January 2024

Preventing
Teen Depression
Vitamin D
Hype and
Reality
The Science
of Asexuality
Cosmic
Voids
Huge empty patches
could help solve
the universe’s
greatest mysteries
January 2024
ScientificAmerican.com
© 2023 Scientific American
CONTENTS
January 2024
VOLUME 330, NUMBER 1
FEATURES
COSMOLOGY
20 COSMIC NOTHING
Huge empty patches of the universe
could help solve some of the greatest
mysteries in the cosmos.
BY MICHAEL D. LEMONICK
HEALTH
28 THE RISE AND FALL OF VITAMIN D
Why worries about widespread vitamin
D deficiencies—and claims of several
health benefits—are overblown.
BY CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN
ENVIRONMENT
36 RUSTING RIVERS
Streams in Alaska are turning orange
with iron and sulfuric acid. Scientists
are trying to figure out why.
BY ALEC LUHN
MENTAL HEALTH
50 PREEMPTIVE MEASURES
Early intervention programs can
prevent depression’s onset, potentially
changing teens’ mental health trajectories
for a lifetime. BY ELIZABETH SVOBODA
MATHEMATICS
58 THE MISSING PIECE
The quest for an “einstein” tile—a shape
never seen before in mathematics.
BY CRAIG S. KAPLAN
SEXUALITY
68 LIFE BEYOND SEX
A lack of sexual attraction was long seen
as a problem that needed to be fixed.
New research on asexuality is expanding
ideas of love and intimacy.
BY ALLISON PARSHALL
ON THE COVER
Large empty swaths of space called voids haven’t
received much scientific attention. Lately, though,
astrophysicists are finally getting the kind of data
they need on the size and spread of voids to start
using them to study some of the big cosmic
questions of our time, such as the nature of dark
matter and dark energy. Researchers investigate
an acid burn in north
Illustration by Chris Wren and western Alaska.
Kenn Brown/MondoWorks. P. 36
Photograph by Taylor Roades Ja n ua ry 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC AN.COM 1

CONTENTS
January 2024 VOLUME 330, NUMBER 1
4 FROM THE EDITOR

6 CONTRIBUTORS
8 LETTERS
10 ADVANCES
The hidden physics of snowstorms. How to cheat
at a coin toss. Restoring the prehistoric rainbow.
Daytime animals become creatures of the night.
74 SCIENCE AGENDA
The nations that produce the most greenhouse
gases need to compensate those that suffer from
their effects. BY THE EDITORS
75 FORUM
The world solved the acid rain problem through collab-
oration and a commitment to reducing the chemical
that caused it. We can do the same for climate change.
BY HANNAH RITCHIE
78 THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH
Better ways to measure obesity.
BY LYDIA DENWORTH
81 Q&A
Why cats are evolutionarily perfect.
BY KATE WONG
82 MIND MATTERS
The “hero’s journey” offers a powerful way
10
to reframe experiences. BY BEN ROGERS,
KURT GRAY AND MIKE CHRISTIAN
84 THE UNIVERSE
nasa needs a bigger budget. Period. BY PHIL PLAIT
86 MATH
This “guaranteed” gambling strategy could ruin
you—but there’s a safer one. BY JACK MURTAGH
89 OBSERVATORY
The definition of the “Anthropocene Epoch”
conveys the all-encompassing challenge
we face. BY NAOMI ORESKES
90 METER
The same poetry applies to crocodile mothers
and human ones. BY NAILA MOREIRA 92
AND STEPHEN PETEGORSKY
92 REVIEWS
Scientific American (ISSN 0036-8733), Volume 330, Number 1, January 2024, published monthly, except for a July/August
Love and loss in a quantum loop. How the issue, by Scientific American, a division of Springer Nature America, Inc., 1 New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New York, N.Y. 10004-
moon swayed history. A dizzying first-contact 1562. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post International Publications
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96 HISTORY independence in reporting developments in science to our readers. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
BY MARK FISCHETTI claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
2 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC AN Ja n ua ry 2 02 4 Illustration by Chanelle Nibbelink

FROM THE EDITOR
Shining Sunlight build these skills and why a focus on fixing rather than preventing
problems makes it difficult for school systems to implement such
on Vitamin D Claims
programs. We hope our article will help broaden support for these
kinds of initiatives. Prevention rarely gets as much appreciation
as it deserves.
The photographs of Alaska’s rusting rivers, beginning on
page 36, are real—the rivers really do look brilliant orange, and
H
that is literally rust. Climate journalist Alec Luhn accompanied
AVE YOU EVER gotten a blood test result saying your scientists studying these bizarre rivers to figure out what is caus-
vitamin D levels are low? Or heard that the vitamin is a ing the discoloration, and photographer Taylor Roades used
miracle cure? It turns out fears about deficiencies, and drones to capture the scenes. Alaska is warming even faster than
hopes of the vitamin’s healing power, have been wildly the Lower 48, and thawing permafrost there is changing ecosys-
overblown. Author Christie Aschwanden on page 28 tems dramatically. Acid from newly exposed bedrock could be
explains why the evidence has pointed one way and then the leaching out iron that later forms rust, or it might be bacteria or
other, and why blood tests can be misleading, in a story full of some other force.
insights about the advancement of science. You need some vita- Until recently, a general lack of feeling sexually attracted to oth-
min D, though probably not supplements. We make vitamin D ers was often considered a psychological problem in itself or a symp-
when sunlight hits our skin, like a human form of photosynthe- tom of some other disorder. Now asexual people and researchers
sis. The best way to get it, if you are able, is to spend more time who study asexuality have shown that it is just another way to be
outdoors—which tends to make everything better. human. Allison Parshall, a writer and editor who works with us fre-
Prepare to look at the night sky in a different way after reading quently (she edited this issue’s Advances department), has a
Michael D. Lemonick’s article on page 20. The universe is full thoughtful story on page 68 about the new cultural and scientific
of . . . voids. They are empty spaces where almost nothing cur- awareness of asexuality and how it is opening up new social norms.
rently knowable exists. Mike is a former editor at S cientific Amer- You may have read about the discovery of a long-sought
ican and a longtime physics writer (and the nicest guy), and he’s mathematical shape called an einstein tile that can cover an in-
been following the mystery of the cosmic voids for decades. When finite surface without repeating a pattern. I thought I’d heard all
they were discovered, they blew astronomers’ minds, but now we about it . . . but then I read computer scientist Craig S. Kaplan’s
have enough data and computing power to study these empty account of its discovery on page 58. It is a delightful narrative,
spaces, which could improve our understanding of gravity, dark full of dramatic tension and charismatic characters who are hav-
matter and dark energy. ing an absolute blast pursuing a new understanding of tiling pat-
Depression can be a debilitating, chronic, episodic condition, terns. The illustrations by Miriam Martincic are inspired by
and preventing it could save money, health and lives. Now there’s M. C. Escher, the artist whose dazzling repeated patterns were
strong evidence that prevention programs can help. Screening popularized in the U.S. by S cientific
teenagers and helping at-risk kids learn emotional and cognitive American. Enjoy the challenge of men-
Laura Helmuth
skills can reduce the risk of early signs turning into mental illness. is editor in chief tally fitting these pieces together in your
Science writer Elizabeth Svoboda discusses on page 50 how to of Scientific American. own mind.
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 Chief Technology Officer, Astronomer Royal and Emeritus
Doherty Earth Observatory, Professor, University of Deputy Director, Woodwell of Zoology and Curator of Everbridge Professor of Cosmology
Columbia University Maryland College Park and Climate Research Center Mammals, Museum of Satyajit Mayor and Astrophysics,
Emery N. Brown Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Carlos Gershenson Comparative Zoology, Senior Professor, Institute of Astronomy,
Edward Hood Taplin Professor School of Public Health Research Professor, National Harvard University National Center for Biological University of Cambridge
of Medical Engineering and of Kate Crawford Autonomous University of Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Sciences, Tata Institute Daniela Rus
Computational Neuroscience, Research Professor, University Mexico and Visiting Scholar, Co-founder, Urban Ocean Lab, of Fundamental Research 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 John P. Moore Professor of Electrical
Professor of Anesthesia, Annenberg, and Co-founder, Alison Gopnik Save Project Professor of Microbiology and Engineering and Computer
Harvard Medical School AI Now Institute, Professor of Psychology and Christof Koch Immunology, Weill Medical Science and Director,
Vinton G. Cerf New York University Affiliate Professor of Chief Scientist, MindScope College of Cornell University CSAIL, M.I.T.
Chief Internet Evangelist, Nita A. Farahany Philosophy, University Program, Allen Institute for Priyamvada Natarajan Meg Urry
Google Professor of Law and of California, Berkeley Brain Science Professor of Astronomy and Israel Munson Professor of
Emmanuelle Charpentier Philosophy, Director, Duke Lene Vestergaard Hau Meg Lowman Physics, Yale University Physics and Astronomy and
Scientific Director, Max Planck Initiative for Science & Society, Mallinckrodt Professor of Director and Founder, TREE Donna J. Nelson Director, Yale Center for
Institute for Infection Biology, Duke University Physics and of Applied Physics, Foundation, Rachel Carson Professor of Chemistry, Astronomy and Astrophysics
and Founding and Acting Jonathan Foley Harvard University Fellow, Ludwig Maximilian University of Oklahoma Amie Wilkinson
Director, Max Planck Unit for Executive Director, University Munich, and Lisa Randall Professor of Mathematics,
the Science of Pathogens Project Drawdown Research Professor, University Professor of Physics, University of Chicago
of Science Malaysia Harvard University
4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N Jan uary 2 02 4
CONTRIBUTORS
MICHAEL D. LEMONICK MARTIN KRZYWINSKI

COSMIC NOTHING, PAGE 20 COSMIC NOTHING, PAGE 20
Mike Lemonick’s father was A lifelong stargazer, Martin
his own personal Carl Sagan, Krzywinski was fascinated by
a physicist who fostered his anything to do with astronomy,
son’s love of the cosmos with first as a child in Warsaw,
stories of Halley’s Comet. Poland, and then in Canada.
The comet was overhead when So when he stumbled on a
Mark Twain was born and then video five years ago about
again as he lay on his death- something called the Boötes
bed, or so the story goes. The void, he was intrigued. He knew
comet was coming again in Boötes as the kite-shaped con-
1986—”the distant future, or stellation that hosts the star
so it seemed to me in the Arcturus. But that this familiar
1950s,” Lemonick says. That constellation contained a mas-
appearance turned out to be sive swath of cosmic nothing-
a dud, “but by then I was ness was entirely new to him.
hooked.” In 1986 he was an “It was like love at first thought,”
editor at the magazine Science he reflects. “I can’t let this go.”
Digest when a non-comet- Krzywinski, who alternates
related revelation rocked the between calling himself an
field of cosmology: matter artistic scientist and a scien-
TAYLOR ROADES
isn’t evenly spread through tific artist, immediately began
RUSTING RIVERS, PAGE 36
the universe, as previously crafting a map of empty
Last summer photojournalist Taylor Roades traveled
thought, but clumps together spaces such as the Boötes
to Arctic Alaska to capture the region’s contaminated
into clusters. void across the universe, which
waterways in startling color. Before the trip, she had
In the ensuing decades, he has adapted into a graphic
seen only an aerial smartphone photograph of these
those clusters received almost for this issue.
rivers, featured in Alec Luhn’s article about the myste-
all the attention. But what The big illustration chal-
rious climate change–driven processes polluting
about the voids they left lenge was giving these empty
them with rust. Roades, who has been camping in
behind? “They were ignored for spaces character; most don’t
the Canadian backcountry since she was a child, ran
decades,” says Lemonick, a even have names. To Krzy-
through most of her drone’s battery life early in the
lecturer at Princeton University winski, that’s all the more
trip—surely the orange-tinted rivers they were seeing
and a former Scientific Ameri- intriguing. “What really inter-
were as bad as it would get? Then, around day four,
can editor. For this issue, he ests me are these giant places
she and the team of scientists reached swaths of
wrote about the physicists who far away that are difficult to
blackened land where vibrant orange sludge seeped
are shining a spotlight into imagine,” he says, because
from the ground like lava. “That was shocking,” even
these voids to solve some of that imagination fosters an
for the scientists, she says.
cosmology’s biggest mysteries. emotional connection. “I’m
Roades grew up in Toronto but moved west to Brit-
“It’s a very old story,” he more likely to emotionally
ish Columbia in 2013 in a “very conscious effort” to
says—yet also, somehow, relate to something that is
immerse herself—and her photography—in forests
brand-new. unseen and unknowable.”
and oceans. Her work has documented Canada’s “for-
gotten rainforests” where old-growth trees are threat-
ened by logging and a coastal B.C. First Nation that is
reclaiming and protecting its ancestral land. In a world CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN
rocked by climate change and environmental degrada- THE RISE AND FALL OF VITAMIN D, P AGE 28
tion, this work feels like a moral imperative. “What Thirteen years ago Christie Aschwanden wrote a cover story for
am I going to say to my future kids? That I did nothing Reader’s Digest debunking the health benefits of multivitamins.
or that I put my effort and skills into stopping it?” “I think it set a record for the most angry letters to the editor,”
she recalls—not because anything was incorrect but because
many people are very attached to their vitamins. “There was a
time when we thought that if we could just get everyone’s vitamin
D levels up, that could really improve overall health,” she says.
As Aschwanden shows in her article, it is now clear that vitamin
“The idea that vitamin pills D may be associated with good health but is probably not its cause.
Most of us get plenty of the substance without supplements. While
are somehow magic elixirs— reporting the story, she was surprised to learn how many of her
friends and loved ones had recently been told they were deficient
it’s very tempting.”
Taylor Roades
in vitamin D by their doctors. The idea “that vitamin pills are some-
how magic elixirs—it’s very tempting,” she says. “We’re all after
—Christie Aschwanden that one weird trick.”
LETTERS
E [email protected]
INTELLIGENCE PROBE endothelium and produces dengue shock

In “An AI Mystery,” George Musser makes syndrome. A number of vaccine con-
multiple references to “probes” that can structs have yielded VAH breakthrough
examine the methods an artificial-intelli- tissue infections, sometimes with lethal
gence model uses to produce its output. immune responses, such as formalin-inac-
Does this not effectively solve the “black tivated measles and earlier RSV vaccines
box” problem that is often cited by AI given to children, as well as killed SARS
experts—that is, the problem of our and MERS vaccines given to monkeys.
inability to know how an AI reaches a SCOTT B. HALSTEAD WESTWOOD, MASS.
certain conclusion? How is the hypotheti-
cal black box different from the inner DEMENTIA AND CREATIVITY
workings of AI revealed by these probes? Thanks for Robert Martone’s Mind
ELISE CORBIN T
ORONTO Matters article, “Dementia Can Unleash
Creativity.” My mother-in-law, as her
MUSSER REPLIES: P robes don’t solve the Alzheimer’s disease advanced, could spout
September 2023
black box problem on their own—they’re reams of reasonable poetry off the top of
just one research tool. They can reveal how her head. She had no previous inclination
groups of artificial neurons in a network outbursts to estimate limits of the abun- to write at all. I could never understand
encode higher-level information, such as dance of hypothetical low-mass primordial poetic creativity, let alone in someone who
parts of speech or positions on a chessboard. black holes that may have formed shortly needed help to do basic living tasks. It’s
Researchers first decide what information after the big bang. nice to know that she wasn’t the only one.
they want to look for and then design a I wonder if some of the hallucinogenic
probe to detect it and translate it into a VACCINE IMPROVEMENT drugs might work in a similar fashion.
human-readable form. The probe can As a physician and vaccinologist, I am EDWIN HAWKINS V
IA E-MAIL
resolve whether a network is merely thrilled that scientists have mastered the
parroting its training data or recognizing ability to differentiate protective and DUSTY BEAUTY
the patterns within it. But probes reveal disease-enhancing forms of respiratory In “Celestial Wonders,” Peter Tuthill
only the presence of information, not how, syncytial virus (RSV) F protein, as provides us with an almost unbelievable
or even whether, the network uses it to reach described in “The Long Shot,” by Tara side-by-side comparison of images of
a conclusion. Researchers must still trace Haelle. This advance has made possible dust surrounding a binary-star system.
how information flows through the system. the construction of safe and protective One portrayal is a complex computer
RSV vaccines that avoid vaccine-associ- simulation, and the other is an image of
BLACK HOLE DONE ated enhanced disease (VAED), some vibrant bands of bright colors received
In “Disappearing Act” [Advances], Adam of which have been recently licensed. from the James Webb Space Telescope.
Mann discusses the evaporation of black The phenomenon of VAED comprises They seem to match perfectly and are
holes, among other things. I have won- two rather different immunopathologies: equal in beauty. My appreciation for
dered what happens when an evaporating antibody-dependent enhancement theoretical physicists and their ability
black hole’s mass has decreased to the (ADE), which I discovered in the late to echo the real world keeps expanding.
point where its gravity is no longer strong 1970s, and vaccine-associated hypersensi- JOSEPH S. NARDELLO M
EDFORD, N.J.
enough to prevent the escape of electro- tivity (VAH). Intrinsic ADE contributes
magnetic radiation. Does the remainder of to dengue infections because dengue AI DON’T THINK SO
the black hole become visible? What does viruses form immune complexes with In “Safeguarding AI Is Up to Everyone”
it look like? What is the remaining matter? the antibody immunoglobulin G. These [Science Agenda], the editors state,
GLENN P. DAVIES HAMILTON, ONTARIO complexes establish productive cellular “Fundamentally, AI is a computing process
infections in macrophages that result in that looks for patterns or similarities in
THE EDITORS REPLY: Current theories the release of high concentrations of toxic enormous amounts of data fed to it.” I find
suggest that at a certain, extremely small NS1, a viral protein that damages cells’ it difficult to accept this definition of AI as
minimum mass, an evaporating black hole
will emit a burst of gamma rays as its “last
gasp” before vanishing from existence. “My appreciation for theoretical
Evaporation occurs so slowly that all known
black holes would require far longer than physicists and their ability to echo
the age of the universe to reach this point.
Consequently, astronomers have used the
the real world keeps expanding.”
nondetection of telltale gamma-ray JOSEPH S. NARDELLO MEDFORD, N.J.

®
ESTABLISHED 1845
valid because I believe that intelligence is EDITOR IN CHIEF Laura Helmuth
the opposite of rote data crunching: it is MANAGING EDITOR Jeanna Bryner COPY DIRECTOR Maria-Christina Keller CREATIVE DIRECTOR Michael Mrak
about creating novel ideas out of limited, EDITORIAL

incomplete and contradictory data or even CHIEF FEATURES EDITOR Seth Fletcher CHIEF NEWS EDITOR Dean Visser CHIEF OPINION EDITOR Megha Satyanarayana
no preexisting data at all. I think we should FEATURES

deflate the current AI hype by emphasizing SENIOR EDITOR, SUSTAINABILITY Mark Fischetti SENIOR EDITOR, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY Madhusree Mukerjee
SENIOR EDITOR, MEDICINE / SCIENCE POLICY Josh Fischman SENIOR EDITOR, TECHNOLOGY / MIND Jen Schwartz
this essence of intelligence. SENIOR EDITOR, SPACE / PHYSICS Clara Moskowitz SENIOR EDITOR, EVOLUTION / ECOLOGY Kate Wong
Regulation should cover all systems

NEWS
or products that produce a “humanlike” SENIOR EDITOR, SPACE / PHYSICS Lee Billings ASSOCIATE EDITOR, TECHNOLOGY Sophie Bushwick
SENIOR EDITOR, HEALTH AND MEDICINE Tanya Lewis ASSOCIATE EDITOR, SUSTAINABILITY Andrea Thompson
output. Requiring that such systems or SENIOR EDITOR, MIND / BRAIN Gary Stix ASSOCIATE EDITOR, HEALTH AND MEDICINE Lauren J. Young
SENIOR OPINION EDITOR Dan Vergano ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR Sarah Lewin Frasier
products include indelible source marks NEWS REPORTER Meghan Bartels
in their output should go a long way
MULTIMEDIA
toward preventing abuse and fraud. CHIEF MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Jeffery DelViscio CHIEF NEWSLETTER EDITOR Andrea Gawrylewski
SENIOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Tulika Bose CHIEF AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Sunya Bhutta
Maybe the method for hiding content MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Kelso Harper ASSOCIATE ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Arminda Downey-Mavromatis
in text and images described in “Out
ART
of Sight,” by Dina Genkina [Advances], SENIOR GRAPHICS EDITOR Jen Christiansen PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR Monica Bradley ART DIRECTOR, ONLINE Ryan Reid
could be used to create such digital ASSOCIATE GRAPHICS EDITOR Amanda Montañez ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITOR Liz Tormes
watermarks. Also, the Content Authen- COPY AND PRODUCTION

ticity Initiative (CAI) is providing an SENIOR COPY EDITORS Angelique Rondeau, Aaron Shattuck
MANAGING PRODUCTION EDITOR Richard Hunt
ASSOCIATE COPY EDITOR Emily Makowski
PREPRESS AND QUALITY MANAGER Silvia De Santis
open standard for embedding content
CONTRIBUTORS
credentials into various files. Camera EDITORS EMERITI Mariette DiChristina, John Rennie
manufacturers are already bringing EDITORIAL Rebecca Boyle, Amy Brady, Katherine Harmon Courage, Lydia Denworth, Ferris Jabr,
Anna Kuchment, Michael D. Lemonick, Robin Lloyd, Steve Mirsky, Melinda Wenner Moyer,
products to market that include the George Musser, Ricki L. Rusting, Dava Sobel, Claudia Wallis, Daisy Yuhas
ART Peter Afriyie, Edward Bell, Violet Isabelle Frances, Lawrence R. Gendron, Nick Higgins, Kim Hubbard, Katie Peek, Beatrix Mahd Soltani
ability to insert content credentials into EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT SUPERVISOR Maya Harty SENIOR EDITORIAL COORDINATOR Brianne Kane
original photographs.
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Naomi Oreskes’s excellent article “Social PRESIDENT Kimberly Lau

Security and Science” [Observatory, May PUBLISHER AND VICE PRESIDENT Jeremy A. Abbate VICE PRESIDENT, COMMERCIAL Andrew Douglas
2023] packs more information, history VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCT AND TECHNOLOGY Dan Benjamin VICE PRESIDENT, CONTENT SERVICES Stephen Pincock
and wise commentary into one printed CLIENT MEDIA SOLUTIONS

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In “A Stratospheric Gamble,” by Scientific American, 1 New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New York, NY 10004-1562 or [email protected]
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Jan uary 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 9

WEATHER
When cold air from the poles meets
Snow Day
warm, moist air from the tropics, it creates
ice crystals that may eventually become
heavy enough to fall as snowflakes. But
Exploring the innards predicting where snowstorms will hit and
of clouds could help how much snow they will leave behind is a
predict snowfall notoriously challenging task. That’s be-
cause the journey from ice crystal to snow
squall is so complicated and meandering.
THE AIRCRAFT’S WINDSHIELD w
as a The crystals often form near the top of
sheet of pure gray, with visibility nearly a cloud, then drift slowly downward. If
zero as the nasa P-3 rattled through a there are any nearby updrafts in the cloud,
snowstorm at 15,000 feet. Probes affixed though, the crystals may get swept back
to the wings measured ice particle sizes in skyward—where they can combine with
the clouds, infrared thermometers record- other ice crystals to become faster-falling
ed temperatures, and cameras snapped snowflakes. These flakes then organize
thousands of pictures of ice crystals. into bands, which are commonly depicted
As the data rolled in, more than a dozen in weather forecasts as colored strips
scientists in the cabin logged the informa- showing where the heaviest snows will
tion. Eight miles overhead, a pilot flew an- likely occur. But the factors that govern
other plane through the very top of the how these bands form are still largely un-
same cloud. The air was so thin that he known. And any snow reaching the ground
wore a spacesuit. may still melt, depending on the warmth
This eight-hour mission was one of of the earth.
many conducted over three years for a Clouds typically consist of many hori-
nasa program called Investigation of zontal, cakelike layers, each with different
Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlan- properties. Snowstorm forecasters in the
tic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms (IM- 1970s and 1980s watched for patterns and
PACTS). The project involves more than used models that drew information from
300 atmospheric scientists, meteorolo- just a few of those layers; today better in-
gists and crew members. Data from their struments and computer modeling have
flights, which were completed in February allowed meteorologists to examine eight
2023, are filling gaps in scientists’ knowl- times as many. But in making predictions,
edge of snowstorm physics—such as more data are always better, and forecasters
where in a cloud ice crystals form and the have to work mostly with observations from
conditions under which they fall out as past research projects to interpret satellite
snow. The findings will be used to help observations and inform their models.
forecasters better predict where snow will “Our forecasts have improved pretty
fall and how much will accumulate—a dif- steadily over the past few decades, but we
ficult task, much to the chagrin of meteo- need a lot more information on the gory
rologists, skiers and schoolchildren hop- details of what happens in those storms,”
ing for snow days. says Jim Steenburgh, an atmospheric sci-
“We’re really trying to understand entist at the University of Utah, who was
how all these different processes act to- not involved in the IMPACTS project.
gether to produce the snowstorms that In 2009 Rauber’s team began looking
create the havoc,” says Robert M. Rauber, more closely at the insides of snowstorms
a recently retired atmospheric scientist through a project called Profiling of Win-
Jelle Wagenaar
at the University of Illinois Urbana-Cham ter Storms (PLOWS). Using advanced ra-
paign who serves as one of the project’s dar technology on the ground and in
principal investigators. planes, the scientists collected amazingly
GELATINOUS ROBOTS PERPLEXING EXOPLANET THE HEADY TRUTH ABOUT
LEARN TO HOP P. 15 DISCOVERED P. 17 STARFISH P. 18
DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE

ADVANCES
detailed data on the microphysical proper- taneously—the first project of its kind to ter understand what happens in the snow
ties of Midwest snowstorms. It showed do so—the researchers followed how the bands in which the crystals fall—specifi-
what Rauber calls snow plumes: areas ice crystals formed within and at the top of cally, how the bands that result in the
within a cloud where convection-driven a storm system. heaviest snowfalls form. Future analyses
wind blows upward, even as ice crystals These data from the project’s 35 flights could focus on how the structure of snow
fall down. “That’s when we said, ‘Holy revealed the microphysical processes by clouds changes with time and affects storm
smokes, there’s a lot of stuff going on here,’” which snowflakes become heavy enough strength. Although the recent measure-
he says. These next-generation airborne to fall: aggregation and riming. In aggrega- ments focused on the U.S. Atlantic coast, the
radar systems “changed our whole view of tion, ice crystals combine and grow into factors that contribute to devastating snow-
these storms.” snowflakes; in riming, ice crystals pick up storms could likely be applied elsewhere.
A decade later Rauber and collabora- supercooled water droplets as they fall. In future projects, slower-flying vehi-
tors began making IMPACTS flights to The IMPACTS project provided some of cles such as drones could capture more de-
study U.S. Atlantic coast snowstorms, the most extensive observations of snow- tailed information from various cloud lay-
which are fueled by humid ocean air. The flakes created by riming in a cloud. ers simultaneously, revealing more about
team used even more advanced radar and “We’re trying to use the radar-reflectiv how ice crystals form and change. But for
lidar equipment to help reveal the pres- ity information to figure out if one or both of now simply identifying which physical
ence and ratio of supercooled water and those processes are present in regions where processes are at play in a looming storm
ice crystals in a cloud, using a measure it’s snowing heavily. Is it aggregation? Is it can help forecasters make better predic-
called reflectivity. This allowed them to riming? What’s going on in there?” says tions, according to Brian Colle, a Stony
study how that ratio changes depending IMPACTS lead investigator Lynn McMur- Brook University atmospheric scientist
on variables such as temperature. Short- die, who works as an atmospheric scientist who worked on IMPACTS. “Just being able
and medium-wavelength radar also gave at the University of Washington. to say that this region is going to get en-
views of minuscule particles, as well as the With a better idea of how ice crystals be- hanced snowfall because of snow-band
overall structure of the cloud, at high res- come heavy enough to fall from a cloud, sci- activity is a step forward from where we’ve
olutions. And by flying two planes simul- entists are now using IMPACTS data to bet- been in the past.” —Susan Cosier
Heads or Tails? hour marathon session, the

team had performed 350,757
little more time aloft with their
initial “up” side on top.
Careful : it’s tosses, shattering the pre-

vious record of 40,000.
For day-t o-d ay deci-
sions, coin tosses are as
not 50–50 The flipped coins, ac-

cording to findings in a
good as random because
a 1 percent bias isn’t per-
preprint study posted on ceptible with just a few
STATISTICS The phrase “coin toss” is a arXiv.org, landed with coin flips, says statisti-
classic synonym for random- the same side facing up- cian Amelia McNamara of
ness. But since at least the 18th century, ward as before the toss the University of St. Thom-
mathematicians have suspected that even 50.8 percent of the time. as in Minnesota, who wasn’t
fair coins tend to land on one side slightly The large number of throws al- involved in the new research.
more often than the other. Proving this lows statisticians to conclude that Still, the study’s conclusions should
tiny bias, however, would require hundreds the nearly 1 percent bias isn’t a fluke. dispel any lingering doubt regarding the
of thousands of meticulously recorded “We can be quite sure there is a bias in coin coin flip’s slender bias. “This is great empiri-
coin flips, making laboratory tests a logisti- flips after this data set,” Bartoš says. cal evidence backing that up,” she says.
cal nightmare. The leading theory explaining the subtle It isn’t difficult to prevent this bias from
František Bartoš, currently a Ph.D. candi- advantage comes from a 2007 physics influencing your coin-toss matches; simply
date studying the research methods of psy- study by Stanford University statistician concealing the coin’s starting position be-
chology at the University of Amsterdam, be- Persi Diaconis and his colleagues, whose fore flipping it should do the trick. Alterna-
came intrigued by this challenge four years calculations predicted a same-side bias of tively, you can do away with flipping alto-
ago. He couldn’t round up enough volunteers 51 percent. From the moment a coin is gether by jiggling a coin between your curved
to investigate it at first. “Nobody was stupid launched into the air, its entire trajectory— palms. But if your friends are unaware of the
enough to spend a couple of weekends flip- including whether it lands on heads or tiny bias, you may as well benefit from your
ping coins,” he says. But after he began his tails—can be calculated by the laws of me- slight advantage. After all, 51 percent odds
Ph.D. studies, he tried again, recruiting 47 chanics. The researchers determined that beat a casino’s house advantage for six-
volunteers (many of them friends and fellow airborne coins don’t turn around their sym- deck blackjack. “If you asked me to bet on a
students) from six countries. Multiple week- metrical axis; instead they tend to wobble coin,” Bartoš says, “why wouldn’t I give my-
ends of coin flipping later, including one 12- off-center, which causes them to spend a self a 1 percent bias?” —Shi En Kim
1 2 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N Jan uary 2 02 4 Illustrations by Thomas Fuchs

