Discover Magazine 2017-05

How Plants Think P.52 Computers With Morals? P.10 The War Over (Quantum) Reality P.28 MAY 2017 Einstein Tesla Curie Hawking Newton & DOZENS More! P.34...

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MAY 2017

Heroes of Science The Stories Behind the Breakthroughs of

Einstein Tesla

Curie Hawking

Newton & DOZENS More!

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How Plants Think Computers With Morals? The War Over (Quantum) Reality P.52

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P.28

BONUS ONLINE CONTENT CODE p.3

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The Theory of Everything: The Quest to Explain All Reality

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LECTURE TITLES 1.

Two Prototype Theories of Everything

2.

The Union of Electricity and Magnetism

3.

Particles and Waves: The Quantum World

4.

Einstein Uniﬁes Space, Time, and Light

5.

Relativistic Quantum Fields and Feynman

6.

Neutrinos Violating Parity and the Weak Force

7.

Flavor Changes via the Weak Force

8.

Electroweak Uniﬁcation via the Higgs Field

9.

Quarks, Color, and the Strong Force

10. Standard Model Triumphs and Challenges 11. How Neutrino Identity Oscillates 12. Conservation Laws and Symmetry: Emmy Noether 13. Theoretical Symmetries and Mathematics 14. Balancing Force and Matter: Supersymmetry 15. Why Quarks and Leptons? 16. Newton’s Gravity Uniﬁes Earth and Sky 17. Einstein’s Gravity Bends Space-Time 18. What Holds Each Galaxy Together: Dark Matter 19. What Pushes the Universe Apart: Dark Energy 20. Quantum Gravity: Einstein, Strings, and Loops 21. From Weak Gravity to Extra Dimensions 22. Big Bang and Inﬂation Explain Our Universe

Pick Up the Quest Where Einstein Failed At the end of his career, Albert Einstein was pursuing a dream far more ambitious than the theory of relativity. He was trying to find an equation that explained all physical reality—a theory of everything. He failed, but others have taken up the challenge in a remarkable quest that is shedding light on unsuspected secrets of the cosmos. Experimental physicist and award-winning educator Dr. Don Lincoln of the world-renowned Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory takes you on this exciting journey in The Theory of Everything: The Quest to Explain All Reality. Ranging across time and space, and at scales ranging from the subatomic to the cosmic—and even into extra dimensions, with these 24 lectures you will bridge the eras between classical and modern physics and get a glimpse of the goal that has motivated physicists for centuries. It’s a dazzling trip!

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Contents

Website access code: DSD1705 Enter this code at: www.DiscoverMagazine.com/code to gain access to exclusive subscriber content.

MAY 2017 VOL. 38, NO. 4

SPECIAL SECTION

34 Heroes of Science

p.43

p.36

We celebrate the heroes who propelled science forward, the communicators who brought science to the public, the families who kept science going for decades and the forgotten researchers whose work lives on. FEATURING

p.38

iProﬁles of 10 Major Scientists iUnsung Heroes iScience Popularizers iThe Next Generation of Science Stars

MARK MARTURELLO

iFamily Dynasties AND MORE! p.46

p.42

May 2017 DISCOVER

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Contents OTHER FEATURES

COLUMNS & DEPARTMENTS

28 The War Over

6 EDITOR’S NOTE

Quantum mechanics explains so much about the universe — why the sky is blue, why stars shine. But over a century after its birth, the interpretation of the theory remains as baffling as ever. Can scientists figure out what it really means? BY TIM FOLGER

Scientific research and its explanation of ideas is the foundation of society.

Reality

52 Smarty Plants

Your flower garden might be brighter than it looks, but not because of the colorful petals. Turns out, plants are pretty brainy, and science is learning why and in what ways. BY MARTA ZARASKA

When Heroics in Science Define Us

8 INBOX Readers muse about 21st-century mummies, physicist Luis Alvarez and a hitchhiking insect.

9

THE CRUX

Creating a moral compass for artiﬁcial intelligence; the impact of clean-burning stoves on our health; a biologist recounts the marvel of his ﬁrst deep-sea dive; and an update on a Discover story on the possibility of meat sans slaughter.

conservationists want to keep it that way by mitigating light pollution. Now, other U.S. parks are taking notice. BY ERIC BETZ

66 HISTORY LESSONS When Dinosaurs Went Bad

Early researchers cast the reptiles as giant lumbering lizards with nary a feather in sight. Times have changed. BY GEMMA TARLACH

70 PROGNOSIS

A Master of Evasion Researchers have had little success in their fight against pancreatic cancer. But a revolutionary method of using the body’s own immune system offers hope. BY DOUGLAS G. ADLER

74 20 THINGS YOU DIDN’T

20 VITAL SIGNS

KNOW ABOUT …

Athlete, Interrupted

Earthquakes

A marathoner’s race in Southeast Asia lands her in the hospital with a dangerous condition that evades diagnosis. BY CLAIRE PANOSIAN

Temblors have been shaking up Earth for eons. And though technology has helped measure strength and flag strike zones, earthquakes still have a few mysteries that rattle experts.

DUNAVAN

24 NOTES FROM EARTH

BY GEMMA TARLACH

Extinction for Easter Island’s Last Endemics

BY NATHANIEL SCHARPING

59 OUT THERE

Powered by magazine

Protecting America’s Last Dark Skies Grand Canyon National Park is a star sanctuary, and

4

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ON THE COVER When Dinosaurs Went Bad p.66 An Island at Risk p.24 How Plants Think p.52 Computers With Morals? p.10 The War Over (Quantum) Reality p.28

Heroes of Science p.34 Cover image: Albert Einstein, in his study at home in Princeton, N.J., 1944. Popperphoto/Getty Images

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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

When Heroics in Science Define Us Talk about science, exploration, history and ideas, and one popular image from my 1970s youth immediately hits me. And makes me laugh. It’s a big, framed painting (at right) of ships hitting the end of the world, with a crew in a lifeboat rowing like mad away from the brink. Four words are etched into a brass plate at the base of the frame: I Told You So. Sarcastic? Sure. Appropriate to launch you into our Heroes of Science special section? Absolutely. For it’s only through scientists and the foundation of inquiry that we know the Earth is indeed a sphere, that our planet revolves around the sun and that gravity is a fundamental force. Scientific discovery is a linchpin of progress, in society, industry, culture and thought. We’ve rounded up dozens of people considered heroes in science, from the famed notables — Einstein, Curie and Darwin — to the unsung heroes — Alhazen, James Hutton and Chien-Shiung Wu. We bring you the stories of how they pushed through adversity, and kept questioning, and testing, the world around them. These hero scientists — and researchers around the globe today — are all about exploration. Their pursuit of the “why” and the “what happens if ” has been essential to what is now our modern world. And their quest will continue, furiously paddling us back from the edge of ignorance.

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

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Inbox PRINT FEEDBACK Modern-Day Mummies? I particularly enjoyed the March issue’s stories about bees, thalidomide and princess mummies! One question regarding mummies: Has anybody around the world buried a mummy with paraphernalia from our era so that it can be discovered hundreds of years from now? What a great idea that would help our descendants know how we existed. Bonnie Holiday, Crown Point, IN They lived lives of prestige and power. In death, these women still command attention. BY NATHANIEL SCHARPING

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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.

38

A Meeting of the Minds I’m a bit slow reading my Discover, but the article “Death From Above” (September 2016 issue) brought back some fond memories of encounters with Luis Alvarez. He was at Hewlett-Packard at the time and came to our division in Colorado Springs, where I worked as a technical writer. He wove a captivating story of extinction, iridium and a really big meteor. Our very large cafeteria was filled and everyone was rapt with attention. And here I was only a few feet from him, as a great scientific mystery was being laid to waste — what a thrill to meet one of the great minds of our times. Dennis Rojo, Colorado Springs, CO

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

HEAVEN AND EARTH Under a starry sky last August at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, glowing lava poured into the Paciﬁc Ocean at the Big Island’s Kamokuna lava delta. Photographer Sean Goebel was among hundreds to view the massive outﬂow spewing from the nearby Kilauea volcano. At this same spot on New Year’s Eve 2016, a roughly 25-acre section of solidiﬁed lava tumbled into the ocean. The collapse nearly took with it ﬁve spectators who had ignored safety barriers. Kilauea’s East Rift Zone, which encompasses this area, has been active since 1983. In that time, it has spread a 55-square-mile layer of mostly hardened lava on the island’s southeast coast.  ERNIE MASTROIANNI; PHOTO BY SEAN GOEBEL

May 2017 DISCOVER

9

THE CRUX

Health care helper robot Zora is based on Nao, the same platform used to create the ﬁrst ethical bot in 2010.

10

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BIG IDEA

Caring Computers

JOHN THYS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Artiﬁcial intelligence is learning right from wrong by studying human stories and moral principles. BACK AROUND THE TURN of the millennium, Susan Anderson was puzzling over a problem in ethics. Is there a way to rank competing moral obligations? The University of Connecticut philosophy professor posed the problem to her computer scientist spouse, Michael Anderson, figuring his algorithmic expertise might help. At the time, he was reading about the making of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which spaceship computer HAL 9000 tries to murder its human crewmates. “I realized that it was 2001,” he recalls, “and that capabilities like HAL’s were close.” If artificial intelligence was to be pursued responsibly, he reckoned that it would also need to solve moral dilemmas. In the 16 years since, that conviction has become mainstream. Artificial intelligence now permeates everything from health care to warfare, and could soon make life-and-death decisions for self-driving cars. “Intelligent machines are absorbing the responsibilities we used to have, which is a terrible burden,” explains ethicist Patrick Lin of California Polytechnic State University. “For us to trust them to act on their own, it’s important that these machines are designed with ethical decisionmaking in mind.” The Andersons have devoted their careers to that challenge, deploying the first ethically programmed robot in 2010. Admittedly, their robot is considerably less autonomous than HAL 9000. The toddler-size humanoid machine was conceived with just one task in mind: to ensure that homebound elders take their medications.

According to Susan, this responsibility is ethically fraught, as the robot must balance conflicting duties, weighing the patient’s health against respect for personal autonomy. To teach it, Michael created machine-learning algorithms so ethicists can plug in examples of ethically appropriate behavior. The robot’s computer can then derive a general principle that guides its activity in real life. Now they’ve taken another step forward. “The study of ethics goes back to Plato and Aristotle, and there’s a lot of wisdom there,” Susan observes. To tap into that reserve, the Andersons built an interface for ethicists to train AIs through a sequence of prompts, like a philosophy professor having a dialogue with her students. The Andersons are no longer alone, nor is their philosophical approach. Recently, Georgia Institute of Technology computer scientist Mark Riedl has taken a radically different philosophical tack, teaching AIs to learn human morals by reading stories. From his perspective, the global corpus of literature has far more to say about ethics than just the philosophical canon alone, and advanced AIs can tap into that wisdom. For the past couple of years, he’s been developing such a system, which he calls Quixote — named after the novel by Cervantes. Riedl sees a deep precedent for his approach. Children learn from stories, which serve as “proxy experiences,” helping to teach them how to

behave appropriately. Given that AIs don’t have the luxury of childhood, he believes stories could be used to “quickly bootstrap a robot to a point where we feel comfortable about it understanding our social conventions.” As an initial experiment, Riedl has crowdsourced stories about going to the pharmacy. They’re not pageturners, but they contain useful experiences. Once programmers input a story, the algorithm plots the protagonist’s behavior and learns to mimic it. His AI derives a general sequence — stand in line, tender the prescription, pay the cashier — which is then practiced in a game-like pharmacy simulation. After multiple rounds of reinforcement learning (where the AI is rewarded for acting appropriately), the AI is tested in simulations. Riedl reports more than 90 percent success. More remarkably, his AI figured out how to commit “Robin Hood crimes” by stealing the meds when the need was urgent and funds were insufficient — mirroring the human capacity to break the rules for higher moral ends. Ultimately, Riedl wants to set AIs loose on a much broader body of literature. “When people write about protagonists, they tend to exemplify their own cultural beliefs,” he says. Well-read robots would behave in culturally appropriate ways, and the sheer volume of available literature should filter out individual biases. Cal Poly’s Lin believes that it’s too soon to settle on just one technique, observing that all approaches share at least one positive attribute. “Machine ethics is a way for us to know ourselves,” he says. Teaching our machines to behave morally requires an unprecedented degree of moral clarity. And that can help refine human morality. AI just might teach us philosophy.

Well-read robots would behave in culturally appropriate ways.

 JONATHON KEATS

May 2017 DISCOVER

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THE CRUX

TRENDING BY MARK BARNA

You Asked life begin in an extreme environment, Q Can without the luxury of adapting to it slowly from a nurturing environment?

Vincent Frisina Danbury, Conn.

A

Life is a bit like Goldilocks: It requires the right temperatures (not too hot or cold), and the right chemical soup for cell creation and nutrition. “Early life would be very delicate and unable to survive in extreme environments, or even in most non-extreme environments that couldn’t support growth and division,” says Jack Szostak, a biophysicist and a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009.

does the ear process sounds coming from Q How inside the body?

Rowena Kong Vancouver, British Columbia

You can hear some of your internal body sounds because your skeleton and inner tissues act as a conductor, guiding vibrations in the body to the inner ear. But oftentimes, innerbody sounds like this are picked up mostly by the outer ear in the conventional manner, says Dennis Trune of the Oregon Hearing Research Center. Try placing a ringing tuning fork atop your head, and your inner ear will pick up the sound, says Elizabeth Olson, an expert on hearing at Columbia University. The fork’s ring would be analogous, though exaggerated, to hearing inner-body sounds.

When the Lights Go Out The sun’s power isn’t limited to lighting and heating our home planet — it could create chaos by way of its coronal mass ejections (CME). These intense releases of magnetic energy can, on rare occasions, cause geomagnetic disturbances on Earth. In 1989, a CME knocked out the power grid across Quebec for nine hours, with an estimated economic loss of $13.2 million. For years, researchers have speculated on how a similar blackout would play out globally. According to a new study in the journal Space Weather, an event engulﬁng London, Paris, Moscow and most of mainland United States would be economically devastating. The outage would essentially halt business, transportation and government operations for days or weeks. If this scenario, the most extreme of the four the researchers developed, ever played out, the U.S. economy could lose up to $41.5 billion each day.

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Inner ear

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To submit a question, email [email protected]. And visit DiscoverMagazine.com/Ask for more answers.

“According to general relativity, the gravitational field does not live in space-time. It is space-time.” — James Overduin, a theoretical physicist at Towson University, on Albert Einstein’s gravitational theory

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Manufacturing $5.18 billion Government $5.09 billion Real estate, rental and leasing $4.25 billion Finance and insurance $3.79 billion Health care and social assistance $3.11 billion Retail trade $2.99 billion Professional, scientiﬁc and technical services $2.85 billion Wholesale trade $2.38 billion

THIS PAGE FROM TOP: NASA/SDO; AJPHOTO/SCIENCE SOURCE. OPPOSITE FROM TOP: GLOBAL ALLIANCE FOR CLEAN COOKSTOVES; EKLER/SHUTTERSTOCK

A

Cooking Clean, Saving Lives We tend to take our modern gas and electric stoves and ovens encouraged the women to cook in ventilated areas.) In the for granted, but in many countries, homes have only kerosene traditional-stove group, 6.4 percent of the mothers-to-be or solid-fuel cooking stoves, which can pollute developed high blood pressure, which household air. Each year, more than 4 million is linked to heart disease and other people die globally of complications from conditions. Just 1.9 percent of women in inhaling smoke from these stoves. the clean-burning group developed it, In a study on the risks, researchers according to the paper in the American found that clean ethanol-burning stoves Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care are healthier than traditional units. They Medicine. monitored 324 healthy pregnant Nigerian Several nations still rely heavily on women: Half used ethanol stoves, and half pollution-producing cookstoves. Here are used wood or kerosene units. (Researchers just a few of those countries: A woman cooks on an ethanol stove.

KEY

COUNTRY 38% 3.5 million 1,954

GHANA 84% 21.3 million 13,300

Population using solid fuels for cooking People affected by indoor smoke Yearly deaths from indoor smoke inhalation

NIGERIA 75% 126 million 70,000

GUATEMALA 64% 9.7 million 5,100 NICARAGUA 54% 3.2 million 2,373

BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA 58% 2.2 million 4,775

HAITI 93% 9.4 million 9,593

UGANDA 97% 35.3 million 13,200

GEORGIA 46% 2 million 7,547

CHINA 45% 607.8 million Over 1 million

INDIA 64% 800 million 1 million

KENYA 84% 36.3 million 15,000

BANGLADESH 89% 137.7 million 78,000 Source: Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves

May 2017 DISCOVER

13

THE CRUX PERSONAL

A researcher’s ﬁrst excursion to the bottom of the ocean leaves a lasting impression. CRAIG McCLAIN is no stranger to what lurks in the belly of Earth’s oceans. The deep-sea biologist is currently executive director of the Louisiana University Marine Consortium. Throughout his career, he‘s tackled many questions about aquatic life, from how food availability affects species to how marine environments impact an organism’s size. Searching for those answers, he’s crossed paths with beasts like the giant isopod, a crustacean that, according to McClain, “is essentially just a roly-poly that‘s double the size of your shoe.” To see his subjects up close, McClain hops a ride in a submersible, a 23-by-8-foot research vessel designed to withstand the enormous pressure at seaﬂoor levels. But before he was heading up labs and leading his own dives, McClain was a rookie. Here, he recounts his ﬁrst, surreal deep-sea dive in the Bahamas.

Craig McClain holds a giant isopod specimen similar to the one he saw on the ocean ﬂoor during his ﬁrst deep-sea dive.

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IN HIS OWN WORDS . . .

It’s the summer after my first year of graduate school, and I’m with a pilot, a sub tech and two deep-sea biologists. One is Craig Young, now the director of the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, and the other is Paul Tyler. And Paul Tyler literally wrote the book on deepsea biology. It’s literally called Deep-Sea Biology. These guys, in my field, are famous. So not only is it my first research trip and my first submersible dive, I’m with two people I have science crushes on. They launch us off the back of the ship, and we’re diving down, and there’s this tiny porthole, maybe

5 or 6 inches across. Sitting naturally, it’s down by my hip, so I have to get into a yoga position to get my face down and actually look out of it. The porthole faces out to the side, so Paul has them swing the submersible around so my portside window now looks toward what they’d been looking at in the front. As I’m going down, every now and then, I get a glimpse of a fish. This is before there was a lot of deep-sea video on the web, so my only encounters with deep-sea organisms had been in jars, on a lab shelf, or photos or pictures, which were largely

grainy. This is my first experience seeing true color. I don’t want to move my face away from the porthole because I want to see everything. But the biggest thing for me is getting to see a giant isopod, which has always captured my imagination, attention and interest. We’re cruising along the seafloor, and I look over and see one swimming. Here it was, nonchalantly swimming past the submersible. I know these are real animals, and I know that this is occurring, but I can’t believe this is actually happening, really in the moment.  AS TOLD TO LACY SCHLEY; PHOTO BY ERNIE MASTROIANNI

TOP: FAU HARBOR BRANCH OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTE

Deep Dive

CLOSE-UP

KRISTIN ALLEN U.S. HALL OF FAME ACROBATIC GYMNAST

BLUE BY DESIGN The male Chapman’s blue butterﬂy — native to southern Europe, Morocco and the Middle East — is known for its wings of shimmering azure. Even at 500x magniﬁcation, the hue remains intense. But this striking shade doesn’t stem from pigment; it’s created when light passes through nanostructures within the scales, an effect known as diffraction. Chemist Anne Gleich of Kaiserslautern, Germany, snapped this image to learn more about the process. The photo won an Image of Distinction award in the 2016 Nikon Small World contest.  ERNIE MASTROIANNI; PHOTO BY ANNE GLEICH

May 2017 DISCOVER

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THE CRUX INFO ART

German

Story Time

Dutch

Luxembourgish

Danish

Flemish

English

Norwegian

Frisian

Spanish

Ladin Portuguese

Tracing the evolution of an ancient fairy tale.

