the trailhead than you are from
are animals that have communities.” a grizzly bear encounter.”
Kasworm, acknowledging the challenges of translo- The North Cascades National Park Complex—
cation, estimates it would require moving about 36 bears which drew nearly one million visitors in 2023—isn’t
to build the initial population of 25 in the North Cascades. Yellow­stone b ­ usy (4.5 million visitors in 2023) or as
“Not all of those animals that you move are going to stay popular as Mount Rainier or the Olympic Peninsula,
where you intended them to be,” he says. “And not all of the sites of Washington’s two other national parks. Vis-
them are going to live.” In the Cabinet-­Yaak Ecosystem, itors can find true solitude in the alpine expanses
bear losses have been caused predominantly by hu- where the peaks’ snowcaps trickle down to aquamarine
mans. In 2009 an elk hunter who said he was acting out lakes and rivers. The region is also the largest of the
of self-­defense killed a bear that turned out to be Irene. grizzly bear recovery zones, covering 9,800 square
miles. Modeling efforts have found the landscape could

T
he night after Schuyler advocated f or easily support about 280 bears. In other words: there’s
the reintroduction program in Newhalem, plenty of room for them.
Shawn Yanity and Kevin Lenon made their way Still, officials don’t deny there would be conflicts in
to the front of a packed auditorium inside a high school the North Cascades. Studies have found that attractants
in Darrington—a logging town 35 miles away. These such as orchards, beehives, and cattle and sheep calving
two tribal leaders had shown up to similarly weigh in areas are associated with encounters between humans

J u ne 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 31
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“Grizzlies were lost because plant and fungi species could serve as potential food
sources; despite their carnivorous reputation, the bears
people killed them. It wasn’t some are omnivores who largely dine on vegetation. Huck-
leberries, a grizzly favorite, abound in the region.
rogue disease or habitat loss.” With this diet come ecological benefits. Bear scat
would disperse seeds across the landscape. Their mas-
—Jason Ransom National Park Service sive claws would turn up and aerate soil when they dig
for roots and rodents. If humans leave them alone—and
and grizzlies. Rates of reported conflicts tend to be they very much want to be left alone—they would be-
highest during grizzlies’ extremely hungry phase, come a fixture of the landscape amid a biodiversity cri-
called hyperphagia, that occurs before hibernation. As sis. A study published in B  iological Conservation p
 ro­
part of the reintroduction plan, agencies would provide jects that warmer, wetter weather would create more
more education about bear spray and storage of human vegetation for grizzlies to eat. Other species may die off,
food, pet food and garbage. but grizzlies “are going to be winners in the climate
In Washington, the public might have more options change game,” says Ransom, a co-­author of the study.
for handling encounters. Traditionally, as a threatened Ransom calls grizzlies a keystone species, in the
species under the Endangered Species Act, bears could sense that they have an outsize effect on their natural
be captured or killed only during defense of life, re- environments relative to their population size—not in
search or conflict situations by federal, state or tribal the sense, as some use the term, that an ecosystem will
authorities. Because grizzly bears have disappeared fall apart without them. The North Cascades region has
entirely from the North Cascades—unlike in other re- shown it can adapt, and “I hope and expect that the
covery zones—officials could use the “nonessential ecosystem will remember them,” he says.
experimental population” designation to allow for ad-

O
ditional “take” activities for limiting conflicts. Accord- n march 21, a fter reviewing nearly 13,000
ing to the environmental impact statement, this would public comments, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
include permits for landowners to kill a grizzly if it is Service and the National Park Service took a big
presenting an ongoing threat to humans, animals or step toward approval: They issued a final environmen-
property and if “it is not reasonably possible” to quell tal impact statement that reiterated their preference
the bear via nonlethal means. to reintroduce grizzly bears to the North Cascades as
Some reintroduction advocates have concerns a nonessential experimental population. An official
about allowing greater liberties for taking grizzlies, “record of decision” will be published this spring. (A
and they worry that a broader definition of who is al- similar process is now underway for the Bitterroot
lowed to kill a bear, and under what circumstances, Ecosystem, a designated grizzly recovery zone in Ida-
might lead to unnecessary bear deaths. Others, such as ho and Montana; a decision is expected by 2026.)
Jason Ransom, a senior wildlife biologist with the Na- Regardless of what moves the U.S. government
tional Park Service, view it as a necessary step to push makes, grizzlies will likely be arriving in the North
through a program that has fallen victim to changing Cascades. Since the passage of a tribal council resolu-
administrations and volatile politics for many years. tion in 2014, the Okanagan Nation Alliance—an orga-
As a scientist who’s long worked on bear recovery, Ran- nization that supports a coalition of First Nations—has
som says it’s not strictly a matter of biology or ecology been working to recover grizzly bears in Canada. This
that underlies his support. year the group is planning to augment a population of
Last September, Ransom trekked to Fisher Creek about six bears on the Canadian side of the North Cas-
Basin, the site of the last known killing of a grizzly bear cades, according to biologist Cailyn Glasser, a resource
in the North Cascades. There’s something about being manager for the Okanagan Nation Alliance.
in a wild ecosystem “that resonates differently with our The bears “don’t care about borders,” Glasser says.
well-­being as a culture,” he says. “When you have big As the region’s grizzly population grows, she thinks it’s
pieces missing, [our well-­being] is degraded.” The griz- only a matter of time before the bears venture south to
zlies, he explains, “were lost because people killed them. the U.S. (Glasser says she’s in regular contact with U.S.
It wasn’t some rogue disease. It wasn’t habitat loss.” officials to coordinate their efforts.) The bears are “go-
The last verified sighting at North Cascades Na- ing to go back and forth, and the reality is that the best
tional Park came in 1991. (Hikers have filed many false habitat in that ecosystem is right along the border.”
reports of grizzlies since then. Most sightings are prob- To Schuyler, the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe Elder,
ably of black bears, which are comparable in size to grizzlies and people can always coexist: “It’s just never
interior grizzlies and can have similar blonde, brown a choice between us or them.” Schuyler traveled to
and cinnamon coats. But they lack the grizzly’s signa- Washington, D.C., in March to impart this belief to rep-
FROM OUR ARCHIVES ture shoulder hump.) Unlike other parts of the country resentatives of a government that historically tried to
Requiem for the
Vaquita. Erik Vance;
where grizzly bears vanished with habitat loss, how- force his people from their land. The parallel wasn’t lost
August 2017. Scientific­ ever, officials have managed the North Cascades as a on him. “We’re advocating for ourselves,” he says, “not
American.com/archive grizzly bear recovery area since 1997. Thousands of just the grizzly bear.”

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Two subadult grizzly bears wrestle in Alaska’s Katmai region.

© 2024 Scientific American

Beyond
NEUROSCIENCE

the Veil
What near-death experiences tell us
about human consciousness
BY RACHEL NUWER
Illustration by GALEN DARA SMITH

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© 2024 Scientific American
F OR DECADES FRANÇOIS D’ADESKY, a retired diplomat and civil servant who
now lives in Brussels, spoke to no one about his near-death experience
(NDE). It happened at the age of 13, when he was hospitalized for acute
appendicitis. D’Adesky vividly recalls seeing his body on the operating
table and then passing through a tunnel, where he met strange beings
who radiated luminosity and goodness. “Your time has not come,” an older being, whom
d’Adesky intuited was God, told him. “You have not undertaken your Earth mission.”
Then d’Adesky perceived traveling “at NDEs as a unique mental state that can offer
breakneck speed through time and space, novel insights into the nature of conscious-
back to the beginning of the creation of the ness. “Now, clearly, we don’t question any-
world,” he says. He eventually arrived at a more the reality of near-death experienc-
gardenlike paradise where spiritual be- es,” says Charlotte Martial, a neuroscientist
ings—one of whom was his deceased at the University of Liège in Belgium. “Peo-
about what happens to the brain during car-
diac arrest, says neuroscientist Jimo Borjigin
of the University of Michigan Medical
School. “If we understand the mechanisms
of death, then this could lead to new ways of
saving lives.”
grandmother, another a childhood friend ple who report an experience really did ex- Like psychedelic drugs and other means
who had died at the age of five—commu- perience something.” of altering consciousness, NDEs could also
nicated telepathically with him. D’Ades- Those who undergo an NDE also return serve as probes for revealing fundamental
ky’s grandmother took him by the hand with “this noetic quality from the experi- truths about the mind and brain. Such states
and led him back into the clinic, where he ence, which very often changes their life,” are perturbations to the system of conscious-
woke up in his body in excruciating pain. adds neuroscientist Christof Koch of the ness, “and when you perturb a system, you
D’Adesky spent his adult life striving to Allen Institute in Seattle, who writes about understand better how it works,” says Chris-
discover what his special mission was. NDEs and other states of consciousness in topher Timmermann, a postdoctoral fel-
Eventually he came to see it as the role he his 2024 book, T  hen I Am Myself the World. low at the Center for Psychedelic Research
played in “making the world a better place,” “They know what they’ve seen.” at Imperial College London. “If we want to
he says. That included helping, as an official A handful of researchers, mostly emer- understand the nature of experience, we
with the United Nations, to get a key reso- gency room doctors, began collecting qual- have to take into account what’s happening
lution passed at the 2011 U.N. Climate itative data about NDEs after the 1975 pub- at the margins of nonordinary states.”
Change Conference. It wasn’t until a few lication of psychiatrist and physician Ray- Moreover, there are important existential
years later, though, when NDEs were enter- mond A. Moody’s book L  ife after Life, implications, although exactly what those
ing the public discourse more often, that he which detailed patients’ accounts of near- might be continues to be debated in the sci-
started sharing the story of his pivotal ex- death experiences. Since then, only a few entific literature and at conferences, includ-
perience beyond his immediate family. “I research teams have attempted to empiri- ing at a 2023 meeting held by the New York
had been afraid for my reputation,” he says. cally investigate the neurobiology of NDEs. Academy of Sciences. It explored conscious-
Near-death experiences have been re- But their findings are already challenging ness through the lens of death, psychedelics
ported across time and cultures. long-held beliefs about the dy- and mysticism. “These transcendent expe-
Rachel Nuwer
An astounding 5 to 10 percent of is a science journalist ing brain, including that con- riences are found in the major world reli-
the general population is esti- and author. Her latest sciousness ceases almost imme- gions and traditions,” says Anthony Bossis,
mated to have memories of an book is I Feel Love: diately after the heart stops a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at
NDE, including somewhere be- MDMA and the Quest beating. This discovery has im- the New York University Grossman School
for Connection in a Frac-
tween 10 and 23 percent of car- tured World (Blooms­ portant implications for current of Medicine, who helped to organize the con-
diac arrest survivors. A growing bury, 2023). Follow her resuscitation practices, which ference. “Might they have some greater pur-
number of scholars now accept on X @RachelNuwer are based on outdated beliefs pose for helping humanity cultivate under-

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standing and awareness of consciousness?” die, they don’t evaluate themselves based of gamma activity, a type of high-frequency
he asks. The weightiness of such questions on their own standards of morals,” says brain wave linked to the formation of mem-
makes careful study of NDEs and their rig- Sam Parnia, director of critical care and re- ory and the integration of information.
orous interpretation all the more critical, suscitation research at the N.Y.U. Grossman Borjigin had seen the same upwelling of
Martial says: “It’s important to disentangle School of Medicine. “They evaluate them- activity in previous studies of the brains of
empirical findings versus belief.” selves based on a universal standard.” healthy rats during induced cardiac arrest.
Although most people describe their In the rodents, the surge occurred across the
On an overcast February afternoon, NDE in glowing terms, a minority recount entire brain. In humans, though, it was con-
Martial was meeting with the 20 members visits to hell-like regions, encounters with fined primarily to the junction of the brain’s
of her neuroscience laboratory when her demonic beings or terrifying voids. In a temporal, parietal and occipital lobes, a re-
phone began to ring. She had asked to be 2019 study, Martial and her colleagues gion involved in multiple features of con-
alerted if someone arrived at the Liège uni- found that among 123 people who reported sciousness, including visual, auditory and
versity hospital on the verge of death. an NDE, 14 percent classified it as nega- motion processing. Past research has also
Martial bolted toward the elevator, and tive—a proportion Martial says she’s associated the region with out-of-body sen-
within about two minutes she made it into “sure” is an underestimate because of how sations, as well as with altruism and empa-
the hospital lobby, its crisscrossing escala- disturbing these memories can be. thy. Although these are all regular compo-
tors and geometric motifs reminiscent of Somewhat surprisingly, religious people nents of NDEs, Borjigin says, it’s impossible
an M. C. Escher drawing. In the resuscita- don’t seem to be more inclined toward to know whether the two patients actually
tion room, Aurore Ancion, an emergency NDEs. There is, however, preliminary evi- experienced an NDE because they did not
physician and doctoral candidate in med- dence of another group being more likely live to tell about it. But “I could almost guess
ical sciences, was already waiting. Laid out to have NDEs: those who are prone to REM what they might have experienced,” she says.
on one of the room’s two beds was a beard- sleep intrusion, a condition that occurs A 2023 study led by Parnia and detailed
ed man in his mid-70s, his hospital gown when rapid eye movement (REM) sleep in his forthcoming 2024 book, Lucid Dy-
open to expose his belly and chest. intrudes into wakefulness and blends ele- ing, provides further evidence of brain ac-
Despite being in the middle of an epi- ments of dreaming and waking. During the tivity after patients’ hearts have stopped.
sode of atrial fibrillation, the man was alert seconds or minutes it lasts for, people may Parnia and his colleagues worked with 25
and cracking jokes. He giggled nervously have an out-of-body experience, sense that hospitals in the U.S., the U.K. and Bulgaria
as Ancion, working around two emergency someone or something is in the room with to review EEG and brain-oxygen data from
doctors, placed a cap over his head for an them, or want to move but find that they 567 people who experienced an in-hospital
electroencephalogram (or EEG, to mea- can’t. In 2019 Daniel Kondziella, a neurol- cardiac arrest. Medical staff managed to
sure electrical signals in the brain) and ad- ogist at the Copenhagen University Hospi- collect interpretable EEG data from 53 of
hered two oxygen readers to his forehead. tal network’s Rigshospitalet, and his col- these patients. Most showed an electrical
Martial, standing in the back, peered leagues recruited a sample of 1,034 adults flatline during the crisis, but in around
through tortoiseshell glasses at a laptop, from the general population in 35 countries. 40 percent of those cases, neurological ac-
where two spiky lines in red and blue began Ten percent of the study participants had tivity consistent with that of conscious
scrolling across the screen—precise mea- experienced an NDE, and of those, 47 per- brains transiently reemerged—in some
surements, to the trained eye, of the pa- cent also reported REM sleep intrusion—a instances up to an hour into CPR.
tient’s brain activity. statistically significant association. Among A different subset of 53 patients from
The doctors eventually had to anesthe- the people who had not had NDEs, just the study survived. Doctors collected EEG
tize the man and shock his heart back into 14 percent reported REM sleep intrusion. and brain-oxygen levels for too few of
a normal rhythm. Martial and her col- Still, little is known about the neurobi- these people to draw a correlation between
leagues hope the data from his and other ology of NDEs. Open questions include any potential memory they had of the
patients’ visits to the resuscitation room whether they are driven by a single, core event and their brain activity. The authors
and from follow-up interviews will provide mechanism or are a more variable response were able to interview 28 of the survivors,
the most detailed picture to date of what to “understanding somehow that death is and six had a “recalled experience of
transpires in the human brain during close near,” as Timmermann says. A few re- death,” as Parnia refers to NDEs.
encounters with death. searchers, including Martial, are peering Parnia and his colleagues also sought to
Many people who had an NDE describe into the brains of people who are ap- test conscious and unconscious awareness,
one or more of a specific set of characteris- proaching or undergoing death, in the including reports of out-of-body experi-
tics. They may recall separating from their hope of understanding what is going on. ences, by projecting a series of 10 random
body and viewing it in real time from above. images on a tablet placed near patients’
They may pass through tunnels and see In 2023 Borjigin and her colleagues heads and by playing a repeated recording
light, encounter deceased relatives or com- published what they suspect could be a sig- of the names of three fruits—apple, pear,
passionate entities, and have a sense of vast- nature of NDEs in the dying brain. The re- banana—to them through headphones ev-
ness and deep insight. People may undergo searchers analyzed EEG data from four co- ery minute for five minutes while they
a life review and morally evaluate the choic- matose patients before and after their ven- were unconscious. None of the survivors
es they have made, including by experienc- tilators were removed. As their brains could remember the images that had been
ing the joy or pain their actions caused oth- became deprived of oxygen, two of the dy- projected. One person who had a recalled
ers. “What’s intriguing is that when people ing patients exhibited a paradoxical surge experience of death correctly named the

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 In Consciousness Space
What form of consciousness is a near-death experience (NDE)? internal awareness. Hallucinations, deep meditation and faint-
How does it compare with psychedelic trips, lucid dreams, and ing spells also involve high internal awareness but with partial
other mysterious inner realms? Charlotte Martial of the Univer- wakefulness and disconnection from reality. Rapid eye move-
sity of Liège in Belgium and her colleagues suggest thinking ment (REM) sleep, when people have their most vivid dreams,
about consciousness as a space with three main dimensions: involves relatively high internal awareness. Dreamless deep
wakefulness, internal awareness and connectedness with the sleep and general anesthesia have low values on all three axes.
outside world. In this illustrative scheme, NDEs and ketamine-­ (REM sleep intrusion, an intrusion of wakefulness into REM
induced anesthesia are associated with very low wakefulness sleep that some people who reported NDEs said they also had,
and connectedness (the person is unresponsive) but very high cannot be represented in this scheme.)

States associated with anesthesia

INTERNAL AWARENESS
Capable of thoughts States associated with sleep Near-death-like experience
unrelated to external Occurs during non-life-threat-
stimuli, including mental ening situations, including
imagery, inner speech Near-death experience meditation and in the midst of
and mind wandering. Occurs during life- a fainting spell.
threatening situations, Awake (normal
including cardiac arrest and consciousness)
after traumatic brain injury.
Fully aware

Ketamine-induced anesthesia

REM sleep REM sleep with

Hallucination (both drug-
with dream lucid dream
induced and psychotic)

General anesthesia
Coma Emergence from a
State that allows minimally conscious state
for some response
Not aware

while under
general anesthesia Minimally conscious state

by Charlotte Martial et al., in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 24; March 2020 (r eference)
Non-REM sleep

Source: “Near-Death Experience as a Probe to Explore (Disconnected) Consciousness,”

without dream Unresponsive
Not awake Fully connected
wakefulness
syndrome

WAKEFULNESS CONNECTEDNESS
Characterized by open eyes— A connection to the world, with an
either spontaneously or in ability to perceive and potentially
response to an external stimulus. respond to external stimuli.
Fully awake Not connected

fruits in order, although this could have such as brain stem reflexes, but others that person “for a new reality”—the transition
been by chance, Parnia says. are normally suppressed to optimize per- from life to death, a condition in which,
According to Parnia, this study presents formance for ordinary life suddenly become Parnia believes, consciousness endures.
“a coherent, mechanistic explanation” for disinhibited because the brain’s natural Other scientists flatly disagree. “When
how and why people have recalled experi- braking systems are no longer working. As you have an NDE, you must have a function-
ences of death. When someone starts dying, a result, “your entire consciousness comes ing brain to store the memory, and you have
Parnia says, the brain becomes dysfunc- to the fore,” Parnia says. The purpose of to survive with an intact brain so you can
tional. Some actions are immediately lost, this change, he suggests, is to prepare the retrieve that memory and tell about it,”

38 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4 Graphic by Violet Isabelle Frances for Bryan Christie Design

© 2024 Scientific American
Kondziella says. “You can’t do that without in follow-ups with surviving participants, In another study currently undergoing
a functioning brain, so all those arguments and they will also use video recordings to peer review, Martial, Timmermann and
that NDEs prove that there’s consciousness compare people’s memories with reality. their colleagues interviewed 31 people who
outside the brain are simply nonsense.” had experienced an NDE and had also tried