PALEONTOLOGY pounds during the fossilization process. By D’Alba, an evolutionary biologist at the
Living Color
inspecting the heated feathers under a mi- Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Neth-
croscope and using a chemical assay to iden- erlands, who was not involved in the new
tify different types of melanin, the team study. For example, flying pterosaurs are
New technique reveals found that biological pigments do leave a presumed to have been brightly colored
fossil colors distinct and identifiable signature in fossils. but have not been examined in detail.
The researchers then checked various fos- Further research might even reveal
THE PREHISTORIC ANIMAL KINGDOM sils for the chemical markers of the pigment how ginger hues evolved in the first place.
was a riot of colors, from iridescent-feath and found them in a 10-million-year-old “Scientists still don’t know how, or why,
ered dinosaurs to jet-black ink excreted by frog, the Cretaceous bird Confuciusornis pheomelanin evolved,” Slater says, espe-
Jurassic squid relatives. Like modern-day and the dinosaur S inornithosaurus. cially because its production can cause
animals, ancient species’ hues helped them The new analysis technique offers a cancer in an animal’s tissues. “The fossil
communicate, camouflage and even regu- “more accurate determination” of the record might just unlock the mystery.”
late body temperature. But reconstructing colors of fossilized animals, says Liliana —Riley Black
these colors today is a challenge because
compounds and structures that color ani-
mals’ skin, fur and feathers usually de-
grade or change during fossilization. Ex-
perts have developed methods to reliably
detect structures and pigments related to
dark colors like the black and brown of
feathered dinosaurs, but other shades (like
the yellow and reddish-orange made by
pigments called pheomelanins) have been
especially hard to pin down.
Now a team of scientists has filled in that
missing chunk of the prehistoric palette by
developing the first reliable test to detect
these gingery colors in fossils. “Pheomela-
nin is clearly an elusive pigment, and these
findings will absolutely help us to detect ev-
idence of ginger pigments in other fossils,”
says the study’s lead a uthor Tiffany Slater, a
paleobiologist at University College Cork
in Ireland. The results were recently pub-
lished in Nature Communications.
Slater and her colleagues went looking
for ginger shades in the fossil record be-
cause evidence of pheomelanins has shown
up there far less often than the researchers
expected, compared with modern-day an-
imals. And the previously reported evi-
dence was largely inconclusive. Scientists
who interpreted a reddish color for the ar-
mored dinosaur Borealopelta, for example,
couldn’t distinguish whether the pheome-
lanin they found came from the original
pigment or from contamination after the
Millard H. Sharp/Science Source
dinosaur’s death.
So Slater and her co-authors created a
test to distinguish between true chemical
traces of ginger colors and those introduced
by nonbiological sources. They heated var-
ious modern-day bird feathers in an oven to
mimic the breakdown of biological com- The bird Confuciusornis, which lived more than 120 million years ago, had warm-colored feathers.
Ja n ua ry 2 02 4 Sc i e n t i f ic A m er ic a n.com 13
SCIENCE IN IMAGES
spewed from protostars collides with sur- disk’s spin, which allows the star to grow.
Stellar Jets rounding dust and gas, producing shock-

waves “rather like a bullet going through
the air,” says the study’s lead author Tom
Whereas older stars like our sun blast
atoms, ions and molecules into space, HH
211 ejects mostly molecular matter. Such a
JWST captures a young Ray, an astrophysicist at the Dublin Insti- surprising difference can help astrophysi-
star’s stunning debut tute for Advanced Studies. These colli- cists understand more about how stars
BY LORI YOUMSHAJEKIAN sions excite the gas, releasing infrared grow out of this critical stage of develop-
light that JWST can observe. ment, Ray says.
SHROUDED IN A TURBULENT KNOT of In this image from the study, the red “I could stare at this for a long time,” says
dust and gas, a fledgling star expels super- depicts excited hydrogen gas that rotates astrophysicist Chin-Fei Lee of Taiwan’s Ac-
sonic jets of material that stretch thou- and vibrates at a few thousand kelvins, ademia Sinica, who has previously ob-
ESA/Webb/NASA, CSA/Tom Ray (Dublin)
sands of times the distance from Earth to surrounded by green from carbon monox- served HH 211 using the ground-based tele-
the sun. This is the dramatic adolescence ide and blue from the young star’s re- scope ALMA in Chile. ALMA has observed
of HH 211, captured by the James Webb flected light. The protostar itself sits in the molecular outflows, but it cannot detect any
Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera rotating, dusty disk at the center of the high-temperature ionized material ejected
and described in a study recently pub- image, where infrared radiation cannot by the jets. JWST did so and produced im-
lished in N
ature. escape because of the density of the dust ages with much higher resolution. “This is so
Herbig-Haro objects, abbreviated “HH,” and gas. Astrophysicists think the matter impressive to me,” Lee says, “because we see
are formed when fast-moving matter ejected by the wiggling jets slows the the whole structure and the beautiful jet.”
ADVANCES
In REASON
We Trust
Mighty Morphin’ rithm repeatedly modifi ed them strategically
modified
so the system improved with each iteration.
Bots Algorithms The team used the same technique to

design virtual bots with other aims, such as
design robots trans
transporting
porting or launching an object. Next
they hope to create more sophisticated ma-
chines that use sensors to interact with
ROBOTICS
Most robots are designed by the world. —
—Matthew
Matthew Hutson
human engineers, who must
painstak
pain staking
ingly
ly arrange every joint and artifi cial
artificial
muscle to make the bot accomplish a specificspecific Better Movement through Iteration
task. The process is slow and limited by hu- Each block shows a cross section of the robot as it
man imagination; having an algorithm do it appeared at one of the 10 stages of automatic
instead could “help usher in the world of be- design. Their positions show how far they were able
spoke robotics,” says computer scientist Josh to move in one second.
Bongard of the University of Vermont. In a new Version 1 moved 0.02 body length Help FFRF defeat the
study, he and his colleagues used feed feedback-
back-
based algorithms to design a variety of blob- Big Lie that the U.S. is
like walking robots in record time. The results
were published recently in the Proceedings
P
roceedings
a “Christian nation.”
of the National Academy of Sciences USA. Holes (white)
Each robot began as a digitally simulated
brick of a gelatinous substance with 64 Muscle patches
(purple)
holes randomly interspersed throughout, Join the nation’s
like a block of Swiss cheese. It also con- Version 3 moved 0.17 body length
tained 64 randomly placed artifi cial muscle
artificial
largest association of
patches that, when fl exed, caused nearby
flexed, atheists and agnostics
parts of its body to stretch and constrict. At working to keep religion
first, the simulated block simply jumped in
first,
place. But as the algorithm tweaked the out of government.
muscle locations, as well as the holes’ loca-
tions and sizes, the block began to hop for-
ward. Nine versions later the holes had co- Version 5 moved 0.33 body length
alesced to sculpt a few stubby “legs,” which Join now or get a FREE trial
had become lined with muscle. The result- membership & bonus issues
ing digital bot could travel half its body of Freethought Today,
length each second—and the entire design FFRF’s newspaper.
process, which the team repeated 100
times, took just 30 seconds on a laptop.
“The big contribution is the way they
achieve all this in a very short time, with a very
limited number of iterations,” says Cecilia Version 7 moved 0.43 body length
ol. 120; October 3, 2023
Laschi, a mechanical engineer at the Nation-

al University of Singapore, who studies soft Call 1-800-335-4021
Source: “Efficient Automatic Design of Robots,” by David Matthews et al.,
robots but was not involved in the new study.

The researchers cast one of the designs
ffrf.us/science
in silicone, making a physical creature about
Vol.
roceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, V
half the size of a bar of soap. For muscles,

the scientists affixed tiny bladders that
could be fl exed by pumping in pulses of air.
flexed Version 10 moved 0.48 body length
The robot walked slower than the simula-
tion—half a body length per minute—but
signifi cantly faster than a random design.
significantly
These movement-
movement-maximizing
maximizing adjustments
were guided by a type of optimization algo-
rithm called gradient descent. This technique,
which powers most machine-
rithms, fi
machine-learning
learning algo-
nds optimal solutions to problems
finds ffrf.org
Proceedings
with an unwieldy number of variables. In this By version 10 the holes and muscle patches had
case, those variables were muscle locations, arranged themselves to form “legs” to help the FFRF is a 501(c)(3) educational charity.
Deductible for income tax purposes.
in P
as well as hole locations and sizes. The algo- robot hop forward more efficiently.
Graphic by Amanda Montañez

ADVANCES
ECOLOGY
umented case of gene transfer between
Gene Thief animal species.

Mantids infected with C. fukuii become
attracted to light, like the shiny surface of
A parasitic worm may water. This behavior is believed to arise
manipulate its host using from protein-level changes in both the
stolen genes parasite and the host’s brain, says senior
author Takuya Sato, a biologist at Japan’s
Kobe University. Because genes encode the
FOR A PRAYING MANTIS, e
ating the instructions to build these proteins, Sato
wrong insect can be a one-way ticket to a and his colleagues set out to examine how
watery grave. Some of its typical bug prey both species’ gene activity changed during
contain horsehair worms, C hordodes the course of a horsehair worm infection.
fukuii, w
hich grow in a mantid’s gut—and The team found that a whopping 1,420
somehow manipulate the mantid into div- of the parasite’s genes resembled those of
ing into the nearest body of water. The their hosts and that these genes were most
spaghettilike worms then wriggle free of active when the parasite was pulling the
their drowned host and reproduce. Aquat- host’s strings.
ic insects eat the worms’ offspring and are Genes can move from one living organ-
then consumed by other mantids, and the ism to another in a process called horizon-
cycle repeats. Horsehair worm and its mantid host tal gene transfer, which is common in bac-
Now researchers may have discovered teria but rare between animals. “That
how the parasite pulls off its fatal trick: to make proteins that affect the mantids’ would be very amazing—to have thou-
it seems to have evolved to use genes nervous system. If confirmed, these find- sands of genes acquired by horizontal gene
Takuya Sato
that its species once “stole” from the ings, published recently in C urrent Bi transfer from the host to parasites,” says
mantids themselves, enabling the worm ology, would be the most extensive doc Etienne Danchin, a biologist at France’s
BIOLOGY
chondrial DNA (mtDNA) from their few mitochondria contain virtually no
Not Your mother’s egg cell.

So what happens to the mtDNA in
DNA at all. The findings were published in
a recent issue of Nature Genetics. “ We
Father’s
the sperm cell? Understanding this pro- were very surprised by the absence of
cess is important for studying mitochon- mtDNA in mature human sperm” because
drial diseases, genetic disorders that re- previous studies had produced conflicting
DNA sult when these “powerhouses” don’t

function properly. Scientists know that
results, says the study’s senior author, mo-
lecular biologist Dmitry Temiakov of
Why don’t sperm cells molecular processes break down the Thomas Jefferson University in Philadel-
sperm’s mitochondria soon after fertiliza- phia. This mtDNA-elimination process
pass on their tion in other animals—but no one has might play a role in human infertility and
mitochondria’s genes? been able to pinpoint when this elimina- can help science understand mitochon-
tion happens in humans. drial diseases, he says.
ALMOST EVERY HUMAN CELL is pow- Now biologists have discovered that it Using molecular biology and micros-
ered by mitochondria, bean-shaped or- happens early—in fact, human sperm’s copy techniques, the researchers exam-
ganelles that use oxygen to synthesize us- ined human sperm cells across their
able energy. These structures evolved developmental stages. They showed that
billions of years ago from free-swimming mitochondria in the sperm’s precursor
bacteria that were engulfed by some of hu- cells did contain DNA, along with an
manity’s earliest ancestors. Because of this important protein called mitochondrial
Kateryna Kon/Science Source
history, mitochondria still have their own transcription factor A (TFAM) that main-
ring-shaped DNA—completely separate tains and protects that DNA. But when
from the 23 chromosomes that make up the sperm cells matured, a slight chemi-
most of the human genome. And although cal change prevented TFAM from enter-
those chromosomes come from both par- ing their mitochondria. Instead it entered
Mitochondria
ents, nearly all humans inherit their mito- the nucleus, where it could no longer
Sophia Agrobiotech Institute, who was not
involved with the research. “But I think
they need to confirm this claim,” he says,
because the researchers haven’t yet located
these potentially stolen genes in the
worm’s genome. The new study confirmed
only that they were present in the para-
site’s tissue samples, and it is still possible
that some of these genes were just contam-
ination from the mantid, Danchin says.
“We should reserve judgment on the
role and extent of horizontal gene transfer
until a whole genome sequence is available
that confirms that the transcripts are
correctly attributed to the mantid and
the worm,” says Julie Dunning Hotopp, a
microbiologist at the University of Mary-
land Baltimore, who was not involved with
the study.
Sato plans to check the parasites’ ge-
nome next. “The mechanism of horizontal
gene transfer in C . fukuii i s still a huge Hot and Heavy A very dense exoplanet
mystery,” he says. “By investigating ge-
nomes of C. fukuii and its mantid host,” found in the “hot Neptune desert”
he hopes to get closer to unraveling it.
A bizarrely dense exo- 1853 b, what can? Naponiello and his co-au-
—Darren Incorvaia ASTROPHYSICS
planet located more than thors propose two possibilities. First, the
500 light-years from Earth is challenging planet may have emerged from the collision
scientists’ understanding of how planets of two preexisting protoplanets. Such colli-
form. This astronomical body, recently de- sions are expected in a planetary system’s
p revent the mtDNA from degrading. scribed in Nature, is the size of the ice giant early epochs, but they are more likely to leave
If mtDNA sticks around in sperm’s Neptune but nearly 10 times heavier— behind multiple planets than to result in a
mitochondria, it could become a source meaning it is denser than steel. single, larger world, Naponiello says.
of infertility. Previous studies showed “It’s impossible for a planet like this to The second possibility is that TOI-1853 b
have formed by classical planetary forma- began as a gas giant about the mass of Jupi-
that people with decreased sperm counts
tion models,” says lead study author Luca ter before losing most of its atmosphere to
and motility have elevated amounts of Naponiello, a Ph.D. candidate at the Univer- intense stellar radiation, ending up as a
mtDNA in those cells. sity of Rome Tor Vergata. Named TOI-1853 b, stripped-down solid core. Indeed, if this plan-
Mouse studies have indicated that the planet is also oddly close to its sun; it et once had a sizable atmosphere, very little
TFAM is absent in sperm’s mitochondria, rockets around the star once every 1.24 remains. That makes it unique even among
says Xinnan Wang, a mitochondrial cell days. Neptune-size worlds are so rarely Neptune-size planets, says astronomer Chel-
biologist at the Stanford University School found in such tight orbits that astronomers sea Huang of Australia’s University of South-
of Medicine. The new study, along with have labeled these planet-sparse zones “hot ern Queensland. Huang finds the gas-giant
Pablo Carlos Budassi (c omposite) ; ESO/Serge Brunier (b ackground)
Neptune deserts.” theory particularly intriguing, as such plan-

prior research in other animals that found
The bigger mystery, though, is how TOI- ets’ thick atmospheres typically obscure
paternal mtDNA can be eliminated after 1853 b got so dense. Astronomers think plan- what’s happening deeper inside. If TOI-
egg fertilization, “shows multiple mecha- ets usually form “bottom-up,” with grains of 1853 b once was a gas giant, then “this is the
nisms that may contribute to maternal rock and dust in a whirling protoplanetary only way we can actually observe [a gas gi-
mitochondrial inheritance in different or- disk glomming on to one another in ever larg- ant’s] interior,” Huang says.
ganisms,” she says. er clumps, eventually assembling a hefty Future analysis of the planet’s remain-
Temiakov says there are probably core. But when that core reaches a certain ing atmosphere could reveal whether either
other, yet unidentified mechanisms that critical mass, a buildup of pressure in the proof these hypotheses is correct. If TOI-
toplanetary disk begins pushing additional 1853 b was formed by collisions, research-
regulate mtDNA in different cells and that
planet-building material away, stifling further ers would expect its atmosphere to include
might contribute to mitochondrial dis-
growth. TOI-1853 b seems to have somehow water and other volatile compounds. If in-
eases if disrupted. “We need to uncover shot right past this limit—it has twice the stead it was once a gas giant, they would
these mechanisms,” he says, “to better amount of solid material that researchers be- expect to see a relatively thin, hydrogen-
understand mitochondrial diseases and lieved could accumulate into a single object. dominated atmosphere.
how to treat them.” —Sneha Khedkar If conventional models can’t explain TOI- —Allison Gasparini

ADVANCES
Odd-Ball over an opening in such a space,

the wave squeezes and releases
balls until the structure absorbed
a wide range of frequencies.
Insulation the air inside. This makes the

air vibrate at a particular fre-
“Getting the holes aligned
perfectly took some practice,”
Doctored ping- quency depending on the

cavity’s size, shape and any
Sabat says. Her team’s ar-
rangement of 90 balls, fixed
pong balls hold holes it might have (just as
blowing across a bottle’s lip
to a sheet of plexiglass, re-
duced low-frequency sounds
back a volley causes a hum, with the pitch
depending on bottle size). And if
heard on the other side by up
to 50 percent compared with the
of noises cavities are constructed in just the
right way, the bouncing sound waves in-
plexiglass surface alone.
“The design gives excellent sound
side will cancel one another out, dampening attenuation, even below 500 hertz” (the
ACOUSTICS
Constant city noise has been the noise. range most associated with long-term
linked to long-term health Sabat chose ping-pong balls as a low- health effects), says Olga Umnova, an
problems, but it’s hard to keep out of homes cost option with geometric properties that acoustics researcher at the University of
and businesses; low-frequency sounds create resonance in the right low-frequency Salford in England, who was not involved in
such as traffic and construction propagate range. By drilling five holes in each ball, her the new study. She adds that a systematic,
easily through walls and other solid materi- team turned them into resonant cavities real-world comparison with simpler options,
als. Expensive, specialized paneling can that each filter one frequency band out of such as plexiglass sheets separated by an
help, but a new study in the Journal of Ap- the surrounding noise. air gap, would be an important next step.
plied Physics shows how everyday materi- But combining the resonating balls to Computer simulations have estimated that
als and clever physics can also do the trick, dampen large ranges of sound is tricky be- the ping-pong paneling improves sound re-
creating a kind of sound insulator from stra- cause the sound waves interact and affect duction by 30 percent compared with an air
tegically pin-pricked ping-pong balls. which frequencies get dampened. To find gap alone.
Robine Sabat, an acoustics researcher the right arrangement, the researchers Sabat’s team hopes low-tech adjust-
at the University of Lille in France, has been placed microphones inside two balls and ments to the new technique could also help
trying to improve noise insulation by study- adjusted the holes’ positions and sizes until with other acoustic aims, such as focusing
ing how sound waves bounce around in hol- the combination captured multiple frequen- sound waves to improve sound quality in
low cavities. When a sound wave passes cy bands. They added and adjusted more concert halls. —Rachel Berkowitz
EVOLUTION
anatomy in others. With evolutionary co-author Chris Lowe, an evolutionary
Heads Up! oddities like starfish, scientists have a hard

time figuring out which body parts corre-
spond to genes with more anterior markers
biologist at Stanford University.
The new study “is a really, really in
teresting piece of work,” says Imran
Starfish are very (or “head” genes) versus more posterior Rahman, a principal researcher at Lon-
weird creatures parts of the body, such as the trunk or tail. don’s Natural History Museum. “I found it
To find the head, the researchers com- very convincing.”
AT FIRST GLANCE, s tarfish seem to be all pared the genes in a Patiria miniata star- The findings probe a big evolutionary
limbs. So where did the head go? Textbook fish with a closely related species of acorn question: How did starfish and their evolu-
descriptions of echinoderms—starfish worm that has a well-studied genome— tionary siblings, which used to have bilat-
and their relatives, including sand dollars and a very obvious head. Using advanced eral symmetry, develop their unique
and sea urchins—tend to say this part of laboratory techniques, the team created a shape? This remains a “big mystery,” says
their body simply evolved away. But new three-dimensional map of the genes that Paola Oliveri, a developmental and evolu-
research in N
ature suggests something far were expressed in thinly sliced samples of tionary biologist at University College
weirder: starfish are almost e ntirely h
ead. the starfish’s arms. London, who was not involved in the study.
Most animals are bilaterally symmetri- The scientists found that the same And beyond echinoderms, the new find-
cal, meaning their bodies can be divided genes active in the acorn worm’s head re- ings may help scientists understand how
into two roughly identical halves. Starfish gion were “switched on” in the starfish’s novel shapes and structures evolved in
have radial symmetry instead, with five bumpy skin—which covers its entire body. other branches of the tree of life, she says.
identical segments of their body radiating The most anterior, headlike genes were es- Next the researchers will examine the
from a central point. Such structural pa- pecially active at the center of each arm, fossil record for earlier starfish and will try
rameters are determined by molecular and the genes became more posterior to- to track when they lost their trunk. The
markers on genes, although the same ward each arm’s perimeter. And surpris- team will also investigate whether other
markers that tell cells and tissues to form a ingly, the starfish entirely lacked the ge- echinoderms are covered in genetically
head in one species can result in different netic patterning for a trunk, says study headlike regions. —Lori Youmshajekian
ANIMAL BEHAVIOR more nocturnal seems like an obvious way NEWS AROUND THE WORLD
Night Life Quick Hits

to beat the heat, the potential impact of cli
mate change on the timing of animal activ
ity has not been widely studied, says
As days get hotter, Michiel Veldhuis, an ecologist at Leiden By Lori Youmshajekian
more animals toy with University in the Netherlands, who was
a nocturnal lifestyle not involved in the new research. ANTARCTICA
These studies looked at how shorter- Ice-penetrating radar has revealed a land-
term temperature fluctuations changed scape of valleys and ridges hidden under
THE WHITE-LIPPED PECCARY, a piglike the animals’ behavior, and it’s not certain nearly two miles of ice in East Antarctica.
animal native to Central and South Amer that any species will become permanently Before the continent froze over about 34 mil-
ica, usually forages for fruit and other more nocturnal because of climate changes lion years ago, the region might have hosted
plants during the day and sleeps at night. in the long term. Embracing the night life tropical-like forests and wildlife.
But scientists in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands could come with significant trade-offs: CHINA
have found that when it gets unusually hot, Nocturnal predators such as pumas often Geologists have discovered a new ore called
these animals become more nocturnal. hunt peccaries and anteaters, and Veldhuis niobobaotite near the city of Baotou in Inner
This behavioral flexibility could help pec says he would like to test whether preda Mongolia. The ore contains the rare-earth
caries—and potentially other species— tion kills more peccaries during the hottest metal niobium, which is used in steel pro-
adapt to climate change. “Maybe there’s months of the year. Animals used to the duction and becomes a superconductor
hope for species to be resilient, to an ex daylight also might have trouble spotting when cooled to low temperatures.
tent,” says Michaela Peterson, a doctoral their own food if they make the switch, ETHIOPIA
candidate at Vanderbilt University and co says postdoctoral ecologist Kwasi Wrens A child’s jawbone uncovered decades ago in
author of a recent study published in B io- ford of the University of British Columbia, the Ethiopian Highlands has been identified
tropica. The study found that during rela who was not involved in the new research. as a two-million-year- old Homo erectus
tively balmy periods, when daily high Plus, animals that are usually active fossil. Discovered more than 6,500 feet
temperatures were lower than 80 degrees during the day might try to avoid noctur above sea level, the find suggests that larg-
Fahrenheit on average, white-lipped pec nal activity when possible. Peterson says er-bodied H . erectus might have been bet-
ter adapted to higher altitudes than other
caries were most active in the afternoon. In the fact that the peccaries shifted their ac
early hominins were.
slightly hotter weather they shifted their tivity to the morning first—when it’s
activity to the morning. But once average cooler, but there is more light than at FRANCE
daily highs topped 94 degrees F, peccaries night—may indicate that the animals still Critics gave higher ratings to Bordeaux wine
were most active after sunset. prefer to be active during the day and be made in years with greater temperature ex-
Studies have found similar shifts in come creatures of the night only when tremes and a higher mean temperature. But
the area’s climate might become too hot
other species, including giant anteaters temperatures turn truly sweltering.
and too dry for grapes to grow at all, and
and cheetahs. But even though becoming —Ethan Freedman
vineyards are increasingly impacted by
floods, wildfires, and other severe events.
A collared peccary, close relative
INDONESIA
of the white-lipped peccary
Indonesians who survived the region’s dev-
astating 2004 tsunami have lower levels of
the stress hormone cortisol than those who
didn’t directly experience the disaster. This
“hormonal burnout” demonstrates how
traumatic events can affect people for de-
cades afterward.
ITALY
For the first time, an artificial-intelligence
program has deciphered a word from a badly
scorched scroll from Herculaneum, one of the
gerard lacz/Alamy Stock Photo
cities buried by the eruption of Mount Vesu-

vius about 2,000 years ago. By distinguish-
ing ink from the background of blackened
papyrus, the technique uncotvered the word
“porphyras”—ancient Greek for “purple.”
For more details, visit www.ScientificAmerican.com/
jan2024/advances
COSMOLOGY
Cosmic Nothing
Huge empty patches of the universe
could help solve some of the greatest mysteries
in the cosmos BY MICHAEL D. LEMONICK
ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS WREN AND
KENN BROWN/MONDOWORKS
Jan uary 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A merican.com
Scientific M ER IC A N.COM 21
C OMPUTATIONAL ASTROPHYSICIST A
lice
Pisani put on a virtual-
reality headset and stared out into the void—or rather a void,
one of many large, empty spaces that pepper the cosmos. “It
was absolutely amazing,” Pisani recalls. At first, hovering in
the air in front of her was a jumble of shining dots, each represent-
ing a galaxy. When Pisani walked into the jumble, she found herself inside a large swath
of nothing with a shell of galaxies surrounding it. The image wasn’t just a guess at what
a cosmic void might look like; it was Pisani’s own data made manifest. “I was completely
surprised,” she says. “It was just so cool.”
The visualization, made in 2022, was a special proj-
ect by Bonny Yue Wang, then a computer science un-
dergraduate at the Cooper Union for the Advancement
ally taken off. They’re becoming kind of a hot topic.”
The discovery of cosmic voids in the late 1970s to

of Science and Art in New York City. Pisani teaches a mid-1980s came as something of a shock to astrono-
course there in cosmology—the structure and evolu- mers, who were startled to learn that the universe
tion of the universe. Wang had been aiming to use didn’t look the way they’d always thought. They knew
Pisani’s data on voids, which can stretch from tens to that stars were gathered into galaxies and that galaxies
hundreds of millions of light-years across, to create often clumped together into clusters of dozens or even
an augmented-reality view of these surprising fea- hundreds. But if you zoomed out far enough, they fig-
tures of the cosmos. ured, this clumpiness would even out: at the largest
The project would have been impossible a decade scales the cosmos would look homogeneous. It wasn’t
ago, when Pisani was starting out in the field. Scientists just an assumption. The so-called cosmic microwave
have known since the 1980s that these fields of nothing background (CMB)—electromagnetic radiation emit-
exist, but inadequate observational data and insuffi- ted about 380,000 years after the big bang—is ex-
cient computing power kept them from being the focus tremely homogeneous, reflecting smoothness in the
of serious research. Lately, though, the field has made distribution of matter when it was created. And even
tremendous progress, and Pisani has been helping to though that was nearly 14 billion years ago, the modern
bring it into the scientific mainstream. Within just a few universe should presumably reflect that structure.
years, she and an increasing number of scientists are But we can’t tell whether that’s the case just by look-
Michael D. Lemonick convinced, the study of the universe’s empty spaces ing up. The night sky appears two-dimensional even
is a freelance writer,
as well as former
could offer important clues to help solve the mysteries through a telescope. To confirm the presumption of
chief opinion editor of dark matter, dark energy and the nature of the enig- homogeneity, astronomers needed to know not only
at Scientific American matic subatomic particles called neutrinos. Voids have how galaxies are distributed across the sky but how
and a former senior even shown that Einstein’s general theory of relativity they’re distributed in the third dimension of space—
science writer at Time.
probably operates the same way at very large scales as it depth. So they needed to measure the distance from
His most recent book
is The Perpetual Now: does locally—something that has never been con- Earth to many galaxies near and far to figure out what’s
A Story of Amnesia, firmed. “Now is the right moment to use voids” for cos- in the foreground, what’s in the background and what’s
Memory and Love mology, says David Spergel, former chair of astrophys- in the middle. In 1978 Laird A. Thompson of the Uni-
(Doubleday, 2017).
ics at Princeton University and current president of the versity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Stephen A.
Lemonick also teaches
science journalism at Simons Foundation. Benjamin Wandelt of the Lagrange Gregory of the University of New Mexico did just that
Princeton University. Institute in Paris echoes the sentiment: “Voids have re- and discovered the first hints of cosmic voids, shaking
the presumption that the universe was smooth. In 1981
Harvard University’s Robert Kirshner and four of his
The study of the universe’s empty
colleagues discovered a huge void, about 400 million
light-years across, in the direction of the constellation
spaces could offer important
Boötes. It was so big and so empty that “if the Milky Way clues to help solve the mysteries
had been in the center of the Boötes void, we wouldn’t
have known there were other galaxies [in the universe] of dark matter, dark energy and
until the 1960s,” as Gregory Scott Aldering, now at Law-
rence Berkeley National Laboratory, once put it.
the nature of neutrino particles.
In 1986 Margaret J. Geller, John Huchra and Valérie
de Lapparent, all then at Harvard, confirmed that the very few concentrated on voids. It wasn’t for lack of
voids Thompson, Kirshner and their colleagues had interest; the problem was that there wasn’t much to
found were no flukes. The team had painstakingly sur- look at. Voids were important not because of what they
veyed the distance to many hundreds of galaxies contained but because their very existence, their
spread out over a wide swath of sky and found that shapes and sizes and distances from one another, had
voids appeared to be everywhere. “It was so exciting,” to be the result of the same forces that gave structure
says de Lapparent, now director of research at the In- to the universe. To use voids to understand how those
stitut d’Astrophysique de Paris (IAP). She had been a forces worked, astrophysicists needed to include many
graduate student at the time and was spending a year examples in statistical analyses of voids’ average size
working with Geller, who was trying to understand the and shape and separation, yet too few had been found
large-scale structure of the universe. A cross section to draw useful conclusions from them. It was analo-
of the local cosmos that astronomers had put together gous to the situation with exoplanets in the 1990s: the
earlier showed hints of a filamentary structure con- first few discovered were proof that planets did indeed
sisting of regions either overdense or underdense with orbit stars beyond the sun, but it wasn’t until the Ke-
galaxies. “Margaret had this impression that this was pler space telescope began raking them in by the thou-
just an observing bias,” de Lapparent says, “but we had sands after its 2009 launch that planetary scientists
to check. We wanted to look farther out.” They used a could say anything meaningful about how many and
relatively small telescope on Mount Hopkins in Ari- what kinds of planets populated the Milky Way.
zona. “I learned to observe on that telescope,” de Lap- Another issue with studying voids was raised in
parent recalls. “I was on my own after a night of train- 1995 by Barbara Ryden of the Ohio State University
ing, which was so exciting.” When she was done, she, and Adrian L. Melott of the University of Kansas. Gal-
Geller and Huchra made a map of the galaxies’ loca- axy surveys, they pointed out, are conducted in “red-
tions. “It was amazing,” she says. “We had these big, shift space,” not actual space. To understand what they
circular voids and these sharp walls full of galaxies.” meant, consider that as the universe expands, light
“All of these features,” the researchers wrote in waves are stretched from their original wavelengths
their paper, entitled “A Slice of the Universe,” “pose and colors into longer, redder wavelengths. The far-
serious challenges for current models for the formation ther away something is from an observer, the more its
of large-scale structure.” As later, deeper surveys light is stretched. The James Webb Space Telescope
would confirm, galaxies and clusters of galaxies are was designed to be sensitive to infrared light in part so
themselves concentrated into a gigantic web of con- it can see the very earliest galaxies, whose light has
centrated regions of matter connected by streaming been stretched all the way out of the visible spec-
filaments, with gargantuan voids in between. In other trum—it’s redder than red. And the CMB, the most
words, the cosmos today vaguely resembles Swiss distant light we can detect, has been stretched so much
cheese, whereas the CMB looks more like cream cheese. that we now perceive it in the form of microwaves.
The question, then, was: What forces made the uni- “Measuring the physical distances to galaxies is diffi-
verse evolve from cream cheese into Swiss cheese? One cult,” Ryden and Melott wrote in a paper in the A stro-
factor was almost certainly dark matter, the invisible physical Journal. “ It’s much easier to measure red-
mass whose existence had in the 1980s only recently shifts.” But, they noted, redshifts can distort the actual
been accepted by most astrophysicists, despite years distances to galaxies that enclose a void and thus give
of tantalizing evidence from observers such as Vera a misleading idea of their size and shape. The problem,
Rubin and Fritz Zwicky. It was more massive than or- explains Nico Hamaus of the Ludwig Maximilian Uni-
dinary, visible matter by a factor of six or so. That versity of Munich, is that as a void expands, “the near
would have made the gravitational pull of slightly side is coming toward us, and the far side is streaming
overdense regions in the early universe stronger than away.” That differential subtracts from the redshift on
anyone had guessed. Stars and galaxies would have the near side and adds to it on the far side, making the
formed preferentially in these areas of high density, void look artificially elongated.
leaving low-density regions largely empty.
Most observers and theorists continued to explore Despite the difficulties, astrophysicists began to
what would come to be known as the “cosmic web,” but feel more equipped to tackle voids by the late 2000s.
Jan uary 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.COM 23

This sphere holds 6,448 voids, mapped in space using the galactic coordinate
A Map of Nothing system. Every void is repeated at a smaller size on the Milky Way’s so-called galactic
Regions of relatively empty space called cosmic voids are plane (central slice) for a clearer look at its light-travel distance to Earth. (The time
everywhere in the universe, and scientists believe studying light took to travel to us from that point is represented in gigayears, or Gyr.) Familiar
their size, shape and spread across the cosmos could help benchmarks—in the form of stars and constellations—are projected onto the sphere
them understand dark matter, dark energy and other big at 7 Gyr from Earth, as all of the shown voids are found within this radius.
mysteries. To use voids in this way, astronomers must map Galactic north pole
these regions in detail—a project that is just beginning. ESTIMATED VOID SIZE
Shown here are voids discovered by the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey (SDSS), along with a selection of Gigalight-years (Gly,
16 previously named voids. Scientists expect billions of light-years)
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5
voids to be evenly distributed throughout
space—the lack of voids in some STAR MAGNITUDE
regions on the globe simply (Apparent brightness from Earth)
reflects SDSS’s sky coverage. Brightest
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Earth’s equatorial plane
Our solar system’s

The largest equatorial plane
void identified in
SDSS data thus far
Celestial is 6.2 Gyr away and
north pole 0.59 Gly across.

