Scientific American - December 2024

A New Kind
of Shape
Treating
Hypochondria
The Science
of Curiosity
How
Horses
Made
the
Modern
World
New archaeological
finds are rewriting
an ancient story
DeCeMber 2024
SCieNTifiCAMeriCAN.CoM
CONTENTS
DECEmbEr 2024 VOLUME 331, NUMBER 5
22
FEATURES
ARCHAEOLOGY CLIMATE CHANGE SUSTAINABILITY

22 WHEN HOrSE bECAmE STEED 40 bUrIED AT SEA 54 THE AFTErLIVES OF OIL rIGS
Archaeological and genetic discoveries Changing the ocean’s chemical and Off the California coast, decommissioned
topple long-standing ideas about biological makeup could force it to pull oil platforms are some of the most produc-
the domestication of equines. vast amounts of planet-warming carbon tive marine fish habitats in the world.
BY WILLIAM T. TAYLOR from the atmosphere. But is that a line Should they be removed or allowed
MATHEMATICS
we want to cross? BY JAIME B. PALTER to stay? BY ASHER RADZINER
32 TESSELLATION rEVELATION HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY

Mathematicians have discovered 48 HYPOCHONDrIA’S SErIOUS TOLL 64 THE rEWArDS OF CUrIOSITY
a new kind of shape with connections Intense health anxiety is a true mental Learning blossoms in a sweet spot
to nature and art. illness and can take lives. The good news between challenge and frustration.
BY ELISE CUTTS is it’s treatable. BY JOANNE SILBERNER BY LYDIA DENWORTH
ON THE COVER
Alberto Bernasconi/laif/Redux
Less than a century ago most facets of everyday life depended

on horses. New findings have upended the received wisdom
about the origin of the relationship between horses and humans.
People domesticated horses far later than previously thought,
a revelation that dramatically changes our understanding
of the human-horse past.
Photograph by Tony Stromberg
DEC E M BER 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.COM 1

CONTENTS
DECEmbEr 2024 VOLUME 331, NUMBER 5
4 FrOm THE EDITOr

6 CONTrIbUTOrS
8 LETTErS
10 ADVANCES
A mysterious “biotwang” sound under the sea.
turning skin temporarily transparent. Atom-size
black holes. Quantum views inside plants.
70 SCIENCE AGENDA
books open children’s minds and teach
them empathy. efforts to censor what kids
read must be stopped. BY THE EDITORS
71 FOrUm
Urbanization threatens many species, but
intelligent and resourceful birds such as the
ASA, ESA and Hubble Heritage Team (STScI)

Great tit offer lessons in how to thrive.
BY ANDERS BRODIN
74 mIND mATTErS
it’s gratifying to connect with old friends—
so why is it hard to reach out?
BY LARA B. AKNIN AND
GILLIAN M. SANDSTROM
75 THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH

concussions are surprisingly common
in everyday life. BY LYDIA DENWORTH 80
77 rEVIEWS
the surprising evolution of oak trees. A new
translation of Haruki murakami’s fantastical,
cyberpunk detective novel. BY AMY BRADY
78 mATH
How many colors does it take to fill in a map?
Mike Lane/Alamy Stock Photo
BY JACK MURTAGH
80 THE UNIVErSE
the fate of the milky Way depends
on our neighbor. BY PHIL PLAIT
82 Q&A
How to protect yourself from a data breach. 71
BY BEN GUARINO
84 ObSErVATOrY
the fossil-fuel industry argues that we can’t live Scientific American (ISSN 0036-8733), Volume 331, Number 5, December 2024, published monthly, except for a July/August
without its deadly products. it is wrong. issue, by Scientific American, a division of Springer Nature America, Inc., 1 New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New York, N.Y. 10004-1562.
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2 Sc i e n t i f ic A m er ic A n Dece m ber 2 02 4
FROM THE EDITOR
Horses and to increase the rate of absorption, and now marine carbon diox-
ide removal efforts are beginning at scale. On page 40, oceanog-
rapher Jaime B. Palter describes strategies being tested or imple-
Humanity mented now to absorb more of the CO 2 in the ocean so it can pull
more CO 2 from our atmosphere, with helpful, elegant graphics.
Hypochondria is a serious health condition that is starting to
get more respectful, insightful and effective treatments. The term
ID YOU GROW UP AROUND HORSES? If not, your par- can refer to excessive fears about getting an illness or anxiety that
D ents or grandparents or greats probably did. Until very some symptom is a sign of a catastrophic health condition. People
recently, horses were our main means of transporta- affected by a new type of hypochondria called cyberchondria
tion and labor. Humans have been hunting horses spend inordinate amounts of time studying medical conditions
since around 300,000 years ago, but when did our rela- online or visiting multiple doctors. Like other anxiety disorders,
tionship with them change from predator-prey to partner? New hypochondria can be disruptive and tormenting. It can frustrate
archaeological and genetic discoveries have changed the under- physicians who can’t find a “real” condition to diagnose and treat.
standing of horse domestication. Rather than a gradual process Health reporter Joanne Silberner on page 48 covers the latest find-
that began around 6,000 years ago, domestication seems to ings on how to diagnose and treat hypochondria, including advice
have happened quickly, around 4,000 years ago, and it abruptly for people who want to help someone with the condition.
changed trade routes, technology and conquest. Archaeozoolo- Offshore oil rigs have become havens for fish, shrimp, mussels,
gist William T. Taylor shares his own research on page 22 and anemones, and more, serving as artificial reefs in otherwise open
pulls together evidence from burial sites, bits, genes and human water. In the Gulf of Mexico, they’ve allowed red snapper and other
history to show how horses made the modern world. species to expand their ranges and populations. When it’s time to
Don’t you love it when mathematicians figure out a problem decommission an oil rig, the platform and upper part of its support
and then realize nature beat them to it? In a fun and beautifully structure can be removed, leaving the bottom part to the fishes. Cal-
illustrated story on page 32, science writer Elise Cutts shows how ifornia now faces a difficult decision over whether to “rig-to-reef ”
three-dimensional shapes with minimal corners can fit together some of its aging offshore rigs. On page 54, freelance writer Asher
to fill a space. It’s another new insight from the field of tessellation, Radziner explains the stakes, the science and the controversy.
which has been on a tear recently. (You may remember our story Curiosity has been challenging to study because it’s hard to
in the January 2024 issue about newfound Einstein tiles, shapes define exactly what it is. It’s a desire to gain knowledge and reduce
that can fit together infinitely without repeating a pattern.) The uncertainty, sure, but it’s also something delicious and stimulat-
iridescent wash on our illustrations may remind you of nautilus ing and fun. I suspect all of you would score high on any curiosity
shells, which contain the newly defined shapes. scale—learning about the world through science is one of the best
The ocean has absorbed about 25 percent of the carbon dioxide ways to satisfy curiosity . . . and encourage even more of it. On
released by fossil-fuel burning since the industrial rev- page 64, Scientific American Science of Health colum-
olution began. This has slowed the pace of global warm- nist Lydia Denworth explores how curiosity influences
Laura Helmuth
ing—giving us enough time to fix it, we hope. Scientists is editor in chief memory and learning, what brain states underlie it,
have speculated for decades that it could be possible of Scientific American. and how to help young people develop it.
BOARD OF ADVISERS
Robin E. Bell Rita Colwell Jennifer A. Francis Hopi E. Hoekstra John Maeda Martin Rees
Research Professor, Lamont- Distinguished University Senior Scientist and Acting Alexander Agassiz Professor Vice President, Astronomer Royal and Emeritus
