The Week - Science Latest Science articles Wed, 23 Aug 2017 11:16:52 -0400 <![CDATA[13 photos of Americans awed and overwhelmed by the total eclipse]]>

On August 21, 2017, the sun gradually went dark from coast to coast across the United States for the first time in 99 years. As it did, millions of Americans turned their gaze upward to catch a glimpse of one of the planet's most spectacular natural wonders.

A crowd gathers in front of the Hollywood sign at the Griffith Observatory to watch the solar eclipse in Los Angeles on Aug. 21. | (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

Coreen Abbott watches the solar eclipse from Bernal Heights Hill in San Francisco. | (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

This rare total solar eclipse was said to be the "most observed and most photographed" in history. Some 200 million people live within a day's drive of its path of totality, a 70-mile band of darkness that stretched through 14 states from Oregon to South Carolina, and hundreds of thousands more had been expected to road trip to get there. Schools, parks, and stadiums hosted viewing parties attended by thousands, and in cities, residents retreated to the rooftops. At one point in the afternoon, NASA reported some 4.4 million people were watching its livestream of the phenomenon.

In some places, applause broke out from the flocks of revelers when the eclipse began; elsewhere, the crowds went silent.

"The only thing we all cared about was the sun, the moon, and the sky," an onlooker in Illinois told The Washington Post. "We all were here for one reason."

Indeed, for a few brief hours, a country fraught with social and political divisions took a moment to gather, to breathe, and to experience the wonder of the moon passing in front of the sun. Below, see the moments across the nation when a rare, astronomical marvel brought America together:

Depoe Bay, Oregon. | (REUTERS/Mike Blake)

Guernsey, Wyoming. | (REUTERS/Rick Wilking)

Des Moines, Iowa. | (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Nashville, Tennessee. | (Rick Diamond/Getty Images for Holiday Inn)

The stands at the Southern Illinois University football stadium in Carbondale, Illinois. | (REUTERS/Brian Snyder)

Ivanka Trump, Melania Trump, and President Trump watch the solar eclipse from the Truman Balcony at the White House. | (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Downtown Washington, D.C. | (ERIC BARADAT/AFP/Getty Images)

White House staff and members of the White House press corps look at the eclipse at the White House. | (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Times Square, New York City. | (REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton)

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. | (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)


]]> Mon, 21 Aug 2017 17:00:00 -0400
<![CDATA[7 hilarious eclipse-themed political cartoons]]>


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<![CDATA[America's eclipse craze, explained]]>

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]]> Thu, 17 Aug 2017 05:50:01 -0400
<![CDATA[The bewitching splendor of an eclipse, in 13 vintage photos]]>

On August 21, 2017, millions of Americans will get the chance to see a total solar eclipse. Technically, this cosmic phenomenon isn't all that rare — an eclipse can be seen from somewhere on this planet every 18 months or so. But to be able to watch the moon blot the sun right out of the sky from your particular spot on Earth? Well, that happens only once in a lifetime.

1961 | Crowds watch the total solar eclipse near Nice, France. | (Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy Stock Photo)

The last time the United Stated played host to that path of totality was in 1979. And this year's event will actually be the first time since 1918 that a total solar eclipse will be visible from coast to coast.

"This is the most awesome astronomical event there is, period," Mike Kentrianakis, a veteran eclipse chaser, told The New York Times. "You'll never ever forget it."

As the moon slowly makes its away across the sun, the darkening day takes on a mystical, ominous quality. The temperature drops. The wind picks up. The dimming sun creates an eerie twilight in hues rarely seen in the natural world. Then, you're plunged into darkness. Depending on where you are, the moment can last anywhere from a few seconds to just over two minutes.

"I had no idea that it was going to be so powerful and emotive and euphoric and exciting," eclipse-chaser Kate Russo told Vox. "It's very unlike another experience."

1927 | Crowds gather on a hill near Giggleswick, north Yorkshire, to view a total eclipse of the sun. | (Keystone/Getty Images)

Should you be one of the lucky millions, equipped with the proper safety glasses, looking up at the sky this Monday, take it from an expert, and resist the urge to capture it on your phone.

"[Missing the eclipse] would be to not live as full a life as you could have," said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has been looking forward to this total solar eclipse since he was a 24-year-old college student. "And having video of it doesn't match watching it happen."

In honor of our modern celestial extravaganza, delight in these vintage photos of people living in the bizarre and brilliant moment of totality.

1912 | Policemen look at the solar eclipse in Berlin. | (Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo)

1925 | President Calvin Coolidge and first lady Grace Coolidge view the solar eclipse from White House Lawn. | (Glasshouse Images/Alamy Stock Photo)

1927 | A group gathers in a window to view the total solar eclipse over London through smoked glass. | (H. F. Davis/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

1927 | A schoolteacher instructs his students on how to safely view the solar eclipse in London. | (Kirby/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

1927 | A group of nurses observe a solar eclipse through special dark glasses in 1927 (location unknown). | (Fox Photos/Getty Images)

1936 | Amateur astronomers view an eclipse of the sun in Hornsey, London. | (E. Dean/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

1936 | Spectators at Upton Park, London, pause during a soccer match to view the eclipse of the sun. | (Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

1952| A man watches an eclipse through a strip of exposed camera film in Sudan. | (Chris Ware/Keystone Features/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

1961 | Students and their teacher watch the solar eclipse through toned glasses in Munich. | (dpa picture alliance/Alamy Stock Photo)

1961 | Several hundred people watch the solar eclipse in Europe. | (dpa picture alliance/Alamy Stock Photo)

1966 | A member of the Junior Astronomical Society observes an eclipse of the sun in the United Kingdom. | (Ronald Dumont/Express/Getty Images)

]]> Wed, 16 Aug 2017 05:31:02 -0400
<![CDATA[This week I learned it might be possible to learn while you sleep, and more]]>

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]]> Fri, 11 Aug 2017 05:40:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Free Martin Shkreli!]]>

Last Friday, Martin Shkreli, the infamous "pharma bro" and perhaps the most hated CEO in America, was convicted in court on three counts of fraud.

Nobody denies that Shkreli engaged in fraud-like behavior: He told investors in two hedge funds he controlled that the hedge funds were flush with cash, when in reality, he had lost almost all of their money on a bad stock bet.

And yet, this condemnation is an outrage. Why? Because Martin Shkreli is nothing less than an American hero.

Let's get one thing out of the way first: Shkreli has not always acted in a way that was dignified, smart, or wise. He often exhibits the characteristics of a spoiled brat. But this is America, where being distasteful is not (yet) a crime.

Shkreli is perhaps most famous for his behavior regarding a drug called Daraprim, which is used to treat a number of things, most notably an obscure infection called toxoplasmosis. Shkreli bought the rights to the drug, and promptly jacked up the price. At a time when many blame rising health-care costs, and the general unfairness of the economic system, on corporate greed, this move, on top of Shkreli's generally fratty behavior, made him a perfect scapegoat. Outrage ensued.

Lost in the Sturm and Drang of all that anger was any context for what Shkreli actually did. As he himself went blue in the face pointing out, those increased prices were to be paid out by insurers and other middlemen, not patients. He even promised to personally pay for the drugs of any patient who had to pay them out.

But casting all that aside, the truth is that what Shkreli did was good. Daraprim is what's called a "specialty drug," used to treat diseases that affect a very small number of people. These diseases are known appropriately as "orphan diseases," because they affect such a small number of people, and there is too little research done on them.

Shkreli wasn't jacking up Daraprim to fly off to Cabo with the profits. He quit the hedge fund world to start a pharmaceutical company with a definite business plan: to buy undervalued drugs, increase their prices, and use those profits to fund research into orphan diseases, and he hired a research team for that purpose. This was a great business plan: With large pharmas focused on producing so-called "blockbuster" drugs, focusing on niche products is a genius way to compete with the big guys.

It was a good business plan, but more importantly, it would have been great for the world. The best way for orphan diseases to be less orphaned is to make drugs and remedies high-margin so that pharmaceutical companies have a profit motive to research them. Otherwise they're going to remain orphaned. In the real world, while government-funded research is useful in coming up with insights, you need a for-profit pharmaceutical industry to turn that basic research into viable drugs, which means that there must be a profit motive. And this doesn't mean that patients have to suffer: Even though drugs would cost a lot individually, they would still represent a small absolute cost for insurers, who would be able to eat it. Everybody wins, especially patients.

But nobody cared about any of that. Shkreli jacked up the price of Daraprim, and he acted like a jerk on social media, and so he must be made to suffer.

This is what makes Shkreli an American hero. Here is a man born of immigrants, whose father was a janitor, who became a self-taught scientist, and intended to get fabulously rich by building a better mousetrap. Isn't that the most quintessentially American thing? Shouldn't we want America to have 10,000 Shkrelis, rather than put the one we have in jail? Today, the only profitable sectors left in the American economy are basically social media apps, financial engineering, and reality TV. Maybe jailing people who quit the hedge fund world to find life-saving drugs isn't the best idea?

Which brings me to the next stage of this drama. The fraud for which Shkreli has been sentenced has both nothing to do with the Daraprim story and everything to do with it. It concerns unrelated events, which happened before the whole Daraprim saga. But, of course, the trial wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for the Daraprim saga.

Shkreli did technically commit fraud — he lied to his investors about how much of their money he still had. But that's not why he was sentenced by a jury. He was sentenced because a prosecutor smelled good publicity in harassing him, and we live in a system where a sufficiently determined prosecutor will find something to hold against you. Shkreli wouldn't have been prosecuted otherwise, because no one was hurt by his crime: He lost his investors' money but then eventually made it back and then some. All of those investors testified at trial that they didn't feel gouged by Shkreli at all. So really, he was prosecuted for being distasteful and for being the target of a media and social media mob. Perhaps he was an inviting target, but that still is not a crime.

The right to be a weirdo, even a distasteful weirdo, and even an offensive weirdo, should be protected. I tend to think there is a good chance that Martin Shkreli could have been the Mark Zuckerberg of biotech — another slightly awkward, slightly-savantish, highly ambitious young man with tremendous ideas but poor social graces and a big ego. But even if he's just a self-important jerk, nothing he did in his business career ever hurt anyone — not his hedge fund fraud and not his purchase of Daraprim.

Two of our current obsessions are diversity and the prospect of a shrinking horizon of economic opportunity in what's been called the great stagnation. If we are to leave the great stagnation, it will be because some people will invent new technologies, new business models, and new ways of doing things. And those innovators will, almost by definition, be weirdos, since they'll be the kind of people who have ideas most people don't (or, at least, don't have the courage to pursue). We believe in diversity when it comes to skin color or sexual orientation, and this is good, but we don't believe in it when it comes to being just plain weird, or having counter-intuitive ideas. If an innovative idea didn't seem crazy to most people, someone would already have done it and it wouldn't be innovative. To Make America Great Again, we have to Make America Weird Again, and the Shkreli case shows that, unfortunately, we have moved far from that goal.

]]> Mon, 07 Aug 2017 11:40:00 -0400
<![CDATA[The great solar eclipse of 2017]]>


Why do total eclipses occur?

What will eclipse gazers see?

How so?

What's the timing of this eclipse?

Will scientists learn anything from the eclipse?
They usually do. For example, reduced glare during the total eclipse of 1919 enabled British astronomers Arthur Eddington and Frank Watson Dyson to observe the extent to which solar gravity bends starlight — confirming a key prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity. This year, in a project dubbed EclipseMob, astronomers across the country will use special radio receivers to study the ionosphere, an atmospheric region between 46 and 621 miles above Earth ionized by solar and cosmic radiation. Day-to-night ionospheric fluctuations can disrupt radio waves and communications systems. (Ion reduction after sundown is one reason AM stations come through better at night.)

Are there other projects?

How to view the eclipse

]]> Sat, 05 Aug 2017 05:39:02 -0400
<![CDATA[This week I learned the only way to use your phone at night without messing with your sleep, and more]]>

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<![CDATA[The genetic breakthrough that could change humanity, explained]]>

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<![CDATA[This week I learned what it would take to obliterate all life on Earth, and more]]>

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]]> Fri, 21 Jul 2017 05:52:02 -0400
<![CDATA[I skeptically tried practicing gratitude. It completely changed my life.]]>



I wandered into the office of Heidi Zetzer, the director of our school's on-site Counseling and Psychological Services Clinic and a Very Smart Person.

"What's with the gratitude thing?" I asked.

You don't ask an academic a question — even a simple one — unless you're prepared for a lengthy answer. Heidi perked up, and I sat down. That's when I first heard the term "positive psychology."

For the longest time, Western psychologists and psychiatrists focused on treating clients' problems. Traumatized? See a counselor and talk about what happened. Depressed? Have your shrink write a prescription. Hysterical? Paging Dr. Freud.

In the late 1990s, a notable group of researchers, led by Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and the late Christopher Peterson, posited a different approach to mental illness and maladies: What if practitioners focused on individual clients' strengths and resiliency, rather than their negative experiences and wounds? What if "happiness" could be actively learned?

The new positive psychologists wrote books and spoke at conferences, promoting the theory that ancient practices and modern science could be combined to enhance the lives of patients. As president of the American Psychological Association (APA), Seligman chose positive psychology as a yearlong theme for the APA.

Supported by solid research and ultimately confirmed by numerous longer-term studies, the field had burgeoned by the time I learned about it. "The gratitude thing," as I had called it, was but one small and simple element of the practice. Kind of like training the brain to focus on joy, my friend Heidi explained.

"It's only a week," she urged. "Try it."

I did. And guess what? It worked.

Every day for a week, I found five distinct things for which I was thankful. They had to be different every day. I couldn't get away with just being grateful for my wonderful husband. But I could, suggested Collie Conoley, another colleague and noted positive psychologist, express my gratitude for specific aspects of a certain person each day.

He's a great cook.

He always puts our family first.

He's a stone-cold fox.

By the end of that week, I found myself slowing down a little. Taking time to notice things I might have walked past before, like a monarch butterfly or a bunch of students laughing together in the quad. One good thought led to another. These kids are so smart. And optimistic. It gives me so much hope for the future!

Fast-forward about a decade — to an ugly race for the American presidency that left many of us on all points of the political spectrum feeling sullied. And on a personal note, a surfing accident knocked me on my back and required two painful operations with what felt like an interminable period of recovery.

I was pretty bummed. And I was not alone — my psychologist friends confided they were struggling to keep up with the demands on their practices wrought by general malaise. It was just so easy to fall into a slump.

Then I remembered "the gratitude thing." After a few busy years, I had fallen out of the regular, conscious discipline of thankfulness.

By sheer coincidence, right when I was at the nadir of my own depression, I read a glowing review of business executive and lecturer Sheryl Sandberg's latest book, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy.

In it, Sandberg — a tragically young widow — outlines how the practices I've come to identify with positive psychology helped her emerge from the crippling morass of grief and reclaim a measure of joy in her life. I thought, If she can do it, so can I.

I started looking for my five moments of gratitude in each day. Like riding the proverbial two-wheeler, it wasn't hard to get back in the swing of it once I got started.

I am surrounded by love.

Friends brought meals every day this week.