A
Kondziella, Martial, and others instead n easier approach t o studying a psychedelic drug—LSD, psilocybin, aya-
theorize that NDEs might be part of a last- NDEs is via safe proxies such as huasca, DMT or mescaline—to see what
ditch survival tactic. Species across the an- hypnosis, induced fainting and psy- they had to say about the similarities and
imal kingdom “play dead”—a behavior chedelic drugs. None of these methods differences between the events. Partici-
technically called thanatosis—when they produce true NDEs, but the states they pants reported stronger sensory effects
perceive a mortal threat, typically from an trigger may have some overlap with the dy- during their NDE, including the sensation
attacking predator. If fight-or-flight fails, ing brain. In 2018 Timmermann, Martial of being disembodied, but stronger visual
the instinct to feign death kicks in as an at- and their colleagues published a study imagery during their drug trip. They re-
tempt to forestall the danger. The animal comparing NDEs with the effects of ported feelings of spirituality, connected-
becomes immobilized and unresponsive to N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a ness and deeper meaning across both.
external stimuli—but with continued mind-altering component of ayahuasca, In comparisons of these mystical expe-
awareness so that, given a chance, it can a South American plant-derived psyche- riences, “the common ground that’s strik-
escape. “Personally, I believe the evolu- delic brew. Trace amounts of DMT also oc- ing to me is in things like a profound, deep
tionary aspect really is the key to under- cur endogenously in humans. “There’s sense of love—that all is love and that con-
standing what NDEs are and how they speculation that that’s somehow underly- sciousness is love,” says Bossis, who stud-
came about,” Kondziella says. “There is a ing NDEs, but the data are very elementa- ies the effects of psilocybin in people with
perfectly valid biological explanation.” ry,” Timmermann says. terminal cancer, focusing on relieving end-
Martial and others have also criticized In the study, 13 volunteers received in- of-life distress, enhancing spirituality, and
the methodological rigor of Parnia’s study. travenous DMT in a lab setting and rated providing a greater sense of meaning and
One concern, Martial says, is that the team their experience on a scale commonly used fulfillment in life. “There’s also a sense of
based its findings on visual readings of pa- to measure NDEs, developed by psychia- transcending time as we know it and a
tients’ EEGs rather than on “a proper sta- trist Bruce Greyson in 1983. The researchers greater acceptance of the mystery of life
tistical analysis.” Parnia says he and his compared the DMT group’s scores and sub- and death.”
colleagues applied the standard method for jective accounts with other people’s taken To Guy Vander Linden, a retired govern-
reading EEGs that “every physician in the from an NDE database that Martial and her ment administrator in Brussels, his NDE is
world” uses in clinical practice. Those who colleagues have been compiling since 2016. still a “gift.” It happened in 1990 after a se-
are criticizing the study, he adds, are “just (The database includes around 2,000 ac- rious bike accident. He was enveloped by a
ignoring it because [they] don’t like it.” counts, accepted from anyone who contacts force of overwhelming love and a deep
In their latest study, Martial and her col- the Liège team claiming to have had an NDE sense of “spirituality not connected to reli-
leagues plan to use the most rigorous ap- and then fills out a lengthy questionnaire.) gion,” he says. He also felt an expansiveness
proach to date to collect both subjective and They found “striking overlap” between in which “I was everything and nothing.”
objective data from around 100 patients, the DMT and NDE groups, Martial says, Vander Linden left the hospital a differ-
including EEG and brain-oxygen readings, with people in both describing a sense of en- ent person. His fear of death was extin-
plus information from several rounds of tering into an unearthly realm, separating guished, he says, because he now knew that
interviews and surveys with survivors in from their body, encountering mystical be- “to die is something fantastic.” He no lon-
the group. The University of Liège team is ings and seeing a bright light. People in both ger saw value in material things and got rid
also trying to more thoroughly evaluate groups also reported feelings of peace, unity of his car and two extra houses. He also
claims about out-of-body experiences. and joy. There was just one significant dif- felt compelled to share his NDE with
Around 79 percent of people who have an ference: those in the NDE group more fre- others through books and conferences.
NDE report leaving their body, and some quently experienced reaching a border de- These changes affected his relationships,
wake up knowing facts about their envi- marcating a point of no return. including with his wife, whom he has since
ronment that they seemingly should not Roland Griffiths, a psychiatrist at Johns divorced. “She said I’m crazy,” Vander
know. “I’m not saying it’s not true, but here Hopkins University who pioneered studies Linden recalls. “To come back with an ex-
we want to objectively test it,” Martial says. of psilocybin and who died last October, perience that others haven’t had—it cre-
To this end, she and her colleagues have reported similar findings with his col- ates conflict.” Years later he is still able to
decorated the hospital resuscitation room leagues in 2022. The authors compared tap into the love he felt when he was bathed
with unexpected objects and images, some 3,192 people who had undergone an NDE, in the clear light of what he’s come to con-
of which are hidden in places that could be a psychedelic drug trip or a non-drug-in- ceive of as universal consciousness.
viewed only from the vantage point of duced mystical experience. The team Regardless of how people interpret
someone near the ceiling. While a patient found “remarkably similar” long-term NDEs, studying them may expand the
is in the resuscitation room, including outcomes across subjects in all boundaries of resuscitation,
while they are conscious, the team plays an three groups, including a re- FROM OUR ARCHIVES provide a better understanding
Tales of the Dying
audio clip of various words and animal duced fear of death and lasting Brain. Christof Koch; of mind and brain, and shine a
sounds once every minute. They will test positive effects of insights they June 2020. Scientific­ flicker of light on some of the
for recollections of any images or sounds had gained. American.com/archive deepest mysteries of existence.

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THE
BIOLOGY

NEW CODE
OF LIFE
Scientists have recently discovered thousands of active RNA molecules,
produced by our genome, that can control the human body
BY PHILIP BALL
Illustration by JAMES YANG

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© 2024 Scientific American
T HOMAS GINGERAS DID NOT INTEND to upend basic ideas about how the human
body works. In 2012 the geneticist, now at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
in New York State, was one of a few hundred colleagues who were simply
trying to put together a compendium of human DNA functions. Their
­project was called ENCODE, for the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements. About
a decade earlier almost all of the three billion DNA building blocks that make up the
human genome had been identified. Gingeras and the other ENCODE scientists were
trying to figure out what all that DNA did.
The assumption made by most biologists at that
time was that most of it didn’t do much. The early
genome mappers estimated that perhaps 1 to 2 per-
cent of our DNA consisted of genes as classically
defined: stretches of the genome that coded for pro-
in 2007. But not until five years later did the extent
of all this transcription become clear. If only 1 to
2 percent of this RNA was encoding proteins, what
was the rest for? Some of it, scientists knew, carried
out crucial tasks such as turning genes on or off; a lot
teins, the workhorses of the human body that carry of the other functions had yet to be pinned down.
oxygen to different organs, build heart muscles and Still, no one had imagined that three quarters of our
brain cells, and do just about everything else people DNA turns into RNA, let alone that so much of it
need to stay alive. Making proteins was thought to be could do anything useful.
the genome’s primary job. Genes do this by putting Some biologists greeted this announcement with
manufacturing instructions into messenger mole- skepticism bordering on outrage. The ENCODE team
cules called mRNAs, which in turn travel to a cell’s was accused of hyping its findings; some critics
protein-making machinery. As for the rest of the argued that most of this RNA was made accidentally
genome’s DNA? The “protein-­cod­ing regions,” Gin- because the RNA-making enzyme that travels along
geras says, were supposedly “surrounded by oceans the genome is rather indiscriminate about which bits
of biologically functionless se­­quences.” In other of DNA it reads.
words, it was mostly junk DNA. Now it looks like ENCODE was basically right.
Philip Ball So it came as rather a shock when, in several 2012 Dozens of other research groups, scoping out acti­­vity
is a science writer and papers in N ature, h e and the rest of the ENCODE along the human genome, also have found that
former Nature e ditor team reported that at one time or another, at least much of our DNA is churning out “noncoding” RNA.
based in London. 75 percent of the genome gets transcribed into RNAs. It doesn’t encode proteins, as mRNA does, but en­­
His most recent book
is How Life Works
The ENCODE work, using techniques that could map gages with other molecules to conduct some bio-
(University of Chicago RNA activity happening along genome sections, had chemical task. By 2020 the ENCODE project said it
Press, 2023). begun in 2003 and came up with preliminary results had identified around 37,600 noncoding genes—that

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is, DNA stretches with instructions for RNA mole-
cules that do not code for proteins. That is almost
If noncoding RNAs power the
twice as many as there are protein-coding genes. way a cell processes genetic
Other tallies vary widely, from around 18,000 to close
to 96,000. There are still doubters, but there are also information, it is possible
enthusiastic biologists such as Jeanne Lawrence and
Lisa Hall of the University of Massachusetts Chan
they can be used in medicine.
Medical School. In a 2024 commentary for the journal
Science, the duo described these findings as part of called fluorescence in situ hybridization, Lawrence
an “RNA revolution.” and her colleagues showed that this RNA wraps
What makes these discoveries revolutionary is what itself around one X chromosome (selected at ran-
all this noncoding RNA—abbreviated as ncRNA— dom in each cell) to induce persistent changes that
does. Much of it indeed seems involved in gene regu- silence the genes. “This was the first evidence of a
lation: not simply turning them off or on but also fine-­ lncRNA that does something,” Lawrence says, “and
tuning their activity. So although some genes hold the it was totally surprising.”
blueprint for proteins, ncRNA can control the activity XIST isn’t that unusual in generating an ncRNA,
of those genes and thus ultimately determine whether though. In the early 2000s it became clear that tran-
their proteins are made. This is a far cry from the basic scription of noncoding DNA sequences is widespread.
narrative of biology that has held sway since the dis- For example, in 2002 a team at biotech company Affy-
covery of the DNA double helix some 70 years ago, metrix in Santa Clara, Calif., led by Gingeras, who
which was all about DNA leading to proteins. “It was working there at the time, re­­port­ed that much
appears that we may have fundamentally misunder- more of human chromosomes 21 and 22 gets tran-
stood the nature of genetic programming,” wrote scribed than just the protein-coding regions.
molecular biologists Kevin Morris of Queensland Uni- It was only after ENCODE published its results in
versity of Technology and John Mattick of the Univer- 2012, however, that ncRNA became impossible to
sity of New South Wales in Australia in a 2014 article. ignore. Part of the antipathy toward those findings,
Another important discovery is that some ncRNAs says Peter Stadler, a bioinformatics expert at Leipzig
appear to play a role in disease, for example, by reg- University in Germany, is that they seemed like an
ulating the cell processes involved in some forms of unwanted and unneeded complication. “The biolog-
cancer. So researchers are investigating whether it is ical community figured we already knew how the cell
possible to develop drugs that target such ncRNAs or, works, and so the discovery of [ncRNAs] was more
conversely, to use ncRNAs themselves as drugs. If a of an annoyance,” he says. What’s more, it showed
gene codes for a protein that helps a cancer cell grow, that simpler organisms were not always a reliable
for example, an ncRNA that shuts down the gene guide to human biology: there is far less ncRNA in
might help treat the cancer. bacteria, studies of which had long shaped thinking
about how genes are regulated.
A few noncoding RNAs had been known for many But now there is no turning back the tide: many
decades, but those seemed to have some role in pro- thousands of human lncRNAs have been reported,
tein manufacture. For instance, only a few years after and Mattick suspects the real number is greater than
Francis Crick, James Watson and several of their 500,000. Yet only a few of these have been shown to
colleagues deduced the structure of DNA, research- have specific functions, and how many of them really
ers found that some RNA, called transfer RNA, do remains an open question. “I personally don’t
grabs onto amino acids that eventually get strung think all of those RNAs have an individual role,”
together into proteins. Lawrence says. Some, though, may act in groups to
In the 1990s, however, scientists realized ncRNA regulate other molecules.
could do things quite unrelated to protein construc- How lncRNAs perform such regulation is also still
tion. These new roles came to light from efforts to a matter of debate. One idea is that they help to form
understand the process of X-inactivation, wherein so-called condensates: dense fluid blobs containing
one of the two X chromosomes carried by females is a range of different regulatory molecules. Conden-
silenced, all 1,000 or so of its genes (in humans) being sates are thought to hold all the relevant players in
turned off. This process seemed to be controlled by a one place long enough for them to do their job collec-
gene called XIST. But attempts to find the corre- tively. Another idea is that lncRNAs affect the struc-
sponding XIST protein consistently failed. ture of chromatin—the combination of DNA and
The reason, it turned out, was that the gene did proteins that makes up chromosome fibers in the cell
not work through a protein but instead did so by nucleus. How chromatin is structured determines
producing a long noncoding (lnc) RNA molecule. which of its genes are accessible and can be tran-
Such RNAs are typically longer than about 200 scribed; if parts of chromatin are too tightly packed,
nucleotides, which are the chemical building blocks the enzyme machinery of transcription can’t reach
of DNA and RNA. Using a microscopy technique it. “Some lncRNAs appear to be involved with chro-

J u ne 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 43
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If only 1 to 2 percent of the RNA ated by any protein but by the gene’s RNA product
alone. This molecule looked ridiculously short: just
from our genome was encoding 22 nucleotides long, a mere scrap of a molecule for
such big developmental effects.
proteins, what was the rest for? This was the first known microRNA (miRNA). At

Some, scientists knew, carried out first “we thought this might be a peculiar character-
istic of C
 . elegans,” Ambros says. But in 2000 Gary
crucial tasks such as turning Ruvkun, another former postdoc in the Horvitz lab,
and his co-­work­ers found that another of these
genes on or off. miRNA genes in C  . elegans, c alled l et-7, a ppears in
essentially identical form in many other organisms,
including vertebrates, mollusks and insects. This
matin-modifying complexes,” says Marcel Dinger, a implies that it is a very ancient gene and “must have
genomics researcher at the University of Sydney. been around for 600 million to 700 million years”
Lawrence and Hall suspect that lncRNAs could before these diverse lineages went their separate
supply scaffolds for organizing other molecules, for ways, Ambros says. If miRNAs are so ancient, “there
example, by holding some of the many hundreds of had to be others out there.”
RNA-binding proteins in functional assemblies. One Indeed, there are. Today more than 2,000 m ­ iRNAs
lncRNA called NEAT1, which is involved in the for- have been identified in the human genome, generally
mation of small compartments in the nucleus called with regulatory roles. One of the main ways miRNAs
paraspeckles, has been shown capable of binding up work is by interfering with the translation of a gene’s
to 60 of these proteins. Or such RNA scaffolding mRNA transcript into its corresponding protein.
could arrange chromatin itself into particular struc- Typically the miRNA comes from a longer molecule,
tures and thereby affect gene regulation. Such RNA perhaps around 70 nucleotides long, known as pre-­
scaffolding could have regularly repeating modules miRNA. This molecule is seized by an enzyme called
and thus repetitive sequences—a feature that has Dicer, which chops it into smaller fragments. These
long been regarded as a hallmark of junk DNA but pieces, now miRNAs, move to a class of proteins
lately is appearing to be not so junky after all. This called Argonautes, components of a protein assembly
view of lncRNA as scaffolding is supported by a called the RNA-­induced silencing complex (RISC).
2024 report of repeat-rich ncRNAs in mouse brain The miRNAs guide the RISC to an mRNA, and this
cells that persist for at least two years. The research, either stops the mRNA from being translated into a
by Sara Zocher of the German Center for Neurode- protein or leads to its degradation, which has the
generative Diseases in Dresden and her co-workers. same effect. This regulatory action of miRNAs guides
found these ncRNAs seem to be needed to keep parts processes ranging from the determination of cell
of chromatin in a compact and silent state. “fate” (the specialized cell types they become) to cell
death and management of the cell cycle.

T
hese lncRNAs are just one branch of the non- Key insights into how such small RNAs can regu-
coding RNA family, and biologists keep discov- late other RNA emerged from studies in C  . elegans i n
ering others that appear to have different func- 1998 by molecular biologists Andrew Fire, Craig
tions and different ways of affecting what happens to Mello and their co-workers, for which Fire and Mello
a cell—and thus the entire human body. were awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Some of these RNAs are not long at all but surpris- Medicine. They learned that RISC is guided by
ingly short. Their story began in the 1980s, when slightly different RNA strands named small interfer-
Victor Ambros, working as a postdoctoral researcher ing (si) RNA. The process ends with the mRNA being
in the laboratory of biologist Robert Horvitz at the snipped in half, a process called RNA interference.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was studying MiRNAs do pose a puzzle, however. A given
a gene denoted lin-4 in the worm Caenorhabditis ele- miRNA typically has a sequence that matches up with
gans. M utations of l in-4 c aused developmental de­­ lots of mRNAs. How, then, is there any selectivity
fects in which “the cells repeated whole developmen- about which genes they silence? One possibility is
tal programs that they should have transitioned that miRNAs work in gangs, with several miRNAs
beyond,” says Ambros, now at the University of Mas- joining forces to regulate a given gene. The different
sachusetts Medical School. It seemed that lin-4 combinations, rather than individual snippets, are
might be a kind of “master regulator” controlling the what match specific genes and their miRNAs.
timing of different stages of development. Why would miRNA gene regulation work in this
“We thought lin-4 would be a protein-coding complicated way? Ambros suspects it might allow for
gene,” Ambros says. To figure out what role this puta- “evolutionary fluidity”: the many ways in which dif-
tive protein plays, Ambros and his colleagues cloned ferent miRNAs can work together, and the number
the C
 . elegans g
 ene and looked at its product—and of possible targets each of them can have, offer a lot
found that the effects of the gene may not be medi- of flexibility in how genes are regulated and thus

44 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
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 The RNA Revolution EMERGING VIEW
Since human DNA’s famous double helix structure was discov-
ered more than 70 years ago, its primary mission has seemed In recent years scientists have found that many parts of the genome
straightforward: It holds the code for proteins, the workhorses express RNA that is not translated into protein. These RNAs—called
noncoding RNA (ncRNA)—may originate from sequences between
in our bodies. DNA transcribes this code into molecules called
protein-coding genes or overlap with them.
messenger RNAs, which bring instructions to the cell’s pro-
tein-making machinery. But recently biologists have found
that DNA also makes a lot of “noncoding RNA,” or ncRNA, which DNA Traditional view of Portion of DNA strand that is
coding gene (gold) associated with an ncRNA (blue)
does not produce proteins. Some ncRNAs can turn genes on
and off. Other functions are still a matter of hot debate.

TRADITIONAL VIEW

For decades genes were largely thought of as discrete segments Long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) is one of these molecules. Parts of the
of DNA that kicked off a process that created proteins. genome that code for mRNA along one of DNA’s two strands (“sense”)
may code for lncRNA on the complementary strand (“antisense”).
DNA Gene
Antisense strand lncRNA

These so-called coding genes produce messenger RNA (mRNA)

through a process called transcription.
Sense strand

In the example below, the genome provides a template for a regulatory

lncRNA. This lncRNA does not lead directly to protein formation.
Instead it loops back to the genome and interacts with a protein-coding
gene, limiting its activity or even turning it off. In this way, lncRNA can
control the amount of protein that is ultimately produced.
mRNA

lncRNA
Transcription blocked
The mRNA then travels to ribosomes—the cell’s protein-building
factories—and constructs proteins out of amino acids through a process
called translation. The process is unidirectional: DNA to RNA to protein.

Amino acid chain

mRNA
mRNA fragment

Protein
Not all ncRNAs are regulatory. Some are “housekeeping” molecules;
one, for instance, forms a scaffold where multiple proteins are
Ribosome assembled into a larger unit. But many defy boundaries. For example,
transfer RNA (tRNA)—part of the protein-synthesis machinery­—is
often classified as a housekeeper but also has regulatory functions.

in what traits might result. That gives an organism or “jumping genes”: sequences that can insert copies
many evolutionary options, so that it is more able to of themselves throughout the genome in a disruptive
adapt to changing circumstances. way. Thus, piRNAs are “a part of the genome’s
One class of small RNAs regulates gene expres- immune system,” says Julius Brennecke of the Insti-
sion by directly interfering with transcription in the tute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian
UNSW Sydney (c onsultant)

cell nucleus, triggering mRNA degradation. These Academy of Sciences. If the piRNA system is artifi-
Source: John Mattick,

PIWI-interacting (pi) RNAs work in conjunction cially shut down, “the gametes’ genomes are com-
with a class of proteins called PIWI Argonautes. PiR- pletely shredded, and the organism is completely
NAs operate in germline cells (gametes), where they sterile,” he says.
combat “selfish” DNA sequences called transposons Still other types of ncRNAs, called small nucleolar

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 RNAs, work within cell compartments called nucleoli viral RNA, it usually recognizes and attacks any
to help modify the RNA in ribosomes—a cell’s pro- “nonself ” RNA. One strategy for protecting thera-
tein-making factories—as well as transfer RNA and peutic RNA from immune assault and degradation
mRNA. These are all ways to regulate gene expres- is to chemically modify its backbone so that it forms
sion. Then there are circular RNAs: mRNA molecules a nonnatural “locked” ring structure that the degrad-
(particularly in neurons) that get stitched into a cir- ing en­­zymes can’t easily recognize.
cular form before they are moved beyond the nucleus Some short ASOs that target RNAs are already
into the cytoplasm. It’s not clear how many circular approved for clinical use, such as the drugs inotersen
RNAs are important—some might just be transcrip- to treat amyloidosis and golodirsen for Duchenne
tional “noise”—but there is some evidence that at muscular dystrophy. Researchers are also exploring
least some of them have regulatory functions. antisense RNAs fewer than 21 nucleotides long that
In addition, there are vault RNAs that help to target natural regulatory miRNAs because it is only
transport other molecules within and between cells, beyond that length that an RNA tends to trigger an
“small Cajal-body-specific RNAs” that modify other immune reaction.
ncRNAs involved in RNA processing, and more. The These are early days for RNA-­based medicine, pre-
proliferation of ncRNA varieties lends strength to cisely because the significance of ncRNA itself in
Mattick’s claim that RNA, not DNA, is “the compu- human biology is still relatively new and imperfectly
tational engine of the cell.” understood. The more we appreciate its pervasive
nature, the more we can expect to see RNA being used