Boötes Void
Referred to as “The
Great Nothing,” it is
a supervoid, com-
prising multiple
subvoids.
Local Voids
Large voids in our
neighborhood, of
which Coma/A1367
was the first to be Galactic equator
reported in 1978
Every void is repeated at a Eridanus Supervoid’s “drop line” You are here.
smaller scale on the galactic onto the galactic plane. Object Position
plane (central slice) for a Distance on this sphere is
represented in gigayears (Gyr; Visible limit of the
clearer look at its light-travel universe (13.79 Gyr)
distance to Earth. a billion years), according to how
much time light took to travel to Earth
from the object. It is represented on 7 Gyr
a logarithmic scale from the center (Earth)
4 Gyr
to the visible edge of the universe.
2 Gyr
1 Gyr
Eridanus
Supervoid

This enormous void
may be the explanation
for the cold spot in the
cosmic microwave
background.
Jan uary 2 02 4
Graphic by Martin Krzywinski
Sources: Sofia Contarini/University of

Bologna, Nico Hamaus/Ludwig Maximilian
University of Munich and Alice Pisani/
Cooper Union, CCA Flatiron Institute, Superlative Star
Princeton University; “Cosmological First spotted by the
Constraints from the BOSS DR12 Void Galactic south pole
Size Function,” by Sofia Contarini Hubble Space Telescope The galactic coordinate system The equatorial coordinate system
et al., in Astrophysical Journal, V
ol. 953; in 2022 via gravitational
August 2023; “Precision Cosmology
is oriented relative to the plane of the is oriented relative to the equator
with Voids in the Final BOSS Data,”
lensing, Earendel is the most
SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.COM
Milky Way and measures positions of Earth and measures positions of
by Nico Hamaus et al., in J ournal of distant known star. It took
Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics,
of objects in the sky using longitude objects in the sky using right ascension
its starlight 12.9 Gyr
25
No. 12; December 2020 (void data) (0–360°) and latitude (–90° to 90°). (0–24 h) and declination (–90° to 90°).
to reach us.
The Vera C. Rubin
Observatory, on the
Cerro Pachón mountain
in Chile, will make
detailed night-sky
surveys that reveal
new voids in
unprecedented detail.
Projects such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey had also cast light (so to speak) on the nature of dark matter.
probed much more deeply into the cosmos than the Although voids have much less dark matter in them
map made by Geller, Huchra and de Lapparent and than the clusters and filaments of the cosmic web do,
confirmed that voids were everywhere you looked. there’s still some. And unlike the chaotic web, with its
Independent observations by two teams of astrophysi- swirling hot gases and colliding galaxies, the voids are
cists, meanwhile, had revealed the existence of dark calm enough that the particles astrophysicists think
energy, a kind of negative gravity that was forcing the make up dark matter might be detectable. They
universe to expand faster and faster rather than slow- wouldn’t show up directly, because they neither absorb
ing down from the mutual gravitational attraction of nor emit light. But the particles should occasionally col-
trillions of galaxies. Voids seemed to offer astrono- lide, resulting in tiny bursts of gamma rays. They would
mers a promising way of studying what might be driv- also probably decay eventually, releasing gamma rays
ing dark energy. in that process as well. A sufficiently sensitive gamma-
These developments caught Wandelt’s eye. His spe- ray telescope in space would theoretically be able to
cialty has always been trying to understand how the detect their collective signal. Nicolao Fornengo of the
large-scale structure of the modern universe came to University of Turin in Italy, co-author of a preprint
be. One of the aspects of voids that he found attractive, study laying out this rationale, says that “if dark matter
he says, was that “these underdense regions are much produces [gamma rays], the signal should be in there.”
quieter in some ways, more amenable to modeling” Voids could even help to nail down the nature of
than the clusters and filaments that separate them. neutrinos—elementary particles, once thought to be
Galaxies and gases are crashing into each other in non- massless, that pervade the universe while barely inter-
linear and complicated interactions, Wandelt says. acting with ordinary matter. (If you sent a beam of
There’s “a chaos” that erases the information about neutrinos through a slab of lead one light-year, or
their formation. Further complicating things, the nearly six trillion miles, thick, about half of them
gravitational attraction between galaxies is strong would sail through it effortlessly.) Physicists have con-
enough on smaller scales that it counteracts the general firmed that the three known types of neutrinos do
expansion of the universe—and even counteracts the have masses, but they aren’t sure why or exactly what
extra oomph of dark energy. Andromeda, for exam- those masses are.
ple, the nearest large galaxy to our own, is actually Voids could help them find the answer, says Elena
drawing closer to the Milky Way; in four billion years Massara, a postdoctoral researcher at the Waterloo
or so, they’ll merge. Voids, in contrast, “are dominated Center for Astrophysics at the University of Waterloo
by dark energy,” Wandelt says. “The biggest ones are in Canada. They’re places that have a lack of both lu-
actually expanding faster than the rest of the uni- minous matter and dark matter, she explains, “but
NOIRLab/NSF/AURA
verse.” That makes them ideal laboratories for getting they’re full of neutrinos, which are almost uniformly
a handle on this still puzzling force. distributed” through the universe, including in voids.
And it’s not just an understanding of dark energy That’s because neutrinos zip through the cosmos at
that could emerge from this line of study; voids could nearly the speed of light, which means they don’t
clump together under their mutual gravity—or under the universe soon because they expect to rapidly mul-
the gravity of the dark matter concentrations that act tiply the number of known voids in their catalog. “In
as the scaffolding for the cosmic web. Although voids the next five or 10 years,” Pisani says, “we’re going to
always contain a lot of neutrinos, the particles are only have hundreds of thousands. It’s one of those fields
passing through—those that fly out are constantly re- where numbers really make a difference.” So, Spergel
plenished by more neutrinos streaming in. And their says, do advances in machine learning, which will
combined gravity can make the voids grow more slow- make it far easier to analyze void properties.
ly over time than they would otherwise. The rate of These exploding numbers won’t be coming from
growth—determined through comparison of the av- projects explicitly designed to search for voids. They
erage size of voids in the early universe to those in the will arrive, as they did with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey,
modern universe—can reveal how much mass neutri- as a by-product of more general surveys. The European
nos actually have. Space Agency’s Euclid mission, for example, which
launched in July 2023, will create a 3-D map of the cos-
V
oid science has changed a lot since Pisani mic web with unprecedented breadth and depth. na-
started studying it as a graduate student work- sa’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will begin its
ing with Wandelt. He offered two or three sug- own survey in 2026, looking in infrared light. And in
gestions for a dissertation topic, she recalls, and one of 2024 the ground-based Vera C. Rubin Observatory will
them was cosmic voids. “I felt that they were the risk- launch a 10-year study of cosmic structure, among other
iest choice,” she says, “because there were very few things. Combined, these projects should increase the
data at the time. But they were also incredibly chal- inventory of known voids by two orders of magnitude.
lenging,” which she found exciting. The data Pisani “I remember one of the first talks I gave on void
and others needed to analyze the voids, however—that cosmology, at a conference in Italy,” Pisani says. “At
is, to test their real-world properties against comput- the end the audience had no questions.” She wasn’t
er models incorporating dark matter, dark energy, sure at the time whether the reason was skepticism or
neutrinos and the formation of large-scale structure simply that the topic was so new to her listeners that
in the universe—were simply not available. “When I they couldn’t think of anything to ask. In retrospect,
started my Ph.D. thesis,” Pisani says, “we knew of few- she thinks it was a little of both. “Initially, I think the
er than 300 voids, something like that. Today we have problem was just convincing people that this was rea-
on the order of 6,000 or more.” sonable science to look into,” she says.
That’s huge, but it’s still not enough for the compre- That’s much less of an issue now. For example,
hensive statistical analysis necessary for voids to be Pisani points out, the Euclid voids group has about 100
used for serious cosmology—with one exception. In scientists in it. “I have to say that Alice was one of the
2020 Hamaus, Pisani, Wandelt and several of their fearless pioneers of this field,” Wandelt notes about
colleagues published an analysis showing that general his former Ph.D. student. When they started writing
relativity behaves at least approximately the same way the first papers on void science, he recalls, some of the
on very large scales as it seems to do in the local uni- leading figures in astrophysics “expressed severe
verse. Voids can be used to test this question because doubt that you could do anything cosmologically in-
astrophysicists think they result from the way dark teresting with voids.” The biggest confirmation that
matter clusters in the universe: the dark matter pulls they were wrong, he says, is that some of those same
in ordinary matter, creating the cosmic web and leav- people are now enthusiastic.
ing empty spaces behind. But what if general relativity, Pisani is perhaps the ideal representative for this fast-
our best theory of gravity, breaks down somehow over emerging field. She approaches the topic with absolute
very large distances? Few scientists expect that to be scientific rigor but also with infectious enthusiasm.
the case, but it has been suggested as a means to explain Whenever she talks about voids, she lights up, speaking
away the existence of dark matter. rapidly, jumping to her feet to draw diagrams on a white-
By looking at the thickness of the walls of matter board, and fielding questions (of which there are now
surrounding voids, however, Hamaus and his col- many) with ease and confidence. She emphasizes that
leagues determined that Einstein’s theory is safe to rely void science won’t answer all of astrophysicists’ big
on. To understand why, imagine a void as “a circle questions about the universe by itself. But it could do
whose radius increases with the expansion of the something even more valuable in a way: test ideas about
universe,” Wandelt says. As the circle grows, it pushes dark matter, dark energy, neutrinos and the growth of
against the boundaries of galaxies and clusters at cosmic structure independently of the other strategies
its perimeter. Over time these structures aggregate, scientists use. If the results match, great. If not, astro-
thickening the “wall” that defines the void’s edge. physicists will have to reconcile their differences to find
Dark energy and neutrinos affect the thickness as out what’s actually going on in the cosmos. FROM OUR ARCHIVES
well, but because they are smoothly distributed both “I find the idea attractive and even somewhat po- The Emptiest Place
in Space. István
inside and outside the voids, they have a much smaller etic,” Wandelt says, “that looking into these areas Szapudi; August 2016.
effect overall. where there’s nothing might yield information about ScientificAmerican.
Scientists plan to use voids to learn even more about some of the outstanding mysteries of the universe.” com/archive
Ja n ua ry 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC AN.COM 27
The
Rise
and Fall
of
Vitamin D
HEALTH
Why worries about widespread vitamin D deficiencies—

and claims of several health benefits—are overblown
BY CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ZARA PICKEN

F OR A WHILE VITAMIN D WAS looking like a bona fide health elixir. It was recognized
a century ago as the cure for rickets, a childhood disease that causes weak and
deformed bones. Then, in the early 2000s, researchers began amassing a pile of
studies suggesting that low vitamin D levels could be a factor in cancer, cardiovas-
cular disease, dementia, depression, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, fractures, respiratory
illnesses and Parkinson’s disease. It seemed reasonable to think that raising our levels of
this simple vitamin—one that our bodies make when lit up by sunshine and that we can get
more of from supplements—could cure practically whatever ailed us.
At least two books called T
he Vitamin D Cure w
published, along with other books and news reports
ere
whose titles include words like “revolution” and “mir-

acle.” There was also a growing concern that we
sampling showed that most people were already get-
ting enough of the vitamin.
There’s no question that vitamin D plays an impor-
tant role in health. It helps your body absorb and re-
weren’t getting enough of the vitamin. G ood Morning tain calcium and phosphorus; both are critical for
America a ired a segment that began with reporter Di- building bone. But except for a few subsets of the
ane Sawyer declaring 100 million Americans were population (such as breastfed infants and people with
deficient. Her guest was Dr. Oz, who told viewers they particular medical conditions), most people probably
could determine their vitamin D level with a simple don’t need supplements.
blood test. Sunshine is the best way to get this vitamin, The story of how vitamin D was discovered, rock-
he said. But if that wasn’t enough, he advised cod liver eted to miracle status and then returned to Earth il-
oil or supplements. lustrates the sometimes jagged path of scientific dis-
Numerous celebrities and vitamin companies covery. It’s also a cautionary tale about the need to in-
raised hopes that vitamin D could be a panacea, says terpret scientific results with humility. Ultimately it’s
JoAnn Manson, an endocrinologist and epidemiologist about the self-correcting nature of science and how
at Harvard Medical School and a lead investigator on knowledge becomes honed over time.
some of the biggest vitamin D studies to date. Sales of
supplements containing the vitamin soared, as did For much of human history, p eople got their
rates of vitamin D testing. vitamin D mostly from the sun. It turns out humans
Then the bottom fell out. Although thousands of are a little bit like plants—we can turn ultraviolet light
studies had linked low levels of vitamin D to an as- into something our bodies need in a process akin
sortment of medical conditions, when scientists tried to photosynthesis.
Journalist Christie administering it as a means to prevent or treat those When the high-energy rays of UV light—UVB—hit
Aschwanden,
problems, the wonder supplement failed miserably. your skin, they start a chain reaction that converts a
a frequent S
cientific
American contributor, The notion that our lives would be better if we all just compound in your skin called a sterol into a vitamin D
is author of Good to Go: raised our vitamin D levels began to look like a fan- precursor. This molecule, after a few more steps, be-
What the Athlete in tasy. The idea that vitamin D deficiency was wide- comes a form of the vitamin that promotes calcium
All of Us Can Learn
spread also crumbled. It turned out that notions of absorption from the gut and increases bone mineraliza-
from the Strange
Science of Recovery what constitutes a deficiency were based on a dubious tion. Vitamin D also seems to bolster the immune sys-
(W. W. Norton, 2019). understanding to begin with. National population tem and tamp down inflammation. It does these things
in part by influencing the production of
inflammatory compounds and suppressing
The study findings were a shock.
the buildup of proinflammatory cells. Re-
searchers are studying whether vitamin D
Vitamin D did not make a dent
can prevent dangerous inflammatory reac- in cancer or heart disease, and it did
tions in people with COVID.
Producing vitamin D became increas- not prevent falls, improve cognitive
ingly difficult for human bodies during
the Industrial Revolution, when smoke
function or reduce bone fracture risk.
and soot darkened the skies and children
spent more time in the shade of crowded Drink it daily—for health with enjoyment.” stance, an offshoot of the Framingham
cities, leading to an increase in rickets. If it sounds antiquated, consider that in Heart Study published in 2008 followed
By the late 1800s researchers had docu- 2022 beer brand Corona launched Corona more than 1,700 people without prior
mented geographic differences in the prev- Sunbrew, a nonalcoholic beer fortified with cardiovascular disease over about five
alence of rickets that pointed to a possible vitamin D. years and found that people with low vita-
link to sunlight. Beer is not, however, a health food. The min D levels had a higher risk of develop-
In the 1920s Johns Hopkins University “natural, evolutionarily appropriate way to ing heart disease. The results generated a
biochemist Elmer McCollum identified vi- get vitamin D is through synthesis in your lot of excitement and hype around vita-
tamin D in cod liver oil and gave it its name. skin,” says Anastassios Pittas, chief of the min D, Manson says.
German chemist Adolf Otto Reinhold division of endocrinology, diabetes and Diabetes, too, seemed to track with D
Windaus won a Nobel Prize in 1928 for metabolism at Tufts Medical Center. But levels. A study published in 2010 followed
showing how the body made vitamin D that does not require getting a sunburn. It close to 6,100 people in Tromsø, Norway,
from sunlight. Calling this previously un- turns out that you don’t need high doses of over a period of 11 years. Their incidence of
known substance a vitamin gave it a sheen sun to get sufficient vitamin D. A 2010 study type 2 diabetes showed an inverse relation
of beneficence. The term “vitamin” had calculated that between April and October, with blood levels of vitamin D before their
been coined by Polish scientist Casimir someone in Boston with 25 percent of their body mass was taken into account: higher
Funk, who created the word by combining skin exposed would need between three D levels were correlated with fewer cases
the terms “vita” (Latin for “life”) and and eight minutes of sunlight per day to get of diabetes. Similarly, a 2011 study of more
“amine” (for amino acids, building blocks enough. Of course, in the winter it might be than 6,500 people in Australia found that
of life). The word created “an aura of safety challenging to find even this amount of sun the risk of developing diabetes over the
and health,” says Catherine Price, author of at some latitudes. course of five years was lowest for the par-
Vitamania: How Vitamins Revolutionized Fortunately, your body is equipped to ticipants with the highest D levels.
the Way We Think about Food. deal with this kind of variation. Your liver All these observational studies have a
The practice of fortifying food with vi- and fat cells store vitamin D for future use, fundamental weakness: they can identify a
tamin D began when McCollum’s former Pittas says. That means you don’t necessar- co-occurrence between vitamin D and a
student Harry Steenbock, then at the Uni- ily need a big dose every day. Your vita- disease, but they can’t prove there is a cause-
versity of Wisconsin–Madison, discovered min D cache generally lasts for about 10 to and-effect relation—or, if there is one, they
that he could produce vitamin D in both 12 weeks, so even if you don’t have a lot of can’t identify in which direction it might go.
rats and their feed by irradiating them with daily D coming in via sunshine in the win- Think of it this way: there’s a strong link
UV light. The rays hit sterol compounds, ter, Pittas says, you could still have enough between someone’s wealth and the price of
found in the cells of plants, animals and circulating from your liver to maintain ad- their car, but that doesn’t mean buying an
fungi, and start a conversion process. For equate calcium and phosphorus levels. It’s expensive vehicle will make you rich.
instance, exposing chickens to UVB light natural to have a winter dip, he says, but “Just because you see an association,
boosts the vitamin D in their meat and egg that is worrisome only if you’re already that doesn’t mean that, okay, if we fix the
yolks. Most of the vitamin D in modern running low on vitamin D. serum vitamin D level, that’s going to fix
supplements comes from irradiated lano- the problem,” says physician Leila Kah-
lin, a grease derived from sheep’s wool. Interest in getting extra vitamin D wati, associate director of the Research
Steenbock also found that feeding dairy took off when studies suggested it might Triangle Institute–University of North
cows irradiated feed or mixing irradiated lower the risk of heart disease, cancer, dia- Carolina Evidence-based Practice Center.
fat extract into milk raised D levels. Today betes, and a range of other conditions. There might be other factors at play. For
fortified milk and other dairy products— The problem is that this evidence came instance, people who take vitamin D sup-
which also use the lanolin-derived form of mostly from observational studies, a type plements may be more health conscious
the vitamin—are some of the most com- of analysis that can’t show cause and effect and do other things that protect them from
mon dietary sources. and that might produce misleading results, disease, and people who are already in poor
In 1936 the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Manson says. These observational studies health probably spend less time outdoors
Company introduced “Sunshine Vita- looked for associations between vitamin D getting vitamin D from sunlight.
min D” beer. The ads exclaimed that “beer levels and a particular health issue or com-
is good for you—but SCHLITZ, with SUN- pared vitamin D status among people with For these reasons, randomized con-
SHINE Vitamin D, is extra good for you. a condition and those without. For in- trolled trials, in which researchers recruit

a group of participants and then assign results, along with others coming out of at risk for vitamin D deficiency. The mak-
them to receive different treatments (or a VITAL, led to growing skepticism about ers of these guidelines looked at much of
placebo), are considered the strongest kind vitamin D by around 2020, says Clifford the same evidence that the institute com-
of medical evidence, says physician Jodi Rosen, an endocrinologist at the Maine mittee reviewed, but they concluded that
Segal, associate director of the Center for Medicine Center’s Research Institute. anything under 20 ng/ml represented
Health Services and Outcomes Research at The ViDA trial did find some modest “deficiency,” and they labeled vitamin D
Johns Hopkins University’s school of pub- supplement benefits in people who had levels of 21 to 29 ng/ml as something they
lic health. A randomized design makes it started the study with a vitamin D deficien- called “insufficiency.”
much more likely that any differences be- cy. But what exactly does “deficiency” mean? The terms “insufficiency” and “defi-
tween the study and placebo groups are ciency” have created “a tremendous amount
I
caused by the intervention rather than by t does not mean what many doctors of confusion,” says Christopher McCartney,
some other variable. think it does, apparently. The widespread an endocrinologist and clinical research
In 2009 Manson and her team em- notion that much of America is walking specialist at the University of Virginia
barked on the world’s largest and most far- around deficient in vitamin D came from School of Medicine. He adds that the En-
reaching randomized vitamin D trial, what Manson calls a “misinterpretation and docrine Society guidelines have been large-
called VITAL. The study followed nearly misapplication” of the normal levels for vi- ly taken to mean that everyone needs vita-
26,000 generally healthy adults, random- tamin D set by the Institute of Medicine min D levels of 30 ng/ml or more.
ized to receive either 2,000 international (IOM, now known as the National Acade- The IOM guidelines don’t support that
units (IU) of vitamin D or a placebo, for an my of Medicine) more than a decade ago. conclusion, and in 2012 the institute com-
average of 5.3 years. The volunteers were Here’s what happened. In 2011 the IOM mittee published a rebuttal paper, “IOM
almost evenly split between men and wom- convened an expert committee to conduct Committee Members Respond to Endocrine
en, and 20 percent of the participants were a thorough analysis of all existing studies Society Vitamin D Guideline.” It contended
Black. The study was designed to look at on vitamin D and health. Based on this evi- that aspects of the society’s guidelines, in-
whether vitamin D supplements could pre- dence, the committee concluded that the cluding the definition of insufficiency, were
vent cancer or cardiovascular disease. bone-strengthening benefits of vitamin D not well supported by evidence. For in-
The results came as a shock. Not only plateau when blood levels (as measured by stance, the society’s guidelines used a 2003
did vitamin D not make a dent in rates of a standard vitamin D blood test) reach 12 study of only 34 people to support its con-
cancer or heart disease, but the trial also to 16 nanograms per milliliter. They also tention that vitamin D levels above
found that vitamin D did not prevent falls, found that there were no benefits to having 30 ng/ml are better for calcium absorption.
improve cognitive function, reduce atrial levels above 20 ng/ml. So they set that as At the same time the society’s committee
fibrillation, change body composition, re- the ceiling for their recommendations ignored a study of more than 300 people that
duce migraine frequency, improve stroke while noting that the majority of the popu- found that calcium absorption pretty much
outcomes, decrease age-related macular lation is just fine at 16 ng/ml. maxes out at vitamin D levels of 8 ng/ml.
degeneration, reduce knee pain or even According to measurements of vita- Michael Holick was the lead author of
reduce the risk of bone fractures. The find- min D levels in the general U.S. population the Endocrine Society guidelines. An en-
ing about fractures “was a real surprise to collected through the National Health and docrinologist at Boston University’s medi-
many people,” Manson says. Nutrition Examination Survey, most people cal school, Holick says that the insufficien-
Extra vitamin D also didn’t lower dia- had levels of 20 ng/ml or more in 2011. Lev- cy standard is justified by an observational
betes risk. In a trial published in 2019 in the els have actually risen since then, meaning study from 2010. It found that about a
New England Journal of Medicine, P ittas that most people are well within the medical quarter of the otherwise healthy adult
and his colleagues randomized more than recommendations, says Rosen, who served males had evidence of osteomalacia, a
2,400 people at risk for diabetes to take on the IOM committee. bone-softening condition linked to low
either 4,000 IU of vitamin D or a placebo So where did the idea of mass deficiency vitamin D levels. The study didn’t find
daily. After two and a half years, a similar come from? First off, 20 ng/ml was errone- bone problems in people above 30 ng/ml;
number of people in each group went on to ously interpreted by some health-care work- hence Holick’s contention that 30 was
develop the disease. ers as the bare minimum, instead of a level the minimum.
The Vitamin D Assessment Study marking good amounts for most people. The Endocrine Society is currently in
(ViDA) recruited 5,110 volunteers ages 50 Recall the IOM found that 16 ng/ml was the process of updating its guidelines, with
to 84 in New Zealand and randomized satisfactory. The implication of the misread- McCartney serving as its methodologist.
them to get either a placebo or 200,000 IU ing was that people needed more than He says that the new guidelines will focus
of vitamin D per month—a huge dose 20 ng/ml for good bone health, Manson says. on randomized trials, not observational
much higher than the recommended daily But some of the confusion stems from ones, and they’ll be careful to call out the
allowance. The study found that levels a second set of guidelines that another evidence gaps that remain.
made no difference in cardiovascular dis- medical group, the Endocrine Society, put The committee is also taking care to
ease, acute respiratory infections, non- out around the same time as the IOM stan- avoid outside influence. “Our conflict-of-
spinal fractures, falls and all types of can- dards. Whereas the institute made recom- interest policy is much more transparent
cer. Other trials found that vitamin D mendations for healthy populations, the and rigorous than I think it has been in the
supplementation did not reduce mortality society’s guidelines were aimed at clini- past,” McCartney says. Holick, who ran the
rates or the risk of invasive cancer. These cians, particularly those caring for patients original guideline-writing group, advocates
large doses of vitamin D supplements. Al-
though there is no evidence that his judg- How We Get Vitamin D
ments were affected by commercial ties, Vitamin D helps our bodies absorb calcium for stronger bones. We get it from two
Holick has received at least $100,000 from slightly different precursor molecules. One is D3, made when sunlight hits our skin
various companies involved in making vi- cells. The other is D2, which comes from fungi and yeast. Some foods may be fortified
tamin D supplements and tests, according with D2. To become active, both molecules go through several conversions in the body.
to a 2018 investigation by Kaiser Health
News (now KFF Health News) and the N ew
York Times. McCartney says that, in part, SUNSHINE AND SKIN FOOD AND SUPPLEMENTS
concerns raised about Holick prompted People, like plants, transform solar energy Very few foods naturally contain high
into essential molecules. When UVB rays amounts of vitamin D. Fatty fish such as
the Endocrine Society to pay extra atten- enter certain skin cells, compounds from salmon and tuna do, as does cod liver oil.
tion to ethics. those cells are transformed into D3. Supplements can contain a mix of D3 and
Holick made a name for himself es- D2 forms; the D3 compound is commonly
pousing the health-promoting powers derived from irradiated sheep’s wool
UVB hits cells called grease, which is also the source of the
of vitamin D and wrote a book called The keratinocytes. The vitamin D in fortified milk.
Vitamin D Solution: A 3-Step Strategy to energy changes cell
Cure Our Most Common Health Problems. compounds called
sterols into D3
He takes 6,000 IU daily and advises his molecules
patients to take a minimum of 2,000 to
3,000 IU per day. For comparison, the 2011
IOM report calculated that the average per-
son’s daily requirement is 400 IU.
Holick told Scientific American that
it is “not true” that he has conflicts of inter-
est. He acknowledged receiving industry
money but said most of the money had
“nothing to do with vitamin D” and was Once in the body, some
instead “associated with me talking about Skin vitamin D can be stored for
weeks or months, primarily
a new drug coming on the market,” for pain fat cells and the liver
tients with chronic hypoparathyroidism.
Still, some in the field see Holick’s evan-
gelism for vitamin D as conflicting with his Vitamin D binding protein
role working on the Endocrine Society transports D2 and D3
guidelines. Rosen says that the guidelines through the blood
“were driven by Mike. He was the chair of
the committee.” Rosen trained with Holick FIRST CONVERSION
and considers him a friend. “He’s a good When D2 and D3 reach the liver, enzymes
there convert those molecules into
guy,” Rosen says. But “just because you another form, 25-hydroxyvitamin D
hypothesize something doesn’t mean you (25D). That form reenters the blood-
have to stick with it.... Michael went to ex- stream, heading for the kidneys.
tremes to show that vitamin D had some-
thing to do with chronic diseases.”
Much of the information put out by
companies offering direct-to-consumer
testing still claims that anything under
30 ng/ml is low. Athlete Blood Test, for SECOND CONVERSION
Graphics consultant: Anastassios Pittas/Tufts Medical Center
In the kidneys, some 25D is changed into the biologically

instance, markets blood tests to active active form of the vitamin, 1,25D. That compound returns
people and encourages them to aim for a to the blood, circulating throughout the body.
level of at least 50 ng/ml. While working
on this story, I had my vitamin D checked
by another testing company, and the labo- Protein
ratory results came back with reference VITAMIN D AS A GENE SWITCH
ranges of 30 to 100 ng/ml, implying that The 1,25D molecules reach cells in many
anything under 30 was not enough. The lab organs and tissues. They function as
“on” switches for genes. The activated
explanation did note that the IOM’s cutoff
genes pass instructions for making mRNA
was 20. (My number was 32.8 ng/ml, proteins to mRNA molecules. The mRNA Gene
which suggests that sunshine really can goes to the cells’ ribosomes, which put
help—I never take supplements, but I ex- together the proteins.
ercise daily outdoors.)
Nucleus Cell
Graphic by Now Medical Studios

More than 10 million vitamin D tests are conditions can cause vitamin D deficiency,
done annually in the U.S., despite the fact so people with these illnesses might also
that these tests are not recommended by need supplements. People who are hospi-
major medical organizations such as the talized or who have had gastric bypass sur-
Endocrine Society, the National Academy gery may also become deficient.
of Medicine and the U.S. Preventive Ser- Typical tests may, however, overesti-
vices Task Force. Three medical societies mate vitamin D problems in some people of
have endorsed a recommendation to “not African ancestry. The standard test mea-
order population-based screening for vita- sures circulating blood levels of a vitamin D
min D” from Choosing Wisely, an initiative precursor, 25-hydroxyvitamin D, that is
to reduce wasteful medical practices. bound to a particular protein. A 2013 N ew
Yet the testing goes on. A study published England Journal of Medicine study found
in 2020 examined medical records from a that some people have gene variants that
large regional health system in Virginia and allow circulation of more of the unbound
found that about 10 percent of the system’s precursor form and less of the bound one.
patients were tested for D levels, although So by focusing on the bound version, the
many of the tests were not indicated by the test underestimates total vitamin D avail-
patients’ health conditions. Supporting the ability. The study, which involved more
idea of the tests being unneeded, 75 percent than 2,000 people, found that those who
of the results came back as normal, says were Black had lower vitamin D levels than
study author Michelle Rockwell, an assistant white participants according to the stan-
professor of family and community medi- dard blood test. Yet those Black people had
cine at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and strong bones and good calcium levels.
State University. Furthermore, some of the Manson is quick to caution that more
test results categorized as abnormal may isn’t necessarily better when it comes to
have been considered just fine by the IOM vitamin D. “Vitamin D is essential to good
standards; the study used a higher reference health, but we require only small to moder-
range of 30 to 99.9 ng/ml. ate amounts,” she says. She doesn’t dis-
Given the VITAL trial’s large size and suade people from taking supplements of
wide scope, many vitamin D researchers up to 2,000 IU per day, but she doesn’t rec-
hoped it would put many of the purported ommend higher levels because some stud-
benefits of vitamin D supplements to rest. ies have found that excess vitamin D can
“But there’s a religiosity around vitamin D,” increase the risk of dangerous falls—re-
Rosen says. Rosen wrote an editorial in the searchers speculate that intermittent high
New England Journal of Medicine saying doses affect the central nervous system,
most people can stop taking vitamin D which could impair balance. And whether
supplements and that the large VITAL you’re taking supplements or not, you are
study was a “decisive verdict.” Even then, probably getting supplemental vitamin D
he says, he got pushback from colleagues if you consume dairy products, breakfast
who refused to believe that vitamin D cereal, plant milks, or other fortified foods,
wasn’t the panacea they had come to be- says Price, author of Vitamania.
lieve. “The evidence is out there,” he says. Despite the disappointing trials on vi-
“People don’t want to pay attention to it.” tamin D, it’s not time to dismiss the vita-
min completely, Manson says. There’s still
A
lthough most people don’t need plenty more to understand. For instance,
supplements, there are exceptions. the VITAL trial showed that among slen- and autoimmune disease, so it’s likely that
Breast milk does not contain enough der or normal-weight people, defined as any connection is complex.
vitamin D for infants, so the American having body mass indexes of 25 or less, Pittas remains convinced that for people
Academy of Pediatrics recommends that vitamin D supplements appeared to lower at high risk for diabetes, vitamin D can play
babies who are breastfed (partially or ex- the incidence of cancer, cancer deaths and a role in prevention. His earlier trial did
clusively) be supplemented with 400 IU a autoimmune disease. This protective effect hint that people who received supplemen-
day of vitamin D beginning in the first few did not show up among heavier people tal vitamin D were less likely to develop
days of life to promote stronger bones. In with higher body masses. Manson cautions diabetes: 24.4 percent of them got the dis-
addition, the academy says all infants and that these numbers need to be verified by ease, versus 26.9 percent of the placebo
children who consume less than 32 ounces further work because they are from a group. That difference alone was too small
of vitamin D–fortified formula or milk per smaller subanalysis of the main study. But to be statistically significant. But when he
day should also get supplements of 400 IU. it’s possible that excess body fat may some- pooled the results with those of two other
Crohn’s disease, cystic fibrosis, celiac how hamper the effectiveness of vitamin D. randomized trials, he found a modest but
disease, and certain liver and kidney Obesity itself is a risk factor for both cancer consistent benefit of about a 3 percent
reduction in diabetes risk over three years. whether vitamin D can help with COVID. magical thinking that vitamins improve
There are some positive signs for treat- One is investigating whether high-dose health, and some people do feel better”
ing COVID, too. Clinical and lab studies vitamin D can reduce the chances of get- when taking them, he says, pointing to the
have shown that vitamin D has a positive ting the extended and debilitating ailment placebo effect as a potential contributor.
effect on the immune system and can tamp of long COVID. The other trial is looking at The ups and downs of vitamin D offer a
down inflammation. “We saw this in our whether 1,000 IU of vitamin D per day can lesson in humility. The relation between
VITAL trial,” Manson says. Holick adds reduce the risk of that illness or overall the vitamin and disease is far more compli-
that vitamin D can help downregulate so- symptom severity. Manson hopes to finish cated and nuanced than it first seemed and
called cytokine storms, immune system analyzing the data in 2024. a reminder that scientific understanding is
overreactions that have provoked life- Vitamins hold a certain allure. They’re always evolving.
threatening respiratory problems in some cheap, they’re relatively safe, and there’s a
COVID patients. sense, emphasized by marketers, that FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Manson’s research group has two ran- they’re “natural” and therefore somehow A Diet for Better Bones. Claudia Wallis; January
domized trials currently underway to test better than drugs, Rosen says. “There’s this 2023. ScientificAmerican.com/archive

