Discover Magazine 2017-03

Discover SPECIAL ASTRONOMY SECTION: Europa Mission, Imaging Exoplanets and More! P.57

SCIENCE FOR THE CURIOUS

®

MARCH 2017

REVEALING THE MYSTERIES OF THE

PRINCESS

MUMMIES

P.38

PLUS

The Messy Science of Saving Bees Secret Life of Fat How One Woman Stopped Thalidomide P.30

P.50

P.68

BONUS ONLINE CONTENT CODE p.5

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Andrew Lyon, Ph.D. Dean, Schmid College of Science and Technology, Chapman University National Fresenius Award of Phi Lambda Upsilon, 2005 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, 2003 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, 2002 Beckman Young Investigator, 2000

chapman.edu

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M AG A Z I N E

PACIFIC NORTHWEST & SAN FRANCISCO August 17-26, 2017

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• Enjoy 2 minutes and 2 seconds of totality at a specially selected viewing location in central Oregon.

• View 2 minutes of totality in the stunning sky above Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

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• Discover some of the Pacific Northwest’s most notable cities, including Seattle, Bend, Portland, and San Francisco. • Explore Seattle’s historic Pike Place Market, nearby Mount St. Helens, the Columbia River Gorge, Crater Lake and Redwood National Park, and cross the Golden Gate Bridge.

• Visit Lowell Observatory, journey through red rock country around Sedona, marvel at the cliffs of Zion National Park, enjoy a storied lodge in Yellowstone, visit the Grand Canyon, pay your respects at Mount Rushmore, and much more. • Enjoy the best of regional cuisine and accommodations in Salt Lake City and Jackson Hole.

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• Enjoy 4-star accommodations in New Orleans, Memphis, and Nashville. • Tap your toes to traditional jazz, go behind the scenes at RCA’s recording studios, visit Graceland and the Grand Ole Opry, and much more. It’s a feast for the eyes — and the ears!

See all the tours at DiscoverMagazine.com/trips-tours

Contents MARCH 2017 VOL. 38, NO. 2

Beekeeper Darren Cox inspects his hives at a Utah field. See page 30.

4

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Website access code: DSD1703 Enter this code at: www.DiscoverMagazine.com/code to gain access to exclusive subscriber content.

Discover SPECIAL ASTRONOMY SECTION: Europa Mission, Imaging Exoplanets and More! P.57

SCIENCE FOR THE CURIOUS

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MARCH 2017

FEATURES

30 Buzzkill

REVEALING THE MYSTERIES OF THE

PRINCESS

While beekeepers across America fight for the survival of their winged charges, political agendas threaten vital scientific progress. BY STEVE VOLK

MUMMIES

38 The Eternal Princesses

P.38

PLUS

The Messy Science of Saving Bees Secret Life of Fat How One Woman Stopped Thalidomide P.30

P.50

Egypt isn’t the only resting place of mummies. Cultures across the world preserved their dead, many of them women. Now, these mummified maidens are giving us a better picture of their ancient worlds. BY NATHANIEL SCHARPING

P.68

ON THE COVER

46 Game Over

Special Astronomy Section p.57

The end of the world as we know it could happen in myriad ways, and while experts can’t know for sure which scenario will pan out, one thing is certain: When it comes, we won’t feel fine. BY YVETTE CENDES

Revealing the Mysteries of the Princess Mummies p.38 The Messy Science of Saving Bees p.30 Secret Life of Fat p.50

50 The Secret Life of Fat Nearly everyone struggles to fend it off, but evolution and our genetics can put some of us at a disadvantage in that battle against the bulge. BY SYLVIA TARA

How One Woman Stopped Thalidomide p.68 The Beauty of Xiaohe was buried in the western Chinese desert for more than 3,800 years. (Jae C. Hong/Associated Press file photo)

COLUMNS & DEPARTMENTS 6

INBOX

You give us a taste of what you thought of our December issue.

7

EDITOR’S NOTE

Travels Across Time and Place Join us as we dive into the past and learn about the lives of those long gone from this world.

9

THE CRUX

A scientist who studies spiders recounts the moment that sparked a surprising discovery, ever-evolving robots might run nonstop manufacturing shops, and more.

20 VITAL SIGNS KIM RAFF

A Gutsy Call A man suffering from extreme bleeding in his gastrointestinal tract

decides he must risk his life in order to save it. BY DOUGLAS G. ADLER

24 NOTES FROM EARTH

with severe birth defects. Americans nearly faced the same fate. They were spared thanks to one woman with some serious know-how.

Return of the Aurochs

BY NANCY KRIPLEN

Cattle breeders and geneticists collaborate to bring back an extinct bovine for a righteous reason. BY JONATHON KEATS

68

HISTORY LESSONS

The Heroine of the FDA In the 1960s, women from nearly 50 different countries bore children

74

20 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT . . .

Metabolism Your diet isn’t the only thing tied to your metabolism. These processes regulate all kinds of biological systems — even artificial ones, like cities. BY GEMMA TARLACH

57 OUT THERE SPECIAL BONUS SECTION Nowadays, amateur astronomers are making such detailed observations of exoplanets, they’re helping experts flesh out their own studies. And in our own solar system, our best bet at finding life might be on one of Jupiter’s moons.

March 2017 DISCOVER

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Inbox Lights Out? I read the Prognosis column “Let There Be Dark” by Dan Hurley in the December 2016 issue (about the health effects of artificial light at night) on the night of the most recent supermoon, just before going to bed. We live in the country; we don’t have any curtains because the closest house is three-quarters of a mile away. So I lay in bed looking out at the bright moon shining right on my face. Even when there is no supermoon, the full moon often wakes me up in the night. And we have commented on how bright the stars make it on a night with a new moon. So I have to question the conclusion researcher David Blask draws in this article that “we evolved to see bright blue, full-spectrum light during the day and to have complete blackness at night.” Except when there is heavy cloud cover, complete blackness at night

6

is nearly impossible. I was in my bed with a house enclosing me. Surely early humans, without the benefit of houses, would see much more light than I do. Perhaps there is a difference between moonlight, starlight and artificial light. But there is always light, and sometimes a lot of it. Lois S., Remus, MI

Man’s Best Friend “The Origins of Dogs” by Gemma Tarlach in the December 2016 issue provides wonderful insight. It makes it apparent the history of dogs is more complicated than we first believed and will take time and study to discern. Of most interest to me, and likely many others, is the future of the evolutionary partnership between dogs and humans. Dogs provide us with hundreds of daily examples of their usefulness and amazing abilities.

They also prove how similar they are to us in daily life. Perhaps their social similarities and acceptance by us have been the primary reason we continue to find ways to expand their practical value. Where will this lead? What are the limits of this partnership? My dogs, like me, are growing old. But they have a better way of approaching old age than I do. They’re not bothered by having to plan for tomorrow — each day is lived to the fullest, and each minute is relished. If tomorrow comes, it will be better and brighter. How wonderful is this gift to us, our dogs? Donald C., Indianapolis Letters are edited for length and clarity.

CORRECTION In the January/February 2017 issue, a story on Greenland sharks stated they were among the oldest invertebrates. They are among the oldest vertebrates.

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Discover SCIENCE FOR THE CURIOUS

Editor's Note

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BECKY LANG Editor In Chief DAN BISHOP Design Director

Travels Across Time and Place I grew up roaming the halls of history. The exhibits of the Montana Historical Society were so much more interesting than my dad’s office at that hulking building near the state Capitol. I’d wander through the re-created frontier town, Territory Junction, peering in at the old saloon and the newspaper office. I’d admire the serene and sacred white bison. But then I’d stand and stare for a long time at one particular diorama. It was a giant cliff. A lone American Indian stood at its edge, waving a hide, taunting a herd of bison as they charged toward him. The animals barreled over the rock’s ledge, landing in a heap at the bottom among men armed with spears. It was an example of how Plains Indians survived for thousands of years. That diorama made me feel as if I could step right into another time and place. That’s the goal, in 2-D, with our cover story starring women whom we call the “princess mummies.” It’s especially visceral seeing a well-preserved hand, or a woman’s hair framing her face, her eyelashes still intact. All these women and girls harnessed power, whether it was societal or spiritual, or both. Researchers are still working to get a full picture of how they lived, ruled and worshipped. Come with us as we travel back to their worlds.

EDITORIAL KATHI KUBE Managing Editor GEMMA TARLACH Senior Editor BILL ANDREWS Senior Associate Editor MARK BARNA Associate Editor ERIC BETZ Associate Editor LACY SCHLEY Assistant Editor DAVE LEE Copy Editor ELISA R. NECKAR Copy Editor AMY KLINKHAMMER Editorial Assistant Contributing Editors

TIM FOLGER, JONATHON KEATS, LINDA MARSA, KENNETH MILLER, STEVE NADIS, ADAM PIORE, COREY S. POWELL, JULIE REHMEYER, STEVE VOLK, PAMELA WEINTRAUB, JEFF WHEELWRIGHT, DARLENE CAVALIER (SPECIAL PROJECTS)

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March 2017 DISCOVER

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THE CRUX T H E L ATEST S C I E N C E N E WS A N D N O T ES

MERGING TIME

This isn’t a fantasy depicting a distant planet — it’s a view from right here on Earth. Photographer György Soponyai created this 360-degree composite from hundreds of unretouched photos he took during an astronomy camp in Hungary last summer. To create the “tiny planet” effect seen here, he first used an extreme wide-angle lens and shot time-lapsed images uninterrupted for 33 hours, taking in both sunshine and starlight. Then he digitally stitched the frames together and warped that panoramic composite into a square, rendering everything from the horizon and below into a sphere. Soponyai captured a bonus detail in the process: The International Space Station created its own trail, the short arc moving across the stars just below the planet.  ERNIE MASTROIANNI, PHOTO BY GYÖRGY SOPONYAI

March 2017 DISCOVER

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THE CRUX PERSONAL

Spidey Senses Investigating an arachnid’s visual sense leads to an eye-opening discovery. JUMPING SPIDERS primarily navigate their world through sight, or so researchers have long thought. As a neuroethologist who studies how the nervous system works, Gil Menda of Cornell University’s Hoy Lab was intrigued by the challenge of figuring out a spider’s complex visual network. So a few years ago, he partnered with Paul Shamble, a spider behaviorist now at Harvard University. Menda developed a technique that allowed them to insert a probe into an arachnid’s tiny brain and discern activity: When a brain cell fired, the researchers would hear a pop. But one day, a pop sounded off unexpectedly, shocking the researchers and leading them to shift their focus of study from sight to sound. Turns out jumping spiders’ auditory systems are much better at detecting noise than anyone thought. Not only can they pick up sounds from at least 375 body-lengths away (about 10 feet), but they’re also specially attuned to the frequencies produced by the wing beats of their flying enemies, like the wasp. Menda relives the chance moment that caused him to change course.

10

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IN HIS OWN WORDS . . .

One day, I was doing visual recording and getting more data on the integration between the eyes in spiders and how the information is being transmitted in the brain. I was searching in the neurons, and I went to the border of the area of the brain where the visual system is. While I was doing that, I didn’t get many responses in that area, but I was moving my chair back, and when I did, I suddenly heard a really strong spike. So I listened and immediately heard very, very pronounced spikes, which means something was going on. It’s almost like when you fish and you feel a bite — it’s the same feeling. I was just feeling that strong pull when I heard that spike. And when I did that, I asked myself, What’s going on here? I hadn’t done anything to the eyes. So I did it again, and there were more spikes. And then I clapped my hands and more spikes. I called Paul, who was working in the next room. I said, “Hey Paul, can you come over for a second? Can you clap your hands?”

He was standing outside of the lab, and he clapped his hands and prrr, you hear the spike. I said to Paul, “That’s the spider.” I asked him if spiders hear sound, and he said no, it’s mainly vibratory, that they “hear” things that are moving, that they can feel. It was unexpected. And we were really, really surprised. We knew at that moment that we had something really big here.  AS TOLD TO LACY SCHLEY; PHOTOS BY MICHAEL OKONIEWSKI

Neuroethologist Gil Menda found jumping spiders (inset) are much better at picking up sounds than anyone thought.

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The thale cress, Arabidopsis thaliana, is a lowly, flowering weed found throughout Eurasia and North America. Nevertheless, it has celebrity status: In 2000, it became the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced. Since then, the humble organism has become a model for molecular and genetic studies. This false-color image of a male plant, magnified 100x, was taken with a scanning electron microscope. It shows small pollen spores inside the stamen’s podlike anthers, seen in lime green.

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calls “zero down time.” It’s a vision of a factory that never stops, not even for maintenance. The connected machines monitor themselves, spotting potential problems before they come up, like a car that knows it needs an oil change. Among the early adopters: GM.

BIG IDEA

Beware the Blue-Collar Bots

FANUC AMERICA CORP.

Next-gen robots that see, feel and learn are taking over factories around the world. AT THE FOOT OF JAPAN’S Mount Fuji, a sprawling campus of large, yellow buildings hides within a forest of pine trees. Inside, an army of robots toils night and day, holidays and weekends, making copies of themselves. These bumblebee-yellow bots — mostly big, sleek, intelligent arms — are strong enough to lift a Corvette and nimble enough to pack heads of lettuce. The company behind this mechanical kingdom, FANUC, has already built a record of over 420,000 robots. American industry averages just over 1.5 robots for every 100 human employees. FANUC has 200 robots for every factory worker. Even in 1960, John F. Kennedy campaigned on retraining American workers who eventually would be replaced by automated machines. Yet technology is only now catching up with such visions. By 2019, robotics experts predict more than a million robots will hit shop floors worldwide in what some call the Fourth Industrial Revolution. But these Asimovian achievements weren’t always as inevitable as futurists would have you believe. In the 1980s, General Motors’ failed modernization attempt showed how difficult it was to get the tech right. Then-CEO Roger Smith tried to beat Japanese automakers with “lights out” manufacturing. He wanted robots automated enough to build cars in dark, lifeless factories. GM partnered with FANUC to build the first generation of those yellow bots. But the tech wasn’t ready. Media accounts revealed robots

painting themselves instead of cars. “GM pushed it harder than the technology could support,” says John Roemisch, a former GM employee and a current FANUC corporate VP. “They were taking 10 steps instead of one step at a time.” Robotics never stopped advancing, but as the dream of fully automated factories slipped further into the future, manufacturing moved to countries with cheap labor.

OX AND BUGGY But the biggest leap in automation stems from perhaps its least sexy advancement — software. Peter Gratschmayr is a senior engineer at Midwest Engineered Systems, a company that takes robots like FANUC’s and designs systems so the machines can actually build a company’s product. He says today’s software makes robots easier to set up, teach and maintain. “We’re just at the edge of it now where the software is fast enough, is intuitive enough,” he says. “All these different types of capabilities that weren’t available in the past are feasible now.” That’s allowing industry worldwide to give remaining mundane factory jobs to robots. A recent Oxford University report predicts computers could take over half of U.S. jobs in the next two decades. And in 2016, the World Economic Forum gathered international political and business leaders to discuss a future “world without work.” Some experts — like Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union — argue that American workers will need a universal basic income to survive in this post-work economy. For now, America has seen some “reshoring” — factories that return stateside, as robots offset labor costs. But mostly the jobs they bring aren’t on the assembly line; they’re in software and robot maintenance. “You’re going to need a high school education or better to be able to work in today’s factory,” Gratschmayr says. “You can still plow fields using an ox and a buggy, but why would you if you could use a tractor?”  ERIC BETZ

It’s a vision of a factory that never stops.

CYBER SENSES Then, about a decade ago, FANUC integrated cameras to give robots sight. That killed the high cost of perfectly aligning production lines so robots got parts at precise times. Next, engineers gave robots an ability that previously required human hands: touch sensitivity, so they could snap parts into place and create tight fits. “Now the latest thing — and what everyone is excited about — is driving the robot to be able to learn, to be able to sense, to be able to communicate,” Roemisch says. FANUC recently teamed with IT mega-company Cisco Systems and industrial powerhouse Rockwell Automation on tech that connects robots, conveyor belts and vibration sensors into one well-oiled machine. The tech brings the so-called Internet of Things into these manufacturing mainstays, linking devices to one another and the internet. But the ultimate automation goal is what FANUC

March 2017 DISCOVER

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THE CRUX TOOLS OF THE TRADE

In the Bag

1

Archaeology essentials for the field. 1. BRUSH Clears away dirt when digging for delicate artifacts. 2. HAMMER Crushes bones into powder for sampling and helps secure grid setup. 3. FACE MASK Shields against dust from cutting bone as well as sediment dust. 4. SAMPLING SPOONS Help collect sediment or other small samples. 5. SCALPEL Delicately frees small samples that have been dug out of sediment layers. 6. DENTAL TOOLS Help free smaller artifacts from sediment. 7. DIAMOND-TIPPED DRILLS Cut bone. 8. RAINPROOF NOTEBOOK AND SHARPIE For all-weather notetaking and labeling sample bags and tags. 9. BRIGHT STRING Creates

site grid. 10. TROWEL Primary excavation tool that lets you dig slowly though sediment layers. 11. PLIERS Collects bone fragments for dating or DNA analysis. 12. pH PAPER Measures sediment acidity/alkalinity. 13. LEVEL Ensures dig site layers are level. 14. HAND LENS Gives a closer look at tiny objects in the field, such as beads or minuscule bone samples. 15. POCKET KNIFE 16. SCALE For use in photos. 17. MEASURING TAPE To lay out grid at the site and measure depth and location of artifacts. 18. HEADLAMP 19. CALIPERS Measures width of bone and other artifacts.

2 3

4

— LACY SCHLEY; TOOLS COURTESY OF BRIDGET ALEX, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

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THE CRUX

Low on Iron? Ditch the steak and eat a bug.