I
f ncRNAs indeed power the way a cell processes to control and improve our well-being. Nils Walter of
genetic information, it is possible they can be used the Center for RNA Biomedicine at the University of
in medicine. Disease is often the result of a cell do- Michigan wrote in an article early in 2024 that the bur-
ing the wrong thing because it gets the wrong regula- geoning promise of RNA therapeutics “only makes the
tory instructions: cells that lose proper control of their need for deciphering ncRNA function more urgent.”
cycle of growth and division can become tumors, for Succeeding in this goal, he adds, “would finally fulfill
example. Currently medical efforts to target ncRNAs the promise of the Human Genome Project.”
and alter their regulatory effects often use RNA strings
called antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs). These Despite this potential of noncoding RNA in
strands of nucleic acid have sequences that are com- medicine, the debate continues about how much of
plementary to the target RNA, so they will pair up with it truly matters for our cells. Geneticists Chris
and disable it. ASOs have been around since the late Ponting of the University of Edinburgh and Wilfried
1970s. But it has been hard to make them clinically Haerty of the Earlham Institute in Norwich, England,
useful because they get degraded quickly in cells and are among the skeptics. In a 2022 article they argued
have a tendency to bind to the wrong targets, with po- that most lncRNAs are just “transcriptional noise,”
tentially drastic consequences. accidentally transcribed from random bits of DNA.
Some ASOs, however, are being developed to dis- “Relatively few human lncRNAs . . . contribute cen-
able lncRNAs that are associated with cancers such trally to human development, physiology, or behav-
as lung cancer and acute myeloid leukemia. Other ior,” they wrote.
lncRNAs might act as drugs themselves. One known Brennecke advises caution about current high esti-
as MEG3 has been found, preliminarily, to act as a mates of the number of noncoding genes. Al­­though
tumor suppressor. Small synthetic molecules, which he agrees that such genes “have been underappreci-
are easier than ASOs to fine-tune and deliver into the ated for a long time,” he says we should not leap to
body as pharmaceuticals, are also being explored for assuming that all lncRNAs have functions. Many of
binding to lncRNAs or otherwise inhibiting their them are transcribed only at low levels, which is what
interactions with proteins. Getting these approaches one would expect if indeed they were just random
to work, however, has not been easy. “As far as I am noise. Geneticist Adrian Bird of the University of
aware, no lncRNA target or therapeutic has entered Edinburgh points out that the abundance of the vast
clinical development,” Gingeras says. majority of ncRNAs seems to be well below one mol-
Targeting the smaller regulatory RNAs such as ecule per cell. “It is difficult to see how essential func-
miRNAs might prove more clinically amenable. tions can be exerted by an ncRNA if it is absent in
Because miRNAs typically hit many targets, they can most cells,” he says.
do many things at once. For example, miRNAs in fam- But Gingeras counters that this low expression
ilies denoted miR-15a and miR-16-1 act as tumor sup- rate might reflect the very tissue-specific roles of
pressors by targeting several genes that themselves ncRNAs. Some, he says, are expressed more in one
suppress cell death (apoptosis, a defense against can- part of a tissue than in another, suggesting that ex­­
cer) and are being explored for cancer therapies. pres­sion levels in each cell are sensitive to signals
Yet a problem with using small RNAs as drugs is coming from surrounding tissues. Lawrence points
that they elicit an immune re­­sponse. Precisely be­­ out that, de­­spite the low expression levels, there are
cause the immune system aims to protect against often shared patterns of expression across cells of a

46 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
© 2024 Scientific American
particular type, making it harder to argue that the cut up into fragments and then spliced back together
transcription is simply random. And Hall doubts that again in various combinations, the exact order often
cells are really so prone to “bad housekeeping” that de­­pend­ing on the condition of the host cell.
they will habitually churn out lots of useless RNA. At its roots, the controversy over noncoding RNA is
Lawrence and Hall’s suggestion that some lncRNAs partly about what qualifies a molecule as “functional.”
have collective effects on chromatin structure would Should the criterion be based on whether the sequence
mean that no individual one of them is needed at high is maintained between different species? Or whether
expression levels and that their precise sequence deleting the molecule from an organism’s repertoire
doesn’t matter too much. leads to some observable change in a trait? Or simply
That lack of specificity in sequence and binding whether it can be shown to be involved in some bio-
targets, Dinger says, means that a mutation of a chemical process in the cell? If repetitive RNA acts col-
nucleotide in an ncRNA typically won’t have the same lectively as a chromosome “scaffold” or if miRNAs act
negative impact on its function as it tends to in a pro­ in a kind of regulatory swarm, can any individual one
tein-­cod­ing DNA sequence. So it would not be sur- of them really be considered to have a “function”?
prising to see quite a lot of sequence variation. Dinger Gingeras says he is perplexed by ongoing claims
argues that it makes more sense to assume that that ncRNAs are merely noise or junk, as evidence is
“genetically encoded molecules are potentially func- mounting that they do many things. “It is puzzling
tional until shown otherwise, rather than junk unless why there is such an effort to persuade colleagues
proven functional.” Some in the ENCODE team now to move from a sense of interest and curiosity in
agree that not all of the 75 percent or so of human the ncRNA field to a more dubious and critical one,”
genome transcription might be functionally signifi- he says.
cant. But many researchers make the point that Perhaps the arguments are so intense because they
surely many more of the noncoding molecules do undercut the way we think our biology works. Ever
meaningful things than was suspected before. since the epochal discovery about DNA’s double helix
Demonstrating functional roles for lncRNAs is and how it encodes information, the bedrock idea of
often tricky. In part, Gingeras says, this may be be­­ molecular biology has been that there are precisely
cause lncRNA might not be the biochemically active encoded instructions that program specific mole- FROM OUR ARCHIVES
molecule in a given process: it might be snipped up cules for particular tasks. But ncRNAs seem to point Journey to the
into short RNAs that actually do the work. But be­­cause to a fuzzier, more collective, logic to life. It is a logic Genetic Interior.
Stephen S. Hall;
long and short RNAs tend to be characterized via dif- that is harder to discern and harder to understand. October 2012.
ferent techniques, researchers may end up searching But if scientists can learn to live with the fuzziness, ScientificAmerican.
for the wrong thing. What’s more, long RNAs are often this view of life may turn out to be more complete. com/archive

J u ne 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 47
© 2024 Scientific American
 Treating
the
Anxious
Teen

48 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
© 2024 Scientific American
 PSYCHOLOGY

Research on the
developing brain
points to new approaches
for helping young people
with common
anxiety disorders
BY BJ CASEY
AND HEIDI MEYER
Illustration by
ELLEN WEINSTEIN

© 2024 Scientific American

A DOLESCENCE IS A REMARKABLE PERIOD of
development and
learning, a time when youths explore and adapt to changes in
their social worlds and begin to form a sense of who they are
and hope to be. It is a time when they first demonstrate a dra-
matic adaptability to the unique cognitive, emotional, physical,
social and sexual demands placed on them as they transition from dependence on their
parents or caregivers to relative independence. It is also, unfortunately, a time when the
emergence of most mental health problems peaks.
The most common mental health concerns facing
adolescents today are anxiety disorders, and their
prevalence has been increasing for the past decade. A
survey of tens of thousands of teens showed that this
prevalence increased roughly 30 to 40 percent between
treatment of anxiety. Current research benefits from
rapidly advancing imaging technologies that can re-
veal patterns of neural activity and exciting potential
avenues for intervention. These modalities have al-
ready provided access to the inner workings of the
2012 and 2018, and based on evidence from teens from developing brain in laboratory animals and teens, and
Germany, it rose another 70 percent during the first scientists hope they will lead to new approaches in
few years of the COVID pandemic. Yet anxiety disor- clinical practice that take into account the unique
ders in young people are largely undertreated. changes in the human brain during adolescence. By
The only evidence-based behavioral treatments for focusing on the developing brain and the behaviors it
anxiety are cognitive-behavioral therapies (CBTs). generates early on in life, we may be better able to alter
They involve identifying triggers of anxiety and then anxiety-related memories, identify cues and situations
desensitizing the affected person to them through cop- that help to reduce symptoms, and mitigate the ad-
ing strategies such as positive thought reframing or verse effects of anxiety for young people before they
breathing exercises, along with repeated exposure to become a more chronic affliction in adulthood.
the triggers in a safe environment. Although CBT is
the most established treatment for adolescent anxiety, In the past two decades w  e have learned that the
not all youths who try it experience relief. Among adolescent brain undergoes notable changes in struc-
those who do, many fail to maintain improvements ture and function, and these changes are distinct from
BJ Casey is Christina L. over time. A mere 20 to 50 percent of patients treated those observed during early childhood and adulthood.
Williams Professor for anxiety without medication during adolescence They are localized, meaning certain brain areas
of Neuroscience remain in remission six years after initial CBT. The change earlier in development than others. Regions
at Barnard College.
consequences can be long-lasting and severe. Left un- involved in emotions, such as the amygdala and the
Heidi Meyer is an treated, anxiety can lead to more serious chronic ill- hippocampus, show peak structural and functional
assistant professor nesses such as depression and substance use disorder changes during the teen years. For example, during
in psych­ological and later in life, greater susceptibility to physical illnesses adolescence the amygdala’s volume increases (a struc-
brain sciences at
Boston University’s
and, in extreme cases, suicide. tural change), and so does the way the amygdala is
Center for Systems Fortunately, new discoveries about the adolescent activated by certain emotional experiences (a func-
Neuroscience. brain are showing promising paths forward for the tional change). In contrast, brain regions and circuitry

50 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
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 The Adolescent Brain Is Different
Changes occurring in specific brain areas take place at varying rates during adolescence. The amygdala and hippocampus, brain
structures involved with the processing and recall of emotional experiences, are activated at higher levels than in the adult brain.
But the prefrontal cortex, involved in the regulation of emotions, does not achieve peak activity levels until well into adulthood.

Brain activity
Adolescent Adult
High

Prefrontal cortex
Amygdala
Hippocampus
Low

associated with the regulation of emotions, thoughts amygdala and the prefrontal cortex are highly inter-
and actions—the prefrontal cortex, for instance— connected with a third region, the hippocampus,
change more gradually, with development continuing which plays a role not only in fear extinction but also
well into adulthood. These differences in developmen- in determining how we experience fear in different
tal timing may lead to an imbalance in communication situations. In particular, the hippocampus provides
among brain regions, allowing one area to prevail over information about the surrounding environment to
another in an adolescent’s decision-making. Accord- help an individual decide whether a given situation is
ingly, in emotionally charged or threatening situations, more likely to present a threat (for example, a bear in
early-­developing emotional areas “win out” over later-­ the woods) or an absence thereof (a bear at the zoo).
devel­op­ing ones, driving some of the reactions and Much of this circuitry is conserved across different
responses linked with the behaviors of anxious and species, enabling the translation of basic animal re-
volatile teens. These regional differences might have search to treatments in humans.
served an evolutionary purpose. They have been linked Recently researchers have focused attention on fear
to heightened sensitivity to emotional and social infor- memory and extinction during adolescence. These
mation that may be essential for reproductive success studies show that adolescents, like preadolescents and
and the survival of the human species. Unfortunately, adults, are capable of acquiring a fear memory, but
these same imbalances have also been associated with they are less able to extinguish those memories than
increased reactivity to stress and greater susceptibility people in other age groups. After being exposed to a
to anxiety disorders. few simple pairings of a neutral stimulus (a colored
A core emotion associated with anxiety disorders square) with an aversive stimulus (a loud noise), chil-
is fear. Although fear is an adaptive response to threats dren, adolescents and adults alike show a fear re-
and therefore essential for survival, persistent fear sponse, measured by sweat gland activity, to the col-
long after a threat has been removed can lead to a ored square even when the loud noise no longer hap-
pathological state of anxiety. People with anxiety dis- pens. When preteen children and adults are then
orders have difficulty identifying when previously presented repeatedly with the colored square without
threatening situations have become safe, and they may the loud noise, they begin to see the square not as
overgeneralize by thinking that a negative experience something predicting the threat of the loud noise but
in one situation will recur in other scenarios. rather as a safe refuge from it—the fear memory is
Decades of animal and human research have iden- extinguished. Adolescents, however, continue to react
tified the basic brain circuitry for remembering an fearfully to the colored square.
acquired fear in adults. The amygdala is key to devel- In cases when fear does get diminished for adoles-
oping a fear memory, and parts of the prefrontal cor- cents, it regularly returns with the passage of time.
tex are involved in decreasing the strength of fear The finding that adolescents “learn” to extinguish fear
memories—a process known as extinction. Both the less readily than younger or older people has been

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 Stepping Down Fearful Thoughts in Teens
An anxious teenager has difficulty knowing when a threat has vanished and becomes preoccupied about when it might come
back. Persistent anxiety lingers for teens because of their diminished ability, compared with that of preadolescents or adults,
to extinguish fearful thoughts. That makes traditional therapies that rely on fear-extinction principles alone to address anxiety
disorders less effective. A promising new approach involves intentional recall of a teen’s fears followed by an extinction protocol.

1 Fear Acquisition 2A Fear Extinction

After 24 hours, the green With repeated presentations Fear Expression
light is presented without of the green light alone,
the loud noise. a new “safe” memory is Adolescent Adult
formed that competes with
High High
the original fear memory.
This effect is called
extinction and is weaker for
adolescents than for adults.

Multiple Fear Expression

simultaneous
exposures to a Adolescent Adult
Low Low
stressful stimulus
High High
(loud noise) with
a neutral stimulus
(green light) 2B Memory Updating
lead to a fear
Following another delay, A reminder cue followed by Fear Expression
response to the
the green light is presented a delay before fear memory
neutral stimulus Adolescent Adult
without the loud noise. extinction results in a
alone—what
change in the fear memory.
is called a High High
Low Low A greater reduction in fear
fear memory.
is achieved than extinction
alone without the cue.
After 24
hours, the person
is prompted to
recall the fear
memory. Low Low

replicated in studies across species (mice, rats and treatments for the developing brain. Specifically, how
humans). Most notably, during this developmental might we use what we know about the brain’s fear cir-
period, the amygdala is much more involved in sus- cuitry and the development of fear learning during
taining the fear memory than the prefrontal cortex is adolescence to guide interventions that may be more
in initiating the extinction process. A lower ability to successful in altering teens’ fear memories?
initiate fear-­extinction learning is thought to confer
a risk for anxiety. Thus, adolescents may innately be One strategy involves c onceding the delayed mat-
at higher risk. uration of the prefrontal cortex and circumventing the
The discovery of differences in fear-extinction be- region in treatment. Rather than relying on prefron-
havior and brain circuitry during adolescence has tal-based extinction learning, we have tested an alter-
important implications not only for understanding native method called memory reconsolidation updat-
the potential for increased susceptibility to anxiety ing. Memory reconsolidation is based on the principle
disorders but also for choosing treatment options. that memories are dynamic, not static. Every time a
Behavioral therapies such as CBT entail identifying memory is retrieved, it gets modified. Reactivating a
triggers of anxiety, finding coping strategies and un- fear memory by presenting a reminder of the fear stim-
dergoing a process of desensitization built on the prin- ulus opens a time-limited window during which the
ciples of fear extinction. But during adolescent fear memory itself becomes prone to disruption and change.
extinction, the involvement of the prefrontal cortex, Studies in both humans and rodents suggest that
which is associated with the planning and control of fear-­memory updating is mediated by changes to the
behavior, is diminished—which implies that for ado- memory in the amygdala. Unlike the prefrontal cir-
lescents, the effectiveness of conventional expo- cuitry, which continues to show developmental
sure-based CBT might also be diminished. Together, changes into young adulthood, the amygdala under-
these facts raise the question of how we should tailor goes peak maturation during midadolescence.

52 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4 Graphic by Jen Christiansen

© 2024 Scientific American
 These findings suggest that one way to help adoles- with a fear cue. Outside the lab, safety cues come in
cents overcome pathological fear is to introduce what many forms and are likely to be a stimulus unique to
is called a reminder cue to retrieve the memory, fol- the individual: a small personal object, a photograph
lowed by a delay before subsequently extinguishing of a loved one, a specific scent. We and others have
it. In our lab, we tested this idea in both healthy ado- shown that in humans and rodents alike, safety cues
lescents and adults by comparing their retention of a act by recruiting brain regions that show elevated ac-
fear memory after extinction with and without a pre- tivity during adolescence, including the amygdala and
ceding reminder cue. We found that even though ad- the hippocampus. The anterior part of the hippo­
olescents typically show diminished fear extinction campus in particular shows a strong increase in activ-
relative to adults, those who were prompted to retrieve ity when a safety cue is presented alongside a fear cue;
the fearful memory several minutes before extinction the degree of activity corresponds to the reduction in
learning showed a dramatic reduction in fear the next fear. Furthermore, safety cues rely less on the prefron-
day compared with those who underwent only extinc- tal cortex than do other forms of fear regulation, such
tion learning. In fact, those adolescents’ fear memories as extinction, highlighting the possible advantage
diminished to the same degree as observed in adults. of using a safety cue–based approach for anxiety
Traditionally, extinction learning involves forming during adolescence.
a new, competing, safe memory that leaves the original It is not feasible to avoid all triggers of excessive
fear memory intact, meaning it is possible for those fear and anxiety, so it’s important that patients do not
fearful thoughts to return later. The current findings, become overly reliant on safety cues to the detriment
however, suggest that with memory reconsolidation of learning other coping skills. Safety cues may be a
updating, the original fear memory is altered. Thus, valuable tool for increasing the tolerability of the early
the reconsolidation approach has the potential to both stages of treatment so that patients do not drop out.
reduce fear at the time of treatment and lessen the Early treatment sessions could include guidance from
likelihood that it will return. the clinician on how to identify and properly deploy a
This research is exciting because it suggests a path safety cue.
to the clinical use of reconsolidation updating. Simple As treatment progresses, cues can give patients a
modifications to existing exposure-based CBT tech- way to reduce their fear response long enough to eval-
niques might prove effective in reducing triggers of uate the situation and use tools from CBT practice.
fear and anxiety in adolescent patients. This method Although research on integrating safety cues into
could entail a step as simple as the therapist reminding treatment is in its earliest stages, the method shows
patients why they are there when they arrive for their great promise, particularly for adolescents. Our group
appointment—the equivalent of the reminder cue and recently demonstrated in mice that intermittently
fear-­memory retrieval in the lab setting. Then the presenting a safety cue during an extinction protocol
therapist could spend several minutes establishing a led to better fear extinction in adolescent mice than
safe rapport with the patient while waiting for the observed in either adolescent (28 to 50 days) or adult
memory to enter a labile state during the reconsolida- rodents trained without a safety cue.
tion-updating window. Desensitization with exposure The hope for these emerging therapeutic ap-
therapy could then begin during the time in which the proaches is that we can tailor current anxiety treat-
updating process takes place. The current variable ments for young people by targeting the developing
efficacy of CBT in adolescents with anxiety disorders brain. It is important to be mindful of the fact that the
may be explained by the fact that some clinicians al- magnitude and intensity of the fear response in people
ready use procedures that inadvertently tap into com- diagnosed with anxiety are probably much greater
ponents of reconsolidation updating. than the fear evoked by aversive stimuli in lab exper-
Recent attempts to incorporate reconsolidation-­ iments, which are often mild, narrowly targeted and
updating approaches in treating adult patients with transient. It is also important to remember that CBT
anxiety and trauma-related disorders have yielded and antidepressants can treat anxiety effectively in
some success, but to date they have not been used with many people. Unfortunately, though, for some, these
adolescent patients. The studies in adults show short- solutions offer only limited or brief benefits. There-
and long-term reduction of symptoms, especially for fore, the most effective forms of treatment may require
patients with specific phobias and post-traumatic a combination of approaches, including desensitiza-
stress disorder. Although more basic and clinical re- tion techniques modified to incorporate reconsolida-
search is needed, this method seems promising. tion updating or safety cues, possibly in conjunction
with antidepressants.

A
nother strategy that may help a doles- The ultimate aim is for us to optimize current treat-
cents extinguish a fear memory involves the ments for youths with anxiety by targeting the brain
use of safety cues that signal there is nothing to during a period of development accompanied by in- FROM OUR ARCHIVES
The Amazing Teen
be afraid of. In an experimental setting, a safety cue tensive learning and, in so doing, improve the quality Brain. Jay N. Giedd;
can be a simple stimulus—a symbol or a sound—that of life for adolescents both in the immediate future and June 2015. Scientific­
is distinguishable from and repeatedly contrasted later in life. American.com/archive

J u ne 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 53
© 2024 Scientific American
Superheavies
CHEMISTRY

Extreme atoms are pushing the bounds of physics and chemistry

BY STEPHANIE PAPPAS
Illustration by QUARTERNATIVE

© 2024 Scientific American

 J u n e 2 02 4 Sc i e n t i f ic A m er ic a n.com 55
© 2024 Scientific American
 A T THE FAR END OF THE PERIODIC TABLE is a realm
where nothing is quite as it should be. The ele-
ments here, starting at atomic number 104
(rutherfordium), have never been found in
nature. In fact, they’d emphatically prefer not
to exist. Their nuclei, bursting with protons and neutrons, tear themselves
apart via fission or radioactive decay within instants of their creation.
These are the superheavy elements: after ruther-
fordium come dubnium, seaborgium, bohrium, and
other oddities, all the way up to the heaviest element
ever created, oganesson, element 118. Humans have
only ever made vanishingly small amounts of these
elements. As of 2020, 18 years after the first successful
creation of oganesson in a laboratory, scientists had
“The periodic table is something fundamental,”
says Witold Nazarewicz, a theoretical nuclear physicist
and chief scientist at the Facility for Rare Isotope
Beams at Michigan State University. “What are the
limits of this concept? What are the limits of atomic
physics? Where is the end of chemistry?”

reported making a total of five atoms of it. Even if they Affixed to the wall i n a concrete-block corridor
could make much more, it would never be the kind of known as Cave 1 in Lawrence Berkeley National Labo-
stuff you could hold in your hand—oganesson is so ratory (LBNL), just steps from one of the few instru-
radioactive that it would be less matter, more heat. ments in the world that can create superheavy atoms,
Using ultrafast, atom-at-a-time methods, research- is a poster-size printout of a table that organizes ele-
ers are starting to explore this unmapped region of the ments by nuclide, meaning based on the number of pro-
periodic table and finding it as fantastical as any medie- tons and neutrons in the nucleus. This graph shows all
val cartographer’s imaginings. Here at the uncharted the known information about the nuclear structure and
coastline of chemistry, atoms have a host of weird prop- decay of the elements, as well as of their isotopes—vari-
erties, from pumpkin-shaped nuclei to electrons bound ations on elements with the same number of protons in
so tightly to the nucleus they’re subject to the rules of the nucleus but different numbers of neutrons.
relativity, not unlike objects orbiting a black hole. It’s a living document. There’s a typo in the title, and
Their properties may reveal more about the primor- there are tears along the poster’s edges where duct tape
dial elements created in massive astrophysical phe- holds it to the wall. It’s been marked up with notations
nomena such as supernovae and neutron star mergers. in Sharpie, added after the poster was printed in 2006.
But more than that, studying this strange matter may These notations are the atomic physics version of sea-
help scientists understand the more typical matter that farers penciling in new islands as they sail, but in this
occurs naturally all around us. As researchers get better case, the islands are isotopes of elements so heavy they
Stephanie Pappas
is a freelance science
at pinning these atoms down and measuring them, can be seen only in particle accelerators like the one here.
journalist based they’re pushing the boundaries of the way we organize In a field where it can take a week to make just one atom
in Denver, Colo. matter in the first place. of what you want, a record of progress is essential.