Tukpahlearik Creek in northwestern
Alaska’s Brooks Range runs bright
orange where permafrost is thawing.
ENVIRONMENT
Rıvers
Rusting
Streams in Alaska are turning orange with iron and sulfuric

acid. Scientists are trying to figure out why BY ALEC LUHN
PHOTOGRAPHS BY TAYLOR ROADES
I T WAS A CLOUDY JULY AFTERNOON in Alaska’s Kobuk Valley National Park, part of
the biggest stretch of protected wilderness in the U.S. We were 95 kilometers
(60 miles) from the nearest village and 400 kilometers from the road system.
Nature doesn’t get any more unspoiled. But the stream flowing past our feet looked
polluted. The streambed was orange, as if the rocks had been stained with carrot
juice. The surface glistened with a gasolinelike rainbow sheen. “This is bad stuff,” said
Patrick Sullivan, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Sullivan, a short, bearded man with a Glock pistol
strapped to his chest for protection against Grizzly
Bears, was looking at the screen of a sensor he had
dipped into the water. He read measurements from the
screen to Roman Dial, a biology and mathematics pro-
fessor at Alaska Pacific University. Dissolved oxygen
was extremely low, and the pH was 6.4, about 100 times
Tributary streams along one third of the 110-kilometer
river are full of oxidized iron minerals and, in many
cases, acid. “It was a famous, pristine river ecosystem,”
Sullivan said, “and it feels like it’s completely collapsing
now.” The same thing is happening to rivers and streams
throughout the Brooks Range—at least 75 of them in
the past five to 10 years—and probably in Russia and
more acidic than the somewhat alkaline river into which Canada as well. This past summer a researcher spotted
the stream was flowing. The electrical conductivity, an two orange streams while flying from British Columbia
indicator of dissolved metals or minerals, was closer to to the Northwest Territories. “Almost certainly it is hap-
that of industrial wastewater than the average moun- pening in other parts of the Arctic,” said Timothy Ly-
tain stream. “Don’t drink this water,” Sullivan said. ons, a geochemist at the University of California, Riv-
Less than a dozen meters away the stream flowed erside, who’s been working with Dial and Sullivan.
into the Salmon River, a ribbon of swift channels and Scientists who have studied these rusting rivers
shimmering rapids that winds south from the snow- agree that the ultimate cause is climate change. Kobuk
dimpled dun peaks of the Brooks Range. This is the Valley National Park has warmed by 2.4 degrees Cel-
last frontier in the state known as “the last frontier,” a sius (4.32 degrees Fahrenheit) since 2006 and could
1,000-kilometer line of pyramidlike slopes that wall get another 10.2 degrees C hotter by 2100, a greater
Alec Luhn is an off the northern portion of Alaska from the gray, increase than projected for any other national park.
award-winning climate wind-raked Arctic Coast. The heat may already have begun to thaw 40 percent
journalist who has One of the most remote and undisturbed rivers in of the park’s permafrost, the layer of earth just under
reported from a town
America, the Salmon has long been renowned for its the topsoil that normally remains frozen year-round.
invaded by Polar Bears,
the only floating nuclear unspoiled nature. When author John McPhee paddled McPhee wanted to protect the Salmon River because
power plant and the the Salmon in 1975, it contained “the clearest, purest humans had “not yet begun to change it.” Now, less
coldest inhabited place water I have ever seen flowing over rocks,” he wrote in than 50 years later, we have done just that. The last
on Earth. Follow him on Coming into the Country, a n Alaska classic. A landmark great wilderness in America, which by law is supposed
social media @alecluhn
1980 conservation act designated it a wild and scenic to be “untrammeled by man,” is being trammeled
T his story is part river for what the government called “water of excep- from afar by our global emissions.
of the Pulitzer
tional clarity,” deep, luminescent blue-green pools and But how, exactly, permafrost thaw is turning these
Center’s nationwide
Connected Coastlines “large runs of chum and pink salmon.” rivers orange has been a mystery. Solving it is crucial
reporting initiative. Now, however, the Salmon is quite literally rusting. for understanding what the sweeping ecological im-
pact could be and to help communities adapt, such as could be in lethal danger. If the bacteria hypothesis was Scientists compare
the eight Alaska Native villages that depend on rivers right, the rusting could gradually smother streams al- data at a “burn”—
a stretch of thawing
in the western Brooks Range for fish and drinking wa- most anywhere there’s permafrost—an area that in-
ground where seeping
ter. Some researchers think acid from minerals is leach- cludes about one fourth of the Northern Hemisphere. water is so acidic
ing iron out of bedrock that has been exposed to water it kills vegetation,
for the first time in millennia. Others think bacteria are To get close t o the Salmon, two graduate students turning it black.
mobilizing iron from the soil in thawing wetlands. and I took a six-seater bush plane inland from the Arctic The orange color
comes from the
I had joined a group of scientists and wilderness coast. The ice close to the Salmon had broken up in late presence of iron
buffs for a six-day trip down the Salmon to try to figure spring, so any gravel bars on the river where a fat-tired mobilized by thawing.
out which, if either, of these hypotheses explained the bush plane might land were still under water. The best
pollution in this once spotless waterway. We’d paddle the pilot could do was to land on a long, flat gravel ridge
downriver about 25 kilometers a day, passing from the in the mist-covered mountains north of the river. The
treeless tundra near its headwaters to the boreal forest rest of the group, who had been taking data in another
at its confluence with the broad, sluggish Kobuk River, watershed, was waiting there for our cargo of inflatable
then follow the Kobuk to the nearest village. Along the pack rafts, paddles, personal flotation devices, food and
way we’d stop at as many tributaries as possible to take 52 water-sampling kits. We strapped the rafts, which
notes, collect vials of water and pick invertebrates off folded down to the size of a gallon of milk, to the top of
the rocks for the first comprehensive sampling of an each pack for the hike to the river.
entire rusting watershed. If the acid-rock hypothesis “This is the heaviest my backpack has ever been,”
proved true, the fish downstream of certain mountains graduate student Maddy Zietlow said before we pow-

A strip of test paper ered through 20 kilometers of windswept ridges, an- stream from where we embarked, a large tributary
dipped into a seep at kle-twisting tussocks and scratchy brush. We finally called Kanaktok Creek was pumping in murky water
a burn site indicates
descended toward the luminescent braids of the Salm- over orange rocks, turning the Salmon green. The next
an acidity around 2.5—
like vinegar. Fish and on to camp for the night as half a dozen white-coated incoming stream was so full of iron that the main stem
fish eggs in such water Dall Sheep bounded away over a ridge. ran half orange and half green. For the rest of the trip
would die. The highest reaches of the Salmon still have clear the river had the color and opacity of pea soup. “Most
water, but they’re too rocky and shallow to float on, so climate change is subtle,” said Forrest McCarthy, a for-
the next morning we sloshed a few kilometers down mer U.S. Antarctic Program field-safety coordinator,
the nascent river until we found a spot deep enough to who was helping with water samples. “This is like,
launch our pack rafts. We stuffed the food and gear into bam!” he continued, snapping his fingers.
oval storage tubes in the rafts and blew them up taut. The first investigators to document the rusting riv-
During the first few kilometers of paddling, we had to ers were U.S. Geological Survey and National Park
lift our butts off the bottom of the rafts to keep from Service personnel studying how permafrost changes
getting stuck every time the current scraped us over a in the Brooks Range are affecting fish such as the Dolly
ledge of rapids. We dodged aquamarine marble rocks Varden, a big, silvery green char with red spots that
the size of couch cushions. local villages prize above all others. In August 2018,
When McPhee was here, he wrote that the river was when biologist Mike Carey flew by helicopter to re-
so clear and full of fish that “looking over the side of the trieve a water sensor he had left in a clean stream east
canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.” of the Salmon, he saw that the bottom was blanketed
These days, however, looking over the side is like star- in orange slime. He couldn’t find any fish or insects.
ing down into a sky full of thick haze. An hour down- “Biodiversity just crashed,” he recalled.
40 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N Jan uary 2 02 4 Map by Daniel P. Huffman

Carey thought the weird situation was a one-off until thawed topsoil you’d find ground as hard as concrete
the following July, Alaska’s hottest month on record. The and as many as 600 meters deep in places like Prudhoe
Agashashok River, 96 kilometers west of the Salmon, Bay, much of which has been frozen since the last ice
turned from turquoise to orange-brown along part of its age. Within that layer is animal and plant matter hold-
course. In the winter of 2019 the snowpack was abnor- ing twice as much carbon as the atmosphere does.
mally high; that can insulate the ground, further encour- When permafrost thaws, microbes begin to digest this
aging permafrost thaw. Then came another hot summer matter and emit carbon dioxide and methane; that
and another snowy winter, and the rusting spread. rotting-vegetable smell means the planet is cooking.
Dial and Sullivan, who had been studying the The ice contains other surprises as well. In Russia
northward march of the tree line in the warming in 2016, anthrax reactivated by permafrost thaw led to
Brooks Range, were shocked by how fast streams there the death of a 12-year-old boy. The softening earth
started transforming. On one 2020 expedition the could also unleash viruses, chemicals or mercury, a
water in a stream called Clear Creek was so acidic it recent study warned—a Pandora’s icebox of unex-
curdled the powdered milk Zietlow used for her night- pected consequences. Still, the rusting of rivers blind-
ly tea. A loose network of interested scientists began sided the Alaska scientists. They suspected that the
to coalesce. For Dial, a kind of wilderness beatnik with thaw was driving it, but they weren’t sure how. Then
a face of white stubble and a stream-of-consciousness David Cooper, an ecologist at Colorado State Univer-
manner of speaking, the expanding project was per- sity, suggested what they now refer to as the “wetlands
sonal: he had been climbing mountains and floating hypothesis”—the idea that microbes in the soil are
rivers in the Brooks Range for more than 40 years. “It’s producing not just methane but also soluble iron.
fascinating from a scientific point of view, but from an Cooper has known Dial since 1979, when, as a teen-
emotional point of view, it’s sad,” he said of the chang- age climber, Dial wandered into Cooper’s research
es he’s witnessing. “The alarming thing is how far our camp in the Brooks Range soaked, freezing and hun-
human reach is, in a big way.” gry. He gave the young Dial warm clothes and food,
After about four hours on the water, we came to a perhaps saving his life. In 2021 Dial invited Cooper on
wide bend where the river looked as if it were disap- a research trip to Timber Creek, 30 kilometers west of
pearing into a tunnel. The current had eaten deep into the Salmon. On the first day Cooper tried some fly-
the softening shore, creating an overhang of earth at fishing and found more iron than fish. “I looked at the
least 30 meters long. Muddy roots hung down like creek,” he recalled, “and I said, ‘This creek is dead. It’s Rivers in the Brooks
strands of a beaded curtain. Globules of watery dirt just blanketed with metals.’” Range flow to the Arctic
plopped into the river, and the air smelled like a mix He wondered whether bacteria might be to blame. and Pacific Oceans.
The Salmon and Wulik
of moldy towels and rotting vegetables—the unmis- The chemical process of breaking down carbon com- Rivers are rusting,
takable scent of thawing permafrost. “I don’t remem- pounds for energy produces hydrogen atoms with an compromising fishing
ber that,” Sullivan said, frowning. extra electron each. Many bacteria rely on oxygen mol- and water supply for
Permafrost ranges from isolated patches in Anchor- ecules to accept that extra electron in a process known people in villages such
as Kiana and Kivalina.
age to a near-continuous sheet in the Brooks Range. If as reduction. But in waterlogged environments, where
Red Dog Mine is one
you set a fire and then dug down into the warmed area there is no free oxygen, bacterial respiration can re- of the world’s largest
like gold miners did, under about a meter of seasonally duce other elements, such as sulfur, or it can reduce the zinc and lead producers.
A
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Ra kR
Kobuk River
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N Jan uary 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.COM 41
Roman Dial, David oxidized iron that, along with organic matter and
Cooper, Dan Gregory manganese, gives soil its brown color.
and Timothy Lyons (left
The thaw of permafrost soil under a wetland allows
to right) discover water
flowing through iron- bacteria to start reducing that oxidized iron, Cooper
rich soils in burns thinks. And reduced iron, unlike oxidized iron, is
as well as wetlands, soluble in water. If it’s carried by groundwater out into
suggesting different an oxygenated stream, it can once again be oxidized.
sources of the rusting.
A crack indicates When that happens, it will fall out of the water as
the ground is shifting “rust” and turn the stream orange. While digging
as underlying perma trenches on marshy ground near Timber Creek this
frost thaws. past August, Cooper and Dial found water as deep as
1.5 meters under the once frozen soil, as well as dirt the
gray color of reduced iron. New groundwater flows
have developed in the thawing earth, Cooper said, and
they have “really awakened a lot of these geochemical
processes that have been basically stalled out for 5,000
years because the ground’s been frozen.”
T
he second night, w e camped among spindly
spruce trees on the gravel shore across from
where Anaktok Creek, a toxic orange tributary,
runs through a long, winding valley and into the Salm-
on. Dial and Sullivan, who knew the Anaktok from
previous trips, wanted to hike half a dozen kilometers
up into the valley and float back down, sampling the trickled out of the dark ground. It was too shallow to
creek and the tiny streams that feed it. The next morn- measure with the sampling kit, so McCarthy offered
ing we grabbed several water-sampling kits each, to sacrifice his Nalgene water bottle. He took one last
paddled across the river, packed up our rafts and start- swig and dumped its contents, then slowly refilled it
ed up the northern slope. As we got higher we could from the seep. When Sullivan dipped a sensor into the
see across to the southern side of the valley, and we bottle, it showed a pH of 2.95, like vinegar. The burn
discovered a startling sight. An expanse of green tun- was from acid. “If it’s got that low of a pH ... it’s ac-
dra maybe 100 meters long looked as if it had been tively burning,” Sullivan said. “There’s at least a dozen
burned—only there hadn’t been any wildfire. burns in this valley,” Dial added.
We scrambled up a hill and began moving along the We stumbled on another burn among the raking wil-
broad ridgeline, and after more than an hour we came low shrubs as we descended toward the creek, and the
across an ugly black sore on our side of the valley. trickle from the lumpy black crust there was strongly
Twigs of dead lingonberry and dryas shrubs drooped acidic, too. Below the black spots, an orange slime cov-
onto dirt the color of fresh asphalt. A channel of water ered the rocks of the Anaktok, rubbing off on the hands
of Alexander Lee, an Alaska Pacific University philoso- Spain’s infamous Rio Tinto, which is so orange and full
phy professor who was helping to sample fish and inver- of acid from upstream mining that it’s considered a
tebrates. A small stream coming down from the hills had potential analogue for acidic sites on Mars.
a highly acidic pH of 3.5. “Wow, this is crazy,” Dial said. Most ore deposits are rich in sulfide minerals such
“And not much rust. It’s probably still in solution,” as pyrite (“fool’s gold”), a compound of sulfur and iron.
Sullivan said. Although the wetlands hypothesis of- If a sulfide mineral is exposed to water and oxygen, as
fered a reason for the orange staining, it couldn’t ex- will happen when miners start breaking up rock, the
plain the acidification. In late 2022 Lyons had con- sulfur splits off the metal and bonds with hydrogen and
tacted Dial with the idea that water was reacting with oxygen molecules, forming sulfuric acid. The resulting
minerals in the bedrock—the “acid-rock drainage contamination by acid and metals, including iron, is a
hypothesis.” He had seen a web article with a photo- problem in flooded mines and in ponds full of tailings
graph Dial had taken of the Salmon in autumn, as (the waste product from processing mined ore) around
bright yellow as the Balsam Poplar trees next to it, and the world. Acid-rock drainage can also happen natu-
he was reminded of research he’d done for nasa on rally when streams weather sulfide rock in ore deposits.

Alaska Natives have spotted occasional orange streams
around the Brooks Range for years—though not in the
numbers appearing now. Lyons thinks permafrost
thaw is lifting the icy lid off the bedrock, allowing oxy-
genated water to reach pyrite-rich shale for the first
time in thousands of years. That’s forming sulfuric acid
and oxidizing the leftover iron, which would normally
precipitate out of the water as rust. The acidity dis-
solves the oxidized iron, allowing it to flow with the
ground seep just as reduced iron does.
But the Brooks Range also happens to have a lot of
alkaline limestone, which makes water more basic. If
the acidic water from a seep reaches an alkaline river
or stream, its pH will rise, and the iron will fall out as
what miners would call yellow boy. “It’s like a one-two
punch,” Lyons said. “You have the shaley rocks with
pyrite that source the acid and the iron, and then the
limestones neutralize that acid and cause the iron to
come out of solution.”
What’s really scary is that the acid might also be
leaching out other metals, such as copper, zinc, cad-
mium, lead and even arsenic, that are then carried far
downstream. Mining areas often hold enough sulfide
minerals to fuel these reactions for millennia. Hillside
seeps from permafrost might “turn on” only in years of
greater thaw, or they could continue for decades or cen-
turies. “That’s why this problem is so challenging from
a remediation point of view,” says Brett Poulin, an en-
vironmental toxicology expert at the University of Cali-
fornia, Davis. “As long as you have water and oxygen
and there’s still a mineral, it will just keep going.”
For the next two days we kept paddling and sam-
pling tributaries as hills coated only by low ground-
cover gave way to lowlands of teeming conifers. The
Salmon, widening, seemed almost devoid of fish, and
the sky was eerily free of birds. After three days of try-
ing, Lee, the philosophy professor, caught only one
Dolly Varden, coring a small tissue sample from its
polka-dotted side to test it for metals.
The murky water started to clear slightly; clean
tributaries were diluting the colored flows. But on our
second-to-last day, just before the Salmon joined the
Kobuk River, we found the ugliest stream yet, coming
out of a marshy woodland. It was more a hideous ma-
roon than orange. Almost like an ooze, it clogged the
filter of the water-sampling kit. Saplings along the
bank had been chewed by beavers, which have been
moving north with the advancing tree line, their ponds
further thawing the permafrost. “It’s a massive wet-
land,” Dial said after paddling partway up the stream.
“I think what we’ve got is the wetlands hypothesis.”
We pulled into the Alaska Native village of Kiana on
the Kobuk at 3:00 a.m. on our final day. By that time
we had rafted more than 145 kilometers and sampled
more than 20 streams, but we still hadn’t solved the
mystery. There appeared to be evidence for both hy-
potheses. In the “valley of the burns,” permafrost thaw
seemed to be allowing water to leach iron out of the
bedrock, which turned our campfire discussions to-
This burn may have begun recently
because much of the vegetation
within it is still green.

ward the acid-rock drainage hypothesis. Around the
ugly stream, though, it was more likely that permafrost
thaw was activating iron-reducing soil bacteria, as the
wetlands hypothesis would suggest. In many places,
both mechanisms are probably playing a role.
Although the Salmon is a good place to investigate
these interactions, it’s relatively far from human habi-
tation, and its effluent gets diluted by the massive Ko-
buk. But as the rusting metastasizes to other rivers in
the Brooks Range, it threatens to harm settlements,
first and foremost the coastal town of Kivalina.
L
ike the Salmon, the Wulik River flows down
from the Brooks Range, and many of its tributar-
ies have been turning orange. The difference is
that at the mouth of the Wulik there is a village, Kiva-
lina, whose 444 residents rely on the river for water
and fish. Small changes in water quality could have
significant consequences for them.
I flew in a small airplane to the shrinking barrier
island north of the Bering Strait where Kivalina is lo-
cated, about 160 kilometers northwest from where our
paddling had ended. The first things I saw on arrival
were crosses marking graves on the narrow strip of
land along the runway. Behind that was the lagoon
where the Wulik empties into the sea.
The next evening Jared Norton, a 25-year-old in a
Los Angeles Dodgers cap and white hoodie, pulled up
a fishing net across the bow of an aluminum boat, a
drizzling rain falling across the lagoon. Like many resi-
dents, Norton spends a lot of his time hunting and fish-
ing. The first few fish were silvery Chum Salmon, also
known as dog salmon because they’re the primary pet
food in Alaska Native villages. Then a big fish with a
turquoise back and sides came into view. “There’s the
one I’m looking for!” Norton said. “There is the one I
need.” It was a Dolly Varden.
Dolly Varden are a big part of Kivalina’s way of life.
They’re also likely to be the first fish affected by rusting
rivers. Chum Salmon leave freshwater for the ocean
days or weeks after emerging from the streambed and
return only at the end of their life, but Dolly Varden
take years to make it to the sea. Once they do, they re- Norton put the Dolly Varden in a metal bucket to
turn to rivers and lakes every year to overwinter. Some take home to his mother. After a few more Chum, a
“residents” never leave freshwater at all. As a result, second Dolly came up in the net. This one was smaller,
they’re more exposed to changes in the streams. with a reddish mark on its pale belly, like a wound that
A mature Dolly Varden is green with red spots—a had healed. Norton hurled it back into the lagoon.
beautiful fish, even more striking than its cousin the Kivalina is a hard place. With no plumbing, resi-
Brook Trout. The name comes from a Charles Dickens dents have to haul water in barrels. Several houses—
character who beguiles men with her cherry-colored prefab wood structures built on short stilts—are crack-
clothes or, more likely, from a red polka-dot fabric in- ing as the land sinks and gets eroded, weakened by the
spired by her. Anglers will pay thousands of dollars to melting of sea ice above and permafrost thaw below.
fish for one in the Wulik, where a 12-kilogram world- Hoping to eventually get enough funding to retreat
record breaker was caught in 2002. Alaska Natives value from the sea, the village has built a school 13 kilometers
the Dolly for its flavorful orange flesh. They say Kiva- inland. The “evacuation road” leading to it is already
lina’s Dolly Varden “taste the sweetest” of all, especially cracking in places from thaw.
after they’ve been left to age for two weeks along the Like several other Alaska Native villages, Kivalina
shore. Residents trade bags of fish with northern villag- depends on rivers flowing out of the Brooks Range for
ers for blubber and with southern villagers for venison. fish and drinking water. For hundreds of years semi-
nomadic Inupiat people came here in the spring to go could suffocate if the streambed is covered in iron. Re- David Cooper tests for
after northbound whales, then moved inland to hunt searchers have found that iron and aluminum on fish pH levels and for electric
conductivity, which can
Alaska’s largest caribou herd as it headed south in the gills hinder respiration. Cherelle Barr, a mother of two
indicate dissolved toxic
fall. They relied on late-autumn Dolly Varden to get who works for the regional native corporation, fishes metals such as copper,
through the nine months of cold. rod and reel for Dolly Varden every fall at her family’s cadmium and arsenic.
The people here have managed to keep these hunt- cabin near the mouth of the Salmon River. Of the 30 Roman Dial pushes
ing and fishing traditions alive despite forced settle- Dollies they caught last year, about 10 were deformed, a metal probe a meter
down into the ground,
ment, Christianization, devastation of the whales and she said. Some had big bumps on their back; others had where permafrost
a long succession of epidemics. To this day, four fifths pus behind their gills. Even bears on a small island in would have been
of their food come from the land and sea—now via the river were wary. “You could tell they were not eating as hard as concrete
snowmobile and motorboat. But tributaries of the Wu- the [fish] that had that stuff by their gills” or the ones if it were still frozen.
The gun is for protection
lik have begun rusting, possibly jeopardizing the Dolly that were deformed, Barr said. The pus could be caused against Grizzly Bears.
Varden. “It would be a real big hurt on us,” says Re- by a parasite or disease, but it is concerning. State sci-
plogle Swan, president of the Kivalina Volunteer entists who track fish have seen them avoid streams
Search and Rescue. “That fish is just a part of our lives.” with elevated iron, manganese and acidity.
Iron and other metals can starve fish by smothering Since 1989 Red Dog, one of the world’s largest zinc
invertebrates they eat, such as mayflies, and fish eggs mines, has been fundamental to the region’s economy.

Every year after the ice starts breaking up, the mine, 64
kilometers inland, discharges treated wastewater into
Red Dog Creek, which flows into the Wulik and to the
sea. Kivalina residents accuse the mine, which in the
past has been found guilty of violating the Clean Water
Act, of spoiling their water. Some people haul drinking
water by boat from another nearby river rather than
filling up at the tank supplied from the Wulik.
In some ways, however, Red Dog Creek got cleaner
after the mine opened because the creek was a natural
source of acid-rock drainage before the mine was there.
In fact, the creek’s orange color was what led a bush
pilot to report the likelihood of valuable minerals there
in the 1960s. Concentrations of heavy metals down-
stream declined after the mine installed pipes to divert
Red Dog Creek and other streams around the ore de-
posits, according to annual monitoring by the Alaska
Department of Fish and Game. The creek also became
less acidic. At the same time, the concentration of “to-
tal dissolved solids” increased, mainly because of sul-
fates and calcium hydroxide the mine was adding to
remove metals from the wastewater.
During the hot summer of 2019 the concentration of
total dissolved solids downstream rose so much it
reached the limit set by Red Dog’s permit, forcing the
mine to stop discharging its wastewater into the creek
for more than a year. The problem was that creeks up-
stream of the mine were beginning to rust, feeding milky
yellow water into the Wulik. Red Dog couldn’t start dis-
charging again until it built a $19-million reverse-osmo-
sis treatment system that released cleaner wastewater.
Since then, more streams above the mine have
turned orange because of permafrost thaw, Fish and
Game says. Total dissolved solids have continued to
rise despite the treatment system. “Fish swimming in
or through this water would not probably die right
away, but it is a chronic stressor,” says Brendan Scan-
lon, a biologist with Fish and Game in Fairbanks.
Permafrost has become a bigger polluter than the
mine, and not much can be done to clean up the problem.
Lime is often dumped into tailings ponds at old mines
to buffer acid, but you can’t “lime” an entire mountain
stream, just as you can’t refreeze the ground around it.
Perhaps the only real hope is that once all the permafrost
has thawed and all the iron has rusted, these wild rivers
will be able to flush out the contamination and restore
themselves, although that would take decades at least.
When we were floating the lower Salmon, in the
round-the-clock sunshine of the Arctic summer, I had
asked Dial what still fascinated him about the Brooks
Range after all these years. He replied that it’s how
much the vast ecosystem here is changing but also how
it has the power to heal. “It’s resilient,” he said. Given
enough time, he hoped, the wilderness might prove
“big enough to clean itself up.”
FROM OUR ARCHIVES

The Permafrost Prediction. Ted Schuur; December 2016.
ScientificAmerican.com/archive
The researchers collect
water samples and
data at a rusty seep.
They think the straight
orange lines may be
trails left by caribou,
Dall Sheep or wolves.