My oldest son took his vacation to come and help out at home. He took me to all my medical appointments, and made me laugh by titling his spring break, "Driving Miss Leslie."

An unexpectedly wet spring and the quiet kindness of a colleague with a green thumb made sure my plants stayed alive until I could care for them again.

... and he may be more gray than not, but my wonderful husband is still a stone-cold fox.

Life will never be perfect. I still see news stories that distress me. The traffic in my city is maddening. I wish I could speed up my recovery. But with just one simple exercise, I'm rediscovering the serenity of that old prayer: accepting the things I can change, working without complaint to change what I can, and being wise enough to know the difference.

And all it took was a little gratitude.

]]> Thu, 20 Jul 2017 05:59:01 -0400
<![CDATA[Do climate skeptics believe in insurance?]]>

















]]> Tue, 18 Jul 2017 05:57:00 -0400
<![CDATA[Donald Trump's $10 trillion climate mistake]]>

Climate change skeptics claim that the science is unsettled while simultaneously proposing to end studies that would settle it. This posture would be ironic and slightly amusing if it wasn't so flagrantly dangerous to the future of human civilization on Earth.

The latest iteration of this ludicrous hypocrisy was on full display last week when the House appropriations committee carved another $50 million from NASA's Earth science division, on top of the already severe 2018 cuts requested by the Trump administration. If eventually endorsed by Congress, the reductions will leave Earth scientists unable to fill gaps in data considered crucial to understanding the state of the planet, thus perpetuating the "unsettled science" that deniers profess to abhor.

The Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory (CLARREO) pathfinder is one of four NASA missions set for elimination. It is practically the apotheosis of the avowed Republican desire for highly accurate climate data and modeling. CLARREO improves the accuracy of spaceborne Earth sensors that use either the infrared or reflected solar spectrum. "In one sense, you can think of CLARREO providing for space instrument calibration what GPS provided for navigation," says Bruce Wielicki, the mission scientist of CLARREO. "Literally up to 100 sensors could achieve greatly improved calibration if CLARREO flies." It would make the comparison of data from different sensors easier and more accurate, with revolutionary implications for climate science.

The mission has been in development since 2008, answering the call of the previous year's Decadal Survey, an assessment of priorities of the Earth science community. "Our current sensors in orbit are not yet designed with the high accuracy of climate change in mind," says Wielicki. "As a result, slow calibration drifts in orbit cannot be detected and could be confused with actual Earth changes. Gaps in current satellite records lead to large uncertainty in how to bridge the gap: Did changes in the Earth, or changes between instrument calibration, cause what we see?"

CLARREO will provide an absolute accuracy of data required for rigorous climate change records, even if gaps occur. Moreover, its infrared spectrometer will be the first to measure the full infrared spectrum of the Earth, to include the far-infrared from 15- to 50-micron wavelength, where half of the Earth's thermal infrared radiation is emitted. "This is the spectral region where the water vapor greenhouse dominates, and can be used to verify the water vapor greenhouse effect as well as water vapor feedback, which acts to amplify human driven climate change," says Wielicki.

To understand the vital importance of the mission, says Roger Cooke, a member of the CLARREO team, one must look at the numbers and work out what we don't know, what we could know with CLARREO, and the price of inaction if we let inexplicably partisan politics prevent scientific progress. Cooke is a risk mathematician at Resources for the Future, an independent, nonpartisan research and analysis organization. He is perhaps the world's foremost expert in the mathematical modeling of risk and uncertainty. "If the Earth's temperature is set to rise at least 3 degrees centigrade in 100 years," he says, "we will need about 40 years to become 95 percent certain of that with the current observing systems. We'll be just as certain of that in 20 years with CLARREO."

It should go without saying, but if we're fighting to save our planet from catastrophic warming, the difference between achieving undeniable mathematical certainty in 20 years versus 40 years is enormously important — and valuable. How valuable? On the order of $10 trillion, Cooke estimates.

Climate change deniers want absolute certainty that the Earth is warming? Fine — here it is. And if the data say otherwise? "Look, if the temperature is not going to rise that much, then there's no problem. We don't have to do anything. We can relax and we don't have to make expensive sacrifices that are not necessary," Cooke says. On the other hand, if the climate is likely to rise 2 or 3 or even 6 degrees over the next 100 years, then we need to know as soon as possible, both to mitigate the risk and to prepare for its destructive effects.

Another project slated for cancellation: the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) spacecraft, a program ten years in the making. PACE will reveal the quantity and diversity of phytoplankton not just in the open waters of the ocean, but in the estuaries close to the shore. That diversity affects everything from the health of the planet to the health of fisheries that depend on a thriving marine ecosystem. The ocean economy in the United States accounts for 3.1 million jobs and contributes $350 billion to the country's GDP, according to Goddard Space Flight Center.

The mission will also advance human understanding of the interaction of the ocean, aerosols, and clouds — major factors affecting the climate. "There is this interplay between aerosols and clouds that we don't fully understand and we definitely don't understand it over the ocean," says Lorraine Remer, deputy lead of the PACE science team.

But here's the thing: To understand any of this, one side will have to admit that there is at least something mildly unsettling about the state of the environment, and give enough inches of ground to at least let the study of the Earth move forward. It is no surprise that feckless, third-rate hucksters like Fox News' Sean Hannity peddle a fear of science and scientists. Data would vaporize the Hannities of the world. Their microphones, however, have ground the debate into quasi-religious pulp.

All of this places scientists at a severe disadvantage. They do not speak an ecclesiastical language. The life's work of an actual scientist might involve the scrupulous study of vegetation feedback in Mauritania or soil moisture percentages in Guadalajara. Notably absent from Earth science conferences are climatologists slapping pulpits and shouting fiery speeches. Just the opposite, presentations consist chiefly of an endless parade of scholars plowing through scores of PowerPoint slides crammed to the margins with data and graphs. Nobody ever got the Holy Spirit in them after listening to a recitation of data generated from semi-parametric quantile regression models. Fox News is not bound by such restrictions as data or proof.

In reality, there is no scientific debate on the subject, anymore so than there is a scientific debate on the shape of the Earth, round versus flat. But it is far more difficult to convey scientific findings to the public than is it to convey skepticism or foment denialism. The latter requires no expertise, but only a willingness to say what it takes to garner another set of eyeballs. The state of the right calls to mind the famous story of priests refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. The story is apocryphal at best, but in the telling, at least the priests didn't deny the existence of the telescope.

In recent years, vast stretches of Antarctica have collapsed into the ocean. The Louisiana coastline is now disappearing by the staggering rate of one football field per hour. Sixteen of the last 17 years were the hottest ever recorded. That's not evidence enough? That doesn't make you at least mildly curious about what the hell is going on? Refusal to fly the spacecraft and instruments that will tell us is not a vote of no-confidence in the missions under discussion. Rather, it is refusal to see proof of what you already know to be true.

]]> Mon, 17 Jul 2017 05:58:02 -0400
<![CDATA[The secret life of urban crows]]>

On a blustery overcast morning this past April, Kaeli Swift walked across the campus of the University of Washington toting a weathered purple-and-white plastic shopping bag. This bag, if found by some unsuspecting student or groundskeeper, would almost certainly trigger a campuswide panic. Inside, Swift had stowed a rubber mask of a grotesque, exaggerated male face — large ears, bulbous nose, silver-whiskered soul patch — a guise that would not look out of place in a 1980s horror film. Also inside: a corpse. That the corpse was only that of a bird didn't make the tattered bag's combined payload any less creepy.

She tromped through the wet grass in calf-high Sorel snow boots and made her way to the university's Center for Urban Horticulture, where she's a teaching assistant for an undergraduate natural history class. Near the dumpsters and trash cans parked behind the center, Swift found a perfect spot for what she was about to do: perform a ritual that, depending how you look at it, is a couple of years old or a couple million.

Swift, a Ph.D. candidate, is a member of UW's nationally acclaimed Avian Conservation Lab. If you've heard or read a news story in the past decade about Corvus brachyrhynchos — aka the American crow — and what science has to say about its confounding habits and aptitude, there's a good chance it was thanks to the work conducted by the lab, which is led by a man named John Marzluff. The UW professor and wildlife biologist is the author of numerous popular books on the subject. In 2008, Marzluff and his fellow researchers made national headlines when they tested a hypothesis — that crows recognize individual human faces — by donning Dick Cheney masks. That led to another revelation: Crows teach other crows to detest specific people (and sometimes attack them).

Today, Swift, 30, would repeat an experiment that uncovered one of the team's more staggering revelations. And she conducted it with the ceremony of an undertaker.

From the old shopping bag she unsheathed the dead crow and turned it in what little sunshine strained through the fibrous clouds. The black feathers sparkled in the light, and close inspection revealed iridescent blues and purples. She covered it back up with a tan cloth, and with the draped bird lying breast down on her two upturned palms, stepped gingerly onto a patch of grass. She tore the linen away and unveiled the corpse to the gray heavens.

There was nothing at first, just an empty sky. Then, a caw. A crow appeared on a nearby power line. Then another caw and another crow. Suddenly crows flew in from all directions. Their plaintive cries soon combined into a chorus. New arrivals joined what quickly grew into a cacophonous dervish of black silhouettes swirling directly above Swift.


This, according to Swift, is what it's like to attend a crow funeral — an instinctive ritual that evolved generations ago and was just discovered by humans; Swift co-authored an article on her findings in the journal Animal Behaviour in 2015. The gist: Upon spotting one of its dead, the flock attends to the fallen bird en masse with loud shrieking. Given enough time, the throng will mob any predator it thinks is responsible, like, say, a human in a Dick Cheney mask, or in a mask like the one Swift had in her bag. (The lab affectionately refers to that be-soul-patched fellow as Joe.)

Because she had decided to leave Joe out of today's repeat of her groundbreaking experiment, she had to take precautions. Early during this gathering tsunami of sound, once the crows became particularly agitated, Swift pulled the hood of her rain jacket over her face, lest the birds, days later, recognize that face.

When I came to Seattle, it was pretty obvious that the corvid of the day here was the crow," Marzluff told me recently. He was hired away from Boise State by the University of Washington in 1997 to teach and to study corvids, the family to which crows belong. (Jays, ravens, and magpies are also corvids.) Marzluff narrowed his focus once he observed just how many American crows lived and thrived in Seattle. The city's rapid growth and unique geography — it's essentially a forest squeezed between two bodies of water — are key to that large crow population. Forests aren't ideal for crow life, but over the past century we've carved and opened up these areas for our suburbs and provided a constant food source — namely, abundant edible trash. We've created what Marzluff calls "a mecca for crows."

What's more, due to the constant exposure to urbanites, crows here are virtually unafraid of humans. "In the countryside there are hunting seasons on crows," Marzluff says. And farmers harass and shoot them to protect their crops. In the city, we either ignore them, feed them, or turn them into icons. Either way, crows here are cued into our daily rhythms and feel safe among us.

That's certainly the case on the campus of the University of Washington, where up to 78,000 students, faculty, and staff spend their days. An early challenge for Marzluff, as he and his colleagues got the lab started, was capturing the campus fowl. (They're not afraid of us, but that doesn't mean they like being nabbed.) The team first tried a complicated makeshift trap involving a pizza box, leg nooses, and a weight. Later, and more successfully, they employed net guns to envelope the birds whole. As they apprehended each crow, the researchers placed a color-coded band on one of its feet, in order to tell the birds apart, and then set it free.

This opened a portal into crow life, permitting researchers access to what felt like another dimension, the crows' dimension.

"We were watching to see what they eat," Marzluff recalls, "and basically they will eat anything — and they will try everything." The birds would, for example, loiter around garbage cans and wait for a squirrel to squirm into a can and pop back out with food. The crows would mob that squirrel and steal its lunch. "I remember one time seeing them eat vomit off the side of a wall," Marzluff says. "You just go, 'Wow, really?' But they're very opportunistic and they make do with just about any scrap in the city you can imagine."

He details the birds' resourcefulness and ingenuity in a 2012 book he co-authored, Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans. In it, we learn that not only do the birds recognize human faces and hold grudges for human misdeeds, but they also teach other birds to recognize grudgeworthy mugs. Fledglings, for example, watch their parents mistreated, hear the cawing associated with it, and learn to despise that human in the same way.

On the other hand, Marzluff writes, crows show great appreciation for humans who treat them well. "Gifts left behind are intended to court or impress people important in a crow's life." These gifts have been known to include candy, keys, and coins.

She was 8 years old and she had trouble reading. The Spokane elementary school she attended in the mid-1990s wanted to hold her back a grade. Was something wrong with her? Sometimes she wondered. The pediatrician had her on Ritalin. She hated Ritalin. It left her feeling separate, other.

She was a curious girl, though, and the wildlife in the hills around Spokane kept her rapt. She pushed herself to read so she could learn more about it: the Sawtooth wolf pack, which stalked the mountains of nearby Idaho.

By the time her family moved to the Seattle suburb of Mercer Island in the early 2000s, Kaeli Swift could read, had kicked Ritalin, and knew science was her jam.

She zeroed in on birds, and corvids in particular, as a biology major at Willamette University, in Oregon. She joined Marzluff as a graduate student at UW in 2012.

Now she's standing in a back lot of the university on a cloudy April morning holding a dead bird and re-creating her most important experiment as perturbed crows orbit, screeching and scolding.

It's hard to overstate the intensity of this experience. Nearly 30 banshees freaking out. They're 20 feet above, where they have the advantage of height and numbers, and all their attention and ire is directed at you. The nerve-fraying shrieks blast from every direction. A crow funeral is disorienting, a bit scary, and more than a little awe-inspiring.

This morning the noise has drawn out a university maintenance worker from behind a utility building. He's tall, sports a short white beard, and wears a bright orange safety vest. Is he here to admonish Swift for all the noise? Just a casual, awestruck observer? It's hard to tell. She's had the occasional run-in with angry people during her experiments throughout the city. She's even had the cops called on her. Trying to talk over the din would be pointless, it's so loud. So the man stands there, expressionless.

Swift says her funeral study demonstrates how crows process death and then warn one another about potential dangers. A dead crow, clearly, means something bad has happened to a crow. The presence of a potential predator, be it a bobcat, Joe with the soul patch, or Swift walking around on a Thursday, appears to make their warnings all the more urgent.

Years ago, Swift will later confess, she bonded with a female crow she had studied on campus, identifiable by its green and orange band. Scientists, of course, are discouraged from connecting emotionally with their subjects, lest it harm their objectivity. But it turned out this crow's territory was Swift's campus-adjacent bus stop. She had named the crow Go (its partner was Stop), and long after the study was over, Swift began feeding Go while waiting for the bus, where every day the crow waited for her. Go was old, at least 14, Swift estimates (crows can live up to 20 years), and she admits she became quite attached to the bird.

Last July a colleague informed Swift, over email, that Go had been found dead on campus. "That just sort of, like, broke my heart in such a deep way," Swift says.

Loss, of course, is at the core of Swift's funeral study. How do intelligent organisms deal with it? How do we cope? She says that when her grandmother died recently and she attended the funeral, she didn't know what to do with herself. She worried that her clinical view of death — she is, after all, a wildlife biologist — might come out and upset her family.