56 SCIENTIFIC A MERIC A N  J u n e 2 02 4
© 2024 Scientific American
 “Everybody likes the handwritten part,” says Jack-
lyn Gates, who leads LBNL’s Heavy Element Group. “If “What are the limits
we were to print this out from 2023—”
“It’s not as fun,” chimes in Jennifer Pore, a staff sci-
of atomic physics? Where
entist in the lab. is the end of chemistry?”
“It’s not as fun,” Gates agrees.
Gates is a nuclear chemist with a wry sense of humor
—Witold Nazarewicz
and a clear fondness for the equipment that she and her Michigan State University
team have developed to synthesize superheavy ele-
ments. They create these elements by smashing stan- stability” where these elements will stop decaying
dard-size atoms together in a 2.2-meter-wide cyclo- immediately. “Some theories predict a year half-life,
tron—a drum-shaped particle accelerator—in a lab or 100 or 1,000 days,” says Hiromitsu Haba, a physicist
perched on a hillside above the city of Berkeley. Con- and director of the Nuclear Chemistry Group at RIK-
struction on the cyclotron started in 1958, after the fall- EN, which is currently on the hunt for element 119.
out from the first nuclear bomb explosions began turn- A half-life—the time it takes for about half of a sub-
ing up in the form of new radioactive elements such as stance’s atoms to decay—that long would be enough
fermium (atomic number 100). Much of the original for serious experimentation or even use in new tech-
cyclotron persists today; in the control room, silver di- nologies. For now, though, research into superheavies
als that wouldn’t be out of place in a cold war–era thrill- is focused on their fundamental properties and what
er sit beside beige panels from the 1980s and blue banks they can reveal about nuclear dynamics, not what they
of buttons from modern updates. can do as materials themselves. That doesn’t mean they
The first of the superheavies, rutherfordium, was won’t eventually become useful, however.
synthesized here in 1969. Rutherfordium, named after “Everything we’re doing right now . . . it doesn’t
Ernest Rutherford, who helped to explain the structure have practical applications,” Gates says. “But if you
of atoms, was also made a few years prior by the Russian look at your cell phone and all the technology that went
Joint Institute for Nuclear Research ( JINR) in Dubna, into that—that technology started back in the Bronze
the same group that first created oganesson in 2002 Age. People didn’t know it would result in these devices
(named after Yuri Oganessian, who led the team that that we’re all glued to and utterly dependent on. So can
created it). Beginning in the late 1950s, the competition superheavy elements be useful? Maybe not in my gen-
to add new elements got hotter than the ion beams used eration but maybe a generation or two down the road,
to make them. Today the vicious disputes over who syn- when we have better technology and can make these
thesized what first, mostly between the Berkeley lab things a little bit easier.”
and JINR, are remembered as the Transferium Wars.
By the 1980s Germany had joined the fray with its Making these elements i s far from easy. Research-
nuclear research institute, Gesellschaft für Schwerion- ers do it by shooting a beam of heavy ions (in this case,
enforschung (GSI), or the Society for Heavy Ion Re- large atomic nuclei without their electrons) at a target
search. The numbers ticked higher, with the three material in the hopes of overcoming the electrostatic
teams trading off naming rights up to copernicium (el- repulsion between two positively charged nuclei and
ement 112, named after Nicolaus Copernicus), discov- forcing them to fuse. At LBNL, the source of the ion
ered in 1996. Controversy continued to dog the super- beam is a device called VENUS (for “versatile electron
heavies; in 1999 researchers at LBNL announced the cyclotron resonance ion source for nuclear science”),
discovery of element 116, now known as livermorium which sits at the top of the cyclotron behind fencing
after Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, only to festooned with radiation warnings. Within VENUS, a
retract that claim after finding that one of their scien- combination of microwaves and strong magnetic fields
tists had fabricated evidence. ( JINR successfully creat- strips electrons off a chosen element (often calcium or
ed livermorium in 2000.) In 2004 Japan’s Institute of argon in Gates’s experiments). The resulting ions
Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) synthesized shoot down a pipeline into the cyclotron, which sweeps
element 113, nihonium, after the Japanese word for “Ja- the ions around in a spiral, accelerating the beam.
pan.” Although element 118 is the heaviest element ever Technicians in the control room use electrostatic
synthesized, the most recently discovered is actually forces to direct the beam out of the cyclotron and into
117, tennessine, which was announced by JINR in 2010. instruments in the “caves,” low corridors that come off
The scientists behind the discovery named it in tribute the cyclotron like spokes. The caves contain beam tar-
to the state of Tennessee, home to several institutions gets; the one in Cave 1 is a thin metal foil about the diam-
that played a role in the experiments. eter of a salad plate. The targets rotate so the beam
The race to create ever heavier elements continues doesn’t hit any single spot for too long. They can melt
to this day, and not just because the researchers who when bombarded with speeding ions, Gates says.
succeed get to name a new element in the periodic table. What the target is made of depends on how many
It’s also because theorists predict that certain combina- protons the researchers want in the final product. For
tions of protons and neutrons may land in an “island of example, to make flerovium (114 protons, named after

J u n e 2 02 4 Sc i e n t i f ic A m er ic a n.com 57
© 2024 Scientific American
 T
Russian physicist Georgy Flerov, who founded JINR), he heaviest element t hat researchers have
they need to hit plutonium (94 protons) with calcium studied chemically is flerovium (114)—the
(20 protons). To make element 118, oganesson, scien- heaviest one that can be created in the quantities
tists beam calcium at californium (98 protons). The and with the duration needed for chemical experi-
more neutrons they can pack into the ion beam, the ments. Scientists can produce flerovium at a rate of
more they can ultimately cram into the final product, about three atoms a day, Düllmann says. “A typical ex-
making even heavier isotopes. periment needs about one month of total run time,”
Most of the time the beam passes right through the he says. “Not every atom that is produced will reach
target without any nuclear interactions. But with six your chemistry setup, and not every atom that reach-
trillion beam particles winging through the targets per es your chemistry setup will be detected in the end.”
second, an eventual nucleus-to-nucleus collision is in- A few atoms can reveal a lot, however. Before
evitable. When conditions are just right, these pileups flerovium was synthesized, some theories predicted
mash the nuclei together, creating a very temporary that it might act like a noble gas—inert and nonreac-
new superheavy atom moving at nearly 600,000 me- tive—and others suggested it might act like a metal,
ters per second. specifically, mercury. Experiments on the element
published in 2022 in the journal Frontiers in Chemistry
Creating a Superheavy Atom showed something weirder. At room temperature,
flerovium forms a strong bond with gold, very unlike
Foil a noble gas. It also bonds with gold at liquid-nitrogen
temperatures (–196 degrees Celsius). Oddly, though,
Ion beam at temperatures between these two, the element
doesn’t react.
Projectile Oganesson is grouped in the periodic table with the
Calcium Target noble gases, but researchers think it is neither noble
20 protons Plutonium nor a gas. It’s probably a solid at room temperature,
28 neutrons 94 protons according to research published in 2020 in Angewandte
145 neutrons
Chemie, and transitions to liquid around 52 degrees C.
There are many such examples, says Peter Schwerdt-
Fusion
feger, a theoretical chemist at Massey University in
New Zealand and senior author of the 2020 paper.
Compound nucleus The reason for these strange characteristics has to
114 protons do with the electrons. Electrons orbit nuclei at certain
173 neutrons
energy levels known as shells, each of which can hold a
2 neutrons specific number of electrons. Electrons in outer shells—
Superheavy nucleus
Flerovium
where there may not be enough electrons to completely
114 protons fill the shell—are responsible for forging chemical
175 neutrons bonds with other atoms. Each shell ostensibly rep-
resents a specific distance from the nucleus, although
To slow down these speeding heavyweights, the re- the actual path of an electron’s orbit in that shell (called
searchers use helium gas and electric fields to guide the an orbital) is often far from a simple circle and can look
particles into a trap for measurement. They can also more like a dumbbell, doughnut, teardrop, or other
pump in other gases to see what kinds of chemical reac- configuration. (According to quantum mechanics,
tions a superheavy element will undergo before it de- these outlines merely represent the places where an
cays. But that’s feasible only if the element lasts long electron is likely to be found if pinned down by an actual
enough, says Christoph E. Düllmann, head of the super- measurement. Otherwise, electrons mostly exist in a
heavy element chemistry research group at GSI. To con- haze of probability somewhere around the nucleus.)
duct and study chemical reactions, researchers require
an element with a half-life of at least half a second. A Selection of Electron Orbital Models
Scientists quantify superheavy elements and their
reaction products by measuring the energy they give
off during alpha decay, the shedding of bundles of two
protons and two neutrons. In a room called the Shack
at LBNL, researchers wait on tenterhooks for data
points showing them where these alpha-decay parti-
cles land inside the detector; their journey reveals in-
formation about the composition of the original atoms
and any reactions they’ve undergone. It’s hard to imag-
ine that chemistry physically happening, Pore says: “It
almost feels like it exists somewhere else.”

58 SCIENTIFIC A MERIC A N  J u n e 2 02 4 Graphics by Jen Christiansen

© 2024 Scientific American
 As a nucleus gets heavier, electrons near it feel an tween these particles often warp the shape into some-
extreme pull from the glut of positive charges there, thing other than the stereotypical sphere you’ll see in
drawing them in closer and reducing the space they diagrams of atoms. Most of the superheavy elements
have to move around in. Because of the uncertainty that have been probed so far have oblong nuclei
principle, which states that a particle’s position and shaped like footballs, says Michael Block, a physicist
speed can’t be known precisely at the same time, this at GSI. Theoretically, heavier ones that haven’t been
reduction in the electrons’ elbow room means their synthesized yet might have nuclei shaped like flying
velocity must increase via a kind of seesawing of fun- saucers or even bubbles, with empty or low-density
damental physical laws. Soon the electrons are travel- spots right in the center. Scientists “see” these shapes
ing at nearly the speed of light. As Einstein’s general by measuring minuscule changes in electron orbits,
theory of relativity suggests, objects moving this fast which are affected by the arrangement of the positive
gain mass and get weird. In particular, the orbits of charges in the nucleus. “This allows us to tell what the
electrons in the lowest-energy states—the innermost size of the nucleus is and what the shape of the nucleus
shells—around a superheavy nucleus tend to contract, is,” Block says.
creating a greater density of electrons closer to the nu-
cleus, Schwerdtfeger says. These changes are known A Selection of Nucleus Models
as relativistic effects.
These effects show up even in naturally occurring
elements of the periodic table. Gold is yellowish be-
cause relativistic effects shrink the gap between two of
its electron shells, slightly shifting the wavelengths of
light that the element absorbs and reflects. Yet relativ-
istic effects don’t usually play a huge role in the chem-
ical behavior of most light elements. That’s why the
order of elements in the periodic table is based on the The layout of the nucleus holds the key to whether
number of protons in each element’s nucleus. This ar- anyone will ever be able to synthesize a superheavy
rangement serves to group together substances with element that sticks around. Certain numbers of pro-
similar chemical properties, which are determined tons and neutrons (collectively dubbed nucleons) are
mainly by the number of electrons in outer shells that known as magic numbers because nuclei with these
are available for chemical bonds. numbers can hold together particularly well. Like
“The periodic table is supposed to tell you what the electrons, nucleons occupy shells, and these magic
chemical trends are,” LBNL’s Pore says. For heavier el- numbers represent the tallies needed to fill nucleonic
ements, in which relativistic effects start to rule, that’s shells completely. The island of stability that re-
not necessarily true. In research published in 2018 in searchers hope to find in a yet undiscovered super-
the journal Physical Review Letters, Schwerdtfeger and heavy element or isotope would be the result of “dou-
his colleagues found that because of relativistic effects, ble magic”—theoretically ideal numbers of both pro-
oganesson’s electron cloud looks like a big, fuzzy smear tons and neutrons.
with no major distinction between the shells. Whether such a thing exists is an open question be-
Even outside superheavy territory, chemists debate cause heavy nuclei might tear themselves apart rather
the placement of certain elements in the periodic ta- than tolerating the required numbers of nucleons.
ble. Since 2015 a working group at the International “Fission is the killer,” M.S.U.’s Nazarewicz observes.
Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has been refer- Unlike the (relatively) gradual whittling down of
eeing a debate over which elements should go in the a nucleus by alpha decay, nuclear fission is a sudden
third column of the table: lanthanum and actinium and utter dissolution. Different models yield different
(elements 57 and 89) or lutetium and lawrencium (71 predictions about how many particles can be packed
and 103). The debate centers on misbehaving elec- into a nucleus before fission becomes inevitable, Naz-
trons: because of relativistic effects, the outermost arewicz says. Theorists are trying to determine this
electrons orbiting these elements aren’t where they limit to understand how large nuclei can truly get.
should be according to the periodic table. After nine There is an interesting liminal space at the edges of
years of official consideration, there is still no consen- what nuclei can bear, Nazarewicz notes. To be de-
sus on how to group these elements. Such problems clared an element, a nucleus must survive for at least
only become more pressing at the heavier end of the 10–14 second, the time it takes for electrons to glom on
table. “We’re trying to probe where that organization and form an atom. But in theory, nuclear lifetimes can
begins to break down and where the periodic table be- be as short as 10–21 second. In this infinitesimal gap,
gins to stop being useful,” Gates says. you might find nuclei without electron clouds, inca-
Along with a window into the limits of chemistry, pable of chemistry, he says.
the dance of electrons can provide a peek into the dy- “The periodic table breaks with the heaviest
namics of the nucleus at the extremes. In a nucleus elements already,” Nazarewicz says. The question
groaning with protons and neutrons, interactions be- is, Where do you break chemistry altogether? Anoth­

J u n e 2 02 4 Sc i e n t i f ic A m er ic a n.com 59
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 1 1766
Expanding the Periodic Table
H First formulated by Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869, the periodic table organizes the
Hydrogen elements by the number of protons they bear and groups elements with the same
1.0080 number of available electrons, and therefore with similar bonding properties,
3 1817 4 1798 in columns. In recent years scientists have created the largest elements yet,
Li Be known as the superheavy elements. These bloated atoms don’t always play by
Lithium Beryllium the traditional rules of chemistry—some that seem like they would be unreactive
7.0 9.012183 noble gases, for instance, turn out to be solids that like to bond after all.
11 1807 12 1808
Na Mg
Sodium Magnesium
22.9897693 24.305
19 1807 20 Ancient 21 1879 22 1791 23 1801 24 1797 25 1774 26 Ancient 27 1735
K Ca Sc Ti V Cr Mn Fe Co
Potassium Calcium Scandium Titanium Vanadium Chromium Manganese Iron Cobalt
39.0983 40.08 44.95591 47.867 50.9415 51.996 54.93804 55.84 58.93319
37 1861 38 1790 39 1794 40 1789 41 1801 42 1778 43 1937 44 1827 45 1803
Rb Sr Y Zr Nb Mo Tc Ru Rh
Rubidium Strontium Yttrium Zirconium Niobium Molybdenum Technetium Ruthenium Rhodium
85.468 87.62 88.90584 91.22 92.90637 95.95 96.90636 101.1 102.9055
55 1860 56 1808 72 1923 73 1802 74 1783 75 1925 76 1803 77 1803
Cs Ba Hf Ta W Re Os Ir
Cesium Barium Hafnium Tantalum Tungsten Rhenium Osmium Iridium
132.9054520 137.33 178.49 180.9479 183.84 186.207 190.2 192.22
87 1939 88 1898 Superheavy 104 1964 105 1967 106 1974 107 1976 108 1984 109 1982
elements
Fr Ra Rf Db Sg Bh Hs Mt
Francium Radium Rutherfordium Dubnium Seaborgium Bohrium Hassium Meitnerium
223.01973 226.02541 267.122 268.126 269.128 270.133 269.1336 277.154

57 1839 58 1803 59 1885 60 1885 61 1945 62 1879

La Ce Pr Nd Pm Sm
Lanthanum Cerium Praseodymium Neodymium Promethium Samarium
138.9055 140.116 140.90766 144.24 144.91276 150.4
89 1899 90 1828 91 1913 92 1789 93 1940 94 1940
Ac Th Pa U Np Pu
Actinium Thorium Protactinium Uranium Neptunium Plutonium
227.02775 232.038 231.03588 238.0289 237.048172 244.06420

er way to understand superheavy elements is to look says. Researchers detected isotopes of lanthanide ele-
for them in space. The elements heavier than iron ments (atomic numbers 57 to 71) in that merger but,
(atomic number 26) form in nature through a process as they reported in N ature at the time, couldn’t nar-
called rapid neutron capture, which often occurs row down the exact elements present. Detecting any
in cataclysmic events such as a collision of two neu- superheavy elements will be even trickier because
tron stars. researchers will need to know which unique wave-
If superheavies have ever arisen naturally in the lengths of light those elements emit and absorb and
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/periodic-table/ (reference)

universe, they were made by this process, too, says pick them out of what Martínez-Pinedo calls the
Gabriel Mar­tín­ez-­Pinedo, an astrophysicist at GSI. “complicated soup of elements” that emerges from
Source: National Center for Biotechnology Information;

In rapid neutron ­capture, also known as the r-pro- one of these events.
cess, a seed nucleus grabs free nearby neutrons, In December 2023, however, astronomers re­­
quickly taking on the mass to make heavy isotopes. ported in the journal S  cience t hat there are excess
This must happen in an environment with ample amounts of several lighter elements—ruthenium,
neutrons roaming freely, which is why neutron star rhodium, palladium and silver—in some stars. These
mergers are opportune spots. elements may be overrepresented because they are
In 2017 scientists observed a neutron star merger the result of heavy or superheavy elements breaking
for the first time by detecting gravitational waves cre- apart via fission. The findings hint that nuclei with
ated by the interaction. “That was the very first con- as many as 260 protons and neutrons might form via
firmation that, indeed, the r-process happens during the r-process.
the merger of two neutron stars,” Martínez-Pinedo Even if superheavy elements created in neutron

60 SCIENTIFIC A MERIC A N  J u n e 2 02 4
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 2 1868

Atomic number (number of Year discovered

He
Helium
protons in the nucleus) 4.00260
5 1808 5 1808 6 Ancient 7 1772 8 1774 9 1670 10 1898
Symbol B B C N O F Ne
Name of element Boron Boron Carbon Nitrogen Oxygen Fluorine Neon
10.81 10.81 12.011 14.007 15.999 18.99840316 20.180
Atomic mass (expressed in 13 Ancient 14 1854 15 1669 16 Ancient 17 1774 18 1894
daltons, also known as
unified atomic mass units)
Al Si P S Cl Ar
Aluminum Silicon Phosphorus Sulfur Chlorine Argon
26.981538 28.085 30.97376200 32.07 35.45 39.9
28 1751 29 Ancient 30 1746 31 1875 32 1886 33 Ancient 34 1817 35 1826 36 1898
Ni Cu Zn Ga Ge As Se Br Kr
Nickel Copper Zinc Gallium Germanium Arsenic Selenium Bromine Krypton
58.693 63.55 65.4 69.723 72.63 74.92159 78.97 79.90 83.80
46 1803 47 Ancient 48 1817 49 1863 50 Ancient 51 Ancient 52 1782 53 1811 54 1898
Pd Ag Cd In Sn Sb Te I Xe
Palladium Silver Cadmium Indium Tin Antimony Tellurium Iodine Xenon
106.42 107.868 112.41 114.818 118.71 121.760 127.6 126.9045 131.29
78 1735 79 Ancient 80 Ancient 81 1861 82 Ancient 83 1753 84 1898 85 1940 86 1900
Pt Au Hg Tl Pb Bi Po At Rn
Platinum Gold Mercury Thallium Lead Bismuth Polonium Astatine Radon
195.08 196.96657 200.59 204.383 207 208.98040 208.98243 209.98715 222.01758
110 1994 111 1994 112 1996 113 2004 114 1998 115 2003 116 2000 117 2010 118 2006
Ds Rg Cn Nh Fl Mc Lv Ts Og
Darmstadtium Roentgenium Copernicium Nihonium Flerovium Moscovium Livermorium Tennessine Oganesson
282.166 282.169 286.179 286.182 290.192 290.196 293.205 294.211 295.216

63 1901 64 1880 65 1843 66 1886 67 1878 68 1843 69 1879 70 1878 71 1907

Eu Gd Tb Dy Ho Er Tm Yb Lu
Europium Gadolinium Terbium Dysprosium Holmium Erbium Thulium Ytterbium Lutetium
151.964 157.2 158.92535 162.500 164.93033 167.26 168.93422 173.05 174.9668
95 1944 96 1944 97 1949 98 1950 99 1952 100 1952 101 1955 102 1957 103 1961
Am Cm Bk Cf Es Fm Md No Lr
Americium Curium Berkelium Californium Einsteinium Fermium Mendelevium Nobelium Lawrencium
243.061380 247.07035 247.07031 251.07959 252.0830 257.09511 258.09843 259.10100 266.120

star mergers were to decay away quickly, knowing able to make the kinds of isotopes that eventually
they existed would help scientists write a history of decay into heavier stable metals such as gold. “This
matter in the universe, Martínez-Pinedo says. New may provide a pathway to some of the interesting iso-
observatories such as the James Webb Space Tele- topes for astrophysics,” says Brad Sherrill, a physicist
scope and the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory at M.S.U. and a co-author of that study.
in Chile should make it possible to see other cosmic Meanwhile other scientists around the world are
events capable of creating superheavy elements. also looking to amp up their ion beams and targets to
“And there will be new gravitational-wave detectors push past element 118. In addition, they’re increasing
that will allow us to see much larger distances and the precision with which they can capture and mea-
with higher precision,” he adds. sure these elements. Researchers at the Facility for
At the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams in Michi- Rare Isotope Beams plan to improve their ability to
gan, a new high-energy beam promises to give further differentiate between particles by a factor of 10. GSI
insights into the r-process by packing more neutrons will soon have a next-generation accelerator for
into isotopes than ever before possible. These are not superheavy synthesis. And at LBNL, Gates and her
new superheavies but beefed-up versions of lighter team are installing instruments to take higher-preci- FROM OUR ARCHIVES
elements. In February researchers reported in the sion measurements of the mass of single atoms. Island of Heavy­
journal P
 hysical Review Letters t hat they had created These new tools should further reveal the contours weights. Christoph E.
Düllmann and Michael
heavy isotopes of thulium, ytterbium and lutetium of chemistry at the extremes. “When we do super- Block; March 2018.
using just one 270th of their beams’ ultimate planned heavy chemistry,” Massey’s Schwerdtfeger says, “we ScientificAmerican.
power output. At higher power levels they should be see surprises all over the place.” com/archive