Swedish Italian Icelandic

Slovak Czech

Walloon

French

Bulgarian Sardinian

ProtoGermanic 1,800 YA

Ukrainian Serbocroatian Russian

Catalan

Romanian

ProtoRomance 1,800 YA

Belarusian Slovenian Polish Lusatian

Irish

Scots

Welsh Latvian

Lithuanian Hindi Romani

ProtoCeltic 3,000 YA

ProtoBalticSlavic 3,000 YA

Greek

ONCE UPON A TIME in Asia Minor, ProtoIndopeople started to tell the tale of The Iranian Smith and the Devil. The plot was simple: 4,600 A craftsman trades his soul for supernatural YA power, then uses his magic to trap the diabolical creature with whom he made the deal. Folklorists, including the Brothers Grimm, have long assumed the story, as well as other tales such as Rumpelstiltskin and Beauty and the Beast, is ancient. Now, there’s ﬁrm evidence for that from Durham University anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani and New University of Lisbon social scientist Sara Graça da Silva. Treating each tale as a species that mutates over time, they’ve borrowed techniques from phylogenetics (the study of evolutionary relationships between living organisms) to map stories onto the tree of Indo-European languages. The Smith and the Devil is the oldest they’ve found, spreading over seven millennia to encompass more than 35 languages — and the devil is still falling for the same trick that tripped him up in Asia Minor.  JONATHON KEATS; ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID CURTIS

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ProtoItaloCeltic 4,600 YA

Proto-IndoEuropean Language 6,500 YEARS AGO (YA)

The Smith and the Devil progressed from proto-languages to all of the modern languages shown here as leaves on the tale's evolutionary tree.

ReDISCOVER

Where’s the Beef?

FROM TOP: 3D BIOPRINTING SOLUTIONS; DAVID PARRY/PA WIRE; DAAN LUINING/MARK POST LAB/MAASTRICHT UNIVERSITY

Past promises of lab-grown meat were overly optimistic. the back burner. His lab at the University of South Carolina shut down in 2011 due to personnel issues, and now he’s concentrating on organ printing at a 3-D bioprinting company in Russia. “Maybe I will return to the topic,” he wrote in an email. “In vitro meat production is the inescapable future of humanity.” While Mark Post, physiology chair at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, shares MORE THAN A Mironov’s optimism DECADE AGO, about in vitro meat’s Discover covered potential, he says the the concept of a future isn’t in at-home coffee-makerdevices. like device “Quite frankly, that could, I don’t see that as overnight, turn a very pragmatic a few animal solution,” says Post, muscle stem whose name has cells into a nice hunk of meat. become synonymous with The July 2006 story, the movement. He debuted “The Way of All Flesh,” his lab-produced meat (cost: explains the vision of $325,000 per burger) in a biologist Vladimir Mironov: highly publicized taste test in Those muscle cells would London in 2013. be harmlessly extracted from Instead, the focus now an animal, and with the right is on ramping up efforts nutrients and environment, to produce it in factorylike they’d multiply just as they settings, Post explains. would in their original host, Bigger production would but even more mean more burgers rapidly. for more than just a The idea was to few taste testers, while target three issues also sending costs way with traditional down. “In essence, it’s meat farming: available,” Post says, protect animals “but not at the scale from inhumane that you need for [mass] conditions consumption.” and eventual His optimistic scenario slaughter; — which depends reduce the on the production environmental infrastructure being in In 2006, Vladimir Mironov, top, dreamed damage of largeplace and regulatory of growing lab meat overnight. Today, Mark scale livestock approvals — is having Post, center, says even one beef patty needs more cultured tissue than what’s above. operations; and a $10 cell-grown give humans hamburger patty on the healthier meat and better food security. shelves in four to ﬁve years. Yet, as you’ve noticed, your local “You need to be able to scale Target stocks no such appliance. production to a tremendous level if you Mironov says his vision hasn’t want to hit the Walmarts of this world,” changed, but he’s put those efforts on he says.  MICHAEL STONE

May 2017 DISCOVER

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Tag, They're It 1

How ﬁsh researchers track their scaly subjects. 1. JAW TAGS Researchers use these external tags, about the size of a quarter, to identify whether a ﬁsh has an internal tracker implanted in it. It’s usually ﬁt onto a ﬁsh’s lower mandible. 2. POP-UP SATELLITE ARCHIVAL TAG This external tag collects detailed data on ﬁsh vitals, location and environmental information, such as light levels. 3. ACOUSTIC TRANSMITTER Internal or external tag that’s ideal for tracking ﬁsh in deeper water. These transmitters produce a unique set of pings that get assigned to an individual ﬁsh. To collect data, researchers either go out in a vessel to pick up signals or download the information from receivers stationed in the ﬁsh’s environment. 4. CINCH TAGS This type of external tag indicates the ﬁsh bearing it is part of a study and lists contact information for the agency monitoring it. If recreational ﬁshers reel in a catch with a cinch tag, they should report it to the agency listed on the tag. 5. LARGE-SCALE MODEL OF CODED WIRE Unlike the model shown here, these internal tags have a true diameter similar to that of mechanical pencil lead. The wire comes on a spool and is lined with imprinted numbers. When a biologist cuts off a piece to make a tag, a unique serial number will be paired with a ﬁsh. To read this number, researchers need magniﬁcation

equipment. 6. T-BAR TAGS External tags that come in a variety of colors. Similar to cinch tags, T-bars ﬂag the ﬁsh as part of a study. 7. RADIO TELEMETRY TAG Internal tag for tracking ﬁsh in shallower waters. Researchers use an antenna, either handheld or secured beneath a plane or boat, to pick up the tag’s radio signal. 8. VISUAL IMPLANT (VI) TAGS Internal tags mixed with brightly colored biocompatible substances that researchers implant into translucent sections of a ﬁsh. While it’s possible to spot them with the naked eye, researchers typically need ﬂuorescent light or magniﬁcation to see VI tags. Different colors can indicate details such as the year a ﬁsh was tagged for study. 9. HYDROSTATIC TAGS Much like cinch tags, these external tags ﬂag the ﬁsh as being part of a study. 10. PASSIVE INTEGRATED TRANSPONDER (PIT) TAGS An internal tag that biologists must scan to activate. PITs relay data on ﬁsh growth rates and movement patterns to a receiver.  LACY SCHLEY; TAGS COURTESY OF U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE, MIDWEST REGION

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WILLIAM ZUBACK/DISCOVER

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Vital Signs

A marathoner completes a race through the Borneo rainforest, then pays the price with a deadly ailment. BY CLAIRE PANOSIAN DUNAVAN

An endurance athlete takes part in an Eco-Challenge in Brazil. Such competitors push themselves to their limits in locales teeming with dangers, including infectious diseases.

→

The Borneo wetlands teem with darting birds, slithering snakes and dangling orangutans. Blood-sucking leeches and slim, coiled microbes also abound. Some folks find out about these guys the hard way. Mary, 46, was a longtime marathon runner from Southern California. She was in my office at UCLA Medical Center for a checkup because she was training for a competition in Borneo, a rugged rainforest island in Southeast Asia. Along with 304 fellow athletes from 26 countries, the petite, fearless blonde was to compete in the EcoChallenge, a multisport race in which

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athletes trek through jungles, kayak on muddy rivers and bike over jagged mountains. I pleaded with her to take precautions for her health given the jungle conditions. “Borneo is swarming with mosquitoes and malaria,” I said. “Won’t you please fill a prescription for malaria pills?” But Mary was leery of the possible side effects. On a previous trip, she’d suffered scary dreams while taking an anti-malarial medication called mefloquine. Another option was the antibiotic doxycycline. Unlike mefloquine, the body tolerates doxycycline far better, although in some patients it causes stomach pain

JUNGLE ADVENTURE During the Borneo competition, Mary was deep in a rainforest brushing against foliage. Suddenly she noticed jelly-like leeches clinging to her skin. “Don’t pull too hard!” a teammate warned, but Mary was already tugging. Soon every spot where a leech once clung was a red, oozing sore. Mary barely noticed the cuts as she continued on in the contest. Over the next few days, she and fellow athletes competed in wet conditions that included kayaking on and swimming in the Segama River and its tributaries. Mary and her team finished seventh in the race, celebrating with high-fives. On the flight back, Mary felt nauseous and hot, and her muscles ached. Upon landing, she drove to an emergency room where a doctor gave her an antibiotic and a shot of Demerol for the muscle pain, and declared her malaria-free. He told her to climb into bed and rest. After her 10 nights under burlap and twigs in Borneo, his order sounded like bliss. But sleep eluded Mary. As her condition worsened, she called a friend who was also a UCLA oncologist. “Denny,” she gasped, “I’ve never felt so sick in my life.” Three days later, Mary awoke in my hospital, squinting her eyes at a new set of doctors crowded around her bed. “Here’s an international athlete who recently swam in a jungle,” said Bernie Kubak, an infectious disease physician, to a group of medical trainees. “Now she has a fever of 102 and an inflamed liver and pancreas. What’s your leading diagnosis?” Having learned of other EcoChallenge athletes who had fallen ill, Kubak had already picked his: leptospirosis. It’s an infection due to Leptospira, a bacterium passed in animal urine that can live for months

ESPEN RASMUSSEN

Athlete, Interrupted

and worsens sunburns. But Mary was skeptical of doxy, as well. “If only I hadn’t resisted,” she says now about skipping the doxy.

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Vital Signs

THE ASIA CONNECTION Asia looms large in the annals of leptospirosis. In 1915, Japanese microbiologist Ryukichi Inada first found leptospires in the kidneys of rats. Spreading through the animals’ urine, the bacteria could survive for months in stagnant water and wet soil. Eventually, he and other scientists found the wily microbes in cows, pigs, dogs and other mammals. But rats and mice will always remain the principal reservoir of leptospirosis, according to Haake, who is currently testing an oral vaccine in hamsters, hoping to help halt the role of rodents in the disease’s spread. In the meantime, humans diagnosed with leptospirosis face a more urgent problem. Whether they live in a

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Leptospirosis

The Borneo Eco-Challenge competition turned out to be a lepto nightmare. tropical forest or an inner-city slum, most are never diagnosed and treated with antibiotics. Although many people recover uneventfully, every year 60,000 pay the ultimate price, often dying with lemon-yellow eyes, rust-red urine, failing kidneys and hemorrhaging lungs. The Borneo Eco-Challenge competition turned out to be a lepto nightmare. Besides Mary, about 80 other competitors contracted the condition. Fortunately, none of them died, but as with Mary, more than one-third required hospitalization. According to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Eco-Challenge “was the first recognized international leptospirosis outbreak associated with the increasingly popular activity of adventure travel.” Since then, many more cases involving adventure racers have been documented around the world. In 2009, 20 lepto infections were identified

in Tchimbé Raid marathoners competing through the tropical forests of Martinique in the Caribbean. Three years later, an outbreak followed a triathlon on Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean. Rainy conditions can create the perfect environment for the microbes by raising water tables and muddying the ground. In Borneo and Martinique, record downpours preceded the ill-fated races. The CDC pointed out that many of the athletes sickened in Borneo had swum in the Segama River and its tributaries, their open sores an easy way for the bacterium to enter bodies. Bottom line: The more medical experts learn about leptospirosis, the more they favor guarding against it with weekly doses of doxycycline during high-risk travel.

NO REGRETS For two to three months after the brunt of the illness, Mary had lingering fatigue and other symptoms. But eventually she was strong enough to resume her standard weekend fare of long bike rides and runs, and she returned to international adventure contests. Her experience in Borneo will always stand as a personal high. “How often can you come around a corner on a mountain bike and see an elephant?” she asks. But it’s also a powerful lesson. Not only did the event showcase spirit and drive among athletes, it also revealed a serious vulnerability of competing in natural surroundings. Mary has no regrets about what happened. “Everything has risk,” she says. “If you fear the unknown and don’t pursue adventure, you’re missing out on such amazing opportunities and experiences.” D Claire Panosian Dunavan is an infectious diseases specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles. The cases described in Vital Signs are real, but patient names and some details have been changed.

SCIENCE SOURCE

in wet conditions. Eyeing Mary’s skin, Kubak could easily picture leptospires drilling into her many open wounds, including those from the leeches. He puzzled over how he could prove it was the bacterium while watching the drip of the intravenous ampicillin, another antibiotic he had added to Mary’s twice-daily doxycycline. Because several drugs were in her system, culturing Mary’s blood now to test for lepto would be useless. So Kubak decided the best way was to use a blood sample from before she received treatment. He made several phone calls, and soon leftover vials of Mary’s blood were on their way from a hospital emergency room to the lab of David Haake, an internationally known leptospirosis researcher at the West Los Angeles VA hospital. Haake was not optimistic. He was supposed to coax delicate germs to grow from this week-old, refrigerated serum? But days later, he spied a faint zone of life in a flask of nutrient agar. Under a microscope, Haake examined the thin, motile corkscrews and later subtyped the bugs. Their genetic fingerprint matched Leptospira weilii, a species exclusive to Southeast Asia.

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Notes From Earth

Easter Island’s Last Endemics Flirt With Extinction A few native species still survive in remote caves and along cliff sides. BY NATHANIEL SCHARPING

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On Easter Island, isolated in the vast Pacific Ocean, 10 species of near-microscopic insects are all that remain of the island’s native species — at least for now. The endemic insects hide in volcanic caves and eke out an existence in an increasingly imperiled habitat. Tourists who flood this tiny island, called Rapa Nui by the native residents, endanger the tiny bugs’ ancestral homes — fragile gardens of moss and ferns. On top of that, hordes of invasive species threaten to crowd them out. Iconic Moai, the monolithic stone statues standing some 40 feet tall, immortalized the island, but its most important inhabitants are almost too small to be seen.

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Tourists ﬂock to Easter Island for a glimpse of its iconic Moai statues (top). Ecologist Jut Wynne takes ﬁeld notes during research at a location high above the Paciﬁc Ocean.

palm tree called Paschalococos disperta, or the Easter Island palm. “Ecosystems don’t collapse; they shift from one steady state to another, and that’s simply what happened here on Rapa Nui,” says Jut Wynne, an ecologist at Northern Arizona University’s Merriam-Powell Center for Environmental Research. “What caused that shift was a very fragile,

GONE UNDERGROUND The island now hosts many non-native species, plus sheep, horses and goats, descendants of the livestock owned by ranchers who worked the island in the early 1900s. Hidden under their feet, however, are some of the last true natives of Rapa Nui. Wynne’s childhood dream of visiting Easter Island finally came true in 2008. That year he launched a baseline study looking at three caves. He sampled over a dozen more caves in 2009 and 2011, and turned up eight new species endemic to the island, bringing the total to 10. Last summer, supported by a Fulbright fellowship,

TOP: MICHELE BURGESS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO. BOTTOM: RAFAEL RODRIGUEZ BRIZUELA

MOAI MATERIALIZE Rapa Nui’s textbook tale of environmental destruction began when humans arrived. Polynesian sailors, carried over the waves in giant canoes, made landfall sometime between A.D. 800 and 1200. Their new civilization turned tropical forests into boats and building materials. For food, they farmed and fished. And by its 17th-century peak, the population had swelled to about 15,000. But just a few thousand people remained when Europeans arrived in 1722. The Moai-building islanders caused an ecological shift that devastated species adapted to a specific kind of environment. What was once palm-dominated scrub forest became grassland. The lost species included at least five kinds of land birds, sea mammals, insects and a type of giant

fire-intolerant ecosystem and the arrival of humans, timed inauspiciously with an extended drought period.” Wynne says that shift strained the existing ecosystem, killing endemic species, and created a much more homogeneous environment.

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He hopes the future may not be as bleak as Rapa Nui’s past. Wynne is working with the park system, the community and the government to increase awareness of the island’s unique, invisible treasures. The park has now closed roads to reduce traffic in vital areas. Even small measures, like roping off areas and putting up signs, could have a large impact, Wynne says.

he expanded his search. The work took him to some of the most remote places on the island in search of fragile habitats where the insects make their last stand. He plumbed the depths of damp caves and rappelled down sheer cliff faces to find the fragmentary patches of moss and ferns where the insects could be hiding. Previous studies showed that many native species once crawled across the island. The remaining insects have likely all retreated to places where conditions reflect the Rapa Nui ecosystem that existed before humans arrived. So far, Wynne has discovered seven species of springtail, tiny insects whose defining feature is a spring-loaded tail that flips them into the air and away from danger — a built-in ejector seat. He has also found two isopod species, popularly known as “roly-polys,” and one species of book louse. And while the results are still tentative, Wynne says his team’s search last summer might have doubled the island’s known endemic species.

‘IN DANGER OF EXTINCTION’ Preserving those insects has also taken on new urgency. Roughly 100,000 tourists came through Rapa Nui in 2015, a surfeit of pedestrians for an island totaling only 63 square miles. Even though a national park covers

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Jut Wynne examines a freshly caught insect. Cave art adorns the wall behind him.

Original Easter Island occupants, clockwise from upper left: Cyptophania pakaratii, Hawaiioscia rapui and Entomobrya manuhoko.

nearly half the island, that hasn’t stopped foot traffic. Tourists regularly walk through some of the insects’ habitats, completely oblivious to the ramifications of their behavior, Wynne says. Even studying the insects in their natural cave environment presents a delicate balance between scientific enlightenment and harmful intrusion. Invasive species present another threat. American cockroaches, millipedes and other hitchhikers now pervade the island, threatening to crowd out — and eat up — the natives. “And because of that,” says Wynne, “we believe that most of the insects on the island are indeed in danger of extinction.”