At the same time, Swift treats the deceased participants in her work with a dignity not typically associated with scientific research.

When she finally covers up the dead crow in today's re-enactment of her funeral experiment, it's with a gentle precision, as if the linen were a religious shroud. At that, the birds slowly grow quieter. Without one of their own to mourn, the circle above thins, and some crows retreat to a power line or disappear altogether. Light cawing remains, but a person can now hear herself talk.

The orange-vested university maintenance worker drawn in by the commotion still stands nearby and is still hard to read. He takes a wary step toward Swift. A kind of "What magic is this?" wary step.

Before he speaks he looks up again at the emptying sky, and back down at the 30-year-old woman standing in Sorels and placing a dark object back into a shopping bag. "Did you do all that?"

Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in Seattle Met. Reprinted with permission.

]]> Sun, 16 Jul 2017 06:16:02 -0400
<![CDATA[This week I learned even smelling your food can make you fat, and more]]>

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]]> Fri, 07 Jul 2017 05:33:00 -0400
<![CDATA[Surviving a lightning strike]]>

Sometimes they'll keep the clothing, the strips of shirt or trousers that weren't cut away and discarded by the doctors. They'll tell and retell their story at family gatherings and online, sharing pictures and news reports of survivals like their own or far bigger tragedies. The tourist hit on a Brazilian beach. The Texan struck dead while out running. The 65 people killed during four stormy days in Bangladesh.

Only by piecing together the bystander reports, the singed clothing, and the burnt skin can survivors start to construct their own picture of the possible trajectory of the electrical current, one that can approach 200 million volts and travel at one-third the speed of light.

In this way, Jaime Santana's family has stitched together some of what happened that Saturday afternoon in April 2016, through his injuries, burnt clothing, and, most of all, his shredded broad-brimmed straw hat. Jaime had been horse riding with his brother-in-law and two others in the mountains behind his brother-in-law's home outside Phoenix. Dark clouds had formed, heading in their direction, so the group had started back.

They had nearly reached the house when it happened, says Alejandro Torres, Jaime's brother-in-law. The riders had seen quite a bit of lightning, enough that they had commented on the dramatic zigzags across the sky. But scarcely a drop of rain had fallen as they approached the horse corrals.

Alejandro doesn't think he was knocked out for long. When he regained consciousness, he was lying facedown on the ground, sore all over. His horse was gone.

The two other riders appeared shaken but unharmed. Alejandro went looking for Jaime and found him on the other side of his fallen horse. Alejandro brushed against the horse's legs as he walked past. They felt hard, like metal, he says.

He reached Jaime. "I see smoke coming up — that's when I got scared." Flames were coming off of Jaime's chest. Three times Alejandro beat out the flames with his hands. Three times they reignited.

It wasn't until later, after a neighbor had come running from a distant property to help and the paramedics had arrived, that they began to realize what had happened: Jaime had been struck by lightning.

Justin Gauger wishes his memory of when he was struck — while fishing for trout at a lake near Flagstaff, Arizona — weren't so vivid. If it were not, he wonders, would the anxiety and lingering effects of post-traumatic stress disorder have trailed him for so long? Even now, some three years later, when a storm moves in, he's most comfortable sitting in his bathroom closet, monitoring its progress with an app on his phone.

An avid fisherman, Justin had initially been elated when the rain started that August afternoon. The storm had kicked up suddenly. Fish are more likely to bite when it's raining, he told his wife, Rachel. But as the rain picked up, becoming stronger and then turning into hail, his wife and daughter headed for the truck, followed later by his son. The pellets grew larger, approaching golf ball size, and really started to hurt as they pounded Justin's head and body.

Giving up, he grabbed a nearby folding canvas chair and turned to head for the truck. Rachel was filming the storm from the front seat, planning to catch her husband streaking back as the hail intensified.


A crashing boom. A jolting, excruciating pain. "My whole body was just stopped — I couldn't move anymore," Justin recalls. "I can't explain the pain except to say if you ever put your finger in a light socket as a kid, multiply that feeling by a gazillion throughout your entire body. And I saw a white light surrounding my body — it was like I was in a bubble. Everything was slow motion. I felt like I was in a bubble forever."

A couple huddling under a nearby tree ran to Justin's assistance. They later told him that he was still clutching the chair. His body was smoking.

Describing that day, sitting on his sofa, Justin draws one hand across his back, tracing the path of his burns, which at one point covered roughly a third of his body. They began near his right shoulder and extended diagonally across his torso, and then continued along the outside of each leg.

He leaves and returns holding his hiking boots, tipping them to show several burn marks on the interior. Those dark roundish spots line up with the singed areas on the socks he was wearing and with the coin-size burns he had on both feet, which were deep enough that he could put the tip of his finger inside.

Lightning is responsible for more than 4,000 deaths worldwide annually — according to reports from 26 countries. (The true scope of lightning's casualties in the more impoverished and lightning-prone areas of the world, such as central Africa, is still being calculated.) Mary Ann Cooper, a retired Chicago emergency physician and longtime lightning researcher, is one of a small global cadre of doctors, meteorologists, electrical engineers, and others who are driven to better understand how lightning injures people, and ideally how to avoid it in the first place.


The changes in personality and mood that survivors experience, sometimes with severe bouts of depression, can strain families and marriages, sometimes to the breaking point. Cooper likes to use the analogy that lightning rewires the brain in much the same way that an electrical shock can scramble a computer — the exterior appears unharmed, but the software within that controls its functioning is damaged.

Despite having a deep vein of sympathy for survivors, Cooper still doesn't believe that some symptoms are real. Some people maintain that they can detect a storm brewing long before it appears on the horizon. That's possible, Cooper says, given their heightened sensitivity to stormy signs in the wake of their trauma. She's less open to other reports — those who say that their computer freezes when they enter a room, or that the batteries in their garage door opener or other devices drain more quickly.

Yet even after decades of research, Cooper and other lightning experts readily admit that there are many unresolved questions, in a field where there's little to no research funding to decipher the answers. It's not clear, for example, why some people appear to suffer seizure-related symptoms after their lightning injury. Also, are lightning survivors more vulnerable to other health problems, such as heart conditions, later in life?

Some survivors report feeling like medical nomads as they struggle to find a doctor with even a passing familiarity with lightning-related injuries. Justin finally sought out help and related testing last year at the Mayo Clinic for his cognitive frustrations.

Along with coping with PTSD, Justin chafes at living with a brain that doesn't function as fluidly as it once did. Talking on the phone one day, sounding quite articulate, he tries to convey the struggles lurking just beneath. "My words in my head are jumbled. When I think about what I'm trying to say, it's all jumbled up. So when it comes out, it may not sound all right."

The popular perception is that the chance of being struck by lightning is one in a million. There's some truth here, based on U.S. data, if one looks only at deaths and injuries in a single year. But Ron Holle, a U.S. meteorologist and longtime lightning researcher who believes that statistic is misleading, set out to crunch some other numbers. If someone lives until 80, lifetime vulnerability increases to 1 in 13,000. Then consider that every victim knows at least 10 people well, such as the friends and family of Jaime and Justin. Thus, any individual's lifetime probability of being personally affected by a lightning strike is even higher, a 1 in 1,300 chance.

Holle doesn't even like the word "struck," saying it implies that lightning strikes hit the body directly. In fact, direct strikes are surprisingly rare. Holle, Cooper, and several other prominent lightning researchers recently pooled their expertise and calculated that direct strikes are responsible for no more than 3 to 5 percent of injuries.

Justin believes that he experienced what's called a side flash or side splash, in which the lightning "splashes" from something that has been struck — such as a tree or telephone pole — hopscotching to a nearby object or person. Considered the second-most-common lightning hazard, side splashes inflict 20 to 30 percent of injuries and fatalities.

As a rule, in high-income regions of the world men are more likely than women to be injured or killed by lightning; at least two-thirds of the time, they're the victims, and possibly more often, depending upon the study. One possible reason is men's propensity for "taking chances," Holle quips, as well as work-related exposure. They are more likely to be on the younger side, in their 20s or 30s, and doing something outside, frequently on the water or nearby.

What should you do if you find yourself stranded a long way from a building or car when a storm kicks up? Some guidance is available: Avoid mountain peaks, tall trees, or any body of water. Look for a ravine or a depression. Spread out your group, with at least 20 feet between each person, to reduce the risk of multiple injuries. Don't lie down, which boosts your exposure to ground current. There's even a recommended lightning position: crouched down, keeping the feet close together.

Still, don't dare to ask Holle about any of these suggestions. There's no such thing as a lightning-proof guarantee, he repeats more than once. "There are cases where every one of these [strategies] has led to death." Instead, for simplicity's sake, everyone these days is advised "When thunder roars, go indoors."

The rain that had threatened all afternoon didn't start to fall until Sara, Jaime's sister, and Alejandro were driving to Maricopa Medical Center in Phoenix. Alejandro sat tense, holding on to his terrible knowledge. "All of this way, I was thinking, 'He's dead. How do I tell her?'"


Jaime had arrived at the Phoenix trauma center with an abnormal heart rhythm, bleeding in the brain, bruising to the lungs, and damage to other organs, including his liver. Second- and third-degree burns covered nearly one-fifth of his body. Doctors put him into a chemically induced coma for nearly two weeks to allow his body to recover, a ventilator helping him breathe.

Jaime finally returned home after five months of treatment and rehabilitation, which is continuing. "The hardest part for me is that I can't walk," he says from the living room of his parents' house. The doctors have described some of Jaime's nerves as still "dormant," says Sara, something that they hope time and rehabilitation will mend.

"We're living through something that we never thought in a million years would happen," says Lucia, Jaime's mother, reflecting on the strike and Jaime's miraculous survival. They've stopped asking why lightning caught him in its crosshairs that April afternoon. "We're never going to be able to answer why," Sara says.


]]> Mon, 03 Jul 2017 05:27:01 -0400
<![CDATA[Could video games be the future of warfare?]]>

Is violence a part of the human psyche? Is our species doomed to a future of war and bloodshed?

Some people think mankind can no sooner abandon war than it can free itself from the constraints of the physical body. Indeed, conflict exists in everything we do. As children, we wrestle with our siblings. We bully. We fight over the best seat near the window. As adults, we argue in our jobs and relationships. We fight outside bars. Nations battle over resources and politics. Conflict is so deeply rooted in our beings that there may not yet be a sane way to eliminate it entirely. And yet, change is the very nature of evolution, and even with stories of everyday violence and heartbreaking crime raging in the media, it's possible that someday, violent acts of war will be a thing of the past. Our battles will take place not on a field, but in virtual worlds.

Virtual reality has seen massive leaps in innovation recently. The worlds that exist in these realities could act as holographic versions of the lives we lead offline, allowing us to play out warfare scenarios with real-life geopolitical outcomes but without the deadly consequences. Take, for example, one of the greatest virtual reality platforms created in the past few decades: Second Life. In this "game" — for lack of a better word — every chunk of virtualized land, every island, every city, and every nation, is owned by a Second Life user. Such a world could serve as a platform on which we could address real-world problems that are too complicated, or too violent, to address in real life. War could be waged in a virtual reality setting and the results deemed internationally binding — saving hundreds of thousands of lives in the process.

Putting this idea into action would be difficult, no doubt. The first barrier would likely be the lack of an international consensus. After all, what could possibly force a sovereign nation to respect the outcome of a CS:Go match in real life? In the absence of actual force, surely they would dismiss the results of such a competition, should they lose. But this could change in the aftermath of a massive, devastating act of violence. After World War II, for example, we saw nations from different parts of the world, big and small, come together in an effort to establish global peace and stability. Perhaps a similar consensus — a mutual craving for international peace — could be established in an effort to rule out violence and push for virtualized conflict.

Implementing video games as a proper replacement for armed warfare would also alter the global balance of power completely. A nation's status would no longer be determined by its resources and manpower, but by the gaming prowess of its citizens. Today's professional electronic sports gamers could be tomorrow's warriors.

In a way, video games are already being utilized by modern militaries. The United States Marines use war-centric video games as a means to gather new recruits, train existing soldiers, and treat veterans suffering from post-war mental disabilities. Realistic war simulators such as Call of Duty and Battlefield are used today to entice new recruits into the world of adrenaline-filled action. So why not use these very games to replace warfare altogether?

It's perhaps a bit idealistic — and maybe even childish — to consider virtual reality video games a suitable replacement for warfare. But morally, there is nothing wrong with the idea. With the world of science and technology advancing at a rapid pace, what seemed incomprehensible yesterday will be mundane tomorrow. As Mahatma Gandhi once said: "If liberty and democracy are to be truly saved, they will only be by non-violent resistance no less brave, no less glorious, than violent resistance. And it will be infinitely braver and more glorious because it will give life without taking any."

]]> Fri, 30 Jun 2017 05:52:02 -0400
<![CDATA[This week I learned just having your phone nearby is making you dumber, and more]]>

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]]> Fri, 30 Jun 2017 05:33:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Why do all our virtual assistants sound female?]]>

Voice assistant technology is arguably one of the coolest and most useful innovations built into many of today's devices. Amazon Echo can use Alexa to order you toothpaste, and Google Assistant can basically control your house, or recognize which voice belongs to which family member and customize the conversation accordingly. In other words, our digital personal assistants are getting pretty advanced.

But for all that technological progressiveness, there's an old-fashioned flaw lingering in our digital assistants: They all sound like women.

Of course, your digital assistant won't admit to being female. Ask Siri, Google Assistant, or Cortana their gender and they'll assure you, in one way or another, that they are genderless. Pose the gender question to Amazon's Alexa, and this is the answer you'll get: "I'm female in character." But the feminine voices with which they respond are unmistakable.

Even the names of these assistants imply femininity. Siri, Cortana, Alexa — they all have a distinctly feminine ring to them. Only Google Assistant tries to be somewhat androgynous, but this is a thinly veiled effort. Sure, in theory, they could be androgynous labels. But science would put these names in the "female" category. Back in 1995, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh came up with a phonetic chart outlining why some names sound more masculine or feminine than others. According to their findings, if the name ends with an "ah" sound or any other vowel, we usually consider it feminine. If you've ever taken a romance language course that covered genders of nouns, you learned masculine nouns typically end in "o," and feminine nouns end in "a." It seems this concept carries over into how we perceive proper names, not just nouns.

So all of this raises a question: As voice assistant technology becomes more prevalent, could there be downsides to casting our voice assistants exclusively as women?

Historically, women have outnumbered men in roles that involve serving others — jobs such as secretaries and office assistants. Because many of us have become accustomed to seeing women standing behind reception desks, carrying trays of food to hungry diners, or changing bed linens in hotel rooms, perhaps it's a subconscious bias that leads developers to give their servile creations feminine qualities.

There could also be a monetary, or simply a user-experience, motivation behind this trend. A study from Indiana University's School of Informatics and Computing found that we prefer feminine-sounding voice assistants — and that's true for both men and women. Why? The research suggests it's because female voices sound "warmer." As such, software developers may explicitly choose to develop future virtual assistants with feminine voices because, to some extent, consumers like female voices better than male-voiced gadgets.