PREEMPTIVE
MENTAL HEALTH
MEASURES
Early intervention programs can prevent depression’s onset, potentially
changing teens’ mental health trajectories for a lifetime BY ELIZABETH SVOBODA
ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREA UCINI

E STHER OLADEJO KNEW she’d crossed an invisible bound-
ary when she started forgetting to eat for entire days at
a time. A gifted rugby player, Oladejo had once thrived
on her jam-packed school schedule. But after she entered
her teenage years, her teachers started piling on assign-
ments and quizzes to prepare students for high-stakes testing that would
help them to qualify for university.
As she devoted hours on hours to cram sessions,
Oladejo’s resolve began to fray. Every time she got a low
grade, her mood tanked—and with it, her resolve to
study hard for the next test. “Teachers [were] saying,
‘Oh, you can do much better than this,’” says Oladejo,
now 18, who lives in Merseyside, England. “But you’re
by Dutch social scientists; and Spain’s Smile Program.
The growing global interest in depression prevention
is helping to establish the efficacy of a range of pro-
grams in diverse settings.
For researchers heading up depression prevention
programs, the stakes of early intervention couldn’t be
thinking, ‘Can I? I tried my best on that. Can I do any higher. The earlier a first episode of depression begins,
more than what I’ve done before?’” and the more episodes a person suffers, the more seri-
One morning, as Oladejo steeled herself for another ous and disabling the condition is likely to be through-
endless day, her homeroom teacher passed out a ques- out life. People who recover from an initial depression
tionnaire to the students, explaining that it would help have a 40 to 60 percent chance of a later episode; those
assess their moods and well-being. Oladejo filled it out, with two episodes have a 60 to 70 percent chance of
her mind ticking forward to her upcoming classes. recurrence, and those with three episodes have a 90
Soon after that, someone called to tell her she’d percent chance—a vicious cycle that too often ends in
been slotted into a new school course called the Blues chronic illness or disability. And since the COVID pan-
Program. Developed by Oregon Research Institute demic, teens’ risk of falling into the cycle has climbed:
psychologist Paul Rohde and his colleagues at Stanford 42 percent of U.S. high school students report lasting
University, the program—a six-week series of hour- sadness or hopelessness in surveys by the Centers for
long group sessions—teaches students skills for man- Disease Control and Prevention, up from 28 percent a
aging their emotions and stress. The goal is to head off decade before.
depression in vulnerable teens. Prevention courses like the one Oladejo took offer
Elizabeth Svoboda Although Oladejo didn’t know it at the time, her hope to halt this trend. Intervention during the teen
is a science writer in course was one in an expanding series of depression years, studies suggest, can potentially stop the kind of
San Jose, Calif., and prevention programs for young people, including depressive cascade that erodes human potential and
author of W
hat Makes
Vanderbilt University’s Teens Achieving Mastery Over imposes massive costs on health-care systems. “It’s a
a Hero?: The Surprising
Science of Selflessness Stress (TEAMS); the University of Pennsylvania’s chronic episodic illness, and relapse is very common,”
(Penguin Group, 2013). Penn Resiliency Program; Happy Lessons, developed says Brown University psychologist Tracy Gladstone.
52 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Ja n ua ry 2 02 4
“If you can avoid that initial episode, I think you’re re- his graduate student Sarah Kate Bearman wanted
ally setting people on a much better path.” to see how much a similar approach could help teens
Courses for at-risk young people have forestalled on the cusp of depression. Bearman’s graduate thesis
depression, numerous studies have found, reducing described an early iteration of the Blues Program,
rates of onset by up to half in the months and years teaching teens cognitive-behavioral skills in four
following the programs. Yet program developers have one-hour sessions. Rohde liked the way this program
struggled to make a convincing case for prevention component condensed cognitive principles into di-
amid unprecedented levels of need for acute care dur- gestible lessons—and he liked that it took less time
ing an ongoing global mental health crisis. than competitors such as the Penn Resiliency Pro-
Feeling like she didn’t have much to lose, Oladejo gram, which could make it easier for schools and agen-
agreed to give the Blues Program a try. The message cies to implement.
she was getting from teachers “was like, ‘You’ve got to After Bearman graduated, Rohde, Stice and Stan-
get ready, we’ve got to do this.’ I was 15—I don’t really ford researcher Heather Shaw continued to develop
know what I want to do in my life quite yet,” she says. the Blues Program and test it at a number of pilot
“I was starting to spiral.” sites. Having watched depression disrupt his clients’
lives year after year, Rohde was fired up about the
Health experts and political leaders have been idea of bending teens’ mental health curve for a life-
brainstorming ways to ward off mental illnesses such time. “We know that if we can prevent depression in
as depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia for young adulthood, we’re going to prevent recurrent
decades. In a 1963 speech to Congress, President episodes of depression,” he says. “We’re going to re-
John F. Kennedy described plans for a comprehensive duce future suffering.”
preventive approach at the federal level. The initiative
would include “selected specific programs directed
especially at known causes” of mental illnesses, Ken- Brain changes during
nedy proposed, but would also involve “the general
strengthening of our fundamental community, social
adolescence may make teens
welfare, and educational programs.”
Such plans stalled during economic crises in the
especially vulnerable to
1970s. Under President Ronald Reagan, federal spend- depression and the cellular
ing on social programs decreased, and national mental
illness prevention mostly receded into the background.
havoc it wreaks.
But rising rates of mental illness through the 1990s,
especially in young people, helped to rekindle broader It makes intuitive sense that preventing a first
interest in prevention. In a 1994 report called “Reduc- depressive episode could reshape someone’s mental
ing Risks for Mental Disorders,” the Institute of Medi- health trajectory. Less intuitive, and less well known,
cine (now the National Academy of Medicine) argued are the biological stakes involved in keeping depres-
for assessing people’s mental health vulnerabilities sion at bay. During each bout of depression, brain tis-
early in life to stave off the worst outcomes. sue can shrink—especially in the hippocampus and
By the late 1990s and early 2000s researchers were prefrontal cortex, which govern memory, emotion and
testing several prevention programs for depression, higher-order thinking. It’s unclear whether this brain
one of the most common mental disorders. Many of atrophy can be fully reversed. The decrease in tissue is
these programs were rooted in the cognitive-behav- also linked to future bouts of depression. In recovered
ioral practice of correcting harmful thinking pat- people who relapsed, the brain’s cortical volume
terns—an approach that has consistently reduced shrank over a two-year period, whereas recovered
depressive symptoms in studies. Among the first pre- people who did not relapse showed no such change.
vention offerings were the Penn Resiliency Program, Brain changes during adolescence may make teens
a series of 12 group classes lasting 90 minutes each, especially vulnerable to depression and the cellular
and the Australia-based Resourceful Adolescent Pro- havoc it wreaks. In a study from McLean Hospital in
gram, consisting of 11 group sessions of 50 minutes. Belmont, Mass., young people who experienced hard-
Around this time Rohde was a young psychologist ship such as emotional abuse at age 14 or 15 were more
at the Oregon Research Institute (ORI), a small com- likely to become depressed compared with those who
pany with National Institutes of Health funding. Early faced such adversity earlier or later in life. Prolonged
in his career, Rohde had helped develop Adolescent stress, research shows, may be more damaging to the
Coping with Depression, one of the first standardized brain during this time—and another study suggests
group treatments for depressed teens. that early stress-linked brain changes may make peo-
When psychologist Eric Stice joined Rohde’s ple more vulnerable to depression.
research group in the mid-2000s, Rohde and his Rates of depression steadily climb during the teen
colleagues started focusing on depression prevention. years, so some specialists contend that the earlier
Stice specialized in preventing eating disorders, and teens enroll in prevention programs, the better. “The
adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of In later sessions of Blues, facilitators explain how
cure is really true in this setting,” says adolescent psy- to challenge negative thoughts—for example, by
chiatrist Elizabeth Ortiz-Schwartz of Silver Hill Hos- brainstorming a new thought that’s less exaggerated
pital in Connecticut. “We need to start looking at early and more optimistic than the original. “Is there an-
adolescence.” Rohde concurs, which is why he, Stice other way to think about this situation?” session lead-
and Shaw designed the Blues Program to serve stu- ers ask. “What advice would you give a friend who was
dents as young as 12. The first step in Blues—now of- feeling the way you do?”
fered at sites in Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah, as well After that, students share their new thoughts with
as in the U.K.—is screening school populations for the rest of the group. For Oladejo, an initial gut reac-
high-risk students like Oladejo. These students report tion—“I tanked that test. I suck at school”—might
sleep problems, low self-esteem or low interest in daily morph into “This isn’t my final exam. I can learn from
activities, but their symptoms aren’t severe enough for this and do better on the end-of-year test.” It isn’t the
a depression diagnosis. (Some symptoms rule teens precise content of the revamped thought that mat-
out of the program; if they report feeling suicidal, ters. “There is not a single right counterthought to a
they’re referred to acute treatment.) Gauging stu- given negative thought,” group leaders tell students.
dents’ distress from the questionnaire works better “Figure out whether a particular new thought makes
than probing into their family histories. “For us, it’s sense to you.”
easiest just to ask the student if they have some symp-
toms,” Rohde says, adding that when teens are strug- The Salt Lake County Department of Youth Ser-
gling, “that provides motivation for working on skills.” vices (DYS) occupies a cluster of squat tan buildings
From there, facilitators organize qualifying stu- ringed by distant snow-topped mountains. Dozens of
dents into small groups and teach them cognitive tac- students congregate there every semester, virtually
tics they can use to process difficult events. Many of and in person, developing new cognitive skills de-
signed to help them evade depression. A blue “Heroes
Work Here!” banner hangs in the front lobby, where I
A teaching tool is the “triangle meet Jodi Rushton, the effervescent social worker who
of feelings, thoughts and actions,” heads up Salt Lake’s version of the Blues Program. She
leads me into a bright classroom, the table stacked with
which illustrates that how people sandwiches and chip bags for the teens who’ll drop in
this afternoon.
think about what happens Rushton tells me that the DYS serves a population at
influences how they feel overall. risk for mood disorders—about one in three Utah teens
report depressive symptoms—and the Blues Program
seemed like a natural fit when she saw it on a list of
these measures resemble those therapists teach de- evidence-based options several years ago. “We were
pressed clients, but the Blues Program introduces teaching pretty outdated programs,” Rushton says.
them as a kind of vaccination strategy. When teens “We needed a revamping.”
learn how to keep stress in check, the theory goes, Enrollment in the program, which DYS staff have
they’ll be able to defuse new stressors before their renamed “Me Time,” has climbed since its inception,
emotional impact explodes. and hundreds of local teens have so far completed the
One teaching tool in the program is the “triangle of course. After COVID hit in 2020, Rushton and her col-
feelings, thoughts and actions,” which illustrates that leagues scrambled to transfer the program online.
the way people think about what happens influences They worried Me Time wouldn’t translate well into
how they feel overall—and, by extension, how moti- virtual space, but their worries were unfounded.
vated they are to take helpful action. A negative In fact, the opposite was true: As soon as DYS started
thought—such as “No one loves me” after a romantic offering online sessions, enrollment exploded. “It just
rejection—can make you feel miserable, and when you took off. Transportation, space, time—all these ob-
feel miserable, you’ll be less likely to risk asking some- stacles were eliminated,” Rushton says. “Even after
one else out. Thinking of the rejection as a painful epi- I close registration, I still just get referrals continu-
sode that you can get through, in contrast, can stop the ously.” She has let teens from other states sign up
cycle of misery. for Me Time because most have no similar option
The triangle concept clicked for Esther Oladejo. “It available locally.
basically made you think, Do I want this small situa- Rushton has a cardinal rule when she leads a ses-
tion to dictate how the rest of my life’s going to go?” sion, whether online or in person: Make sure each stu-
Oladejo says. She could see how her own reactions fol- dent gets at least one chance to hold the floor. “It’s re-
lowed the pattern: after she flubbed an assignment, ally interactive,” she says. “A lot of the effectiveness
she’d beat herself up and feel worthless, and that sense falls on how much attention you can give to every-
of worthlessness made it hard to tackle the next round body—drawing out the teens who maybe are more shy,
of papers and tests. handling the ones who want to talk all the time.”
After chatting with Rushton, I meet a few local Me
Time participants ranging in age from 12 to 17. To Depression over the Ages
protect student privacy, the program is closed to out- Young people are particularly vulnerable to depression and anxiety—a
side observers, but the students told me about the finding that is now a well-established fact. Arriving at this conclusion has
dynamic it fosters. “Everyone knows, like, ‘Think not been a simple process, because there are no definitive tests. A diag-
really deeply about if a problem’s as big as you think nosis relies on symptoms, and those symptoms—as well as their severity
and length—vary from person to person. Increasingly nuanced surveys
it is,’ ” says Monica, the oldest of the group. But the
and broader screening efforts are contributing to a clearer understanding
program sessions, she continues, helped her transi-
of the condition—and this research points to the teen years as a period
tion from knowing what she s hould do to actually do- of particular risk. An individual is most likely to experience the first symp-
ing it. “It was really helpful to be able to discuss per- toms of depression before the age of 20. And although the COVID pan-
sonal experiences and how we could have changed demic increased the prevalence of depression across all ages, rates for
the way we were thinking,” she says. “Being able to 15- to 24-year-olds exhibited a notable bump.
have a group discussion allowed it to stick more. I’ve
kind of taken it to self-reflect every day: ‘Is my reac- AGE OF ONSET
tion fitting the size of this issue?’ ” According to a 2021 meta-analysis of 192 studies, the global peak age of onset for
Teens could also learn cognitive-behavioral skills depressive disorder is 19.5 years. Age of onset for generalized anxiety disorder peaks at
one-on-one with a therapist. But in general, individual 15.5. Although they are distinct conditions, anxiety and depression can be intertwined.
Sources: “Age at Onset of Mental Disorders Worldwide: Large-Scale Meta-analysis of 192 Epidemiological Studies,” by Marco Solmi et al., in Molecular Psychiatry, Vol. 27; June 2, 2021; “Global Prevalence
therapy can impose a high cost burden on families—

Distribution of Age of Onset (percent of total)
and Burden of Depressive and Anxiety Disorders in 204 Countries and Territories in 2020 Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic,” by Damian Santomauro et al., in Lancet, Vol. 398; October 8, 2021 (data)
and some Salt Lake teens say they like Me Time better
0 2 4 0 2 4
than traditional therapy, which tends to have an un-
even power dynamic between therapist and client. Me Age
Depressive Generalized Anxiety
Time “just helps more,” one participant tells me. 10 Disorder Disorder
“You’re not put on the spot, and you’re able to form a
connection with other people.” The give-and-take 20 Most
spirit of Me Time chats helped another student feel common
Most age of
less isolated in their mental health struggles. “You 30 common onset
could hear other people’s situations—how they coped age of is 15.5
with it or what they did to solve the problem. If it was 40 onset
just one-on-one, I don’t think I would have been is 19.5
helped as much.” 50
Having watched countless Blues Program sessions
in action, Rohde agrees. There’s something alchemical,
he thinks, about teaching cognitive skills in a small-
COVID’S IMPACT
group context. “Part of the value is getting kids to-
The COVID pandemic elevated depression risk, especially among young and middle-age
gether,” he says. “As they feel comfortable, they can groups. The global prevalence of depressive disorders grew by nearly 28 percent in 2020,
share the thoughts and feelings and actions that they’re and anxiety disorders rose by almost 26 percent, according to a study in the Lancet.
struggling with. That can be helpful for the other stu-
dents because it normalizes that these kinds of prob- Prevalence per 100,000 People
lems are really, really common.” 0 4,000 0 4,000 8,000
Like her counterparts in Salt Lake City, Esther
Oladejo drew more than she’d expected on the well of Major Depressive Disorder Anxiety Disorders
support from her small group. She didn’t know most Age Before pandemic
of the other students in her Blues class well at first, but 5–9 During pandemic
their shared trust grew. When other group members 10–14
shared school or family problems, she advised them as 15–19
best she could—and felt gratified when they came back 20–24
25–29
to report that her suggestions had helped. In return, 30–34
they buoyed her in the same way. “I feel like that’s re- 35–39
ally important—someone who’s looking at you as if 40–44
they actually see you,” she says. 45–49
50–54
S
55–59
chool systems in Utah, the U.K., and else- 60–64
where have adopted the Blues Program in part 65–69
because of the evidence for its effectiveness, 70–74
75–79
Rohde says. After the ORI team secured funding from Male
80–84
the National Institutes of Mental Health, they 85–89 Female
launched a large-scale 2015 Blues Program trial that 90–94 Nonbinary category
not provided in data set
enrolled 378 Oregon students at risk of depression. 95–99
Just 10 percent of students who finished the Blues
Graphic by Jen Christiansen Ja n ua ry 2 02 4 Sc i e n t i f ic A m er ic a n.com 55

Program had developed depression by the two-year called CATCH-IT. The study—which has enrolled
follow-up mark, compared with 25 percent of control more than 500 teens from western Illinois, Chicago
group members who read a cognitive-behavioral self- and Louisville, Ky.—will track not just their depressive
help book called Feeling Good. symptoms after the programs but how they deal with
A 2018 meta-analysis of four separate Blues Pro- stress and low moods. So far Gladstone hasn’t had any
gram trials showed that enrolled students were sub- trouble recruiting trial subjects. “It’s really difficult to
stantially less likely than control subjects to develop find mental health support,” she says. “Families are
depression within two years. Other prevention pro- just excited about the trial. They want their kids in.”
grams for students at risk, including the Penn Resil-
iency Program, have also significantly reduced stu- Despite bursts o f local enthusiasm for prevention
dents’ depressive symptoms, as have offerings such as programs, few school districts or agencies, whether in
Op Volle Kracht (At Full Force) in the Netherlands and the U.S. or abroad, have programs like TEAMS or
Spain’s Smile Program. Blues available for struggling teens, and most people
Salt Lake City’s Blues Program site results have are not even aware that such programs exist.
largely mirrored these broader ones. During the 2021– The hard part of broadening the programs’ reach,
as Gladstone and Rohde have found, isn’t convincing
teens or families to give them a try. It’s convincing those
Those in charge of funding these in power that the programs are practical and affordable
for resource-strapped communities—and that preven-
programs may ultimately look tion is worth investing in. Aside from a small one-time
fee, schools and nonprofits don’t need to pay licensing
to the essential human element: fees for Blues Program material. But ORI charges orga-
how students fare in their lives nizations $2,800 to train their staff on how to deliver
the Blues content to teens, and each local facilitator who
as they approach adulthood. wants to instruct other staff must pay thousands more
to get certified as a “trainer of trainers.” Administering
the program adds to the workloads of counselors, social
2022 school year, students scored notably lower on a workers, and other staff, which can oblige managers to
standard depression symptom scale after finishing the pay for more staffing hours or hire more employees.
program, and their scores remained almost as low In general, Gladstone says, depression prevention
three months later. And Me Time’s new online format programs are easiest to implement in countries
seems to work as well as the traditional one: after the with national health insurance systems, such as the
program, online participants’ depressive symptom U.K. These systems, figuring the programs will even-
scores actually dropped more than those of in-person tually lead to lower costs for mental health care, are
students. Still, how long these benefits will last re- more apt to fund local agencies or nonprofits that offer
mains unknown because studies have not yet been the programs.
done to assess how many depressive episodes any of In the U.S., however, “insurance is generally at-
these programs might prevent over a lifetime. tached to people’s jobs, and people switch their jobs,”
The programs that don’t hold up as well in trials, at Gladstone says. “Often there’s not really an incentive
least so far, are those designed to prevent depression for insurance companies to fund prevention programs,
in entire school populations. A meta-analysis of more because by the time somebody would develop the
than 40 studies found that schoolwide prevention pro- [condition] you’re trying to prevent, somebody else
grams were significantly less effective at staving off will be paying for the treatment.” Although some U.S.
depressive symptoms than targeted programs for at- insurance companies have started funding exercise
risk young people. Schoolwide programs, Brown Uni- programs that prevent physical illness, they don’t reli-
versity’s Gladstone notes, enroll more students who ably reimburse providers or agencies for depression
don’t have symptoms—and who may therefore be less prevention programs.
motivated to master the skills taught in depression That typically leaves local governments, school
prevention programs. “One of the things about these districts and nonprofits on the hook to fund preven-
interventions is that they take work,” she says. “It’s tion efforts. Me Time is in a fortunate position, draw-
hard to engage in something when it doesn’t have any ing from the DYS’s annual mental health prevention
resonance for you.” budget of more than $570,000. Across the region,
Further trials are underway to determine which Rushton is trying to increase access to program re-
program components are most crucial for effective sources by devoting more time to “training trainers”—
prevention. Along with her colleague Benjamin Van briefing school staff members across the Salt Lake
Voorhees, Gladstone has launched a controlled trial region so they can deliver the course to their own stu-
comparing two different online depression prevention dents. But this can be a challenging process, she says.
programs for at-risk students: Teens Achieving Mas- “Social workers and counselors, people in schools, are
tery Over Stress (TEAMS) and a self-guided course really weighed down. And so even asking them, ‘Hey,
we want you to teach this six-week class’—it’s kind of about her own abilities has given her courage to speak
a big ask.” up more and take chances. “Before I probably would
To help make the Blues Program more feasible on a have hid away,” she says. “But the structure of being
local level, Rohde wants to do more real-world data able to think, ‘Okay, what are the benefits? Am I going
collection on the practical side of depression preven- to be okay doing it?’ Yeah. Let’s go.”
tion programs—how much they’ll cost per student, for That willingness to advocate for herself led Olade-
instance, and how that compares with the cost of treat- jo to an unexpected breakthrough. After finishing the
ing an already depressed teen. Those kinds of concrete Blues Program and enrolling in college, she continued
numbers could help convince local decision makers to to flounder academically, and she grew more aware of
support the program and health insurance companies the mismatch between the hours she put in and the
to reimburse for it, he says. “It gives them the kind of results she was getting. If what you’re doing isn’t work-
data they need to say, ‘We’re going to prevent this much ing, Blues lessons had prompted, w hat are some other
future treatment cost down the road.’ ” ways of solving the problem? S he decided to approach
But Janet Welsh, principal investigator for Penn State a tutor on her college campus to explain her dilemma,
University’s Evidence-Based Prevention and Interven- and the tutor referred her to the campus support
tion Support program, points out that cost-savings num- team. After some tests, they told her she had dyslexia,
bers wouldn’t necessarily drive wider adoption for de- which helped her get proper assistance—and finally
pression prevention programs. “To be perfectly honest, make sense of why school had been such a struggle.
I have those data for substance abuse,” says Welsh, who (It’s common for those at risk of depression, like
regularly evaluates research-based mental health pro- Oladejo, to have other conditions like dyslexia, ADHD
grams. “I can show you how much it saves to do universal or anxiety; the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has
prevention. Yet people still won’t do it.” called for kids and teens to be screened for both de-
That reluctance, Welsh says, stems from a basic pression and anxiety so they can get fast, effective
feature of human psychology: the tendency to value treatment.) “I’d put myself down, thinking, ‘Why
in-the-moment problem solving over avoiding future can’t I just get it the first time around?’ ” Oladejo says
crises. “Prevention of anything—violence, drug abuse, of her academic troubles. “But because I was able to
mental health problems—is always going to be [the use the skills, not be so anxious to ask for help, I was
less favored option],” she says. If a depressed teen goes able to get a diagnosis.”
to therapy and gets well, her providers can document This progression reveals how the decisions people
a clear trend of recovery. But if a student takes a de- make in one moment, like Oladejo’s choice to speak up
pression prevention course and remains well, it’s a and get evaluated for learning challenges, lead to a dif-
different, lowercase kind of triumph, one that can be ferent array of options than those they’d have if they
hard for funders to appreciate when their communities hadn’t made that fateful decision. In that sense, it isn’t
are in mental health crisis. “I can point to some really just cognitive skills or stress regulation or a support
well-adjusted kids and say, ‘Look, they don’t have sub- group atmosphere that counts for teens at risk of de-
stance abuse or mental health problems,’ ” Welsh says. pression. It’s the way those things equip them to make
“And you’re like, ‘Yeah? So?’ ” choices that alter the decision tree itself. For adults
who first slid into depression in middle or high school,
D
espite the challenges of making the case it’s an absorbing thought experiment: If I’d known how
for prevention, Rohde, Gladstone, and others to approach that setback differently, how would my
hope that more communities will buy into it— choices have been different? And what other choices
especially given the strong enrollment Blues Program would have opened up? And then, a nd then?
sites have seen since the COVID pandemic began. Cli- It’s in the unfolding of these sequences that the
nicians also see opportunities for further honing the promise of prevention is clearest. To help initiate such
programs to attract newcomers, taking steps such as sequences for others, Oladejo has volunteered with the
tailoring curricula for students from different back- U.K.-based nonprofit Action for Children, speaking
grounds. A program that works well in California’s with local officials and lawmakers about her Blues Pro-
Bay Area won’t necessarily land in urban Detroit, ru- gram experience. She might pursue a psychology doc-
ral England or Alaska Native communities. “Invest- torate so she can become a therapist—and she has a
ing in the research and application of those programs clear vision of the work she wants to do, helping clients
is going to be essential,” Ortiz-Schwartz says, “so that build the kind of group support structure that got her
districts can find solutions that are more on target through her own worst days. “I don’t want to be like
with their population.” the usual therapist. If I do face-to-face, I want it to be
Although more data and customized lesson plans an inclusive session,” she says. “I want to be able to give
may help make the case, those in charge of funding people that sense they’re not alone.”
may ultimately look to the human element: how stu-
dents like Esther Oladejo fare as they approach adult- FROM OUR ARCHIVES
hood. Although Oladejo’s mood still drifts up and A Look Within. J ohn Gabrieli; March 2018.
down at times, she says disputing negative thoughts ScientificAmerican.com/archive
MATHEMATICS
The
Missing
Piece
The quest for an

einstein tile—a shape
never seen before
in mathematics
BY CRAIG S. KAPLAN
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
MIRIAM MARTINCIC
I N NOVEMBER 2022 a colleague of
mine casually asked what I was working on. My
dazed answer reflected the swirl of ideas that was consuming all my mental
energy at the time: “Actually, I think the solution to a major open problem just fell
into my lap.” A week before, I had received an e-mail asking me to look at a shape.
That was the first time I saw “the hat,” an unassuming polygon that turned out to
be the culmination of a decades-long mathematical quest.
The e-mail came from David Smith, some-
one I knew from a small mailing list of peo-
ple interested in tilings—different ways
to arrange shapes to cover a flat surface.
Smith isn’t a mathematician; he is a self-
professed “shape hobbyist” who experi-
ments with geometry in his spare time from
his home in Yorkshire, England. After
infinite collection of shapes that cover a flat sur-
face with no gaps and no overlaps. I will focus
on cases where the infinitely many tiles in a
tiling come in a finite number of
distinct shapes. Imagine a hand-
ful of templates that can be used
to cut copies of the shapes out of an
unlimited supply of paper. Our goal is to
Smith sent me the hat shape he’d been arrange cutouts on an infinite tabletop so that every
playing with, we began corresponding bit of table is covered by exactly one layer of paper. We
regularly, spending the rest of 2022 studying the hat can move each cutout into position through some com-
and its properties. In 2023 we reached out to two ad- bination of reflection (flipping the paper over), rota-
ditional researchers, mathematician Chaim Good- tion (turning it in place) and translation (sliding the
man-Strauss and software developer Joseph Samuel shape around without turning it). If we achieve our
Myers, both also members of the mailing list and well goal of constructing a tiling, we say that the set of
known in the larger world of tiling theory. The four of shapes “admits” the tiling and, more generally, that the
us continued to study the hat and, in what felt like rec shapes tile the plane.
ord time, succeeded in proving that the shape was a Not all sets of shapes admit tilings. A square yields a
long-sought object that many assumed couldn’t exist: tiling resembling graph paper, among other patterns,
an aperiodic monotile, also known as an einstein tile. and is therefore a monotile: it tiles the plane on its own
(as a set of one). A regular pentagon, in contrast, cannot
tile the plane by itself. Neither can a regular octagon,
although a two-element set consisting of an octagon and
a square does tile.
Square Pentagon
Does tile Doesn’t tile
As it turns out, Smith’s hat was just the beginning

of a sequence of revelations. As we explored the new
landscape of ideas revealed by this shape, we were
surprised multiple times by additional discoveries
Craig S. Kaplan that further deepened our understanding of tiling Octagon Octagon + Square
is a professor of com
theory. Soon the hat led to “turtles,” “spectres,” and Doesn’t tile Does tile
puter science at the
University of Waterloo other wonders that yielded more insights than we
in Canada. His research could have expected at the outset.
focuses on interactions
between mathematics
Tiles have fascinated humans since ancient times,
and art, and he has long
had an interest in but mathematicians began studying them in earnest in
mathematical tiling. the 20th century. A so-called tiling of the plane is an
60 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N Jan uary 2 02 4 Graphics by Jen Christiansen

How can we determine whether a given set of shapes Heesch Number: 6
tiles the plane? There’s no algorithm we can use to an-
swer this question, and in fact none could exist—the
problem is what’s known in theoretical computer sci-
ence as “undecidable.” Nevertheless, we can study in-
dividual sets and attempt to build tilings through trial
and error or other methods. Along the way we often
encounter fascinating examples of how local interac-
tions (the different ways two tiles can sit side-by-side)
influence global behavior (the large-scale structure of
the tiling out to infinity in every direction).
There are multiple ways to figure out whether a
single shape can tile the plane. Some people, such as
Smith, will even cut out physical paper copies of a
shape using a computer-controlled cutting tool and
play with them on actual (regrettably finite) tabletops,
recruiting the immediacy of touch to augment visual
intuition. In the hands of a skilled explorer like Smith,
a shape will disclose its tiling secrets in short order.
And in the pre-hat era, a shape would invariably be-
have in one of two ways. The second possibility is that the shape tiles the
The first possibility is that the shape will not tile the plane periodically. In a periodic tiling, the arrange-
plane. As a quick test, we might try to surround it comment of tiles repeats in a regular pattern determined
pletely by copies of itself; if we can’t, then the shape by an infinite grid of parallelograms. We can describe
certainly does not admit any tilings. For instance, the a periodic tiling using three pieces of information: a
regular pentagon is unsurroundable, which immedi- finite cluster of tiles called a translational unit and two
ately outs it as a nontiler. But although surroundability line segments that define the sides of a parallelogram
provides evidence of tilability, it is not firm proof: there in the grid. We can slide a copy of the translational unit
are deceptive nontilers that can be completely sur- out to every vertex in the grid, without rotating or re-
rounded by one or more concentric layers of copies flecting it, and these copies will interlock to complete
before getting irretrievably stuck. In 1968 mathemati- a tiling. This method offers a quick test of a shape’s
cian Heinrich Heesch exhibited a shape that could be ability to tile: we assemble candidate translational
surrounded once but not twice and asked whether units and then see whether any of them covers the
there was an upper limit to the number of concentric plane by repeating in a regular grid. As with Heesch
rings one might build around a nontiler, a quantity numbers, no one knows whether there is any bound on
now known as a shape’s “Heesch number.” The current the smallest translational unit a shape might require
record holder is a particularly ornery polygon with a before it can be repeated to tile the plane. Myers dis-
Heesch number of six, discovered in 2020 by Bojan covered the current record holder, a shape whose sim-
Bašić of the University of Novi Sad in Serbia. plest translational unit contains 10 tiles.
Heesch Number: 1 Anisohedral Polyhex Translational unit
Heesch Number: 2

When Smith began experimenting with the hat, Based on what was known about tilings at the time,
what caught his eye was that it refused to conform to Wang’s conjecture was quite reasonable. Building on
either of these options. The hat did not obviously tile this work a few years later, however, Wang’s student
the plane: he couldn’t find a way to build a translational Robert Berger disproved the conjecture by construct-
unit of any size. But it did not obviously fail to tile the ing the first aperiodic tile set, a sprawling system of
plane, either: with effort, he could surround a hat with 20,426 Wang tiles. In passing, Berger speculated that
multiple layers of copies without getting stuck. It was it should be possible to construct smaller aperiodic
conceivable that the hat might be a nontiler with a high sets, inaugurating an irresistible mathematical quest
Heesch number or a periodic monotile with a large to see how small a set could be. By 1971 Raphael M.
translational unit, but Smith knew that such cases were Robinson of the University of California, Berkeley,
rare. He reached out to me because he also knew that had gotten down to a set of six modified squares.
there was one other possibility, one so extraordinary
that it demanded to be considered in full. Six Robinson Tiles
A
bout 60 years ago m athematicians started
wondering whether there were sets of shapes
that could only tile the plane without ever re-
peating periodically—that is, that someone could as-
semble copies into arbitrarily large patches without
ever encountering a translational unit. Such a set is
called aperiodic. Crucially, aperiodicity is a much
stronger property than nonperiodicity. Lots of shapes,
including a humble 2 × 1 rectangle, can admit tilings
that are periodic as well as tilings that aren’t periodic.
Aperiodic sets have no possible periodic tilings.
Periodic Nonperiodic
Then, in 1973, University of Oxford mathematician

Roger Penrose achieved a stunning breakthrough
with a set of just two tiles: the “kite” and the “dart.”
Two Penrose Tiles
The notion of aperiodicity was first articulated by

Hao Wang in the early 1960s, while he was a math pro-
fessor at Harvard University. He was studying what
we now call Wang tiles: square tiles with symbolic la-
bels or colors on their edges that must be positioned so
that neighboring squares have the same markings on
their adjoining edges. (These labels are a convenient
shorthand for equivalent rules that can be expressed
geometrically.) Wang observed that if, given a set of Penrose’s work left us one step short of an obvious fin-
tiles, one can find a rectangle whose top and bottom ish line: an aperiodic monotile, a single shape that
edges have the same sequence of labels and whose left admits only nonperiodic tilings. Such a shape is also
and right edges also match, then that rectangle is a sometimes called an “einstein,” from the German “ein
translational unit, and hence the set tiles the plane. He stein,” meaning “one stone.” (It’s a pun on the name
then conjectured the converse: that if a set of Wang “Einstein” but otherwise has no connection to the fa-
tiles admits a tiling of the plane, then it must be pos- mous Albert.) The question of whether an aperiodic
sible to build such a rectangle. In other words, he monotile exists has been called the einstein problem.
claimed that Wang tiles can never be aperiodic. After Penrose, progress stalled for nearly 50 years.
A few other sets of size two were discovered, including behavior. The hat is what’s known as a polyform: a
one by Goodman-Strauss. Some mathematicians pro- shape made up of copies of some simple unit element.
posed single-shape solutions, but these inevitably For example, the pieces in the video game T
etris r ep-
required small amendments to the rules of the game. resent all the ways to stick four squares together.
For example, the Socolar-Taylor tile is a modified regu-
lar hexagon that tiles aperiodically. The catch is that
for copies of this hexagon to conspire to force all tilings
to be aperiodic, nonadjacent tiles must come to an
agreement about their relative orientations. There is
no way to bake this restriction into the outline of the
tile without introducing a trick, such as extruding the
hexagon into three dimensions or breaking it into dis- The hat is made from eight kites. These kites aren’t
connected pieces. the same as Penrose’s; Smith made them by
slicing a regular hexagon into six equal pieces with
One Socolar-Taylor Tile lines connecting the midpoints of opposite edges.
He knew that I had recently written software to com-

pute Heesch numbers of polyominoes (glued-together
squares), polyhexes (regular hexagons) and polyia-
monds (equilateral triangles), and he wondered
whether it could be adapted to polykites. Fortunately,
I had added support for kites the year before with the
help of Ava Pun, an undergraduate at the University
of Waterloo.
My software easily generated large clusters of hats
Even when a problem in mathematics is unsolved, without getting stuck, reinforcing our belief that the
there is often a broad consensus among mathemati- hat tiled the plane. Better yet, these new computer-
cians about its likely answer. For example, Goldbach’s generated clusters became raw data that Smith and I
conjecture states that every even number greater than could study to refine our intuition. We began grouping
two is the sum of two odd primes. This conjecture is hats in different ways, usually coloring them by hand
unproven, but the evidence we have overwhelmingly in digital illustrations, to search for order. Recurring
suggests that it’s correct. One reason I was always fas- patterns leaped out immediately, organized around a
cinated by the einstein problem is that I did not see sparse arrangement of reflected hats embedded in a
clear evidence for or against it (apart from the grim larger field of unreflected hats (something Smith had
reality of a 50-year dry spell). Some mathematicians also observed in his paper experiments).
were resigned to the impossibility of aperiodic mono-
tiles, but I was open to either outcome. If nothing else, Tile Pattern Exploration Reflected tile (dark gray)
I suspected that an existence proof would be more
tractable than a nonexistence proof. The former was
likely to be an argument about the properties of a spe-
cific shape, but the latter would necessarily be a state-
ment about all shapes. As we now know, in this in-
stance there is some justice in the universe.
Smith hadn’t specifically set out to find an

aperiodic monotile, but he was aware of the history
and significance of the problem. He was always on the
lookout for signs of aperiodicity in his explorations. It
was Smith who first dared to suggest, in an e-mail on
November 24, 2022, that the hat might be an einstein,
modestly adding, “Now wouldn’t that be a thing?”
Smith and I began trying to understand the hat’s