DELICATE BALANCE Economic incentives make fully protecting the caves difficult, however. The island needs revenue from visitors, and the beautiful vistas and caves filled with indigenous art are a potent lure. Sebastián Yancovic Pakarati, an expert on Rapa Nui’s natural heritage and one of Wynne’s collaborators, says the island must develop a plan to better protect its natural and cultural treasures before opening the floodgates of tourism. But he is heartened that residents seem willing to play a role in the ongoing protection of their island and its resources. With the combination of newfound support and greater oversight, he is hopeful that these endangered areas can be preserved. “The new generations want to pay more attention, not just to conserving and preserving the Moai and the cultural legacy of our ancestors, but we also want to place a major emphasis on nature’s heritage and biodiversity,” says Pakarati, who serves on the Advisory Council of National Monuments. And the park is now working on a conservation plan to protect and monitor caves in an area with the highest concentration of native species. “We hope this initiative can help with the conservation and preservation of the location, and eventually the rest of the island,” Pakarati says. D Nathaniel Scharping is a staff writer for Discover. Follow him on Twitter: @NathanielScharp

TOP: NICHOLAS GLOVER. BELOW, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: E.L. MOCKFORD & J.J. WYNNE, 2013/ZOOTAXA 3702: 437-449; S. TAITI & J.J. WYNNE, 2015/ZOOKEYS 515: 27-49; E.C. BERNARD, F. N. SOTO-ADAMES & J.J. WYNNE, 2015/ZOOTAXA 3949 (2): 239-267

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WAR OVER

REALITY QUANTUM PHYSICS MAY BE WELL UNDERSTOOD, BUT SCIENTISTS STILL DON’T AGREE ON WHAT IT MEANS.

BY TIM FOLGER

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HERE’S A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT:

ILLUSTRATIONS BY RICHARD KAIL/GETTY IMAGES

Imagine astronomers didn’t really believe that Earth orbits the sun or that our world turns daily on its axis. What if they viewed the heliocentric model of the solar system merely as an abstract mathematical tool to track planets and stars with great precision, not as a literal description of the way things are? What if they claimed we can’t truly know whether the sun orbits Earth or vice versa and, moreover, that such questions were not even worth asking? It would be preposterous. No respectable scientist would ever entertain such notions — except when it comes to the most powerful theory in the history of physics: quantum mechanics. More than a century after its birth, quantum mechanics, the physics of atoms, photons and other particles, remains as baffling as ever. Experiments have repeatedly confirmed the theory’s weird predictions with phenomenal accuracy — to a dozen or more decimal places in some cases. Technologies derived from it drive the world’s economy: The electronics industry as we know it wouldn’t exist without quantum mechanics. It explains why the sky is blue and how stars generate their light. And yet, despite the theory’s unquestioned dominance and practical significance, physicists still don’t agree on what it means or what it says about the nature of reality. Some physicists deny that quantum mechanics describes any sort of objective reality. At least a dozen interpretations of quantum mechanics vie for physicists’ hearts and minds, each with a radically different take on reality. Adán Cabello, a physicist at the University of Seville in Spain, recently summed up the confusing, incompatible gaggle of viewpoints as “a map of madness.”

There’s the Many Worlds model, which posits the existence of innumerable parallel realities. If that seems a tad extravagant, you might prefer QBism (pronounced “cubism”), where the quantum world and the scientists who observe it are inextricably bound together in an unpredictable, interactive universe. The central issue is that physicists don’t know what the most basic equation of quantum theory — a mathematical formulation called the wave function — actually represents. Does it describe a fundamental feature of the physical world? Or is it instead just a handy way to predict experimental results? “There is no standard interpretation,” says Antony Valentini, a theoretical physicist at Clemson University. “It’s extraordinary. I don’t know of any comparable episode in the history of science.” Where does that lack of consensus leave physicists? After all, quantum mechanics isn’t just a branch of physics; it is modern physics. “Most of the things that people are doing on almost every floor of every physics department in the world are quantum in one way or another,” says Matt Leifer, a physicist at Chapman University in California. If physicists can’t agree on — or don’t know — what their reigning theory is all about, does it mean they’ve hit a wall in terms of understanding the world? Recent efforts to rule out some interpretations haven’t brought us any closer to an answer. If there’s one thing certain about the quantum world, it’s that nothing’s ever settled.

LIGHT AND SHADOW The confusion dates to the early days of quantum mechanics, in the 1920s, when Niels Bohr clashed with Albert Einstein. Bohr, an almost oracular figure in 20th-century physics, argued that when studying the atomic world, physicists must give up the notion of a reality that exists independently of their own measurements. The message of quantum mechanics

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is inescapable, he said, and exceedingly strange: Atoms and MANY WORLDS, ONE CAT Some of the attempts to answer that question have, if all other particles do not possess definite positions, energies anything, only added an extra dose of weirdness to the or any properties until they are measured in an experiment. quantum brew. Perhaps the strangest of all the interpretations To be clear, it’s not just that physicists don’t know what the is the one first proposed in 1957 by Princeton physicist properties are; the properties literally only come into being at Hugh Everett. In his doctoral thesis, Everett argued that the the time of the measurement. equations of quantum mechanics should be taken at face Einstein categorically rejected Bohr’s view. While value: Quantum waves are real, with each possible wave in strolling the grounds of the Institute for Advanced Study in effect representing a separate, independent reality. According Princeton University one moonlit night, Einstein famously to the Many Worlds theory, as Everett’s idea is now known, asked a colleague, “Do you really believe the moon is not every possible physical event actually takes place — in its there when you are not looking at it?” Einstein remained own parallel universe. The implications are staggering. convinced until his death that quantum mechanics was At this moment, for example, an uncountable only a steppingstone toward a deeper, more number of yous are reading this, possibly comprehensive theory that would make scratching their heads. sense of the uncanny phenomena of the For all its universe-begetting quantum world. outlandishness, the Many Worlds view What makes quantum mechanics so WHY AREN’T has many advocates. “In a certain confounding? Consider the following PEOPLE, TREES sense, it’s very conservative,” says iconic, oft-repeated experiment: A David Wallace, a philosopher of beam of light shines through two AND EVERYTHING physics at the University of Southern parallel slits cut into a barrier and ELSE AS WAVY AND California. “It leaves the physics falls on a strip of photographic film INDISTINCT AS THE unchanged, and it holds onto the idea beyond the barrier. Since light itself that scientific theories are supposed to consists of a stream of particles — ATOMS THEY’RE give us a description of what is going photons — it seems reasonable to MADE OF? on, even if what’s going on is much assume that the photons pass through weirder than we thought.” one slit or the other en route to the film. But, of course, there’s no consensus. And if physicists set up the experiment Many physicists prefer the idea that quantum with a photon detector at each slit, that is waves — or more precisely, their mathematical indeed what they see: Photons hurtle randomly representations, wave functions — don’t correspond to through either the first slit or the second, which results in actual physical entities; the wave function simply reflects the two separate clumps of dots forming on the film. probability that a particular experimental outcome will occur. A slight adjustment, however, profoundly alters the results. This eliminates the paradoxes of quantum mechanics without If physicists remove the photon detectors, the pattern created the necessity of conjuring innumerable universes. Case in on the film changes completely. Instead of two clusters of point: Erwin Schrödinger’s hapless cat. dots, alternating light and dark bands appear across the film, Schrödinger, a contemporary of Bohr and Einstein, and what physicists call an interference pattern. That pattern one of the founders of quantum mechanics, devised his could form only if each individual photon somehow spread famous thought experiment to highlight what he saw as the out like a wave and went through both slits simultaneously. absurdity of Bohr’s ideas. His Rube Goldbergian experiment Bright bands develop on the film where two wave crests has six components: a steel box, a cat, a radioactive element, coincide; overlapping crests and troughs create the dark a Geiger counter, a hammer and a vial of cyanide. The bands. In other words, photons behave like particles with cat is put in the steel box; the lid is closed. No one can see detectors present and like waves without detectors. what’s happening inside. During any given interval of time, For Bohr, this showed that the objects we consider particles the radioactive element may or may not emit a high-energy don’t have a definite existence until they are observed. On the particle. If it does, the Geiger counter detects it and triggers very smallest scales, reality is blurry, not sharply defined — at the hammer to smash the vial, releasing poisonous fumes that least when no one is looking. kill the cat. If it doesn’t, the cat survives. Since everything ultimately consists of those blurry According to the rules of quantum mechanics, the particle-waves, why don’t we see quantum effects in our radioactive particle exists as a wave function in all its possible everyday lives? Why aren’t people, trees and everything else as states — both emitted and not emitted. A single, definite state wavy and indistinct as the atoms they’re made of ? The short crystallizes only upon measurement. What does that mean for answer is no one really knows, hence the crazy cornucopia the cat? Is it both alive and dead until someone opens the box of quantum interpretations. In one way or another, the for a look? Schrödinger ridiculed the notion of a cat — or manifold versions all seek to answer a single question: Are anything — existing in two different conditions at once. these “quantum waves” as real as the ground beneath your To some physicists, Schrödinger’s thought experiment feet, or are they purely mathematical constructs without any shows that the wave function can’t be real, that it represents physical existence?

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nothing more than the probabilities of different events. The cat is alive or dead, not alive and dead. The cat’s condition is determined before anyone opens the box. The only thing that changes when the box opens is our knowledge of the cat’s fate.

with so many different wave functions. The predictions those wave functions make are so different.” The PBR theorem shows that quantum states must therefore correspond uniquely with something that’s real — that is, it proves the wave function actually exists and is not just an abstract measure of probability. Despite some rave reviews, the PBR result hasn’t changed many minds. “I was a bit disappointed that the people who liked it were the people who already believed the conclusion,” says Pusey. The naysayers instead deny one of PBR’s main assumptions: that there exists an objective reality we can measure in the first place.

CARDS AGAINST REALITY In our everyday world, it seems, the laws of quantum theory lead to absurd results. But what about that two-slit experiment? If the wave function isn’t actually real, what creates those light and dark bands? Four years ago, Matthew Pusey of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Jonathan Barrett, then at the University of London, and Terry Rudolph at A MALLEABLE UNIVERSE Imperial College London published a paper The notion of a completely objective reality in Nature Physics where they argued is the bedrock principle of science, which convincingly that quantum waves must is the main reason Einstein was so be real. In an interview with Nature, uncomfortable with Bohr’s “nothing Clemson physicist Valentini said, “I IF THE WAVE exists without observation” take on don’t like to sound hyperbolic, but I FUNCTION ISN’T quantum theory. Yet Christopher think the word ‘seismic’ is likely to ACTUALLY REAL, Fuchs, a physicist now at the apply to this paper.” University of Massachusetts, and Pusey, Barrett and Rudolph’s WHAT CREATES Ruediger Schack of Royal Holloway theorem, known as PBR, uses THOSE LIGHT AND University of London disagree. a sophisticated mathematical DARK BANDS? They contend that Bohr was on to argument to show that any something: Our notion of an objective interpretation of quantum mechanics reality needs modification. The physical that doesn’t treat the wave function as a world cannot be separated from our own real object invariably leads to results that efforts to probe it. How could it be otherwise, contradict quantum theory itself. If they’re since we ourselves are embedded in the very world right and the wave function is real, interpretations we’re seeking to understand? like Everett’s Many Worlds, which take the reality of the They call their way of looking at quantum mechanics wave function as a given, could start to seem more plausible. QBism, a modified version of a theory they developed with In that case, Schrödinger’s cat would be alive in one universe, University of New Mexico physicist Carlton Caves called dead in another. Alternatively, fans of Bohr’s view could claim Quantum Bayesianism. QBism combines quantum mechanics that the cat exists as a fuzzy quantum wave inside the closed with Bayesian probability, a variation on standard probability box; the frazzled feline would indeed be in a combined alivein which the odds of any given event are revised as one gains dead state until someone takes a look. more knowledge of the many possible conditions tied to the To get the gist of the PBR argument, consider a simple card event. For example, if a patient complains of headaches to a game between you and a dealer involving two decks of cards. doctor, the initial odds of a diagnosis of brain cancer might be One deck holds only red cards, the other deck only aces. The low. As the doctor examines the patient, the odds of a cancer dealer gives you a card and asks which deck it came from. In diagnosis may go up or down. most cases the answer will be easy. But for two cards — the QBism applies similar reasoning to physics experiments: two red aces — there’s no way to tell. The aces could come Whenever physicists perform an experiment, they are updating from either deck. That’s fine with a deck of cards, but the their own subjective knowledge. There is no fixed underlying quantum version doesn’t play so nicely. reality that different observers can independently experience. If the wave function is not a real physical object and instead Just as a doctor must assess each patient individually, so only measures experimental probabilities, then more than too must a physicist approach the fresh, ever-changing one wave function could describe a single physical state, say phenomena presented by the quantum world. In QBism, the the position of a photon (just like that red ace could come experimentalist cannot be separated from the experiment — from either deck). The notion that a slew of different wave functions could describe the same underlying reality falls apart both are immersed in the same living, unpredictable moment. “If QBism says one radical and important thing about in quantum mechanics, says Pusey. Reality can’t come from the nature of reality, then observer participancy is it,” says two decks. He and his colleagues showed that the probabilistic Schack. “Subjects matter. And reality, if QBism is right, interpretation becomes a problematic one. cannot be conceived without always including the subject. “It leads to so many possibilities that you can prove that That’s certainly a bold statement about the real world, about quantum mechanics wouldn’t allow it,” says Pusey. “It reality. It’s just a feature of reality that is very fundamental.” wouldn’t make sense for one physical state to be compatible

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Quantum theory, Schack says, offers profound observations about the real world, but the theory itself is not a description of the world. He posits that the right way to think of quantum mechanics is as a set of rules about how to correctly conduct experiments. “Whether you see a wave or particle depends on what question you ask,” says Schack. “What do physicists do? They choose experiments. You could describe any experiment as a gamble on the outcome. Quantum mechanics is a useful guide to action: It tells you how to put together your experimental apparatus so that it works in the end.” Schack says he and Fuchs like to use a term they’ve borrowed from the American philosopher William James, who saw reality as being “malleable.” QBism, says Schack, makes the same point. What sort of universe do we inhabit? Is it like a giant machine, with the future evolving from the past according to immutable laws? Or is it inherently interactive? “Why would you want a clockwork universe?” he asks. “QBism gives a much richer universe. It’s a reality in which we matter far more than we ever could in a clockwork universe.”

BACK TO THE BEGINNING If QBism is right, if the wave function isn’t real and quantum theory doesn’t give us a direct description of reality, it leaves unanswered the most basic of all questions: What then is the quantum world actually like? What is it made of ? Particles? Waves? Something beyond our ability to imagine? For theoretical physicist Valentini, the answer has been there from the earliest days of quantum theory. In 1927, the French physicist Louis de Broglie, who first proposed that particles could behave like waves, developed an interpretation of quantum mechanics called pilot wave theory, where waves and particles are both equally real. Each particle rides its own wave. The pilot wave is a bizarre thing — it exists in multiple dimensions — but it is a real physical object. Pilot wave theory explains the strange two-slit experiment: A particle always goes through one slit or the other; at the same time its pilot wave travels through both slits. But there’s no wave-particle paradox because the experimental apparatus and the wave-surfing particle all form one interdependent system described by a pilot wave. Adding or removing a detector from the experiment changes the system’s pilot wave and the pattern on the screen. Bohr and other physics luminaries rejected de Broglie’s idea, though, in part because it didn’t provide any way to predict the exact paths of particles. In the 1950s, David Bohm, a leading American physicist, did some additional

work with de Broglie’s idea, but for the most part pilot wave theory languished until the early 1990s when it hooked Valentini as a grad student. Valentini has devoted his career to almost single-handedly resurrecting the pilot wave idea. Now his years of work actually have a chance — a small one, he admits — of being vindicated. Of the many interpretations of quantum theory, pilot wave theory is unique in that Valentini has found a way in which it might be experimentally tested. No other interpretation of quantum mechanics can make that claim. Many Worlds, Bohr’s interpretation and others are all experimentally indistinguishable — they reproduce the results of standard quantum theory. But if Valentini is right, certain effects predicted in pilot wave theory may have left an imprint on the cosmic microwave background, the primordial radiation left over from the Big Bang that still pervades all of space. The temperature of that radiation is almost a perfectly uniform 2.725 degrees Celsius above absolute zero. Detailed observations, however, have found slight variations in the radiation. Standard quantum theory can explain nearly all of these variations, but in 2015, new data released by the European Space Agency’s Planck spacecraft revealed evidence of small anomalies in the background radiation. And that is just the kind of thing Valentini has been looking for. While conventional quantum theory predicts that random quantum fluctuations in the early universe have left celestial imprints, pilot wave theory predicts fluctuations that are less random, leaving slightly different wrinkles in the cosmic microwave background radiation. “It’s tantalizing,” Valentini says. “We’re carrying out the analysis partly to understand things better and partly to see what the data can tell us about the predictions that we have.” Another two years of data and analysis should settle the question. Valentini also feels encouraged by the PBR theorem because it lends support to a central tenet of pilot wave theory: The wave function is real. Nevertheless, he realizes the odds of his life’s work being confirmed are slim. “Who knows what will happen?” he says. “It may be 20 years of work down the drain. We don’t know. You have different camps pushing hard for their own interpretation. But really, if we’re going to be honest, as scientists, if a member of the public asks us what is the meaning of our most basic theory of physics, I think we all have to say we don’t know.” D Tim Folger is a contributing editor to Discover and series editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing, an annual anthology. He lives in New Mexico.

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COVER STORY

Heroes of Science

Here’s to the household names and forgotten ﬁgures who accomplished incredible feats of knowledge — no capes required. ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARK MARTURELLO

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You know the ﬁrst guy in our Rushmore of great scientists, but can you name the other three?

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HEROES OF SCIENCE

Albert Einstein The whole package 36

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crowd barged past dioramas, glass displays and wide-eyed security guards in the American Museum of Natural History. Screams rang out as some runners fell and were trampled. Upon arriving at a lecture hall, the mob broke down the door. The date was Jan. 8, 1930, and the New York museum was showing a film about Albert Einstein and his general theory of relativity. Einstein was not present, but 4,500 mostly ticketless people still showed up for the viewing. Museum officials told them “no ticket, no show,” setting the stage for, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, “the first science riot in history.” Such was Einstein’s popularity. As a publicist might say, he was the whole package: distinctive look (untamed hair, rumpled sweater), witty personality (his quips, such as God not playing dice, would live on) and major scientific cred (his papers upended physics). Time magazine named him Person of the Century. “Einstein remains the last, and perhaps only, physicist ever to become a household name,” says James Overduin, a theoretical physicist at Towson University in Maryland. Born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879, Einstein was a precocious child. As a teenager, he wrote a paper on magnetic fields. (Einstein never actually failed math, contrary to popular lore.) He married twice, the second time to his first cousin, Elsa Löwenthal. The marriage lasted until her death in 1936. As a scientist, Einstein’s watershed year was 1905, when he was working as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office, having failed to attain an academic position after earning his doctorate. That year he published his four most important papers. One of them described the relationship between matter and energy, neatly summarized E = mc2. Other papers that year were on Brownian motion, suggesting the existence of molecules and atoms, and the photoelectric effect, showing that light is made of particles later called photons. His fourth paper, about special relativity, explained that space and time are interwoven, a shocking idea now considered a foundational principle of astronomy.