But we also can't pretend that socially engrained biases don't exist, and don't influence our decisions. Whether people realize it or not, we often contextualize women within certain helping roles. And making our tech helpers exclusively female by default reinforces this stereotype.

If all voice assistants are women, could this encourage people to order women around more, or view them as somehow less human?

The same question could be posed regarding the ethnicity of our voice assistants. While some GPS systems let users switch settings to hear voices with various vocal qualities that might indicate non-white ethnicities, this option is not available on all devices yet. People who aren't native English speakers have also pointed out that some voice assistants can't recognize their accents, an issue that is likely to become much more common as voice commands become more pervasive in our everyday technology.

We've seen throughout history the impact that language can have on one's self-identity and ability to be accepted into a society. For example, during Europe's Napoleonic Wars, the British imposed their own laws and English language on the Dutch-descended South Africans (called Boers) who lived on South Africa's Western Cape, essentially limiting their ability to express themselves in their native language and thereby also limiting the power they had within the society.

Likewise, when English settlers expanded west across North America, they set up rules to govern local Native American populations. Many Native American families were forced to send their children to boarding schools, where the children were forbidden to speak their native languages, and were even forced to give up their names and adopt more traditionally English-sounding names.

The commonality across both of these examples (and the many, many others found throughout history) is the way in which dominant cultural groups try to suppress and remove "other" cultures from mainstream society.

Mohammad Khosravi Shakib wrote in a 2011 research paper in the Journal of Languages and Culture that language and culture are tied to one another. "Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we perceive ourselves and our place in the world," he says.

In essence, to remove someone's ability to communicate in their own language removes part of their culture as well. More perceptibly, it removes that person's ability to have power in society. When voice assistants become the gatekeepers to your checking account, your car, and your education, it's going to matter a whole lot if voice technology only responds to perfect, "proper" English.

To have voice assistants that demonstrate no diversity, that can't recognize certain languages, slang words, or expressions is to have a technology that could alienate entire groups of people from this technology. And maybe that wouldn't be such a huge issue, if it didn't seem that voice-controlled technology was poised to become an integral part of U.S. society in the future.

Going forward, developers would do well to build diversity into their technologies. If the goal is to make these technologies more human-like, they need to better reflect the human race as a whole.

]]> Wed, 28 Jun 2017 05:41:02 -0400
<![CDATA[This week I learned that looking at puppies can save your marriage, and more]]>

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]]> Fri, 23 Jun 2017 05:42:00 -0400
<![CDATA[This incredible machine can suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere]]>

A Swiss startup wants to fight climate change with machines that suck carbon dioxide out of the air, said Adele Peters at Fast Company. Zurich-based Climeworks' CO2 collectors are housed in shipping containers. "Small fans pull air into the collectors, where a sponge-like filter soaks up carbon dioxide," which is later released "in a pure form that can be sold, made into other products, or buried underground." Eventually, governments and corporations may pay the company to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to meet ambitious climate goals, though the collecting machines would need "to be built at massive scale" to make an impact.

(Courtesy image)

Climeworks estimates that it would need 750,000 shipping ­container–size units to capture 1 percent of global emissions. That number is not as outlandish as it seems, however. "The same number of shipping containers pass through the Port of Shanghai every two weeks."

]]> Mon, 19 Jun 2017 05:55:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Are geniuses born or made?]]>

The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia houses an array of singular medical specimens. On the lower level the fused livers of 19th-century conjoined twins Chang and Eng float in a glass vessel. Nearby, visitors can gawk at the bladder stones of Chief Justice John Marshall, and a thighbone from a Civil War soldier with the wounding bullet still in place. But there's one exhibit near the entrance that elicits unmatchable awe. You can see smudge marks left by museumgoers pressing their foreheads against the glass.

The object that fascinates them is a small wooden box containing 46 microscope slides, each displaying a slice of Albert Einstein's brain. These remnants of tissue are mesmerizing even though — or perhaps because — they reveal little about the physicist's vaunted powers of cognition. Other displays in the museum show disease and disfigurement. Einstein's brain represents potential, the ability of one exceptional mind to catapult ahead of everyone else.

Throughout history, rare individuals have stood out for their meteoric contributions to a field. Lady Murasaki for her literary inventiveness. Michelangelo for his masterful touch. Marie Curie for her scientific acuity. "The genius," wrote German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, "lights on his age like a comet into the paths of the planets." Consider Einstein's impact on physics. With no tools at his disposal other than the force of his own thoughts, he predicted in his general theory of relativity that massive accelerating objects — like black holes orbiting each other — would create ripples in the fabric of space-time. It took 100 years, enormous computational power, and massively sophisticated technology to definitively prove him right, with the physical detection of such gravitational waves less than two years ago.

Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the very laws of the universe. But our understanding of how a mind like his works remains stubbornly earthbound. What set his brainpower, his thought processes, apart from those of his merely brilliant peers?

Philosophers have long been pondering the origins of genius. Early Greek thinkers believed an overabundance of black bile — one of the four bodily humors proposed by Hippocrates — endowed poets, philosophers, and other eminent souls with exalted powers. Phrenologists attempted to find genius in bumps on the head; craniometrists collected skulls — including philosopher Immanuel Kant's — which they probed, measured, and weighed.

None of them discovered a single source of genius, and such a thing is unlikely to be found. Genius is too elusive, too subjective, too wedded to the verdict of history to be easily identified. And it requires the ultimate expression of too many traits to be simplified into the highest point on one human scale. Instead, we can try to understand it by unraveling the complex and tangled qualities — intelligence, creativity, perseverance, and simple good fortune, to name a few — that entwine to create a person capable of changing the world.

Intelligence has often been considered the default yardstick of genius — a measurable quality generating tremendous accomplishment. Lewis Terman, the Stanford University psychologist who helped pioneer the IQ test, believed a test that captured intelligence would also reveal genius. In the 1920s, he began tracking more than 1,500 California schoolkids with IQs generally above 140 — a threshold he labeled as "near genius or genius" — to see how they fared in life and how they compared with other children. Terman and his collaborators followed the participants, nicknamed "Termites," for their lifetimes and mapped their successes in a series of reports. The group included members of the National Academy of Sciences, politicians, doctors, professors, and musicians. Forty years after the study began, the researchers documented the thousands of academic reports and books the Termites published, as well as the number of patents they were granted (350) and short stories they wrote (about 400).

But monumental intelligence on its own is no guarantee of monumental achievement, as Terman and his collaborators would discover. A number of the study's participants struggled to thrive, despite their towering IQ scores. Several dozen flunked out of college at first. Others, tested for the study but with IQs that weren't high enough to make the cut, grew up to become renowned in their fields, most famously Luis Alvarez and William Shockley, both of whom won Nobel Prizes in physics. There's precedent for such underestimation: Charles Darwin recalled being considered "a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect." As an adult he solved the mystery of how the splendid diversity of life came into being.

Scientific breakthroughs like Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection would be impossible without creativity, a strand of genius that Terman couldn't measure. But creativity and its processes can be explained, to a certain extent, by creative people themselves. Scott Barry Kaufman, scientific director of the Imagination Institute in Philadelphia, has been bringing together individuals who stand out as trailblazers in their fields — people like psychologist Steven Pinker and comedian Anne Libera of the Second City — to talk about how their ideas and insights are kindled. Kaufman's goal is not to elucidate genius, but to nurture imagination in everyone.

These discussions have revealed that the aha moment, the flash of clarity that arises at unexpected times — in a dream, in the shower, on a walk — often emerges after a period of contemplation. Information comes in consciously, but the problem is processed unconsciously, the resulting solution leaping out when the mind least expects it. "Great ideas don't tend to come when you're narrowly focusing on them," says Kaufman.

Studies of the brain hint at how these aha moments might happen. The creative process, says Rex Jung, a neuroscientist at the University of New Mexico, relies on the dynamic interplay of neural networks operating in concert and drawing from different parts of the brain at once — both the right and left hemispheres and especially regions in the prefrontal cortex. One of these networks fosters our ability to meet external demands — activities we must perform, like going to work and paying our taxes — and resides largely in outer areas of the brain. The other cultivates internal thought processes, including daydreaming and imagining, and stretches mainly across the brain's middle region.

Jazz improvisation provides a compelling example of how neural networks interact during the creative process. Charles Limb, a hearing specialist and auditory surgeon at University of California, San Francisco, designed an iron-free keyboard small enough to be played inside the confines of an MRI scanner. Six jazz pianists were asked to play a scale and a piece of memorized music and then to improvise solos as they listened to the sounds of a jazz quartet. Their scans demonstrate that brain activity was "fundamentally different" while the musicians were improvising, says Limb. The internal network, associated with self-expression, showed increased activity, while the outer network, linked to focused attention and also self-censoring, quieted down. "It's almost as if the brain turned off its own ability to criticize itself," he says.

This may help explain the astounding performances of jazz pianist Keith Jarrett. Jarrett, who improvises concerts that last for as long as two hours, finds it difficult — impossible, actually — to explain how his music takes shape. "I'm bypassing the brain completely," he tells me. "I am being pulled by a force that I can only be thankful for."

Even as neuroscientists try to understand how the brain fosters paradigm-shifting thought processes, other researchers are wrestling with the question of when and from what this capacity develops. Are geniuses born or made?

Over the past several decades, scientists have been searching for genes that contribute to intelligence, behavior, and even unique qualities like perfect pitch. In the case of intelligence, this research triggers ethical concerns about how it might be used; it is also exceedingly complex, as thousands of genes may be involved — each one with a very small effect.

Genetic potential alone does not predict actual accomplishment. It also takes nurture to grow a genius. Social and cultural influences can provide that nourishment, creating clusters of genius at moments and places in history: Baghdad during Islam's Golden Age, Kolkata during the Bengal Renaissance, Silicon Valley today.

Natural gifts and a nurturing environment can still fall short of producing a genius, without motivation and tenacity propelling one forward. These personality traits, which pushed Darwin to spend two decades perfecting On the Origin of Species and Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan to produce thousands of formulas, inspire the work of psychologist Angela Duckworth. She believes that a combination of passion and perseverance — what she calls "grit" — drives people to achieve. Duckworth, herself a MacArthur Foundation "genius," says the concept of genius is too easily cloaked in layers of magic, as if great achievement erupted spontaneously with no hard work. She believes there are differences when it comes to individual talent, but no matter how brilliant a person is, fortitude and discipline are critical to success.

Nor does it happen on the first try. "The No. 1 predictor of impact is productivity," says Dean Keith Simonton, professor emeritus of psychology at UC Davis and a longtime scholar of genius. Big hits emerge after many attempts. "Most articles published in the sciences are never cited by anybody," says Simonton. "Most compositions are not recorded. Most works of art aren't displayed." Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and the first commercially viable light bulb, but these were just two of the 1,000-plus U.S. patents he was awarded.

Some geniuses never get the chance to be productive. Throughout history women have been denied formal education or deterred from advancing professionally. Mozart's older sister, Maria Anna, a brilliant harpsichordist, had her career cut short by her father when she reached the marriageable age of 18. Half the women in the Terman study ended up as homemakers. People born into poverty or oppression don't get a shot at working toward anything other than staying alive. "If you do believe that genius is this thing that can be singled out and cultivated and nurtured," says McMahon, "what an incredible tragedy that thousands of geniuses or potential geniuses have withered and died."

Sometimes, by sheer good fortune, promise and opportunity collide. If ever there was an individual who personified the concept of genius in every aspect, it was Leonardo da Vinci. Born in 1452 to unmarried parents, Leonardo began life in a stone farmhouse in Italy's Tuscan hills. From these simple beginnings, Leonardo's intellect and artistry soared like Schopenhauer's comet. The breadth of his abilities — his artistic insights, his expertise in human anatomy, his prescient engineering — is unparalleled.

Today an international group of scholars and scientists is tracing the artist's genealogy and hunting down his DNA to learn more about his ancestry and physical characteristics, to verify paintings that have been attributed to him — and, most remarkably, to search for clues to his extraordinary talent.

Genealogists are tracking down Leonardo's living relatives on his father's side for cheek swabs. Anthropologists are seeking access to remains believed to be Leonardo's at Château d' Amboise, a castle in France's Loire Valley where he was buried in 1519. Historians and geneticists are experimenting with techniques to obtain DNA from fragile Renaissance-era paintings and paper.

The quest to unravel the origins of genius may never reach an end point. For some, that is as it should be. "I don't want to figure it out at all," says Keith Jarrett when I ask if he is comfortable not knowing how his music takes hold. "If someone offered me the answer, I'd say, 'Take it away.'"

In the end it may be that the journey is illuminating enough and that the insights it reveals along the way — about the brain, about our genes, about the way we think — will nurture glimmers of genius in not just the rare individual but in us all.

Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in National Geographic. Reprinted with permission.

]]> Mon, 19 Jun 2017 05:48:02 -0400
<![CDATA[5 weird materials that could replace plastic]]>

Plastic is a wonder. It's malleable, so it can be molded into a variety of useful objects — from bottles to bags to medical supplies. At the same time, it's also durable and can resist wear and tear. Indeed, since synthetic plastic was first invented back in 1907, the world hasn't been able to get enough of the stuff. According to one study, we've manufactured enough plastic since World War II to coat the entire globe in a layer of saran wrap.

The problem, of course, is that for all its benefits, plastic is pretty rough on the environment. A single plastic bottle, when tossed into a landfill, could take at least 500 years to show signs of decay. And those styrofoam packing peanuts that make sure your packages arrive unharmed? Those will sit around for one million years. That's a bummer, but even worse is that a lot of our discarded plastic doesn't wind up in a landfill at all. Instead, it lands in the ocean, with one study suggesting as much as 8 million metric tons of plastic found its way to the ocean in 2010. That's "five plastic bags filled with plastic for every foot of coastline in the world," says Jenna Jambeck, an associate professor at the University of Georgia and an author on the study.

Okay, enough doom and gloom. Here's the good news: Scientists know this is a problem, and are working hard to find a solution. Here are a few recent attempts.

1. Sugar + carbon dioxide

The latest effort comes from the University of Bath, where researchers have created a new type of plastic that's biodegradable and made from two common ingredients: sugar and carbon dioxide. "This new plastic is a renewable alternative to fossil-fuel based polymers, potentially inexpensive, and, because it is biodegradable, will not contribute to growing ocean and landfill waste," explains Antoine Buchard, Whorrod Research Fellow at the university's department of chemistry. And, because this new material is bio-compatible, it could be used in medical devices and implants, so that's cool.

2. Edible water bottles

Before you picture yourself gnawing on a Dasani bottle, check out the Ooho, a "bubble-like sphere of water." The H2O is protected inside a gelatinous film that's made of plants, so it's biodegradable, but it's also entirely edible. Meaning in the future, you might be eating your water, not drinking it. The downside: The portions are pretty small. Plus, once you've bitten into the bubble, it can't be re-sealed, so you've gotta drink the whole thing. But that might not be so bad, considering we're all dehydrated all the time.