Cricket 20 * Mealworms 40 Grasshopper 40 Sirloin56beef Buffalo worms 76 TIMELINE

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From egalitarian kids to STDs.

5&8

Young kids are pretty good at respecting authority, but new research claims that by just age 5, they’re already standing up to the man, as it were. And by age 8, they’re rooting for the underdog when they realize the balance of power is off.

Speaking of power, a seven-year study of people in their 60s found that stressful, high-demand jobs can be good for you if you have control over your workflow: Those with high-demand, high-control jobs saw a 34 percent decrease in the likelihood of death compared with folks in high-control, low-demand jobs.

1 in 5

34%

And even though you’re a lot less likely to die of breast cancer these days, a New England Journal of Medicine article contends that we’re pulling the trigger too early on treatment: For every one case of a small tumor caught early that would have been a health threat, about five essentially harmless tumors also receive the same treatment.

Other maladies really are growing in numbers. The CDC claims the total combined number of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis cases reported in 2015 reached a peak, at nearly 2 million. Looks like it’s time to break out the bananas again and demonstrate how to put on a condom.

2

Agnodike

Women Scientists of Antiquity

Marie Curie. Rosalind Franklin. Ada Lovelace. Before these wonder women of modern science could make their marks, another group of females would leave their own scientific legacies in great, ancient civilizations.

2700 B.C.

2300 B.C.

1200 B.C.

Third century B.C.

First century A.D.

Merit Ptah

Enheduanna

Agnodike

The Egyptian physician was the first woman in medicine, and perhaps all of science, mentioned by name in texts. Her son, a high priest, called her “the chief physician,” and her portrait appears in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

A Sumerian woman appointed as high priestess of the moon goddess. Her prestigious religious title included duties related to astronomy, such as establishing observatories and tracking the movements of the moon and stars.

TapputiBelatikallim

Miriam the Jewess

DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

A Babylonian perfumer considered the world’s first chemist and first mentioned in cuneiform tablets. “Belatikallim” is a title suggesting she might have been a high-ranking scientist.

Grecian law at the time forbade women from studying or practicing medicine — punishable by death. So Agnodike dressed as a man to learn the trade. She established a reputation as an expert in women’s diseases before revealing herself, which helped overturn the law.

This alchemist lived in Alexandria and is perhaps the first female scientist to have her work preserved in any form. Descriptions of her designs for alchemical and chemical equipment were included in Egyptian encyclopedias compiled in the third century A.D.

THIS PAGE FROM TOP: EVGDEMIDOVA/SHUTTERSTOCK; IN-FINITY/SHUTTERSTOCK; REDKOALA/SHUTTERSTOCK; DECENT/SHUTTERSTOCK; IN-FINITY; ROBIN TREADWELL (COLORIZATION)/SCIENCE SOURCE. OPPOSITE: GLOBAL FISHING WATCH

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MILLION

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Commercial Overfishing Commercial overfishing damages fish populations, marine habitats and ecosystems — consequences that also affect people who depend on the ocean for food and work. So Google collaborated with nonprofits Oceana and SkyTruth to create Global Fishing Watch, an interactive map that, through both

satellite and land-based tracking technology, gives a near realtime look at commercial fishing across the globe. The watchdog tool can show several layers of data, including current fishing activity (white spots) and the boundaries of restricted marine areas (red outlines). Visit globalfishingwatch.org.

March 2017 DISCOVER

17

THE CRUX SCIENCE SMACKDOWN

Power Poses: Plus or Bust? Experts continue to quarrel over the stances' supposed benefits. IN 2010, RESEARCHERS Amy Cuddy, Dana Carney and Andy Yap reported that people who adopted expansive postures — so-called “power poses,” like putting your hands on your hips — had higher levels of the “macho” hormone testosterone and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and were more likely to take risks than those who struck more timid poses, such as crossing your arms. People soon started assuming Superman-like stances to step up their game in high-stakes situations. And Cuddy — with a best-selling book, packed speaking engagements and a popular TED talk — has become a power-pose guru. But now, after a change of heart about the study’s controversial methodology, Carney is at odds with her former collaborator about whether there’s actually any power in the power pose. In Science Smackdown, we invited the former colleagues to go mano a mano over this debate. Instead, they mostly chose to go statement a statement.  AMY PATUREL

ADOPTING AN EXPANSIVE POSTURE LEADS TO POWER In response to Carney, Cuddy, a business professor at Harvard University, argues her initial finding — that people feel more powerful after adopting an expansive posture — has been successfully replicated in at least nine published studies. When people feel more powerful, the popular theory goes, behavioral and physiological effects, like changes in hormone levels, blood pressure and heart rate, will follow. Over time, these basic posture tweaks can change people’s lives, Cuddy told Discover via email. She touts thousands of testimonials from strangers who have reached out to her with stories of how feeling powerful has helped them overcome rough patches in their lives. They look at challenges not as threats, but as opportunities.

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The Opposition THE POSE IS POWERLESS But while people may feel more powerful in a Superman-like stance, some scientists think any behavioral differences are, at best, grossly exaggerated. Carney, now a business professor at the University of California, Berkeley, writes, “I do not believe that ‘power pose’ effects are real.” In addition to other investigators’ failed replications on nearly every power-pose effect, Carney admits to manipulating the original 2010 data to inflate the link. Such so-called p-hacking was generally accepted at the time, particularly in studies (like the one in 2010) without many participants. Now, scientists view it as cherry-picking data to support hypotheses. To be fair, both sides agree the reported changes in hormone levels haven’t panned out in other research, but the jury is still out on how strong the case is for the other supposed effects.

Does posing like Wonder Woman make you feel powerful?

CBS PHOTO ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

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Vital Signs

A Gutsy Call A middle-aged man puts his life on the line to diagnose a mysterious bleeding condition. BY DOUGLAS G. ADLER

By the time he landed in our emergency department, Albert was having, by his own account, his 11th episode of gastrointestinal bleeding. He’d developed crampy abdominal pain and passed a large volume of bright-red blood. He felt weak and lightheaded, and on more than one occasion he fainted. Albert, who was in his late 50s, had been to several hospitals and clinics in the area. A slew of internists, gastroenterologists and surgeons couldn’t diagnose the problem. CT scans and endoscopies, in which a camera is inserted inside a patient, weren’t revealing. Albert had even undergone a capsule endoscopy, swallowing a camera the size of a pill that essentially makes a movie of its transit through the intestines. These images showed only some old blood in Albert’s small intestine. They did not reveal a clear source to treat. When I first met Albert in the emergency department, he had already received several units of packed red blood cells and copious intravenous fluids. Although he was feeling much better physically, he was deeply discouraged. He had spent a lot of time and money on his bleeding episodes, which were taxing physically and emotionally. One of the most frequent consultation requests we receive in gastroenterology is to evaluate and treat patients with bleeding in the gastrointestinal, or GI, tract. Patients

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It was during a conversation with him about his waning patience (and finances) that I proposed a somewhat unconventional approach to his problem. with GI bleeding usually have so-called upper bleeding — from the esophagus, stomach or the beginning of the small intestine — or lower bleeding, which arises from the colon. In between these two locations lie 20 or so feet of the small intestine where bleeding develops much less frequently. I dutifully repeated Albert’s upper and lower endoscopic exams and the

pill-camera examination and found nothing specific to treat. We then elected to perform a deep endoscopic exam of the top of the small intestine; this also revealed nothing. We were at square one. Our strong suspicion was that Albert had bleeding somewhere in his small intestine. After two days in the hospital without bleeding, Albert was preparing to leave, girding himself for the next episode. It was during a conversation with him about his waning patience (and finances) that I proposed a somewhat unconventional approach to his problem: administering blood thinners while he was in the hospital to see if we could trigger a bleed and catch it in the act.

A DIFFERENT APPROACH Blood thinners have been used for decades to treat conditions that predispose patients to clotting — the opposite of Albert’s problem. Given

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Vital Signs

WAITING TO BLEED We initially adjusted his heparin dose so his blood would take twice as long as normal to clot in the event of bleeding. Albert was clearly anxious about the procedure, and I was, too. I wanted him to bleed at a particular place and nowhere else.

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DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

“If you don’t bleed tonight, we can increase the dose in the morning. Everyone is still on standby, so let’s just wait and see.”

Blood cells when magnified appear tubular.

Whenever my pager went off that day, I was sure it was Albert’s nurse saying he was bleeding. I stopped by his room at the end of the day and found him watching television, looking dismayed. “Nothing happened,” he said. “Clearly,” I deadpanned. “If you don’t bleed tonight, we can increase the dose in the morning. Everyone is still on standby, so let’s just wait and see.” The next morning, we bumped up the heparin dose, making Albert’s blood even thinner. By day’s end, still no bleeding. But as I was preparing to head home, my pager went off. It was the nurses’ station on Albert’s floor. I called back immediately. “It’s started,” the nurse said. “He’s passing blood from below right now.” I asked the nurse to start IV fluids and packed red blood cells, and I sprinted to Albert’s room. He gave me a big grin and a thumbs-up. He was the happiest bleeder I ever met.

After confirming he was stable and that the fluids and red blood cells were keeping his blood pressure in the normal range, I sent Albert to radiology for an angiogram. This would give us a real-time, highresolution map of the blood vessels by following dye injected into an artery while he was given an X-ray. Normal blood vessels appear as welldemarcated tubes, while bleeding sites look like fluffy clouds as the blood spills out of vessels and pools where it doesn’t belong. We kept the heparin running during the angiogram.

BREAKTHROUGH Within a few minutes of injecting the dye, we saw the bleeding — a small artery feeding a portion of the small intestine, known as the ileum, just beyond where our endoscopic examinations could probe. The bleed’s pattern and the look of the blood vessels around it suggested a tumor, the radiologist said. I picked up the nearest phone and called the surgeon involved in Albert’s case. Everyone agreed: He needed surgery. A few hours later, we got the news. The surgeon found and removed a small growth in the ileum known as a carcinoid tumor. These often grow in the small intestine and can widely metastasize if left untreated. Albert had no other evidence that the tumor had spread and made a full recovery without any more episodes of bleeding or signs of cancer. The practice of using blood thinners to induce bleeding is still performed only rarely in medicine. In Albert’s case, it was the right idea at the right time. He literally had to risk his life to save it. D Douglas G. Adler is a professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine. The cases described in Vital Signs are real, but names and certain details have been changed.

ANDRII VODOLAZHSKYI/SHUTTERSTOCK AND REINHOLD LEITNER/SHUTTERSTOCK

orally, by injection or intravenously, the drugs inhibit the ability to form blood clots. My idea was to give Albert an intravenous blood thinner while a team of doctors stood ready to treat him if the bleeding started. This approach wasn’t new, but it was rare in the medical literature. The upside was that this might allow us to find the cause of Albert’s troubles. The downside was that his previous episodes were massive and lifethreatening, and patients on thinners can bleed extensively. I pointed out to Albert that, unlike his earlier experiences outside the hospital, this one would be closely monitored with an IV in place and blood ready to be administered. “What happens if I don’t bleed even on these blood thinners?” he asked. We could adjust the level of the blood thinner to make the blood as thin as needed, I told him. “But obviously the risk of a severe bleed increases as we make your blood thinner and thinner.” “OK,” he said. “I’ll do it.” We agreed that he would receive heparin, a common blood thinner for people with blood clots or who have had heart attacks. The drug prevents the blood from clotting normally and can be dosed so the extent of blood thinning can be closely controlled. This would allow us to thin Albert’s blood as much or as little as needed. The following morning, we started him on IV heparin. We had already alerted the blood bank as well as our colleagues in surgery and interventional radiology. Everybody was standing by to intervene if needed.

A

B LL Bu ig -NE tt ge W on r s

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Notes From Earth

Return of the Aurochs Using cave paintings and skeletons, scientists are resurrecting the first recorded animal to have gone extinct.

→

Inscribed on rocks along the riverbanks in Portugal’s Côa Valley are figures of wild horses and aurochs — the common ancestor to all domestic cattle breeds — drawn by Paleolithic hunters tens of thousands of years ago. Archaeologists scrambled to protect these petroglyphs in the 1990s, as the Portuguese government planned to flood the valley behind a giant dam. Within four years, Côa was listed as a United Nations World Heritage Site, ensuring that this record of prehistoric megafauna would survive. All that was missing was the wildlife itself. Ronald Goderie intends to fill that void. A cattle breeder trained in ecology, he’s working to reintroduce aurochs to the Côa Valley. The problem is that the aurochs, Bos primigenius, has been extinct since 1627. Goderie isn’t concerned. To revive the aurochs, he’s collaborating with geneticists at Wageningen University and ecologists at a nongovernmental organization called Rewilding Europe. Together they’re “back-breeding” modern cattle to take on aurochs-like traits — like menacing horns and stripes along their backs — and then introducing herds of these doppelganger herbivores into landscapes where aurochs once roamed. The project may seem whimsical, but

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At the Lascaux Cave in France, a large bull was drawn over earlier paintings of wild cattle more than 10,000 years ago. Scientists are using ancient depictions like these to re-create the animals.

there are serious ecological reasons for bringing aurochs back onto the scene. “Agricultural land is being abandoned on a large scale in Europe, and natural grazing is one of the key processes for preserving biodiversity,” says Goderie. “We’re trying to re-establish a wild bovine that can do the job. To be able to do this as well as possible, we think these cattle should resemble the aurochs as much as possible.” Goderie and his collaborators are not alone in their belief that wild grazing is necessary, and that the job calls for an animal akin to the aurochs. As Goderie releases his first 40 animals in the Côa Valley, other breeders are raising backbred herds. For instance, a conservation organization called Arbeitsgemeinschaft Biologischer Umweltschutz (ABU) has more than 100 of their own faux

Ancient humans carved this image of an aurochs along a wall in Portugal’s Côa Valley Archaeological Park.

aurochs grazing in various nature reserves in northwest Germany. Extinction aside, the aurochs appears to be thriving.

SUPERCATTLE The petroglyphs of the Côa Valley are just one of many traces of ancient aurochs. The animals appear in the famous cave art of Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, where they were painted 30,000 years ago, depicted with hulking muscles and great twisting horns. Encountering some aurochs during the Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar was awed. “In size these are little but inferior to elephants,” he proclaimed. “They spare neither men nor beast.” Yet the combined power of men and their beasts ultimately proved unbeatable. The spread of agriculture foreclosed the natural habitat of aurochs, which once covered most of Europe, Asia and northern Africa. By the early 17th century, the final holdouts survived in the Jaktorów Forest of Poland, protected by noblemen who also liked to hunt them. The death of the last aurochs in 1627 was also the world’s first recorded extinction. After their demise, aurochs only grew in stature. They came to embody a primeval ideal, and there was a longing to revive them.

TOP: UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UIG VIA GETTY IMAGES. BOTTOM: NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

BY JONATHON KEATS

The most expensive Mercedes-Benz® ever made. Rarer than a Stradivarius violin.

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How to Park $11.7 Million on Your Desktop The 500K Special Roadster is one of the rarest and most­sought after automobiles ever built.

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Notes From Earth

The first to try were a couple of German zookeepers, brothers named Heinz and Lutz Heck, who managed the zoos of Berlin and Munich in the 1930s. “They had in mind the idea of creating Aryan supercattle,” says Goderie. They crossed some of the most primitive and aggressive breeds (including Spanish fighting bulls), attaining a superficial resemblance to old depictions of aurochs. Few scientists took their efforts seriously. But the Heck cattle excited Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who supposedly set some loose on his estate for pleasure hunting.

LOSING EUROPE’S PASTURELAND When the Heck brothers bred their supercattle, Europe was predominantly farmland, essentially equivalent to the continental landscape when aurochs went extinct. Nine decades later, “there’s a geographic revolution in Europe,” asserts Rewilding Europe ecologist Wouter Helmer. “Almost 1 million hectares a year are being abandoned by small-scale farmers.” Large swaths of land are no longer being cultivated. And that’s a problem, says Helmer, because ungrazed land will rapidly grow forested, crowding out wildflowers and butterflies. “Large herbivores have shaped the European landscape,” he says. “For a million

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years, they did so in a natural context, and for the past 10,000 years, they did so as livestock.” With their voracious appetites and propensity to trample everything around them, wild and domesticated bovines maintained an ever-shifting mosaic of ecosystems ranging from deep forest to open prairie. The removal of domestic cattle and lack of wild alternatives could result, by Helmer’s reckoning, in a loss of half the landscape’s biodiversity. To preserve open terrain in nature reserves, organizations such as Rewilding Europe often enlist domesticated herds. In 2008, cattle breeder Goderie was providing that service in the Netherlands — grazing parks with Scottish Highland cattle — when he began thinking about more suitable breeds. “In one of the nature areas near ours, there was the idea of starting with Heck cattle,” he recalls. Concerned about their aggressiveness, he resolved to start over, seeking an animal as well adapted to the land as aurochs were in their time. Borrowing the Greek word for “bull,” he dubbed his creature the tauros.

CAVE PAINTINGS COME TO LIFE The timing of Goderie’s quest was auspicious. Researchers were sequencing mitochondrial DNA from aurochs remains (and would

successfully sequence the first nuclear genome in 2015). Teaming up with Wageningen University molecular geneticist Richard Crooijmans, Goderie surveyed how different primitive cattle breeds were related to the aurochs in order to decide which animals to mix. They started with six different types of cattle from three regions of Europe. “You have to start with many breeds because most of them are highly inbred,” explains Crooijmans. “Without variation, you can’t select.” And since the goal is to breed animals for their ability to thrive in the wild, selection of aurochs-like traits (or phenotypes) has been their initial focus. They deduce those traits from cave paintings and ancient skeletons. Some, like menacing horns, have obvious advantages for animals living in the wild. Other characteristics, such as stripes down the back, are not obviously important but might be genetically related to traits that prove significant. And all of the characteristics must be considered in terms of their potential risk to humans. (That’s why Spanish fighting bulls aren’t on the menu.) Even with Crooijmans’ expertise, the breeding process is excruciatingly slow. Each generation requires a couple of years before traits mature, and he can’t

FROM LEFT: BARRY BATCHELOR/PRESS ASSOCIATION/AP IMAGES; NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

The Heck brothers, Heinz and Lutz, were German zookeepers who re-created their own version of aurochs (above) in pursuit of an Aryan supercattle. More recently, conservationists have begun creating another aurochs-style breed, called tauros (right), which are less aggressive.