Yet these patterns never formed a translational Substitution
unit. Moreover, the tiles seemed to build up into fami- (Metatiles)
lies of related “motifs” at multiple scales. This kind of
recurring hierarchy hinted at a best-case scenario for
eventually proving the hat was aperiodic: we could
hope to find a system of so-called substitution rules.
In a substitution system, every tile shape in a set is
equipped with a rule that can be applied to replace it
by a collection of smaller copies of the tiles. Armed
with a suitable substitution system for hats, we might
be able to start with a “seed” configuration of tiles and
apply the rules iteratively, zooming in as we go to pre-
B
serve scale. In this way, we would define a sequence of y the start of 2023 S mith and I had half of a
ever-larger clusters of hats, which would eventually proof of aperiodicity, and arguably it was the
fill the entire plane. Many aperiodic tile sets, including easy half. Our metatiles and substitution rules
Penrose’s, can be shown to tile the plane with substitu- guaranteed that the hat was a monotile: it tiled the in-
tion systems like these. finite plane rather than petering out with an unexpect-
edly large, but finite, Heesch number. And it was easy
Substitution (Penrose Example) to see that the tilings generated by the rules were non-
periodic. But remember that nonperiodicity is a far cry
from aperiodicity. Perhaps our rules were just an over-
ly complicated way to construct hat tilings, and peri-
odic tilings existed, too. To complete the proof, we had
to show that every tiling by hats was necessarily non-
periodic. I had some inkling of how that step might
play out, but I felt as I imagine Smith had the previous
November: close to the limits of my mathematical ex-
pertise. It was time to call in reinforcements.
Early in January 2023 Smith and I reached out to
Goodman-Strauss, a mathematician who has pub-
lished many important articles about tiling theory. I
consider him a go-to authority on contemporary re-
search. He is also known as a mathematics communi-
cator and an organizer of hands-on activities, and at
the time he was transitioning into a new role as an
On my 50th birthday, about two weeks after I first outreach mathematician at the National Museum of
saw the hat, I found a preliminary set of substitution Mathematics in New York City. In other words, he was
rules. The trick was to avoid working directly with already swamped. But he provided valuable input and
“naked,” or single, reflected hats, which necessarily insisted that we also contact Myers immediately. My-
behaved differently than their unreflected counter- ers left academia after receiving a Ph.D. in the math-
parts. Instead I grouped each reflected hat with three ematical field of combinatorics, but he remained in-
of its neighbors to form an indivisible unit, a new terested in tilings. In particular, he maintained a long-
“metatile” that could be treated as a full-fledged tile term project to catalog the tiling properties of
shape with a substitution rule of its own. I refined the polyforms. I had run some supporting computations
metatiles and their rules through the rest of 2022, ar- for him back in 2006, and I was using his software as
riving at a system of four metatiles, each one a kind of part of my own research on Heesch numbers.
schematic representation of a small cluster of hats. I hadn’t worked that closely with Myers before, so
I was unprepared for his combination of mental horse-
Metatiles power, coding skill and knowledge of the field. His
previous work on tilings had left him perfectly pre-
pared for this moment. A mere eight days after being
introduced to our work in progress, Myers completed
the proof, confirming in late January that the hat was
the world’s first aperiodic monotile.
Before Myers came onboard, we already had our
substitution rules and could generate tilings; his mis-
sion was to prove that all tilings by the hat had to be
nonperiodic. In the aperiodicity playbook, the stan-
dard move at this point is to show that any tiling bears
the imprint of the substitution rules. In other words, ematical discovery. Way back in December 2022 he
he needed to prove that for any arbitrary hat tiling, had shocked me by e-mailing me a second shape, a
there is a unique way to group tiles into metatiles, polykite we call the turtle, which behaved a lot like the
metatiles into supertiles, and so on forever, reverse- hat. The turtle, too, radiated an uncanny aura of aperi
engineering an infinite tower of substitutions that odicity. Was it possible that Smith had discovered two
ends with the full, infinite tiling. A preexisting math- revolutionary shapes in two weeks after others had
ematical argument then would allow us to conclude looked in vain for 50 years? I begged for patience; my
that the tiling must be nonperiodic. The challenge of head was already full of hats, so to speak.
this strategy is to locate this tower atop an arbitrary
hat tiling whose construction was not constrained at
the outset to obey our rules.
Myers developed a computer-assisted approach to
solving this problem. We generated an exhaustive list
of 188 small clusters of tiles that could appear in hat
tilings. These clusters represented every legal arrange-
ment around a single hat so that each tile in any con-
ceivable tiling must lie at the center of one such cluster.
Myers then showed that each of these clusters could
be divided up in a unique way into fragments of the
metatiles, implying that the hats in any tiling could be But after resolving the sta-
grouped to yield a tiling by metatiles. Finally, he dem- tus of the hat, Myers began
onstrated that in a tiling made of metatiles, it was al- contemplating the neglected
ways possible to group metatiles into larger clusters turtle. A week or two later he
called supertiles, which behave exactly like larger stunned the three of us with the
metatiles. This last step launches a kind of recursion: observation that the turtle was nec-
because the supertiles behave just like metatiles, the essarily also aperiodic because it was really just
same grouping process applies to them as well. Once a hat in disguise. In fact, the hat and the turtle
we group hats into metatiles and metatiles into super- were two shapes in a continuous family of poly-
tiles, all subsequent levels of the hierarchy lock into gons, all of which were aperiodic and tiled in the
place with a single mathematical flourish. same way.
Supertiles
The hat can be regarded as a polygon with edges of

⎯
length 1 and √ 3 (where two consecutive edges of
length 1 form one longer edge). Just as one can con-
struct a family of rectangles by varying the lengths of
its horizontal and vertical edges independently, we can
choose any two numbers a a nd b t o replace the hat’s
edge lengths and obtain a new polygon that we will call
⎯
We had our prize, a nd in early February 2023 we Tile(a,b). Using this notation, the hat is Tile(1,√ 3 ),
⎯
began writing a manuscript to share the hat with the and the turtle is Tile(√ 3 ,1). Myers showed that nearly
world. That might have been the end to an already all shapes of the form Tile(a,b) are aperiodic mono-
magical story were it not for Smith’s capacity for math- tiles with the same tilings. There were just three excep-

tions: Tile(0,1) (the “chevron”), Tile(1,0) (the “com- Soon after, Myers doubled down on the link he had
et”) and the equilateral polygon Tile(1,1) (which never forged between the hat and the turtle, developing a
acquired a catchy nickname). Each of these three remarkable second proof of the hat’s aperiodicity
shapes is more flexible, admitting both periodic and based on the Tile(a,b) continuum. He relied on the
nonperiodic tilings. classic technique of proof by contradiction: he posited
the existence of a periodic tiling of hats, and then, from
Tile(0,1): Chevron the existence of such a tiling, he derived an absurdity
that showed the initial supposition (the periodic hat
tiling) was impossible. Specifically, he found that one
could stretch and squeeze edges in a periodic hat tiling
to obtain equivalent, periodic tilings by chevrons and
comets. But chevrons and comets are both polyia-
monds (unions of equilateral triangles) built on top of
regular triangular tilings at different scales. In an argu-
ment that involves combinatorics, geometry and a dash
of number theory, Myers proved that because the chev-
ron and comet tilings originated from the same sup-
Tile(1,4)
posedly periodic hat tiling, their underlying triangle
tilings would have to be related to each other through
a mathematically impossible scaling factor. This was a
Tile(1,√3): Hat second way to prove that the hat is an aperiodic mono-
tile. It’s exciting not just because it bolsters the claim of
the hat’s aperiodicity but also because it represents a
whole new method of proof in this field, which could
be useful in analyzing other tiles in the future.
W
e put our manuscript online i n March
2023 and received an enthusiastic, over-
whelming response from mathematicians
and tiling hobbyists. The hat became an immediate
source of inspiration for artists, designers and puzzle
Tile(1,1) creators (you can now buy hat tiling sets on Etsy, for
instance). It’s important to remember that the work
has not yet emerged from the crucible of peer review,
although it has withstood a great deal of scrutiny from
Tile(√3,1): Turtle experts with barely a scratch.
When we first revealed the hat, people objected to
one aspect of our work more frequently than any other:
the use of reflected tiles. Every tiling by hats must in-
clude a sparse distribution of reflected hats, as Smith
and I discovered early on. Mathematically, this objec-
tion does not derail our result: the accepted definition
of a monotile has always allowed reflections as legal
moves in tilings. Still, many wondered, could there be
a shape out there that yields a “one-handed,” or “chi-
Tile(4,1) ral,” aperiodic tiling in which no tiles are flipped over?
Our manuscript offered no insight into this problem,
and we were as prepared as everyone else to settle in
for the long wait until its resolution.
Tile(1,0): Comet Happily, Smith had one more astounding surprise
for us. Less than a week after our first manuscript went
live, he began e-mailing the rest of us about Tile(1,1),
the equilateral member of the continuum of shapes
that included the hat and the turtle. We knew that this
polygon was not aperiodic: it admitted periodic tilings
that mixed unreflected and reflected tiles. But Smith
observed that if he deliberately restricted himself to
tiles of a single-handedness (no flipping allowed), he
produced intriguing clusters of tiles.
Tile(1,1) with Reflected Tiles Reflected tile (dark gray) There is no shortage of unsolved
problems in tiling theory. David
Smith joins a pantheon of
enthusiastic amateurs who have
made important contributions to
the field, often after reading about
Tile(1,1) without Reflected Tiles
open problems in this magazine.
There is a romance t o stories of mathematicians

working for years on intractable problems, sometimes
in secret, and finally emerging into the light with a
new result. That is not our story. Although I was al-
ways fascinated by the einstein problem, I never
worked on it directly—I started only when I was
handed the answer in November 2022. The hat more
or less materialized in Smith’s hands, and I was lucky
The four of us immediately dove into a new col- that he chose to contact me. A few months later we
laboration. We computed large patches of unreflected had a complete proof, created through a process that
copies of Tile(1,1) and studied them for patterns. We was, as far as I can tell, painless for all four of us. Per-
discovered a way to group tiles into recurring clusters haps our pace reflects the fact that there is a clear pro-
and then determined substitution rules for those clus- cedure to follow in generating a proof of aperiodicity
ters that yielded superclusters with identical behavior. if you have the right shape to begin with. Our sense of
Once again, this recursive grouping guaranteed the ease was also surely a result of the decades we had
existence of a unique infinite hierarchy of substitu- each spent pondering the einstein problem and re-
tions that forced all unreflected (single-handed) til- lated questions. That experience left us
ings to be nonperiodic. The final trick was simply to well positioned to recognize the hat as a
replace the edges of Tile(1,1) with arbitrary curves, possible solution and to know what to
which guaranteed that tiles and their reflections do with it.
couldn’t coexist in a tiling. The result was a family of There is no shortage of unsolved
shapes that we called spectres, all of which turned problems in tiling theory, a branch of
out to be chiral aperiodic monotiles. mathematics with a low barrier to en-
try and lots of visual appeal. Smith
Tile(1,1) Spectres joins a pantheon of enthusiastic
amateurs who have made im-
portant contributions to the
field, often after reading about
open problems in this maga-
zine. He is in the company of
Robert Ammann, who indepen-
dently discovered many of the
same results as Penrose and con-
tributed other important ideas to
tiling theory; Marjorie Rice, who discov-
ered new classes of pentagonal monotiles; and Joan
Taylor, who originated the Socolar-Taylor tile. I should
also include the artist M. C. Escher, who invented the
math he needed to draw his tessellations, even if he
would not have thought of it as math at all.
As the impact of our aperiodic monotiles ripples FROM OUR ARCHIVES
outward, I’m sure it will stimulate new scholarly re- Art by the Numbers.
Stephen Ornes;
search. But I hope we also entice others who might August 2018.
have seen mathematics as forbidding but now recog- ScientificAmerican.
nize an opportunity to play. com/archive
Life
Beyond
Sex
SEXUALITY
A lack of sexual attraction was long

seen as a problem that needed to be
fixed. New research on asexuality is
expanding ideas of love and intimacy
BY ALLISON PARSHALL
Illustrations by
MARCOS CHIN
68 SCI E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N
I N GRADUATE SCHOOL people often asked Megan Carroll whether she was gay. Her
sociology dissertation was on inequalities within communities of gay fathers, so
her research participants were curious about how she identified. “I would say, ‘Oh,
I’m maybe mostly straight? I don’t really know. It’s complicated.’” It was, at the
time, the closest she could get to the truth. She’d had crushes on both boys and girls
in high school and had been in a relationship with a man; being around her romantic inter-
ests sent her heart fluttering in her chest. But nothing like that happened when she
considered having sex with any of them—she simply wasn’t interested. Her friends assured
her she just needed to meet the right person, someone who would light her fire.
When that hadn’t happened by the time she was 18,
Carroll thought she might simply have a low libido and
went looking for an explanation. Thinking her birth
which sexual desire was not necessary for a fulfilling life.
Because this idea subverts a cultural assumption
about what it means to be human, it is often difficult for
control might be to blame, she spoke with a nurse, who asexual people to recognize, let alone embrace, their
suggested that perhaps her boyfriend was “just a bad identity. “Your very existence is, in some way, in op-
lover.” Then Carroll wondered whether it was the pills position” to the societal norm, says CJ Chasin, an asex-
she was taking to treat her depression. Over the next 12 ual gender and sexuality scholar at the University of
years she visited multiple therapists, psychiatrists and Windsor in Canada. Even after realizing she probably
physicians and tried different antidepressants—in- was asexual, Carroll still visited doctors to experiment
cluding a less commonly prescribed drug that gave her with her medications before finally accepting that she
tachycardia, or a faster heart rate. Eventually she settled just is the way she is.
on one that had shown no measurable effect on sex drive Over the past two decades psychological studies
in clinical trials. have shown that asexuality should be classified not as
Throughout these years of experimentation, Car- a disorder but as a stable sexual orientation akin to
roll’s libido—the physiological desire for sexual stimu- homosexuality or heterosexuality. Both cultural
lation and release—did fluctuate. But what remained awareness and clinical medicine have been slow to
constant was that her libido was rarely, if ever, directed catch on. It’s only recently that academic researchers
at another person, even her crushes. have begun to look at asexuality not as an indicator of
In 2016 Carroll stumbled on a Facebook post about health problems but as a legitimate, underexplored
asexuality. She’d heard the term, typically defined as way of being human.
experiencing little to no sexual attraction, but had never
felt that it applied to her. Then Carroll read a comment In biology, the word “asexual” typically gets used in
that mentioned demisexuality, a specific experience of reference to species that reproduce without sex, such
feeling sexual attraction only after developing an emo- as bacteria and aphids. But in some species that do re-
Allison Parshall
tional bond with someone. The idea that asexuality was quire mating to have offspring, such as sheep and ro-
is a freelance writer
and editor for a spectrum opened an entire world that had never been dents, scientists have observed individuals that don’t
Scientific American. discussed in her gender and sexuality courses—one in appear driven to engage in the act.
This behavior is more analogous to human asexual- stand how we think about ourselves before they interpret
ity, a concept rarely mentioned in medical literature data about us,” Jay says. The AVEN team conducted a
until recently. In a pamphlet published in 1896, pio- review of the literature and interviewed seven research-
neering German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld de- ers, most of them psychologists.
scribed people without sexual desire, a state he called AVEN put its findings in a report and sent it to the
“anesthesia sexualis.” In 1907 Reverend Carl Schlegel, committee in charge of reevaluating the HSDD diag-
an early gay rights activist, advocated for the “same nostic criteria for the D SM’s fifth version. One com-
laws” for “the homosexuals, heterosexuals, bisexuals mittee member was Lori Brotto, a psychologist at the
[and] asexuals.” When sexologist Alfred Kinsey de- University of British Columbia who was conducting
vised his scale of sexual orientation in the 1940s, he some of the earliest studies of asexuality. Brotto found
created a “Category X” for the respondents who unex- that AVEN’s report aligned well with what she was
pectedly reported no sociosexual contacts or reac- already learning from her research, which compared
tions—exceptions from his model whom he estimated the behavior, experiences and physiological responses
made up 1.5 percent of all males between the ages of 16 of self-identifying asexual people with those of non
and 55 in the U.S. Asexuality was largely absent from asexual people who had received an HSDD diagnosis.
scientific research over the subsequent decades, al- She consistently found differences in responses among
though it was occasionally referenced by activists and the asexual group that suggested asexuality shouldn’t
scholars in the gay liberation movement. be categorized as a sexual dysfunction.
It wasn’t until the World Wide Web emerged that In 2013 the D
SM-5 w as published with a revamped
asexual people around the globe began finding one section on sexual dysfunction that split HSDD into
another on Internet forums. They started building a male and female disorders with new names. Each one
shared language in the early 2000s, mapping the land- contained a line specifying that someone who identi-
scape of asexuality through a grassroots development fies as asexual should not be given the diagnosis. This
of concepts and labels. Calling themselves “aces,” they change meant that asexuality was no longer a disorder
tended to split sexual and romantic attraction into in the eyes of the American Psychiatric Association,
spectrums of their own; asexual people can experience and it opened up new ideas for researchers investigat-
varying levels of each. Aces can be sex-repulsed, sex- ing sexual desire.
neutral or sex-positive; they may have sex frequently
or never. There are aces who have high libidos and aces The study of asexuality developed throughout
with none to speak of. Some aces masturbate, and oth- the mid-2010s and is now growing rapidly, says Jessica
ers don’t. Different as they are, members of the ace Hille, a gender and sexuality researcher at Indiana
community are unified by their relative lack of sexual, University’s Kinsey Institute. In a review published in
and sometimes romantic, attraction to others. November 2022, Hille found 28 studies on asexuality
At the time, however, being asexual could be con- published between January 2020 and July 2022,
sidered indicative of a psychiatric disorder, according “whereas 10 years ago I don’t know that you would
to the American Psychiatric Association’s D iagnostic have found 28 papers in the [entire] field,” she says.
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( D SM). If Today “asexuality is widely accepted as a sexual
someone reported being distressed by their low sexual orientation in the literature,” Hille says, but cultural
desire, a doctor could diagnose them with hypoactive awareness remains in its infancy, especially compared
sexual desire disorder (HSDD). A person could also with other orientations under the LGBTQIA+ um-
qualify for the diagnosis if their partner was upset by brella. Saying you don’t experience sexual attraction
their low sexual desire—even if they themselves were is still like saying you don’t eat, Hille explains, and “if
fine with it. In other words, the person in a couple “who you don’t eat, there’s something wrong with you, and
didn’t like sex enough had the disorder,” explains Da- you’re hurting yourself.” Asexual people sometimes
vid Jay, founder of the Asexual Visibility and Educa- get this message not just from family and acquain-
tion Network (AVEN), an online forum that became a tances but from their health-care providers.
starting point for much of the ace community. Shelby Wren, a health equity researcher at the Uni-
Levels of sexual desire can fluctuate throughout life versity of Minnesota, published a study in 2020 in
for many reasons that may or may not be a cause for which 30 to 50 percent of respondents who had dis-
medical concern, including changes to hormone levels closed their asexuality in a medical setting said a thera-
or mental health. If someone is experiencing significant pist or doctor had attributed their asexuality to a
distress about a dip in desire, they may benefit from di- health condition. The proposed diagnoses included
agnosis and treatment. But asexual people tend to expe- anxiety, depression and, in one case, a personality dis-
rience their lack of sexual attraction to others as a rela- order. “You don’t know what’s going to happen when
tively stable orientation rather than a disorder requiring you disclose your sexual orientation,” Wren says. “And
intervention. So when work began on an updated ver- for a lot of people, that stops them from talking about
sion of the DSM in the late 2000s, Jay and others at things that could be relevant to their health care.”
AVEN wanted to make this clear to the scientists drafting For Rowan, an actor and writer based in Scotland,
it. “We wanted researchers to, at the very least, under- who asked to be identified by first name only, this very

experience began with a routine appointment with jected and misunderstood.” For instance, asexual people
their gynecologist. When the nurse asked whether they are sometimes subjected to conversion therapy, a prac-
were sexually active, they said no—they had a boy- tice aimed at changing someone’s sexuality or gender
friend but hadn’t had penetrative sex. “I don’t want to,” identity. It is banned for minors in 22 U.S. states because
Rowan recalls explaining to the nurse. “I don’t feel any- of its well-documented and extensive harms, including
thing. I don’t feel ready enough.” Rowan, who was in increased rates of suicide. A 2018 U.K. government sur-
their early 20s at the time, felt ashamed, “like there was vey of LGBTQIA+ people found that asexual respon-
part of me that wasn’t right, and I wanted it to be fixed.” dents were the most likely to be offered conversion
The doctor referred Rowan to a psychosexual therapist. therapy and as likely as gay and lesbian people to receive
In their first therapy appointment, Rowan suggested it. A recent survey by the Trevor Project found that
that they might not be sexually attracted to anyone. 4 percent of asexual youths in the U.S. were subjected to
They don’t recall the therapist mentioning that again conversion therapy, on par with bisexual respondents.
over the course of four appointments; instead the ther- On the legislative level, bans on conversion therapy
apist suggested a physical exam of Rowan’s genitals. should explicitly reference asexuality, Benoit says. So,
During the internal exam, Rowan felt “nothing” too, should professional associations of health-care
and removed from their body. “That was really confus- practitioners, says Samantha Guz, a social work re-
ing for me at the time, that a medical exam is just as searcher at the University of Chicago. “Asexual people
cold and devoid of any feeling” as was physical inti- are made to be so invisible in our society that I don’t
macy with their boyfriend. Rowan recalls the therapist think just having a broad call against conversion ther-
reporting that nothing was physically wrong with apy is specific enough,” Guz says.
them and then spending the next few sessions trying Even well-meaning doctors might unwittingly
to identify Rowan’s mental blockage. These encounters harm their patients. To a clinician, a patient who is
had lasting effects on Rowan, including dissuading worried that they s hould f eel more sexual desire—and
them from seeking therapy to treat their depression. who does not know they are simply asexual—might
Rowan is not alone. In a report on asexual discrimi- initially look similar to patients who want sexual inti-
nation published in October 2023 by Stonewall, a U.K.- macy and could benefit from treatments aimed at in-
based LGBTQIA+ rights organization, many interview- creasing or restoring desire. Treatments for certain
ees reported that low awareness of asexuality had types of sexual dysfunction do help some people whose
negatively impacted their health care at some point. level of sexual desire leaves them distressed and un-
One participant’s therapist told her to set goals to get satisfied, Brotto says. For some people, though, this
over her “fear of sex” and to take a medication to in- distress may be coming not from an intrinsic desire to
crease her libido. Another participant’s therapist as- want sex but from external pressures such as partners
sumed that her asexuality stemmed from childhood or society as a whole. “I have worked with folks where
trauma and would change with time, which led the it’s taken us many, many months for the person to re-
participant to force herself to do things she was not ally understand how well asexuality fits with their
comfortable with. And another participant’s doctor as- identity,” as opposed to having an issue that is rooted
sumed her asexuality came from her antidepressants. in a health problem or a situational condition, Brotto
(While antidepressants have been shown to impact says. Most doctors, though, don’t know that such a
one’s physiological desire for sexual release, or libido, distinction exists or is necessary, she adds.
there is no evidence that they lower one’s sexual attrac-
S
tion to others, which is the component of desire that is ince coming to embrace their asexuality,
most relevant to asexuality, Carroll explains. Some Rowan has become more comfortable with ex-
asexual people have never taken these medications, pressing love and receiving it from friends and
including sources quoted in this article.) partners without the weighted expectations of sex.
Other stories in the report show what can happen With their most recent therapist, they finally had a
when asexuality becomes the focus of doctor’s visits positive experience talking about asexuality in thera-
for completely unrelated issues, interfering with treat- py. “She would ask me specific questions about [my
ment and even causing harm. This was an “over- asexuality], but she didn’t make assumptions about
whelming pattern” in the report, says lead author and what it meant,” Rowan says.
asexual activist Yasmin Benoit. One participant who In early 2022 the American Association of Sexual-
was suffering from pelvic pain, for example, described ity Educators, Counselors and Therapists published a
how her general practitioner would not give her a re- position statement on how to care for asexual patients.
ferral to a gynecologist until she first saw a psycho- It says asexuality is not a disorder or a response to
sexual therapist. This prerequisite resulted in a seven- trauma and that asexual individuals often face diffi-
month delay in treatment and, according to the par- culty in finding affirming health care. (Unlike the
ticipant, “extensive muscular damage.” DSM, t he World Health Organization’s International
Refraining from disclosing one’s asexuality to a men- Classification of Diseases still hasn’t specified that
tal health provider is often a “very rational decision,” asexuality isn’t a disorder.) The association opposes
Chasin says. “It’s always much worse to be actively re- “any and all” attempts to change or pathologize some-
one’s asexual orientation and labels such attempts as housing systems, which are built for nuclear family
conversion therapy. structures that might not be attainable or desirable for
Jared Boot-Haury, a clinical psychologist and certi- many asexual people, she explains.
fied sex therapist, who drafted the statement, hopes Having found a home in the ace community both
that larger organizations such as the American Medi- personally and professionally, Carroll now under-
cal Association will put forward similar statements stands the distress that drove her to doctors’ offices
and, ultimately, clear and empirically supported quite differently. She must have known “deep down
guidelines for clinicians. inside” that her disinterest in sex wasn’t a problem; it’s
Meanwhile many studies of asexuality are moving “the rest of the world that’s a problem,” she says. To-
beyond confirming it exists, instead exploring how ace day her students seem so “receptive to asexuality,
people find intimacy in their relationships and per- wanting to learn about what I know.”
sonal fulfillment outside of the cultural scripts for It’s not just young people who are coming around.
building a life around a sexual or romantic partner. When Carroll lectures about asexuality, she often tells a
The asexual community has had to reimagine love and story about her mother, Laura Vogel, a licensed profes-
relationships to fit its needs; this wisdom could help sional counselor who specializes in recovery from sexual
everyone, asexual or not, Jay says. He cites the U.S. trauma. Vogel knew traumatic experiences could de-
surgeon general’s recent report of an “epidemic” of crease someone’s desire for sex, but for a long time she
loneliness, which showed how social connection has didn’t know that asexuality could be something entirely
significantly decreased over the past 20 years. separate from that. When Carroll came out as asexual to
“Because the ace community was denied the infra- her mother in 2017, Vogel began reading up on the sub-
structure of intimacy and had to invent our own, we ject and realized how her lack of awareness might have
have become this site of innovation that a lot of people, affected her clients. “That was a learning period for me,”
especially nonqueer people, suddenly are interested in,” Vogel told me recently. Since then, if a client expresses
Jay says. He is raising a child in a three-parent family, little to no desire to have sex, she sends them home with
which was the subject of a 2020 Atlantic article. Jay now resources about asexuality to see whether it resonates.
counsels people, asexual or otherwise, on how to build “If a therapist had done what my mom now does ...
intentional relationships outside of cultural norms. it’s hard to describe what that would have meant for
Carroll, now a sociologist at California State Uni- me personally,” Carroll says. “That awareness can save
versity, San Bernardino, also investigates resources for asexual people years and years of uncertainty.”
ace people that might apply more broadly. Some of her FROM OUR ARCHIVES
latest work examines the difficulty that asexual and The World’s First Trans Clinic. Brandy Schillace; August 2021.
aromantic people often face in accessing middle-class ScientificAmerican.com/archive
SCIENCE AGENDA OPINION AND ANALYSIS FROM S CIENTIFIC AMERICAN’S BOARD OF EDITORS
Science and Justice plomacy can be slow, and it will be tough to

make these reparations a reality.
Demand Climate
Nevertheless, the U.S. and its carbon-
spewing counterparts must pursue climate
reparations to right the wrongs of carbon
Reparations pollution and help lower-income nations

weather the climate emergency.
Reparations, broadly understood, are
Overwhelming evidence shows that pollution by the U.S. payments offered to make up for loss or
and other developed nations has caused the climate crisis, damage, and they can be a touchy subject
and poorer nations are suffering the most BY THE EDITORS for a range of legal and psychological rea-
sons. They are just one of several funding
T
mechanisms through which we can try to
HE U.S. GOT a powerful remind- this era of climate crisis, in which decades’ ease the unequal burden of climate change,
er last summer that pollution worth of carbon pollution from rich na- including some that focus specifically on
doesn’t care about borders. tions is magnifying natural disasters, climate mitigation or adaptation. But
Smoke from wildfires blazing poorer countries are paying some of the whatever the term, the science is clear on
across Canada billowed hun- steepest costs. the necessity of these payments.
dreds of miles south, painting skies from It’s time to start compensating these Scientists estimate that worldwide, hu-
New York City to Chicago and beyond a countries. The United Nations recently de- mans produced nearly 2.5 quadrillion ki-
hazy orange and damaging air quality to cided to address this issue through its year- lograms of carbon dioxide between 1851
the point that health officials were warning ly climate gathering, the Conference of the and 2021. Analysis after analysis has
people not to go outside. Parties, or COP. At COP27 in November shown that over time the U.S. has pro-
Greenhouse gas pollution is similar— 2022, world leaders agreed to create a fund duced by far the most heat-trapping gas-
not governed by borders, warming the for loss and damages for climate disasters, es—17 percent of the global total. This as-
planet indiscriminately and damaging the and attendees at 2023’s COP28 planned to tronomical amount equals the combined
climate on an extremely broad scale. In further the conversation. But climate di- emissions produced by more than 20 de-
veloped nations, including Germany, Ja-
pan and Australia. In comparison, climate
emissions from 47 of the least developed
countries add up to just 6 percent of the to-
tal. China ranks second among individual
countries, at 12 percent of total emissions,
but it began industrializing much later
than the U.S. Because of China’s large pop-
ulation, the country’s per capita emissions
are slightly more than half of those of Aus-
tralia, Canada or the U.S.
Although industrial countries occa-
sionally pledge to solve these problems,
they still bicker about how much climate
disruption they are willing to permit, and
they haven’t put their money where their
promises are. Wealthy nations have
pledged to fund projects to mitigate cli-
mate change such as expanding clean en-
ergy, as well as adaptation projects such as
building seawalls. They’ve promised $100
billion a year for these kinds of projects,
but the funding hasn’t materialized. And
because industrial countries have opposed
decarbonization for so long, mitigation
and adaptation are not enough.
People are already dying from the con-
sequences of carbon pollution that devel-
74 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N Jan uary 2 02 4 Illustration by James Yang

FORUM COMMENTARY ON SCIENCE IN THE NEWS FROM THE EXPERTS
oped nations generated while amassing

their wealth. For example, last September
a hurricanelike storm from the Mediterra-
nean drenched Libya with one year’s worth
of water in a single day. Two dams col-
lapsed, and at least 4,000 people died, al-
though the true toll might be closer to
10,000. Scientists have determined that
such a disaster—a one-in-600-year
flood—is 50 times more likely today than
it was when the planet was 1.2 degrees
Celsius cooler.
“By delaying the discussion, we have
accepted that people can die and that enor-
mous harm can happen at the global level,”
says Joyeeta Gupta , a sustainability scien-
tist at the University of Amsterdam.
Scientists are also clear on the role this
pollution plays in exacerbating disasters,
both in general and for individual cases.
Hundreds of studies have sought to quan-
tify the contribution of climate change to
specific disasters. The majority of such
studies on heat waves show that these
events are becoming more likely or more
severe as climate upheaval continues.
What We Learned
Around half of the studies on heavy rain-
fall and flooding or on drought reach that
same conclusion.
As the climate crisis worsens these
kinds of events, their toll becomes ever from Acid Rain
steeper. In 2022 Earth experienced about
By working together, the nations of the world can solve
40 billion-dollar disasters, including
Hurricane Ian in the southeastern U.S., climate change BY HANNAH RITCHIE
devastating floods in Pakistan and
I
drought in eastern Africa. The U.S. bears
more of the responsibility for these crises T FEELS LIKE the world is ending. what can help us face today’s crises. An
and boasts more resources for responding Wildfires in Canada and Europe, eye-opening example is acid rain; the way
to them, whereas countries across the de- floods in China, and a stream of rec in which nations confronted this geopolit-
veloping world lack the wealth, insurance ord-breaking heat waves have gar- ically divisive problem can teach us how we
infrastructure and government programs nered numerous headlines. Time is can tackle climate change today.
needed to recover from disaster. Mean- running out, and it’s easy to believe that so- Acid rain was the leading environmen-
while the slower-moving calamity of ciety cannot fix big environmental prob- tal concern of the 1990s. At one point it was
sea-level rise is eating away the tiny home- lems—I have personally battled this feeling one of the most pressing bilateral diplo-
lands of small island nations, which might of helplessness for more than a decade. matic issues between the U.S. and Canada.
soon begin facing the steep costs of invol- But our past efforts tell us there is hope. It is caused mainly by sulfur dioxide (SO2),
untary relocation. In my role at Our World in Data, a gas that is produced when we
We call on those who have become rich an online project that publishes Hannah Ritchie burn coal. It dissolved old
is deputy editor of the
at the expense of a less livable world to pri- research and data on the world’s online web publication sculptures, stripped forests of
oritize the needs of developing countries biggest problems, I’ve spent Our World in Data. She their leaves, leached nutrients
and others bearing the brunt of the climate years looking at how seeming- is a senior researcher at from soil, and polluted rivers
crisis. At home and abroad, there’s no time ly insurmountable challenges the University of Oxford. and lakes. Emissions from the
Her book Not the End
to wait. The science is clear: the industrial have evolved. I think it’s worth U.K. would be carried by the
of the World will be
world is responsible. The least we can do is studying these issues to under- published this month wind to Sweden and Norway;
pay for the damage we’ve done. stand what went right and by Little, Brown Spark. emissions from the U.S. would
Illustration by Thomas Fuchs Jan uary 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 75