3. 'Smart mud'

Researchers at the University of Tokyo think they've created a revolutionary material in the lab by mixing water with clay and a little extra something to thicken it up: a "molecular glue" called sodium polyacrylate. "The mixture is almost 98 percent water," New Scientist explains, but it transforms into a sort of mud, or gel, that could potentially become very strong. Bonus: This stuff is "self-healing" and can regain its strength, even if it breaks under pressure.

4. Mushrooms

Hidden underneath a mushroom's outer shell is a complex system of tubular cells called mycelia. These are fungi's eyes and ears; they sense the surrounding environment, absorb nutrients as food, and help the fungus grow and survive. They look a bit like fine, white hair, and they're the secret ingredient in a new kind of fungus-based packing material. A company called Ecovative Design is mixing natural ingredients (like oats or hemp) with the mycelia, which grows and binds the mixture together into a solid mat. Put these mats into a mold, and voila: You've got a container, carton, or canister that's eco-friendly. According to, this mushroom material can break down in a landfill in about 180 days. Ecovative is marketing its innovation as a replacement for traditional styrofoam. And if you want to grow your own customized mold, that's an option, too.

5. Shrimp shells

If you had to guess, how many plastic bags would you say you have lying around your house? Twenty? A hundred? No doubt, plastic bags are a massive environmental nuisance. Some one trillion of them are used around the world every year, and almost none of them are recycled. The effort to encourage people to buy canvas bags, or at least reuse their plastic ones, is ongoing, but in the meantime, an engineering professor at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. is taking a different approach: She wants to make biodegradable bags out of shrimp shells. For now, her project is aimed specifically at Egypt, where there is a huge overabundance of crustacean shell waste. The shells are collected, boiled in acid to make them less brittle, and stripped down to a plastic bag-like material. Just two pounds of shells can yield 15 biodegradable shopping bags. "I like the whole idea of taking a waste product and then making something that will contain waste and will make an environmental problem better," Everitt told The Week.

]]> Fri, 16 Jun 2017 05:45:01 -0400
<![CDATA[This week I learned that a low-carb diet may be changing your personality, and more]]>

Read more on the facts mentioned:

]]> Fri, 16 Jun 2017 05:36:01 -0400
<![CDATA[The shared flaw of our fights against terrorism and climate change]]>

Donald Trump and Al Gore would no doubt cringe at the thought that politically speaking, they are brothers from different mothers. After all, what do the Republican president and the Democratic presidential wannabe have in common besides the fact that they are both old, white, pompous dudes who live in mansions and hate Hillary Clinton?

Whether they realize it or not, they both believe in the precautionary principle — the notion that even a small chance of a catastrophic event requires sweeping measures to avert it. Nor do they care about the costs of these "sweeping measures" — both in terms of money and individual liberty.

Their only disagreement is about the events in question: Trump invokes this principle in his crusade against Islamist terrorism — and Gore and his fellow global warming warriors against climate change.

Dick Cheney famously declared that if there was even a "1 percent chance" of another 9/11-style attack by al Qaeda, "we have to treat it as a certainty in our response." For all of Trump's criticisms of the Iraq War, he has a natural instinct for this kind of excess. No sooner did the dastardly Manchester attack occur than Trump reiterated, as he had in his inaugural address, that this "wicked ideology must be obliterated."

To that end, Trump, who has never explicitly rejected pre-emptive strikes against states that harbor terrorists, has significantly escalated America's military offensive against ISIS. He has eagerly embraced — and grown — the massive surveillance state he inherited from his predecessors to snoop and spy on Americans. He rejects basic due process rights not just for enemy combatants captured in the theater of war, but even domestic terror suspects such as the New York dumpster bomber. And then there is his plan to subject prospective refugees to "extreme vetting" to ensure with 100 percent certainty that no terrorist enters the country. (Not to be outdone, incidentally, after the London Bridge attack, British Prime Minister Theresa May demanded the authority to censor and control speech on the internet and has also suggested that human rights laws be scrapped if they come in the way of fighting terrorism.)

Given that the odds that Americans will perish in any terrorist attack — not just those involving Islamists — on U.S. soil is 1 in 3.6 million per year — if the trends of the last four decades are any indication, such draconian steps to avert another 9/11-style event won't make Americans substantially safer. But they will make them substantially less free.

Liberals understand this when it comes to dealing with global terrorism. Al Gore himself gave a great speech in 2006 lamenting all the constitutional protections that the war on terrorism was claiming and expressed alarm that the executive branch had been conducing warrantless surveillance of telephone calls, emails and other internet communication inside America.

But when it comes to global warming, Gore's ideological blind spots are more dazzling than the sun. He condemned Trump's pullout from the Paris agreement as "indefensible" and "reckless." Likewise, the ACLU, which has been heroically fighting Trump's travel ban and other constitution-busting moves, bizarrely tweeted that the withdrawal would be a "massive step back for racial justice."

But the fact of the matter is that a pre-emptive strike against climate change will be no less damaging for justice, racial or otherwise.

The goal of the Paris agreement was to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Centigrade by 2100. But the most optimistic assessments suggest that even if all the signatories live up to their Paris pledges, it's still a Pollyannaish assumption that won't be met. To exceed the agreement and actually meet its goal would require nothing short of the climate change equivalent of Mao's Cultural Revolution to socially engineer a complete global lifestyle shift.

What will this entail? Certainly something far beyond President Obama's coal regulations, which still wiped out (along with fracking) the coal industry in West Virginia — and, along with it, entire livelihoods. Fracking, incidentally, helped to tap natural gas, which is 50 percent cleaner than coal. But climate change warriors such as the Union of Concerned Scientists don't think that cuts it. They want to settle for nothing short of a complete shift to zero-emission renewables — and rightly so if exceeding the Paris targets are a serious goal. America's love affair with SUVs will also need to be cured. So far every administration has tried to achieve that by raising fuel efficiency standards. But every time car mileage improves, people drive more and emit more. Hence regulators will have to outlaw the internal combustion engine as Gore has long recommended.

And what about those pesky skeptics who question the climate change gloom-and-doom? Do they deserve First Amendment's free speech protections? Gore may cry crocodile tears about the abrogation of civil liberties by the war on terrorism, but Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California singled out Reason Foundation (where I work) as an outfit that is part of the "web of denial" undermining "climate science." Some climate change warriors have called for jailing dissenters, on par with the indefinite detention of alleged suspects in the fight against terrorism. The Democratic Party's 2016 platform wants to criminally investigate whether companies such as ExxonMobil lied about global warming to the public and shareholders back in 1997 (even though the company long ago became an advocate of a carbon tax)!

And whatever Western governments would need to do to avert global warming, India and China have to do much more. The former, after all, "merely" have to embrace more modest lifestyles without cars and air conditioning, the latter would have to abandon hope of ever foregoing mass poverty.

So what should be done about these twin threats — global terrorism and global warming — of the 21st Century? Abandon the precautionary approach that seeks to attack the problem at its root. In the case of Islamic terrorism, the better option would be the one deployed during the Cold War against communism, namely containment and deterrence. Imagine how much more havoc America would have caused in the world if it had decided that this "extremist ideology" didn't have to be managed but obliterated from the face of the earth?

Likewise, on global warming, better than trying to put the world on a radical and painful energy diet to avert the problem in the first place, perhaps look for technical fixes such as carbon sequestration to remove the carbon from the atmosphere and build human defenses against it.

Otherwise, we may well kill humanity in trying to save it.

]]> Tue, 13 Jun 2017 05:55:00 -0400
<![CDATA[This week I learned the dark origin story of the seat belt, and more]]>

]]> Fri, 09 Jun 2017 05:37:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Will robots replace therapists?]]>

You've heard the news: Robots are coming for our jobs. Bookkeepers, umpires, factory workers, and even legal assistants could all see their employability disappear in the next 20 years.

But what about jobs that require a more personal, human touch? Surely those are safe, right?

Actually, new innovations suggest that artificial intelligence is invading even the world of physical and mental health care. For the millions of people seeking mental health treatment from a living, breathing human, this raises a question: What role will robots and AI play in the world of therapy? Will therapists and counselors be replaced by our unfeeling robot overlords?

We're already seeing AI make some advancements here. Take, for example, a new program called Woebot from Stanford researchers. Woebot is essentially a chatbot therapist. It uses a Facebook messenger to administer a very common form of therapy called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which, as Megan Molteni at Wired explains it, "asks people to recast their negative thoughts in a more objective light." Once they see their negative thoughts, they can start to recognize patterns and triggers, and try to stop them. Woebot checks in with users daily by sending messages, asking simple questions along the lines of "How do you feel today?" or "What are you doing right now and what's your general mood?" Because it's a robot, it remembers a user's responses and "gets to know" them as time passes. It recognizes changes in mood and can tailor suggestions, the same way a real therapist might.

The Woebot is supposed to help people overcome fears of being judged or stigmatized, letting them obtain mental health help in a format that's both familiar to them and anonymous. People may not admit to friends that they're struggling, but might readily confide in Woebot — especially because they know the app won't judge them. Of course, Woebot isn't a complete replacement for face-to-face therapy, but not everyone has the time (or the money) to see a real therapist. And research suggests this kind of thing can really work. One recent study shows Woebot could reduce anxiety and depression in users.

This isn't the first attempt at creating a robotic therapist. Researchers who helped created Ellie — a robot that helps veterans who are battling post-traumatic stress disorder — agree robots "listen" without judgment, and people may be more likely to confide in them more honestly. Ellie analyzes tone of voice, eye gaze, facial expressions, and head gestures to look for indicators of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in patients. However, the robot's developers stress she's not a replacement for human therapists because she doesn't try to offer any kind of treatment (unlike Woebot); she just gathers data.

But there's another problem: Sometimes patients enter therapy but don't stick with it, or don't have the motivation to change their behavior or environment. It's hard to identify who will or won't follow through, but a team of Penn State engineers is working on ways to use machine learning to come up with customized mental and physical health plans that help patients stay motivated. It's based on a gaming technique: Users are encouraged to move through virtual environments and perform certain tasks. As they do, scenarios get progressively harder and users have to exert more energy and greater motivation. The patient's performance results could help researchers measure their personal level of motivation, and tailor mental health treatment accordingly to keep them interested and committed.

One of the most difficult parts of treating people suffering from mental health problems might be trying to identify those who are at the highest risk of self-harm. This is really hard to do. Suicidal thoughts are not usually rooted in a single, isolated incident such as a relationship breakup, job loss, or death of a close friend. This unpredictability is a problem for clinicians, but scientists are looking at how machine learning might be able to help. By examining huge quantities of data and pulling out patterns that humans might miss, robots could help spot potentially suicidal patients.

In one study, an algorithm predicted suicide attempts with surprising accuracy. The research particularly focused on improving clinicians' predictive abilities about suicide. It found that today's modern clinicians are no more able to definitively find the factors that lead to suicide than mental health specialists of 50 years ago. Machine learning could be the missing link that leads to major advancements in reducing self-harm through prediction and prevention.

All of this said, while robots are already supplementing the work therapists do, they can't create genuine connections with clients, the kinds of connections needed to really help patients thrive. For now, that's something only humans can do. So take comfort, doctor, you're not out of a job just yet.

]]> Thu, 08 Jun 2017 05:51:01 -0400
<![CDATA[Planetarium, and a brief history of space music]]>

For as long as people have been looking up at the planets, we've been trying to fill them: with gods, with Martians, but especially with sound.

The latest attempt at the latter, out this Friday, is the song-cycle Planetarium by Sufjan Stevens, composer Nico Muhley, The National's Bryce Dressner, and percussionist James McAlister. Featuring a string quartet and seven trombones, the album is dense and galactic in its ambitions, but also magnificently human despite its upward-focused themes. The 17 tracks, which range from 30 seconds to 15 minutes, parade a range of musical styles keyed into the "mood" of each subject, from the classically influenced "Earth" to the house-beat-bopping "Saturn." For all four musicians involved, Planetarium marks an unequivocal highlight of their careers.

Strictly speaking, Planetarium is not a new project; its earliest iteration dates back to 2012, when a Dutch concert hall commissioned Muhly to write new music. Muhly roped in his friends, Dressner and Stevens, and Stevens brought with him his longtime collaborator, McAlister, who worked on the percussion and electronic sequencing on the album.

To the joy of anyone who has spent the last half decade listening to Planetarium via terrible cellphone videos on YouTube, Friday's release is an expanded studio version of that project. In addition to compositions for each of the nine planets (Pluto is included "out of pity"), the album features songs for "Halley's Comet," "Black Energy," "Tides," and "Black Hole." With all the rearrangements and additions, Planetarium now runs about 15 minutes longer than the original hour-long suite.

Yet despite the number of its contributors, there is something about Planetarium that is devastatingly lonely. It touches on a fear that man has spent centuries grappling with when looking up at the stars: Is there anybody else out there?

And in that question, a cataclysmic possibility: What if there's not?

When reflecting on the origin of Planetarium to Billboard, Muhly noted that "with [ancient] Greek and Roman religions, there's an active connection between observing something and making art about it. Naming stars is a weird combination of the scientific and poetic." In fact, the plaits of music and the cosmos wind back more than 2,000 years, to the triangle-loving Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras. Among his most influential theories, Pythagoras described the "music of the spheres," a celestial, philosophical symphony in which the sun, moon, and planets influence the goings-on of Earth with their inaudible hums — a kind of mathematical balance not so unlike the relation between the length of a string and the depth of the note it produces, another of Pythagoras' discoveries.

In addition to giving the heavenly bodies their names, then, the Greeks gave them their first recorded voice.

While Pythagoras' musical spheres had been disproven by the early 20th century, composers were nevertheless still attempting to describe the sounds and symphonies of the planets. For Arnold Schoenberg, that meant the liftoff of his atonal period: "If traditional compositions can be said to be bound by something comparable to the 'laws of gravity,' then the final movement of Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 2 surely breaks free of those 'laws,'" writes James Wierzbicki for the Journal of Sonic Studies. "And with its poetic text that speaks of 'wind from other planets,' the composition in more ways than one represents an idea that doubtless has long occupied human imagination."

One of Schoenberg's admirers, Gustav Holst, later composed the closest comparable suite to Planetarium, The Planets, a cycle that premiered in 1918. The seven-movement orchestral work (Pluto had not been discovered yet, and Earth is excluded) sought to describe the "character" of the planets with pieces like the dramatic "Mars, the Bringer of War" and "Neptune, the Mystic." Holst's regal "Jupiter" is perhaps the most famous of the works, and it uses the same E-flat major scale to communicate the grandeur of Zeus that was used in Joseph Haydn's 18th-century "cosmic opera" Il mondo della luna to connote the grand mystery of the moon, or in Liza Lehmann's later "Ah, Moon of My Delight," to connote the romance.

But the world was rapidly changing, and with it, our understanding of space, technology — and music. The goofy, fantastical visions in the 1902 silent science-fiction film Le Voyage dans la Lune (which has since been given a new soundtrack by the band Air) paved the way for the 1924 Soviet film Aelita: Queen of Mars, a story in which "all radio stations on Earth [receive] a strange message" from the cosmos. First contact is made not through sight, but through sound, Wierzbicki notes.