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The last aurochs died in 1627 in the world’s first recorded extinction. Scientists now use ancient art and skeletons to determine traits like menacing horns and stripes, as shown in this 17th-century woodcut.

yet select characteristics just by looking at the genes. “Commercially interesting traits like milk yield have been very well studied, but primitive traits like horn shape have not,” he says. “What we want is to get a grip on those primitive phenotypes based on genome sequences. Then we can go much faster.” Goderie now has about 500 animals at various stages of becoming modern-day aurochs. They live everywhere from the Côa Valley to the Velebit mountains in Croatia — often side by side with horses that other Rewilding Europe affiliates have back-bred for primitive traits. Some tauros cattle already have eel stripes and horns that would impress Caesar (though he might be mystified by the ear tags, which are required by law because the animals are technically still domesticated). Given the demands of rewilding, even Heck cattle are gaining new respect. “Heck cattle contain several interesting breeds that do not exist anymore,” notes Margret Bunzel-Drüke, a zoologist working at ABU. The genetic traits of those lost breeds may turn out to be important, especially as animals spread across the continent and contend with different climates. ABU has taken up where the Heck brothers left off, crossbreeding Hecks with other cattle to make them less belligerent and more like aurochs. “Each different rewilding area poses different problems,” Goderie acknowledges. “I think having only one strategy might be risky.” On the verge of reclaiming Bos primigenius from extinction, the makers of modern aurochs aren’t taking any chances. D

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The science and politics of saving America’s bees gets messy. And the bees continue to die.

BUZZKILL BY STEVE VOLK

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PHOTO BY ALEX WILD

Dozens of dead worker bees lie headfirst in a hive. High mortality rates still affect bee colonies around the U.S.

Despite all the years, and all the troubles, Darren Cox still likes to put on his bee suit.

Commercial beekeeper Darren Cox stands among some of his hives in a bee yard in the rich Cache Valley north of Salt Lake City. Bees have been dying at faster rates than normal, as a host of ailments weaken colonies.

playing a critical role in human health. The trouble started about 10 years ago, when beekeepers around the world began reporting a mysterious phenomenon: Bees that had been healthy simply disappeared, leaving no dead bodies for study. The crisis was called colony collapse disorder (CCD). And as scientific wisdom has it, the CCD crisis is over. Bees no longer just “disappear.” Instead, they die at far faster rates than normal as a host of other ailments, such as deformed wing virus and deadly pathogens, exact a toll. Cox’s bees don’t produce the same honey yields they did before. Queen bees struggle to survive even a third of their normal life spans, leaving beekeepers in a constant battle to replace them. According to Cox and other beekeepers, classic CCD is back, too. In the summer of 2015, Cox showed A large queen bee (left), smaller, infertile female worker bees (center), and male drones (right) all make up a functioning honeybee colony. me several hives that bore the standard

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LEFT: ALEX WILD (3)

A big, block-shaped man in his 50s, Cox sports a bowlish blond haircut and serious demeanor. But when he slips into his protective gear, his netted hat in hand, he offers a rare smile. “Time to get out there,” he says. It’s a summer day in Cache Valley, an agricultural center set among the mountains of northern Utah. The skyline, composed of peaks popping with shimmering green, speaks resoundingly of life, vibrant and fertile. Several years ago, Cox and his wife built a beautiful house here, so high up that eagles soared within feet of the living room windows. But for Cox, a commercial beekeeper fighting for his livelihood, these days even his Valhalla strikes a sour note. “When we first got here,” Cox tells me, “there was so much wildlife. Fox and deer. Every bird you can imagine. You don’t see wildlife like you did anymore. Where’d it all go?” Cox keeps his “livestock” in so-called bee yards placed throughout the area. Today he’ll visit them, winding through deep valleys, up tall mountains and into one of the most perplexing questions in science: What is killing our honeybees — and can we stop it? Wild and domestic bees are both in deep trouble. Colony losses among Queen bees commercial beekeepers reach 30, 40, today barely even 50 percent or more annually, a pace that threatens the beekeeping survive a third of and agricultural industries — and their normal everyone who eats. Bees pollinate life spans some $30 billion in U.S. crops each year, including most fruits and leafy greens,

ABOVE: KIM RAFF

signs: healthy brood; good stores of pollen and nectar, or “bee food,” and little else; a few straggling workers, maybe 10 percent of the population he had last week; and a big queen, running around her now-empty castle like a mom, knowing that without her stable of workers she’ll be unable to feed her babies. “Our bees are manifesting a bunch of different symptoms,” Cox says as he kicks a beat-up Ford flatbed truck into gear. “Bees are dying, but what people are missing is that bees are also weakening.” As president of American Honey Producers, a trade association for beekeepers, Cox hears this from numerous members. In honeybee years, we are many generations on from the inception of the crisis, and bees themselves seem different, weaker. “They don’t have as much vigor,” says Cox. For Cox and other beekeepers, the long, reasoned march of science looks more like a slow hair-pull, in which a difficult

scientific problem is rendered almost impossible to resolve by the toxic influences of politics and money.

ENLIGHTENMENT AND PARADOX In the early years of the bee crisis, beekeepers looked to science as their savior. “We believed that government, the media and, most importantly, scientists were focused,” says Cox. “If a solution to this problem existed, we figured it would be found and acted on.” Ten years on, however, beekeepers have grown frustrated because the field seems stuck in the fact-gathering stage. The reasons for overall bee declines are broadly understood: diminished bee habitat; the Varroa destructor, a nasty parasitic mite; viruses and pathogens; and agricultural chemicals, including pesticides, fungicides and insect growth regulators (IGRs). But the problem of declining bee health might actually be getting worse, largely because the factor of agricultural

March 2017 DISCOVER

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chemicals lies at the nexus of science, finance and politics. Much of the controversy, and concern, has centered around a particular class of neonicotinoid pesticides (neonic for short), which yield billions in revenue for chemical-makers. The resulting conflict is best framed, reports E.G. Vallianatos, a scientist retired from the Environmental Protection Agency, by what he calls the “Rachel Carson paradox.” Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, documented the pernicious effects of agricultural chemicals and served as a rallying point for the modern environmental movement. But more than 50 years later, Vallianatos expresses disappointment. “Everyone acts like the book was responsible for a new dawn,” says Vallianatos. “But did anyone actually read it?” Carson’s argument was fundamental: Because pests and weeds quickly develop resistance, chemical pesticides create a kind of arms race. We apply increasingly toxic concoctions in greater amounts, and bugs and weeds evolve and rally. Time has proven her right. Today we pump roughly 2.5 times more chemical pesticides, fungicides and herbicides into the environment than we did when Silent Spring was published. But the number of regulatory labs has decreased, leaving more chemical inputs in the environment and far fewer scientists to study them. The standard rebuttal is that modern pesticides are better targeted toward pests. But this doesn’t capture the plight of the bee, or government regulators. One of the most important papers in the field of bee declines, co-authored by then-USDA scientist Jeffrey Pettis in 2010, drew comb and wax samples from beehives in 23 U.S. states, finding an average of six

different pesticides in each and as many as 39. Numerous scientists I interviewed — from entomologist John Tooker at Penn State University, to Galen Dively and prominent entomologist Dennis vanEngelsdorp at the University of Maryland, to Pettis and others — said the number of chemicals in our environment is so vast that assessing all of their possible interactions is virtually impossible. “Just think back to your chemistry classes,” Susan Kegley, a chemist and CEO of the environmental consulting firm Pesticide Research Institute, told me. “You combine three chemicals and nothing happens, but if you introduce them in a different order, you get a big reaction. So as a scientist working on this problem of bee declines, you have to choose which pesticides, how much and the order of introduction. Then you have to acknowledge everything you might be missing if you’d changed even one of these variables, however slightly.” Scientists are doing what science does best: isolating specific interactions of chemical and bee in the lab while understanding they might miss important synergies among other variables. Thus far, the scrutiny has settled on one particular class of pesticide, yielding significant results. But in a development that shows just how politics creep into science, the data hasn’t ruled the day. The result has been gridlock.

“Bees are dying, but what people are missing is that bees are also weakening.”

A COMPLICATED PICTURE The confidence beekeepers once felt that the crisis would be resolved peaked in 2009 at Apimondia, the largest international gathering of beekeepers.

U.S. Commercial Honeybee Colony Loss The map below shows the results of an annual survey of beekeepers and their bee colony losses. The chart tracks winter losses in the U.S. in the past decade, as well as annual losses since 2010-2011. The Bee Informed Partnership, a research consortium based at the University of Maryland, tracks mortality rates, rather than overall population, to get a more accurate sense of colony turnover year to year.

44% of colonies were lost in 2015–2016

2015–2016 Loss by State

Average Loss by Year 40%

20% 10%

Total Annual Losses Winter Losses

0%

Reporting year (April– April)

SOURCE: Bee Informed Partnership/University of Maryland

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ALISON MACKEY/DISCOVER AFTER BEE INFORMED

30%

2006 – 200 7 2007 – 20 08 2008 – 20 09 2009 – 20 10 2010 –201 1 2011 – 201 2 2012 – 20 13 2013 – 20 14 2014 – 20 15 2015 – 20 16

≥60% ≥50% ≥40% ≥30% ≥20%

Percentage of colony lost

50%

Two of the world’s most respected Bees entomologists — Pettis, then research leader at the USDA’s Beltsville Bee pollinate some Laboratory, and vanEngelsdorp, then at Penn State — there revealed the early results of an experiment in U.S. crops they’d just completed. each year In a conversation included in the documentary The Strange Disappearance of the Bees, both scientists appeared visibly excited. They had looked into the danger that a widely used class of pesticides, neonicotinoids, might pose to bees. “We’re finding that virus levels are much higher in CCD bees,” vanEngelsdorp says in the film, “but since we are not finding a consistent virus or a consistent pathogen, that implies that something else is happening underneath it. Something is breaking down their immune A worker bee gathers nectar from a purple coneflower. Scientists are trying to figure out system, or somehow challenging them so that which factors — viruses, pesticides or a combination — weaken bees’ immune systems. they are more susceptible to disease.” encounter a dose that big? Sublethal effects are treated as The pair fed neonics to bees, then exposed that group and less urgent, yet neonics subject bees to a variety of sublethal a neonic-free control group to Nosema, a common gut pathogen in the honeybee. The bees fed neonics proved more suseffects with long-term, fatal consequences. ceptible to Nosema. And the effect was consistent even when Neonics have been demonstrated to impair the honeybee’s bees received neonics in amounts too small to be detected in foraging capabilities, memory and navigation systems, undermining their ability to survive and aid their hive. In one study, their system. “The only reason we knew the bees had exposure led by French scientist Mickaël Henry, researchers tagged [to neonicotinoid pesticides],” says vanEngelsdorp, “is because honeybees with GPS trackers and released them. Some bees we exposed them.” received a dose of neonic equal to real-world exposures while Beekeepers rejoiced. “They really sounded like they found the controls received no neonics. The bees fed pesticide proved something big,” says Dave Hackenberg, a central Pennsylvania two to three times more likely to die without returning to the beekeeper. “They were like, ‘This is it.’ ” hive and sharing their food. “We really felt confident,” says Bret Adee, co-owner of Adee Such deaths can add up. Honeybee colonies can total tens Honey Farms in South Dakota. “These were the guys everyone of thousands of bees, enough to withstand natural cyclical would listen to, and now we were going to get something done.” losses. But foraging bees last only a few weeks at best. Early But nothing happened. deaths force premature worker bees out to forage, leading to a A confirming study surfaced quickly; a French team of scientists actually beat vanEngelsdorp and Pettis into print. But weaker colony of weaker bees. neonics remained in wide use. The deluge beekeepers expected Worse, as Pettis and vanEngelsdorp demonstrated, exposure to neonics also appears to compromise the bee’s immune — of scientists, nailing down the problem, of regulatory agencies, rushing to act — never materialized. And today, the system. A recent scientific literature review conducted by neonic lies right at the heart of that Rachel Carson paradox. researchers in the U.K., Japan, France and Italy concluded Neonics are what’s known as a systemic insecticide, meanthat exposure to systemic insecticides, including neonics, ing they spread throughout the tissue, pollen and nectar of renders bees more susceptible to numerous diseases. Further, the treated plant. Companies, including Bayer and Syngenta, exposure increases the mortality rate from illnesses that honeybee colonies usually shrug off. create varying formulas of neonics, which can be applied to This causal link has eluded researchers because the factors seeds or growing crops. The neonic entered broad use in the occur concurrently, according to the report. Diseases and parU.S. in the late 1990s and quickly became ubiquitous, used on asites comprise the immediate cause of bee declines. Pesticides millions of acres of corn, cotton, soybeans, canola and more, are a key underlying factor. The January 2016 paper, pubaccounting for about $2.5 billion in sales. lished in Environment International, identifies two popular Jay Vroom, CEO and spokesman at CropLife America, a neonics, clothianidin and imidacloprid, as disturbing immune trade partnership of seed and pesticide manufacturers, says signaling in the bee, promoting the replication of illnesses like studies measuring the effect of neonics on bees in field conditions “consistently demonstrate no negative effects.” deformed wing virus (DWV). This finding is key, the authors Scientists say the picture is complicated. Regulatory agenwrite, because DWV is commonly found in collapsed colonies. cies devote most of their energy to answering two questions: Immune suppression also escalates over time, perhaps eluding How much of a given chemical is required to kill a non-target typical insecticide field studies. insect outright, and how likely is it that beneficial species will “We’re talking about synergistic effects,” says Pettis.

ALEX WILD

$30 billion

March 2017 DISCOVER

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Those scientists remain anonymous, fearing career reprisals, but the allegations are serious: watered-down findings, retracted studies, indefinite delays in receiving agency approvals to publish controversial papers. Four of those scientists were working on issues related to polWHACK-A-MOLE linator declines, says Jeff Ruch, PEER’s execu“We call it the ‘whack-a-mole’ theory of bee tive director. science,” says Hackenberg, the commercial beeChavonda Jacobs-Young, USDA-Agricultural keeper in central Pennsylvania. “People who stick Research Service administrator, denies any such their head too far above ground on the subject of problem, saying that “scientific integrity and pesticides get whacked.” rigorous science are of the utmost importance This kind of talk smacks of conspiracy. to us.” However, the alignment of self-interests leaves The USDA inspector general, however, plotting and planning unnecessary. Big agriculannounced in early 2016 that she’d received a tural companies pay many millions annually “significant volume” of scientific censorship in political donations and lobbying. The politicomplaints, enough to trigger an investigation. cians receiving all of this attention and money determine the Pettis himself may have been a victim. In summer 2014, dwindling budgets at agencies like the EPA and USDA. he was demoted, just two months after he testified before In late 2014, EPA scientists released a study showing that Congress. “I was asked by the [ag] committee to restrict my neonic seed treatments produce no significant increase in testimony to the Varroa mite,” says Pettis. But under questioning, he declared that neonics raise the danger for bees to crop yield. The reason is simple, even predictable: Each year, “a new level.” soil-based pests, targeted by seed treatments, only pop up in While no one at the USDA ever mentioned his testimony as about 10 percent of America’s cropland. But instead of dialing back pesticide use, scientists at USDA publicly rejected the main reason for his demotion, Pettis says, he heard rumblings that he had angered people downtown. the EPA’s findings. The controversy over bee declines has driven Pettis and In recent years, allegations of scientific suppression have vanEngelsdorp — Batman and Robin, once poised to save the grown louder. In fall 2015, Jonathan Lundgren, an entomologist in the USDA’s Agricultural Research office who is now bees — to separate scientific corners. the director of the nonprofit research Ecdysis Foundation, Pettis even retired early from his post at USDA-ARS, in filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that his supervilarge part because he says he felt “muzzled” by government sors levied a pair of bogus suspensions on him to prevent policies that prohibit him from saying anything that might his publicizing the dangers of chemical pesticides. Attorneys even be “construed” as reflecting on policy. “Chemicals,” he for a group called Public Employees for Environmental says, “need to be used when indicated by signs or risk of pest Responsibility (PEER), an alliance of science professionals infestation, as opposed to prophylactically.” that represented Lundgren in court, alleged that an addiI interviewed vanEngelsdorp, who sounded a different note tional nine USDA scientists also sought help. in 2015, in his office at the University of Maryland, where he runs the Bee Informed Partnership, a consortium that includes government, industry and beekeeping constituents. He says the Varroa mites are a big problem, and typified pesticides as a lesser concern. “As a scientist,” vanEngelsdorp says, “I am motivated by the data.” He recently published a pair of papers that deepen the debate. In the first one, published online last April in Apidologie, he surveyed beekeepers and samples over five years from 41 states. He found that the Varroa mite is more prevalent than suspected, even when beekeepers follow good practices, and a significant vector for disease. And in a September study in Nature Scientific Reports, he found that exposure to multiple chemicals in a colony correlates with high rates of colony deaths. The evidence, gathered from 91 bee colonies owned by three commercial beekeepers, showed just Entomologist Jeffrey Pettis, who has since retired from the USDA, was demoted two months after testifying before Congress about neonicotinoids and their effect on bee health. trace amounts of neonics but did find that

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In recent years, allegations of scientific suppression have grown louder.