J u n e 2 02 4 Sc i e n t i f ic A m er ic a n.com 61
© 2024 Scientific American
Tree Swallow

© 2024 Scientific American

ANTHROPOGENIC
ECOLOGY

EVOLUTION
Humans are changing more than just the environments
species inhabit. We are changing the species themselves
BY LEE ALAN DUGATKIN

June 2024 SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.COM 63

© 2024 Scientific American
T HE PEPPERED MOTH IS AN ICONIC EXAMPLE of
Charles Darwin’s theory of evo-
lution by natural selection. For centuries peppered moths (Biston betularia)
were common in the forests around Manchester, England, and elsewhere.
With their light-­colored wings, peppered moths were camouflaged from
predators against the light-­gray bark of the trees they rested on during the
day. By the early 19th century, however, soot from the industrial revolution had forged a
new evolutionary environment, one that favored dark-­colored moths, which matched the
soot-­covered trees better than their lighter peers. In the 1950s and 1960s evolutionary biol-
ogists found that in industrial areas, 80 percent of the moths were dark-­colored, and the
dark moths had a 2:1 survival advantage over light-­colored moths in those areas. Today, in
our age of molecular genetics, we know the mutation that probably produced the dark-­
colored moths occurred around 1819 and was the result of “jumping genes”—bits of DNA
that change position in a genome and may create a mutation in the process.
The darkening of the peppered moth is also an ex- For long stretches of evolutionary time, natural
ample of anthropogenic evolution: evolutionary change selection has favored a tight link between ambient tem-
caused by alterations humans make to the environ- perature and the start of the breeding season for many
ment. In recent years scientists have identified many animals, including birds. Hormones associated with
more cases of human-­mediated evolutionary change. reproduction kick into gear when the weather warms;
The full scope and effects of anthropogenic evolution birds court, construct nests and bring food home to
are only now coming into focus. But already we have deposit into the mouths of their waiting young. For Tree
ascertained that humans are shaping the evolutionary Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor), the spring thaw is the
trajectories of animals across the globe, from insects to trigger that sets that reproductive cascade into motion.
whales. As a result of our influence, key aspects of ani- But that trigger is now being pulled too early. Largely
mal behavior are changing, including where they live, as a result of increased carbon dioxide emission, the
where they breed, what they eat, whom they fight and average spring temperature for Tree Swallows living in
whom they help. We are remodeling more than just the northern New York increased about 1.9 degrees Celsius
environments species live in. We’re altering the species between 1972 and 2015, and the spring thaw is starting
themselves as they evolve in response to our impact on earlier. Over that same period Tree Swallows started
Lee Alan Dugatkin
Donald M. Jones/Minden Pictures (preceding pages)

is a professor of biology their surroundings. breeding 13 days earlier. The environmental cue the
at the University of One consequence of this change is that we are creating birds use to time breeding has become mismatched
Louisville. His newest mismatches between animals and the settings in which with their altered conditions.
book is T he Well- they evolved. Creatures once well equipped to meet the Because of this mismatch, breeding swallows risk
Connected Animal:
Social Networks and challenges of their environment suddenly face a world experiencing cold snaps they otherwise would not have
the Wondrous Complexity in which their fine-­tuned behavioral adaptations are no been exposed to. These cold snaps don’t directly affect
of Animal Societies longer adaptive at all. In some species, natural selection the survival of adult birds, but they do reduce the activity
(University of Chicago is recalibrating behavior so that individuals are better of the insect prey that swallows bring back to their hun-
Press, 2024). Follow
Dugatkin on Facebook
suited to their new circumstances. The question is gry nestlings. Parents are unable to find enough food for
at facebook.com/ whether it will be able to do so fast enough to keep pace their brood, which leaves their young less likely to sur-
lee.dugatkin/ with human transformation of the planet we all share. vive and reproduce.

64 SC I EN T I F IC A M ER IC A N  J u n e 2 02 4
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 Peppered moth

Using data on 11,236 chicks from more chicks in nests that year. Mass casualties able to expect natural selection to favor
than 2,000 nests, J. Ryan Shipley, now at the were not the only detrimental effect Shipley birds that start breeding later. But this
Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and and his team observed. They also found that mismatch is a daunting problem for natural
Landscape Research, and his colleagues nests in which eggs hatched before the last selection to solve. Unlike feather coloration
found that Tree Swallow nestlings that cold snap had, on average, one fewer surviv- getting a bit brighter or drabber, recalibrat-
hatched between 2011 and 2015 were twice ing chick than nests in which eggs hatched ing the links between temperature and the
as likely to have experienced a cold snap after the last cold snap. onset of mating is incredibly complex, in-
during their early development as birds that Of course, not every Tree Swallow re- volving hormonal, neurobiological and
Alex Hyde/Getty Images

had hatched in the 1970s. One upshot of sponds to the onset of spring thaw in ex- behavioral changes. It may take more time
that was an increase in the number of com- actly the same way. Some may initiate than the swallows have.
plete nest failures in which every single breeding earlier than the average bird, oth- Air pollution is not the only anthropo-
nestling in a nest died. A nasty cold snap in ers later. If that variation is based on under- genic disturbance producing a discrepancy
June 2016 led to the death of 71 percent of lying genetic differences, then it is reason- between environmental cues and the onset

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 of reproduction. Artificial light at night carded shells from mollusks, including Black asphalt pavement and the metal
(ALAN), caused by everything from snails, to shield their vulnerable abdomen. in buildings are excellent heat conductors,
streetlamps to car headlights to residential Hermit crabs are always looking to upgrade and together they give rise to what are
and commercial housing, is having similar to a better shell. Sogabe and Takatsuji saw known as urban heat islands. One study of
effects. The problem isn’t just that birds many a crab scrounging among the shells 57 cities across Scandinavia found that
migrating at night crash into lit buildings, that had accumulated in the discarded tire. temperatures in urban areas were up to five
although that is part of it. The researchers hypothesized that once in- degrees C higher than those in adjacent ru-
To examine the impact of light pollution side, crabs wouldn’t be able to climb the ral locales. Evolutionary biologists such as
on the courtship displays of the firefly P  ho- concave inner wall to leave and therefore Shane Campbell-­­Staton of Princeton Uni-
turis versicolor, a species in which both males would eventually die in the tire. When the versity are beginning to piece together how
and females flash light signals, Ariel Fire- scientists brought a discarded tire into their urban heat islands impose new selective
baugh and Kyle Haynes of the University of laboratory and placed hermit crabs inside it, forces on species that live in these settings.
Virginia set up experimental plots, each of not a single crab could get out. He and his colleagues have studied the ef-
which contained a mesh canister. From 9:30 Sogabe and Takatsuji then ran a field fects of urban heat islands and anthropo-
p.m. to 11:30 p.m. on 10 consecutive nights, experiment in which they placed six tires genic evolution in crested anole lizards
they placed a female in each canister and on the seabed in Mutsu Bay. A year and a (Anolis cristatellus) living in Puerto Rico.
recorded her flash rate, along with the num- half later, after the tires had been in place They worked at four different locations,
ber of males who approached her canister long enough to acquire lots of shells—the each of which had an urban site and a
and how often they flashed. Some experi- remains of snails that were most likely nearby forest site. As they had feared, am-
mental plots were lit by two white flood- drawn to the tires to feed on the algae that bient temperatures were higher in all the
lights, whereas others had no artificial light. accumulates on them—the researchers be- urban sites. Not only were the perches
Unlit plots drew in relatively few fireflies, gan monthly collections of hermit crabs where the urban lizards spent much of the
but of the fireflies recorded in them, around from the tires. Over the course of 12 months day hotter than the perches of the forest
90 percent of stationary females and 65 per- they collected 1,278 hermit crabs that had lizards, but the body temperature of the
cent of visiting males flashed courtship dis- gotten stuck in those six tires. It’s unclear urban lizards was higher, too.
plays. Lit plots had significantly more firefly whether the crabs will evolve physical or Urban heat islands should produce dif-
visitors, but not a single male or female in behavioral adaptations that can help them ferent natural selection pressures for ther-
these plots flashed—not even once. Under escape this ecological trap. mal tolerance in urban populations of liz-
ALAN, fireflies abandoned their normal ards compared with forest populations. To

U
courtship ritual. Just as with CO2 emission rbanization is a driving force in an- see whether this divergence is happening,
and Tree Swallow breeding season, ALAN thropogenic evolution. One way to Campbell-­Staton and his team captured
is placing animals in environments that are measure its extent is by using the so-­ lizards at all the study sites and brought
dramatically different from those in which called Human Footprint Index, a compos- them to their lab, where they measured the
their ancestors evolved. Whether P. versi- ite measure that takes into account human animals’ behavioral responses to increasing
color c an adapt to these changing environ- population density, land use, ALAN, roads, temperatures. They placed the anoles un-
ments over time remains to be seen. railroads, navigable rivers, and more. Mar- der heat lamps and raised the temperature
lee Tucker of Radboud University in the one degree C each minute. As the tempera-
Evolutionary mismatches are just one Netherlands and her colleagues analyzed ture increased, a researcher would period-
consequence of anthropogenic change; the GPS data from 803 individual animals be- ically flip a lizard onto its back and touch it
creation of ecological traps is another. These longing to 57 mammal species across the with a pair of forceps to see whether it
traps occur when, after some relatively globe, including Mongolian wild ass (Equus would flip itself back over. That scene
rapid change to the environment, animals hemionus hemionus), giraffe (Giraffa ca- might sound funny, but for lizards in the
display a preference for suboptimal habitats melopardalis), brown bear (Ursus arctos), wild, ending up on their backs is no laugh-
that reduce their reproductive success. Eco- roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), European ing matter. Righting themselves can be a
logical traps need not be physical traps, but hare (Lepus europaeus) and brushtail pos- matter of life or death, particularly when
they can be. One such trap results from used sum (Trichosurus vulpecula). They found predators are nearby. Indeed, one reason a
tires. People toss roughly 30 million metric that in areas with a large human footprint, lizard may be on its back is because a pred-
tons of tires every year, and although some such as urban areas, animals moved around ator has knocked it over. Campbell-­Staton’s
are repurposed, many are dumped into the in their environment only half as much as team found that the maximum tempera-
environment, often illegally. animals in low-­footprint areas. ture at which a lizard could right itself was
Atsushi Sogabe and Kiichi Takatsuji of Animals in and around the towns and higher for the populations from urban heat
Hirosaki University in Japan studied the cities we have built live radically different islands than for forest animals.
ecological traps that discarded tires create lives from those in nearby rural environ- Research into the genomes of these ani-
for hermit crabs. Their work began after ments. They encounter different foods, mals has revealed what may be the genetic
they observed many small snail shells inside predators, light and surfaces. Soundscapes basis for the urban lizards’ heat tolerance.
a tire on the floor of Japan’s Mutsu Bay. In are also extremely different in cities, where A follow-­up genetic comparison of anoles
most hermit crab species, the head and tho- animal communication is often masked, from urban and forest environments found
rax are protected by a calcified exoskeleton, garbled, and otherwise hindered by the that one gene variant known to produce a
but the abdomen is not. The crabs use dis- hubbub we humans produce. moldable response to temperature change

66 SC I EN T I F IC A M ER IC A N  J u n e 2 02 4
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 Crested anole

was more common in the city lizards than in term experiment on the effect of light pol- that keep our cities aglow at night are dis-
their forest counterparts. We do not know lution. Two groups of blackbirds were rupting reproduction in blackbirds and
whether this variant originated recently, like tested. Each group included 10 birds from probably many other species.
the peppered moth’s gene for dark pigmen- Munich and 10 birds from the forest, and
tation, or had been present at low levels in each bird was housed in its own cage within Urbanization also affects t he person-
the broader lizard population for a long time the aviary. Blackbirds in both groups expe- alities of city-­dwelling creatures. In animal
and only recently became more common. In rienced the same daytime light regime. But behavior research, personality is a suite of
either case, anthropogenic evolution has at night, birds in the control group had just behaviors that are engaged in consistently,
already reshaped the behavioral and genetic enough light to orient themselves (0.0001 across long stretches of time, and that differ
constitution of city lizards. lux), whereas the birds in the experimental among individuals of the same species. Mel-
Cities aren’t just hotter; they’re brighter. group were exposed to a much brighter anie Dammhahn of the University of Mün-
Like early s­ pring thaws, artificial lighting nighttime environment (0.3 lux). ster in Germany and her collaborators stud-
can cause evolutionary mismatches. To ex- The results were striking: Birds in the ied personality in populations of striped
amine how ALAN has impacted reproduc- experimental group reached sexual matu- field mice (Apodemus agrarius) across an
tion in urban animals, Davide Dominoni of rity 26 days earlier than birds in the control urban-­rural gradient that spanned four ur-
the University of Glasgow and his col- group. Over the course of the seven-­month ban locations in Berlin and five rural areas
leagues captured male European Blackbirds experiment, city birds in the experimental north of the city. They trapped 96 mice from
(Turdus merula) in Munich, Germany, and group had a reproductive season that was 12 these nine populations and conducted be-
in a forest 40 kilometers southwest of the days longer than that of city birds in the con- havioral tests on the mice in an enclosure set
city. They fitted the birds with a tiny light trol group. A similar comparison for forest up in their natural habitats. The traps they
sensor that collected light readings every birds found that the experimental group’s used were attached to an opaque plastic pipe
two minutes. Birds in the forest experi- reproductive season was nine days longer. that opened on one side into a naturally lit
enced very low ambient light levels at night That longer reproductive season under arena built by the researchers.
reptiles4all/Getty Images

(an average of 0.00006 lux); birds in Mu- ALAN came with a hefty price tag. The fol- To measure boldness, the investigators
nich were exposed to much brighter night- lowing year, when both groups were ex- noted when mice left the dark pipe to enter
time environments (an average of 0.2 lux). posed to the same conditions as in year one, the open arena. To measure exploration,
The researchers then brought blackbirds males in the experimental group showed no they looked at the behavior of mice once
from both locations to an aviary for a long-­ signs of reproductive activity. The lights they entered the open field, recording how

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long it took them to move into the center of Common Myna (Acridotheres tristis) was subject to anthropogenic evolution. It may
the field and how much time they spent ex- introduced into Australia about 150 years be, for example, that certain behavioral ad-
ploring across the entire field. Urban mice ago. Today this bird is widely regarded as an aptations already in place make individu-
tended to be bolder and explore more than invasive pest because it outcompetes native als more sensitive to anthropogenic distur-
their rural counterparts, perhaps because birds for nesting sites. To protect native bance. Patrick Miller of the University of St
bolder, more exploratory animals are more birds, Australia has developed programs for Andrews in Scotland and his team investi-
likely to venture into urban areas in the first trapping and killing mynas. Between 2005 gated this possibility by studying the anti-
place. Once urban colonization has taken and 2012, more than 50,000 trapped birds predator behaviors of several whale spe-
place, these same traits may prove beneficial were killed by a clever and ruthless new cies. They tested whether the degree to
because urban environments are constantly predator: humans. The survivors and their which whales rely on acoustic signals to de-
being fragmented into smaller sections by descendants have done a good job of adapt- tect predators predicts the degree to which
roads and new construction. During the ing to this novel threat. Mynas in areas of the underwater noise pollution we gener-
fragmentation process, bolder explorers are intense trapping show heightened anti- ate—largely through seismic exploration,
more likely to move into new habitats with predator behavior, such as staying close to underwater drilling and the use of naval so-
better food or fewer predators. And because refuges, compared with mynas in areas nar—disrupts their feeding behavior. The
boldness and exploration have been shown where trapping is less frequent. scientists compared changes in the forag-
to be at least partially genetically deter- Until recently, it wasn’t clear whether ing behavior of northern bottlenose whales
mined in other species, bold mice probably mynas in high-­trapping areas demon- (H yperoodon ampullatus) , humpback
tend to beget more bold mice, leading to the strated different antipredator tactics be- whales (Megaptera novaeangliae), sperm
observed population-­level personality dif- cause of natural selection favoring innate whales (Physeter macrocephalus), and
ferences between urban and forest mice. avoidance behavior or because they were long-­finned pilot whales (Globicephala me-
Not all animals’ responses to anthropo- learning about the increased danger while las) when exposed to the sound produced
genic change are inborn, however. Some living in those areas. To find out, Marie C. by naval sonar or the sounds of mammal-­
species may learn how to mitigate the det- Diquelou of the University of Rennes in eating killer whales (Orcinus orca). To con-
rimental effects of human influence, includ- France and Andrea Griffin of trol for the possibility that any
ing mismatches, ecological traps and prob- the University of Newcastle in FROM OUR ARCHIVES sound at all would adversely af-
A History in Layers.
lems related to life in the city. The extent to Australia set up an experiment. Jan Zalasiewicz; fect foraging behavior, the four
which animals do so is difficult to gauge, For four days, either adorned in September 2016. test species were also exposed
largely because animal behaviorists have a mask, a white lab coat and a ScientificAmerican. to broadband noise and the
only recently investigated this possibility in black top hat or wearing no com/archive sounds produced by a popula-
the wild. That said, there is some evidence mask or hat but draped in a dark jacket, the tion of fish-­eating killer whales.
from birds that learning can reduce the im- researchers approached mynas at feeding The study results were arresting: North-
pact of anthropogenic disturbance. stations they had constructed. On the fifth ern bottlenose whales stopped feeding com-
Most species of parrots in the neotropics day of the experiment, they approached the pletely when they heard either the sounds
build their nests inside tree cavities and are feeding station again wearing one costume of mammal-­eating killer whales or sonar.
considered obligate cavity nesters, meaning or the other. But this time they carried a More generally, the extent to which north-
they build nests only in cavities. The logging birdcage containing two live mynas and a ern bottlenose, sperm, humpback and long-­
industry, however, is cutting down the trees portable amplifier, which played recordings finned pilot whales reduced their feeding
in which parrots nest. Pedro Romero-­Vidal of mynas emitting alarm calls. time in response to the sounds of a predator
of the University Pablo de Olavide in Spain During the final part of the experiment, (a mammal-­eating killer whale) correlated
and his colleagues systematically looked at one of the scientists approached the feeding positively with their reduction in foraging
cavity-­nesting species of parrots at eight sites station in costume, put out food and re- time when they heard the sonar (but not
across Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica and corded the behavior of the mynas. Diquelou broadband noise or sounds of the fish-­
Panama. The team found that in areas where and Griffin found that mynas made the eating killer whales). That is, the antipreda-
tree cavities were particularly rare because most alarm calls during the final days of the tor behavior of whales does predict the
of logging to clear land for cattle pastures, study but only when a researcher was extent to which anthropogenic noise will
parrots became more innovative in their nest dressed as they had been on day five, when play havoc with their feeding behavior.
building. In Buenos Aires, parrots nested in the mynas could pair that researcher with People tend to think of evolutionary bi-
holes in the walls of buildings and railway the alarm calls of other birds. Mynas had ology as a discipline focused on events that
Chase Dekker/Minden Pictures (opposite page)

stations, and data from 137 pairs of birds learned that humans with particular char- happened slowly and in the distant past. But
from eight different parrot species show that acteristics (in this case, their apparel) were anthropogenic evolution is happening here
they have nested in the bract leaves of palm especially dangerous, giving them at least and now. We are driving massive and rapid
trees that were spared logging rather than in some relief from their new foe. evolutionary changes in species around us.
the oak, beech and pine trees they prefer. If we want to ameliorate the undesirable,

W
Such innovation may provide some respite ith a growing u  nderstanding of often unintended, consequences of our ac-
in the face of escalating deforestation, but for the effects of anthropogenic tions, we need to understand all we can
how long and for how many species? change on the environment, sci- about how animals respond to the alter-
Birds may also learn novel survival skills entists are trying to generate predictions ations we have made, and continue to make,
such as how to avoid a new predator. The about which species are most likely to be in our shared environment.

68 SC I EN T I F IC A M ER IC A N  J u n e 2 02 4
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Humpback whale

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SCIENCE AGENDA OPINION AND ANALYSIS FROM S CIENTIFIC AMERICAN’S BOARD OF EDITORS

Homeschooling Needs chil­­­dren facing bullying or gun violence

or who need more challenging or more

More Uniform Oversight

advanced schoolwork, a homeschooling
environment may be best.
But many parents are attracted to
Without standards and monitoring, home­­school­ing because they want to
children may get an incomplete education have more say in what their child learns
and what they do not. Nearly 60 percent
or be abused BY THE EDITORS of home­school parents who responded
to the 2019 NCES survey said that reli­
gious instruction was a motivation in
their d ­ ecision to educate at home. Some
Christian home­school­ing curricula teach
Young Earth Creationism instead of evo­
lution. Other curricula describe slavery
as “Black immigration” or extol the vir­
tues of Nazism.
Some children may not be receiving any
instruction at all . Most states don’t require
home­schooled kids to be assessed on spe­
cific topics the way their classroom-based
peers are. This practice enables educa­
tional neglect that can have long-lasting
consequences for a child’s development.
In the worst cases, home­school­ing hides
abuse. In 2020 an 11-year-old boy in Mich­
igan was found dead after his stepmother
used homeschooling to conceal years of
torture. A small study of children who had
been seriously abused found that eight of
17 school-age victims were ostensibly be­
ing home­schooled. In these cases, homes­
chooling was a farce—a hole in children’s
social safety net for abusers to exploit.