The Cold War cracked the mystery of space into a hysteria. The extraterrestrial warble of the theremin, one of the first electronic instruments, became a ubiquitous signal of the otherworldly and mysterious. Professional thereminist Rob Schwimmer calls it akin to "fingerprinting in space," but New York Times music critic Harold C. Schoenberg described the sound as a "cello lost in a dense fog and crying because it does not know how to get home." While space was popularly believed to be so crowded that H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds radio broadcast, about aliens visiting Earth, was mistaken for a real emergency, music still painted the cosmos for a while longer as lonely, dark and, most importantly, "lost."

As electronic instruments continued to progress, twinkling beeps and boops, like Morse Code or the noisy dashboard of a spaceship, began to communicate the technological and man-made. Stanley Kubrick, though, would return to 19th-century classical music to portray the enormous mystery of space. Richard Strauss had imagined a sunrise when he composed Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1896; in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it becomes a sonic representation of an ominous intellectual dawning:

But the classical compositions of Strauss and Holst would eventually be phased out by the rise of the synthesizer, which had the ability to produce laser-like zaps and hums. Curiously, the early synthesizers could also be used just as convincingly to communicate the terrestrial as it could the extraterrestrial. Composer Mort Garson, one of the first musicians to work with the Moog synthesizer, wrote an entire album of music intended to be played for growing plants.

Garson was hardly turned around, though. He also used the Moog synthesizers to write the music played over the Apollo 11 moon landing footage on CBS, marking the first time many Americans heard the instrument. "The only sounds that go along with space travel are electronic ones," he later explained to the Los Angeles Times.

Suddenly everyone was telling stories about space — and needing to write music for it. Heroes and villains played out battles between good and evil across star-scapes and sound-scapes, in movie theaters and on TV. Star Trek (1966), Star Wars (1977), and Flash Gordon (1980) all got bold, valiant themes worthy of pushing the boundaries of the universe.

Fittingly, when mankind makes contact with the extraterrestrials in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), a five-tone pattern is used for interspecies communication. But the message is lost: Although the motif is implied to have been heard by "persons all over the world," Wierzbicki writes, "no one ever knows what the signal means."

In addition to being fruitful soil for thinly veiled Cold War metaphors, outer space budded themes of alienation, "otherness," and an inability to communicate. David Bowie, creator of the human-shaped alien persona Ziggy Stardust, crooned of precarious separation in "Space Oddity": "For here I am sitting in a tin can / Far above the world / Planet Earth is blue / And there's nothing I can do." On Hunky Dory, Bowie howls the question "is there life on Mars?" like it's a desperate wish.

What Stevens, Dressner, Muhly, and McAlister create with Planetarium is a tip of the hat to the past 2,000 years of space music. A classical universe is arrived at through the strings and trombones while the careful use of auto-tune shuttles the aural cosmonaut to the stars.

Stevens' own music often wrestles with the question of God and the painful separation that comes with death. Charged with writing the lyrics for Planetarium, he pulls from mythology and astrology even as his emotionally transparent voice touches something far more raw and personal: "As I kept listening [to the album], I felt this kind of utter terror and foreboding," he said.

There are lyrical winks and turns of phrase, but ultimately Planetarium has the weight of something that's not been in the works for just five years, but for decades. Compared with "the unreachable, insurmountable, distant mystery of the universe, all of a sudden it feels so small — it feels so claustrophobic, on planet Earth," Stevens said. "I see now why we look to the stars."

For as long as there are people and there are stars above those people, then there will be music to fill the darkness. If there is one thing that makes us human, it's that endless search for someone else — romantically, spiritually, or astronomically.

The loneliness of an empty universe is too unbearable to comprehend. But if space is a big, dark void, then at least not let it be a silent one.

As our curiosity pushes us farther and farther beyond our own tiny blue marble, music is guaranteed to follow. Garson, the musician who was tasked with composing music for the CBS broadcast of the 1969 lunar walk, explained that "people are used to hearing things from outer space, not just seeing them. So I used a big, symphonic sound for the blastoff, some jazzy things for the zero-G game of catch, psychedelic music for a section that uses negatives and diffuse colors on shots taken inside the ship, and a pretty melody for the moon."

"After all," Garson said, "it's still a lovely moon."

]]> Wed, 07 Jun 2017 05:39:01 -0400
<![CDATA[The terrible risk management of climate change 'moderates']]>

Can conservative intellectuals think straight about climate change? Back in 2014, I argued that their fixation with the so-called global warming "pause" demonstrated most of them could not. After 2014, 2015, and 2016 all came in as the hottest years ever recorded, each one breaking the previous record (and the last by a huge margin), I checked back in to see whether such people — like The New York Times' Ross Douthat — had recanted and admitted their previous error. As of a few weeks ago, he had not.

Finally, Douthat has returned to the subject and admitted fault on the since-vanished pause. But he has made no change to his underlying view on climate change, still subscribing to what he calls "lukewarmism," a belief that climate change is real, humans are causing it, but it won't be as bad as the greens say. He's still wrong — and he unintentionally offers a good demonstration of why this sort of fake moderation on climate is untenable.

Like his colleague Bret Stephens, most of Douthat's column makes meta-discourse points, though at least in this instance he both admits to errors on his own part and the fact that the Republican Party is saturated with full-blown denial. But he outsources the meat of his lukewarmer case to two articles by Oren Cass.

In both articles Cass makes two basic moves against the conventional climate hawk perspective. First, he argues that the damage from even the worst case scenarios envisioned by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won't be that bad, according to their own admissions. By way of examples, he points to the IPCC median prediction of 60 centimeters in sea level rise by 2100. That's possible to ameliorate, he argues. What's more, economic models suggest that human society will be so much richer that we'll easily be able to afford to fix the damages, even if they are very expensive.

Second, Cass argues that more extreme scenarios — higher and faster sea level rise, feedback loops leading to uncontrolled rapid temperature increase, a hidden nonlinear factor in the way climate sensitivity behaves, and so on — can't be attached to any known probability, and therefore deserve no risk weighting. One could imagine similarly bad scenarios for epidemic disease or nuclear war. "Working with a catastrophic mindset and a century-long timeline, one can construct an apocalyptic scenario from almost any problem," Cass writes. The implication is that these scenarios can thus be safely disregarded.

There is a lot more fluff in the articles, but those are the two major points. Let me take them in turn.

Cass is correct about the median sea level projection. But he does not mention that upper bound of that projection is 98 centimeters — that is, the IPCC believes there is a 17 percent chance that sea level rise will be greater than 98 centimeters. He also doesn't mention that the IPCC has a longstanding tendency to err on the side of conservative predictions, even if more dramatic ones are scientifically justified. That's probably partly why their sea level rise prediction under a business-as-usual scenario increased by about 60 percent between their fourth and fifth assessment reports.

What's more, in the years since the last IPCC report, new preliminary science has cast doubt on the report's conclusion that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will take centuries to collapse. The latest measurements show melting happening faster and over more of each ice sheet. Cass's read of the science is rather Panglossian.

But it's the economic projections of future damage where Cass's views of risk really go haywire. As an initial matter, you must remember that it's possible to delete nearly half the Earth's population and only remove about 5 percent of world GDP. (Indeed, climate impacts are projected to hit poor nations much harder than rich ones.) Will nations like Equatorial Guinea or the Democratic Republic of the Congo be rich in 83 years? It's certainly possible, but I wouldn't put much money on it. And while rich countries might spend trillions on fixing them up, looking around the world today I would certainly not count on that happening automatically.

Second, if it is impossible (as yet) to attach a really solid probability to a rapid collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, it's even more impossible to attach a solid probability to what rate the economy is going to grow over the next eight decades. Cass points to a model done by Yale's William Nordhaus suggesting that climate damage will cost $20 trillion in 2100, but world GDP will be $510 trillion, so no biggie.

But as Jerry Taylor points out, other economic models have suggested damages far, far larger than that — especially if the harmful effects of climate change hit growth rates, and not just levels. Whether we'll be able to simply buy our way out of any future problems is, at a minimum, highly contestable.

More fundamentally, if we are talking risk assessment, any future economic projections are on much shakier epistemological grounds than climactic ones. (If you think climate models are off, check out the IMF sometime.) Whereas one could in principle figure out more or less for sure what is going to happen to Greenland given better data, better models, and better science, there's no way to get such certainty when it comes to political economy. Nordhaus' prediction of 2.3 percent world growth relies on continuous improvements in total factor productivity in line with earlier observations. But it could be that we'll simply hit an insurmountable technological bottleneck in a decade or two and be stuck there forever.

I don't think that will happen, but unlike the physics of carbon dioxide and infrared radiation, there is no law of nature stating that better technology and economic arrangements will always exist. And while a total stop does seem implausible, U.S. growth in real GDP per capita actually has slowed steadily since the 1960s, and dramatically so since the 2008 crisis — indeed, productivity growth was negative in 2016. Is that a new normal, reflecting perhaps a fundamental failure of innovation, as some argue? Personally I believe not; I think stagnant growth and low innovation reflects inequality and monopolization more than a failure of technological discovery.

But it sure does not look good in terms of glibly hanging the human future on trillions of imagined future dollars. And at a bare minimum, there is no possible justification for leaning on such economic projections while discarding equally uncertain but possible disaster scenarios.

In reality, you do not have to know the precise probability of a future disaster to know it's a real possibility. And the very worst future climate possibilities are bad enough that it's worth spending quite a lot to head them off. Trusting to future riches that may or may not exist is simply poor risk management.

]]> Tue, 06 Jun 2017 05:35:00 -0400
<![CDATA[7 brutally hilarious cartoons on Trump's climate change backslide]]>


]]> Fri, 02 Jun 2017 14:48:40 -0400
<![CDATA[Can greenhouse gases become an innovative new raw material?]]>

For years, manufacturers have relied on raw materials like petroleum and crops to make industrial chemicals. In turn, those industrial chemicals go on to be used in all kinds of consumer products, from couch cushions to running shoes. But petroleum depletes a nonrenewable resource, and plants require lots of energy and land. Neither method is particularly efficient or cheap.

But what if harmful greenhouse gases could be harnessed as the raw material instead, allowing us to use existing resources to make chemical manufacturing greener, cheaper, and more efficient?

It's an ambitious vision — and just what Derek Greenfield, cofounder and CEO of a San Francisco-based startup called iMicrobe, has in mind. iMicrobe (short for Industrial Microbes) wants to transform natural gases into chemicals to be used in manufacturing. To do so, it needs to engineer microscopic interactions between bacteria and gas. The company uses chemical reactions between methane — which is found in most natural gas — and micro-organisms like yeast to produce results that are identical to the ones achieved with bio-based raw materials. The chemicals that result from these methane-microbe interactions can then become the building blocks of still more chemicals — substances that manufacturers use to create the things we buy.

"Cells are already amazing chemists," says Greenfield. "We're trying to come up with more efficient types of chemistry that don't generate pollution."

His research team has already started using gas to create chemicals. The process they've come up with works a little bit like brewing beer. The researchers "feed" yeast-like microbes in the lab — but instead of feeding the microbes fermented hops, they feed them natural gas, which fuels the chemical reaction.

"Instead of feeding them greens, we're feeding them methane," says Greenfield. And though he concedes that the chemicals that result are less tasty than beer, they're much more valuable in the long run.

Right now, the team is using E. coli bacteria in their process, but they're also testing other microbes, too. Ultimately, they hope the process can make natural gas the input for all kinds of chemical outputs.

If methane and other greenhouse gases did come to be seen as raw materials, not just pollutants, this could change the way manufacturing works in the United States. The country has a huge reserve of natural gas — about 2,474 trillion cubic feet as of 2014, much of it methane. Because all that gas is already in the U.S., Greenfield hopes that using it to fuel chemical production could keep jobs in the country.

"The U.S. is the innovation center of the world because the government invests in a lot of early-stage research," he says. "Eventually products can be greener and made in the U.S. They'll support advanced manufacturing, and they'll be cheaper, too."

The process isn't yet being used commercially. Before that happens, iMicrobe will need to find manufacturers willing to partner with them to tailor the process to specific industrial processes. Greenfield concedes that it's not enough just to demonstrate potential of this process in the lab. "Even if you have the best of intentions, if you don't go to market, you've made no impact." But he's optimistic — especially since methane is so abundant and cheap. And the company recently received a boost from the EPA, which awarded it a $300,000 grant to help it bring the new technology to market.

Even though his work will always take place behind the scenes, Greenfield believes it will pay off in the end.

"If we're successful, a number of years down the line people will be able to buy products made using our process," he says. Everything from fragrances to plastics might one day be made using chemicals that came from microbes and methane. "They won't know that [the products were] made using our process, but they'll be buying something greener."

]]> Fri, 02 Jun 2017 05:53:02 -0400


]]> Fri, 02 Jun 2017 05:52:02 -0400
<![CDATA[This week I learned flight times are longer now than they were 50 years ago, and more]]>

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]]> Fri, 02 Jun 2017 05:43:02 -0400
<![CDATA[When chance intervenes]]>


One pivotal day 66 million years ago, a 6-mile-wide asteroid slammed into the Earth off the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The explosion — as powerful as millions of nuclear bombs — kicked up billions of tons of vaporized rock, filling the sky with a dark cloud that blotted out the sun for decades. Global temperatures plunged 50 degrees. The dinosaurs that dominated the planet died off for lack of food. Their disappearance led to the rise of mammals, and eventually to the evolution of Homo sapiens. In a new BBC documentary that aired this week, scientists who've drilled down into the asteroid’s crater say that it hit "in the worst possible place" — shallow coastal waters where the underlying sediments were filled with gypsum; if the big rock had entered the atmosphere just 30 seconds earlier or later, it would have landed in the deep Atlantic or Pacific Ocean and not created the catastrophic cloud of sulfur. Most dinosaurs would have survived. The human race might never have arisen.

So much is the product of chance: how people meet their spouses, which of our parents' genes we inherit, why this person and not that one gets cancer or dies in a terrorist attack. A cascade of unlikely events can decide a presidential election by 77,000 votes out of 136 million cast, sending history off in an uncharted direction. But the human mind finds randomness emotionally unsatisfying, even threatening. Could we really have so little control over the circumstances that shape our lives? We crave reasons for what happens. So we retroactively see patterns that render events inevitable, or attribute them to fate or divine will or just plain luck. The sages — and life experience — tell us that the truth lies somewhere in the middle: We don't control the cards we're dealt, but do get to use some skill, wisdom, and courage in playing them. But sometimes, stuff just happens. Flaming happenstance can fall out of a clear blue sky. Ask any apatosaurus.

]]> Fri, 26 May 2017 05:55:02 -0400
<![CDATA[How to make sure a robot doesn't take your job]]>

The debate over artificial intelligence is tricky.