STEPHEN AUSMUS/USDA-ARS

“Everyone wants an easy answer, a sole culprit, but neonics don’t seem to be the single driver. What they are is a significant factor.” This powerful data has generated conflict, however, both inside and outside the halls of science.

The parasitic Varroa mite feeds off of both adult honeybees and developing larvae. Originally native to Asia, Varroa mites were accidentally introduced to the U.S. in the 1980s.

Varroa mites travel from hive to hive by attaching to an adult host

FROM LEFT: ALEX WILD (2); BEE INFORMED PARTNERSHIP

fungicides are more prevalent than thought and closely correlate with bee deaths. The finding seemed to slightly push vanEngelsdorp, who commented in a news release at the time that we need to “make sure we only use the products we need, when we need them.” Former commercial beekeeper David Mendes, who serves with vanEngelsdorp on the Bee Informed Stakeholder Advisory Board, praises his ethics and rigor but says the politics are important. “I think Dennis would need the evidence to be beyond incontrovertible before he could take any stand on pesticides,” says Mendes. “That’s an even higher standard than science usually requires.” Darren Cox’s personal enlightenment about the ways in which science can be subverted reached full bloom when the USDA mounted a series of workshops on the stressors affecting bee health. The agency invited him to two meetings covering mites, viruses and bee nutrition. Agency representatives assured him for months, he says, that a pesticides roundtable would follow. Then, he says, “They told us, ‘There isn’t going to be any meeting on pesticides.’ ” Cox readily acknowledges that his bees are “afflicted by a variety of stressors.” But talking about this decision, his frustration shows. “The USDA’s own website, on the science of bee health, lists four stressors, including pesticides,” he says. “But that’s the one thing they wouldn’t hold a meeting about. Now, why is that?”

“THE HONEY HUM” On the last day of my trip to Utah, at a peak time of day for bee foraging, Cox took me to a bee yard wedged tightly between a farm and a major road. Arrayed before us were at least three prime bee-attractors: milkweed, safflower and thistle, in full bloom. I expected Cox to open the top box on one of the “bee stacks,” to check on their health. But instead he walked right through the bee yard to the surrounding field. “You hear that?” he asked. “Hear what?” I responded. “Exactly,” he said. “The sky should be filled with bees, and you should hear them. We call it ‘the honey hum.’ ” The sky was empty, and the only noise was the sound of the wind. His bees, many tens of thousands of them, crawled and

Bees born with deformed wing virus emerge with crumpled, misshapen wings and die within days. The virus is one of several closely associated with Varroa infestations.

hovered listlessly around their hives. Neonics are not so prevalent by Cox’s bee yards, but other chemicals are, including Lorsban, which attacks the nervous system. Further, as a commercial pollinator, Cox comes into contact with all the chemicals, including neonics, used in the areas he visits, and those chemicals can wind up in his bees. Immediately after witnessing this dismal scene, Cox took me to a bee yard where he keeps another trove of bees, up in the mountains, away from any development or farms. There, the sound was unmistakable — a warm buzz. The prospect of weaker bees, which fail to forage even in abundant habitat, is not a product of beekeepers’ imaginations. Scientists like Pettis, Lundgren and vanEngelsdorp seem to agree on this: Bees are less vigorous than before. Of course, they are also dying. Over the winter, 2015-2016, fellow beekeepers called Cox and reported record losses. Hackenberg lost 90 percent of his stock, saying they “disappeared” just like they did during colony collapse. Cox is suffering, too. He recently had to make up the loss of 30 percent of his hives. The bad year, however, might actually turn out to be a good thing. The price per hive for crop pollination continues to increase. Soon the plight of the honeybee might force such massive cost increases that angry citizens will demand change. In April 2016, a group of Bayer shareholders publicly demanded that corporation executives “turn away” from neonics because they are linked to bee declines. In addition, Cox and his fellow beekeepers have become increasingly political, writing letters of protest about Pettis’ demotion, contributing significant funding to a new, private lab for Lundgren — the whistleblower who has now left the USDA — and looking for ways to provoke action. Toward the end of a day spent checking on his suffering bees, Cox pointed his truck up a steep mountainside in the Cache Valley and expressed his newfound sense of place in this scientific debate. “Whatever feeling we once had — that this was all going to go smoothly or in some typical, orderly process, and science was just going to figure this out and we’d get back to business — is long gone,” he says. “This is a fight.” D Steve Volk is a contributing editor at Discover.

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Her name lost to the ages, the mummy now known as The Beauty of Xiaohe is at least 3,500 years old. She was found in a tomb complex in western China, along with the remains of hundreds of other members of her lost culture.

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They lived lives of prestige and power. In death, these women still command attention.

SABINA LOUISE PIERCE

BY NATHANIEL SCHARPING

here is something disconcerting about looking at the face of someone who has long departed from this world and realizing that they look just like you. That connection to the past has long intrigued archaeologists, for whom mummies represent an opportunity to gain firsthand information about ancient cultures. Preserved tissues hold a treasure-trove of information: the diseases individuals had, their diet, their genetic information, the microbes they carried with them and, in many cases, clues about the politics and culture of their time. Our minds may leap to Egypt at the word mummy, but cultures across the world have developed techniques meant to forestall decomposition. For many of these peoples, mummification preserved the perceived connection between the physical body and the immortal soul — just as they needed each other in life, so too were soul and body linked in the afterlife. In many cultures, mummification was also a status symbol. Preparing a body took significant time and effort, which meant the process wasn’t available to just anyone. Receiving such lavish treatment signaled to others that you were revered and admired. While King Tut is arguably the most famous mummy, many of the others found around the world are women. Young and old, these eternal princesses have taken on a second life as cultural and scientific ambassadors for the civilizations they left behind. When they were alive, they were women of significance. In death, they may be even more so.

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Lady Dai’s well-preserved mummy is a popular museum exhibit in China’s Hunan Province (top right), along with a reconstruction of how she might have looked in life (above). Despite the wrinkled appearance of her extremities, her limbs and skin were pliable enough for a recent autopsy (right).

CHINA

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he was a minor aristocrat, but Lady Dai clearly enjoyed the sumptuous trappings of her role as the wife of a provincial nobleman during the Han Dynasty in the second century B.C. Buried deep within a hillside in south-central China, her perfectly preserved tomb was discovered in 1972 by workers digging an air raid shelter. The small room is filled with the objects that defined her comfortable life: exquisite lacquerware, dresses, slippers, beauty products and containers of her favorite meals, including swans and other birds. Lady Dai’s veins are still filled with blood, and nearly all of her soft tissues are intact. Her skin is pliable enough that researchers were able to bend her arms and legs. One of the world’s bestpreserved mummies, Lady Dai is so well-kept that Chinese doctors were able to perform an autopsy more than 2,000 years after her death. They found that it was a love of the good life that probably took her out of it. She may have been pampered, but Lady Dai was anything but healthy. Although she was only around 50, the autopsy revealed a litany of health complications that included high cholesterol, diabetes, hypertension and schistosomiasis, a parasitic infection. Despite these ailments, Lady Dai maintained her lavish lifestyle until the very end, when poor health caught up to her.

“She overindulged, perhaps in a feast … and then she had a heart attack and that was the end of her,” says Charles Higham, a researcher at the University of Otago in New Zealand, who has studied Lady Dai extensively. In keeping with her station, Lady Dai was buried in a tomb that also contained her husband and son, though their bodies were not so well-preserved. She was wrapped in 10 layers of silk and laid to rest in a series of four nested coffins covered in lacquer. To keep out air and water, the tomb builders encased her entire cypress wood sepulcher in a layer of charcoal and kaolin clay several feet thick. Archaeologists also found traces of mercury in her coffin, indicating that the toxic metal may have been used as an antibacterial agent. “The Han had the idea that if you wanted to go into the afterlife and live forever, you had to preserve the body,” says Higham. “They were no fools, you know, they knew all about decomposition … which is why they took such pains to wrap her [and seal her tomb].” Most Chinese nobles of this period made attempts to preserve their bodies after death, but few succeeded. Many of them were laid to rest in jade coffins or even jade suits of armor under the misguided notion the precious stone would protect them from decay. Lady Dai endured, however, simply because she was so thoroughly sealed from the environment.

FROM TOP: GARY TODD (3); HUNAN PROVINCIAL MUSEUM; ALL MAPS BY JAY SMITH

LAVISH LIFE

THE SIBERIAN

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: INSTITUTE OF ARCHEOLOGY AND ETHNOGRAPHY/SIBERIAN BRANCH OF RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE (2); CHARLES O’REAR; RIA NOVOSTI/SCIENCE SOURCE

RUSSIA

ound in Siberia’s Altai Mountains, the mummified remains of the Ice Maiden lay for millennia in an undisturbed tomb, surrounded by sacrificial offerings and valuable possessions. When Russian archaeologist Natalie Polosmak exhumed her body in 1993, locals decried the removal of the mummy, which they believed to be the remains of a legendary princess. Finds at her burial complex do indeed indicate the maiden was an important member of the Pazyryk people, who roamed southeastern Siberia more than 2,000 years ago. Archaeologists working at the site found the remains of six horses — a costly sacrifice among the nomadic Pazyryk — complete with saddles and gold-trimmed harnesses. The excavation team also found the bodies of a teenager and a man with a fatal head injury, perhaps

killed to accompany the maiden to the afterlife. The maiden herself was wrapped in a silk tunic from India, stained with dyes of exotic origin, possibly from as far away as the Mediterranean coast. With her was an ornate Chinese mirror and a small pouch filled with cannabis. A burial in permafrost, as well as an elaborate mummification process, preserved her. Her embalmers separated her head from her body and pulled out cartilage, eyes and sinuses. Her breastbone, rib cartilage and internal organs were also removed before the body cavity was stuffed with grasses and sewn up with horsehair. Researchers also detected evidence of mercury on her body. Even though she was no older than 30, an eclectic collection of tattoos crowds her skin. The

menagerie includes beasts both mythical and real, including a stylized, fantastical deer adorning her left shoulder. Unfortunately, we know little about who the Ice Maiden actually was during her time on Earth. She was probably in pain for the last several months of it, though, based on evidence from medical imaging and forensic analysis. Possibly weakened from what appears to be breast cancer — MRI scans revealed abnormal tissue growth that may have been malignant tumors — she fell from her horse. The fall injured her right hip and shoulder; she also suffered a blow to the head. Even then, researchers think she may have hung on to life for some time before finally succumbing, based on healing at the fracture sites. During this period, she probably relied on cannabis to soothe her pain, and the psychedelic visions that likely resulted may have given her status as a shaman or healer, according to Polosmak. The fact that she was buried alone — the other individuals were found in a separate part of the grave complex — may be another sign of her special status. The presence of cannabis in her tomb may not be that meaningful, though, says Adrienne Mayor, who wrote about the maiden in The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World. Most of the Pazyryk people were found buried with cannabis, and Mayor doesn’t believe that she was necessarily a priestess or medicine woman — she could have just been a woman of high standing attempting to cope with debilitating pain.

Reconstructions of the Ice Maiden’s tattoos (above) and wardrobe (below) are typical of the richly symbolic Pazyryk culture. Her body (left) underwent an elaborate mummification process before burial in Siberia’s permafrost (lower left).

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Some five centuries after her death as an offering to the gods, La Doncella appears to be sleeping peacefully. She was found in 1999 on Llullaillaco, one of South America’s tallest mountains (left). Researcher Johan Reinhard discovered her near another sacrificial victim (below) and items such as a comb and bags of food.

ARGENTINA

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igh among the Andes in Argentina, La Doncella, the maiden, was taken to the top of a mountain and left to die. Some 500 years ago, she was a capacocha, a sacrifice offered to the gods by the Inca in exchange for continued prosperity. Not just anyone was fit to be a capacocha. Children were selected from among the villages, likely chosen for their beauty and purity. The boys were taken to the Incan capital of Cuzco and sacrificed immediately; the girls were sent to compounds where they assisted priests. These chosen girls, called aclla, helped prepare chicha, a fermented corn beverage, and other ritual items, says Johan Reinhard, an independent researcher who has done extensive work on high-altitude archaeological sites. He discovered La Doncella’s body in 1999 just beneath the summit of Llullaillaco, one of the tallest mountains in South America. During annual religious ceremonies, or in extreme circumstances such as severe drought, the most perfect of the

aclla would be chosen to become capacocha and offered as tribute. Preparatory rituals could be lengthy and sometimes involved a monthslong procession that wound its way from village to village through the empire, each stop an opportunity for the residents to celebrate the sacrificial victim’s passage. During these final months, La Doncella, in her early teens, would have been treated like royalty. Chemical analysis of her hair shows a dramatic change in diet, as well as regular doses of coca leaves and alcohol from a special ritual beer. These substances were thought to enhance spiritual experiences but were likely also used to ensure that the children remained in a state of drugged compliance. La Doncella’s journey ended some 22,000 feet above sea level in the mountains. Her body was discovered tucked into a hollow in the rock, head slumped sleepily onto her chest. She was dressed in finely woven alpaca fur and adorned with ornaments of gold and silver. With her was a spondylus shell, a type of mollusk native to Ecuador and highly prized by the Inca, for whom it likely signified the life-giving water that sustained their crops. The young woman died peacefully, in all likelihood. There is no sign of trauma, and it was probably a combination of coca leaves, alcohol and the deadly cold that allowed her to slip into a final sleep. To the Inca, however, a sacrificial death may have been more transcendental than final. According to Reinhard, the children who served as sacrifices were in effect deified and worshipped as intermediaries to the gods.

FROM TOP: JOHAN REINHARD; MARIA STENZEL/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE; REINHARD; STENZEL

OF THE ANDES

THE BEAUTY OF

TOP: MATT ROURKE/AP PHOTOS (2). BOTTOM: COURTESY OF VICTOR MAIR

CHINA

n the middle of the desolate Taklamakan Desert, on the far western edge of China and surrounded by forbidding mountains, a necropolis descends for five levels into the sands. Inside the Xiaohe tomb complex are about 300 burials dating to around 2000 B.C. The bodies belong to an ancient society of farmers and herders who once managed to eke out a living in their arid surroundings. First found by a local hunter in the early 20th century but not extensively excavated until 2002, the burial complex’s extreme environment was a boon to archaeologists. The low humidity and freezing winters spared some of the bodies from the ravages of decomposition. And none endured better than the Beauty of Xiaohe, whose body has survived even down to her delicate eyelashes. “She’s stunning. I call her the Marlene Dietrich of the desert,” says Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her name lost to the ages, the Beauty wore a tall hat of white felt and fur-lined boots. Her body was surrounded by grave goods, including an intricately carved wood phallus placed on her chest; in the harsh climate, fertility was likely highly prized, says Mair. Overt sexual symbolism adorns the graves, and both men and women were buried with wooden decorations representing sexual organs. Their erstwhile homeland falls within China’s borders now, but the bodies — many with red or light brown hair — have distinctly Western features.

So where did these desert dwellers come from? The clues we have only hint at their possible origins. DNA tests indicate that their ancestry was a mix of Eurasian populations. Mair believes, based on their genetic signatures and fragmentary evidence about their language, that they came from somewhere between southeastern Europe and the Ural Mountains. Over the course of generations, they must have worked their way east across the windswept steppes, moving herds from pasture to pasture. They settled in the Taklamakan Desert, Mair believes, because it offered protection in the form of isolation. Their surroundings were desolate, he says, but they must have built a vibrant society, as evidenced by their richly symbolic burials. “Human beings are very adaptable and no matter where they settle, no matter what difficulties they face, they try to create some quality of life,” Mair says. “You don’t have to have luxurious conditions and material wealth to have an interesting, meaningful life.”

Museum visitors got an up-close view of the Beauty of Xiaohe during a 2011 exhibit in Philadelphia, part of an international tour. The event also re-created part of the tomb complex that preserved her, along with hundreds of other members of a lost culture, for 4,000 years. Marked by massive wooden posts, the necropolis (below) extends deep into the sands and is still a forbidding sight in the arid Taklamakan Desert of western China.

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Carved during her lifetime, the sculpture now known as the Berlin Bust (above) captures Nefertiti’s legendary beauty. Her fate remains a mystery, hinted at in murals in Egypt’s Valley of the Queens (left) and potentially hidden behind a wall of Tutankhamun’s tomb, scanned in 2015 and 2016 (below).