T
Although it’s impossible to say how
HE NUMBER OF CHILDREN anyone that they are home­s chooling a commonly homeschooling conceals abuse,
being educated at home has been child, and in most of the country, once a data from Connecticut paint a concerning
growing for the past few decades. child has exited the traditional school­ picture. Following the abuse and 2017
No one knows by how much, and room environment, no one checks to en­ death of an autistic teenager whose mother
that is part of the problem. Home­ sure they are receiving an education at all. had removed him from school, Connecti­
school­ing is barely tracked or regulated in Home­schooled students have won the cut’s Office of the Child Advocate found
the U.S. But children deserve a safe and National Spelling Bee; one was the most that 36 percent of children withdrawn
robust education, whether they attend a prolific mathematician in history. Many from six nearby districts to be home­
traditional school or are educated at home. are well-rounded and well-adjusted chil­ schooled lived in homes that had been sub­
The National Center for Education dren who go on to thrive as adults. But ject to at least one report of suspected abuse
Statistics (NCES) reported that by last others do not receive a meaningful educa­ or neglect. Not one state checks with Child
count, in 2019, nearly 3 percent of U.S. tion—and too many have suffered horrific Protective Services to determine whether
children—1.5 million—were being home­ abuse. The federal government must de­ the parents of children being home­
schooled. This number, calculated from a velop basic standards for safety and qual­ schooled have a history of abuse or neglect.
nationwide survey, is surely an under­ ity of education in home­school­ing across Home­s chool­ing advocacy organiza­
count because the home­schooling popula­ the country. tions promote studies that claim to show
tion is notoriously hard to survey, and When a traditional classroom setting equal or higher levels of academic achieve­
more children have been home­schooled cannot meet the educational, social or ment among home­schooled students. But
since the COVID pandemic began. Eleven emotional needs of a child, homeschool­ these studies often are conducted by
states do not require parents to inform ing can allow parents to take over. For home­school­ing advocates and are meth­

70 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4 Illustration by Thomas Fuchs

© 2024 Scientific American
 FORUM COMMENTARY ON SCIENCE IN THE NEWS FROM THE EXPERTS

odologically flawed. It’s difficult for social

scientists to recruit representative sam­ The Human Body
Is Made of Bags
ples for more rigorous research because of
lax reporting requirements and the un­
derground nature of homeschooling,
making the kind of sweeping comparison We are like levers and computers, but above all,
between home­school­ing and non­home­ humans are bags of biology BY BETHANY BROOKSHIRE
school­ing students that some groups re­
port im­possible. Still, studies of different
home­schooled populations have shown
that children’s success depends heavily on
their parents’ education background. De­
spite this, in 40 states parents do not need
to have even a high school–level educa­
tion to educate their children at home.
The federal government usually leaves
issues of education for states to decide, and
home­school­ing is no exception. A dizzying
maze of laws and legal precedents governs
parents’ ability to home­school, and the
rules differ in each state and sometimes
even differ between school districts.
Whenever a piece of state legislation is
suggested or introduced to regulate some
aspect of homeschooling, advocacy orga­
nizations such as the Home­school Legal
Defense Association fight back. This year
Michigan’s Education Department pro­
posed a registry of home­schooled students
in the state and was met with fierce push­

Y
back. In 2023 Ohio removed all assessment
requirements for home­schooled students. OUR KIDNEYS a
 re like filters. Your how to replicate or get inside our various
South Dakota, Vermont and New Hamp­ brain is like a computer. Your di­ bags is a critical part of modern medicine.
shire have also removed some oversight gestive system is like a tube. Your Finally, it gives me comfort. Life isn’t that
requirements in the past few years. hands are controlled a bit like a complex after all. It’s just a series of bags get­
It is clear that home­school­ing will con­ marionette. These kinds of com­ ting more and more fancy and specialized.
tinue to lack accountability for outcomes parisons get made in part because doctors If this sounds like something that would
or even basic safety in most states. But and scientists are desperate to find ways to come to a sleep-deprived person in the mid­
federal mandates for reporting and as­ visualize our bodies that aid understanding. dle of the night, it is. I’ve been having diffi­
sessment to protect children don’t need to It helps that these analogies are not quite as culty sleeping since sometime in 2020, and
be onerous. For example, home­s chool visceral as the real thing. I’m sure I’m not alone. Through trial, error,
parents could be required to pass an initial All these descriptions are useful, but one, prescriptions and meditation apps, I have
background check, as every state requires I’ve discovered, is missing. Our bodies are found the one thing that truly works for me:
for all K–12 teachers. Home­s chool in­ like tubes or levers or computers, yes, but studying human anatomy. My insomnia led
structors could be required to submit doc­ above all, they are like bags—bags that are me on an exhaustive, 18-month-long search
uments every year to their local school stuffed inside other bags stuffed for boring books to be read for
district or to a state agency to show that in still more bags. Our bodies are Bethany Brookshire self-improvement by the light of
their children are learning. nesting-bag arrangements like is an award-winning a carefully dimmed lamp. After
science journalist and
Education is a basic human right. We the used bags stuffed under your author of P ests: How a perusal of classical literature,
need to make sure kids have chances to kitchen sink, with the bonus of Humans Create Animal my eye fell on the holy grail.
investigate what makes them curious, thumbs and anxiety. This no­ Villains ( Ecco, 2022). Her Clinically Oriented Anatomy, b y
study history and science and reading, tion gives me clarity: when I work has appeared in Sci- Keith L. Moore, Arthur F. Dal­
entific American, the New
and ask questions and learn from others. have trouble understanding York Times, the W  ash-
ley and Anne M. R. Agur, is
We want them to reach adulthood ready anatomy, I look for the bag. It ington Post, the A tlantic, a brick of a book, more than
to take on the world. gives me context—figuring out and other outlets. 1,000 pages long and weighing

Illustration by Andrew Baker J u ne 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 71

© 2024 Scientific American
FORUM THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH

in at a solid six pounds. It is the textbook of

Harvard Medical School’s Human Func­
and often merge into tendons. When one of
these bags is injured or infected, the blood or Starting
Palliative
tional Anatomy course. These days my book infection will spread first inside the bag, al­
is as battered as any first-year medical stu­ lowing doctors to predict where it will go
dent’s, and I am fixated. I share the anatomy next and intervene.
facts I find most fascinating on Blue­sky, Tik­
Tok and Instagram in a series I call Insomnia
Nerves pervade these bags as well, so the
network of bags might serve a sensory pur­ Care
Sooner
Anatomy Academy. pose in addition to providing storage. Scien­
In the many hours I’ve spent waiting for tists are still trying to figure out how manip­
sleep to finally set in, I’ve discovered all ulating our muscular packets could help
kinds of captivating tidbits—human anato­ with mobility or pain. Supportive care,
my can, in more ways than one, really keep The bags don’t stop there. Joints are sur­ started early, will
you up at night. Teeth are connected to the rounded by joint capsules—tight, dou­
jaw by joints, and scientists are still learning ble-layered bags with thin layers of fluid
improve more lives
about the ligaments that hold them in place. that help our bones rub safely against each BY LYDIA DENWORTH
Some people have an extra set of ribs, which other, allowing us to pivot without pain.
come from the last vertebra in their neck. Bags don’t end with what we can see with

I
People who can breastfeed may have extra the naked eye. Each individual cell is a bag,
breast tissue that produces milk and releases its membrane separating its contents from N THE LAST MONTHS o
 f my mother’s
it into their armpits. Every page offers a new its surroundings. Within those cellular life, before she went into hospice, she
weird fact that emphasizes our evolutionary bags, like especially gooey m  atryoshka d
 olls, was seen at home by a nurse practi­
history and our wild individual variability. are organelles, minute bags separating out tioner who specialized in palliative
I can barely flip a page without running their own microchemistry. The organelles care. The focus is on improving pa­
into a bag. Your skin? A many-layered sack can each have a different pH and hold some tients’ quality of life and reducing pain
holding in all your insides. Under the skin, molecules inside while keeping others out. rather than on treating disease. Mom had
bags abound. It’s perhaps easy to think of Much like you may do with the bags un­ end-stage Alzheimer’s disease and could
the stomach, which is a tube closed off at the der your kitchen sink, cells even reuse and no longer communicate. It was a relief to
top and bottom by the esophageal and py­ recycle some of their bags. Tiny bags called have someone on hand who knew how to
loric sphincters, respectively, as a bag. The vesicles contain chemical messengers. read her behavior (she ground her teeth, for
bladder, too, is a bag, for the temporary stor­ Those bags dump their contents outside instance, a possible sign of pain) for clues
age of urine. the cell and merge with the larger bag of as to what she might be experiencing.
That’s not all. The heart has not one but the cell membrane, only to get pinched off I was happy to have the help but wished
two bags: a tough, fibrous outer pericardi­ and reused again when more packaging is it had been available earlier. I’m not alone
um and a serous pericardium that protect required. Life itself can be boiled down to in that. Evidence of the benefits of pallia­
the heart and fix it firmly in place in our con­ bags: the first cell wasn’t a cell until it was tive care continues to grow. For people
stantly moving thorax. The brain and spinal fully separated from the outside world— with advanced illnesses, it helps to control
cord are triple-wrapped with three layers of until it had a bag. physical symptoms such as pain and short­
meninges. These sacks physically protect Some researchers are studying how to ness of breath. It a­ ddresses mental health
our most delicate and essential bits. Inside make synthetic vesicles able to release issues, including depression and anxiety.
there’s another, different sack—a blood- chemicals where and when we want them. And it can reduce unnecessary trips to the
brain barrier of linked cells that prevents Others are trying to build artificial placentas hospital. But barriers to access persist—
most infections from reaching the brain. for premature infants. Some bags might be especially a lack of providers. As a result,
The uterus is a bag—one that can be filled allies, whereas others might be worthy ad­ palliative care is too often offered late,
with a fetus. That fetus builds its own inner versaries. It’s a constant fight for new med­ when “the opportunity to benefit is lim­
bag in conjunction with the parent, creating icines to get past our determined brain bags ited,” says physician Kate Courtright of
the placenta, layers of parental and fetal so they can cure our mental ills. the Perelman School of Medicine at the
cells that protect and provide. Sitting with my anatomy text and wait­ University of Pennsylvania.
Even your muscles have bags. Groups of ing patiently for sleep, I find my many bags In 2021 only an estimated one in 10 peo­
muscles that do the same thing, along with both wondrous and comforting. The world ple worldwide who needed palliative care
the nerves and blood vessels that keep them can seem endlessly complex, full of things received it, according to the World Health
going, are bundled together into what are we think we should have known, things we Organization. In the U.S., the numbers are
called fascial compartments. These bags are did or didn’t do well enough. But human better—the great majority of large hospitals
so tight they might be better described as life, the physical stuff that makes us love and include palliative care units—but it’s still
flesh vacuum-packing cubes. They are more hate and judge and care? It’s just bags all the hard for people who depend on small local
than just packaging: they reduce friction way down. hospitals or live in rural areas. Outpatient

72 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
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palliative care is especially hard to find. care is offered, the more satisfied patients cancer, although that’s where much of the
Experts are also working to correct report feeling. And ideally, people who research has been done. It benefits those
misconceptions. “When people hear the need it now get referred to palliative med­ with heart failure, chronic kidney disease,
words ‘palliative care,’ they think ‘end-of- icine around the time they are diagnosed dementia, chronic obstructive pulmonary
life care—I’m going to die,’” says physician with a serious illness. An influential study disease (COPD), Parkinson’s, and other
Helen Senderovich, a palliative care expert in 2010 found that patients with lung can­ serious illnesses.
at the University of Toronto. Although cer who received palliative care within In January 2024 the Journal of the Am­­
palliative medicine grew out of the hospice eight weeks of diagnosis showed signifi­ er­i­can Medical Association p  ublished a
movement, it has evolved into a multidis­ cant improvements in both quality of life pair of studies that broke “new ground” in
ciplinary specialty encompass­ and mood compared with developing sustainable, scalable palliative
ing physical, psychological and Lydia Denworth patients who got only stan­ care programs, according to an accompa­
spiritual needs of patients and is an award-winning dard cancer care. Even though nying editorial. One, the largest-ever ran­
science journalist and
their families throughout the those receiving early palliative domized trial of palliative care, included
contribut­ing editor for
trajectory of disease, Sender­o­ Scientific American. She care had less aggressive care more than 24,000 people with COPD,
vich says. That path includes is author of Friendship at the end of life, they lived kidney failure and dementia across 11 hos­
the time when treatments are (W. W. Norton, 2020). an average of almost three pitals in eight states. The researchers
still being tried. months longer. made palliative care an automated order,
So palliative care specialists have begun More recent studies have confirmed the where doctors had to opt out of such care
referring broadly to “supportive care”— life-quality advantages of earlier palliative for their patients instead of going through
“anything that is not directly modifying care, although not all studies have shown an extra step of opting in. The rate of re­
the disease,” says medical oncologist and longer survival. “Patients don’t just start ferrals to palliative care increased from
palliative care specialist David Hui of the having pain and anxiety and weight loss 16.6 to 43.9 percent, says Courtright, lead
MD Anderson Cancer Center. For exam­ and tiredness only in the last days of life,” author of the study. Length of hospital
ple, wound care and infusions to improve Hui says. Starting palliative care earlier al­ stay did not decline overall, but it did drop
red blood cell counts in cancer patients are lows patients and the care team to “think by 9.6 percent among those who received
supportive; chemotherapy is not. ahead and plan a little bit,” he adds. palliative care only because of the auto­
Generally, the earlier that supportive Nor is palliative care effective only for mated order.
The second study looked at 306 pa­
tients with advanced COPD, heart failure
or interstitial lung disease. Half these peo­
ple participated in palliative care via tele­
health visits with a nurse to handle symp­
tom management and a social worker to
address psychosocial needs; the other peo­
ple in the study did not get such care.
Those who received the calls quickly
showed improved quality of life, and the
positive effects persisted for months after
the calls concluded.
Because there are not enough palliative
care providers, Hui advocates for a system
that directs them to patients who would
benefit most. Usually, and not surpris­
ingly, those are people with the most se­
vere symptoms. This system uses early
screening of symptoms to identify these
people. Hui calls the approach “timely”
palliative care. “In reality, not every pa­
tient needs palliative care up front,” Hui
says, so timely care uses scarce resources as
effectively as possible.
I don’t know exactly when my mother
needed to start palliative care, but I hope
that going forward more caregivers and
more families know to ask about it sooner.

Illustration by Jay Bendt J u ne 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 73

© 2024 Scientific American
MATH

Just consider the simple social net-

work at the bottom of this page:
Chandler has three friends, Monica
and Phoebe each have two, and Janice has
one, for a total of eight. We then divide
those eight friends by the four people in
the network to get an average of two
friends. Notice, though, that Monica’s
friends have 2.5 friends on average
(Chandler’s three plus Phoebe’s two, all
divided by two). Monica’s friends have
more friends on average than she does
(2.5 > 2), which could make her feel rela-
tively unpopular even though she’s actu-
ally perfectly average. Her local perspec-
tive on her immediate friend circle tells a
different story than the global perspective
of her status in the network as a whole.
The same happens to Phoebe and Jan-
ice, whose friends have 2.5 and three
friends on average, respectively. Only

Why Your Friends Are Chandler’s friend group is relatively un-

popular, with an average that rounds to

More Popular Than You

1.67 friends. The majority of people in
this group are less popular than their
friends. Another way to quantify this sit-
The inspection paradox makes mathematical uation is to look at the average number of
sense of social networks, long train wait times friends that one’s friends have in this net-
work, which is approximately (2.5 +
and always-busy call centers BY JACK MURTAGH 2.5 + 3 + 1.67)/4 = 2.42. That number is
larger than the average person’s friend

D
count of two.
O YOU EVER FEEL like your friends have more friends Surprisingly, this will always happen
Jack Murtagh
than you do? AlthoughThe your momofmight
frequency insist
trains varies that every
between four minutes and every 12 in
writes about math every
minutes. network (unless everybody has
you’re just as popular as they are, math’s inspection par- and puzzles, including an identical number of friends, in which
adox explains why you’re probably right. It 12also reveals a series4on mathematical 4 case the counts12will be equal). On average,4
why it often feels like you’re waiting too long for the train curios­it­ies at Scientific people’s co-authors have had more co-au-
American and a weekly
or bus, why call centers always seem to be experiencing high- puzzle column at thors than they have, and their sexual
er-than-average call volume, and other daily frustrations. Gizmodo. He holds partners have had more sexual partners
Consider a social network like Facebook, where the average a Ph.D. in theoretical than they’ve had. Although such network
user has a few hundred friends. Someone with 10,000 friends ap- computer science from dynamics are sometimes dubbed the
Harvard University.
pears in 10,000 other users’ friend lists, making
If passengers many every
arrive steadily of those
two minutes, each
Follow friendship
is more likely to encounter
Murtagh paradox,
a 12-minute they
interval than fall under
a four-minute one.a
(average) people feel unpopular by comparison. On the flip side, on X @JackPMurtagh more general phenomenon known as the
someone with five friends ap- inspection paradox.
pears only in their five friends’ The inspection paradox is not a para-
lists, making at most only five dox at all, because both perspectives can
Chandler Monica
people feel popular by com- be valid simultaneously. The apparent
3 friends 2 friends
parison. That’s the key idea: contradiction arises when individuals
a person’s representation in perceive an average to be larger than a
other users’ friend circles is global perspective would suggest because
Orbon Alija/Getty Images

proportional to their own pop- they are more likely to encounter large
ularity. You’re more likely to Janice Phoebe instances. Monica’s friends in our hypo-
1 friend 2 friends
have very popular friends pre- thetical network are more popular than
cisely because they’re popular. she is, and she also has a typical number
Don’t tell your mom. of friends.

74 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4 Graphics by Amanda Montañez

© 2024 Scientific American
 Confused? Here’s another example.
Ask university students what their aver- On average, people’s friends have
age class size is, and the answer will always
skew larger than the administration’s offi-
more friends than they have, and
cial reports of average class size. Are these their sexual partners have had more
students exaggerating? Is the administra-
tion deflating numbers to make their stu- sexual partners than they’ve had.
dent-teacher ratio look more favorable?
No—both perspectives are correct. Stu-
dents in big lecture courses naturally re- not bad luck; it’s just probability. You’re the structure of the social network would
port larger class-size averages, whereas more likely to arrive during long intervals take too much time. Instead researchers
students who take only intimate seminars simply because they’re longer. tried picking random people and moni-
report smaller class-size averages, but The sample timeline below depicts six toring their friends. This slight tweak
both are giving accurate reports. There are intervals between trains—half of these greatly improves the chances that well-­
far more people in the former group be- last 12 minutes, and the other half last four. connected people will show up in the sam-
cause lecture halls contain more people The transit authority could advertise an ple because, as we’ve seen, people’s friends
than intimate seminars. Polling the stu- average of eight minutes between trains, tend to be more popular than they are.
dents counts high-enrollment classes but individual commuters are three times This technique allowed the researchers to
more often than low-enrollment classes, as likely to show up during a long interval detect a flu outbreak two weeks earlier
whereas when the university tallies aver- and experience a frustrating wait. than with traditional random sampling.
age class size, it counts big lectures and Scientists need to stay diligent about Even for those of us who don’t work in
small seminars each only once. the inspection paradox and the biases it research, the inspection paradox can

The frequency of trains varies between every four minutes and every 12 minutes.

12 4 4 12 4 12

If passengers arrive steadily every two minutes, each is more likely to encounter a 12-minute interval than a four-minute one.

The inspection paradox is at work in can cause. To conduct a study on average help explain our everyday observations.
some of the most mundane places.
Chandler Sup- university class size, for example, one
Monica Why is it that call centers always seem to
pose a transit authority promises that its 2 friends
3 friends must specify exactly what one means to be experiencing higher-than-normal call
metro trains pull through a station every measure and tailor the polling methodol- volume? Maybe they just say that to ex-
eight minutes on average. If you arrive at ogy accordingly. cuse understaffing, or maybe we all tend
the station at a random time between But some clever researchers have also to call at the same time, such as during
trains (ignore rush hour), then some- exploited the phenomenon to improve our lunch breaks. But perhaps we’re just
Janice Phoebe
times you’ll sit for seven minutes and 50 2 friends
1 friend their random sampling. A particularly in- more likely to belong to a bigger group of
seconds, and other times you’ll hear the teresting example comes from a study on simultaneous callers precisely because
oncoming whistle just as you cross the the spread of flu. During an outbreak, it’s bigger. If airlines are complaining
turnstile. You might expect these cases to well-­connected people tend to contract that not enough people buy tickets and
even out over time to about a four-minute diseases earlier because of their high so- they’re forced to fly nearly empty planes,
wait on average. cial contact. To detect outbreaks quickly, why do you so rarely enjoy the luxury of
So why does it always feel longer than epidemiologists could prioritize monitor- an uncontested armrest? Because few
that? Sure, train arrivals every eight min- ing those people, if they knew who they people do overall. Sometimes when you
utes on average don’t imply every eight were in advance. The naive method of feel down on your luck, a broader per-
minutes on the dot. The schedule usually checking the flu status of random mem- spective really can help. At least it’s
is staggered. But why does your bad luck bers of the population gives no priority to something to ponder while you wait for
always plunk you in a long interval? It’s well-connected people, and mapping out the next train.