1. Become an AI trainer or explainer



2. Develop specialized skills




3. Be creative





4. Embrace manual labor





5. Strategize your future





]]> Fri, 26 May 2017 05:54:02 -0400
<![CDATA[This week I learned how the world's hottest chili would kill you, and more]]>

Read more about the facts mentioned:

]]> Fri, 26 May 2017 05:38:02 -0400
<![CDATA[This week I learned about a 'zombie madness' that consumed medieval English villagers, and more]]>

Read more about the facts mentioned:

]]> Fri, 19 May 2017 05:47:02 -0400
<![CDATA[The Endangered Species Act, explained]]>


What is the Endangered Species Act?


How does the Endangered Species Act work?





Is the Endangered Species Act effective?



Are there any problems with the Endangered Species Act?




What's next for the Endangered Species Act?



]]> Fri, 19 May 2017 05:23:00 -0400
<![CDATA[Can biofuels save us from climate apocalypse?]]>


But how are people supposed to get around without them?





First, let's take corn ethanol, which is produced in the United States in vast quantities, backstopped by federal regulations and subsidies. Stephens is basically right to say that corn ethanol is no good. Given ideal conditions, it should be somewhat better than gasoline on carbon emissions. But if conditions are non-ideal — like if farmers plow up new land to plant more corn to grow ethanol, thus releasing lots of carbon dioxide — then it can easily become worse than traditional gasoline, and increase food prices. This has indeed happened.

All this is no mystery to climate hawks. That's basically what the EPA said back in 2011. I argued the corn ethanol mandate should be scrapped back in 2013.

However, sugarcane ethanol is a different story. In Brazil, they have developed a whole industrial complex around sugar ethanol, with efficient production systems using the sugarcane byproducts to fuel the processing plants, and price structuring to support sustained production. They have modified Brazilian cars to accept ethanol mixed with gas at any ratio, from pure gas to pure ethanol. While it has some problems (like any fuel system does), it is a functional system, cutting greenhouse gas emissions relative to gasoline by over 60 percent.

In theory, other ethanol feedstocks are even more promising. Switchgrass ought to be better than sugarcane, while giant miscanthus might even be a net negative for carbon — that is, it still might end up pulling more carbon dioxide out of the air than is released after harvesting, processing, and burning for fuel.

There's a similar story with biodiesel. Done right — like out of fryer grease, or with best-practices farming — it should be a large net positive for emissions. Done wrong, as with palm oil from clear-cut rainforest, it's a disaster.

Biofuels are obviously not without their problems. As this study explains in detail, a greater percentage of ethanol in a fuel mixture does increase acetylaldehyde emissions (since it is a natural partial combustion product of ethanol burning), as well as methane emissions. We don't want that. However, greater ethanol fractions also reduces the output of nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, as well as non-methane hydrocarbons — things you don't want to breathe either.

Moreover, it ought to be possible to further tune the emissions control systems of flex-fuel cars to further cut emissions. The above study and others note that the bulk of the bad emissions come during the warm-up phase of the car's operation, when the engine and the catalytic converter are below optimum operating temperature. Once the car is warmed up, emissions fall by a lot. With better technology (perhaps a catalyst warmer) or better chemistry, or both, we ought to be able to improve results. In general, more complete and efficient combustion is an achievable goal.

The reality of biofuel cars is similar to that of gas-powered cars back around the 1910s or so. It takes a lot of detailed, back-breaking industrial development to get from a paper theory to a functioning prototype to a viable large industry. Americans in those days had to set up thousands of ore mines, smelters, parts and assembly factories, as well as vast oil wells and refineries. There were side effects too, like back in the 1960s, when our cities were blanketed in suffocating, cancer-causing smog from the pollution-spewing cars of the day.

But factories were built, and side effects can be fixed. In the 1970s Congress mandated catalytic converters, gas engines got more efficient, the skies cleared up, and fewer people died of lung disease.

Standing up a huge new industry from scratch is not easy. Brazil has reached basic workability with sugarcane ethanol, which took decades of persistence, and it's not all the way there yet. Following in their footsteps with, say, giant miscanthus would require vast changes in farming, gigantic processing plants, alterations to car engines, and many other changes. No doubt there would be unforeseen difficulties, some of which might even be insurmountable — any new industrial paradigm is necessarily something of a crapshoot.

Only one thing is for sure: If we listen to ignorant, duplicitous climate trolls, we will never develop the advanced transportation technologies of the future, much less save future generations from climate apocalypse.

]]> Mon, 15 May 2017 05:43:02 -0400
<![CDATA[When a lifelong pianist's memory fades]]>

All his life, Steve Goodwin had been a private man. No matter the circumstances, he'd say he was doing just fine. But as he sat in his Wilsonville, Oregon, home that Monday morning, he wasn't fine.

Over the weekend, he'd argued with his youngest daughter, Melissa. The blowup ended when his daughter, tears in her eyes, opened the front door of her home and told him to leave.

As is the case in all families, they'd had minor disagreements before. But Saturday's battle had been raw. Steve knew he needed to set things straight. It was time to reveal his secret.

His wife, Joni, called Melissa, who lived three blocks away. After she arrived, they gathered in the living room and made small talk. Then, from a shirt pocket, Steve pulled out his handwritten notes.

Mom and I saw a neurologist. I have a spot in my brain. I am being honest. If this progresses into Alzheimer's, I know what it is like. I saw my mom. I experienced the pain of her personality changing, her being unkind to me and saying hurtful things.

If I ever do or say anything hurtful, I want you to know that I am sorry. No matter what I do and say, you are my little girl and I love you.

For Melissa, the bitter news explained so much. She'd first noticed changes the previous summer. She'd been at her parents' house, and she'd asked her father to play his piano, something he'd done all her life. Steve was a software engineer by profession, but music was his true passion. Growing up, Melissa and her sister fell asleep each night to his songs. Decades later, the music allowed Melissa, now in her late 30s, to forever be the little girl who so loved her father.

On that day, she'd watched in confusion as her father, always so smooth and proficient, fumbled and stopped. He said he hadn't been practicing. Now she knew the truth.

More extensive tests revealed that Steve, then 65, had early-onset Alzheimer's, a disease passed genetically from his mother. By the time his mother died, at age 74, she spent her days, in silence, staring out a window. She didn't recognize her son. Once an accomplished musician, she didn't know what to do with a piano.

Now, it was his turn. A grim fear took hold within Steve.

The disease, Melissa knew, would block out all her father had ever been. Her father's essence was his music, the soundtrack to her life. She'd taken it for granted. And now the music was dying.

The music and Steve's inspiration remained a mystery. He was the only musician in the family. No one else spoke, or understood, his language.

Melissa thought about hiring a professional pianist to work with her father. But she figured most would require a musical score. Her father had none. She needed someone who could pull the music from him, and also respect and treat tenderly the composer's vulnerable soul. A proud man, Steve hadn't told anyone outside the family about his diagnosis.

Whenever Melissa approached her mother, Joni changed the subject: Let's not ruin this good day. Instead of looking to the future, Joni focused on the present, protecting Steve and his dignity. He used to cook dinner, but now he didn't remember if he'd added salt, or whether the recipe called for salt. He tested her patience by asking the same question repeatedly.

Joni missed hearing him at the piano. His music represented a life together: courtship, marriage, family, buying a house, grieving over the death of a pet, empty rooms when the girls left for college, and now, the joy of being grandparents.

Steve's life, as is the case with many men, had been defined by what society calls success: money, power, and an impressive résumé.

"Steve was a freelance software entrepreneur," Joni said. "He made a comfortable living, but we weren't rich. But he always believed he had it in him to create something special with his software. He talked about his ship coming in." But before his projects launched, she said, a big player in the competitive industry would beat him to the punch.

Joni had always told her husband his true gift, even if no one outside the family heard it, was his music. "He'd say, 'Sweetie, thank you very much,'" Joni said. "Then he'd get back to his software to pay the bills."

Just like her father, Melissa had told no one what was going on. Not even her closest friend, Naomi LaViolette, who knew only that Melissa's father was dealing with a medical issue.

They had become friends three years earlier in one of those strange and fortuitous moments where two unrelated lives become intertwined. Their kids attended the same preschool and they'd see each other in the parking lot.

One day, Naomi, a deeply private woman, surprised herself when she began crying after Melissa asked how her day was going. Instead of saying fine and getting in her car, she said she was going through a divorce and was afraid.

They went on walks, talking about life and struggles. Over the years, the two women had family dinners and outings. Melissa watched Naomi's kids when Naomi needed time alone or had to work on her career.

She was a pianist.

Naomi started piano lessons at 4. Blessed with perfect pitch, a genetic trait some researchers say is found in only 1 in 10,000, Naomi could identify a musical note by hearing it played once. At 7, she discovered she could learn a piece of music by listening to it. As an adult, she earned a master's degree in classical music and could play anything from jazz to pop to gospel. She performed in clubs and at festivals, released her own music, and was featured on CDs with other musicians.

In the summer of 2015, the two women met for coffee. Naomi casually asked Melissa how she was doing. This time, it was Melissa who cried. She told Naomi about the diagnosis and the music, how her father no longer played the piano, and how the music would be lost. Naomi, who'd had no idea that Steve was a pianist, wanted to help.

"I told her that I could learn his music, even by listening to parts of it," she said. "If he could provide anything, we could work together."

While grateful, Melissa declined Naomi's offer. Her father had never played for anyone outside of family and friends. With his skills now fading, she doubted he would subject himself to such embarrassment. As the disease progressed, Steve was growing more defiant. He didn't want special attention, certainly not anyone feeling sorry for him.

Music was no longer talked about. Joni had barred Melissa from raising the subject.

But during a phone call, Naomi brought up the music once more. Melissa said she'd think about it.

A month later, Melissa learned her father was scheduled to take a test to see if he was sharp enough to receive an experimental drug that might slow the pace of the disease. Steve had taken the test twice. Both times, he had failed. This was his last chance.

To help her father relax, she took him on a hike the day before they had to be at the doctor's office. As she pulled into the driveway, she brought up Naomi's offer.

For a long while, Steve was silent.

"Then he asked me why she'd want to work with him," Melissa said. "He said it would be a waste of her time."

Why do this? Because, his daughter said, she cares. A long pause. And then ...

"Yes." And Steve began to cry.

After dropping her children at school, Naomi drove to the Goodwin home, where Steve, Joni, and Melissa waited. They talked honestly about the future. Although Steve had received the experimental drug, his brain was not responding.

Naomi told Steve she'd love to hear him play. Steve moved to the piano and sat at the bench, hands trembling as he gently placed his fingers on the keys.

Naomi discreetly slipped a small recorder near the piano. Starts and stops and mistakes. Long pauses, frustration surfacing. But Steve pressed on, for the first time in his life playing for a stranger.

That night, Naomi pulled out the recorder. She listened just as she had as a child and later as a student to transcribe the jazz solos of Horace Silver, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk. She understood Steve's music. She found hints of themes, counterthemes, harmonies, and rhythms.

"It was beautiful," Naomi said. "The music was worth saving."

Her responsibility, her privilege, would be to rescue it. The music was still in Steve Goodwin. It was hidden in rooms with doors about to be locked.

Every other week, Naomi and Steve met in his home to spend hours together. He'd fumble at the piano, then she'd take his place. He'd tell her what he remembered and tried to answer her questions. He struggled to explain what he heard in his head. He stood by the piano, eyes closed, listening to his own work, for the first time being played by someone else.

Steve and Naomi spoke in code: walking bass lines, playing just off the beat, intervals, moving from the root to end a song in a new key. Steve heard it. All of it. He just couldn't play it.

The disease, though, took a toll on Steve. One afternoon, he could remember how he began and then ended one of his compositions. But the middle, no matter how hard he concentrated, was lost.

At the next session, Naomi asked Steve if they could work together on the middle section to save the song. He agreed. With Steve's input, she created the passage. Steve loved it, said it was what he would have played if he could. He insisted that she be credited as a collaborator on the piece.

And, then, another miracle. Working with Naomi had stirred within Steve the belief he could compose one last song. One day, Naomi received an email. Attached was a recording, a testament to loss and love, to the fight. Steve called it "Melancholy Flower."

Naomi hit Play.

She heard multiple stops and starts, Steve struggling, searching while his wife called him "honey" and encouraged him. The task was overwhelming, and Steve, frustrated and angry, said he was quitting. Joni praised him, telling her husband this could be his signature piece. Keep going, she said, keep going. He did.

It would be the last song Steve Goodwin would ever compose.

Through last year and into 2017, Naomi figured out how to play 16 of Steve's favorite, and most personal, songs. She scored the music for future musicians. With Naomi's help, the Goodwin family found a sound engineer to record Naomi playing Steve's songs. Joni thought that would be the end. But it wasn't.

In the months leading up to the 2016 Oregon Repertory Singers Christmas concert, the director asked Naomi, the group's pianist, for song choices. She said she had a special one in mind: "Melancholy Flower."

She told the director about her project with Steve. The director agreed to add it to the repertoire. But to make it work, Naomi would have to add lyrics and a choral arrangement. She asked Steve's permission. He considered it an honor.

After the concert, Naomi told the family Steve's music was beautiful and professional. It needed to be shared in public.

The family rented a former church in downtown Portland and scheduled a concert. Word got out. By the day of the show, more than 300 people had said they would attend.

By then, Steve was having a hard time remembering the names of some of his friends. He knew the path his life was now taking. He told his family he was at peace.

Steve arrived and sat in the front row, surrounded by his family. The house lights dimmed. Naomi took the stage. Her fingers. His heart.

Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in The Oregonian. Reprinted with permission.

]]> Sun, 14 May 2017 05:35:02 -0400
<![CDATA[How tiny can nanowires get?]]>

When it comes to microchips, bigger isn't better. Quite the opposite, in fact: The smaller the chip — and the tinier the components it fits — the more computing power can be packed into one place. But as researchers race to find innovative new ways to make smaller chips, they're running up against a wall: The teensier the chip, the slower and more expensive it is to make.

The culprit is the infinitesimal wires that create circuits on the chips. The tiny wires control the flow of electrical signals and power across chips, and they can be found inside everything from your phone to your hard drive to your microchipped pet.

The more wires, the faster and more powerful a device — but so far, the smallest ones sold commercially limit the amount of power a chip can deliver. The tiniest chips on the market today have wires that are just 22 nanometers thick (about 4,000 of them could fit across the width of a single human hair). But for manufacturers, that's much too large.

As is, these tiny wires are produced using complex fabrication processes that rely on generating light wavelengths that cost a lot and are complicated to produce. Thankfully, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, and Argonne National Laboratory may have a solution to create smaller wires for less money.

The team describes its discovery in the journal Nature Nanotechnology: "The processors inside your smartphone are more powerful than the computer that took the Apollo mission to the moon," says Priya Moni, a graduate student at MIT who co-wrote the paper. But though the technology is complex, she says, the fabrication process doesn't have to be.

Moni and her colleagues borrowed from existing, but unrelated, fabrication processes to make even smaller wires a possibility. First, they use an electron beam to create a pattern on a tiny structure that's destined for life as a microchip. Then, they create tiny lines with a super-strong substance called a block copolymer. It gets its strength from molecules that sort themselves into wee chains and stick tightly together, forming more patterns on the chip. The third step is to make a top coat of polymer that forces the materials below into tiny vertical layers — turning them into wires that are much smaller than the ones they'd be able to create with any one of the old techniques.