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efertiti may be the most famous missing woman in the world. Her story has all the elements of a good mystery: a beautiful woman, a missing body, political intrigue and a decadeslong debate over her fate. We know that she existed, thanks to hieroglyphic writings that indicate she was a queen and mother of six during Egypt’s 18th dynasty, around 1300 B.C. And we have an idea of what she might have looked like from the Berlin Bust, an iconic piece by the sculptor Thutmose created during her lifetime that now resides in a German museum. That’s about all we know, though. What her role was in life, whether she was Tutankhamun’s mother and the circumstances surrounding her death all remain unknown. Identifying her body would answer some of those questions, but we have not yet discovered a tomb bearing her name. That’s not for lack of trying, of course. The search has gone on for decades, with competing and often hotly contested theories. The latest chapter in the saga began in 2015, when University of Arizona Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves claimed to have discovered evidence of another chamber in Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings, based on radar scans. He theorized that the room could contain Nefertiti, inciting a storm of controversy. Further scans cast doubt on his conclusions, however, and it appears that the search for her body has again come up empty-handed. Another theory holds that a mummy called “the younger lady,” discovered in 1898, is actually Nefertiti. The mummy was found in a side chamber of the tomb

of Amenhotep II, the greatgrandfather of Nefertiti’s husband. Its age is right, and other clues point to a royal burial, including the symbolic positioning of her arms. A comparative analysis of her facial features indicated a match to the Berlin Bust. But other researchers believe, based on a controversial DNA study, that the younger lady is Tutankhamun’s mother — but not Nefertiti. The controversy over Nefertiti’s resting place is in some ways an extension of the tumult she experienced in life. The pharaoh Akhenaten, her husband, upended centuries of polytheistic tradition and converted Egypt to the worship of the sun god Aten, even going so far as to construct a new capital city some 250 miles to the north of the previous capital, Thebes. This swept the country into disarray, and the changes he wrought would ultimately be overturned. During this time, some Egyptologists believe that Nefertiti came to rule as a pharaoh in her own right, possibly under the name Smenkhkare. She would have reigned for no more than a year or two. When she died, pharaoh or not, her royal status meant she would have been mummified according to tradition: Priests would have removed her organs and washed her body with a solution of natron, a naturally occurring soda ash similar to modern baking soda. They then would have placed packets of linen, resin and natron in her body cavities and anointed her body with oils and resin. Finally, they would have wrapped layer upon layer of resin-soaked linen around her body, sealing the queen in an antimicrobial shroud. While we know that she lived, and what would have happened to her after death, we are still missing the critical piece of evidence that would tie her story together: Nefertiti herself. It’s a cold case for the ages.

THIS PAGE FROM TOP: VPC TRAVEL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; SUPERSTOCK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; MOHAMED EL-SHAHED/AFP/GETTY IMAGES. OPPOSITE: JAY SMITH

THE SEARCH FOR

Put simply, mummification is the full or partial preservation of soft tissues, accomplished by arresting the process of cell disintegration and bacterial growth that begins soon after death. The many ways to become a mummy share two characteristics: the absence of liquid water, and an environment free of, or at least hostile to, bacteria.

Natural Mummification DESICCATION

HERMETIC ENVIRONMENTS If a burial chamber or coffin is sealed tightly enough, water and foreign microbes cannot get in, leaving the corpse largely untouched.

In extremely dry environments, moisture leaves the body rapidly. Without water, the bacteria that usually begin to eat away at tissues are unable to survive, and the formation of celland organ-destroying enzymes is halted, leaving the body intact, if a bit shriveled.

NATURALLY ANAEROBIC ENVIRONMENTS Some cultures in Europe buried bodies in nearby peat bogs; the oxygenfree environment kept microbes out as well.

FREEZING Bacteria cannot survive without liquid water; keeping a body below freezing halts microbial activity.

Artificial Mummification

Although practices differed across cultures, most methods of artificial mummification involved removing the internal organs and replacing them with grasses or linens to re-create the body’s original shape. The body was then closed up and usually treated with some sort of chemical agent. This could be a salt solution, as in the case of the Egyptians, or mercury or some other mixture. Finally, the preparers wrapped the body in cloth and placed it in a sealed coffin.

The Ultimate DIY: Self-Mummification

This rare type of mummification was practiced mostly by Buddhist monks who attempted to attain divinity by purposefully preserving their bodies. The process was long and painful, and involved surviving solely on a diet of tree bark, pine needles, nuts and berries for up to a decade. The ascetic diet of slow starvation eliminated body fat — which tends to decay faster than other types of tissue — and built up chemical compounds toxic to bacteria associated with decomposition. Just before death, the individual would bury himself alive with the help of other monks. D Nathaniel Scharping is a staff writer at Discover.

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BY YVETTE CENDES ILLUSTRATIONS BY OCTAVI NAVARRO

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Cosmology deals with the big questions of the universe, often the same questions that keep philosophers up at night. When did the universe begin? How did it start? Has the universe always been expanding? (For the record, the answers are: about 13.8 billion years ago, in a highdensity state that rapidly expanded called the Big Bang and yes, but not always at the same speed.) But here’s a question they haven’t figured out yet: How’s it all going to end? It’s a big question all right, but we’ve made surprising headway toward an answer. In the last years of the 20th century, the astrophysical community was stunned to learn that the universe was driving itself apart. For decades, scientists had known that distant galaxies all move away

No one knows what dark energy is, so we can’t be sure how it will behave in the future. In 2003, Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College proposed a new theory of the expansion of the universe where the rate of acceleration keeps increasing over time. Imagine a driver who keeps a foot on the gas pedal of a car with no top acceleration. As the car goes faster and faster — the speed of the velocity change itself increasing over time — the car would eventually fly apart in pieces as friction took its toll. A similar thing happens to a universe with relentless acceleration: Galaxies would be destroyed, the solar system would unbind and eventually all the planets would burst asunder as the rapid expansion of space rips apart its very atoms. Finally, our universe would end in an explosion, a singularity of literally infinite energy.

from us, with the farther ones moving the fastest. The only way this makes sense is if the universe itself is expanding. Given all the matter in the cosmos, the force of gravity should be slowing down that expansion. But when cosmologists calculated just how much it’s slowed down, they got a negative result — the expansion of the universe is speeding up! Nobody knows what’s driving the acceleration, so cosmologists have dubbed that mystery dark energy. It is so dominant (about 69 percent the total content of the entire cosmos) that dark energy quickly became a part of any discussions about the final end of the universe. And while there are no definite answers yet, those discussions have come up with a few interesting possibilities.

Current theories predict that if this so-called Big Rip is in our future, it will take another 22 billion years to arrive. But there are still many details to fill in, and scientists like Vanderbilt University mathematician Marcelo Disconzi will provide those details. His work originally focused on bulk viscosity — the measurement of a fluid’s resistance to expansion or contraction — and how moving fluids behave when approaching the speed of light. (That can happen in extreme astronomical situations, such as an exploding star.) No one had successfully modeled how a viscous fluid would act at relativistic speeds, but working with colleagues in the Vanderbilt physics department, Disconzi successfully did it. For decades, scientists had been trying to link mainstream physics’ understanding of viscosity with a related concept: cosmic viscosity, which

tells us about the universe’s resistance to accelerating expansion. The universe is modeled as a fluid, in large scales, so Disconzi’s work proved instrumental in starting to understand cosmic viscosity. He showed for the first time that the driving force behind the Big Rip — if it happens — could be the universe’s cosmic viscosity. The results are interesting, but Disconzi acknowledges that Big Rip theories still require a bit of work to make sense, particularly the part about infinite energy being released. “In physics, finding an infinity is likely an indication that we are missing part of the puzzle,” he says. An improved theory might show that the universe’s expansion rate doesn’t really go all the way to infinity, no matter how large the Big Rip becomes. For now, as with many cosmological theories, we’ll have to wait and see.

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Many current theories suggest dark energy is a cosmological constant, a kind of uniform energy that exists throughout space. “If the cosmological constant is the dominant thing in the universe,” explains Mark Trodden, a co-director for the Penn Center for Particle Cosmology at the University of Pennsylvania, then instead of speeding up unsustainably and tearing itself apart, the universe would just keep expanding — forever. “If the cosmological constant continues to dominate, the universe will continue to accelerate and that’s it.” “That’s it” might not sound like much, but it’s a bleak way to go. As the cosmological constant continues to drive the acceleration of the universe, all the galaxies outside our immediate neighborhood will be too far away to be visible in a few trillion years — their light will simply never reach us. Entropy would continue to increase as well: Star formation itself will end in 100 trillion years as all the matter to fuel them is exhausted. Black holes will evaporate, matter itself will eventually decay into radiation and the universe will be a cold, lightless, lifeless place for the rest of eternity. This dark future is known as the Big Freeze. Dark energy is so baffling that it has taken the better part of two decades to understand the theory enough to even design experiments to study it, let alone figure out if the Big Freeze lies in our future. (Not that we could

Ask a theoretical cosmologist how the universe will end, and one of the first things you’ll hear is how many options are still on the table. “It’s very difficult to tell how the universe will end just from local measurements,” explains the University of Pennsylvania’s Mark Trodden. There’s little we know for sure; in a universe of infinite possibilities, anything can happen. But with the emergence of dark energy, a few of the previous contenders for our ultimate fate are now much less likely.

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do anything about it if it did, of course.) Trodden is a theorist for one such planned experiment at the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, currently under construction, that will image the entire sky every few nights at unprecedented detail. When it “switches on” in 2022, the telescope will study billions of galaxies every night, giving astrophysicists an unparalleled ability to test galactic behavior. By analyzing how gravity affects galaxies’ light, and analyzing their three-dimensional positions and movements in space, the scientists should have enough information to finally unlock some of dark energy’s secrets. Does it arise from quantum fluctuations in the vacuum of space? Is it just a part of gravity we’ll have to add to the laws of physics? Understanding such details is crucial if we want to figure out whether we’re heading for the Big Freeze — or something else.

The Big Crunch

The Dyson Scenario

The Big Crunch is a classic scenario for how the universe could end. The driving idea: What if the expansion of the universe does not last forever? At some point, the universe might stop growing because of the gravitational pull of all the matter inside of it, and then it would start to collapse back into itself. The final result would be a universe that reaches a tiny singularity, a dark reflection of the Big Bang. There was even some speculation that a “Big Crunch” could produce a Big Bounce right afterward, Big Banging a new universe into creation. Perhaps our universe was merely one iteration of an infinite string of Big Bangs, Crunches and Bounces. Unfortunately, the discovery of dark energy dealt the Big Crunch a deathblow, since it suggests the universe will expand forever. Unless it turns out dark energy can change its nature dramatically, the Big Crunch seems an unlikely way for the universe to end.

One important question concerning the ultimate fate of the universe concerns its inhabitants: Can intelligence and consciousness overcome entropy, the eventual wearing down of our universe? In the 1970s, Freeman Dyson was one of the first physicists to contemplate the end of the universe using modern cosmology. He proposed that in the distant future, intelligent beings might figure out a way to “cheat” a Big Freeze-like scenario. First, as the end times approach, the beings would need to store a finite amount of energy in the universe; they would then use half this energy to power their thoughts (the only remains of their super-advanced lives). Once this was used up, the beings would enter a state of non-energy consumption; they’d be in stasis, while the energy remained. The universe would continue to cool, running down, but after a certain point another half of the remaining energy reserves would be released, thanks to an as-yet-unknown technology created by the beings, allowing them to think once again.

They’d effectively come back to life, never aware of the break in their thoughts. Eventually, they’d use up their available energy and return to stasis, with more energy in reserve. They could keep this cycle going infinitely and, from their perspective, never face the end of the universe. The beings’ thinking sessions would slow over time, but there could be an infinite number of them through this energy rationing. Who would mind slow thought processes if time stretches on forever? Dyson’s concept on eternal intelligence was a good attempt at tackling how the universe’s end might not be civilization’s, but like the Big Crunch, it can’t overcome dark energy’s implications. An accelerating universe means that eventually parts currently in contact will be isolated from each other, and energy stored in these areas would be inaccessible. As such, while some theorists have speculated our future descendants could transfer information to new “baby” universes via wormholes or black hole formation, it appears inevitable that after some point, intelligence in our own universe will simply be impossible.

Of course, there’s always the chance that dark energy won’t actually matter. The other scenarios we’ve considered assume that our universe is all there is. But what if there’s more out there, and our universe is but a small part of a multiverse? Could these other universes affect the ultimate fate of our own? The short answer is yes. “Imagine you go to a very, very large scale — much larger than our current observable universe,” explains Jonathan Braden, a cosmologist at University College London. While our own universe is homogenous and roughly the same everywhere, taking such a large view might reveal that it’s just a tiny pocket with its own physical parameters and laws, different from the larger multiverse. If so, our universe would exist in a state known as a false vacuum, where we wrongly suppose that we exist in the most stable state, but it’s still possible to drop to another one suddenly. Braden explains this would result in a phase transition, a change similar to how water changes from liquid to gas at its boiling point — only for the entire universe. Basically, our cosmos might be like one of the bubbles boiling in a pot of water, he says, just one of many with their own sets of laws and constants. “Eventually these bubbles can run into each other, and from our viewpoint it would be like our universe … collided with another universe.” That would be as bad as it sounds. Such a collision would spell an immediate end to our universe as everything changes to a new state. It could result in a combination of the two universes, or it could create something new entirely. There would be no warning, and nothing we could do about it. What scientists can do, however, is see whether a false vacuum ever existed in our own universe in the very distant past, which could help tell us whether such a collision is likely to happen again. Such a prehistoric false vacuum would necessarily be much smaller than the scale of our universe (just a bubble within our bubble), but it might still leave behind a hint that something curious happened long ago. Braden is part of a research team trying to predict what such a signature would look like. Their prime target is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the oldest light scientists can see, which dates back to when the universe was just 380,000 years old. The team hopes that perhaps a little blip on the otherwise uniform CMB would betray the existence of such a false vacuum in the distant past, as well as provide the first concrete evidence for a multiverse. If we can’t ward off the end of our universe, the least we can do is try to understand it. D Yvette Cendes is a Ph.D. student in astronomy at the Dunlap Institute, University of Toronto. See more of her writing at yvettecendes.com

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The Secret Life of FAT Changes in our DNA can determine much more than the battle of thick versus thin. BY SYLVIA TARA

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It

was a breezy Friday evening in the fall in San Diego. I was a biochemistry Ph.D. student out to dinner with friends after a full week of research, classes and teaching. I’d had a strong interest in biology since grade school, particularly in how the body malfunctions and the inventive ways we treat it. The idea that tiny molecules affected our health, thoughts and quality of life was fascinating to me. Keeping my fat in check had never been easy, and I watched my weight closely. On this day, like every other, I had counted my calories since the morning. I ate a painstakingly balanced combination of grains, proteins and vegetables. I abstained from anything fun — no sugar, carbheavy snacks or alcohol. I had run for 40 minutes, and lifted weights. As I sat down to dinner with my friends, I held steadfast — I ordered a small salad and water. My friend, Lindsey, ordered a beer and burrito and devoured it all. That seemingly trivial event changed everything for me. Lindsey was 4 foot 11 inches and probably about 95 pounds. She never went to the gym. She drank sugary lattes and indiscriminately ate fast food. She worked in the lab all day like me, and hunched over a computer in the evening. Yet somehow this petite woman was able to pack in a large steak burrito, with beans, rice, sour cream, guacamole, cheddar cheese all wrapped in a flour tortilla, and then down a beer as if all this were nothing unusual. She had no guilt afterward, no appearance of worry, she made no comments about feeling sick after eating it or how she would need to run on the treadmill the next morning. Nothing. I felt as though nature was cackling in my face. This was one of the moments in my life that made

me realize that we are not all created equal, at least not when it comes to fat. Just as some people are taller, or produce more sweat, or grow more hair, there are some who simply produce more fat than others. And one of those people happened to be me.

THE THRIFTY GENOTYPE We have all come to accept that our genes determine everything from the color of our eyes to the straightness of our teeth to our height, our talents, even our moods. But strangely, when it comes to fat, we tend to underestimate the effect of genetics. For the most part, fat is considered a personal failing — a punishment for lack of willpower, for eating too much, and for being too lazy to exercise and burn off those calories. Fortunately, science has come to the rescue by showing the many ways genes influence fat. This avenue of research is still new, since we have only recently begun to decode the mysteries of the human genome, but studies are emerging every year. A good example of how our genes can determine fatness is the story of the Pima Indians who crossed the Bering Strait from northern Asia and settled in the Americas approximately 30,000 years ago. One population of the tribe settled near the Gila River in Phoenix, Ariz., and another kept migrating south, making their home in Maycoba, Mexico. The Pima sustained themselves by tilling dry soil to grow squash, corn, beans and cotton, and by hunting small animals and other game. This lifestyle provided them a natural, well-balanced diet, and required them to get plenty of exercise. What worked against the Pima, however, was drought, which occurred several times each century, destroying crops and reducing animal

KENARY820/SHUTTERSTOCK

Fat is considered a personal failing — a punishment for lack of willpower. Fortunately, science has come to the rescue by showing the many ways genes influence fat.

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populations. Famine would follow and only those who could withstand long bouts of hunger managed to survive. The Pima endured these conditions for millennia, and geneticists believe that, over time, their bodies evolved a “thrifty genotype” — a set of genes that enabled them to subsist on very few calories by increasing the efficiency of their metabolism and storing as much energy as possible as fat. For centuries, this genetic adaptation helped to maintain the population. Then, during the mid-19th century, the fate of the two Pima settlements in Phoenix and Maycoba started to diverge, with fascinating consequences. The Arizona Pima started encountering Caucasian migrants in 1850 as they made their way to California in search of gold. The Pima assisted the weary travelers, offering food and protection. The outsiders, feeling welcomed, started staking claims along the Gila River, on which the Pima depended to irrigate their farms. With the ongoing gold rush in California, more settlers arrived, and the new farmers and ranchers started diverting water and land from the Pima. Tensions arose, eventually leading the U.S. government to resettle the Native Americans on a reservation, though the Pimas’ new land didn’t include surrounding hunting lands or water rights to the Gila River. Without sufficient water for their farms, the Pima faced starvation. The government offered food assistance starting as early as the 1930s. It included Western foods such as milk, bacon, cheese, canned meats and dry cereal, as well as flour and lard that the Pima used to make deep-fried bread. The lives of the Native Americans no longer

included farming or hunting, and they became more sedentary. Some started to work in nearby factories, and others joined the armed services. Increasingly, they were introduced to the American lifestyle, and the Arizona Pima started gaining weight — lots of it. The encroaching obesity among the tribe was noticed by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) in 1963, while they were doing an area survey. The rate of obesity and diabetes in the Arizona Pima was so high that the institute established research programs focused on the group to understand why. The institute measured the health of the Arizona Pima every two years. Since 1965, tribe members have voluntarily undergone physical examinations specifically looking at weight, height, body mass index (BMI) and factors for diabetes. The population of overweight Pima Indians was found to be more than three times higher than the U.S. national rate. The Arizona tribe also had drastically higher rates of diabetes. Yet Caucasians living nearby at the time led a similar lifestyle without the same ill effects. The NIDDK researchers also became aware of the Pima who lived in Maycoba, Mexico. As they were genetically similar to the Arizona Indians, the researchers wanted to know if both groups had the same health problems.