Einstein expanded on relativity in 1916 with his theory of gravitation: general relativity. It holds that anything with mass distorts the fabric of space and time, just as a bowling ball placed on a bed causes the mattress to sag. During a solar eclipse in 1919, astronomers showed that the sun’s mass did indeed bend the path of starlight. (The temporary darkness around the sun enabled astronomers to chronicle the bending.) The validation made Einstein a superstar. Two years later, Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics, not for general relativity, but for his discovery of the photoelectric effect. By this time, the 42-year-old physicist had made most of his major contributions to science. In 1933, Einstein accepted a professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where for years he tried (unsuccessfully) to unify the laws of physics. He became a U.S. citizen in 1940, and his fame grew as a public intellectual, civil rights supporter and pacifist. Many consider Einstein’s theory of general relativity to be his crowning achievement. The theory predicted both black holes and gravitational waves — and just last year, physicists measured the waves created by the collision of two black holes over a billion light-years away. During their epic journey across the cosmos, the ripples played with space and time like a fun-house mirror contorting faces. General relativity also is the bedrock of gravitational lensing, which uses the gravity of stars and galaxies as a giant magnifying glass to zoom in on farther cosmic objects. Astronomers may soon take advantage of such physics to see geographic details of worlds light-years away. Einstein, who died of heart failure in 1955, would have applauded such bold, imaginative thinking. His greatest insights came not from careful experimental analysis, but simply considering what would happen under certain circumstances, and letting his mind play with the possibilities. “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination,” he said in a Saturday Evening Post interview. “Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” — MARK BARNA

Unsung Hero

Alhazen Method man Observe. Hypothesize. Experiment. Revise. Repeat. The scientiﬁc method is the foundation upon which researchers build. The man who laid the groundwork for it, however, is all but forgotten in the West. Born in the mid-10th century in what is now Iraq, Ibn al-Haytham, known to English speakers as Alhazen, was a man of endless curiosity. At a time when the Arabicspeaking world was the epicenter of scientiﬁc inquiry, Alhazen was one of its brightest stars. He wrote more than 100 books on physics, mathematics and astronomy, among other ﬁelds, and is believed to be the ﬁrst to explain how our brains create the illusion of the moon appearing larger near the horizon. His pioneering work on optics inspired the likes of Roger Bacon and Johannes Kepler centuries later. But Alhazen’s creation of the scientiﬁc method is his most far-reaching achievement. Known for developing theories based on experimentation and data collection rather than abstract thought, Alhazen stressed the need to test results — especially those considered canon, as he wrote in his Doubts Against Ptolemy: “A person who studies scientiﬁc books with a view of knowing the real facts ought to turn himself into an opponent of everything that he studies; he should thoroughly assess its main as well as its margin parts, and oppose it from every point of view and in all its aspects. . . . If he takes this course, the real facts will be revealed to him.” Alhazen’s advice can be seen in action today around the world, from middle school science fairs to the Large Hadron Collider. — GEMMA TARLACH

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HEROES OF SCIENCE

Marie Curie She went her own way

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espite her French name, Marie Curie’s story didn’t start in France. Her road to Paris and success was a hard one, as equally worthy of admiration as her scientific accomplishments. Born Maria Salomea Sklodowska in 1867 in Warsaw, Poland, she faced some daunting hurdles, both because of her gender and her family’s poverty,

which stemmed from the political turmoil at the time. Her parents, deeply patriotic Poles, lost most of their money supporting their homeland in its struggle for independence from Russian, Austrian and Prussian regimes. Her father, a math and physics professor, and her mother, headmistress of a respected boarding school in Russian-occupied Warsaw, instilled in their five kids a love of learning. They also imbued them with an appreciation of Polish culture, which the Russian government discouraged. When Curie and her three sisters finished regular schooling, they couldn’t carry on with higher education like their brother. The local university didn’t let women enroll, and their family didn’t have the money to send them abroad. Their only options were to marry or become governesses. Curie and her sister Bronislawa found another way. The pair took up with a secret organization called Flying University, or sometimes Floating University. Fittingly, given the English abbreviation, the point of FU was to stick it to the Russian government and provide a pro-Polish education, in Polish — expressly forbidden in Russian-controlled Poland. Eventually, the sisters hatched a plan that would help them both get the higher education they so desperately wanted. Curie would work as a governess and support Bronislawa’s medical school studies. Then, Bronislawa would return the favor once she was established. Curie endured years of misery as a governess, but the plan worked. In 1891, she packed her bags and headed to Paris and her bright future. At the University of Paris, Curie was inspired by French physicist Henri Becquerel. In 1896, he discovered that uranium emitted something that looked an awful lot like — but not quite the same as — X-rays, which had been discovered only the year before. Intrigued, Curie decided to explore uranium and its mysterious rays as a Ph.D. thesis topic. Eventually, she realized whatever was producing these rays was happening at an atomic level, an important first

step to discovering that atoms weren’t the smallest form of matter. It was a defining moment for what Curie would eventually call radioactivity. Around the same time, Curie met and married her French husband, Pierre, an accomplished physicist who abandoned his own work and joined his wife’s research. The two started examining minerals containing uranium and pitchblende, a uranium-rich ore, and realized the latter was four times more radioactive than pure uranium. They reasoned some other element must be in the mix, sending those radioactive levels through the roof. And they were right: After processing literally tons of pitchblende, they discovered a new element and named it polonium, after Marie’s native Poland. They published a paper in July 1898, revealing the find. And just five months later, they announced their discovery of yet another element, radium, found in trace amounts in uranium ore. In 1903, Curie, her husband and Becquerel won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on radioactivity, making Curie the first woman to win a Nobel. Tragedy struck just three years later. Pierre, who had recently accepted a professorship at the University of Paris, died suddenly after a carriage accident. Curie was devastated by his death. Yet she continued her research, filling Pierre’s position and becoming the first woman professor at the university. In 1911 Curie won her second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry, for her work with polonium and radium. She remains the only person to win Nobel prizes in two different sciences. Curie racked up several other accomplishments, from founding the Radium Institute in Paris where she directed her own lab (whose researchers won their own Nobels), to heading up France’s first military radiology center during World War I and thus becoming the first medical physicist. She died in 1934 from a type of anemia that very likely stemmed from her exposure to such extreme radiation during her career. In fact, her original notes and papers are still so radioactive that they’re kept in lead-lined boxes, and you need protective gear to view them. — LACY SCHLEY

Unsung Hero

Chien-Shiung Wu “First Lady of Physics” Chien-Shiung Wu’s path to the highest levels of science began in coastal China’s Jiangsu Province. She arrived in the U.S. in 1936 to pursue a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. While there, her experiments with X-ray emissions and xenon gas became important contributions to the Manhattan Project. But it was her work a few years later, at Columbia University, that would earn her a place in the physics pantheon. Wu was the ﬁrst to verify — and later reﬁne — Enrico Fermi’s theory of radioactive betadecay, which describes how some unstable atoms emit radiation when transforming into more stable atoms. In 1956, other researchers asked Wu to help them prove their hypothesis about a breakdown of the law of parity. The law states that objects and their mirror images should behave the same way, only reversed, like a right and left hand. Wu’s complex experiments conﬁrmed their hypothesis. The team won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957, but never acknowledged Wu’s contribution. The lack of credit didn’t hold Wu back. She went on to become the ﬁrst woman president of the American Physical Society and a National Medal of Science recipient. She enjoyed a long career as a distinguished professor, and great acclaim within her ﬁeld, where she was known as the “First Lady of Physics.” At a memorial conference in her honor in 1997, Nobel laureate Leon Lederman spoke for many when he recalled her exacting standards during their collaboration decades earlier: “The week of agony I endured some 40 years ago at the hands of my esteemed colleague C.S. Wu taught me a lesson about what it means to be a great scientist. That is, that validity of your results must have the highest priority.” — G.T.

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HEROES OF SCIENCE

Unsung Hero

Francis Beaufort Charting a course for good When he was barely a teenager in the 1780s, Francis Beaufort went to sea in the British Royal Navy. On his ﬁrst voyage, to China, the ship foundered because of inaccurate navigational charts. Beaufort and other crew members spent ﬁve days on the open water before being rescued. The harrowing experience set him on his life’s course. When he was a midshipman, Beaufort began making weather reports every two hours rather than the standard 12- to 24-hour span. By the time he was in command, he kept a detailed weather journal as well, and he had devised a system of alphanumeric notations about weather conditions that became standard throughout the Navy. You may have heard of the Beaufort Scale, which evolved out of his notation system and classiﬁes wind force. Though Beaufort developed the scale for winds at sea, it was later modiﬁed to include overland winds as well. What you may not know are Beaufort’s other contributions to science. When he was appointed as Hydrographer to the Admiralty in 1829, he was determined to map all uncharted waters. Over the next 26 years he produced nearly 1,500 meticulously detailed charts, some of which are still, like his notation system, in use today. He also began publishing mariner notices and timetables, transforming the Hydrographer’s Ofﬁce from obscurity into a cutting-edge institution. Oh, and one more science assist: In 1831, as Captain Robert FitzRoy prepared to survey the coasts of South America, he asked Beaufort to ﬁnd someone well educated, “some scientiﬁc person,” to accompany the expedition. FitzRoy’s ship was the HMS Beagle. Beaufort recommended Charles Darwin. — G.T.

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Isaac Newton The man who deﬁned science on a bet

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saac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642. Never the humble sort, he would have found the date apt: The gift to humanity and science had arrived. A sickly infant, his mere survival was an achievement. Just 23 years later, with his alma mater Cambridge University and much of England closed due to

plague, Newton discovered the laws that now bear his name. (He had to invent a new kind of math along the way: calculus.) The introverted English scholar held off on publishing those findings for decades, though, and it took the Herculean efforts of friend and comet discoverer Edmund Halley to get Newton to publish. The only

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reason Halley knew of Newton’s work? A bet the former had with other scientists on the nature of planetary orbits. When Halley mentioned the orbital problem to him, Newton shocked his friend by giving the answer immediately, having long ago worked it out. Halley persuaded Newton to publish his calculations, and the results were the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or just the Principia, in 1687. Not only did it describe for the first time how the planets moved through space and how projectiles on Earth traveled through the air; the Principia showed that the same fundamental force, gravity, governs both. Newton united the heavens and the Earth with his laws. Thanks to him, scientists believed they had a chance of unlocking the universe’s secrets. Newton’s academic devotion was absolute. His sometime assistant Humphrey Newton (no relation) wrote, “I never knew him to take any recreation.” He would only really leave his room to give lectures — even to empty rooms. “Ofttimes he did in a manner, for want of hearers, read to the walls,” Humphrey wrote in 1727. Newton never went halfway on anything. It would take too long to list his other scientific achievements, but the greatest hits might include his groundbreaking work on light and color; his development and refinement of reflecting telescopes (which now bear his name); and other fundamental work in math and heat. He also dabbled in biblical prophecies (predicting the world’s end in A.D. 2060), practiced alchemy and spent years trying, and failing, to produce the fabled philosopher’s stone. Alas, even Newton’s genius couldn’t create the impossible. In 1692, this rare failure, along with the unraveling of one of his few close friendships — and possibly mercury poisoning from his alchemical experiments — resulted in what we’d now call a prolonged nervous breakdown. Newton’s scienceproducing days were over, for reasons known only to him, though he would remain influential in the field.

So how did Newton pass his remaining three decades? Remarkably, by modernizing England’s economy and catching criminals. After languishing on a professor’s salary at Cambridge University for decades, in 1696 Newton received a cushy royal appointment to be Warden of the Mint in London. It was meant as an easy job with a nice paycheck: It “has not too much bus’nesse to require more attendance than you may spare,” his friend Charles Montague wrote after landing him the job. But Newton, focused as ever, threw himself into it. After a promotion to Master of the Mint, he oversaw the recoinage of English currency, advised on economics, established the gold standard and replaced all the country’s metal currency with improved, ridged coins (still in use today), which made it harder to shave off bits of the precious metals. He also focused his attention on counterfeiters, searching them out as zealously as he sought answers from the heavens. Newton established information networks among London’s shadiest spots, even going undercover to do so. Counterfeiting was considered high treason, punishable by death, and Newton relished witnessing his targets’ executions. Newton was known by his peers as an unpleasant person. He had few close friends and never married. Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed called him “insidious, ambitious, and excessively covetous of praise, and impatient of contradiction.” The man could nurse grudges for years, even after his foes had died. He famously feuded with German scientist Gottfried Leibnitz, mainly over who invented calculus first, creating a schism in European mathematics that lasted over a century. Newton also made it his life’s work to torment English scientist Robert Hooke, destroying the legacy of a man once considered London’s Leonardo da Vinci. How fitting that the unit of force is named after stubborn, persistent, amazing Newton, himself a force of nature. — BILL ANDREWS

I Know That Name One of the biggest honors a scientist can receive is to become the namesake of a unit of measurement — a ﬁtting reward if they’re the ones who discovered what’s being measured in the ﬁrst place. (All four of our “Rushmore” scientists have units named after them, though only Newton’s made it into the ofﬁcial International System of Units.) Sometimes, though, the label is all we know of the scientist. Let’s revisit the people behind the units.

DANIEL GABRIEL FAHRENHEIT (1686–1736) The Dutch physicist invented alcohol and mercury thermometers, as well as the temperature scale that now bears his name (and perplexes the world outside the U.S. and a handful of other countries), with 0 degrees marking the temperature of a 1-1 mix of ice and salt.

ANDERS CELSIUS (1701–1744) A well-traveled Swedish astronomer and professor at Uppsala University, he invented the Celsius (also called centigrade) temperature scale. In the system, now used worldwide, water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at 100.

WILLIAM THOMSON, LORD KELVIN (1824–1907) The British mathematician and physicist helped establish thermodynamics and invented our third temperature scale: 0 is equivalent to absolute zero, the theoretical coldest temperature possible. It isn’t measured by degrees, but individual kelvins.

JAMES PRESCOTT JOULE (1818–1889) The unit that measures work, or energy (a force acting over distance), honors the British physicist who established that all forms of energy are equivalent. He also developed thermodynamics, along with Lord Kelvin.

ALESSANDRO VOLTA (1745–1827) The namesake behind today’s volts, which measure differences in electrical potential, Italian physicist and experimentalist Volta discovered methane, used his tongue to detect electricity and invented the ﬁrst electric battery. Continued on next page

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(1775–1836) Another major electrical unit, the current-measuring ampere, takes its name from this French physicist. He was one of the main founders of the science of electromagnetism, which he christened “electrodynamics.”

MAX PLANCK (1858–1947) The German theoretical physicist invented quantum theory, so of course his unit is hard to grasp. The Planck length (1.616 x 10-35 meters), a tiny fraction of a proton’s diameter, is theoretically the smallest possible measurable length.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL (1847–1922) The Scottish-born inventor of the telephone and teacher of the deaf may have a famous name, but the unit named for him hides behind a fractional preﬁx: the decibel. Fittingly, it quantiﬁes the relative intensity, or loudness, of sounds.

CHARLES F. RICHTER (1900–1985) In 1935, the American seismologist and physicist came up with the earthquake-measuring scale that bears his name (though today’s scientists have replaced it with other, more precise systems). Originally interested in astronomy and chemistry, Richter got into seismology simply because that’s where a job opened up.

TETSUYA “TED” FUJITA (1920–1998) The scariest tornadoes are classiﬁed as EF5, but where does the F come from? The Japanese-born storm researcher Fujita lent his name to the system he created for classifying tornadic destructiveness, though scientists have since reﬁned it into the Enhanced Fujita scale. He also contributed to hurricane and thunderstorm analysis.

WILBUR SCOVILLE (1865–1942) Even the hotness of hot peppers is susceptible to scientiﬁc quantiﬁcation. While developing his test, which assigns Scoville heat units to the various species of the genus Capsicum, the American pharmacist (and presumed spiciness fan) realized the most sensitive instrument at his disposal was the human tongue. — B.A.

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Charles Darwin Delivering the evolutionary gospel

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harles Darwin would not have been anyone’s first guess for a revolutionary scientist. As a young man, his main interests were collecting beetles and studying geology in the countryside, occasionally skipping out on his classes at the University of Edinburgh Medical School to do so. It was a chance invitation in 1831 to join a journey around the world that would make Darwin, who had once studied to become a country parson, the father of evolutionary biology. Aboard the HMS Beagle, between bouts of seasickness, Darwin spent his five-year trip studying and documenting geological formations and myriad habitats throughout much of

the Southern Hemisphere, as well as the flora and fauna they contained. Darwin’s observations pushed him to a disturbing realization — the Victorian-era theories of animal origins were all wrong. Most people in Darwin’s time still adhered to creationism, the idea that a divine being was responsible for the diversity of life we find on Earth. Darwin’s observations implied a completely different process. He noticed small differences between members of the same species that seemed to depend upon where they lived. The finches of the Galapagos are the best-known example: From island to island, finches of the same species possessed differently shaped beaks, each adapted to the unique sources of food available on each island.