J u ne 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 75
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MIND MATTERS EDITED BY DAISY YUHAS

out the idea that babies simply kick in ex-

citement when they see the mobile moving.
In fact, our data indicated that it was the
coordinated movement of the foot and the
mobile that prompted a baby’s activity.
Further, when we removed the string,
the babies kept on kicking at the highest
rate they had reached while tied to the
mobile, suggesting that they expected the
toy to respond. Some infants were visibly
frustrated when that did not happen.
At some point while they were tethered,
then, the infants must have figured out that
they were in control. To pinpoint this aha!
moment, we developed an algorithm to
search for spikes in the rate of foot move-
ment during tethering. For some infants,
we found a sudden burst of activity coupled
with dramatic changes in the rate of move-

An Infant’s Aha! Moment

ment, including pauses and abrupt increas-
es or decreases in speed. Such fluctuations
and shifts are typical signatures of complex
When babies realize they can influence the world systems—from stock markets to brain ac-
BY ALIZA SLOAN AND SCOTT KELSO tivity—that are on the verge of change. We
believe those initial spikes in activity coin-
cided with those babies’ aha! discovery.

S
Our observations also revealed a pat-
OMETIMES THE SIMPLESTques- to the mobile and the other to the infant’s tern: in the first minute or so of tethering,
tions are the hardest to answer. foot. If the baby moves, the toy will, too. each time the mobile responded to the in-
How, for example, do you decide Over multiple sessions, scientists can ob- fants’ movements, they froze and waited
to wiggle your fingers? A lot is serve as the infants learn and recall a sim- for the mobile to stop before kicking again.
known about the muscles and ple cause-and-effect interaction: kick a The mobile’s unfamiliar and unexpected
neural structures involved—the puppet foot, and the mobile moves. movement triggered a strange, dynamic
and the strings, as it were—but what about We used that setup to identify the mo- dance on the babies’ part: move, pause,
the puppeteer? ment when babies first realize they can con- move, pause. We suspect that they were, in
How humans develop the ability to will- trol the mobile’s motion. We worked with 16 a sense, running their own experiment: “If
fully make things happen still remains infants who were three to four months of I do this (kick), I see that (the mobile
mysterious. In a recent study, we tried to age, employing motion-capture technology moves),” and, conversely, “if I do not kick,
catch infants in the act of discovering their to measure the movements of both infant I do not see the mobile move.”
ability to influence the world. As we re- and mobile in three-dimensional space. As Notably, the infants did not all behave
ported last September in the Proceedings of in past such experiments, infants kicked in the same way. In fact, one child showed
the National Academy of Sciences USA, w  e significantly more when their foot was teth- no such signs of discovering how her be-
identified these aha! moments and the ered to the mobile than when it was not. But havior might affect the mobile, even
events surrounding them, revealing for the did they know that their movements were though she doubled her activity while in-
first time how agency forms. propelling the mobile? teracting with it. This approach could
For more than 50 years researchers One clue came when an experimenter therefore help us understand and predict
have used a very simple method to investi- pulled the string to make the mobile move individual paths of motor and cognitive
gate learning in infancy. They place a baby instead of letting the baby do it. Infants development for both healthy infants and
into a crib with a mobile suspended above moved less in that situation than when the those at risk of developmental delays.
it. Then a scientist ties one end of a string mobile was stationary. This finding rules But what does this experiment tell us
Guido Mieth/Getty Images

about the origins of agency? Quite a lot, we

Aliza Sloan is a re­­search scientist at Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Complex Systems and Brain would argue. Several years ago one of us
Sciences. She studies organizing processes in human development. (Kelso) proposed that the birth of agency is
Scott Kelso holds the Glenwood and Martha Creech Eminent Scholar Chair in Science at Florida Atlantic a dynamic, self-organizing process and, to-
University and is a professor emeritus of intelligent systems at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. gether with the late physicist Armin Fuchs,

76 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
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 THE UNIVERSE

developed a model of it. To break that down:

“Dynamic” means that patterns and rela- The Scale of Space
Will Break Your Brain
tionships evolve over time. “Self-organiza-
tion” refers to the fact that many complex
systems in nature organize themselves into
specific forms without any instructions. In Can we understand the universe
these cases, to return to our opening ques- without comprehending its size? BY PHIL PLAIT
tion, there is no concrete puppeteer pulling
the strings. Rather patterns emerge and
change spontaneously in systems that are
open to exchanges of energy, matter and in- SPACE IS BIG. T
 hat’s why we call it space. such agreed-on conventions) as exactly
formation with their surroundings. But how big is “big”? 149,597,870.7 km. Mercury is about 0.4 AU
Our theory is that when an organism That’s relative. When an astronomer from the sun and Venus about 0.7. Their
(here, a baby) and its environment (the says something is nearby, they might mean distances from Earth depend on where all
mobile) interact, they form a self-organiz- it’s a few million kilometers away (if the planets are in their orbits and increase
ing dynamic system. Goal-directed action they’re talking asteroids) or a few tens of when respective planets are on opposite
emerges spontaneously when the organ- trillions (for stars) or a few tens of quintil- sides of the sun, so Venus will range from
ism realizes that its movements cause the lions (for galaxies). about 0.3 to 1.7 AU from Earth.
world to change. No matter the destination, it’s a long Neptune, the farthest major planet
Our findings align beautifully with our walk. We make it easier on ourselves by from the sun, is 4.5 billion km out, or
theory. The babies’ initial movements con- using huge units to measure distance, such 30 AU. Pluto’s at roughly the same dis-
sisted of squirming and thrusting without as a light-year, the distance traveled in a tance, and it’s a long way from us. The New
discernible purpose or direction. But once year by light—the fastest thing in the uni- Horizons spacecraft took more than nine
tethered to the mobile, the more intensely verse. A light-year is about 10 trillion kilo- years to get there despite moving at speeds
they moved, the more their attention was meters (km). But that’s still fairly abstract of more 50,000 km per hour.
drawn to the effect their kicking had (both to the typical person reading casually These numbers are still difficult to
the feeling of the string tugging and the about “nearby” exoplanets or “distant” grasp. When I traveled to schools to give
sight of the mobile responding). When ba- galaxies. One way to better grasp this scale demonstrations to kids about astronomy,
bies’ attention to their relationship with the is to take it step by step. The moon is the one of my favorite props was the solar sys-
toy reached a critical level, they realized they closest astronomical object to us in the tem rope: a hefty 15-meter cord that repre-
could make the mobile spin. Spontaneous entire universe. On average across its or- sented the average sun-to-Pluto distance.
movements became purposeful action. At bital path, it’s about 380,000 km from The students were given photos of planets,
that point of transformation, we observed a Earth. That’s already a pretty long way; and we’d place them at the proper scaled
burst of foot activity and tight coordination nearly 30 Earths could fit side by side over distance from the sun. The inner four
between the infant and the mobile. that distance! Or think of it this way: the planets were so close together that the kids
Historically, the entire issue of purpose Apollo astronauts, traveling faster than were practically on top of one another, but
and agency in living things—and, dare one any human before them, took three days to the outer planets were spread out a long
say, “free will”—has been clouded in phil- reach the moon’s vicinity. way; we had to either find a long hallway or
osophical debate and controversy. Many The sun is about 400 times farther go outside for the demo.
arguments land at one of two extremes: ei- away from us than the moon is: 150 mil- That lesson proved so popular that I
ther there must be an inner director—a self lion km. How far is that? If you could pave created a spreadsheet allowing anyone to
that makes decisions—or free will does not a road between Earth and the sun, it would calculate the solar system to scale. It’s
actually exist, because the environment take you about 170 years to drive there at based on the size of the sun, so you can
and circumstances predetermine a person’s highway speeds. Better pack a lunch. A change it from the default of one meter to,
behavior. But our infant study emphasizes commercial jet would be better—it would say, the size of a grape and find out how big
how understanding the relationship be- take a mere 17 years. and how far-off the planets become. It’s
tween an organism and its environment is When we work with objects inside the fun—and eye-opening.
essential to uncovering the origins of di- solar system, it’s convenient to use the But it’s useful, too, to consider the sep-
rected behavior. As our model proposes, Earth-sun distance as a kind aration between objects in
the experience of agency emerges o nly of cosmic meter stick. We call Phil Plait  terms of their size. For exam-
when an organism (the baby) senses it is it the astronomical unit, or AU, is a professional ple, the sun is 1.4 million km
coupled to its environment (in this case, the and it is defined by the Inter- astronomer and science wide. The nearest star system
communicator in Virginia.
mobile setup). In this way of thinking, the national Astronomical Union He writes the Bad to the sun is Alpha Centauri,
interaction and relationship between the (the keeper of all astronomical Astronomy Newsletter which is 41 trillion km away. If
two are crucial for purpose to arise. numbers, names, and other on Beehiiv. we divide the second number

J u ne 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 77
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THE UNIVERSE

by the first, we find that Alpha Centauri is rarely because they’re so far apart relative to form clusters of clusters, called superclu-
about 30 million “suns” away. Stars are their size. But galaxies are more crowded sters. The Virgo Cluster and the Local Group
very small compared with the distance be- together in space, so it’s not too big a surprise are part of the Laniakea Supercluster, which
tween them, and that is one reason you that galaxy collisions are not only common may have more than 100,000 galaxies in it
really don’t need to worry about one ever but ubiquitous. The Milky Way grew to its and stretches for 500 million light-years.
colliding with our sun! tremendous size by colliding and merging The universe is 13.8 billion years old, so
That’s also why we use light-years to with other galaxies, and in fact every big gal- you might think the most distant objects
measure these distances; it’s a more palat- axy has undergone multiple collisions. we can see are roughly that distance away
able unit for dealing with interstellar jour- The Milky Way and Andromeda are the in light-years. But the cosmos is expand-
neys. Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light-years two biggest galaxies in a clutch of about ing, and in the time it’s taken for the light
away. The Orion Nebula is about 1,250 100 galaxies that we call the Local Group. from distant objects to reach us, that ex-
light-­years from the sun. The center of the It’s about 10 million light-years across. pansion has swept them farther from us.
Milky Way is 26,000 light-years away, and There are even bigger and more populous Because of this movement, the observable
the galaxy itself is a flattish disk some groups, called galaxy clusters. The nearest universe is estimated to be more like 90 or
120,000 light-years across. big one is the Virgo Cluster, with well over so billion light-years across!
The nearest big galaxy to the Milky Way 1,000 galaxies in it, located about 50 mil- After all that, I’ll let you in on a secret:
is Andromeda, which is 2.5 million light- lion light-years from us. And smaller even astronomers can’t truly grasp these
years from us. That’s an interesting num- groups exist that are closer to us. scales. We work with them, and we can do
ber because it’s “only” 20 times the size of Galaxy clusters are held together by the math and physics with them, but our ape
the Milky Way. Most galaxies are pretty gravity of their members and can be tens of brains still struggle to comprehend even the
close in size. millions of light-years wide. But we’re not distance to the moon—and the universe is
Inside galaxies, stars collide extremely done! Clusters can clump up in the cosmos to two million trillion times bigger than that.
So, yeah—space is big. And it’s true
that we are very, very small. These scales
If you could pave a road between can seem crushing. But I’ll leave you with
Hasbi Sahin/Getty Images

Earth and the sun, it would take you this: although the cosmos is immense be-
yond what we can grasp, by using math
about 170 years to drive there at and physics and our brain, we can actually
understand it.
highway speeds. Better pack a lunch. And that makes us pretty big, too.

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Q&A WITH LISA MESSERI and MOLLY CROCKETT

The Risks of Trusting AI words in a paper. That struck us as techni-

cally implausible. But more broadly, we’ve
discovered that scientists are talking about
We must avoid humanizing machine-learning models using AI tools to make their work more ob-
used in scientific research BY LAUREN LEFFER jective and to be more productive.
We found that both those goals are quite
risky and open up scientists to producing

M
more while understanding less. The worry is
ACHINE-LEARNING MODELS trust to the information produced by AI,” that we’re going to think these tools are help-
a re quickly becoming common says Molly Crockett, a cognitive psycholo- ing us to understand the world better, when
tools in scientific research. gist and neuroscientist at Princeton Univer- in reality, they might be distorting our view.
These artificial-­intelligence sys- sity and a co-author of the study. AI models MESSERI: We categorize the AI uses we
tems are helping bioengineers are human-made products, and they “rep- observed in our review into four catego-
discover new potential antibiotics, veteri- resent the views and positions of the people ries: the Surrogate, the Oracle, the Quant
narians interpret animals’ facial expres- who developed them,” says Lisa Messeri, and the Arbiter. The Surrogate is what
sions, papyrologists read words on ancient a Yale University sociocultural anthropol- we’ve already discussed—it replaces hu-
scrolls, mathematicians solve baffling prob- ogist who worked with Crockett on the man subjects. The Oracle is an AI tool that
lems and climatologists predict sea-ice paper. Scientific American spoke with is asked to synthesize the existing corpus of
movements. Some scientists are even prob- both researchers to learn more about the research and produce something, such as a
ing large language models’ potential as prox- ways scientists use AI—and the potential review or new hypotheses. The Quant is AI
ies or replacements for human participants effects of trusting this technology too much. that is used by scientists to process the in-
in psychology and behavioral research. In An edited transcript of the interview follows. tense amount of data out there—maybe
one recent example, computer scientists ran produced by those machine surrogates. AI
ChatGPT through the conditions of the Why did you write this paper? Arbiters are like [the tools described] in
Milgram shock experiment—a study on LISA MESSERI: [Crockett] and I started the P NAS r eplication study Crockett men-
obedience, begun in 1961, in which people seeing and sharing all sorts of large, lofty tioned—tools for evaluating and adduct-
gave what they believed were increasingly promises of what AI could offer the scien- ing research. We call these visions for AI
painful electric shocks to an unseen person tific pipeline and scientific community. because they’re not necessarily being exe-
when told to do so by an authority figure— When we really started to think we needed cuted today in a successful or clean way, but
and other well-known psychology studies. to write something was when we saw they’re all being explored and proposed.
The AI model responded similarly to hu- claims that large language models could
mans: 75 percent of simulated participants become substitutes for human subjects in You’ve pointed out that even if AI’s
administered shocks of 300 volts or more. research. These claims, given our years of hallucinations and other technical
But relying on these machine-learning conversation, seemed wrong-footed. problems are solved, risks remain.
algorithms also carries risks. Some of those MOLLY CROCKETT: I have been using CROCKETT: The overarching metaphor
risks are commonly acknowledged, such as machine learning in my own research for we use is this idea of monoculture, which
generative AI’s tendency to produce occa- several years, and advances in AI are en- comes from agriculture. Monocultures are
sional “hallucinations” (factual inaccura- abling scientists to ask questions we very efficient. They improve productivity.
cies or nonsense). AI tools can also replicate couldn’t ask before. But as I’ve been doing But they’re vulnerable to being invaded by
and even amplify human biases about char- this research and observing that excitement pests or disease; you’re more likely to lose
acteristics such as race and gender. And the among colleagues, I have developed a sense the whole crop when you have a monocul-
AI boom, which has given rise to complex, of uneasiness that’s been difficult to shake. ture versus diversity in what you’re grow-
trillion-variable models, requires water- ing. Scientific mono­cultures, too, are vul-
and energy-hungry data centers that are Beyond using large language models to nerable to risks such as errors propagating
likely to have high environmental costs. replace human participants, throughout the whole system.
Lauren Leffer 
One big risk is less obvious, though po- how are scientists thinking This is especially the case with
is a contributing writer
tentially very consequential: humans tend about deploying AI? and former tech report­ the foundation models in AI
to attribute a great deal of authority and CROCKETT: Previously we ing fellow at Scientific research, where one infrastruc-
trustworthiness to machines. This mis- helped write a response to a American. She covers ture is being used and applied
many subjects, includ­
placed faith could cause serious problems study in [the P
 roceedings of the ing artificial intelligence, across many domains. If there’s
when AI systems are used for research, National Academy of Sciences climate and weird biol­ some error in that system, it
according to a recent paper in N  ature. USA] that claimed machine o­gy, because she’s can have widespread effects.
“These tools are being anthropomor- learning could be used to pre- curious to a fault. Follow We identify two kinds of sci-
her on X @lauren_leffer
phized and framed as humanlike and super- dict whether research would and on Bluesky entific monocultures that can
human. We risk inappropriately extending [be replicable] just from the @laurenleffer.bsky.social arise with widespread AI adop-

80 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
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 And what type of research is that?
CROCKETT: Well, as of right now, AI
cannot think like a human. Any research
about human thought and behavior, as
well as qualitative research, is not address-
able with AI tools.

Would you say that in the worst-case

scenario, AI poses an existential threat
to human scientific knowledge produc-
tion? Or is that an overstatement?
CROCKETT: I don’t think it’s an over-
statement. I think we are at a crossroads:
How do we decide what knowledge is, and
how do we proceed in the endeavor of
knowledge production?

Is there anything else you think is im­­

port­ant for the public to really under-
tion. The first is the monoculture of know- atory breadth, where someone thinks stand about what’s happening with AI
ing. AI tools are suited to answer only cer- they’re examining more than they are. and scientific research?
tain kinds of questions. Because these There are an infinite number of questions MESSERI: From the perspective of reading
tools boost productivity, the overall set of we could ask about science and about the media coverage of AI, it seems as though this
research questions being explored could world. We worry that with the expansion is some preordained, inevitable “evolution”
become tailored to what AI is good at. of AI, the questions that AI is well suited to of scientific and technical development. But
Then there’s the monoculture of the answer will be mistaken for the entire field as an anthropologist of science and technol-
knower, where AI tools come to replace hu- of questions one could ask. Then there’s ogy, I would really like to emphasize that
man thinkers. And because AI tools have the risk of the illusion of objectivity. Either science and tech don’t proceed in an inevita-
a specific standpoint, this shift eliminates there’s an assumption that AI represents all ble direction. It is always human-driven.
the diversity of human perspectives from standpoints, or there’s an assumption that These narratives of inevitability are them-
research production. When you have many AI has no standpoint at all. But at the end of selves a product of human imagination and
kinds of minds working on a problem, the day, AI tools are created by humans come from mistaking the desire by some for
you’re more likely to spot false assump- coming from a particular perspective. a prophecy for all. Everyone, even nonscien-
tions or missed opportunities. Both mono- tists, can be part of questioning this narra-
cultures could lead to cognitive illusions. How can scientists avoid falling into tive of inevitability by imagining the differ-
these traps? How can we mitigate ent futures that might come true instead.
What do you mean by “illusions”? these risks? CROCKETT: Being skeptical about AI in
MESSERI: One example that’s already out MESSERI: There’s the institutional level science doesn’t require being a hater of AI in
there in psychology is the illusion of ex- where universities and publishers dictate science. We love science. I’m excited about
planatory depth. Basically, when someone research. These institutions are developing its potential for science. But just because an
in your community claims they know partnerships with AI companies. We have to AI tool is being used in science does not
something, you tend to assume you know be very circumspect about the motivations mean that it is automatically better science.
that thing as well. behind that. One mitigation strategy is just As scientists, we are trained to deny our
to be incredibly forthright about where the humanness. We’re trained to think human
In your paper, you cite research demon- funding for AI is coming from and who experience, bias and opinion have no place in
strating that using a search engine can benefits from the work being done on it. the scientific method. The future of autono-
trick someone into believing they know CROCKETT: At the institutional level, mous AI “self-driving” labs is the pinnacle of
something when really they only have funders, journal editors and universities realizing that sort of training. But increas-
online access to that knowledge. And stu- can be mindful of developing a diverse ingly, we are seeing evidence that diversity of
dents who use AI assistant tools to respond portfolio of research to ensure that they’re thought, experience and training in humans
to test questions end up thinking they not putting all the resources into research who do the science is vital for producing ro-
understand a topic better than they do. that uses a single-AI approach. In the fu- bust, innovative and creative knowledge. We
MESSERI: Exactly. Building off that illu- ture it might be necessary to consciously don’t want to lose that. To keep the vitality of
sion of explanatory depth, we also identify protect resources for the kinds of research scientific-­knowledge production, we need to
two others. One is the illusion of explor- that can’t be addressed with AI tools. keep humans in the loop.