SHEDDING THE GUILT Eric Ravussin of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, based in Baton Rouge, La., was one of the first

Pima Chief Antonio Azul (far left) led his tribe in the late 1800s, an era before Western food supplemented their diets. By 1908, a book of medical observations on the Pima and other Southwest tribes noted increased obesity incidence, and included this image of a Ute woman (left). This Pima family (above) was photographed around 1900 outside their adobe home in Arizona.

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FROM LEFT: MASSACRES OF THE MOUNTAINS: A HISTORY OF THE INDIAN WARS OF THE FAR WEST/JACOB PIATT DUNN/HARPER & BROTHERS/1886; BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY BULLETIN 34 PLATE XXII/1908; GRANGER NYC

scientists to make the trek to Maycoba, high in the Sierra Madre. Ravussin remembers, “There were no paved roads. There was nothing there — no electricity, no running water, nothing. No one had cars.” It took researchers eight to 10 hours using a fourwheel-drive vehicle through the rocky terrain to get to the village. The Maycoba Indians still farmed and rode bicycles in lieu of driving cars. For the most part, they maintained the rural lifestyle followed by their ancestors. As a result, the Maycoba Indians were far healthier than their Arizona counterparts. Compared with the Maycoba population, the Arizona Pima obesity rate was 10 times greater among the men, and three times for the women; diabetes was five and a half times higher among the tribe in Arizona. Clearly, the newly moderniz ed lifestyle was taking its toll. The tale of the two tribes illustrates the genetics of fat at work. The Pima would not have survived the frequent famines through the centuries without evolving their thrifty genotype. However, in the modern time of plenty, their genes are a liability, leading to high rates of obesity and diabetes compared with other races. Eventually, analysis of DNA from the Pima suggested that they have variations on certain chromosomes that are linked to fatness. Thanks to their genetic inheritance, their bodies are storing away calories, anticipating a famine that never comes. We can’t change our genes, but science is learning that we can influence how they affect our health. And, as the Pima prove, there may be extra measures we need to adopt to accommodate our genetic peculiarities when it comes to fat. If we can’t lose all the excess weight we’ve stored, at least we can shed some of the guilt associated with it.

Bouchard, now at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, and his team executed two foundational studies that upended the understanding of genetics and weight between 1986 and 1990, before the Human Genome Project was completed. The first study showed that our propensity to gain fat, and where the body stores it, are influenced by genetics. Bouchard put 12 male identicaltwin pairs on a diet of an extra 1,000 daily calories above their normal eating pattern for 84 days. As he expected, the young men put on a significant amount of weight — the average gain was 13 percent. Bouchard observed that related twins were three times more likely to gain the same amount of total body weight, fat percentage and subcutaneous fat — fat just beneath the skin — than unrelated test subjects. For a weight-loss experiment, Bouchard again isolated male identical twins in a research unit for four months. First, he measured the exact calories needed for the twins to maintain their current weights. He then imposed a standardized exercise routine of two hours per day, ultimately inducing a calorie deficit of 53,000 per person over the duration of the study. A s t h e t w i n s s l i m m e d d ow n from exercise, Bouchard looked at body weight, lean mass and fat distribution and found the amount of energy burned during exercise was also influenced by genetics. If one twin burned 80 calories compared with 100 burned by a comparator group during a workout, then the other twin would likely suffer the same metabolic shortcoming. Bouchard found that our genes influence our resting metabolism, fat mass, percent of fat and abdominal visceral fat, and cholesterol levels. He and his colleague Angelo Tremblay discovered one important exception, though — a vital piece of information for those seeking to control their weight. They found that when subjects performed vigorous exercise, genetics didn’t matter as much. Bouchard’s definition of “vigorous” was any exercise that caused metabolism to increase by six times or more over resting metabolism (which can be achieved by running about 4 to 6 mph or cycling about 12 to 16 mph, or doing other activities that produce rapid breathing and sweat within a few minutes).

Compared with the Maycoba population, the Arizona Pima obesity rate was 10 times greater among the men, and three times for the women; diabetes was five and a half times higher among the tribe in Arizona. Clearly, the newly modernized lifestyle was taking its toll.

AMPED-UP METABOLISM Claude Bouchard conducted some of the first studies showing that genes affect fat. After getting his Ph.D. in population genetics and physical anthropology in 1977 from the University of Texas at Austin, Bouchard returned to his native Quebec and started a laboratory at Laval University where he and his staff began studying obesity.

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The lesson is clear: Once we enter a specific range of strenuous exercise, the body kicks in to lose fat, no matter what our genes want.

CALORIE HOARDING New technological advances are allowing for more specific investigation of our genes. For example, individuals with variations in a gene called FTO tend to desire high-calorie foods more often and have more fat as a result. This genetic variation causes an almost twofold increased risk of obesity compared with those who don’t inherit it. Colin Palmer at the University of Dundee in Scotland conducted one study that shows the effects of the FTO gene. He assessed almost 100 schoolchildren to see whether they carried the FTO variant gene or the normal gene. He then evaluated what the children ate by allowing them to take food from a buffet that included an assortment of fruits and vegetables, as well as higher-calorie foods such as chips and chocolate. When he analyzed what they consumed, he noticed that children with the FTO gene variant had eaten more of the higher-calorie, energy-dense foods compared with children with the normal gene. “They had the same amount of food, the same mass of food, it was just the higher-calorie foods,” Palmer says. Not surprisingly, children with the variant gene also had about 4 pounds more body fat. The FTO gene is thought to be expressed not only in the brain, where it increases our desire to eat fattening foods, but also in fat tissue. Harvard Medical School researcher Melina Claussnitzer and her team found that a single variation in the FTO gene caused fat cells that would normally become healthier beige to turn into white fat cells instead. Beige fat cells have the potential to turn into energy-burning brown fat cells when activated by exercise. But in people with the FTO mutation, fewer cells become beige and more turn into energy-storing white cells. So the result of the FTO mutations is a drive to eat higher-calorie foods paired with less calorie burning and more calorie hoarding — a challenging combination for any dieter. Although individuals with variants in their FTO gene have almost double the risk of obesity compared with those who do not inherit the gene, “having the FTO variant doesn’t mean one is destined to be fat. We can still control what goes in our mouths, though it may be more work for some than others,” Palmer explains.

HEAVIER, HEALTHIER Not all fat caused by genetics is a bad thing — and some of it may actually be protective. Ruth Loos is the director of the Genetics of Obesity and Related Metabolic Traits program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. She’s slender, with short, wispy blond hair that frames her angular features. Working with Bouchard, Loos grew fascinated with the genetics of fat and metabolism, and eventually went on to establish her own lab at Mount Sinai. As she set out to design her research, she noticed that many genes being identified were linked to high BMI, which simply compares someone’s weight with their height. Loos realized BMI isn’t the best measure of fatness because it doesn’t separate fat mass from lean tissue like muscle. In other words, if you’re a bodybuilder with only 7 percent fat but a lot of muscle, your BMI will be high, perhaps the same as that of someone who is obese with lower muscle mass. Loos wanted to tease out which sections of DNA had to do with fatness, not just weight. So her team conducted an analysis of the genetic data from 36,626 individuals to see which genes were associated with body fat. From this research, Loos found that fatness was significantly linked to variations in the FTO gene and a gene called IRS1. It was already understood that FTO variations were associated with being overweight, encouraging kids to seek fattier foods, for example. But the linkage of the IRS1 gene to fat was new. As the team analyzed the data, they uncovered a mystery. One variation of the IRS1 gene caused lower fat in men. At first, this seemed like a lucky gene to have. But as Loos analyzed the data further, she saw that while men with this variant indeed had less fat in their arms, legs and trunk, they also had higher triglycerides — fat found in the blood — and lower good cholesterol in their blood and increased insulin resistance, all signs of ill health. How could this be? They were thinner than men without the variant, and thinness should lead to better health, not worse. More puzzling, this variant didn’t seem to affect women in the same way. Loos and her team looked further. Perhaps this adverse metabolic profile was linked to how fat was distributed. Her team reviewed measurements for subcutaneous fat, the healthier fat which sits under the skin, and visceral fat, the unhealthy fat that surrounds the organs. They

The good news is, unless you have one of the very rare genetic mutations that undeniably cause obesity, your genes are just one factor in your weight profile.

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STEVE GSCHMEISSNER/SCIENCE SOURCE

Fat cells, or adipocytes, form an insulating layer that stores energy. Most of each cell’s volume is a large liquid droplet.

found that men with one IRS1 variant (let’s call it variant A) had lower subcutaneous fat and more visceral fat compared with those without the variation. However, the men with variant B were fatter but also healthier. Why would the gene that produces more fat protect you against disease, Loos wondered. Slowly, she and her team pieced together an answer. IRS1 contains the code for a protein that’s involved in mediating cells’ sensitivity to insulin, a hormone that helps the body use sugar and store fats. She found that IRS1 variant A was associated with lower expression of this protein in subcutaneous fat and visceral fat. So, cells in these areas weren’t as sensitive to insulin and weren’t internalizing glucose and fats. This occurred in men much more than in women. In addition, IRS1 variant A was inhibiting the expansion of fat tissue. With no place to go, more fat was hanging around in the blood, causing health issues. On the other hand, those with IRS1 variant B were able to easily expand their fat tissue. So they were a little chubbier because the fats in the blood went where they belonged — into fat. Loos’ findings described a new kind of fat gene. Other gene variants — like mutations in FTO or the gene for leptin, an energy-balancing hormone — had been linked to overeating or fat cell type. But IRS1 was the first that was linked specifically to fat cell creation. When we don’t create new fat cells to house our circulating fats, we’re prone to more diseases. With less fat, we may appear to be healthier, but may actually be in danger of developing diabetes and other diseases.

“Genes that increase your risk of obesity can also protect you from Type 2 diabetes [and] cardiovascular disease and give you an optimal lipid profile,” Loos says. “These are what we call the healthy obesity genes. So these individuals who had the variant to increase fatness actually were good fat storers. They store the fat where it should be stored. And it protects their liver, it protects their muscle, it protects against visceral fat. And that fat protects them against disease as well. So these [good] genes, they do exist.” You can undergo a diagnostic test to find out whether you have any known gene variants that are associated with obesity. If you have such a variant, are you doomed to a life of flabbiness? The good news is, unless you have one of the very rare genetic mutations that undeniably cause obesity, your genes are just one factor in your weight profile. In the end, daily actions matter more. How much we decide to eat, what we eat and how much we choose to exercise will, in the majority of cases, trump our genes. Fat genes like the FTO variant, however, make it harder to stay on track and keep weight down. “You may be genetically susceptible to become obese, but it doesn’t mean that you’re destined to become obese,” Loos says. “Genes load the gun, and environment pulls the trigger.” D

Reprinted from The Secret Life of Fat by Sylvia Tara. Copyright © 2016 by Sylvia Tara. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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SAILING EUROPA’S SEAS

NASA’s planned Europa mission spacecraft will provide the best view we’ve ever had of Jupiter’s icy moon, home to a salty ocean under a thick shell of ice. The probe’s dozens of close approaches will take it as low as 16 miles above the surface, as in this illustration. The mission will return high-resolution photographs, determine the ice thickness with radar and investigate what look like icy plumes erupting from the satellite’s surface. Read the full story by Eric Betz on page 58, and find out how amateur astronomers are contributing to the search for worlds in other star systems, beginning on page 64.  ERNIE MASTROIANNI, ILLUSTRATION BY NASA/JPLCALTECH

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Inside the Historic Mission to Europa After decades of canceled missions and false starts, NASA is finally headed for Carl Sagan’s dream destination. BY ERIC BETZ The first dives to the dark and deep places of our planet revealed a moonscape. Beneath icy waters and far from the Sun’s nourishing light, the planet appeared dead. No plants. No photosynthesis. No photons. But then scientists in submarines began exploring Earth’s single greatest mountain range, the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, which occupies almost a quarter of our world’s surface. Explorers like Robert Ballard call this great rift the Boundary of Creation. Here, our planet bleeds molten blood through some 10,000 active volcanoes and then cools to heal itself. In the mid-1970s, Ballard was among the first to see this other Earth. (In ’85 he discovered the Titanic.) Along the Galapagos Rift, his team came across great white chimneys rising more than a dozen stories. Instead of a desert, they found thriving ecosystems in temperatures that would melt lead. No sunlight could reach such depths. But alien creatures abound in this abyss anyway. Great tube worms towered 10 feet tall alongside clams colonized by symbiotic bacteria. And in decades of expeditions all over Earth, scientists continue to turn up new forms of life that can replicate photosynthesis using only chemicals. Their energy source, their evolutionary origins — even their food chain is distinct from ours. These so-called extremophiles kindle hope that alien life is abundant and, just maybe, nearby. Liquid oceans have been found on Saturn’s moons Titan, Enceladus and possibly Mimas, as well as Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. And scientists have now

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even found signs of ancient oceans on the dwarf worlds Pluto and Ceres. But out of all these water worlds, Europa is still the most enticing. It packs more saltwater than Earth and shows signs of geologic activity, like potential underwater volcanoes, and water vapor plumes spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists also suspect the surface ice mixes with the water below, delivering the nutrients necessary for life. If we find life in only one other place in our solar system, it most likely will swim in the seas of Europa, pulling chemical energy from hydrothermal vents. But the cost has remained too high for that draw to translate into an

If we find life in only one other place in our solar system, it most likely will swim in the seas of Europa, pulling chemical energy from hydrothermal vents. actual space mission — until now. In just five short years, NASA will launch the first mission to explore Europa and possibly even land on it. After decades of false hopes and well-conceived missions that proved too expensive, the space agency has officially greenlighted a multibilliondollar mission that could help answer the ultimate question: Are we alone in the cosmos? The Europa Multiple

Flyby Mission isn’t the first one on the books, but it does appear to be the one that will make it. “We’re all saying it looks like this one’s gonna stick,” says Europa mission Deputy Project Scientist Dave Senske of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “Everything’s moving in the right direction where we’ve got a lot of support from NASA, we’ve got support in Congress — the stars are aligning. It is Europa’s time.”

LIQUID WATER ON EUROPA? In 1977, the same year divers first explored Earth’s hydrothermal vents, two very different explorers of the deep launched on a path to the first reconnaissance of another ocean world — Europa. Voyager 1 visited Saturn and Jupiter, where it watched as the moon Io let off a volcanic blast. And something strange was happening on neighboring Europa. Long, linear cracks crisscrossed its surface. But the probe couldn’t get close enough to see what was happening. Thankfully, Voyager 2 was close on its heels.

NASA/ESA/AND M. KORNMESSER

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Hubble caught water vapor plumes escaping from Europa’s south pole, shown here in an artist illustration using real images but enhanced ejecta.

On July 9, 1979, at 8:04 a.m. Pacific Time, faint rays of sunlight that had bounced off Europa’s icy surface and met the passing Voyager 2 spacecraft were received back on Earth. Those first images traveled half a billion kilometers to where Carl Sagan was waiting, along with the rest of the mission team. “At first glance, the world looks like nothing so much as the canal network Percival Lowell imagined to adorn Mars,” Sagan eventually wrote of the experience. He wondered if the lines could be ridges or troughs, perhaps as a result of expansion and contraction. Could they have something in common with Earth’s plate tectonics? “At the moment of discovery, the vaunted technology has produced something astonishing,” Sagan wrote. “But it remains for another device, the human brain, to figure it out.” In reality, the puzzle had been solved before Voyager even arrived. Three astronomers — Stanton Peale, Patrick Cassen, and Ray Reynolds — published a paper in the journal Science just before the Jupiter flyby suggesting

volcanism on Io. The trio reasoned that the moon always made its closest approach to Europa at the same spot in its orbit. This resonance creates an orbital eccentricity just big enough for a tidal pull from the hefty nearby gas giant. The approach also makes Io’s volcanoes spew sulfur on Europa’s surface — potentially a key factor for any life under the ice. And, if the tugs from Jupiter could heat Io, they could cause volcanism on Europa too. Those aqueous allusions have grown into a widespread assumption that a global ocean lurks beneath many miles of ice. On the cover of the October 1979 Geophysical Research Letters, the same three astronomers also published a paper titled “Is there liquid water on Europa?” It’s a question that still needs a solid answer.