FORUM
disperse over Canada. Just like climate One thing we learned from confronting ments to be put on the table. The initial
change, it crossed borders, and no country acid rain and the ozone hole is that the cost targets were too modest to make a large-
could fix it alone. of technology really matters. The cost- enough difference. But over time countries
This is a classic game-theory problem: benefit ratio of desulfurization technolo- increased their ambitions, amended their
countries will act only if they know others gies was key in eliminating acid rain. The agreements and reached for higher goals.
are willing to do the same. With acid rain, cost of installing “scrubbers” to capture SO2 This is a basic principle of the Paris Cli-
they did act collectively. Government offi- from coal plant emissions was significant mate Accords. Countries agreed to step up
cials signed international agreements, but not budget breaking. Had it been huge, their commitments to keep global tem-
placed emissions limits on power plants countries wouldn’t have made the switch. perature rise below 1.5 or two degrees Cel-
and started to reduce coal burning. In Eu- Similarly, cheap low-carbon technolo- sius. This has been happening but not fast
rope, SO2 emissions fell by 84 percent; in gies are essential in the fight against climate enough. The world is on track for an in-
the U.S., 90 percent. Some countries re- change. In the past decade the price of solar crease of around 2.6 degrees C by 2100,
duced them by more than 98 percent. energy has fallen by more than 90 percent which is bad. Still, it’s a degree lower than
We did something similar to restore and that of wind energy by more than where we were headed in 2016. Govern-
Earth’s protective ozone layer. No single 70 percent. Battery costs have tumbled by ments have increased their target num-
country was responsible for the world’s 98 percent since 1990, bringing the price of bers, and just like with acid rain and the
emissions of ozone-depleting substances, electric cars down with them. Globally, one ozone hole, they must continue to aim
so there was little upside and some down- in every seven new cars sold is now electric. higher. If every country fulfilled its pledge,
side to individual countries taking the lead At the same time, countries are waking the world would limit temperature rise to
on their own. The only way to cut emis- up to the potential costs of not moving to two degrees C. If they met their net-zero
sions substantially was for many countries clean energy, whether in the form of climate commitments on time, we could keep it
to join in. Since the Montreal Protocol on damages—at home or overseas—or unfa- even lower.
reducing the hole in the ozone layer was vorable ties to volatile fossil-fuel markets. Finally, the stance of elected officials
opened for signatures in 1987, almost 200 Another important lesson is that cli- matters more than their party affiliation.
countries have signed it, and emissions of mate agreements and targets take time to Environmental issues do not have to be so
ozone-depleting substances have fallen by evolve. The ozone hole and acid rain were politically divisive. Acid rain was a biparti-
more than 99 percent. not fixed by the first international agree- san issue in the U.S. during Ronald Reagan’s
presidency. And it wasn’t a Democrat who
finally took action; it was Reagan’s Repub-
How Cooperatively Stemming SO₂ Emissions Quelled Acid Rain lican successor, George H. W. Bush. Before
Sulfur dioxide (SO₂) is a cause of acid rain. This chart shows the dramatic rise and fall of SO₂ emissions
taking office, Bush pledged to be the “envi-
relative to the peak of emissions in each country or region, which occurred at different times. The chart ronmental president,” something that
reflects emissions data through 2019. would be a bold stance for many right-wing
leaders today but that we need to see re-
Years from Peak Emissions, by Country peated if we are going to set and reach loft-
–100 –75 –50 –25 0 25 50
ier goals. In the U.K., there is strong public
100
Percent of Peak Emissions
After a long support for net-zero emissions even among

coal-burning past, the political right. Margaret Thatcher—
90 the U.K. reached peak
arguably one of the U.K.’s most right-wing
emissions in 1970. Almost
80 50 years later, emissions prime ministers ever—was one of the earli-
had decreased by est to take climate change seriously.
70 U.K. a staggering The climate crisis is not exactly like the
98 percent.
environmental problems we’ve solved be-
60
Source: “Data Explorer: Air Pollution,” Our World in Data
fore. It will be even harder to address, and

we should be honest about that. It means
50
rebuilding the energy, transportation and
U.S. food systems that underpin the modern
40
world. It will involve every country and al-
30 most every sector. But positive change is
China’s happening. To accelerate it, we need to
Europe emissions doubled
20 have the expectation that things can move
between 1992 and
2006 and then fell faster. That’s where past lessons come in.
10 by 68 percent in They demonstrate that such expectations
China only 13 years. are not unrealistic. Change can happen—
0 but not on its own. We need to drive it.
76 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N Jan uary 2 02 4 Graphic by John Knight

THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH
Stepping Off the BMI Scale cation on both sides,” Gepner says, using
BMI to determine obesity “is like flipping
a coin.”
Now there are better ways than body mass charts Not only does BMI fail to distinguish
to measure health risks BY LYDIA DENWORTH between muscle and fat, but it says noth-
ing about where that fat sits in your body,
A
says Priya Jaisinghani, an endocrinologist
CCORDING TO STANDARD cal- Medical Association acknowledged as and specialist in obesity at N.Y.U. Langone
culations, my husband’s body much when it announced last June that Health in New York City. With fat, as with
mass index (BMI) is too high. BMI alone is an imperfect measure and real estate, location matters. Abdominal
Yet he is the fittest person I that clinical practice needs to change. fat confers higher risk, as does fat around
know—an athlete carrying The new thinking on BMI does not ne- vital organs. A 2018 study looked at mag-
plenty of muscle and very little fat. gate the need to address the health risks netic resonance imaging scans—the gold
Therein lies the problem with BMI. De- associated with a high body-fat percentage. standard for body-composition re-
rived by dividing someone’s weight in ki- In 2013 the AMA recognized obesity as a search—collected by the U.K. Biobank, a
lograms by the square of their height in disease and noted that it often leads to large biomedical database. The results
meters, a BMI number classifies a person many dangerous conditions, including can- showed that people with fat concentrated
as underweight (less than 18.5), normal cer, diabetes and heart disease. The risks of in their abdomen had higher risk for type 2
weight (18.5 to 24.9), overweight (25 to obesity haven’t changed. For the time be- diabetes, heart disease and metabolic dis-
29.9) or obese (30 or more). But that sim- ing, however, insurers still rely on BMI to ease than did people with the same BMI
ple formula obscures critical details such determine people’s eligibility for bariatric and of the same age whose fat was spread
as the difference between muscle and fat. surgery and most weight-loss drugs, in- through other parts of their body.
When it comes to individual cluding popular new options A further problem is that BMI is based
health risks, those details tell Lydia Denworth such as Wegovy. on height and weight tables developed us-
is an award-winning
the real story. science journalist and
A recent study showed just ing data from non-Hispanic white people,
The shortcomings of BMI contributing editor for how imprecise BMI can be. mostly men. Yet researchers now know that
have been recognized for de- Scientific American. She Yftach Gepner, a physiologist race, ethnicity, sex and age affect body com-
cades. Yet physicians kept us- is author of Friendship and epidemiologist at Tel Aviv position and health risks differently. For
(W. W. Norton, 2020).
ing it as a quick way to diagnose University, and his colleagues instance, Black people tend to have greater
obesity and as a proxy for overall health. looked at data on about 3,000 Israeli men muscle mass and thus may be misclassified
“It made life really easy,” says clinical psy- and women. Roughly one third of those as obese on the basis of BMI. The opposite
chologist Cynthia Bulik, founding director whose BMI placed them in the normal is true for Asians, who tend to have more
of the University of North Carolina Center range were found to be obese when their body fat at lower BMIs, so their actual dis-
of Excellence for Eating Disorders. “It also actual body fat was measured. And a third ease risks may be missed.
led to a type of tunnel vision.” of those who were identified as overweight Although BMI has value for assessing
Equating a slightly high BMI with poor by their BMI had normal amounts of body obesity at a population level, better meth-
health isn’t always accurate. The American fat. “If you are combining the misclassifi- ods exist for individuals. “The key is not to
use BMI on its own as an index of health,”
Bulik says. To properly assess health, doc-
tors should combine the index with mea-
sures such as waist circumference, blood
pressure and cholesterol levels. Bioelectri-
cal impedance analysis, which uses electric
signals to tell fat from muscle in the body,
is becoming more common in medical
offices. “In a very few years it is going to
become standard,” Gepner says. DEXA
scans, a type of x-ray imaging that can dis-
tinguish between muscle and fat, and MRI
also can be used to measure body fat, al-
though they tend to be more costly and are
therefore less accessible.
With so many alternatives available, no
one, including health-care workers, should
give BMI too much weight.
78 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N Jan uary 2 02 4 Illustration by Jay Bendt

ANJALI GOSWAMI Q&A
Why Cats
Are Perfect
Felines have attained
evolutionary excellence
BY KATE WONG
A
NJALI GOSWAMI THINKS cats
are perfect—not in the same way
as the average cat person, out of
admiration for their beauty, ath-
leticism and independence of just that species, there seems to be a lot teeny amount of allometry [dispropor-
spirit, but from a scientific standpoint. of variation. tionate change in one body part relative to
Goswami is an evolutionary biologist at They have different coat colors, sure. But the whole as a consequence of size] if they
the Natural History Museum in London they all have the same baby heads—they’re get really big: a small elongation of the face
who studies large-scale patterns of evolu- round, and they don’t elongate as the animal and an increase in muscle mass. But the
tion in vertebrate animals over time. matures, which goes against the standard variation is nothing compared with what
She contends that cats—from tabbies to developmental pattern for mammals. Dogs you see in other groups such as dogs. Ulti-
tigers—are quintessential products of evo- have short, round faces as puppies but long, mately big cats are really similar to small
lution. Her explanation reveals cats, and snouty faces as adults. An adult cat looks cats, far more so than you would predict.
the meaning of evolutionary success, in a pretty much like a baby cat but bigger. With
fascinating new light. dogs, breeders play off that developmen- What does this have to do with
An edited transcript of the interview follows. tal variation to create breeds with different being perfect?
face shapes. But because cats don’t have that Cats have nailed one thing so well that they
When I first came across your argument developmental variation, there isn’t much all do it and just come up with slightly dif-
about cats being perfect, my initial to play around with other than coat color. ferent sizes. That’s why they’re perfect
thought as a cat fan was, “Well, of course This all goes back to the fact that cats are evolutionarily. They don’t need variation.
they are. Science confirms the obvious.” extremely specialized. Every member of They might get bigger or smaller, but they
But then I realized that this was a really the order of mammals known as the carniv- don’t change anything else, because
interesting idea. How did it come about? orans, which includes cats and dogs, has an they’re just right otherwise. They’re not
I was reading a book by Alex Dehgan called upper fourth premolar and a lower first mo- jacks-of-all-trades; they’re masters of one.
The Snow Leopard Project. In it, Dehgan lar that form what we call the slicing pair, Bears are the anticats. There are only a
mentions that in this area in Afghanistan which slices meat. Many carnivorans retain few species of bear, and they do different
where he was setting up a national park, molars behind the slicing pair that can grind things. You’ve got your superspecialized,
there are several cat species. up stuff such as vegetation. But weird herbivore, the giant panda, which
I thought that was kind of Kate Wong is a senior cats have lost pretty much ev- basically eats only bamboo. And then
amazing because ecologically editor for evolution erything behind their slicing you’ve got spectacled bears, which favor
and ecology at
cats all do the same thing. Scientific American. teeth. They might have a nub, a fruits and bromeliads. You’ve got polar
They’re hard-core predators. peg tooth, but it can’t process bears, which are hypercarnivorous marine
They’re carnivores. And there are lots of stuff. This difference is why foxes are per- mammals, and the omnivorous black
other places around the world where mul- fectly happy going through garbage, where- bears and grizzlies. And then there are
tiple species of cats have been able to coex- as leopards will kill livestock instead. sloth bears, which mostly eat social in-
ist—not only today but also in deep time. It doesn’t matter whether they’re tiny sects. So almost every single species of
The thing is, although there are lots of Bengal cats or gigantic lions or tigers; bear does something totally different. And
species, they all kind of look the same. they’re gonna basically look the same. If they’re just okay at all of it [laughs]. I really
They’re just big or small. I started thinking you handed me a lion or tiger skull, I could do like bears a lot because of that opposite
about how cats can be so similar. not—as a person who’s a pretty solid expert side of things. They’re interesting because
in carnivorans in general—tell you which they’re so ecologically diverse.
Tell me more about how they are one it was. Most people would be hard-
similar. I’m thinking of all the breeds pressed to tell you. They look nearly iden- People usually talk about a group’s
of domestic cats, and even within tical. That’s how similar cats are. There’s a diversity as a mark of success. But
Illustration by Shideh Ghandeharizadeh Ja n ua ry 2 02 4 Sc i e n t i f ic A m er ic a n.com 81

Q&A MIND MATTERS EDITED BY DAISY YUHAS
you’re saying it’s the sameness of cat

species, their lack of variation, that To Lead a Meaningful Life,
Become Your Own Hero
indicates that they’re evolutionarily
successful or “perfect.”
Cats challenge standard biases in evolu-
tionary biology. People have said to me, The narrative blueprint underpinning many heroic tales
“What about bats? What about rodents?
These groups have so many species doing
can offer a powerful way to reframe experiences
all kinds of things.” And I’m like, “Yeah, BY BEN ROGERS, KURT GRAY AND MIKE CHRISTIAN
because they suck.” They haven’t figured
W
out how to do anything well, so they keep
trying different things. HAT DO B eowulf, Batman naturally frame our lives in story form.
a nd B
arbie a ll have in com- These life tales stitch together different
Do any other vertebrate groups measure mon? Many ancient legends, events into an overarching narrative with
up to cats in this way? comic book sagas and block- the storyteller as the protagonist. They
Monitor lizards are as awesome as cats. buster movies share a story- help people define themselves and make
They are the cats of the reptile world. They telling blueprint called the hero’s journey. existence more coherent.
vary hugely in body size—they have maybe This timeless narrative structure, first Of course, some stories are better than
an even bigger body-size range than cats described by mythologist Joseph Camp- others—some evoke awe and excitement,
do—and they are all utterly identical. bell in 1949, is found in ancient epics, whereas others make people yawn. We
They’re also hard-core carnivores. such as the O dyssey a nd the E pic of Gil- wondered whether the hero’s journey pro-
gamesh, a nd modern favorites, including vides a template for telling a more compel-
You and your colleagues have been the Harry Potter, Star Wars and Lord of ling version of one’s own history. After all,
studying skull evolution. Did you the Rings series. Many such stories have the hero’s journey lies at the heart of the
discover anything interesting about become cultural touchstones that influ- most culturally significant stories around
cats in the course of that research? ence how people think about their world the world.
We’ve been trying to measure skull shape in and themselves. To explore the connection between peo-
a similar way across all tetrapods [verte- Our research reveals that the hero’s ple’s life stories and the hero’s journey, we
brates with four limbs]. We’re looking at sal- journey is not just for legends and super- first had to simplify the storytelling arc
amanders and frogs, birds and crocodiles, heroes. In a recent study pub- from Campbell’s original for-
dinosaurs and mammals, and then we try to lished in the Journal of Per- Ben Rogers is an mulation, which features 17
assistant professor of
understand what we see—the variation, the sonality and Social Psychology, management and organ steps. Some of the steps in the
speed at which things evolve and the factors w e show that people who ization at Boston College. original set are very specific,
that are associated with how fast things frame their own life as a hero’s He studies the ways such as undertaking a “magic
evolve. Within mammals specifically, being journey find more significance people find meaning and flight” after completing a quest.
social or solitary affects how fast you evolve. in it. This insight led us to de- the stories we tell about Think of Dorothy, in the novel
our work and lives.
Social mammals evolve faster. Cats are no- velop a “restorying” interven- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
toriously solitary except for lions. And cats tion to enrich individuals’ Kurt Gray is a professor being carried by flying mon-
don’t evolve quickly. Compared with other sense of meaning and well- of psychology at the keys to the Emerald City after
groups, cats are slowly evolving animals. being. When people start to see University of North vanquishing the Wicked Witch
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
There are lots of things that have tried to their own lives as heroic quests, He directs the Deepest of the West. Others are out of
be cats—other groups of mammals that we discovered, they report less Beliefs Lab, where he touch with contemporary cul-
have evolutionarily converged on cats. Mar- depression and can cope better studies morality, religion ture, such as encountering
supials have tried to be cats. An extinct with challenges. and the ways we make “women as temptresses.” We
sense of AI. He is author
group of carnivorans called creodonts tried The human brain seems of the forthcoming book abridged and condensed the 17
to be cats. Weasels have tried to be cats. hardwired to make sense of the Outraged: Why We Fight steps into seven elements that
There’s all kinds of stuff that has tried to be world through stories. Over about Morality and can be found in both legends
a bit catlike in different ways. But they kind millennia of evolution, Homo Politics ( Pantheon). and everyday life: a lead pro
of dip in and dip out of being cats, and they sapiens h as spent countless Mike Christian is Bell tagonist, a shift of circumstanc-
can’t really outcompete cats in their space. hours sitting around fires and Distinguished Scholar es, a quest, allies, a challenge, a
They haven’t lasted. All of those things that telling tales of challenge and and a professor of personal transformation and a
have tried to be cats do other things, too, and triumph. Our interest in story- organizational behavior resulting legacy.
at the University of North
those things are fine. But there aren’t a lot of telling explains why we read Carolina at Chapel Hill. For example, in J.R.R. Tolk-
things that are around today that do a very magazine articles that open He studies human energy ien’s T he Lord of the Rings, F
ro-
good job of being a cat. with an anecdote and why we and engagement at work. do (the protagonist) leaves his
The Hero’s Journey journey reported more meaning in life.
The many steps of a “hero’s journey,” a narrative blueprint described by mythologist Joseph Campbell, can be We then wondered whether making
abridged to seven key elements. one’s story more “heroic” would increase
2 Shift 3 Quest feelings of meaningfulness. We developed
a “restorying” intervention in which we
prompted people to retell their story as a
hero’s journey. Participants identified each
of the seven elements in their life, and then
Classic Modern we encouraged them to weave these pieces
together into a coherent narrative.
In six studies with more than 1,700 par-
ticipants, we confirmed that this restory-
ing intervention worked: it helped people
see their life as a hero’s journey, which in
turn made that life feel more meaningful.
Intervention recipients also reported great-
er well-being and became more resilient in
1 Protagonist 4 Allies the face of personal challenges; these par-
ticipants saw obstacles more positively and
dealt with them more creatively.
Critically, our intervention required
two steps: identifying the seven elements
and connecting them in a coherent story.
In other studies, we found that doing only
one or the other—such as describing as-
pects of one’s life that resembled the hero’s
7 Legacy 5 Challenge journey without linking them together—
had a much more modest effect on feelings
6 Transformation of meaning in life than doing both.
Furthermore, the intervention in-
creased participants’ tendency to perceive
home in the Shire (a shift) to destroy the used questionnaires to measure the partic- more meaning in general. For instance, af-
Ring (a quest). Sam and Gandalf (his al- ipants’ sense of meaning in life, amount of ter retelling their stories according to our
lies) help him face the enemy forces of Sau- life satisfaction and level of depression. prompts, people were more likely to per-
ron (a challenge). He discovers unexpect- We then examined their stories for the ceive patterns in seemingly random strings
ed inner strength (a transformation) and seven elements of the hero’s journey. We of letters on a computer screen.
eventually returns home to help the friends found that people who had more of the el- Anyone can frame their life as a hero’s
he left behind (a legacy). In an everyday- ements in their life stories reported more journey—and we suspect that people can
life parallel, a young woman (the protago- meaning in life, more flourishing and less also benefit from taking small steps to-
nist) might move to Los Angeles (a shift), depression. These “heroic” people (men ward a more heroic life. You can see your-
develop an idea for a new business (a and women were equally likely to see their self as a heroic protagonist, for example,
quest), get support from her family and life as a hero’s journey) reported a clearer by identifying your values and keeping
friends (her allies), overcome self-doubt sense of self than other participants did, them top of mind in your day-to-day. You
after initial failure (a challenge), grow into as well as more new adventures, strong can lean into friendships and new experi-
a confident and successful leader (a trans- goals, good friends, and so on. ences. You can set goals much like those of
formation), and ultimately help her com- We also found that narratives in line classic quests to stay motivated and chal-
munity (a legacy). with the hero’s journey provided more lenge yourself to improve your skills. You
With our condensed version of the he- benefits than other kinds, including a can also take stock of lessons learned and
ro’s journey, we looked at the connection basic “redemptive” arc, in which a per- ways you might leave a positive legacy for
between how people told their life stories son’s life story goes from defeat to tri- your community or loved ones.
and their feelings of meaning in life. umph. Of course, redemption is often a Although you might never save the
Across four separate studies, we collected part of the “transformation” aspect of the world on a massive scale, you could save
life stories from more than 1,200 people, hero’s journey, but compared with people yourself. You can become a hero in the con-
including online participants and a group whose life story contained only the re- text of your own life, which, at the very
of middle-aged adults in Chicago. We also demptive narrative, those with a full hero’s least, will make for a better story.
Graphic by Matteo Farinella Ja n ua ry 2 02 4 Sc i e n t i f ic A m er ic a n.com 83

THE UNIVERSE
current state of a Mars sample return

Let nasa Do What (MSR) mission and found there is a
“near-zero probability”—tech speak for
nasa Does Best “no way”—of its being ready for launch by
2028. It could meet a 2030 deadline but at
a cost of $10 billion, which would make it
Increasing nasa’s budget would ease pressure and among the most expensive science projects
allow the agency to dream even bigger BY PHIL PLAIT nasa has ever undertaken.
But it’s a vital part of nasa’s plans.
N
The National Research Council’s Plan-
ASA has a planet-size problem on its hands. Ironically, etary Science Decadal Survey for 2013–
its source is here on Earth: Congress, which has the pen- 2022, created by a panel of dozens of lead-
ny-wise but pound-foolish policy of releasing just a ing scientists, stated that an MSR was a
trickle of funding to the space agency every year, hobbles “highest-priority flagship mission” for
many of nasa’s mission goals that require thinking past that decade. A 2008 nasa preliminary
a two-year House or six-year Senate term. This hurdle has reper- planning document reported that of 55
cussions that can be felt across the solar system. important investigations into Mars, half
Right now on Mars the Perseverance rover is collecting small would be addressed by an MSR. Looking
samples from inside the 45-kilometer-wide Jezero Crater, which into the idea of life on Mars, ancient or ex-
held a huge lake billions of years ago. Scientists consider it one of tant, is clearly a critical scientific goal for
the best places to scout for evidence of ancient life on Mars or at nasa with potentially immense signifi-
least to see whether conditions were ripe for its genesis. cance for all of humanity.
These Martian souvenirs safely rest inside hermetically sealed Phil Plait The first part is already underway. A
cylinders that are either stored onboard the rover or dropped in is a professional decade-old report from the Mars 2020 Sci-
strategic locations on the planet’s surface. A future Mars-bound astronomer and ence Definition Team states that using the
mission will pick them up and bring them to Earth for study. The science communicator Perseverance rover to collect samples from
in Colorado. He writes
problem? That later mission currently does not exist—and it’s not the B ad Astronomy
the planet’s surface would lower the cost of
clear when it will. Newsletter. Follow him a future MSR mission. “Any version of a
Last September an independent review board investigated the on X @BadAstronomer 2020 rover mission that does not prepare
a returnable cache would seriously delay
any significant progress toward sample re-
turn,” it notes. Heeding that advice, nasa
designed Perseverance to collect those
samples, and the rover has been doing so
since 2021. Now comes the hard(er) part:
delivering them to scientists on Earth.
Until very recently, the plan was to use
Perseverance itself to bring the collected
samples to a suitable landing spot. While
this would take time away from its explo-
ration (and, more worrisome, would make
the mission run up against the expected
life span of the rover), it’s probably the saf-
est and easiest method, and it’s certainly
the most cost-effective.
In the meantime, nasa would build a
lander and a Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV),
a rocket that would take Perseverance’s
samples into Martian orbit. (The lander
NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
would come equipped with two sam-

ple-carrying helicopters, based on the suc-
cessful Mars Ingenuity Helicopter, as a
backup if Perseverance couldn’t complete
the task.) From there a European Space
A Mars vista captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover in April 2023 Agency Earth Return Orbiter mission
would rendezvous with the MAV, ingest enough margin for technical safety consid- small a portion the agency gets. Cutting
the sample container—literally opening ering the difficult nature of the engineer- nasa’s funding is like making room on your
up and “swallowing” it—and bring it to ing and management required. computer’s hard drive by deleting tiny text
Earth, where it would land in the Utah By “fund it,” I don’t mean take needed files while ignoring the gigabytes of movies
desert like the OSIRIS-REx return capsule money away from other deserving endeav- you’ve already watched.
did recently with its asteroid samples. ors, as has happened when other nasa Please note that I’m talking about what
The 2023 independent review board missions have run over budget. And I don’t we o ught t o do. That may be a stretch with
put the kibosh on that, however, finding think it should become a separate line item a Republican-led U.S. House of Represen-
that this mission cannot be accomplished in n
asa’s budget, as the James Webb Space tatives that in 2023 proposed bludgeoning
in the needed time frame with the avail- Telescope did when its costs bloated. That nasa with a 22 percent cut that would kill
able budget. In essence, nasa has to start approach might suffice for this particular the MSR, end moon landings and lead to
planning the MSR all over again. The good case, but it is not a long-term solution for 4,000 layoffs. Perhaps if the public were
news is that this work has already begun, nasa’s predicament. more vocal, Congress might listen. M ight.
and the space agency hopes to have a new The basic issue here is that nasa’s fund- A monkey wrench in all these works is
mission concept by this spring. ing is a zero-sum game, so cost overruns in the bipartisan Fiscal Responsibility Act of
It’s easy to point fingers at nasa for the one mission affect other projects. But the 2023, intended to thwart debt default by
cost overruns and schedule delays, but to be money shuffling wouldn’t be so dire if the federal government. Part of the fallout
fair, the agency played by all the adminis- nasa simply had a bigger overall budget. from this act, which became law last June, is
trative rules. That’s not to downplay mis- This increase would also fix many of the a cap on nasa’s budget until 2025. This cap
management issues, which the indepen- management problems pointed out in the has had an impact already: nasa officials
dent review pointed out in detail, but, 2023 MSR report, allowing nasa to hire are considering cuts to the Hubble Space
honestly, those kinds of problems can be more technical and administrative staff. Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observa-
expected for huge projects spanning multi- This funding shouldn’t be controver- tory, two of the space agency’s workhorses.
ple divisions of a government agency. Com- sial, but nasa’s finances are hugely exag- Increasing the budget for an MSR is essen-
mittees met, ideas were debated, reviewers gerated in public perception compared tially impossible as long as this act is in ef-
reviewed, and the best plans advanced. with the actual budget. According to one fect, and the uncertainty about funding
Then reality intruded. Getting to Mars is poll, in 2018 the average American thought makes it difficult for nasa to know exactly
hard. M any missions never make it. Adding nasa received more than 6 percent of fed- how to move forward on any new designs.
the incredibly complex technical issue of eral spending, when in reality it gets only If the MSR—and nasa itself—can
not only getting back but doing so after a 0.5 percent. Given the amazing things weather these setbacks for the next two or
complicated orbital rendezvous makes nasa achieves with this tiny slice, a dedi- three years, there may yet be a path forward.
matters more than twice as hard. Just get- cated effort to correct this misconception Despite all this havoc, the argument for in-
ting into orbit from the Martian surface is would make increasing the space agency’s creasing nasa’s overall budget still stands.
ridiculously difficult, and n asa’s import- funding much less of a political struggle. Boosting it by, say, 20 percent to $30 billion
ant requirements for testing and redundan- From a strictly economic point of view, a year would ease a vast amount of pressure
cy—in the case of the MAV, at least—make nasa returns far more money than it is the agency finds itself under when propos-
it all but impossible under the current plan. given. The agency estimated that it gener- ing and building new missions. Even dou-
Where does this leave things? Well, the ated an economic output of $71.2 billion in bling its funding would hardly make a dent
MSR could be canceled, but that is clearly 2021; that puts its return on investment at in national spending, and the payoff would
the worst possible option. Given the mis- around $3 for every $1 going in. And, of be tremendous. This isn’t to say that every-
sion’s scientific importance—and all the course, we get a lot more from nasa than thing nasa does is cost-effective; for in-
time and money already invested, as well as simply economic benefits. stance, I have been vocal about the enor-
the efforts undertaken by Perseverance— In general, nasa’s science and explora- mously bloated and decreasingly useful
this idea shouldn’t be considered seriously. tion enjoy broad bipartisan support. This Space Launch System rocket. But that proj-
nasa could trim the MSR’s budget, but at fact is especially remarkable in today’s po- ect’s delays and overruns can be traced to
this point under the current plan, that litical environment, where it might be congressional meddling. With less pork-
would do more harm than good. There’s no hard to get the two parties to agree on the barrel legislation and better management,
science being done with an MSR, so all the time of day and where Republicans have a nasa could deliver on its promise of bring-
engineering is geared toward picking up history of trenchant antiscience stances— ing the universe to Earth.
the samples and getting them to Earth. especially when it comes to climate sci- With an MSR, we have a real shot at in-
Cutting any of the tech needed for that ence, a field nasa heavily supports. vestigating some of humanity’s oldest and
could jeopardize the mission. Increasing nasa’s resources should be most fundamental philosophical ques-
So here’s my radical thought: Fund it. a no-brainer. Instead Congress has tended tions. How did we get here? Are we alone?
Fully. G ive nasa what it needs to make to target nasa whenever a budgetary ax is The cost to find these answers, even in the
this mission work, including a wide- wielded. This makes zero sense given how near term, is relatively trifling.