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This suggested not only that species could change — already a divisive concept back then — but also that the changes were driven purely by environmental factors, instead of divine intervention. Today, we call this natural selection. When Darwin returned, he was hesitant to publish his nascent ideas and open them up to criticism, as he felt that his theory of evolution was still insubstantial. Instead, he threw himself into studying the samples from his voyage and writing an account of his travels. Through his industrious efforts, Darwin built a reputation as a capable scientist, publishing works on geology as well as studies of coral reefs and barnacles still considered definitive today. Darwin also married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, during this time. They had 10 children, and by all accounts Darwin was an engaged and loving father, encouraging his children’s interests and taking time to play with

them. This was a level of attention uncommon among fathers at that time — to say nothing of eminent scientists. Through it all, the theory of evolution was never far from his mind, and the various areas of research he pursued only strengthened his convictions. Darwin slowly amassed overwhelming evidence in favor of evolution in the 20 years after his voyage. All of his observations and musings eventually coalesced into the tour de force that was On the Origin of Species, published in 1859 when Darwin was 50 years old. The 500-page book sold out immediately, and Darwin would go on to produce six editions, each time adding to and refining his arguments. In non-technical language, the book laid out a simple argument for how the wide array of Earth’s species came to be. It was based on two ideas: that species can change gradually over time, and that all species face difficulties brought on by their surroundings. From these basic observations, it stands to reason

Nikola Tesla Wizard of the Industrial Revolution

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ikola Tesla grips his hat in his hand. He points his cane toward Niagara Falls and beckons bystanders to turn their gaze to the future. This bronze Tesla — a statue on the Canadian side — stands atop an induction motor, the type of engine that drove the first hydroelectric power plant. We owe much of our modern electrified life to the lab experiments of the Serbian-American engineer, born in 1856 in what’s now Croatia. His designs advanced alternating current at the start of the electric age and allowed utilities

to send current over vast distances, powering American homes across the country. He developed the Tesla coil — a high-voltage transformer — and techniques to transmit power wirelessly. Cellphone makers (and others) are just now utilizing the potential of this idea. Tesla is perhaps best known for his eccentric genius. He once proposed a system of towers that he believed could

that those species best adapted to their environments will survive and those that fall short will die out. Though Darwin’s theory was logically sound and backed up by reams of evidence, his ideas faced sharp criticisms from adherents of creationism and the religious establishment around the world — just as he had feared. Although it wouldn’t become widely accepted until the 1930s, Darwin’s theory of natural selection and his ideas on evolution have survived largely intact. “I can’t emphasize enough how revolutionary Darwin’s theory was and how much it changed people’s views in so short a time,” says Jerry Coyne, professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. “On the Origin of Species is absolutely thorough and meticulously documented, and anticipated virtually all the counterarguments. There’s nothing you can really say to go after the important aspects of Darwin’s theory.” — NATHANIEL SCHARPING

pull energy from the environment and transmit signals and electricity around the world, wirelessly. But his theories were unsound, and the project was never completed. He also claimed he had invented a “death ray.” In recent years, Tesla’s mystique has begun to eclipse his inventions. San Diego Comic-Con attendees dress in Tesla costumes. The world’s most famous electric car bears his name. The American Physical Society even has a Tesla comic book (where, as in real life, he faces off against the dastardly Thomas Edison). While his work was truly genius, much of his wizardly reputation was of his own making. Tesla claimed to have accidentally caused an earthquake in New York City using a small steam-powered electric generator he’d invented — MythBusters debunked that idea. And Tesla didn’t actually discover alternating current, as everyone thinks. It was around for decades. But his ceaseless theories, inventions and patents made Tesla a household name, rare for scientists a century ago. And even today, his legacy still turns the lights on. — ERIC BETZ

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ISAAC ASIMOV (1920–1992)

Asimov was my gateway into science ﬁction, then science, then everything else. He penned some of the genre’s most iconic works — ﬂeshing out the laws of robotics, the messiness of a galactic empire, the pitfalls of predicting the future — in simple, effortless prose. A trained biochemist, the Russian-born New Yorker wrote proliﬁcally, producing over 400 books, not all science-related: Of the 10 Dewey Decimal categories, he has books in nine. — B.A.

RICHARD FEYNMAN (1918–1988) Feynman played a part in most of the highlights of 20th-century physics. In 1941, he joined the Manhattan Project. After the war, his Feynman diagrams — for which he shared the ’65 Nobel Prize in Physics — became the standard way to show how subatomic particles interact. As part of the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster investigation, he explained the problems to the public in easily understandable terms, his trademark. Feynman was also famously irreverent, and his books pack lessons I live by. — E.B.

ROBERT FITZROY (1805–1865)

FitzRoy suffered for science, and for that I respect him. As captain of the HMS Beagle, he sailed Charles Darwin around the world, only to later oppose his shipmate’s theory of evolution while waving a Bible overhead. FitzRoy founded the U.K.’s Met Ofﬁce in 1854, and he was a pioneer of prediction; he coined the term weather forecast. But after losing his fortunes, suffering from depression and poor health, and facing ﬁerce criticism of his forecasting system, he slit his throat in 1865. — CARL ENGELKING

JEAN-BAPTISTE LAMARCK (1744–1829) Lamarck may be remembered as a failure today, but to me, he represents an important step forward for evolutionary thinking. Before he suggested that species could change over time in the early 19th century, no one took the concept of evolution seriously. Though eventually proven wrong, Lamarck’s work brought the concept of evolution into the light and would help shape the theories of a young Charles Darwin. Science isn’t all about dazzling successes; it’s also a story of overcoming failures and incremental advances. — N.S.

LUCRETIUS (99 B.C.–55 B.C.)

My path to the ﬁrst-century B.C. Roman thinker Titus Lucretius Carus started with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Michele de Montaigne, who cited him in their

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essays. Lucretius’ only known work, On the Nature of Things, is remarkable for its foreshadowing of Darwinism, humans as higher primates, the study of atoms and the scientiﬁc method — all contemplated in a geocentric world ruled by eccentric gods. — M.B.

KATHARINE MCCORMICK (1875–1967) McCormick planned to attend medical school after earning her biology degree from MIT in 1904. Instead, she married rich. After her husband’s death in 1947, she used her inheritance to provide crucial funding for research on the hormonal birth control pill. She also fought to make her alma mater more accessible to women, leading to an all-female dormitory, allowing more women to enroll. As a feminist interested in science, I’d love to be friends with this badass advocate for women’s rights. — L.S.

JOHN MUIR (1838–1914)

In 1863, Muir abandoned his eclectic combination of courses at the University of Wisconsin to wander instead the “University of the Wilderness” — a school he never stopped attending. A champion of the national parks (enough right there to make him a hero to me!), Muir fought vigorously for conservation and warned, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we ﬁnd it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” It’s a reminder we need today, more than ever. — ELISA NECKAR

ROLF O. PETERSON (1944– )

Peterson helms the world’s longestrunning study of the predator-prey relationship in the wild, between wolves and moose on Isle Royale in the middle of Lake Superior. He’s devoted more than four decades to the 58-year wildlife ecology project, a dedication and passion indicative, to me, of what science is all about. As the wolf population has nearly disappeared and moose numbers have climbed, patience and emotional investment like his are crucial in the quest to learn how nature works. — BECKY LANG

MARIE THARP (1920–2006)

I love maps. So did geologist and cartographer Tharp. In the mid-20th century, before women were permitted aboard research vessels, Tharp explored the oceans from her desk at Columbia University. With the seaﬂoor — then thought to be nearly ﬂat — her canvas, and raw data her inks, she revealed a landscape of mountain ranges and deep trenches. Her keen eye also spotted the ﬁrst hints of plate tectonics at work beneath the waves. Initially dismissed, Tharp’s observations would become crucial to proving continental drift. — G.T.

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Galileo Galilei Discoverer of the cosmos

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round Dec. 1, 1609, Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope at the moon and created modern astronomy. His subsequent observations turned up four satellites — massive moons — orbiting Jupiter, and showed that the Milky Way’s murky light shines from many dim stars. Galileo also found sunspots upon the surface of our star and discovered the phases of Venus, which confirmed that the planet circles the sun inside Earth’s own orbit. “I give infinite thanks to God, who has been pleased to make me the first observer of marvelous things,” he wrote. The 45-year-old Galileo didn’t invent the telescope, and he wasn’t the first to point one at the sky. But his conclusions changed history. Galileo knew he’d found proof for the theories of Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (14731543), who had launched the Scientific Revolution with his sun-centered solar system model. Galileo’s work wasn’t all staring at the sky, either: His studies of falling bodies showed that objects dropped at the same time will hit the ground at the same time, barring air resistance — gravity doesn’t depend on their size. And his law of inertia allowed for Earth itself to rotate. But all this heavenly motion contradicted Roman Catholic doctrine,

which was based in Aristotle’s incorrect views of the cosmos. The church declared the sun-centered model heretical, and an inquisition in 1616 ordered Galileo to stop promoting these views. The real blow from religious officials came in 1633, after Galileo published a comparison of the Copernican (sun-centered) and Ptolemaic (Earth-centered) systems that made the latter’s believers look

foolish. They placed him under house arrest until his death in 1642, the same year Isaac Newton was born. The English mathematician would build on Galileo’s law of inertia as he compiled a set of laws so complete that engineers still use them centuries later to navigate spacecraft across the solar system — including NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter. — E.B.

Unsung Hero

Raymond Dart Getting to the root of it In 1924, scientiﬁc consensus held that humans had evolved somewhere in Eurasia. After all, human-like fossils had been found from Germany’s Neander Valley to the Indonesian island of Java. Then an Australian anatomist working in South Africa received a package. The delivery was expected. Its contents were not. The box was supposed to contain a fossilized partial baboon skull from a limestone quarry in the country’s heartland. Raymond Dart had planned to add it to a museum collection. To Dart’s surprise, the skull in the box belonged to a child. Not a human child, but also not a baboon. The specimen was large-brained. Because the spinal cord entered the skull at the bottom rather than at the back, as it does for chimps, Dart believed the individual had walked upright — until then, considered an exclusively human trait. He called the skull Australopithecus africanus and argued that it showed we evolved in Africa. Science, its center of authority then ﬁrmly in Western Europe, scoffed. But South African paleontologist Robert Broom and Dart began exploring the country’s numerous cave systems. They turned up more fossils, far older than any from Eurasia. Even as Dart’s theory of our ancestral African homeland was vindicated, a series of discoveries in eastern Africa beginning in 1959 suggested that was where our ancestors had evolved. Over the past two decades, however, South Africa has re-emerged as the potential root of our family tree with additional ﬁnds, some older than eastern Africa’s famous “Lucy.” Paleoanthropologists still disagree on where our ancestors took their ﬁrst bipedal steps. But the debate, thanks to Dart, is over which part of Africa we should call home. — G.T.

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HEROES OF SCIENCE

Ada Lovelace The enchantress of numbers

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o say she was ahead of her time would be an understatement. Ada Lovelace earned her place in history as the first computer programmer — a full century before today’s computers emerged. She couldn’t have done it without British mathematician, inventor and engineer Charles Babbage. Their collaboration started in the early 1830s, when Lovelace was just 17 and still known by her maiden name of Byron. (She was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron.) Babbage had drawn up plans for an elaborate machine he called the Difference Engine — essentially, a giant mechanical calculator. In the middle of his work on it, the teenage Lovelace met Babbage at a party. There, he showed off an incomplete prototype of his machine. According to a family friend who was there: “While other visitors gazed at the working of this beautiful instrument with the sort of expression . . . that some savages are said to have shown on first seeing a looking-glass or hearing a gun . . . Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention.” It was mathematical obsession at first sight. The two struck up a working relationship and eventual close friendship that would last until Lovelace’s death in 1852, when she was only 36. Babbage abandoned

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his Difference Engine to brainstorm a new Analytical Engine — in theory, capable of more complex number crunching — but it was Lovelace who saw that engine’s true potential. The Analytical Engine was more than a calculator — its intricate mechanisms and the fact that the user fed it commands via a punch card meant the engine could perform nearly any mathematical task ordered. Lovelace even wrote instructions for solving a complex math problem, should the machine ever see the

light of day. Many historians would later deem those instructions the first computer program, and Lovelace the first programmer. While she led a raucous life of gambling and scandal, it’s her work in “poetical science,” as she called it, that defines her legacy. In the words of Babbage himself, Lovelace was an “enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects . . . could have exerted over it.” — L.S.

Pythagoras Math’s mystery man

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emories of middle or high school geometry invariably include an instructor drawing right triangles on a blackboard to explain the Pythagorean theorem. The lesson was that the square of the hypotenuse, or longest side, is equal to the sum of the squares of the other sides. Simply put: a2 + b2 = c2. A proof followed, adding a level of certainty rare in other high school classes, like social studies and English. Pythagoras, a sixth-century B.C. Greek philosopher and mathematician, is credited with inventing his namesake theorem and various proofs. But forget about the certainty. Babylonian and Egyptian mathematicians used the equation centuries before Pythagoras, says Karen Eva Carr, a retired historian at Portland State University, though many scholars leave open the possibility he developed the first proof. Moreover, Pythagoras’ students often attributed their own mathematical discoveries to their master, making it impossible to untangle who invented what. Even so, we know enough to suspect Pythagoras was one of the great

mathematicians of antiquity. His influence was widespread and lasting. Theoretical physicist James Overduin sees an unbroken chain from Pythagoras to Albert Einstein, whose work on curving space and time Overduin calls “physics as geometry.” Even today, the sea of numerical formulas typically on physicists’ blackboards suggests the Pythagorean maxim “All is number,” an implication that everything can be explained, organized and, in many cases, predicted

through mathematics. The Pythagorean theorem proof doesn’t just work sometimes, most of the time or when the stars align — it works all the time. Pythagoras’ legacy includes the scientific hallmarks of pattern, order, replication and certainty. — M.B.

Unsung Hero

Mary Anning Godmother of paleontology Along the southern coast of England, waves crash against sea cliffs, eroding the rock and revealing fossils that span the Mesozoic Era, the time of dinosaurs and giant reptiles. For centuries, locals combed the beaches, or picked their way up the crumbling cliffs, looking for curiosities to sell to tourists and collectors. It was dangerous work, but Mary Anning’s father taught her the trade when she was still a child. When he died young, it became a way for Anning to help support her family. Anning was no more than 13 years old when she found her ﬁrst notable fossil, in 1812: the fossilized body matching the Ichthyosaurus skull her older brother had uncovered the previous year. She soon discovered more, including plesiosaurs, ﬁsh, invertebrates and a pterosaur, England’s ﬁrst. Visitors to her fossil shop often noted they found Anning a woman of considerable intelligence and knowledgeable about anatomy. Geologists and scholars in the emerging ﬁeld of paleontology sought her out. When she died of cancer at age 47, she was honored by the Geological Society of London, an organization that would not admit women for another 72 years. Respect is one thing; formal recognition is another. Anning’s ﬁnds entered museum collections under the names of the men who purchased them from her. Research based on her discoveries rarely acknowledged her contribution. Even today, the sharp-eyed woman who got her hands dirty taking pick and shovel to sea cliffs is best remembered as a tongue twister: She sold seashells by the seashore, yes, but she also scienced. — G.T.

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HEROES OF SCIENCE

Great Dynasties of Science The car industry had the Fords, oil had the Rockefellers, and politics had the Kennedys. Science, too, has its legacy lineages.

The Curies PIERRE CURIE

MARIE CURIE

(1859–1906) Physicist and chemist

(1867–1934) Chemist and physicist

Originally specialized in crystallography, but joined his wife’s research. Their discovery of radioactive elements radium and polonium earned them the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Henri Becquerel.

Won a second Nobel Prize, in chemistry, in 1911, for continued study of radioactive elements.

The Alvarezes LUIS FERNANDEZ ALVAREZ (1853–1937) Physician Developed a better way to diagnose the macular form of leprosy.

LUIS WALTER ALVAREZ (1911–1988) Physicist

IRÈNE JOLIOT-CURIE (1897–1956) Chemist Shared the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with her husband for research on radioactivity and for creating the ﬁrst artiﬁcial radioactive element, phosphorus.

ÈVE CURIE LABOUISSE (1904–2007) Writer, journalist and diplomat Best remembered for writing Madame Curie, a best-selling biography of her mother.

Contributed to the Manhattan Project and several key government radar projects in World War II; won the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on a liquid hydrogen bubble chamber.

MARY LEAKEY

(1903–1972) Archaeologist and paleoanthropologist

(1913–1996) Archaeologist and paleoanthropologist

Key ﬁgure in advancing the theory of our African origins; also promoted primate ﬁeld research and helped Jane Goodall get her start.

Sometimes working with Louis and sometimes on her own, made several major hominin ﬁnds, including Homo habilis, our distant ancestor.

COLIN LEAKEY (1933– ) Plant biologist Currently a leading expert on the genetics of beans.

MEAVE LEAKEY (1942– ) Paleoanthropologist

(1944– ) Paleoanthropologist

Has led teams in Africa’s Turkana Basin that have discovered new hominin species.

Primarily known for coordinating several important African digs, his leadership of Kenyan cultural and wildlife conservation groups, and his positions in Kenyan government.

(1972– ) Paleontologist and anthropologist Heads the Koobi Fora Research Project, which focuses on ﬁnding human fossils in the Turkana Basin.

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Pioneered the study of the stomach’s electrical activity and founded electrogastrography, a non-invasive technique for diagnosing certain digestive conditions.

WALTER ALVAREZ (1940– ) Geologist

The Herschels SIR WILLIAM HERSCHEL

CAROLINE LUCRETIA HERSCHEL

(1738–1822) Astronomer Besides discovering Uranus and making many other astronomical observations, was the ﬁrst to map the Milky Way’s disk-like shape.

(1750–1848) Astronomer Valuable assistant to her brother and an astronomer in her own right: Her discoveries include eight comets.

SIR JOHN HERSCHEL RICHARD LEAKEY

LOUISE LEAKEY

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(1884–1978) Physician

Along with his father, developed the hypothesis that an asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs.

The Leakeys LOUIS LEAKEY

WALTER C. ALVAREZ

(1792–1871) Astronomer, mathematician, chemist and photographer Among many other things, helped found the Royal Astronomical Society; made signiﬁcant contributions to cataloging the Southern Hemisphere’s night sky and to the ﬁeld of photography.

WILLIAM JAMES HERSCHEL

ALEXANDER STEWART HERSCHEL

(1833–1917) British ofﬁcer

(1836–1907) Astronomer

One of the ﬁrst people to use ﬁngerprints for identiﬁcation.

Made many observations of astronomical objects, including meteors and comets.

— L.S.

Carl Linnaeus Say his name(s)

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t started in Sweden: a functional, user-friendly innovation that took over the world, bringing order to chaos. No, not an Ikea closet organizer. We’re talking about the binomial nomenclature system, which has given us clarity and a common language, devised by Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus, born in southern Sweden in 1707, was an “intensely practical” man, according to Sandra Knapp, a botanist and taxonomist at the Natural History Museum in London. He lived at a time when formal scientific training was scant and there was no system for referring to living things. Plants and animals had common names, which varied from one location and language to the next, and scientific “phrase names,” cumbersome Latin descriptions that could run several paragraphs. The 18th century was also a time when European explorers were fanning out across the globe, finding ever more plants and animals new to science. “There got to be more and more things that needed to be described, and the names were becoming more and more complex,” says Knapp. Linnaeus, a botanist with a talent for noticing details, first used what he called “trivial names” in the margins of his 1753 book Species Plantarum. He intended the simple Latin two-word construction for each plant as a kind of shorthand, an easy way to remember what it was. “It reflected the adjective-noun structure in languages all over the world,” Knapp says of the trivial names, which today we know as genus and species. The names moved quickly from the margins of a single book to the center of botany, and then all of

biology. Linnaeus started a revolution, but it was an unintentional one. Today we regard Linnaeus as the father of taxonomy, which is used to sort the entire living world into evolutionary hierarchies, or family trees. But the systematic Swede was mostly interested in naming things rather than ordering them, an emphasis that arrived the next century with Charles Darwin.

As evolution became better understood and, more recently, genetic analysis changed how we classify and organize living things, many of Linnaeus’ other ideas have been supplanted. But his naming system, so simple and adaptable, remains. “It doesn’t matter to the tree in the forest if it has a name,” Knapp says. “But by giving it a name, we can discuss it. Linnaeus gave us a system so we could talk about the natural world.” — G.T.