GALILEO’S TANTALIZING FINDS Almost all knowledge of Europa comes from a limited data set gathered by NASA’s Galileo mission to the Jupiter system. Launched in 1989 after years of delay due to the space shuttle Challenger disaster, Galileo rewrote

planetary science textbooks despite being plagued by one severe problem. The spacecraft’s 16-foot-wide umbrellashaped high-gain antenna was supposed to unfurl after traveling far enough from the Sun. This would allow large images to be sent back every minute for years. Instead, the motor got stuck, and the antenna never raised. Galileo’s inadequate connection turned a data deluge into a trickle. Observations were forced through a secondary dish using a signal 10,000 times fainter. With only a dozen close flybys of Europa (the spacecraft went into safe mode on two of those), JPL scientists had to make the most of their opportunities. The single highestresolution Europa image ever taken has just 6 meters per pixel resolution and isn’t even in color. Still, Europa’s first photo album was startling. Galileo imagery seemed to confirm what astronomers suspected: Europa was best explained as a spinning shell of ice atop a large liquid water ocean. The surface also gave clues to Europa’s history. Its fractured and icy terrain crawls around, breaking up

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THE MOTHER OF INNOVATION Europa mission Project Scientist Robert Pappalardo is among those scientists in waiting. He figured his work on Galileo would lead to a job on an eventual Europa trip. And, around the turn of the millennium, that dream looked likely to come true when a group of astronomers proposed the Europa Ocean Discovery mission. Ultimately, the small craft was seen as unrealistic and NASA moved in favor of New Horizons’ trip to Pluto instead. Still, the decadal survey, a document summarizing the planetary science community’s priorities, ranked Europa near the top. Astronomers wanted a Europa orbiter. Eventually the space agency asked Pappalardo and a team of JPL scientists for an intermediate-class mission. The team combined efforts with the European Space Agency’s mission to explore Jupiter’s other icy moon, Ganymede. They called it the Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer — JUICE. This time, the astronomical community said the concept wasn’t worth the cost. NASA backed out, leaving the Europeans to build JUICE themselves. (That mission

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In 2013, a team of scientists on the British research vessel James Cook used remote-controlled submersibles to explore hydrothermal vents 16,400 feet (5,000 meters) below the ocean surface. They found blind shrimp and abundant anemones.

is planned to launch in 2022.) “I said I’ll go to JPL and if after three years you don’t get a mission, I’ll go back to academics,” Pappalardo says. He didn’t give up. “After nine years, I’m still here. It was a little like Lucy and the football.” The complicating factor in all these missions was that Europa’s orbit sits

Any spacecraft needs heavy radiation shielding to withstand the deadly downpour of high-energy electrons streaming off Jupiter at nearly light speed. some 400,000 miles (644,000km) from our solar system’s biggest planet. That’s about twice as far away as the Moon is from Earth. Any spacecraft needs heavy radiation shielding to withstand the deadly downpour of high-energy electrons streaming off Jupiter at nearly light speed. After the latest orbiter was rejected, NASA asked its scientists to look at alternatives, and they found several. One plan seized on something NASA had already mastered: studying the moons of Saturn. JPL’s Brent

Buffington worked miracles calculating the extended Cassini mission trajectory. Buffington’s colleagues compare the crackshot astrodynamicist to Rich Purnell, the “steely eyed missile man” who saves the day in Andy Weir’s The Martian. Thanks to Buffington’s calculations, Cassini’s last seven years have used the remaining 20 percent of fuel for 155 orbits that swoop by Saturn’s moons in daredevil flybys, finding signs of hydrothermal vents on Enceladus, rainfall on Titan, and other new science. During its closest flybys, Cassini scrapes within 16 miles (25km) of the surface. Buffington was asked for the same magic as mission designer for a Europa flyby spacecraft. He divided the moon into 14 overlapping regions that allow a global map in high resolution. The best images will match those streaming from orbiters at Mars or the Moon. And, because it doesn’t stay close to Jupiter like a Europa orbiter would, the flyby design doesn’t require intensive shielding. “We have an architecture that is much better tuned for a mission of discovery,” says Europa mission Project Manager Barry Goldstein. “By having a mission where we loop in and out . . . we’re able to observe Europa from afar, and if we see a plume while we’re far out, we can adjust our flyby.” If the moon has active plumes like

NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHY CENTRE

and pushing together in a process akin to plate tectonics — the only known world other than Earth with such geology (See “Ice Tectonics,” p. 61). Galileo’s magnetometer also detected an induced magnetic field between Jupiter and Europa. The easiest way to interpret that is with a salty, global subsurface ocean. Ice simply isn’t conductive enough. The team only managed to gather enough data for a frustratingly low-resolution map of the moon, but the few high-resolution images were enough to whet scientists’ appetites. Many of the current small crop of Europa scientists worked as graduate students using Galileo data. To them, a follow-up mission seemed obvious. But in the years since Galileo’s 1995 arrival at Jupiter, scientists watched NASA launch 11 missions to Mars without a single craft to explore Europa.

TOP: NASA/JPL/ORION MOON. BOTTOM: DISCOVER/ROEN KELLY, AFTER NASA/NOAH KROESE, I.NK

the ones Hubble detected, the spacecraft could taste Europa’s ocean and determine its composition, thanks to targeted flybys. The final proposal includes at least 45 flybys — radiation eventually will kill the spacecraft — almost all of which come within 60 miles (100km) of the surface. And it pulls it off for a low $2 billion. That’s half the expected cost of prior designs. The combination of imagery and topographical data will revolutionize Europa science like the first 3-D data from the Moon and Mars did, says Europa Imaging System Principal Investigator Elizabeth Turtle of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab. But getting the photos isn’t easy. Inner solar system images benefit from the Sun’s brightness, as well as steady orbits around their less hostile targets. The Europa flyby mission’s closest passes will skim the surface at a height equal to Earth’s best spy planes. The ground below will move fast under extremely low-light conditions. So, instead of borrowing technology from Cassini, whose CCD cameras have been challenged by similar conditions at Saturn, Turtle’s team turned to New Horizons’ LORRI camera. Its high-resolution flyby images of far-off Pluto have stunned the public in recent years. Instead of a CCD camera, the spacecraft uses CMOS, a detector that works better in low-light conditions. “It’s a kind of detector that’s in a lot of digital cameras these days,” Turtle says. “It’s good for Europa because it’s more radiation tolerant than CCDs and it can do a much more rapid readout.”

THE BRINY DEEP Like his colleagues, Kevin Hand also learned Europa while working on images from Galileo. But the datastarved years since then have driven NASA’s deputy chief scientist for solar system exploration to extremes in search of new discoveries. He trekked Alaska’s North Slope and explored Antarctica’s dry valleys. He also dove to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and East Pacific Rise with Hollywood

Europa’s fractured crust shows clear signs of a young surface — one that’s perhaps still actively shifting. This high-resolution mosaic of the Conamara Chaos region is one of the few such close-ups gathered by Galileo in the 1990s.

Ice Tectonics

Subsumption band Truncated older features

Cold, brittle outer ice shell

Cryolavas

Liquid ocean Warmer, convecting Subducting plate portion of ice shell denser than deeper, warmer ice Subsumption of plate into shell interior

filmmaker James Cameron. There, he explored the Lost City Hydrothermal Field, which spews methane and hydrogen into the saltwater in a process much different from the black smokers found by Ballard and other explorers in the 1970s. There are no tube worms or clams. Instead, vastly different life-forms persist like snails, mollusks, and crustaceans. Many scientists believe similar sites served as the starting point for all life on Earth. “Obviously, NASA’s mantra has long been ‘follow the water,’ ” Hand says of the space agency’s search for life. “We think [Europa] is where the water is.” But life requires more than that. It also needs energy. And it needs the elements to form life. Those things can come

In 2014, scientists treated Europa’s crust like a jigsaw puzzle: They broke the surface into many pieces and then fit them back together. But a chunk the size of Wales was missing, implying plate tectonic activity pushed it under the surface like Earth’s subducting plates.

from volcanism recycling Europa’s rocky seafloor. However, for life to be widespread on Europa, vents aren’t enough. The life-forms Hand saw at Lost City are actually dependent on oxygen dissolved in the water. On Earth, that oxygen is derived from living things that use the Sun. Hand wanted to know if there was another way to get that oxygen on Europa. He and his colleagues at JPL created what they call “Europa in a can.” The laboratory experiment allows the astronomers to replicate Europa’s temperature, pressure, and radiation conditions on tiny ice samples. The Galileo spacecraft saw hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) in just one place on Europa’s surface. So the scientists showed in the

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OUT THERE

HUNTING THE WHITE WHALE Mike Brown, perhaps better known as “Pluto Killer” for finding the new worlds that led to the dwarf planet’s demotion, teamed up with Hand on the Europa salt studies. The pair found ways to use the massive Keck telescopes to gather observations with better resolution than even the Galileo spacecraft. Brown likes to joke that they’re looking for Europa’s whales. And, in October 2015, one of his students netted Moby Dick. This white whale leapt out when Caltech graduate student Patrick Fischer turned innovative mathematical formulas loose on the Keck observations. Fischer asked his computer to search an arbitrary collection of spectra for any strange signatures, and then clump them into sets. Those were turned into maps. To his surprise, one of them perfectly mapped Europa’s bizarre chaos terrain — a result that shows it’s actually chemically different from the rest of the moon. What exactly is unique about the chemical fingerprint remains unknown. The team suspects that salt was recently cycled onto the surface there due to ice melt. On our planet, this would be like a salt flat in the deserts of the American Southwest. On Europa, these salts are likely interacting with rocks at the seafloor. Sampling the deposits could give astronomers a way to reach deep beneath the ice and see the processes below. Western Powys Regio turned

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out to be the brightest such region, making it a prime place to land and look around. This newfound knowledge has helped a group of scientists push NASA to take a second look at sending a lander on the current Europa mission. Another force for a lander is U.S. Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas). He’s flooding the mission with cash.

A LOBBYIST FOR THE OUTER SOLAR SYSTEM As a member of the Commerce, Science, and Justice subcommittee in charge of NASA funding, Culberson says he watched as recent presidential administrations refused to give the agency the funding it needs to complete all its missions. So, when he took over as committee chairman in 2014, the congressman made sure funds for a Europa mission were written into law. He also holds regular meetings with the mission scientists and engineers to understand what they need in order to answer what Culberson calls “the most fundamental question we face.” That last component, finding life on Europa, has also caused conflict within NASA. The space agency wasn’t planning to include a lander on this

mission. But Culberson, who now controls the purse strings, forced the issue. To do the Europa mission right, he argues, scientists must be able to directly detect life. So he funded a JPL study to examine the feasibility of attaching a lander to the current flyby mission. Culberson got Congress to set aside $175 million last year for developing both a flyby spacecraft and a lander. Congress also designated money for the two prior years — before the White House even gave the mission an official spot on its own budget. That helped NASA move its spacecraft from preproject to a formal project in 2015. And instruments were recently announced. But Culberson’s hands-on approach made him as much an opponent as an ally in the eyes of NASA headquarters under the Obama administration. The Texas conservative is outspoken in his criticism of what he sees as a boggeddown big-government bureaucracy. But he was also the leading force behind a recent 13 percent increase in NASA’s Planetary Science budget. And he’s trying to give NASA administrators longer terms that aren’t as dependent on the whims of the White House. But in the

NASA/JPL/MICHAEL BENSON, KINETIKON PICTURES

lab how the chemical could form on the icy moon and eventually decay to oxygen (O2). Finally, they used the twin W.M. Keck Observatory telescopes in Hawaii to map the moon’s hydrogen peroxide deposits. Hand’s group also examined the strange colors that stand out on Europa’s cracked surface. They showed the browning yellow streaks are actually a byproduct of what happens when salt is hit by Jupiter’s radiation. “I think part of the discoloration we see on Europa’s surface is damaged sea salt,” Hand says, implying ocean water reaches the surface.

Michael Benson used some 40 images taken by Voyager 1 on March 3, 1979, to create this mosaic of Europa with Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

meantime, to make sure NASA spends the money on Europa as intended, he pushed through a bill that makes it illegal for NASA not to send along a lander. Culberson also mandated that the mission fly on NASA’s titanic Space Launch System (SLS), and that the launch take place by 2022 — the earliest opportunity. “SLS is essential because it has the payload lift capacity to take these complex, very large spacecraft out to deep space in record time,” Culberson told Astronomy magazine in a 2016 interview. “The engineers tell me that they can achieve those goals.” SLS is often decried for its high cost as a “rocket to nowhere,” but a less capable launch vehicle like the Atlas V would take more than six years to reach Europa, and most mission scientists will be near or past retirement age by the time it arrives. “As a team, we love the idea of flying on SLS,” says Goldstein, the project manager. THE DANIEL BOONE MISSION Part of the newfound push is that, absent a lander, the Europa mission can’t answer the question astronomers and the public most want answered.

“From orbit and flybys, you can assess habitability, but to make a complete or convincing case for detecting signs of life, you really need to go down to the surface,” says Hand, who’s in charge of examining science from the lander. However, the flyby mission only succeeded because of its innovative and low-cost approach. NASA is cautious about adding a lander that could possibly cost another $1 billion. “We’ve been the beneficiary of a significant amount of funding from Congress, and we’ve been doing our damnedest at trying to spend that money competently,” Goldstein says. But mission scientists say they’re surprised so far by what the engineers have come up with. A lander might not be as tough as previously expected. Under one of the proposed designs, the lander would travel to Jupiter with the flyby spacecraft and then go into hibernation out near Callisto, away from heavy radiation. NASA would send in the lander after the flyby spacecraft had mapped the surface. Then, the lander would make use of two successful technologies developed for Mars. A “Sky Crane” would lower the lander down toward the ice, where

inflated balloons would bounce the spacecraft into a safe spot. The Sky Crane keeps the surface ice from baking under rocket thrusters that would chemically alter the surface. The current design calls for a 10-day battery-powered mission, but scientists are considering adding solar panels to increase that life span. The instrument payload still has to go through a competitive application process; however, the “straw man” payload includes a gas chromatography mass spectrometer, which will be able to detect organics, as well as an infrared spectrometer. “You’ve gone a long way and invested a lot of money and a lot of time and talent to get there,” Culberson says. “Why would you just send one instrument to check if there’s life in that ocean when they’ve got the ability to double check it with two instruments?” At press time, the space agency still hadn’t announced a decision on the lander’s fate. There’s a lot more than Europa science at stake in the decision. Culberson says he sees the first lander as a “Daniel Boone precursor.” A decade after this mission, a follow-up spacecraft would actually attempt to venture into Europa’s oceans and look for black smokers. The congressman says he’s already tapped an expert in underwater exploration: Robert Ballard. A handful of researchers from JPL and elsewhere is examining how to melt through the ice. And the spacecraft developed for Europa will inform future missions that will explore the other ocean worlds too. Culberson believes that developing that path is a crucial part of NASA’s mission over the next decade. “That’s all coming. That’s all a part of what I’m envisioning for the future,” Culberson says. “The groundwork I’m laying today brick by brick is intended to achieve these dreams, for the future and the far future, and it’s a wonderful thing to contemplate.” D Eric Betz is an editor of Discover and a former editor of Astronomy. He’s on Twitter: @ericbetz

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OUT THERE

Seek Exoplanets From Your Backyard Learn how amateur astronomers can help professionals study worlds outside our solar system. BY DENNIS CONTI

The question, “Are we alone?” has endured since humans first looked up at the night sky. Indeed, astronomers now believe that most stars have one or more planets orbiting them. Considering that the stars we see at night with our naked eyes are all members of just our home galaxy, and given the billions of other galaxies that we now know exist, the number of exoplanets must be truly stunning! Amateur astronomers often apply their skills toward producing the “stellar” pictures that grace the pages of Astronomy and other publications. But is there any role that amateur observers can play in contributing to our knowledge of exoplanets? The answer is a resounding yes!

FINDING EXOPLANETS So far, astronomers have confirmed some 1,900 exoplanets, with more than 3,700 others as candidates. The best-known astronomical instrument for finding exoplanets has been the Kepler spacecraft, which uses an indirect way to detect distant worlds called the transit method. Just as a flea passing in front of a spotlight would cause a tiny dip in light, so too an exoplanet passing in front of its host star would cause a similar drop that Kepler detects. Astronomers combine individual measurements of the star’s light throughout the planet’s transit to create a light curve. They then use the duration and depth of the light curve (and how often it recurs) to calculate important characteristics of the exoplanet such as the period of its orbit, the size of the planet, and, if the

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orbit’s period is known, the inclination, or tilt, of the exoplanet’s orbit with respect to our line of sight. A planet whose transit just skims the top of its star, for instance, will have a shorter transit than one that crosses the star’s full diameter, even if their orbital periods are the same. While other techniques for detecting exoplanets exist, the transit method is the one most suited for amateur astronomers’ skills and equipment abilities.

Amateurs can now produce exoplanet observations of sufficient quality that professionals can use them to supplement their own studies. AMATEUR DETECTIONS Backyard astronomers have been detecting exoplanets successfully for more than a decade. In fact, in 2004, collaboration between professional and amateur observers — the XO Project, led by Peter McCullough from the Space Telescope Science Institute — resulted in several new exoplanet discoveries. Amateurs also are regular collaborators with the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) exoplanet search, organized by Vanderbilt and Ohio State universities. Bruce Gary’s 2007 publication of Exoplanet Observing for Amateurs was

the first attempt to formalize the best practices of exoplanet detection. Today, most amateur exoplanet hunters post their results online as part of the Exoplanet Transit Database (ETD) project, which is sponsored by the Czech Astronomical Society (http:// var2.astro.cz/ETD). Astronomers can use the same site to determine upcoming exoplanet transits at their locations. Exoplanet results will also soon be posted to the American Association of Variable Star Observer (AAVSO) International Database. With advances in CCD imaging and the development of supporting software, amateurs can now produce exoplanet observations of sufficient quality that professionals can use them to supplement their own studies. For example, a science team led by noted exoplanet researcher Drake Deming from the University of Maryland, College Park, is studying the atmospheres of 15 exoplanets in nearinfrared wavelengths with the Hubble Space Telescope. In order to provide refined timing predictions for the transits, a worldwide network of amateurs is conducting ground-based observations of those same targets in visible bands. Some of the amateurs participating in this collaboration include members of the AAVSO and the KELT follow-up team.

HOW-TO Amateur astronomers use a technique called differential photometry to track the brightness of exoplanet host stars. As the name implies, this technique measures the relative change in brightness between the host star and one or

ESO/L. CALÇADA

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Transits, when planets cross their stars from our point of view, are the best way for amateurs to study exoplanet systems.