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© 2024 Scientific American
OBSERVATORY KEEPING AN EYE ON SCIENCE

Deadly Delays exposed to asbestos compared with that in

the general population. Asbestos expo-
sure also led to increased rates of lung,
The harms of asbestos have been known for pleura, stomach, colon and rectal cancers.
more than a century. Why did the U.S. take Crucially, the evidence indicated that
so long to ban it? BY NAOMI ORESKES there was no safe level of exposure.
At a 1964 New York Academy of Sci-
ences conference on asbestos, industry

I
representatives agreed that the only way
N MARCH the U.S. Environmental lung disease often seen in asbestos work- to prevent cancers caused by asbestos ex­­
Protection Agency announced that it ers, and doctors began to notice that vic- posure was to eliminate that exposure.
was banning ongoing uses of asbestos. tims of asbestosis often also developed And so, in the 1970s, many nations began
People might have thought, Wait— lung cancer. to ban asbestos. As of 2020, at least 67
what? Wasn’t it already banned? After More than 30 years passed before the countries had banned asbestos use either
all, many remember asbestos—a natu- asbestos-cancer link was firmly estab- entirely or with very limited exemptions.
rally occurring, fibrous mineral that is lished, however. In 1960 a book published Because of the long latency period of
resistant to heat and flame but is also toxic by E. I. du Pont de Nemours & many cancers caused by as­­
and carcinogenic—being removed from Company openly acknowl- Naomi Oreskes is a best­os—and the difficulty of
schools and hospitals across the U.S. start- edged that “pulmonary carci- professor of the history knowing all the circumstances
ing in the 1970s. The new epa decision is noma has been ob­­served with of science at Harvard in which people might have
welcome, of course, but it highlights the such high frequency in em­­ University. She is author been exposed to asbestos out-
of Why Trust Science?
need to figure out a better process for dis- ployees of the asbestos indus- (Princeton University side industrial settings—it is
pensing with deadly products. try that a causal relationship Press, 2019) and co-­ hard to say just how many peo-
Scientific understanding of the harms has been accepted by most author of T he Big Myth ple have died or are still dying
of asbestos can be traced back to 1898, authorities.” Four years later (Bloomsbury, 2023). from asbestos. The University
when British factory inspector Lucy Irving J. Selikoff, a doctor and of Washington–based In­­sti­
Deane described asbestos manufacturing researcher at Mount Sinai Hospital in New tute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
as one of four dusty occupations worthy of York City, tied together various lines of estimates that as­­best­os caused more than
scientific observation because of “their investigation in a now classic study. He 40,764 worker deaths in 2019 alone; this
easily demonstrated danger to the health found a statistically significant higher figure does not include deaths outside
of workers.” In 1927 the term “asbestosis” incidence of mesothelioma—an other- industrial settings, such as those of family
was adopted to describe a devastating wise extremely rare cancer—in workers members exposed to asbestos brought
home on a worker’s clothes or shoes.
According to the U.S. Centers for Dis-
ease Control and Prevention, be­­tween
1999 and 2015 there were 45,221 me­­so­­
the­li­o­ma deaths in the U.S. The cumula-
tive number of occupational deaths that
were caused by asbestos over the course of
the 20th century may be something on
the order of 17 million, with perhaps an­­
oth­er two million deaths from nonoccupa-
tional exposures.
Yet until now, only various partial and
limited bans have been in place in the U.S.
It’s generally impossible to say why
something didn’t happen in a given situa-
tion. But in this case, industry pushback,
aided by antiregulatory attitudes that
have dominated in the U.S. since the
1980s, clearly played a role. In 1989 the
epa tried to use its authority under the
Toxic Substances Control Act (TOSCA) to
phase out and ultimately ban most asbes-
tos-containing products. But a company

82 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4 Illustration by Scott Brundage

© 2024 Scientific American
 METER EDITED BY DAVA SOBEL

named Corrosion Proof Fittings, backed

by several trade associations, successfully CHRYSALIS
challenged the rule in federal court. The
plaintiffs claimed that the agency’s rule We think of metamorphoses
would save only three lives over the course as glorious and beautiful,
a quiescent
of 13 years and at “an approximate cost of
$128–277 million.” That was patently chrysalis emerging
false, and the court did not accept it. But it as a yellow butterfly
did accept a different complaint about the slowly unfolding her
procedure by which the epa had come to translucent wings
its proposed remedy. letting them dry
The epa could have proposed a new in the open air
rule, but during the 1990s the political and flying off
tide had turned against “big government” in a flittering arc
as various industry groups worked to de­­ reminding us
mon­ize “regulation,” and the epa stood
of our emergence from
back. Rather than attempting to propose a the chrysalis of self-conscious
new, broad rule under TOSCA, the agency adolescence
fo­cused on more limited and specific reg-
ulations, such as developing guidelines to into the less tumultuous
uncertainties
accredit asbestos-removal personnel, or
of adulthood and of
regulations that were explicitly autho-
rized by Congress. the final transformation
One such regulation was the 1990 As­­ we yearn for, the moldering body
bestos School Hazard Abatement Re­au- releasing the immortal spirit, but imagine
thorization Act, which empowered the how the wormlike
epa to help schools deal with asbestos on caterpillar feels after a life
their grounds. As a result of these choices, of serenely munching leaves
asbestos use was greatly reduced, but it to curl herself
was not eliminated, and a number of on the underside of a chosen leaf
asbestos-bearing products remained on secreting a fiber
the market. spinning a cocoon, incorporating
Moreover, throughout the 1990s and twigs, urticating hairs,
2000s industry groups pursued a strategy fecal pellets, bits of leaf and bark
similar to that of the tobacco industry,
disguised from
attempting to cast doubt on the science
predatory bats and nightjars
that demonstrated the harms of asbestos. while the arrival works its magic and
Among other things, they attempted to
discredit asbestos researchers—particu- if she’s aware
larly Selikoff—as zealots and to muddy as all things are aware
rock, tree, wind
the scientific waters by claiming that only
certain mineralogical forms of asbestos she must feel
were hazardous, when in fact the science her skin stretching, covering
supported no such distinction. her body now
In 2016 Congress amended TOSCA to a thing with wings
restore to the epa some of the authority that doesn’t resemble
that had been stripped from it by the hope so much
courts. The asbestos ban is the epa’s first as grace, the undeserved love
new rule under the amended law. that comes into our lives
America was once a leader in occupa- as a gift.
tional health and safety. Now we are lag-
gards. It took 126 years for us to heed Lucy Michael Simms has written four full-length poetry
collections, the latest of which is S
 trange
Deane’s warning about the dangers of Meadowlark ( Ragged Sky Press, 2023). In 2011 the
asbestos. We need a better way to trans- Pennsylvania State Legislature awarded him a
late science into policy. Certificate of Recognition for his service to the arts.

Illustration by Masha Foya J u ne 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 83

© 2024 Scientific American
REVIEWS EDITED BY AMY BRADY

Everything ness and God. The game is not

something you can choose to
play or not; it’s a shadow in the
fying logic gone awry. Technolo-
gy and gamified work promised
to free us from labor but in-

Is a Game Plato’s cave you didn’t even re-

alize you were living in.
Clancy weaves a clear-eyed
stead generate more, with re-
wards not for workers but for
shareholders. And yet this un-
What we have gained, and lost, by gamifying account of games from ancient restrained, amoral growth pos-
our lives BY CARMEN MARIA MACHADO history—they predate written sesses a kind of logic familiar to
language, she tells us—to the anyone who has played Monop-
modern world of computers oly—even if that same person,
and the Internet. She explores in their real life, struggles to
the role of dopamine in learn- support themselves.
ing, the essential value of ran- Our knack for adapting to
domness and chance, and the a game’s rules—even when
addictive qualities of maybes they deviate significantly from
and surprises. She covers mul- our values or experience—
tiple tangles between humans illustrates one of games’ most
and computers on the battle- simultaneously charming and
fields of Go, checkers and sinister qualities: the ease
chess; unpacks the long and with which we can use games
disturbing history of war as a proxy to divorce ourselves
games; and dispatches the from the things they stand in
thorny question of artificial in- for. Clancy is, rightfully, pessi-
telligence—especially large mistic about this faculty and
language models such as how what­ever strengths it lends
ChatGPT—with ruthless effi- us seem to be outweighed by
ciency. (It is dangerous, she its potential for disaster. “Game
concludes, to “[treat] language theorists sought universal solu-
like a game without meaning.”) tions in abstract mathematics,
Clancy carefully puts these and the world is worse off for
historical moments and devel- our leaders’ faith in their tech-
opments in context. This ap- nocratic solutions,” she argues.
proach is particularly pleasur- And those who seek to win at
able when it takes the form of any cost—so-called maximizers
deep dives into specific games. who view life as a zero-sum
NONFICTION When was the essential tool for growth, learn- There’s Kriegsspiel, a war game game—are already among us.
last time you ing and survival, as well as a way beloved by 19th- and 20th-­ This discussion may make
played a game? Maybe you beat of understanding our own bod- century leaders (including the reader feel slightly cornered.
a friend at chess, or played ies, history and future. She ar- Adolf Hitler), whose influence Is there any way to escape the
Sushi Go! with your kids, or gues that games—with their mix lives on in Dungeons and Drag- most damaging philosophies
recently lost hours of your life to of play, choices, tactics, goals ons, Settlers of Catan and Risk; that have emerged from games’
Baldur’s Gate 3 (raises hand). and rewards—touch on every SimCity, whose sandbox struc- omnipresence? Is anything in
But even if you can’t remember, single natural and artificial as- ture became the darling of radi- our lives untouched by the push
the fact is, you probably played pect of our lives. They can re- cal libertarians seeking to strip and pull of these models?
a game today. Have you felt the flect biological impulses, evolu- resources from the govern- Clancy is not trying to fix
languorous tug of swiping or tionary strategies, social struc- ment; and Snakes and Ladders, these problems. Hers is a de-
scrolling through videos or dat- tures, military operations, and which is based on a 13th-cen- scriptive, not prescriptive, proj-
ing profiles? Counted your the way we have historically tury Indian game, Moksha Pat- ect. But it’s one that contextu-
steps? Been subject to the forc- conceptualized morality, fair- am, meant to elucidate ideas alizes and clarifies the upshot
es of the economy or the gov- about karma and fate. of losing perspective. “Games
ernment? Applied for a loan? But no sooner does Clancy have always been about discov-
Used the Internet? Worked for establish games’ ubiquitous ering who we are,” she writes. At
a company? Experienced desire, power than she demon­­strates the end of the book, the ques-
motivation, pleasure? how overreliance on the sim- tion remains: In the many kinds
Games have developed a plicity of game logic has de- of games we join in, what kind
contemporary, ahistorical repu- stroyed empires, expedited war of player will you choose to be?
Olena Ruban/Getty Images

tation for triviality—a way peo- crimes, undermined education,

ple lose themselves instead of aided unfettered capitalism Carmen Maria Machado is author
understanding themselves. But Playing with Reality: and—at least once—brought of In the Dream House (Graywolf Press,
as Kelly Clancy explains in Play- How Games Have Shaped Our World  the world to the brink of nuclear 2019) and H  er Body and Other Parties
ing with Reality, games are not by Kelly Clancy. disaster. Capitalism is perhaps (Graywolf Press, 2017), which was
only not unserious but also an Riverhead, 2024 ($30) the best example of this simpli- a finalist for the National Book Award.

84 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
© 2024 Scientific American
 Unwinding the River
A radical new relationship
with the great Mississippi

NONFICTION Blast. Carve. atop levees. Four thousand

Dredge. Smash. years ago the continent’s
Such powerful verbs fill a native inhabitants built
single paragraph midstream enormous earthworks along
in Boyce Upholt’s sweeping the river, mysterious testa-
ecological history of the ments from great civilizations.
Mississippi River. It’s fitting, But too quickly, both on the A tugboat pushes cargo on the Mississippi River at dawn.
given that brute force has continent and in Upholt’s
been the dominant paradigm telling, Indigenous peoples deemed expendable along the his own uncertainty about how
since settler times for con- were forced offstage. Enter way as engineers forced their to move forward. Break down
tending with the river, whose settlers and swindlers, pio­­­neers will on the landscape. “It’s an all the barriers and let the river
watershed encompasses and politicians, all bent on imagined canvas,” Upholt run free again along the sinewy
40 percent of the continental unbending the river, ecosys- writes, “that we’ve stretched paths depicted in cartographer
U.S. There was a time when tems and human bodies atop the geological frame of Harold Fisk’s 1940s maps, one
humans had a more intimate the continent.” of which graces the cover of
relationship with the river Upholt’s narrative can loop The Great River? Pursue green
the Ojibwe people called the like the river’s oxbows, folding infrastructure as relentlessly
Misi-­ziibi, w
 hich Upholt back on itself in an at times as it has been denied? Whom
translates as “the Great River,” confusing chronology, but or what to prioritize? Farmers
and in this fascinating and such is the complexity of the or cypress or shrimpers?
Riddhish Chakraborty/Getty Images

troubling book, he argues Mississippi. The river that Commerce or communities?

that we could choose this once was will never be again, Even if we can rekindle our
path again. so altered is its shape and so relationship with the river,
Upholt, a New Orleans– transformed the world it what we may not be able to
The Great River:
based journalist, deftly weaves The Making and Unmaking courses through, a warmer choose is the path of the river
the river’s story with deep of the Mississippi place that swings more itself. Water finds its way.
historical research, as well as by Boyce Upholt. frequently between drought Can we?
reporting from canoes and W. W. Norton, 2024 ($29.99) and flood. Upholt reckons with — Meera Subramanian

IN BRIEF

Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat The Garden against Time: Honeymoons in Temporary Locations
by Joe Shute. Bloomsbury Wildlife, 2024 ($26) In Search of a Common Paradise by Ashley Shelby.
New Yorkers will recall a by Olivia Laing. W. W. Norton, 2024 ($27.99) University of Minnesota Press, 2024 ($22.95)
sanitation commissioner’s When the COVID pandemic Unsettling and satirical, this
now infamous proclamation: shuttered communal out- collection of stories and erra-
“The rats don’t run this city. door spaces, author Olivia ta from a “post-Impact” near
We do.” Rat chroniclers of- Laing began restoring a pri- future considers life amid
ten show disdain toward vate 18th-century garden escalating climate disasters,
their subjects, but in Stow- in Suffolk, England. Her focused on the lived experi-
away, journalist Joe Shute positions him- memoir alternates between ence of change as it’s hap-
self instead as a kind of Lorax, speaking vignettes of this restoration process— pening. Freighters relocate Arctic life to the
for the rats when few others will. He from uprooting obnoxious nettles to plant- Antarctic; “Internally Displaced Persons of
guides readers down sewers, into bustling ing floors of wallflowers—and thoughtful Means” flee America’s coasts and head to
(rat-filled) metropolises and through research on the cultural significance of heartland Resettlement Zones; and a phar-
mounds of research in pursuit of a deeper reconstructing Eden. As Laing guides maceutical company offers Climafeel, “a
understanding of rats and, by extension, readers through the exclusionary history recombinant DNA biologic that blunts the
humans. Shute’s earnest, playful descrip- of plant domestication and land owner- effects of solastalgia,” the psychological
tions of these creatures—“a shadow of ship, she seeks to transform her garden distress afflicting survivors in a world up­­­
us,” “the ultimate transgressors”—betray into a place of universal refuge. Written ended. Writer Ashley Shelby’s storytelling
some bias. But his enthusiasm spreads in lyrical prose that almost begs to be is brisk, sharp-elbowed and deeply empa-
easily, much like the ultrasonic laughter sung, this book offers captivating insights thetic, even as she experiments with a host
that his pet rats, Molly and Ermintrude, into “the cost of building paradise.” of forms, including the brochure text for a
make when tickled.  —Maddie Bender — Lucy Tu cruise to flooded cities. —Alan Scherstuhl

J u ne 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 85
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GRAPHIC
GRAPHIC SCIENCE
SCIENCE

The Lure of Light in the Night

Insects aren’t drawn to nighttime illumination for the reasons
we think they are
TEXT BY GARY STIX | GRAPHIC BY IMMY SMITH

T
HE ENDURING IMAGE of a moth frantically circling a noc-
turnal light source—whether candle, campfire or electric
bulb—has long intrigued both scientists and literary types,
including Shakespeare. (“Thus hath the candle singed the
moth,” Portia quips in The Merchant of Venice.) Entomol-
ogists have mulled possible explanations for insects’ attraction to
all forms of artificial light. The creatures, some have suggested,
are drawn to a flame’s heat, or they mistake fire or electric light for
the moon, which is assumed to act as a kind of celestial compass.
In perhaps the most intensive study to date attempting to answer
this question, researchers claim to have come up with “the most
plausible model for why insects gather at artificial lights,” as reported
in Nature Communications. Investigators at Imperial College Lon-
don, Florida International University and the Council on Interna-
tional Educational Exchange discovered through fieldwork and
laboratory experiments that insects grow increasingly disoriented
around artificial light—so much so that they lose all perspective
about which way is up. It turns out that insects ordinarily maintain
their up-down orientation by turning their backs toward the sky,
the brightest thing they perceive even at night. That allows
them to stay properly aligned on a steady flight path.
This evolutionary strategy sufficed for many millions
of years, until humans came on the scene with their fire
and electricity. When insects encounter an outdoor bulb
after dusk, confusion reigns. They tilt their backs toward the
bulb as if it were the sky and initiate endless, sometimes erratic
loops around it. With light pollution increasing and with drastic
declines in insect numbers worldwide, new forms of lighting may be
needed to preserve these populations, which are integral to the
health of global ecosystems.

LIGHT AND FLIGHT PATHS

The sustained banking motion that
a moth maintains to keep its back
to the light results in a relatively
unperturbed, orbiting flight path
around the lightbulb. At times,
though, the moth ends up flying
under the bulb and begins a steep
upward climb. The insect then
begins to stall, losing speed as
it climbs before crashing down.
Similarly, when the moth flies over
the bulb, its inverted orientation
at the apex of its flight path can
send it plummeting earthward. Moth’s back
(orange dot) Orbiting Stalling Inverting

86 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
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 WITH THE SUN AT YOUR BACK
The tendency of insects to turn their backs toward
the light is called the dorsal light response. Bigger animals
such as humans can tell up from down based on the pull
of gravity sensed directly by the inner ear, among other
inputs. Insects’ minute sensory organs and their rapid
aerial accelerations prevent a moth or a wasp from
distinguishing immediately above from below. As
a result, they use the sky’s brightness as a constant
that allows them to self-orient by pointing their backs
to the heavens—or at least they did before the arrival
of human civilizations that always keep the lights on.

Large yellow underwing moth

(Noctua pronuba)

WHICH WAY IS UP? Light reflected from surface above

To probe the validity of their
back-to-the-light thesis, re­
searchers in the lab at Imperial Moth’s back
College London created two (orange dot)
opposing scenarios and tested
them using high-speed video.
In one scenario, ultraviolet light
shining from above (simulating the
sky) enabled the moths to fly along
a stable, linear path. In the other,
UV light emitted from the floor Normal flight Moth inverts and crashes
caused the insects to tilt, fully
invert and come crashing down.

Light reflected from surface below

Source: “Why Flying Insects Gather at Artificial Light,” by Samuel T. Fabian

et al., in N ature Communications, Vol. 15; January 2024 (r eference) J u ne 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 87
© 2024 Scientific American
HISTORY C
 OMPILED BY MARK FISCHETTI

50, 100 & 150 Years like. This is true to a certain ex­­
tent, as has been found in flow-
ers. But the feathers of the
ments. The mountains were
colored according to survey re­­
ports, and volcanic craters were
is overlaid with several layers of blue­bird, the kingfisher and oth- formed. The lowlands were put
round stones, and the fire is er birds are colored blue due to in, including depths of water.
lighted. When everything is ap­­ the dispersion of the light strik- Cliffs, marshes and beaches
par­ent­ly at a great heat the ing minute air cells in the horny were reproduced in exact col-
priest walks across. It has been structure of the feathers. So far ors. Forests of redwood, oak
discovered that one kind of no blue pigment has been ex­­ and pine were made from
stone, basalt, is used. This is of tracted from these feathers.” carved fragments of sponges,
volcanic origin, is extremely painted the natural shades.
porous and is one of the worst THE LARGEST MAP Paved and un­­paved roads, rail-
conductors of heat known. It is IN THE WORLD roads and all the mountain
quite possible to have a lump of “Showing all natural and man- trails were carved out as trench-
PLEISTOCENE HUMANS basalt red-hot at one end and made features, the largest map es, and filled in with magnesite,
FOUND IN UKRAINE yet cool enough to hold in the in the world is being erected in white-­surfaced for every mile
1974 “The systematic hand at the other end. Thus the the Ferry Building in San Fran- of the 6,000 of paved highways.
study of Pleistocene cunning priest knows exactly cisco. The map, about two No railroad is too small to be
humans was first fo­­cused in where to put his feet.” thirds completed, is 600 feet shown. Ties and rails were laid,
France. Yet the first occupation long, a ‘working model’ of the tunnels were cut through the
sites to be discovered in cen- WHAT MAKES state of California, made to mountain walls, and trestles
tral and eastern Eu­­rope, many BLUEBIRDS BLUE? scale. All the rivers, bays, lakes and bridges put in. Mine shafts
of them spectacularly rich, “The average person is apt to and coastline are modeled on were bored. Steamers and barg-
were unearthed al­­most as long think that all the color effects data from the United States es are placed on the rivers to
ago. The information they con- seen in nature are produced by Geo­detic and Geological sur- indicate directions and limits
tain is vital to understanding certain substances, dyes or the veys and various state depart- of inland water traffic.”
how early humans survived and
perhaps even thrived under
ice-age conditions in Europe,
perhaps best demonstrated by
nearly 100 Pleistocene sites in
and around the Ukraine. The
earliest sites are be­­tween
80,000 and 75,000 years old.”

STATUE WANDERS
ATOP THE U.S. CAPITOL
1874 “The iron dome of the
Capitol at Washing-
ton is 300 feet high, and is sur-
mounted by a metallic statue. It
has a motion resulting from the
unequal expansion of the oppo-
WALKING BAREFOOT site sides of the dome. The
ON RED-HOT STONES length of the oscillation from
1924 “In some parts of the eastern limit to the western
Asia the priests, limit is four and a half inches. In
in order to show their magical the morning the east side of the
 ol. 230, No. 6; June 1974

powers, walk on red-hot stones dome is rapidly heated, while

spread over a fierce fire, without the west side is chilled by radia-
any protection to their feet. This tion through the night. As the
achievement has always puzzled sun passes to the western side,
scientists. Many times the feet this side is heated, but because
have been closely examined and the east side still retains a good
S cientific American, V

have not shown any signs of portion of its heat, the expan-
1974, Spiral Reaction: “Spirals of chemical activity form in a shallow dish of
being burned. The real explana- red reagent. A blue ring was induced by touching the surface of the solution with sion is more nearly equalized.
tion has only just come to light. a hot filament, then the dish was rocked to break the ring. The free ends of the [Overall,] the statue inclination
A shallow pit is dug and in the fragmented circular wave each curl around a pivot point, winding up into spirals.” to the west is a little greater
bottom is placed the wood. This Photographs were taken over eight minutes. than that toward the east.”

88 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N J u ne 2 02 4
© 2024 Scientific American