Unsung Hero

James Hutton Unconformist rock star Born in Edinburgh at the height of the Enlightenment, James Hutton was a gifted observer. With that skill he would formulate the ﬁrst theories of deep time, and of how our planet’s surface constantly recycles itself — ideas considered heretical in his day. Hutton’s work became the basis of modern geology, inspired Charles Darwin and preﬁgured plate tectonics, volcanology, geobiology and the Gaia Hypothesis, a late-20th-century view of the planet as a single self-regulating organism. His keen eyes also steered him away early on from a different path. After attending medical school in the 1740s, Hutton opted to become a gentleman farmer. He traveled through much of Britain learning the latest agricultural techniques, but the landscapes themselves increasingly drew his attention. He became obsessed with unconformities in the rocks, where strata are distorted, rumpled or jumbled in composition, some layers of rock thrusting near vertically into those above or below. Earth, Hutton theorized, was not a static thing, but a dynamic world of constant reinvention. Continents built up and then wore down, the cycle repeating over millions or even billions of years. Hutton lived at a time when even learned “natural philosophers” — the word scientist did not yet exist — believed Earth was a mere 6,000 years old. When he ﬁnally published Theory of the Earth in 1788, he endured vituperative criticism. The key word here is endured. Despite the initial negative reaction, and a few decades of obscurity after his death, Hutton’s theory eventually became mainstream — the bedrock upon which modern earth sciences sit. — G.T.

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HEROES OF SCIENCE 50

Rosalind Franklin The hero denied her due

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n 1962, Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize for describing DNA’s double-helix structure — arguably the greatest discovery of the 20th century. But no one mentioned Rosalind Franklin — arguably the greatest snub of the 20th century. The British-born Franklin was a firebrand, a perfectionist who worked in isolation. “She was prickly, did not make friends easily, but when she did she was outgoing and loyal,” Jenifer Glynn wrote in My Sister Rosalind Franklin. Franklin was also a brilliant chemist and a master of X-ray crystallography, an imaging technique that reveals the molecular structure of matter based on the pattern of scattered X-ray beams. Her early research into the microstructures of carbon and graphite are still cited, but her work with DNA was the most significant — and it may have won three men a Nobel. While at King’s College London in the early 1950s, Franklin was close to proving the double-helix theory after capturing “photograph #51,” considered the finest image of a DNA molecule at the time. But then both Watson and Crick got a peek at Franklin’s work: Her colleague, Wilkins, showed Watson photograph #51, and Max Perutz, a member of King’s Medical Research Council, handed Crick unpublished data from a report Franklin submitted

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to the council. In 1953, Watson and Crick published their iconic paper in Nature, loosely citing Franklin, whose “supporting” study also appeared in that issue. Franklin left King’s in 1953 in a long-planned move to join J.D. Bernal’s lab at Birkbeck College, where she discovered the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. But in 1956, in the prime of her career, she developed ovarian cancer — perhaps due to her extensive X-ray work. Franklin continued working in the lab until her death in 1958 at age 37.

“As a scientist, Miss Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook,” Bernal wrote in her obituary, published in Nature. Though it’s her achievements that close colleagues admired, most remember Franklin for how she was forgotten. — C.E.

Unsung Hero

Henrietta Lacks Woman, cell line, symbol More than 65 years after her death, Henrietta Lacks’ contributions to science are a cause célèbre. HBO planned to air a movie about her life in April; high-proﬁle lectures and conferences now bear her name. When Lacks died at 31, however — a wife, a mother of ﬁve and an impoverished black tobacco farmer struck down by cervical cancer — she was virtually unknown. Tissues from the malignancy were collected, without the knowledge or consent of Lacks or her family, and used to create the ﬁrst human-derived cell lines. HeLa, as the cell lines are known, have proven invaluable for cancer research. They have been the basis of tens of thousands of experiments. But researchers barely tried to protect Lacks’ identity, treating her cells as no different from a sample collected from a lab rat. When writer Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 best-seller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks brought her story into the public spotlight, it spurred an outcry. Little changed, however. In 2013, researchers published the HeLa genome, with personal information pertaining to both Lacks and her family, online with her identity. The incident led the National Institutes of Health to create a review process that gave Lacks’ descendants a voice in approving future HeLa research. The arrangement represents a new era in the handling of human genetic material. There are other Henriettas out there: individuals whose genetic information has been used in research without consent. It’s logistically impossible to track down these unwitting participants or their descendants. Instead, they remain the true unsung heroes of science. Henrietta Lacks’ greatest legacy is to give them a face, that we be reminded of our debt to them. — G.T.

Getting Out the Word FROM TOP: ALFRED EISENSTAEDT/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; ASTRID STAWIARZ/GETTY IMAGES; COLIN MCPHERSON/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; EVERETT COLLECTION; MICHEL GUNTHER/SCIENCE SOURCE; ROBIN MARCHANT/GETTY IMAGES; DAVID MONTGOMERY/GETTY IMAGES

Science needs to get out of the lab and into the public eye. Over the past hundred years or so, these scientists have made it their mission.

SEAN M. CARROLL (1966– )

the ﬁrst buckets. His posthumously published A Sand County Almanac is a cornerstone of modern environmentalism.

The physicist (and one-time Discover blogger) has developed a following among space enthusiasts through his lectures, television appearances and books, including The Particle at the End of the Universe, on the Higgs boson.

BILL NYE (1955– )

With her 1962 book Silent Spring, the biologist energized a nascent environmental movement. In 2006, Discover named Silent Spring among the top 25 science books of all time.

What should an engineer and part-time stand-up comedian do with his life? For Nye, the answer was to become a science communicator. In the ’90s, he hosted a popular children’s science show and more recently has been an eloquent defender of evolution in public debates with creationists.

RICHARD DAWKINS (1941– )

OLIVER SACKS (1933–2015)

RACHEL CARSON (1907–1964)

The neurologist began as a medical researcher, but found his calling in clinical practice and as a chronicler of strange medical maladies, most famously in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

The biologist, a charismatic speaker, ﬁrst gained public notoriety in 1976 with his book The Selﬁsh Gene, one of his many works on evolution.

JANE GOODALL (1934– )

Studying chimpanzees in Tanzania, Goodall’s patience and observational skills led to fresh insights into their behavior — and led her to star in a number of television documentaries.

CARL SAGAN (1934–1996)

It’s hard to hear someone say “billions and billions” and not hear Sagan’s distinctive voice, and remember his 1980 Cosmos: A Personal Voyage miniseries. Sagan brought the wonder of the universe to the public in a way that had never happened before.

STEPHEN JAY GOULD (1941–2002) In 1997, the paleontologist Gould was a guest on The Simpsons, a testament to his broad appeal. Among scientists, Gould was controversial for his idea of evolution unfolding in ﬁts and starts rather than in a continuum.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON (1958– ) The astrophysicist and gifted communicator is Carl Sagan’s successor as champion of the universe. In a nod to Sagan’s Cosmos, Tyson hosted the miniseries Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey in 2014.

STEPHEN HAWKING (1942– )

His books’ titles suggest the breadth and boldness of his ideas: The Universe in a Nutshell, The Theory of Everything. “My goal is simple,” he has said. “It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”

E.O. WILSON (1929– )

The proliﬁc, Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist ﬁrst attracted broad public attention with 1975’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. His subsequent works have ﬁlled many a bookshelf with provocative discussions of biodiversity, philosophy and the animals he has studied most closely: ants.

ALDO LEOPOLD (1887–1948) If Henry Thoreau and John Muir primed the pump for American environmentalism, Leopold ﬁlled

SCIENCE STARS The next generation As science progresses, so does the roll call of new voices serving as bridges between lab and layman. Here are some of our favorite emerging science stars: British physicist Brian Cox became a household name in the U.K. in less than a decade, thanks

— M.B.

to his accessible explanations of the universe in TV and radio shows, books and public appearances. Neuroscientist Carl Hart debunks anti-science myths supporting misguided drug policies via various media, including his memoir High Price. From the Amazon forest to the dissecting table, YouTube star and

naturalist Emily Graslie brings viewers into the guts of the natural world, often literally. When not talking dinosaurs or head transplants on Australian radio, molecular biologist Upulie Divisekera coordinates @RealScientists, a rotating Twitter account for science outreach. Mixing pop culture and chemistry, analytical chemist

Raychelle Burks demystiﬁes the molecules behind poisons, dyes and even Game of Thrones via video, podcast and blog. Climate scientist and evangelical Christian Katharine Hayhoe preaches beyond the choir about the planetary changes humans are causing in PBS’ Global Weirding video series. — ASHLEY BRAUN

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SMARTY PLANTS They learn. They remember. They make decisions. Your garden greenery is brainier than you think. BY MARTA ZARASKA

ONICA GAGLIANO, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Western Australia, thought her experiment on associative learning in plants wasn’t working. Her team was trying to find out whether you could train common peas in a way similar to how Pavlov trained his dogs. But the two-week experiment was over, with no results — or so she believed. “I went into the lab to dismantle everything. And then I suddenly realized that these plants were doing what I was looking for — and doing it so well, so beyond my expectations, that I couldn’t even see it at first,” she says. For the first time, Gagliano and her colleagues showed that you can train plants the same basic way you can train dogs. While Pavlov’s mutts learned that the ring of a bell meant food was coming, Gagliano’s team taught the garden peas to associate a fan with light. The researchers placed seedlings under a maze made out of plumbing pipes; the growing pea had to make a choice each time it hit a fork in the road whether to go left or right.

M

The first three days were devoted to training. Gagliano taught one group of peas that if a fan blew at them from a certain part of the maze, a blue light (something all peas crave) would follow. Another group of seedlings was trained that when the fan blew, the light would appear in the opposite corridor. For the third group, acting as a control, there was no association between the fan and the light. And the little pea plants learned. “Depending on the treatment, the plants knew exactly what the fan meant,” Gagliano says. Based on maze studies involving animals, the typical subjects for this type of experiment, Gagliano and colleagues expected the peas to grow randomly, which is the standard research assumption — for animals. Their initial model didn’t take into account that peas have their own system and will always grow toward light. “Until I saw my peas doing their thing, the standard, hypothetical assumption of 50/50 random choice was all I could see, and what most scientists would see because of our own learned conditioning, funny enough,” says Gagliano. “The peas taught me how to see beyond my own training and conditioned assumptions.”

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For Gagliano, that particular experiment, published in Scientific Reports in late 2016, showed not only that plants can learn by association — which is astounding in itself — but also how easily humans underestimate plants. “We are plant blind,” she says.

Evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano (below) studies the cognitive abilities of a variety of plants, including the humble pea (right) in her lab at the University of Western Australia.

THE ROOT OF THINKING In 1880, Charles Darwin theorized that plants have special cells devoted to processing information and making decisions about root growth, similar to a brain. Yet it was only in the 1990s that František Baluška, a plant cell biologist at the University of Bonn in Germany, began proving Darwin’s theory. Baluška admits that he was once plant blind, too. Early in his career, he suspected that a group of cells in the plant roots could be important. Only years later would he and colleagues discover the cells were actually a kind of command center. “These cells are highly specialized for sampling and processing information and then directing the root growth,” he says. “And they are very similar to our neurons.” In a way, it makes perfect sense that plants would have their “brains” in the soil. Soil is a tough place to be. “It’s a very difficult task for the root to find

nutrition there,” Baluška says. “At least 20 physical parameters — such as temperature, humidity or levels of heavy metals — are continuously sampled and analyzed. And all this information has to be then somehow processed and compared to make the right decision about which way to grow.” He believes we should think of plants as having a body plan not so unlike our own, just upside down, with their heads buried in the ground and their backsides and sexual organs, such as flowers, sticking into the air. It may be a disturbing thing to picture, but Darwin had a similar mental image of plants. No matter where the “brains” of plants might be located — if they exist at all, that is, since the idea remains controversial — plenty of behavioral studies show they are far more brainy than we tend to assume. For one, they remember stuff. If you don’t water your houseplants, they may not get angry, but they might commit your misdeed to memory. To study this memory, scientists can evoke what’s called a “drought stress” in their leafy subjects. In one 2015 study, researchers took 3-week-old specimens of Arabidopsis thaliana (a relative of cabbage and mustard) out of the soil. They patted all the water off their roots with filter paper and left the seedlings to dry for up to two hours. That kind of treatment is something no plant likes — hence the stress. Later, when the young seedlings were put back into water, they didn’t trust the newfound abundance and behaved as if they were ready for another period of drought: The pores on their leaves remained partially closed, limiting drinking, but also limiting moisture loss in case of another dry spell.

FRANCES ADRIJICH (2)

SHAKEN AND STIRRED In 2014, Gagliano chose a different species to study plant memory: Mimosa pudica, famed for its sensitivity to touch. If you brush a leaf of a mimosa with your fingers, it will fold almost instantly. She

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TOP: JAY SMITH AFTER GAGLIANO, M. ET AL. LEARNING BY ASSOCIATION IN PLANTS/SCIENTIFIC REPORTS/SREP38427/2 DECEMBER 2016. BOTTOM: SUTHAN/SHUTTERSTOCK

and her colleagues from the University of Western Australia and University of Firenze in Italy did something more radical to the mimosa plants than stroking their leaves: They dropped them from heights. The researchers let them fall 6 inches, far enough to cause the plants to fold their leaves. It happened after the first drop, and the second, and the third. But by the fourth go, the mimosa leaves weren’t as eager to close. After 60 falls, the plants completely ignored the experience. Even a month later, they still remembered that being dropped was harmless and would not bother to fold their leaves. But if the scientists vigorously shook the mimosa pots instead of dropping them, the plants rapidly closed their leaves to protect themselves from danger, showing it was not just simple fatigue that made them indifferent to the fall. It was memory. “The typical reaction to this experiment is, ‘But plants have no brains, so how can they do it?’ ” Gagliano says, “But let’s look the other way round — they do it. So the question should rather be, ‘How do they do it?’ ” Researchers can’t answer that question yet, but a few possibilities are emerging. It could be, for example, that fluctuations in calcium levels in plant cells leave imprints of stress in a way that’s similar to how long-term memories are formed in animals. Other studies hint that memory in plants may be epigenetic in nature. Mice, for example, can inherit fearful memories from their parents through changes in how their genes are expressed, without any changes to the DNA itself. The same may hold true for plants. In 2015, a group of Canadian scientists published the results of an experiment on Indian colza plants, relatives of turnips that are cultivated in India for their oil-rich seeds. The researchers repeatedly exposed 2-week-old seedlings to extreme heat — about a scorching 107 degrees Fahrenheit. Afterward, they allowed the stressed plants to grow peacefully and reproduce in a comfortable 71.6 degrees Fahrenheit. But when the tissues of the next generation were tested, they had differentially expressed genes — clear signs of epigenetic memory — even though they themselves had never experienced a hot spell.

PLANT CHAT Just like humans, plants have many ways of figuring out what’s happening in their environment. And if they can’t rely on their memories to compare experiences, they can always chat with others to find out what’s going on through the mycorrhizal network, an underground system that connects roots of plants and conducts signals through interwoven bodies of fungi. “These are direct pipelines from plant to plant, like a telephone wire,” says Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia who studies mycorrhizal networks.

Pea Plant Experiment (A)

(B)

Seedlings inside Y-maze

The first study to clearly show plants do indeed talk through that underground network was done in 2013 by scientists based in the United Kingdom. They took fava bean plants and divided them into three groups. Some were chosen as broadcasters — they were covered in hungry aphids that would munch on the unlucky plants, destroying them. A second group of beans was aphid-free, but connected to the plants under attack via the root network. And the third, the control group, was aphid-free but also separate from the other groups, unplugged from the soil “telephone” system. By sending out chemical compounds via the mycorrhizal network, the broadcasters warned the second group of plants of impending insect attack. Those plants began producing aphidrepellent chemicals. But the unplugged plants remained unaware of the danger and did not produce the specific aphid defense. To test whether the fava plants were truly communicating through the roots, the researchers covered all three groups of plants in polyester bags, preventing them from talking via airborne chemicals — another way plants can exchange information. The next time you go to a forest, Simard says, take a deep breath and sniff the air. What you are smelling is the language of trees. “We can tune in to some of their conversations, because many of the volatile compounds that plants use in communication have odors,” she says. In a classic 1983 study, when leaves of some trees were damaged, their healthy neighbors emitted more phenolics and tannins — their natural insect repellents — in response, as if they themselves were under an attack. The obvious question is whether the plants are really talking, or if they’re just eavesdropping on what is happening with the others. After all, if a plant being devoured by an insect is emitting

Pea seedlings in a maze of plastic pipes learned how to seek the blue light they crave in a 2016 experiment. One group (A) learned to associate a fan with a subsequent light and grew toward the fan during the testing phase. A second group (B) learned to associate a fan with light in the opposite direction and grew away from the fan. A third group acted as the control and was trained that there was no association between light and fan.

Mimosa pudica will close its leaves almost instantly if the plant perceives a threat.

Plants Communicate Via . . .

Compounds in the air

Researchers have long known plants can communicate with each other through the release of volatile compounds in the air; studies have now shown an underground system of roots and fungi, called the mycorrhizal network, can also carry signals from one plant to the next.

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defensive chemicals that are later detected by another plant, it doesn’t necessarily mean the first plant had any intention of warning others. But scientists from Israel recently put such doubts to rest by studying how garden peas raise a “drought alarm.” A plant stressed by lack of water will emit chemicals that its neighbors detect. These plants react to the warning by closing their stomata — tiny openings on their leaves — to slow down moisture loss. But the chain of threat communication doesn’t end there. The plants that have been warned, even though not stressed themselves, will start sending signals about the impending drought to those farther away,

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encouraging them to prepare for the hard times. And the reason they do it is not necessarily altruistic. In the case of peas, for example, being less vulnerable to drought also means being less vulnerable to pests, which attack when plants are weakened. If all the neighbors are healthy, they are less likely to attract leaf-munching visitors to the area. Everyone is better off. “Information is being sent from one plant to another, directly, and it changes their behavior,” Simard says. “We humans push air through our vocal cords and out comes sound. With plants it’s not air over vocal cords, but carbon compounds released into the air. It’s a language, too.”

DAVID READ/UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD

Mycorrhizal networks in the ground

IMAGE QUEST MARINE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

And just like humans, it appears not all plants speak the same language. Different individuals release different volatile compounds — words — into the air, which combine into what scientists call a “signature” — the equivalent of a sentence. The more related the plants are, the more similar their language, and the easier it is for them to communicate. Experiments in 2014 on sagebrush showed some plants spoke a language dominated by camphor compounds, while others emitted more thujone, coincidentally the same chemical suspected to be responsible for the hallucinogenic effects of absinthe. Those sagebrush plants that communicated using similar airborne “words” were better at warning each other about the arrival of hungry pests. What’s more, plants inherit their language from parents — so speaking the same dialect helps them also recognize relatives.