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OUT THERE The Basic Transit Light Curve

Transit of WASP-12b LEFT

RIGHT

Predicted ingress

Predicted egress

Normalized flux

0.96

0.92

0.88

By fitting a model to a light curve, an observer can learn valuable information about the exoplanet itself and pass that information to professional astronomers.

1 2 3 Time

As a planet crosses in front of its star, it blocks some of the light. By plotting the amount of light against time, astronomers create a light curve.

The author’s home setup includes an 11-inch SchmidtCassegrain telescope.

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1h 2h 3h 4h UT Time (January 6, 2016)

more nearby comparison stars. For ground-based observers, this means that atmospheric effects, such as thin passing clouds, should have a similar effect on both the host and comparison stars. However, during the exoplanet’s transit, the host star’s brightness will change, but not the brightness of the comparison stars. During image acquisition, the observer measures just a few key stars, which typically range in brightness from 8th to 13th magnitude. The exoplanet observer’s objective is to accurately capture the brightness of the host star prior to, during, and after the predicted time of the exoplanet’s transit. It is important that the observer’s CCD detector never reaches saturation (its maximum detection level), or else changes in the host star’s brightness could go unrecorded. Although a star’s photons spread out over multiple pixels of a CCD’s detector, the majority of them — a star’s so-called full-width at halfmaximum (FWHM) — fall on just a small number. Because each pixel can capture only a small amount of light, it

is important to spread the FWHM over several of them. So, if the star’s FWHM falls on only one or two pixels, the observer may actually have to defocus the star so that the FWHM spans a larger number — ideally, three to five. This approach is, of course, contrary to the sharp pinpoint stars that deep-sky imagers strive for. After all the raw images are calibrated, exoplanet observers can use off-the-shelf software to conduct the differential photometry. Two of the more popular packages are AIP4WIN, which comes with the Handbook of Astronomical Image Processing, by Richard Berry and James Burnell, and AstroImageJ (AIJ), freeware maintained by Karen Collins of the KELT team. AIJ is an all-in-one package that includes everything from image calibration to exoplanet model fitting. Both software choices will produce several data items for each image: a timestamp, the change in brightness of the host star relative to one or more comparison stars, the change in brightness (if any) of each comparison star relative to the other comparison stars, and error estimates for these measurements. The observer then fits the data to a model of what an exoplanet transit should look like. Two popular sources for performing such a fit are AIJ and the ETD website. The difference between observed data and what a model predicts is a measure of how “good” a particular fit is. The

TOP: ROEN KELLY/DISCOVER (2). BOTTOM: DENNIS CONTI

Brightness

0h

N

c

b

E e The XO Project, a collaboration between amateur and professional astronomers, discovered five exoplanets using only twin 200mm lenses.

d

DO IT YOURSELF 20 AU 0.5"

LEFT: NRCHIA/CHRISTIAN MAROIS/W.M. KECK OBSERVATORY. RIGHT: XO PROJECT

Using the largest telescopes on Earth and advanced imaging systems like adaptive optics, professional astronomers can directly image exoplanets, like this multiple-planet system around the star HR 8799 (obscured at center, with planets labeled b-e). For amateurs, transits will have to suffice for now.

goal is to minimize this difference; users can do so by changing certain inputs to the model. For example, they could eliminate comparison stars that are not of the same magnitude or stellar type as the host star, or they could make changes to the number of pixels used in the differential photometry process to determine the star’s inherent brightness. The result is a light curve that delivers the beginning and end times of the transit, its depth, and a set of key parameters such as the planet’s size and the inclination of its orbit.

THE VALUE OF AMATEUR DATA The final data from amateur transit modeling is valuable to professional astronomers in at least two ways: First, when professional astronomers are conducting their own studies of exoplanets, they might be missing information such as the midpoint of the transit or the ratio of the exoplanet’s orbit to the radius of the host star — key measures that amateur astronomers can provide. This, in fact, is the case for some of the exoplanets in the aforementioned

A Practical Guide to Exoplanet Observing is available at www.astrodennis.com for readers who are interested in exoplanet observing, as well as for veteran observers who want to use AstroImageJ as their exoplanet-modeling program. The AAVSO also has its Exoplanet Observing Manual, which describes how AAVSO resources can be of use to exoplanet observers.

Hubble study. Joey Rodriguez of the KELT team combines multiple amateur observations into one “global model fit” for the science team’s use. Second, the professional community may rely on amateur observations to confirm the existence of an exoplanet candidate as well as develop initial orbital information about possible transits. Amateur astronomers participating in the KELT project are performing this role.

OBSERVING VS. IMAGING Exoplanet observing is in some cases more challenging than deep-sky imaging, and in other cases more forgiving. Because even a sub-pixel shift of a star on the CCD detector might result in an apparent change in brightness, exoplanet observers must employ some form of autoguiding and ensure that their telescope mount is accurately polar aligned and they have minimized or corrected any periodic error. As stated earlier, a deep-sky imager wants pinpoint stars, but an exoplanet observer may desire defocused ones. A

deep-sky imager needs multiple filters to obtain a great-looking picture; an exoplanet observer typically uses only a single filter for an observation. A deep-sky imager may spend hours processing images while an exoplanet observer can typically conduct model fitting in a shorter time period. Will amateur astronomers ever be able to directly image worlds outside our solar system? This is hard to imagine, though attempts are underway. However, the precision with which they can conduct transit observations will continue to provide professional astronomers with valuable data to supplement their studies. Beyond contributing to real science, the satisfaction an amateur astronomer can take in witnessing a planet transiting across a star light-years away is its own reward. D Dennis Conti, chairman of AAVSO’s Exoplanet Section, is leading a worldwide collaboration of amateur astronomers working with a Hubble science team, and is a member of the KELT exoplanet follow-up team.

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History Dept Overline Lessons

The Heroine of the FDA One woman was all that stood between thalidomide and America. BY NANCY KRIPLEN

The president was beaming. The woman beside him — a brunette wearing proper gloves and hat — also smiled, shyly. She was tall, her dark hair lightly streaked with gray. This was the hero who saved the United States from the tragedy of thalidomide, a drug often prescribed to pregnant women that could result in serious birth defects such as short, flipper-like arms and legs. The year was 1962, and in a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, Frances Oldham Kelsey had just received the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service from John F. Kennedy. But Kelsey’s body of work goes well beyond thalidomide. Scientists still benefit from changes she and her colleagues set in motion. Countries communicate more efficiently about common medical problems thanks to her, and researchers know that drugs — and viruses — that appear to have little or no side-effects on pregnant women can be devastating to their developing babies. Her importance in medical history can’t be overstated.

INADVERTENT TRAINING Frances Oldham was born on Vancouver Island, Canada, in 1914. The daughter of a retired British army officer, “Frankie” went to schools in both Canada and England. Her interest was in the sciences — first biology, then biochemistry and finally pharmacology, the study of how chemicals act on the human body. She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from McGill University in Montreal. At her mentor’s suggestion, she applied to the new pharmacology department at the University of Chicago.

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President John F. Kennedy honors FDA medical officer Frances Kelsey (top) in 1962 for her work blocking U.S. approval of thalidomide. A kindergarten student in Great Britain born with short limbs, a birth defect from the drug, uses a pencil-holding device to learn to write.

“Dear Mr. Oldham,” began the letter offering her a position, assuming that this “Frances” was a man. “Perhaps I should set him straight,” she said, according to her Autobiographical Reflections. “Don’t be ridiculous,” said her McGill adviser. “Accept the job, sign your name, put Miss in brackets afterwards, and go!” Oldham earned her Ph.D. in pharmacology in 1938, and five years later she married Fremont Ellis Kelsey, with whom she worked on the massive World War II project to find a substitute for quinine to fight malaria. Now Frances Kelsey, she next enrolled in the University of Chicago

TOP: U.S. FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION. BOTTOM: LEONARD MCCOMBE/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

→

History Lessons

THE THALIDOMIDE CRISIS Kelsey had been at the FDA only a month when a fateful application in four thick volumes landed on her desk in September 1960. The William S. Merrell Co. of Cincinnati was requesting approval to sell a Germandeveloped drug on the American

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From top: At the FDA, Kelsey determined that thalidomide studies were incomplete and did not support the maker’s claims. The drug, marketed as Distaval in the U.K., was prescribed for pregnant women with morning sickness.

market under the trade name Kevadon. Generically known as thalidomide, it was a mild sedative often prescribed for pregnant women with morning sickness, and it was already available in some two dozen other countries. As was FDA procedure, a three-person team studied the thalidomide application: a chemist, a pharmacologist and a medical officer, in this case Kelsey. If no one filed any objections within 60 days, the drug would receive automatic approval. Each of the team members found problems. The chemist found mistakes in the translation of the original German documents. The pharmacologist felt the animal studies submitted were not a good indication of possible toxicity in humans, since animals absorb thalidomide poorly. Kelsey, in the medical area,

Kelsey’s body of work goes well beyond thalidomide. Scientists still benefit from changes she and her colleagues set in motion. determined the submitted clinical studies were incomplete and, therefore, the drug’s claims were not adequately supported. Many of the submissions from doctors (she recognized a few of the names from questionable JAMA papers) read more like advertising testimonials than well-designed, well-executed scientific studies. While awaiting Merrell’s response in early 1961, Kelsey read a letter in the British Medical Journal mentioning a possible side effect of thalidomide: peripheral neuritis, a painful tingling in the arms and feet. Merrell had never mentioned it — the company later claimed it didn’t know. Immediately, Kelsey wrote to Merrell asking for more information and additional proof of safety. As the approval time stretched into more than a year, Merrell’s representatives grew increasingly impatient, complaining to Kelsey’s

TOP: ART RICKERBY/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES. BOTTOM: SCIENCE AND SOCIETY PICTURE LIBRARY/GETTY IMAGES

medical school solely for the extra credentials. “As a woman, I needed the extra credentials. Let’s face it, I needed all the help I could get to obtain a job,” she wrote in her autobiography. Upon graduation, she was hired as an editorial assistant at the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), verifying the scientific accuracy of submitted papers. In 1952, when her husband became head of the pharmacology department at the University of South Dakota, the family (which now included two young daughters) moved to the small college town of Vermillion in the southeast corner of the state. Kelsey continued her research and commuted by overnight train to Chicago to study the new field of nuclear medicine. Kelsey’s wide-ranging experience in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s would serve her well in the 1960s to recognize the threat of thalidomide. From her pharmacology work, she knew the importance of animal studies and of carefully scrutinizing new drugs. From the anti-malaria studies, Kelsey saw that mothers and their unborn babies did not necessarily react the same way to drugs. And from her JAMA work, she had learned the names and practices of doctors who kept appearing on less-than-scientifically robust articles. When she landed a job as a medical officer at the Food and Drug Administration, she was uniquely prepared. The Kelseys were ready to leave smalltown life and return to the big city, so when Fremont Kelsey also received a job offer in Washington (from the National Institutes of Health), they made the move.

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History Lessons superiors and relentlessly badgering her by phone and memos to urge approval. Merrell even called Kelsey’s complaints “slightly libelous.” (Today, this sort of continual contact with FDA reviewers is discouraged.) Meanwhile, reports of startling birth defects in babies born to mothers who had taken thalidomide were surfacing in Germany, Australia and other countries where the drug was legal — including Kelsey’s native Canada. It was the beginning of the end. By November 1961, thalidomide

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was taken off the market in Germany, and other countries soon followed. Four months later, Merrell withdrew its application from the FDA. Even though Kelsey and her team kept thalidomide off the American shelves, many doctors had dispensed “investigative samples” of the drug. Because of this, and because some mothers had obtained the drug overseas, the U.S. saw an estimated 17 births of deformed babies. Still, compared with the numbers worldwide — more than 10,000 children in 46 countries — it’s clear that what FDA historian John Swann calls Kelsey’s “persistence and grit” averted a disaster.

A JOB WELL DONE Elsewhere in Washington, Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver had been holding intermittent hearings for more than two years, originally on drug pricing and marketing, but expanded into drug safety. In July 1962, a detailed

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story about America’s close call with thalidomide appeared on the front page of The Washington Post, under the headline “Heroine of FDA Keeps Bad Drug Off Market,” with a photo of Kelsey. (Supposedly, the story had been leaked to the Post by a Kefauver commission staffer, with the senator’s encouragement.) The Rose Garden award ceremony for Kelsey followed in August, and an omnibus bill tightening regulations on the pharmaceutical industry and drug trials passed the Senate two weeks later. After reconciliation with a similar House bill sponsored by Rep. Oren Harris of Arkansas, President Kennedy signed the Kefauver-Harris Drug Amendments bill into law in October 1962. Standing in the half-circle of invited officials looking on was Frances Kelsey. The Kefauver-Harris bill “changed the face of drug regulation,” says Swann, who knew Kelsey. Companies now had to prove drugs were effective as well as safe, based on rigorous, well-controlled studies by qualified researchers. Further, the FDA would establish (and monitor) good manufacturing practices, and control of prescription drug advertising would be transferred from the Federal Trade Commission to the FDA. Later in 1962, Kelsey was named head of the FDA’s new investigational drug branch. For the next 43 years, she stayed at the FDA. On Aug. 6, 2015, Frances Oldham Kelsey, now frail, white-haired and living with a daughter in southern Ontario, was visited by the lieutenant governor of Ontario, who presented her with the Order of Canada medallion. The next day she died, at the age of 101. D Nancy Kriplen is a freelance journalist and author of several biographies, including The Eccentric Billionaire: John D. MacArthur — Empire Builder, Reluctant Philanthropist, Relentless Adversary.

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20 Things You Didn’t Know About …

Metabolic rate varies widely among vertebrates, with zippy hummingbirds and slow-moving sloths at opposite extremes.

1 Let’s get meta about metabolism: It’s so much more than the thing you’re trying to boost to banish those pesky extra pounds. The term refers to all of the chemical reactions within an organism that keep it alive. 2 Derived from metaboleˉ, Greek for change, metabolism is about power: how it’s acquired and how it’s spent. Scientists have been using the word since the late 19th century, but the concept was around much earlier. 3 The 13th-century Arab physician Ibn al-Nafis, for example, observed that “both the body and its parts are in a continuous state of dissolution and nourishment, so they are inevitably undergoing permanent change.” 4 Metabolism isn’t just for individual organisms: Researchers apply the term to the processes through which entire natural ecosystems acquire and maintain (or lose) resilience, such as predator-prey balance and levels of photosynthesis. 5 Researchers also study the metabolism of some less-than-natural ecosystems — large cities — in terms of how urban areas consume resources and generate waste. 6 A primitive kind of metabolism was present in single-celled organisms more than 3.5 billion years ago. Due to low levels of atmospheric oxygen, the process may have been fermentative, still found in microbes such as yeast today. 7 As oxygen increased in Earth’s atmosphere and organisms became more complex, different forms of metabolism evolved, from plants’ photosynthesis to the lesser-known chemolithotrophy. 8 Many bacteria and archaea, another type of single-celled organism, use chemolithotrophy to get their energy from inorganic compounds such as ammonia in anoxic, extreme environments. No air, no sun, no problem! 9 Regardless of an organism’s energy source, its metabolism is a balance of catabolism, breaking energy down into usable units, and anabolism, using those units for vital building projects such as bone growth. 10 The grunt work of metabolic processes is done by enzymes. These proteins act like crowd control, ensuring molecules reacting catabolically or anabolically are where they need to be. 11 The enzymes themselves are constantly losing stability and being replaced, which means metabolism is a product of … metabolism. Whoa.

BY GEMMA TARLACH

12 Metabolic diseases, which are typically genetic, cause the body to produce one or more enzymes insufficiently or not at all. Metabolic syndrome (MetS), however, is a more complex constellation of conditions. 13 MetS factors include increased abdominal fat, high blood pressure, insulin resistance, abnormal blood coagulation and cholesterol levels as well as elevated C-reactive protein, an indicator of inflammation. 14 The causes of MetS are not fully clear, but genes, inactivity and obesity all play a role, leading to significantly elevated risk of heart disease, diabetes and death. 15 We all know that being active and fit will make us healthier — and we’ve all heard the sales pitches that we can achieve that goal by revving up our metabolism with certain foods. Scientific support for many marketing claims is mixed, however. 16 Green tea extract, for example, has been shown to increase energy expenditure in some studies, possibly by inhibiting certain enzymes. A 2011 metaanalysis, however, found that the modest results varied both by individual and origin of extract used. 17 A 2012 review showed that green tea’s boost is even more of a bust: Its use resulted in “statistically insignificant” weight loss and no significant effect on weight management. 18 And sorry, but your metabolism will never match that of the ruby-throated hummingbird, which has the highest metabolic rate of any vertebrate when active. 19 To maintain body temperature and beat its wings up to 200 times a second, the metabolic record-setter, like other hummingbirds, needs enormous amounts of energy. The small birds typically consume their body weight in nectar every day. So much for thinking you can diet by “eating like a bird.” 20 On the other hand, in 2016 researchers found that the three-toed sloth had the lowest metabolic rate of any mammal, an adaptation that evolved to reduce fuel needs in the energy-poor forest canopy environment where it lives. Slothfulness isn’t one of the seven deadly sins — it’s just smart evolutionary strategy. D Gemma Tarlach is senior editor at Discover.

DISCOVER (ISSN 0274-7529, USPS# 555-190) is published monthly, except for combined issues in January/February and July/August. Vol. 38, no. 2. Published by Kalmbach Publishing Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Periodical postage paid at Waukesha, WI, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to DISCOVER, P.O. Box 62320, Tampa, FL 33662-2320. Canada Publication Agreement # 40010760. Back issues available. All rights reserved. Nothing herein contained may be reproduced without written permission of Kalmbach Publishing Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Printed in the U.S.A.

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Metabolism

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