MATH
Despite the warranted pessimism about

beating casinos at their own games, a sim-
ple betting system based in probability
will, in theory, make you money in the long
run—with a huge caveat.
Consider betting on red or black at the
roulette table. The payout is even. (That
means if you bet $1 and win, you win $1.
But if you lose, you lose your $1.) And, for
simplicity, assume that you really have a
50–50 shot of calling the correct color.
(Real roulette tables have some additional
green pockets on which you lose, giving
the house a slight edge.) We’ll also suppose
that the table has no maximum bet.
Here’s the strategy: Bet $1 on either col-
or, and if you lose, double your bet and play
again. Continue doubling ($1, $2, $4, $8,
$16, and so on) until you win. For example,
if you lose the first two bets of $1 and $2 but
win your third bet of $4, that means you
lose a total of $3 but recoup it on your
win—plus an additional $1 profit. And if
you first win on your fourth bet, then you
lose a total of $7 ($1 + $2 + $4) but make
out with a $1 profit by winning $8. This pat-
tern continues and always nets you a dollar
when you win. If $1 seems like a measly
haul, you can magnify it by either repeat-
ing the strategy afresh multiple times or
beginning with a higher initial stake. If you
This “Fail-Proof” start with $1,000, double to $2,000, and so

on, then you will win $1,000.
Gambling Strategy
You might object that this strategy
makes money only if you eventually call
the right color in roulette, whereas I prom-
Could Ruin You ised g uaranteed profit. The chance that

your color will hit at some point in the long
run, however, is, well, 100 percent. That is
The martingale betting strategy has ruined to say, the probability that you’ll lose every
many gamblers—when the Kelly criterion could bet goes to zero as the number of rounds
have brought them riches BY JACK MURTAGH increases. This holds even in the more re-
alistic setting where the house enjoys a
B
consistent edge. If there is at least some
ENEATH THE VARNISH of flashing lights and free cock- Jack Murtagh writes chance that you’ll win, then you will win
tails, casinos stand on a bedrock of mathematics, engi- about math and puzzles, eventually because the ball can’t land in the
Pictures Colour Library/Alamy Stock Photo
neered to slowly bleed their patrons of cash. For years including a series on wrong color forever.
mathematically inclined minds have tried to turn the mathematical curiosities So should we all empty our piggy
at Scientific American
tables by harnessing their knowledge of probability and and a weekly puzzle
banks and road-trip to Reno, Nev.? Un-
game theory to exploit weaknesses in a rigged system. column at Gizmodo. fortunately, no. This strategy, called the
An amusing example played out when the American Physical He holds a Ph.D. in martingale betting system, was particu-
Society held a conference in Las Vegas in 1986, and a local news- theoretical computer larly popular in 18th-century Europe, and
science from Harvard
paper reportedly ran the headline “Physicists in Town, Lowest University. Follow
it still draws in bettors with its simplicity
Casino Take Ever.” The story goes that the physicists knew the Murtagh on X and promise of riches—but it is flawed.
optimal strategy to outwit any casino game: don’t play. @JackPMurtagh Gambling ranked among the many vices
of notorious lothario Jacques Casanova
de Seingalt, and in his memoirs he wrote, The dreamy pencil-and-paper world
“I still played on the martingale, but with
such bad luck that I was soon left without
that mathematicians inhabit, where
a sequin.”
Do you spot a flaw in the profit-prom-
a gambler can roam freely across
ising reasoning above? Say you have $7 in all infinity, permits what in reality
your pocket, and you’d like to turn it into
$8. You can afford to lose the first three should be impossible.
bets in a row of $1, $2 and $4. It’s not very
likely that you will lose three in a row,
though, because the probability is only ous that you can’t actually force an advan- maximizes wealth in such situations. Sci-
one in eight. So one eighth (or 12.5 per- tage in a casino game. Yet it is surprising entist John Kelly, Jr., who worked at Bell
cent) of the time you’ll lose all $7, and the that we have to resort to arguments about Labs in the mid-20th century, realized that
remaining seven eighths of the time you’ll solvency and mortality to rule it out. The to make the most money, a gambler should
gain $1. These outcomes cancel each other dreamy pencil-and-paper world that bet a consistent fraction of their purse on
out: −1∕8 × $7 + 7∕8 × $1 = $0. mathematicians inhabit, where we can every round.
This effect scales up to any amount of roam freely across all of infinity, permits He worked out a simple formula for the
starting capital: there is a large chance of what should be impossible. perfect fraction, which he described in a
gaining a little bit of money and a small For games with winning chances of 1956 paper: 2p – 1, where p is the probabil-
chance of losing all your money. As a re- 50 percent or worse, there is no betting ity that you’ll win (p = 0.6 in the coin-flip
sult, many gamblers will turn a small prof- strategy that secures an upper hand in a fi- example). In the experiment, betting
it playing the martingale system, but the nite world. What about more favorable 20 percent of your available cash on each
rare gambler will suffer complete losses. games? If you had $25 in your wallet and flip hits the sweet spot. Note that the strat-
These forces balance out so that if a lot of could repeatedly bet on the outcome of a egy puts more money on the line if you
players used the strategy, their many biased coin that you knew turned up heads keep winning, and it constricts bet size as
small winnings and few huge losses would 60 percent of the time (where you would your cash dwindles, making it very unlike-
average out to $0. again either lose your full bet or gain an ly that you’ll go bust.
But the true argument doesn’t stop at amount equal to it), how much money Unlike the martingale betting strategy,
$7. As I mentioned, the idea is to keep play- could you turn your $25 into? Researchers the Kelly criterion works in practice and
ing until you win. If you lose three in a row, tested 61 finance students and young pro- proves its worth as a mainstay of quantita-
go to the ATM and bet $8 on a fresh spin. fessionals with this exact experiment, let- tive finance. Professional card counters in
The guaranteed profit depends on a will- ting them play for half an hour, and were blackjack also use it to size their bets when
ingness to keep betting more—and the in- surprised by their poor performance. (You the deck gets hot.
evitability of winning at some point with can try it for yourself.) Economists warn that although the
persistent play. A disconcerting 28 percent of partici- Kelly criterion works for generating
Here’s the key defect: you have only pants went broke despite having an advan- wealth, it’s still a gamble with pitfalls of its
so much money. The amount you wager tage, and a shocking two thirds bet on tails own. For one, it assumes that you know
each round grows exponentially, so it at some point in the game, which is never your probability of winning a bet, which
won’t take long before you’re betting the rational. On average, the participants can be true in many casino games but less
farm just to make up your losses. It’s a bad walked away with $91 (winnings were so in fuzzy domains such as the stock
strategy for generating wealth when you’re capped at $250). This might seem like an market. Also, Kelly asserts that in the
taking a small but nonzero chance of risk- ample take for someone starting with $25, coin-toss experiment, you’re most likely to
ing your livelihood for a puny dollar. Even- but the researchers calculated that over the grow your wealth if you keep betting
tually you’ll go bankrupt, and if this hap- 300 coin tosses time allowed for, the aver- 20 percent of it. But if you have $1 million
pens before your jackpot, then you’ll be out age winnings of players using the optimal to your name, it’s perfectly reasonable not
of luck. strategy (described below) would be more to want to gamble $200,000 on a coin flip.
Finitude breaks the martingale in an- than $3 million! At some point, you will need to price in
other way, too. Probability dictates that The players face a dilemma: Bet too your personal level of risk aversion and ad-
you are guaranteed to win e ventually, b ut much per round, and they risk losing their just your fiscal decisions to respect your
even if you had a bottomless purse, you entire bankroll on a few unlucky tosses. own preferences.
could die before “eventually” arrived. Yet But bet too little, and they fail to capitalize Still, if you find yourself placing wagers
again the pesky practicalities of the real on the sizable advantage the biased coin with odds in your favor, ditch the martin-
world meddle with our idealized fun. affords them. The Kelly criterion is a for- gale and remember that the Kelly criterion
As we reflect back, it might seem obvi- mula that balances these rival forces and is a better bet.

KEEPING AN EYE ON SCIENCE OBSERVATORY
Does the The Crawford Lake announcement at

tracted a great deal of press, much of it
Anthropocene
focused on a misguided controversy that
erupted over how narrowly to define the
Anthropocene. Amid this hubbub, observ
Matter? ers may have been left to wonder why de

fining this chapter in Earth’s history should
matter to ordinary people at all.
The definition of this new geological epoch conveys Sherlock was not a maverick. He was a
the all-encompassing nature of the challenge we face respected member of the British Geologi
BY NAOMI ORESKES cal Survey, and he built on the work of oth
ers who had already made similar argu
ments. One was American polymath George
Perkins Marsh, who had called attention
to deforestation and the role of humans as
“disturbing agents.” In addition to revisit
ing deforestation, Sherlock described the
altered courses of rivers through dams and
canals; changes to the hydrologic cycle and
to the seacoast; and the huge quantities of
stuff people move while mining the raw
materials of modern civilization and
building streets, bridges and railroads.
Human impacts were becoming so mani
fest, Sherlock argued, that the distinction
between “natural” and “artificial” was be
coming difficult to sustain. We needed a
new term—he suggested “anthropogra
phy”—to study the effects of human activ
ities on Earth.
Sherlock closed his book with a chap
ter on climate change, in which he drew
on the arguments of two prominent scien
tific colleagues. One was geochemist
Svante Arrhenius, who is known today as
the first person to calculate the potential
Canada’s Crawford Lake has sediment layers that may show when human activity began to change our planet. impact of increased atmospheric carbon
I
dioxide on climate. The other was Amer
N 1922 BRITISH GEOLOGIST Robert report to the International Commission on ican geologist Thomas Chrowder Cham
Lionel Sherlock published a book, Stratigraphy—has proposed Crawford berlin, who had proposed that the ice ages
Man as a Geological Agent: An Account Lake in Canada as the official site for mark were caused by fluctuations in CO2 levels.
of His Action on Inanimate Nature, ing the Anthropocene. Chamberlin, Sherlock explained, “thinks
that put forth what is now considered Crawford Lake contains an exception that the Permian glaciation was a conse
to be the central argument for recognizing ally well-preserved sedimentological rec quence of the removal from the atmo
the Anthropocene as a new geological ep ord of environmental history. Its annual sphere of the vast mass of carbon locked
och: the scale and character of human ac layers of lake mud, meticulously studied up by animals and plants, in the forms of
tivities have become so great as to compete by geologist Francine M. G. McCarthy of limestone and coal, during the carbonif
with natural geological and Brock University in Ontario, erous period.” If that were so, then “we
Peter Power/AFP via Getty Images
Naomi Oreskes is a

geophysical forces. One hun professor of the history display the “golden spike” of may reasonably consider the result of a
dred and one years later geol of science at Harvard radioactive plutonium pro reversal of the process,” which was al
ogists have broadly rallied University. She is author duced in the mid-century by ready underway: burning those vast coal
around Sherlock’s core idea, of Why Trust Science? atmospheric atomic bomb deposits was putting the CO2 back into
(Princeton University
and the Anthropocene Work Press, 2019) and co- tests, as well as ash from coal- the atmosphere, which would warm the
ing Group—a committee of author of T he Big Myth fired power plants, heavy met planet—an argument that was later taken
scientists (including me) who (Bloomsbury, 2023). als, and microplastics. up by American oceanographer Roger
OBSERVATORY METER EDITED BY DAVA SOBEL
Revelle, a scientific mentor to former vice

president Al Gore.
In the 1950s Revelle and other scientists
Baby Crocodile
began the sustained study of anthropo- Tender bones, tiny soul: it could escape
genic climate change, and in 2000 Eu- in death in an instant. Itself death-dealer—
mouth of teeth, tyrannosaur
gene F. Stoermer and Paul J. Crutzen for-
in miniature, an apparently exact copy
mally proposed the word “Anthropocene” of its dozen nestmates—it repeats, too, time.
in a paper to reflect the idea that profound,
irreversible changes were taking place. Yet over its life lurks the great oversoul:
But science is intrinsically conserva- the mother. She hulks. Seems to sleep. Slitty eyes,
creaking limbs, so freighted
tive—the burden of proof is always on those
with scales and bulk as to appear unmovable,
making a novel claim—and the social and she tolerates our whispering observation
economic consequences of recognizing the
adverse effects of burning fossil fuels have for minutes on end, gaggle of stupid tourists
closer to death than they think.
led to tremendous resistance beyond the
All at once she shifts. Someone has edged
halls of scientific conferences and the
too close, camera at the ready, leaning.
pages of scientific journals. Her monstrous shape
The definition of the Anthropocene lunges, wedge-head swinging, fixing
matters for at least two reasons. The first is
us with reptilian glare:
that it is a way for scientists to declare—as
hard, cold, glittering, driving
loudly as they can while still behaving as as a Cadillac, and seeming as emotionless.
scientists—that the shifts going on around But that’s the thing with life, we’re all
us are no small issue. Anthropogenic cli- the same. Repeated instances
mate change is far more than an “inconve-
of the same thing. This mother
nient truth”; it is a profound alteration in
is me, the surging swamp
the conditions of life on Earth. In myriad within her the same that boils
ways—large and small—the past may no from my gut, breast, and brain whenever
longer be a reliable guide to the future. another small child strips a toy
When taken seriously, that means we must
from my son, or whacks him with a stick;
rethink core assumptions about how we
when a pickup truck cuts the corner
build our economies and our infrastruc- too close as I’m carting my child behind my bike.
tures, how we travel, how we plan for global Vigilant, monstrous, enormous
pandemics, and even how we eat. guardianship underlain by rage: oh this world
The second reason is that the definition
is too much a war, too harsh, is what
of the Anthropocene extends the conver- each mother, great freight of making, brooks
sation beyond climate change. What geol- on the mud by black creek waters or
ogists can now see in rocks—from the sub- on the side of a shuddering mattress
tle (think changes in the ratios of carbon when she wrests from the great nothingness a life.
and oxygen isotopes) to the gross (think
plastic residues in marine sediments)—
points to large-scale, far-ranging and ut-
terly pervasive human impacts.
It is common for people to say (or think)
that as climate change proceeds, we can
“just adapt.” Some wealthy people even
think that, if necessary, they will move to
higher ground or lower latitudes (or,
preposterously, to Mars). No doubt some
people will become climate refugees, ei-
ther voluntarily or under duress. But the
definition of the Anthropocene reminds
Stephen Petegorsky
us that the challenge we face is geological

in scale. It affects the whole Earth. It re-
minds us that as this new epoch unfolds,
there won’t be anywhere to hide.
Naila Moreira
teaches writing at Smith
College and contributes
poetry, nature essays
and fiction to a variety
of publications. Her
middle-grade novel
The Monarchs of Wing-
haven is forthcoming
from Walker Books.
F reelance photographer
Stephen Petegorsky
has exhibited inter
nationally and worked
with collections at
Harvard’s Museum
of Comparative Zoology,
Yale’s Peabody Mu
seum, the Smithsonian,
and others.
REVIEWS EDITED BY AMY BRADY
Love and Grief tion, mystery and romance.

The concept at the heart of
A Quantum Love Story is that
the loop they’re in, nothing
lasts forever, even when time
stands still.
on a Loop time, memory and conscious-

ness are all similar substances,
both stubborn and fluid. The
Carter, despite his visual
memory, is the first to break.
Keeper of the watch, he’s been
A tender novel about savoring, and mystery to be solved is at once the one to track all the things
escaping, quantum memory BY MEG ELISON simple (how did we get here?) they’ve done within the con-
and deeply complicated (how fines of their repetition to avert
far back do we have to go to the disaster that landed them
change the conditions in which here. When he starts to forget
we live now?). The romance is their previous loops, Mariana
built on the smallest daily inti- realizes they can’t keep loop-
macies: cooking and going out ing indefinitely. The stakes go
to eat, meeting one another’s beyond the two of them: The
pets, playing tennis, and trying entire time line is at risk as
to hold these pleasures even they uncover the dangers of
as time works against the lov- ReLive’s design flaws and
ers to take everything from memory medicine. One of them
them over and over again. is going to have to make a con-
Chen’s body of work—in- siderable sacrifice. But if that
cluding his previous books Here means losing each other, Mari-
and Now and Then and Star ana isn’t sure she can do it.
Wars: Brotherhood—is growing Add to that the possibility that
in distinction largely thanks she might be able to save Shay,
to his ability to spin human and the dilemma of the novel’s
frailty into a golden webwork final act is set.
between the concepts of space Readers who crave hard-
and time. His prose choices shell explanations of time trav-
create a friendly, highly acces- el or who need to know exactly
sible understanding of charac- what mechanism causes the
ter and setting. The result is a continuum to loop and create
world rendered in Technicolor, an eddy will have to look else-
every corner lit, every scene set where. Chen is not that kind of
so that the reader can walk writer. Although the science
FICTION
Time and grief are to explain something to her right in. Chen’s charming char- of memory and the brain comes
two inexorable com- about how they’ve been there acterizations are at their best in across as well researched and
panions in life, even when we before and how he needs her cooperative relation to one an- intriguing, the realm of quan-
are falling in love. It is truths to remember. Carter, who has other: Carter and Mariana give tum mechanics remains a cos-
like this one that set the scene an eidetic memory, can do off that slow-burn ozone long mological question mark.
for A Quantum Love Story. nothing but remember. He before they ignite, and even the Readers who enjoy the difficult
Tragedy has already struck knows what’s about to happen: story’s AI presence (a helpful questions about how we move
when the novel begins, as neu- there’s going to be an explo- yet coy assistant patterned af- through time with a great deal
roscientist Mariana Pineda has sion at Hawke, and time is ter the late David Bowie) is en- of love (and very little control),
just lost her best friend, Shay. going to bend around them in dearingly tender. however, will appreciate how
Carrying Shay’s framed por- a time loop that restarts every People who enjoyed reading Chen builds a skiff made of pa-
trait, Mariana is headed to four days. The 7 1⁄2 Deaths of Evelyn per to sail through the storm.
marvel at the new Hawke This emotional new novel Hardcastle, b y Stuart Turton, The twin companions of time
Accelerator with the team from from Mike Chen combines or who watched the Netflix and grief are not the adversar-
ReLive, an experimental pro- what is best about science fic- series Russian Doll will antici- ies they seem, and Carter and
gram that allows people to pate the bittersweetness of Mariana have more fodder for
reenter their memories and live this time-loop romance. It both reconciliation than for fighting.
those moments once again. resembles real life and distorts We arrive at the end of the
Mariana has given up her old it, giving us the chance to con- book with our hearts bruised
life to start working at ReLive template both the mundane but intact.
just before disaster hits. sameness and the numinous
One morning she runs into qualities of our daily lives. Fans
Meg Elison is a novelist and essayist
Carter Cho, a mysterious man of Audrey Niffenegger’s T he based in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her debut
bearing doughnuts and a Time Traveler’s Wife will fore- novel, T he Book of the Unnamed
surprising amount of knowl- A Quantum Love Story see the frustration and peril Midwife, won the 2014 Philip K. Dick
edge about who she is and by Mike Chen. ahead; although Mariana and Award. Her latest book is N umber
what she’s after. Carter tries MIRA, 2024 ($30) Carter can accept and enjoy One Fan ( MIRA, 2022).
92 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N Jan uary 2 02 4 Illustration by Chanelle Nibbelink

Lunar History
The far-reaching influences
of Earth’s moon
NONFICTION
A few days a renewal, and eternity.” Shared
month the moon lunar knowledge was our an-
rises as a fat pearl above us. cestors’ Google calendar, help-
“If you’re lucky,” Rebecca ing them to coordinate the
Boyle (a contributor to Scientif- hunts, harvests and ceremonies
ic American) writes in her new that allowed societies to coag-
book, “you will see a few hun- ulate. Our moon, Boyle writes,
dred of these in your life.” It’s has done nothing less than en-
a quick sentence whose senti- able “the beginning of history.”
ment—like the silvery orb it In the hands of a less deft
conjures—might pass you by: writer, sentences like that one
our lives are finite; our lives are might raise red flags of hyper- plinary research so impressive, precipice of its uncertain future.
marked in moons. This is a bole. But Boyle’s command of that readers will have no As governments and billionaires
poetic revelation in itself, but her subject is so clear, her jour- qualms about learning to see scheme for a moon-based econ-
Boyle’s project is far more am- nalistic instincts and interdisci- their world through a moon-col- omy, Boyle considers who gets
bitious. Not only does she ored lens. Boyle structures the to determine the future of this
show how the moon scaffolds book in three sections: how the “limited, special, spectral, spiri-
our years, but she reveals its moon was made, how the moon tual thing.”
sway over just about every fac- made us and how we made the The moon cannot be re-
et of our history, including sci- moon in our image. “There is no duced to a resource or a divine
entific discovery, religion, cli- story about the Moon that does symbol. It is its own place—
mate, physiology, psychology not tell us something about all of ours, Boyle writes, which
Onkamon Buasorn/Getty Images
and evolution, with gravitation- Earth,” Boyle writes. From Mes- means it’s also none of ours.
al tides nudging our distant opotamian priests to the Apollo Even now it’s spiraling away
fish relations to walk. Its cycles program’s “white Protestant from Earth at roughly the rate
Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial
of departure and return helped Companion Transformed the men who … drank whiskey from of fingernail growth. Six hun-
early humans grasp concepts Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made highball glasses,” she surveys dred million years from now it
such as “becoming, birth, van- Us Who We Are by Rebecca Boyle. those who have defined our will be too far away to eclipse
ishing, death, resurrection, Random House, 2024 ($28.99) lunar view, guiding us to the the sun. —Erica Berry
IN BRIEF
Exordia Dead in Long Beach, California: A Novel The Allure of the Multiverse: Extra Dimensions,
by Seth Dickinson. Tor, 2024 ($29.99) by Venita Blackburn. MCD, 2024 ($27) Other Worlds, and Parallel Universes
In Seth Dickinson’s 2015 After discovering her brother by Paul Halpern. Basic Books, 2024 ($30)
debut novel, T
he Traitor Baru Jay’s suicide, Coral, a Black, Physicist Paul Halpern has
Cormorant, a fiercely willful gay graphic novelist with bit- noticed the public’s fixation
woman from a colonized ising wit, assumes his identity. with the multiverse—take
land plots her revenge against She texts Jay’s friends and Everything Everywhere All at
a brutal empire. This fascina- daughter from his phone and Once winning seven Oscars
tion with weighing the value creates social media ac- in 2023, for instance. Such
of specific lives against a greater good also counts in his name, all while burying her- popular science fiction serves
powers his new book, a mind-shredding self in the banality of daily life. Coral’s es- as a launchpad for Halpern’s crash course
first-contact epic. A spaceship or weapon capades are interwoven with snippets from on the strange physics behind multiple-uni-
or something has appeared in Kurdistan, her own novel, Wildfire, a tale of a dystopi- verse theories. His lively synthesis of millen-
where its mysteries get puzzled over by a an, alien world that gradually infiltrates nia of scientific debate humanizes promi-
sprawling cast. There are nukes, alien brain Coral’s actual reality. Those excerpts occa- nent theorists such as Theodor Kaluza and
locks, intergalactic warfare and a scope sionally meander, but author Venita Black- Brandon Carter, and his analogies—such as
that keeps expanding long after the stakes burn’s prose is stunning, sensitive and a bickering couple to illustrate renormali
seem clear. This thrilling novel grips hard- that-made-me-snort funny. Richly layered zation—simplify heady concepts. It’s still
est when Dickinson’s characters must rea- and ambitiously structured, this unconven- a dense read, but it’s worth the exertion:
son through the science of seemingly im- tional novel about death and denial is more of an Interstellar blockbuster than
possible p henomena. —Alan Scherstuhl bizarre in the best way. —Lucy Tu a Rick and Morty episode. —M addie Bender

GRAPHIC SCIENCE
Cells by Count BODY SYSTEM
and Size Tissues of

the Head
250 grams
The larger a cell type is, the rarer it is
in the body—and vice versa
BY CLARA MOSKOWITZ,
Respiratory
JEN CHRISTIANSEN AND NI-KA FORD 260 g
M
ANY ASPECTS of our world, from the body
mass of creatures in the animal kingdom to
the population of cities across the globe, fol- Urogenital
low an intriguing mathematical pattern. Tract
Known as Zipf ’s law, the rule says that 290 g
when something’s size is doubled, that thing becomes
about half as common. Researchers wondered whether
the law extended to the human body. Ecologist Ian A.
Nervous and
Hatton of McGill University, independent researcher
Endocrine
Jeffery A. Shander and their colleagues amassed data 1,100 g
about the volume and frequency of human cells and
looked for the pattern. It turns out that it holds.
“As you double the volume of a cell, the frequency of
cells of that size is halved,” Hatton says. Teensy, nonnu- Digestive
cleated red blood cells are by far the most common cells 1,920 g
in our bodies, whereas the comparatively gigantic muscle
cells in our arms and legs are the scarcest. Being able to
use a cell’s size to estimate its frequency in the body could
Skeleton and
help doctors better understand certain body systems and
Connective
hard-to-count cell types, the researchers say. The study Tissue
suggests, for instance, that immune cells called lym- 2,560 g
phocytes are far more common than biologists realized.
Number of Cells in the Human Body
(calculated for a 60-kilogram female)
Each dot is a cell type, color coded by cell class Cardiovascular

1014 Most numerous: Circulating and Lymphatic
erythrocytes (red blood cells) 2,650 g
Most massive: Striated
1012
myocytes in the thigh’s
sartorius muscle
Skeletal
1010
Muscles
13,600 g
108
106 Integumentary
and Adipose
Tissues
104 17,000 g
102 MASS OF BODY SYSTEMS

Gray bars show cell count (Calculated for a 60-kilogram female
10
distribution when mass data form.) Different systems in the human
1 are aggregated into bins. body account for differing amounts
of our total biomass. The largest
10–10 10–8 10–6 10–4 system, the integumentary and adipose
Mass of Each Cell Type in Grams tissues, consists mainly of skin and fat.
94 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N JA N UA RY 2 02 4
CELL CLASS Each cell class (full circle)
represents the total
Blood of many different
This class includes both nonnucleated cell types within
cells (including erythrocytes and platelets) that class
and nucleated cells (including lymphocytes, (polygons).
monocytes and macrophages).
Epithelial and Endothelial

A range of different kinds of epithelial cells
cover the outer surface of internal organs
and the body. Endothelial cells line the inner
surface of blood vessels.
Fibroblast and Osteoid

Fibroblasts contribute to the formation
of connective tissue throughout the body.
Osteoid cells (including osteoblasts and
osteocytes) are bone-specific.
Adipocyte
The adipocyte class includes white fat 24,900 billion
cells and brown fat cells. Locations include Circulating erythrocytes, Platelets
under the skin, in the soft interior organs commonly known simply
of the body and in bone marrow. as red blood cells, are the
most numerous cells in the
body (about 19,200 billion).
Stem, Germ and Pericyte
Cells in this group—including oocytes
(immature egg cells)—have the capacity 1,780 billion
to develop and mature into other, more
specialized cell types.
Neuron and Glial

This class includes 57 neuron cell types
and 22 glial cell types. Most are in the brain. 470 billion
Cell size and count vary dramatically across
the peripheral nervous system.
261.3 billion
Myocyte 261 billion
Myocytes—or muscle cells—have two
subclasses: striated (skeletal and cardiac)
S
and smooth (present in walls around hollow

LL
CE
organs/passageways, eyes, and elsewhere). 229 billion

OF
R
BE
M
NUMBER AND AGGREGATE MASS OF CELLS
IN THE HUMAN BODY, BY CELL CLASS
NU 18,200 grams
134 billion
(Calculated for a 60-kilogram female form.) These two
strands show the hierarchy of cells by number (frequency
87 billion
in the body) as well as by how much total biomass they
account for in the body. The discrepancy between the
two arises from the fact that the most numerous cells are
often very small and therefore contribute only a modest Although striated
amount of biomass, whereas the more massive cells, myocytes in the thigh’s
though relatively uncommon, make up much of our heft. sartorius muscle are the
Total cell mass does not equal total body mass, because most massive of all human
bodies also include large volumes of water. cells at 452 micrograms,
there are only about
348,000 in the body, for a
AGGREGAT
E MASS OF CELLS total of nearly 158 grams.
14,000 g
Source: “The Human Cell Count and Size

The aggregate mass of circulating Distribution,” by Ian A. Hatton et al.,
106 g 3,650 g erythrocytes is about 1,880 grams. in P NAS, Vol. 120; September 2023 (d ata)
720 g 938 g 1,940 g

JA N UA RY 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 95
HISTORY C OMPILED BY MARK FISCHETTI
50, 100 & 150 Years

states, Maine and Maryland,
have both: more than 25 miles
per hour establishes prima facie
evidence against the driver, and
more than 35 is categorically
prohibited. In all other states,
the driver has to read the book
to discover whether the speed
limit is absolute or prima facie.
Five states specify 25 miles,
sixteen name 30, and nine 35.
As extremes, we have 20 in
Massachusetts and 40 in Kan-
SLEEP POTION BOOSTS sas. Three states ask for a ‘rea-
DELTA WAVES sonable and proper’ speed,
“Experiments dating without stating any numerical
1974
back as far as 1913 limits. In overtaking a car
have pointed toward a natural ahead, the faster we move and
sleep potion in the body fluids the quicker we get it over with,
of an animal that induces sleep the less road is it necessary for 1974, Retina Trick: “Figure at top left can look like a person’s head with a chef’s
when it is injected into another us to preempt. So Virginia re- hat or, when rotated 90 degrees, like a dog (bottom left). Figures at right can look
animal. Such a factor has now quires that an illegal speed can like a bearded man’s head or a U.S. map. When people tilted their head 90 degrees
been partially characterized by be maintained for an eighth (shown by arrow) to view, they preferentially recognized the figure that was
a group at the University of Ba- upright in the environment instead of the figure that was upright on the retina.”
of a mile before it becomes
sel. They call it ‘sleep-factor an offense; Delaware, Massa-
delta’ because it promotes achieved until 1994, when Euro NOT DEAD YET
chusetts, Minnesota and New
the production of delta waves, tunnel, now Getlink, opened “The late Marquis d’Ourche,
Hampshire give the driver a
the long, slow brain waves the Channel Tunnel, quickly one of whose friends was bur-
quarter-mile grace; while Flori-
characteristic of light sleep.” dubbed the Chunnel. ied alive, left a sum of 20,000
da, Louisiana and Missouri
Scientists still consider sleep- allow a driver to burn up the francs ($4,000) to the French
factor delta, now called delta road for a half-mile before the Academy of Medicine, to be
sleep-inducing peptide, to be speed becomes a matter for given to the inventor of a simple
a leading sleep regulator. police interference.” process of ascertaining when
death has really occurred, and a
CHUNNEL PLAN further sum of 5,000 francs for
“The English Channel tunnel discovery of a scientific method
project is kept alive by its proof verifying death. Altogether
moters, although the British 102 essays were sent in. Most
government persists in refusing contained such absurd sugges-
to grant the necessary authori- tions that the list was cut to 32.
ty, for national and strategic The large prize was not award-
reasons. The material to be ed, but the 5,000 francs were
encountered for the entire dis- divided between four competi-
tance is very favorable, being MY FARMLAND FOR tors. No new facts, likely to en-
a deep bed of chalk infiltrated YOUR MAGAZINES large the domain of forensic
with clay. With the boring ma- “One of our esteemed medicine, have been elucidated
1874
chine designed for this work, subscribers says by these investigations.”
TOP SPEED LIMIT: a heading 12 feet in diameter that he has taken the Scientific
ol. 230, No. 1; January 1974
35 MILES PER HOUR can be driven at 120 feet per American regularly for the past MARSHMALLOW PLATES
“Every state, almost, day, and two machines started 25 years, and has the volumes “Gypsum mixed with 4 percent
1924
has a general speed at opposite ends should meet in all bound. He was recently of powdered marshmallow root
limit on the open road. Some less than three years. Comple- offered a farm of 160 acres will harden in about one hour,
states name a figure not to be tion of the concrete-lined tunnel of land, free and clear, in ex and can then be sawn or turned,
exceeded under any circum- is estimated at 4½ years. With change for these volumes, but and made into dominoes, dice
S cientific American, V
stances. Others set a figure represent prices the cost is esti- declined the trade. He has de- and so on. With 8 percent of
lated to reckless driving; if you mated at $145,000,000.” rived great benefit from the marshmallow, the hardness
drive faster than this and have Plans for a tunnel were made volumes, and holds them to be of the mass is increased, and
a smash, it is up to you to prove numerous times beginning of more value to him than many it can be rolled out into thin
that you were not reckless. Two in 1802, but one was never hundred acres of farming land.” plates, and painted or polished.”

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Preventing

Photograph by Taylor Roades Ja n ua ry 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC AN.COM 1

4 FROM THE EDITOR

2 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC AN Ja n ua ry 2 02 4 Illustration by Chanelle Nibbelink

MICHAEL D. LEMONICK MARTIN KRZYWINSKI

INTELLIGENCE PROBE endothelium and produces dengue shock

© 2023 Scientific American

valid because I believe that intelligence is EDITOR IN CHIEF Laura Helmuth

about creating novel ideas out of limited, EDITORIAL

no preexisting data at all. I think we should FEATURES

Regulation should cover all systems

watermarks. Also, the Content Authen- COPY AND PRODUCTION

Naomi Oreskes’s excellent article “Social PRESIDENT Kimberly Lau

and wise commentary into one printed CLIENT MEDIA SOLUTIONS

enjoyed her praise of productive old PRODUCT & TECHNOLOGY

shown in the related graphic, bats were PRINT PRODUCTION

Jan uary 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 9

DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE

Jan uary 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 11

Heads or Tails? hour marathon session, the

Careful : it’s tosses, shattering the pre-

not 50–50 The flipped coins, ac-

1 2 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N Jan uary 2 02 4 Illustrations by Thomas Fuchs

© 2023 Scientific American

Stellar Jets rounding dust and gas, producing shock-

Bots Algorithms The team used the same technique to

Laschi, a mechanical engineer at the Nation-

robots but was not involved in the new study.

half the size of a bar of soap. For muscles,

Graphic by Amanda Montañez

© 2023 Scientific American

Gene Thief animal species.

Not Your mother’s egg cell.

DNA sult when these “powerhouses” don’t

Neptune deserts.” theory particularly intriguing, as such plan-

Jan uary 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 17

Odd-Ball over an opening in such a space,

Insulation the air inside. This makes the

Doctored ping- quency depending on the

Heads Up! oddities like starfish, scientists have a hard

Night Life Quick Hits

cities buried by the eruption of Mount Vesu-

The discovery of cosmic voids in the late 1970s to

Jan uary 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.COM 23

Earth’s equatorial plane

Our solar system’s

© 2023 Scientific American

© 2023 Scientific American

Sources: Sofia Contarini/University of

Why worries about widespread vitamin D deficiencies­—

Jan uary 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 29

whose titles include words like “revolution” and “mir-

Jan uary 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 31

In the kidneys, some 25D is changed into the biologically

Graphic by Now Medical Studios

Jan uary 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 35

Streams in Alaska are turning orange with iron and sulfuric

Jan uary 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 39

40 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N Jan uary 2 02 4 Map by Daniel P. Huffman

Jan uary 2 02 4 Scientific A merican.com 43

Why worries about widespread vitamin D deficiencies—

Reparations pollution and help lower-income nations

Does the The Crawford Lake announcement at

Matter? ers may have been left to wonder why de