FIGURING OUT THE FAMILY TREE If you are a plant, there is a good chance you’ll spend your life surrounded by your family, for better or for worse. “For a plant, there are two reasons to recognize a relative,” says Susan Dudley, plant biologist at McMaster University in Ontario. “One is to avoid mating with them, and the other is to benefit from the relationship. Competition can be costly. So whom do you trust? Your relatives share your genes, so in a way their success is your success. It’s basically nepotism.” In one of Dudley’s experiments, Arabidopsis thaliana plants sampled chemicals coming from the roots of their siblings. Once exposed to these signatures, they restrained the growth of their own roots to leave more resources for others, something they didn’t do if the secretions came from strangers. Plants are also capable of recognizing their relatives by their body shape — which tends to be similar to their own. In a series of experiments published in 2014, Argentinian biologists grew young Arabidopsis thaliana (yes, scientists really like that plant) in rows of pots. The team used many different setups: In some, the seedlings were simply placed between either relatives or strangers. In other setups, the researchers positioned plastic light filters between the plants. And in yet others, they used genetically modified plants that lacked some sensory light receptors. After analyzing all the data, the researchers were able to establish that the seedlings recognized each other by body shape: The plants’ light receptors could sense different patterns of red to far-red light and blue light visible around and reflected off of the other seedlings, creating a profile of each plant. Think of it in broad terms, the way you can pick out a friend walking toward you in a crowd, even if the light is in your eyes and you can’t see her facial features. For the seedlings, if a

similarly shaped relative was detected, nepotism kicked in: The plant would grow its leaves away from the family member to avoid shading it. In addition to talking to each other, recognizing relatives and remembering stressful events, some plants can even count. Take the Venus’ flytrap, a carnivorous plant native to the wetlands of the Carolinas. When a fly lands inside the trap, the leaves shut, and the plant begins to digest its prey. Experiments published in 2016 showed the plant counts how many times the victim touches sensory hairs on the outer surface of the trap, initially to confirm the catch is something that moves, and therefore edible. One, two, and the trap shuts. Three, four, five, and digestive juices start flowing. The mechanism is simple, but strikingly reminiscent of what’s going on in the brains of animals: Touching the sensory hairs fires electrical messages, or “action potentials” — known as nerve impulses in animals. “The plant can judge, by simply counting the number of action potentials spreading over the trap, whether useless dead material has landed inside it or if useful animal prey has been caught,” says Sönke Scherzer, an electrophysiologist at the University of Würzburg in Germany, and one of the study’s co-authors. “Counting also includes some kind of memory, since the plant must remember — at least for a certain time interval — how many action potentials have been evoked before.” If plants can learn, count and recognize family, can we say they actually think? That they are intelligent? Conscious? How you answer these questions depends largely on your definition of concepts such as intelligence or cognition. Yet the way we view plants is changing. “A few years ago you couldn’t use the term plant behavior in accepted journals, but now the concept of plant behavior is not controversial anymore,” says Baluška. Gagliano believes we tend not to credit plants with intelligence simply out of habit, because most of us remain plant blind: “If you want to see plants as something that can never do anything purposefully,” she says, “that’s what you are going to see.” D

The Venus’ ﬂytrap counts the number of times prey comes in contact with its sensory hairs to determine the size of the hapless insect, when to shut its leaves to trap the creature, and even how much digestive juice to produce for its meal.

Marta Zaraska is a freelance journalist based in France and author of Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession With Meat.

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How To Fix Your Fatigue and Get More Energy

PALM SPRINGS, CA -- According to patients at the Center for Restorative Medicine, a new discovery has completely transformed their lives. Founder and Director Dr. Steven Gundry is a world-renowned heart surgeon, a best-selling author, and the personal physician to many celebrities. But his latest medical breakthrough could be the most important accomplishment of his career. In a dramatic press conference yesterday, Dr. Gundry unveiled a simple — yet highly effective — solution to symptoms that plague millions of Americans over 30: low energy, low metabolism and constant fatigue. He went on to say that persistent fatigue can be a warning sign for much more serious health problems…including diabetes, obesity, hypertension and heart disease. “When you’re feeling low energy, that’s your body screaming HELP!” He told the crowd of reporters and medical professionals. Dr. Gundry’s radical solution was inspired by a breakthrough with a “hopeless” patient who had been massively overweight, chronically fatigued and suffering from severely clogged arteries. The secret to his breakthrough? “There are key ‘micronutrients’ missing from your diet,” Dr. Gundry told the room. “If you can replenish them in very high dosages, the health results are astonishing.”

This unorthodox philosophy is what led Dr. GundryWRFUHDWHWKHZRUOG¶V¿UVWDWKRPH treatment for fatigue — which has since become remarkably successful with his patients. “They’re reporting natural, long-lasting energy ZLWKRXWDµFUDVK¶DQGWKH\¶UHIHHOLQJVOLP¿WDQG active,” he revealed yesterday.

The science behind his formula is brand new, and was met with both fascination and enthusiasm by those in attendance. Immediately following the announcement, Dr. Gundry’s team released a comprehensive video presentation, so that the public can be educated as to exactly how it works. Watch the presentation here at www.GetEnergy26.com Within just a few hours, this video had gotten thousands of hits, and is now considered to have gone viral. One viewer commented: “If this works, it’s exactly what I’ve been praying for my whole life. I’ve never seen anything like this solution before…the truth about my diet was shocking and eye-opening.” Of course, Dr. Gundry’s announcement was met with some hesitation. We spoke to some who attended the press conference, who advised that people keep their expectations realistic. It makes a lot of sense, and it sounds great in theory, but we’ll have to wait and see what the results are. Knowing Dr. Gundry, however, there is a great deal of potential. See his presentation here at GetEnergy26.com

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A Look at the Universe and All Its Wonders

PRESERVING THE VIEW As the starry sky glows green from the northern lights, one source of illumination is noticeably absent: light pollution. With no glare from streetlights or billboards, this lone observer at Glacier National Park’s Lake McDonald enjoys a sight all but invisible from urban areas. Read how ofﬁcials at our national parks are taking the lead to slow the growth of light pollution, starting on page 60.  ERNIE MASTROIANNI; PHOTO BY JACOB FRANK/NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

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OUT THERE

Protecting America’s Last Dark Skies Few stargazing sites deliver like America’s national parks. But even these places are under threat. BY ERIC BETZ

A smattering of crisp, white clouds lingers west of Grand Canyon National Park. And as the desert sun sets, smoke from a far-off fire turns the sky as red as the surrounding Supai sandstone. Venus slowly emerges from behind the clouds like a beacon of the night. Jupiter and the evening star push toward the horizon, racing the crescent moon in a perfect isosceles triangle. Their setting leaves an inky black sky bustling with activity. Faint stray meteors streak at zenith, and satellites crawl across the sky like ants on their ardent paths. If you sat here on a moonless night like this and counted through until dawn, you could tally thousands of stars. “The place you are in is special — keep that in your mind — in contrast to the places that most of us live,” says International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) astronomer John Barentine, who manages the Dark-Sky Places Program. “Every human being once shared this experience of looking up into the night sky and seeing it filled with stars.” Before the spread of electricity, humans across the planet knew the stories written in the skies. Sitting around smoldering campfires, people looked to the stars and relived the tales of their heroes. Now these experiences are confined to star sanctuaries like Grand Canyon National Park. In 2016, while the nation celebrated a century since the inception of the National Park Service, the agency recommitted itself to protecting a resource overlooked by many in America — the night sky.

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FORGOTTEN HEROES And, as a crowd builds in a darkened parking lot near Grand Canyon’s Mather Point, the talk here turns to the greatest of those ancient heroes — Hercules. Barentine is guiding a group of parkgoers on a tour of the night sky. “Imagine with me that there is the body of a man who’s kneeling,” Barentine says as he sketches the figure on the sky in green laser. “His body is this set of four stars here that’s sometimes called The Keystone.” As part of his 12 labors of penance, Barentine explains, Hercules was forced to steal the golden apples of the Hesper-

A GRAND STAR PARTY But not on this night. Not here. The National Park Service has shut off the visitor center lights for the annual Grand Canyon Star Party. Red LED ropes guide park visitors from telescope to telescope through the parking lot, where some 50 amateurs have their instruments open to the public. “Ask questions. Take any telescope you like and ask them what they’re looking at,” the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association’s Jim O’Connor tells a standing-room-only crowd at the visitor center auditorium.

Sitting around smoldering campfires, people looked to the stars and relived the tales of their heroes. Now these experiences are confined to star sanctuaries like Grand Canyon National Park. ides. To get them, our Greek hero — the illegitimate son of Zeus — adventured in search of Hera’s secret garden and killed the dragon that guarded them. That serpent is now commemorated in the constellation Draco the Dragon, placed next to Hercules in the night sky. “The human brain saw patterns in those stars. And we translated all of our human hopes and our fears and our dreams and our worries onto those stars,” says Barentine. “The natural night sky inspires. “We are losing this thing — ‘the night’ — that has been our common

“We’re going to interpret the night sky for you.” Each year, the Tucson astronomy club partners with the Park Service to host eight nights of public observing near the South Rim’s Mather Point. It’s the best-attended special event that the Canyon hosts. Enthusiastic volunteers bring their telescopes from all over the country to camp together and share their love of the stars with visitors from all over the world. The Saguaro Astronomy Club of Phoenix hosts a simultaneous star party at the remote North Rim Lodge.

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shared experience for so much of the history of humanity,” he adds. Humans themselves are the cause. Light pollution from streetlights, structures, parking lots, billboards, and more now spreads by 6 percent each year. As a result, these common stories from our past have faded like the constellations that cradled them.

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In both instances, tourists come to see the Grand Canyon and find themselves looking through an eyepiece at the heavens. Unlike most star parties with a dedicated core of amateur astronomer attendees, this one brings in more than 1,000 members of the public each night. Many travelers revel in the park’s skies every other night of the year. The Grand Canyon and other major American national parks have set attendance records in recent years.

THE LAST REFUGE “There are not many places you can go in the lower 48 United States that are relatively easy to get to where you can see this,” Barentine says. “A typical

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night at Grand Canyon, if the moon is down, if you’re there late into the night, will be filled with thousands of stars.” The public lands that shelter the last of our wild places now also give refuge to our celestial heritage. Most Americans have never seen the Milky Way — the nebulous and star-rich center of our galaxy. And within a decade, scientists expect that Americans will have to make pilgrimages to one of just three significant dark patches to see the Milky Way in all its wonder. These refuges consist of the deserts of eastern Oregon/western Idaho, western Utah/northeastern Nevada, and the Colorado Plateau — the 100,000 square miles of high elevation desert surrounding the Grand Canyon.

To protect the last of these sites, the National Park Service has established its Colorado Plateau Dark Sky Cooperative. It’s an attempt to rally state and federal agencies, along with local tribes, communities, businesses, and citizens, to the dark-sky cause. This community support network recognizes the popularity of Southwest skies and their importance as a tourism draw, as well as an environmental necessity. And already their movement has helped forward discussions on what to do about errant visitors center lights and streetlights, as well as encroaching oil and gas development. Over the past decade, sites like Chaco Culture National Historical Park, Rainbow Bridge National Monument,

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OUT THERE

Revelers watch the sunset during the annular eclipse at Grand Canyon National Park in 2012.

Grand Canyon ofﬁcials hope to preserve the region’s natural lightscape for centuries to come.

FROM TOP: ERIC BETZ; NPS; TYLER NORDGREN

Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, and, most recently, Canyonlands National Park, have been named Dark-Sky Parks, which increases their profile as stargazing destinations. The attention helps protect the natural lightscape, too.

FLIPPING THE SWITCH But light pollution is creeping into even these places. At the Grand Canyon, skyglow washes in from Las Vegas and Phoenix — hundreds of miles away. The enemies of the night are also now approaching the gates. Every visitor to the Grand Canyon South Rim’s main entrance must pass through the tiny town of Tusayan. And an Italian developer, the Stilo Development

Group, recently tried — and has so far failed — to seize on this and build shopping malls, tract homes, high-end boutiques, and even a dude ranch just off Highway 64. To the east, another developer is pushing a controversial plan to build a gondola to the bottom of the Grand Canyon near the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers — a site where the Hopi tribe believes their ancestors originated. Such developments could capitalize on the nearly 5 million visitors who travel to the Grand Canyon each year. But they would also strain the already scarce water supplies and wash out some of the faintest stars cherished by those who travel to the parks to reconnect to the natural world. The Park Service opposes the developments at its door. And it’s now tackling the developments within its borders as well.

Light pollution (brighter colors) from Phoenix and Las Vegas spreads to Grand Canyon National Park’s night skies.

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OUT THERE “We’re trying to improve the dark skies here in Grand Canyon National Park,” says park ranger Marker Marshall. “We’ve got a lot of light fixtures that are very old and are not as dark-sky friendly as they could be.” Park officials have developed a plan with help from the IDA. And the Grand Canyon has applied for provisional IDA Dark-Sky Park status — the gold standard for any stargazing destination. But the task ahead is monumental. Thousands of old lights at the South Rim had to be cataloged and analyzed, with hundreds more several hours away at the North Rim. To achieve full dark-sky status, the park will have to actually fix the offending lights. Most luminaries on the replacement list would be a familiar nuisance to any skygazer. But the canyon also operates remote trading posts and campgrounds far below the rim, like Indian Gardens and Roaring Springs.

“We have inventoried a little over 5,000 fixtures — everything from porch lights to floodlights on big buildings,” says the now former Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent Dave Uberuaga. The change will play out one lightbulb at a time. The Park Service is now looking at how to treat each one — shielding the lights that need shielding and buying new lamps where necessary. And even switching off a light isn’t always easy. Desert View Watchtower, designed by famed architect Mary Colter, is one of the most iconic park buildings. From its perch, the 70-foottall stone structure looks all the way down to the Colorado River — a rarity at the South Rim. That profile recently prompted river runners to complain about an errant light left on. “The electrician went up there and they couldn’t find a way to turn it off, so they went into the electrical panel box, and it was wired in. It didn’t even have a switch,” Uberuaga says. Ultimately, the

park is pushing to retrofit all offending lights and achieve a full dark-sky designation by the Grand Canyon’s own centennial in 2019.

A PRESERVE LIKE NO OTHER Susan Schroeder is CEO of the Grand Canyon Association, the park’s non-profit partner in fundraising. She says her group aims to gather about $1 million to complete the retrofits and add ranger-led interpretive programs about dark skies. The money also will pay for an astronomers’ campground at Mather Point, one of the most popular sites in the entire park system. The grounds will cater to dark-sky enthusiasts and their telescopes. So far, one generous amateur astronomer has covered much of the cost. Joe Orr was a member of both the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association and the Grand Canyon Association. He donated a large part of his wealth to protect dark skies at the park, and

Light Pollution Map of the United States

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With no nearby cities, Utah’s Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, situated just north of the Grand Canyon, has some of America’s darkest skies.

his passionate programs on the subject inspired others to give money as well. Orr died recently, but he left some money in trust to help with the Grand Canyon retrofits. And last year’s star party was named in his honor. “That anchor initial amount really got us launched,” Uberuaga says. Already the undertaking at Grand Canyon is tougher than any previous dark-sky effort. So far, most IDA parks have been small. They’re often in remote places with little nearby development and relatively few visitors. Those parks never had a lot of lighting to begin with. In contrast, the Grand Canyon had nearly 5 million visitors in 2015. And it’s also home to a town of park workers. “This is really in many respects unlike any Dark-Sky Park application we’ve dealt with before,” says Barentine. And the herculean effort is even more remarkable because it comes at a time when Grand Canyon National Park is already facing a multibillion-dollar backlog in maintenance work to repair

leaky water supply pipes and antiquated infrastructure. Other National Park Service sites face similar problems.

DARK SKIES FOR ALL PARKS But if funding allows, the standards developed at Grand Canyon will be rolled out across the parks system. Anyone with an iPad can now theoretically go out into the field and catalog lights, creating an actionable database. “They would like to get to a model where essentially almost every national park unit short of the ones that are in urban settings would qualify to become a Dark-Sky Park under the IDA program because they’ve put a standard set of policies in place,” Barentine says. “They would standardize the application process to the IDA.” That could help protect these dark-sky sanctuaries in perpetuity. Even remote-sounding national parks like Rocky Mountain and Joshua Tree have seen light pollution encroach from nearby cities. The problems now also include Alaska’s remote

North Slope and the desolate Bakken region centered in North Dakota. The boom in oil production has created jobs in the previously unpopulated region. And that new residential and commercial infrastructure is bringing new lights near Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The impact is most obvious when seen from space. NASA photos show how the Bakken region became one of the brightest regions in the West in just a few short years. Its skyglow rivals that of large metropolitan areas. The same is true of shale oil fields in Texas. “The place you are in is special, but it shouldn’t be in a sense,” Barentine says to a group of skywatchers standing near Mather Point. “Of course, the Grand Canyon is great and we can’t reproduce it everywhere on Earth, but the night sky over the Grand Canyon is something that we can bring back if we so choose to do that.” D Eric Betz, a former associate editor at Astronomy, is an associate editor at Discover.

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History Lessons

When Dinosaurs Went Bad Today’s depictions of agile, often feathered animals are a far cry from the saggy tail-draggers of yesteryear. How did early research get it so wrong? BY GEMMA TARLACH

In 1842, English anatomist Richard Owen proposed the term dinosauria for the strange animal fossils he and colleagues had begun to study. Owen drew from ancient Greek to create the word: deinos, meaning “terrible” in the awesome-to-behold sense, and sauros, “reptile” or “lizard.” The truth is, those early paleontologists — and generations of their successors — got those terrible lizards, well, terribly wrong: T. rex as a tail-dragging lunk, tanklike Iguanodon, long-necked sauropods submerged in water because surely they were too big to walk on land. Scientiﬁc inaccuracies abound in this 1916 illustration of a tail-dragging, sprawled-posture Diplodocus by Heinrich Harder. A century later, we know better thanks to a richer fossil record and more rigorous research. One problem early paleontologists faced was that they were limited to merely looking at a fossil but back then the concept would have in both academic and public spheres, and finding a living animal to compare it been very hard to imagine.” and research standards were often less with visually. than rigorous. In lecture rooms and ENTRENCHED IDEAS “Dinosaurs were very alien, museum halls, the idea of dinosaurs as Early on, a few great minds did suspect very different,” says University of overgrown lazy lizards was so dominant that science might be getting dinosaurs Leicester paleontologist David Unwin. that it verged on the absurd. wrong. Comparative anatomist “[Paleontologists] tried to force them to Consider the Diplodocus debate of fit into paradigms that didn’t exist then.” Thomas Henry Huxley, for example, the early 20th century. After acquiring noticed similarities in the body plans Matthew Lamanna, assistant a specimen of the massive sauropod, of dinosaurs and birds as early as curator of vertebrate paleontology Carnegie Museum paleontologist the 1860s. He thought there might at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of William Holland and colleagues be an indirect evolutionary relationNatural History, agrees that early mounted it for display in an elephantship, though he never claimed birds paleontologists were restricted by what like posture. We now know this was the descended from dinosaurs. they could compare dinosaurs to — right approach: legs directly beneath But Huxley — often called Darwin’s and how they understood the broader the body, rather than the sprawled bulldog for his staunch support of living world. stance of a reptile. evolution — couldn’t rally others to the “Remember the origin of the word The move brought howls of disapproval, most pointedly from two idea. It would be more than a century dinosaur predates the theory of evolution,” Lamanna says. “Ideas about paleontologists, American Oliver Hay before the dinosaur-bird connection animal [species] being transitional had and German Gustav Tornier, who gained traction. yet to materialize. Now we know that insisted that the 80-foot-plus animal And it was a long hundred-plus dinosaurs are sort of bizarre croc-birds, had walked like a reptile. years. Interest in dinosaurs was growing

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TOP: ROYAL SASKATCHEWAN MUSEUM (RSM/R.C. MCKELLAR). BOTTOM: DEINONYCHUS ANTIRRHOPUS BY ROBERT BAKKER/J. OSTROM ET AL./COURTESY OF THE BULLETIN OF THE PEABODY MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY/JULY 1969/YALE UNIVERSITY/PEABODY.YALE.EDU/YPM-VP-005207

“Holland had a spectacular rebuttal,” says Lamanna, referring to a withering 1910 paper by the Carnegie paleontologist, which included illustrations based on Tornier’s claims. “Holland articulated the skeletons in the sprawling posture, but their ribs were so damn deep that they projected below the body.” As Holland drily pointed out in the retort, if his critics were right about the dinosaur’s stance, “the Diplodocus must have moved in a groove or a rut. This might perhaps account for his early extinction. It is physically and mentally bad to ‘get into a rut.’ ” Research waned during and immediately after the world wars, but at the same time, dinosaurs’ sheer weirdness made for perfect escapist fare in movies such as 1933’s King Kong. In fact, Hollywood and pop culture’s embrace of dinosaurs may have set research back. According to veteran dinosaur illustrator Gregory Paul, writing in The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs, “the very popularity of dinosaurs gave them a circus air that convinced many scientists they were beneath their scientific dignity and attention.” While the idea of dinosaurs as lumbering lizards persisted, research didn’t come to a standstill. Postwar expeditions to Mongolia and China, mostly by Soviet and Polish scientists, unearthed many new species that couldn’t be forced into the traditional reptile stereotype, such as the monster-clawed enigmas Therizinosaurus and Deinocheirus. It was a Yale University team in the mid-’60s, however, that ushered in a new era for the terrible lizards.