The super-small lines — less than 10 nanometers in width, or a mere 20 atoms wide — do more than save space. Do Han Kim, who co-authored the paper, says that the smaller the wires, the less power is lost during computing. As a result, batteries last longer and devices are more energy-efficient.

"We were able to create very targeted chemistry," says Moni. And since the semiconductor industry is evolving so quickly, she notes, it's important to stay ahead of the curve. "They're always looking for solutions to problems that are 10, 20 years in the future," she says.

Now that the team has developed a better method for creating wires, they'll work to improve the process. Within a decade, you could find them inside your hard drive — ensuring a big future for ever-more-minute microprocessors.

]]> Fri, 12 May 2017 05:59:00 -0400
<![CDATA[This week I learned smiling actually makes you look older, and more]]>

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]]> Fri, 12 May 2017 05:31:02 -0400
<![CDATA[Why you should work 4 hours a day, according to science]]>

When you examine the lives of history's most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organized their lives around their work, but not their days.


How did they manage to be so accomplished? If some of history's greatest figures didn't put in immensely long hours, maybe the key to unlocking the secret of their creativity lies in understanding not just how they labored but how they rested.

After his morning walk and breakfast, Charles Darwin was in his study by 8 a.m. and worked a steady hour and a half. At 9:30 he would read the morning mail and write letters. At 10:30, Darwin returned to more serious work, sometimes moving to his aviary or greenhouse to conduct experiments. By noon, he would declare, "I've done a good day's work," and set out on a long walk. When he returned after an hour or more, Darwin had lunch and answered more letters. At 3 p.m. he would retire for a nap; an hour later he would arise, take another walk, then return to his study until 5:30, when he would join his wife and family for dinner.


But at the same time, his days don't seem very busy to us. If he had been a university professor today, he would have been denied tenure. If he'd been working in a company, he would have been fired within a week.

It's not that Darwin was careless or lacked ambition. He was intensely conscious of time and, despite being a gentleman of means, felt that he had none to waste.

But he managed something that seems increasingly alien today. His life was full and memorable, his work was prodigious, and yet his days were filled with downtime.

Darwin is not the only famous scientist who combined a lifelong dedication to science with apparently short working hours. We can see similar patterns in many others' careers, and it's worth starting with the lives of scientists for several reasons. Science is a competitive, all-consuming enterprise. Scientists' accomplishments — the number of articles and books they write, the awards they win, the rate at which their works are cited — are well-documented and easy to measure and compare. As a result, their legacies are often easier to determine than those of business leaders or other famous figures.

One example is Poincaré, the French mathematician whose public eminence and accomplishments placed him on a level similar to Darwin's. Poincaré's 30 books and 500 papers spanned number theory, topology, astronomy and celestial mechanics, theoretical and applied physics, and philosophy; he was involved in efforts to standardize time zones, supervised railway development in northern France, and was a professor at the Sorbonne.


We see the same pattern among other noted mathematicians. G.H. Hardy, one of Britain's leading mathematicians in the first half of the 20th century, would start his day with a leisurely breakfast and close reading of the cricket scores, then from 9 to 1 would be immersed in mathematics. After lunch he would be out again, walking and playing tennis. "Four hours' creative work a day is about the limit for a mathematician," he told his friend and fellow Oxford professor C.P. Snow. Hardy's longtime collaborator John Edensor Littlewood believed that the "close concentration" required to do serious work meant that a mathematician could work "four hours a day or at most five, with breaks about every hour (for walks perhaps)."

A survey of scientists' working lives conducted in the early 1950s yielded results in a similar range. Illinois Institute of Technology psychology professors Raymond Van Zelst and Willard Kerr surveyed their colleagues about their work habits and schedules, then graphed the number of hours spent in the office against the number of articles they produced. You might expect that the result would be a straight line showing that the more hours scientists worked, the more articles they published. But it wasn't.


From there, the curve rose again, but more modestly. Researchers who buckled down and spent 50 hours per week in the lab were able to pull themselves out of the 35-hour valley: They became as productive as colleagues who spent five hours a week in the lab. Van Zelst and Kerr speculated that this 50-hour bump was concentrated in "physical research," and that most of those 10-hour days were spent tending machines and occasionally taking measurements.



First, the great students didn't just practice more than the average, they practiced more deliberately. During deliberate practice, Ericsson explained, you're "engaging with full concentration in a special activity to improve [your] performance." You're not just doing reps, lobbing balls, or playing scales. Deliberate practice is focused, structured, and offers clear goals and feedback; it requires paying attention to what you're doing and observing how you can improve.

Second, you need a reason to keep at it, day after day. Deliberate practice isn't a lot of fun, and it's not immediately profitable. It means being in the pool before sunrise, working on your swing or stride when you could be hanging out with friends, spending hours perfecting details that only a few other people will ever notice. There's little that's inherently or immediately pleasurable in deliberate practice, so you need a strong sense that these long hours will pay off, and that you're not just improving your career prospects but also crafting a professional and personal identity. You don't just do it for the fat stacks.


But there was something else that Ericsson and his colleagues noted in their study, something that almost everyone has overlooked. "Deliberate practice," they observed, "is an effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day." Practice too little and you never become world-class. Practice too much, though, and you increase the odds of being struck down by injury, draining yourself mentally, or burning out.

How do students marked for greatness make the most of limited practice time? The rhythm of their practice follows a distinctive pattern. They put in more hours per week, but they don't do it by making each practice longer. Instead, they have more frequent, shorter sessions, each lasting about 80 to 90 minutes, with half-hour breaks in between.

Add these several practices up, and what do you get? About four hours a day. About the same amount of time Darwin spent every day doing his hardest work and Hardy and Littlewood spent doing math.

This upper limit, Ericsson concluded, is defined "not by available time, but by available [mental and physical] resources for effortful practice." The students weren't just practicing four hours and calling it a day; lectures, rehearsals, homework, and other things kept them busy the rest of the day. In interviews, the students said "it was primarily their ability to sustain the concentration necessary for deliberate practice that limited their hours of practice." This is why it takes a decade to get Gladwell's 10,000 hours: If you can only sustain that level of concentrated practice for four hours a day, that works out to 20 hours a week (assuming weekends off), or 1,000 hours a year (assuming a two-week vacation).

Ericsson and his colleagues observed another thing, in addition to practicing more, that separated the great students at the Berlin conservatory from the good, something that has been almost completely ignored since: how they rested.

The top performers actually slept about an hour a day more than the average performers. They didn't sleep late. They got more sleep because they napped during the day. Of course there was lots of variability, but the best students generally followed a pattern of practicing hardest and longest in the morning, taking a nap in the afternoon, and then having a second practice in the late afternoon or evening.

For all the attention the Berlin conservatory study has received, this part of the top students' experiences — their sleep patterns, their attention to leisure, their cultivation of deliberate rest as a necessary complement of demanding, deliberate practice — goes unmentioned. In Outliers, Gladwell focuses on the number of hours exceptional performers practice and says nothing about the fact that those students also slept an hour more, on average, than their less accomplished peers, or that they took naps and long breaks.

This is not to say that Gladwell misread Ericsson's study; he just glossed over that part. And he has lots of company. Everybody speed-reads through the discussion of sleep and leisure and argues about the 10,000 hours.

This illustrates a blind spot that scientists, scholars, and almost all of us share: a tendency to fixate on focused work, to assume that the road to greater creativity is paved by life hacks, propped up by eccentric habits, or smoothed by Adderall or LSD. Those who research world-class performance look only at what students do in the gym or practice room. Everybody concentrates on the most obvious, measurable forms of work and tries to make those more productive. They don't ask whether there are other ways to improve performance and your life.

This is how we've come to believe that world-class performance comes after 10,000 hours of practice. But that's wrong. It comes after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, 12,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep.


]]> Sat, 06 May 2017 05:25:00 -0400
<![CDATA[This week I learned squirrels were once America's most beloved pet, and more]]>

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]]> Fri, 05 May 2017 05:36:00 -0400
<![CDATA[Please stop spouting nonsense theories about the meaning of consciousness]]>















]]> Thu, 04 May 2017 05:39:02 -0400
<![CDATA[The New York Times' staggering own goal on climate change]]>




Why doesn't Stephens dig into the details of the science? Because he is very obviously too dim or lazy to grasp the foundations of science in general or the details of climate science in particular. Just look at the central premise of his article:


Stephen asserts that while he accepts the idea that the Earth is warming, and that there is some human influence there, "much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities." The purpose of his first two admissions is basically to help him evade charges of being a science denier, because the evidence that the Earth is warming is incredibly strong. Now that 2016 has blown away the record for the hottest year ever measured — and with it the preposterous denier meme that there hadn't been significant warming since 1998 — deniers have retreated to questioning secondary conclusions.

The problem here is twofold.

First, from an epistemological standpoint, the global temperature increase that Stephens professes to believe in is also a "matter of probabilities." It could be that all the temperature measurements for the last century have been mistaken. It is extraordinarily unlikely that this is the case, but it's not impossible. That's an inescapable part of any scientific conclusion, which can never be permanently certain due to limitations in its foundational assumptions. This can be seen in the IPCC report which Stephens claims to have read: It says that the global temperature increase is "virtually certain" (meaning 99-100 percent probability), while humans being the root cause is "extremely likely" (95-100 percent probability).

Second, Stephens does not even reference other things which the greens are supposedly exaggerating. Here are some conclusions which the IPCC report lists as virtually certain, should greenhouse gas emissions not be arrested: "more frequent hot and fewer cold temperature extremes over most land areas," "near-surface permafrost extent at high northern latitudes will be reduced," "global mean sea level rise will continue for many centuries beyond 2100." What exactly are people getting wrong, and how?

He doesn't say. It is beyond obvious that when it comes to climate change Stephens does not know what he is talking about. He is doing an unlettered imitation of the climate troll routine: bad faith accusations of scientific impropriety so as to set himself up as the wounded victim of left-wing intolerance. He's just so ignorant that he can't even figure out where the best point of attack would be.

But in the real world, warming is happening; it's caused by humans; and if it's not stopped, the consequences are virtually certain to be very bad — indeed, they are already happening. (Speaking of probabilities, the IPCC estimates of future harms could also be an undershoot — error bars go in both directions.)

And that brings me back to The New York Times, and the jaw-dropping business error of hiring someone like Stephens as a columnist. Defensive Times employees, like executive editor Dean Baquet, expressed bewilderment that people would refuse to "understand different views." Op-ed page editor James Bennet argued that Stephens was merely contributing to a "vitally important debate."

This is a crock.

If the Times were really committed to ideological diversity in its op-ed page, it would at a minimum hire a conservative who actually supports President Trump, and perhaps even more importantly hire someone with Bernie Sanders-style politics. (Sanders is the most popular politician in the country, yet there are more supporters of torture among columnists of our two major national newspapers than supporters of the senator.)

What we see here is that the neurotic upper-class liberal need for civil debate over important issues stops the moment we reach territory they actually care about. Trump is gauche and uncouth, and his media proxies tend to be really weird liars, while Sanders wants to jack up marginal tax rates a whole lot. A rich, glib, dumb, anti-Trump conservative, on the other hand, can give Upper East Side cocktail parties that frisson of intellectual disputation while conveniently avoiding most of the actually important questions. A little climate denial is just a niggling side detail.

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<![CDATA[This week I learned female dragonflies will fake death to avoid male suitors, and more]]>

Read more about the facts mentioned:

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<![CDATA[Should you be massaging your baby?]]>

Expectant and new parents love to know exactly what baby gear they should be buying. People are eager to make suggestions: the best swings, the right carriers, the MamaRoo, the Rock n' Play, the Miracle Blanket, all "guaranteed" to soothe your kiddo. But here's one suggestion you probably don't hear very often: infant massage. It may sound "out there" — and maybe I'm biased because I live in Los Angeles — but there's a lot of research supporting the benefits of this calming technique.

But what, exactly, is baby massage? Surely we can't just give our kiddos a rigorous rubdown, right? Infant massage is seen as a form of therapy across the world, and a bonding method between parent and baby. It's usually done during the first year of a child's life and involves gently rubbing and kneading the baby's body. There are two styles: Indian, which is rigorous, and Western, which is a bit more gentle. In the U.S., parents also use infant massage to ease common problems like colic and gas pains. Research also suggests it can help with weight gain, sleep, and bonding and intellectual development. It can even help ease postpartum depression in new mothers.

It may sound too good to be true, but if you think about it, it makes so much sense; we hear how beneficial skin-to-skin contact can be for babies. And it's natural that we want to hold and touch our infants. Massage provides a structured place for that mother's (or father's) touch. "Parents are the expert on their babies, and therefore the best person to massage their babies," says Summer Sinclair-Menkee, CEIM (Certified Educator of Infant Massage). "Early touch is so crucial to newborn development, and babies would rather feel skin on skin from mom or dad. The tools and techniques parents gain from an infant massage class give them the confidence to soothe their infants, tune in to their non-verbal cues, and bond deeper with the person that is their baby."

When should you start massaging your little one? "It's best to wait until baby's umbilical cord falls off to begin infant massage with your newborn," Sinclair-Menkee explains. Not only is there a right age, there's also a right time to massage. "The best state to massage you baby in is 'quiet alert,'" Sinclair-Menkee says. "You don't want to wake your baby up for a massage, nor do you want them to be too fussy or crying during massage. Usually after a nap, a diaper change, or 15-20 minutes after a feeding, so they've had time to digest, is the best 'quiet alert' window for newborns. It's baby-led. Once your infant is two to four months old, then you can start implementing a bedtime routine with massage and bath time. Some parents like massage before bath time, and some prefer it after the bath. This just depends on you and baby."

There are a number of educational resources available for parents who want to give this a try. Sinclair-Menkee recommends Infant Massage: A Handbook for Loving Parents by Vimala McClure, and Loving Hands: The Traditional Art of Baby Massage by Dr. Frederick Leboyer. Curious parents can also sign up for an infant massage class with a Certified Educator of Infant Massage.

So, are there any downsides to baby massage? Sinclair-Menkee says she's heard concerns that it could be "messing up their organs," but says this is entirely false. "The only thing that a parent could do 'wrong' during belly massage is massage counter-clockwise, which would back the baby up, rather than relieve them," she explains. "The must-do 'right' with the belly routine is to only massage baby's belly in a clockwise direction around the naval, because the colon starts on the right side and ends on the left side, like an upside down horseshoe."

In terms of massage tools, you'll need some kind of oil or lotion. Organic cold-pressed vegetable oils (seed, nuts, fruit, or plant-based) are recommended by the International Association of Infant Massage for massaging newborns. "I prefer and carry organic cold-pressed mustard seed oil and sweet almond oil because they are most commonly used in the East Indian tradition, which was my first introduction to infant massage," Sinclair-Menkee says.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, the hospital baby care class provided some information on infant massage, but I never learned more than the basics. And of course, I didn't retain much after I actually gave birth. Had I known more about the benefits of baby massage, I would have paid more attention. If massage can ease those first fraught months after birth and calm your crying child, it's worth a shot.

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