Paleontologist John Ostrom’s 1969 description of agile Deinonychus antirrhopus (shown here in an illustration by Bob Bakker, his student at the time) ushered in a new way of understanding dinosaurs.

book The Dinosaur Heresies as personally influential. Evidence mounted in support of Ostrom and his new school of thought. But stalwarts of the Old Lizard Guard remained — until another extraordinary discovery in the mid-1990s. Dinosaur feathers in amber from Myanmar are another link to the animals’ descendants: birds.

THE DINOSAUR RENAISSANCE The team, based near Bridger, Mont., and led by John Ostrom, found numerous fossils of an animal he would later name Deinonychus antirrhopus. Some pieces had been discovered in 1931, but Ostrom was the first to grasp the dinosaur’s significance. In 1969, he laid out a case for Deinonychus as an “active and very agile predator” that was potentially warmblooded. In subsequent research, Ostrom went a big step further: He compared his famous find with specimens of the earliest-known bird, Archaeopteryx, and made the link Huxley had stopped short of a century earlier: Birds evolved from dinosaurs. Ostrom’s theory, bolstered by additional finds, reignited interest in the field. And if Huxley was Darwin’s bulldog, Ostrom had his own bold champion in former student Bob Bakker, whose larger-than-life personality was perfectly sized to take on the establishment. “Bakker argued that even the least birdlike dinosaurs were more birdlike than we thought,” says Lamanna, who cites the paleontologist’s 1986

FEATHERWEIGHT FIND In 1995, a farmer in northeastern China found a feathered dinosaur. “It was the final piece of the puzzle,” Lamanna says. “The skeptics had to admit that dinosaurs were progenitors of birds because feathers are such a uniquely avian characteristic. It was one of those rare moments in science where the answer is so clear it’s like getting hit over the head with a two-by-four.” The Chinese dinosaur, Sinosauropteryx, had primitive, almost furlike feathers classified as filamentous. But in short order, researchers found more feathered dinosaurs, including Caudipteryx and Protarchaeopteryx. “These dinosaurs had feathers with a central rachis, veined, barbed,” says Lamanna, referring to their advanced structure. “They were modern feathers for all intents and purposes.” The last holdouts to the dinosaur-bird connection caved. Additional feathered finds — both filamentous and fully developed — continue to emerge. In December 2016, for example, researchers described a fully feathered, partial tail of a dinosaur preserved in amber from Myanmar. Myanmar, also known as Burma, is an emerging hotspot for fossil discoveries, illustrating another phenomenon changing our understanding of dinosaurs. More people looking in more places means more fossils are seeing the light of day. Some of the most stunning recent finds have come from Argentina, Morocco, Australia and Niger. Dinosaurs have now been found from the Arctic Circle to Antarctica. Technology is also a driving force. “We’ve got more fossils, which is great,” Unwin says. “But it’s laptops and

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The Many Iterations of Iguanodon Few dinosaurs have had as many extreme makeovers as Iguanodon. Over nearly two centuries, the herbivore has been imagined as a spike-nosed lummox, inappropriate kangaroo and now, at last, a stiff-tailed, mostly quadrupedal animal. 1825: Only the second dinosaur (after Megalosaurus) to be classiﬁed scientiﬁcally, the species’s ﬁrst fragmentary fossils were named by British paleontologist Gideon Mantell for the similarity of their teeth to those of iguanas. In addition to reconstructing Iguanodon as a stout, tail-dragging reptile, early paleontologists placed a ﬁnger bone on the animal’s snout. (Fun fact: The individuals Mantell initially described as Iguanodon were reclassiﬁed in the 20th century as relatives Therosaurus and Mantellisaurus.) 1851: Dining or dino-ing? A London event held inside a reconstructed Iguanodon was the talk of the town and helped cement the notion of the dinosaur as a tanklike, spike-nosed reptile.

1878: It was one step forward, one step back when several Iguanodon specimens turned up in Bernissart, Belgium. The completeness of multiple individuals conﬁrmed once and for all that the ol’ snout spike was actually a modiﬁed thumb. Paleontologists also realized the animals were not dedicated quadrupeds. They overcorrected, however, and reconstructed it in a bipedal kangaroo posture — even though they had to misalign some of the bones to make it work. 1980: The discovery of stiffened tendons along the tail established Iguanodon as no tail-dragger. Other research during this dinosaur renaissance, looking at the inﬂexibility of its hand and wrist, revealed that Iguanodon spent most of its time with four limbs on the ground, but was capable of some bipedalism. 21st century: Will future Iguanodon reconstructions sport feathers? Stay tuned. Despite having a beak and being an ornithischian, or “bird-hipped” dinosaur, the animal isn’t closely related to the lineage that evolved into birds. However, since 2002 paleontologists have unearthed a couple of other ornithischians with primitive bristle or furlike feathers. Iguanodon may get yet another makeover. — G.T.

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mainframes that are the foundation of this field moving forward. Digitization has had the biggest impact on how we describe the past.” Lamanna sees some of the biggest strides — no pun intended — being made in how dinosaurs moved. For starters, let’s nail the coffin shut on the whole tail-dragging thing. Dinosaurs did not walk like crocodiles. “We’ve found a lot more skeletons, and we also have hundreds of fossil trackways, preserving dinosaur footprints,” says Lamanna. “If you watch a crocodile walking, you’ll see its tail leaves a significant furrow, something we don’t see very much with dinosaurs.” Unwin agrees, adding that digitization allows paleontologists to model movement in a way that would have been impossible a few decades ago. “We might not be able to tell how T. rex moved yet, but increasingly we can tell you how T. rex didn’t move,” he says.

NEXT STEPS As passionate as paleontologists get about advances in their field, one imagines they’re no more excited than their predecessors once were about their theories. Might we one day find that our early 21st-century reconstructions are just as flawed as the reptilian beasts imagined in the Victorian era? Unwin doubts it, noting modern paleontology’s methods: “Computers allow us to approach our research more like they do in astronomy and physics and other hard sciences. We’re moving away from the qualitative, subjective approach and toward quantitative modeling. We’re producing very rigorous work. Thirty years ago we never had anything like the datasets underpinning our research now.” Lamanna is more cautious: “I’m sure we’re doing things now that we’ll regret one day, too.” Some things, after all, never change. D Senior editor and dinosaur lover Gemma Tarlach cried through much of Jurassic World.

FROM TOP: BIODIVERSITY HERITAGE LIBRARY/ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE NATURAL KINGDOM/S.G. GOODRICH/DERBY&JACKSON, NEW YORK/1859; MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP NORTH AMERICA LLC/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

History Lessons

Prognosis

A Master of Evasion Pancreatic cancer is notoriously difﬁcult to treat. It might meet its match with researchers’ latest immunotherapy tactics. BY DOUGLAS G. ADLER

Most people don’t obesity and simply being older even know they have a than 60. Obviously, not all pancreas, let alone what it does. of these risk factors can be One of my patients, Richard, controlled. was no exception. He came The organ’s location ensures to see me after experiencing its intimate relationship with several months of weight loss many of the key blood vessels and fatigue. that course through the A CT scan revealed a abdomen. So when pancreatic concerning spot on his pancreas cancers either spread to other as well as other spots on his organs or become intertwined liver, and a biopsy confirmed with some of these vessels, our worst fears: He had surgery is off the table. Even pancreatic cancer. The spots on among those who do undergo his liver also were pancreatic surgical removal of the cancer, cancer cells, indicating recurrence is common, with the cancer had spread, or as many as 60 percent seeing metastasized, to another organ. the disease return within Richard’s cancer was advanced six months. and likely to result in his death. That’s why even in 2017 most In more than two decades patients with pancreatic cancer as a doctor, I’ve diagnosed are left with medical, rather more than 1,000 patients with than surgical, treatment options. pancreatic cancer, and giving Often, that medical treatment this kind of news is never easy. becomes purely palliative, Richard was 65, had just retired The pancreas hides behind the stomach and small intestine. The meaning we manage the growth organ’s location makes treatment of pancreatic cancer challenging. a few months earlier and was of the cancer and its effects on looking forward to spending the body as well as we can, but time with his grandchildren. When The pancreas itself is about 6 inches we don’t expect to cure the disease. I called him with his results, he was long and tucked away behind the RESISTANCE IS THE RULE understandably devastated. I marveled stomach and small intestine. It pumps Chemotherapy has emerged as the once again at the destructiveness of out hormones such as insulin, which cornerstone of treatment for pancreatic this disease. helps to regulate blood sugar levels, cancer patients. It extends life by Pancreatic cancer — pancreatic in addition to enzymes that allow us months or years and can improve ductal adenocarcinoma — is the to digest food. When cells start going quality of life. Drugs like fluorouracil, most common tumor of the pancreas awry, catching cancerous growths early oxaliplatin and irinotecan work by and has the worst prognosis. Within is nearly impossible. The symptoms mimicking and damaging DNA five years of diagnosis, 95 percent — jaundice, weight loss and pain — molecules, or inhibiting enzymes of patients die of the disease. Yet often develop late in the course of the involved in cell and DNA replication, researchers are finally making some disease, usually too late for effective slowing the uncontrolled growth of headway by studying how to harness treatment with surgery. The risk factors tumor cells. Another common and the power of the body’s own immune for pancreatic cancer are numerous newer drug used to treat pancreatic system to extend, by even a few months, but some major ones include tobacco cancer is gemcitabine, which also patients’ lives. use, chronic pancreatic inflammation,

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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.

August 14-22, 2017

• 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!

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mimics one of the building blocks of DNA and interferes with the ability of cancer cells to reproduce. However, as a 95 percent mortality rate suggests, chemotherapy isn’t a viable treatment over the long term. Why is it that pancreatic cancer seems to be maddeningly resistant to most chemotherapy regimens? Pancreatic cancers are often desmoplastic, meaning that they contain and are surrounded by dense scar tissue called fibrosis. This scar tissue can serve as a protective barrier for pancreatic cancers, allowing tumors to resist chemotherapy and evade the body’s own immune system. Pancreatic cancer cells can also protect their nuclei, home to the chromosomes that contain DNA, by blocking chemotherapy agents. Moreover, in some cases, pancreatic cancer cells can even repair damage to their DNA caused by the chemotherapy drugs that do get into the tumor, further protecting themselves.

IMMUNE SYSTEM ADVANTAGE Despite all of this bad news, researchers are aggressively looking for new avenues to treat pancreatic cancer. One of the more interesting of these is immunotherapy. Immunotherapy treatments use the body’s own immune system to seek out and destroy cancer cells. If there were a way to strengthen the body’s immune system to give it an advantage, this would offer patients a chance to not only kill cells in the primary tumor, but also allow the body to “scrub” away cancer cells that have spread to other organs. Immunotherapy takes several forms. The most appealing version would be a so-called cancer vaccine. A pancreatic cancer vaccine could be made of whole pancreatic cancer cells, treated so they can’t replicate, but modified to present certain molecules on the surface of those cells. Those molecules would help “teach” the body’s immune system to recognize and attack these cancer

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Pancreatic cancer cells are adept at protecting themselves from chemotherapy drugs.

cells. In this way, the patient’s newly educated immune system would then target and kill any future cells that show the same antigens — the real pancreatic cancer cells. A similar idea involves injecting cancer patients with strains of different bacteria that have been genetically modified to present antigens found on pancreatic cancer cells. This helps teach the immune system to target the rogue cells. These vaccines have been used in combination with chemotherapy to provide a one-two punch to pancreatic cancer cells. One study used a pancreatic cancer vaccine with modified pancreatic cancer cells known as GVAX, alongside the chemotherapy drug cyclophosphamide and a special bacterium that boosts the immune response. Researchers reported that those with metastatic pancreatic cancer who received the combination treatment had an overall improved survival with only limited side effects. The added survival translated into several months of extra life, and while that may not sound like much, a few months of additional survival with an aggressive cancer is a big deal.

BEYOND THE VACCINE Other possible ways to attack pancreatic cancer cells focus on taking away their ability to hide from the

immune system. One approach is to give patients specific antibodies that target the homing devices (essentially chemical receptors) in white blood cells, rendering the tumor cells immunologically visible. Antibodies like this have been helpful in a variety of cancers, and have potential for pancreatic cancer, but so far they haven’t worked for unclear reasons. Conversely, the immune system contains triggers to blunt immune responses, and antibodies that block these “off-switch” checkpoints might be able to further reduce the ability of these cancers to escape the immune system. Drugs that work in this manner have been approved to treat melanoma but have been tested in a limited manner, with little success so far, in patients with pancreatic cancer. In yet another approach, researchers could modify specific white blood cells (called T-cells) to see and target pancreatic cancer cells, although this therapy could attack healthy cells, too. Novel methods to turn these modified T-cells off after a certain time are one way around this potential complication. These approaches could ideally be used alone or in combination with each other or chemotherapy to attempt to “hit” these tumors with everything we have. Immunotherapy as a science is still young; our understanding of the immune system and how it helps fight cancer is a work in progress. Medical researchers are working hard to develop effective vaccines and other immunotherapy treatments for pancreatic cancer. While it would be fantastic for patients if we could use immunotherapy to cure this disease, just stopping — or even slowing — its progress would be a tremendous leap forward. D Douglas G. Adler is a gastroenterologist and professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine.

STEVE GSCHMEISSNER/SCIENCE SOURCE

Prognosis

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20 Things You Didn’t Know About …

Seismographs (above) record waves traveling though the ground during seismic events such as the 2003 Boumerdes quake in Algeria (below), the result of shifting tectonic plates.

1 Our planet is full of famous shaky spots — California, Japan, New Zealand and so on — but the father of modern seismology hailed from comparatively stable Ireland. 2 In 1849, Dublin-born engineer Robert Mallet detonated kegs of gunpowder he’d buried on a beach to test how shock waves traveled through rock and other material: the world’s first seismological experiment. 3 We’ve also got Mallet to thank for the very word seismology. He coined the term from the Greek seismos, or earthquake. 4 Mallet wasn’t the first to study tremors, though. Back in the fourth century B.C., for example, Aristotle theorized that surface shakes were caused by winds whooshing through underground spaces. 5 In the second century A.D., China’s Zhang Heng created the first seismoscope, which reportedly picked up a jolt not noticed by humans. 6 A massive quake near Lisbon, Portugal, in 1755 was felt as far away as Finland. It inspired the first proposal that waves of energy traveled from a single point of origin through rock, much the way sound waves travel through air. 7 It wasn’t until the early 20th century, though, that researchers understood seismic waves, which we now categorize as either body (moving through the planet’s interior) or surface. 8 The body wave known as a P wave, sometimes called a primary or compressional wave, travels faster than any other and is the first wave detected during an event. 9 You know what else picks up P waves? Pooches. Dogs can hear the waves, which have too high a frequency for our ears to notice. That’s why there are so many reports of dogs barking immediately before a quake. 10 P waves compress and move particles in the same direction that the energy is traveling — imagine the in and out of an accordion in action. 11 But slower, secondary S waves, the other type of body wave, move particles perpendicular to the direction the wave itself is traveling: up and down

BY GEMMA TARLACH

or side to side. 12 Surface waves, which travel only at or near Earth’s surface, actually cause the most damage. These waves move slower than body waves but don’t lose their oomph as they travel. 13 While seismic waves are now well understood, science still can’t explain earthquake lights (EQL), multicolored flashes in the sky typically reported before or during many large tremors. EQL sightings date back to at least the fourth century B.C. 14 A 2014 study in Seismological Research Letters suggested that EQL may be the result of positive charges building up along the fault line as stress increases before the big shake. 15 Large earthquakes happen mostly along faults where tectonic plates meet as they move over the planet’s surface. But plenty of smaller earthquakes, most not even felt by humans, occur across the world every day due to detonations, such as nuclear weapons testing or mining, or rising magma linked to volcanic activity. 16 Magma on its way to the surface can fracture crust or expand existing fissures; it’s a process similar to the way wastewater pumped underground during oil and gas extraction operations can cause small-scale seismic events. 17 Non-tectonic temblors are usually magnitude 3 or less on the Richter scale, the famous but now antiquated way to measure a quake’s shake. The Gutenberg-Richter law, however, remains fundamental to both seismology and geophysics. Simply put, the law states that within a region, the bigger the quake, the less likely its occurrence. 18 In January, Scientific Reports published an update to the law, which researchers believe more accurately models risk for catastrophic quakes. 19 And it’s good timing: The planet appears to be experiencing an uptick in high-magnitude quakes. From 1977 to 1999, the world experienced zero seismic events that were magnitude (m) 8.5 or higher. Since 2004, however, we’ve had six big shakes of m8.5 or more. 20 But our fussy planet does go through dips and peaks in seismic activity. From 1950 to 1965, for example, no fewer than seven quakes of m8.5 or more jolted Earth. So don’t retreat to your bunker just yet. 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. 4. 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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