Doherty Earth Observatory, Professor, University of Deputy Director, Woodwell of Zoology and Curator of Artificial Intelligence and Professor of Cosmology
Columbia University Maryland College Park and Climate Research Center Mammals, Museum of Design, Microsoft and Astrophysics,
Emery N. Brown Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Carlos Gershenson Comparative Zoology, Satyajit Mayor Institute of Astronomy,
Edward Hood Taplin Professor School of Public Health Research Professor, National Harvard University Senior Professor, University of Cambridge
of Medical Engineering and of Kate Crawford Autonomous University of Ayana Elizabeth Johnson National Center for Biological Daniela Rus
Computational Neuroscience, Research Professor, University Mexico and Visiting Scholar, Co-founder, Urban Ocean Lab, Sciences, Tata Institute Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi
M.I.T., and Warren M. Zapol of Southern California Santa Fe Institute and Co-founder, The All We Can of Fundamental Research Professor of Electrical
Professor of Anesthesia, Annenberg, and Co-founder, Alison Gopnik Save Project John P. Moore Engineering and Computer
Harvard Medical School AI Now Institute, Professor of Psychology and Christof Koch Professor of Microbiology and Science and Director,
Vinton G. Cerf New York University Affiliate Professor of Chief Scientist, MindScope Immunology, Weill Medical CSAIL, M.I.T.
Chief Internet Evangelist, Nita A. Farahany Philosophy, University Program, Allen Institute for College of Cornell University Meg Urry
Google Professor of Law and of California, Berkeley Brain Science Priyamvada Natarajan Israel Munson Professor of
Emmanuelle Charpentier Philosophy, Director, Duke Lene Vestergaard Hau Meg Lowman Professor of Astronomy and Physics and Astronomy and
Scientific Director, Max Planck Initiative for Science & Society, Mallinckrodt Professor of Director and Founder, TREE Physics, Yale University Director, Yale Center for
Institute for Infection Biology, Duke University Physics and of Applied Physics, Foundation, Rachel Carson Donna J. Nelson Astronomy and Astrophysics
and Founding and Acting Jonathan Foley Harvard University Fellow, Ludwig Maximilian Professor of Chemistry, Amie Wilkinson
Director, Max Planck Unit for Executive Director, University Munich, and University of Oklahoma Professor of Mathematics,
the Science of Pathogens Project Drawdown Research Professor, University Lisa Randall University of Chicago
of Science Malaysia Professor of Physics,
Harvard University
4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N DECE M BER 2 02 4
CONTRIBUTORS
WILLIAM T. TAYLOR
WHEN HORSE BECAME STEED, PAGE 22
Growing up in Montana, William T. Taylor lived in a
house that was “adorned with every trapping of cow-
boy culture you could imagine,” he says. “On a fancy
occasion, you’d put on your cowboy boots, your bolo
and your hat.” His grandfather was a rancher, but his
own father was a lawyer, so they didn’t have any ani-
mals. Then, after graduating from college, Taylor spent
a summer doing archaeology research in Mongolia,
another place with “very vibrant horse culture.” While
helping to excavate a 2,500-year-old horse burial,
“I had so many questions about the interactions
between people and horses that I couldn’t really get
an answer to.”
Taylor ultimately became an archaeozoologist and
recently published a book called Hoof Beats (Univer-
sity of California Press, 2024). In this issue, he tells
the story of horses’ domestication and spread across
the ancient world. These findings inform our under-
standing of both the past and the present, shaping
conservation strategies for the planet’s last wild horse
species, native to Central Asia, and supporting Indige-
nous peoples’ long histories with horses on America’s
Great Plains. “The way we think about our ancient
relationships to horses,” Taylor says, “is very much the
on-the-ground reality for folks today.”
THOMAS FUCHS ADVANCES, PAGE 10

Illustrator Thomas Fuchs (above) says the weirder the assign- VIOLET FRANCES
ment, the better. For more than a decade his illustrations for TESSELLATION REVELATION, PAGE 32
Scientific American have depicted strange scientific discoveries As an assistant art director at Scientific American in
that can’t be captured in photographs. This month he was chal- the 1990s, Violet Frances became enchanted by older
lenged to come up with visuals for quantum entanglement, fungal issues from the 1950s and 1960s. “The design was so
robots and seeing with sounds. Advances, the magazine’s news clear, so laser-focused,” she says. In what was an era
section, “is so un-illustratable, and I love it for that reason,” he of busy, 3D illustrations, she became fixated on sim-
says. “If there’s no image in your head, it frees you up a lot, and plicity. Her favorite illustration she produced was a
you can go completely wild.” Also see the drawing Fuchs did for our two-page spread for a 1998 story about fundamental
Science Agenda ( page 70) about book bans. particles called gluons: a single, eye-catching Feyn-
Fuchs has long been artistically inclined. “I was always the guy man diagram. These pared-down graphics “look kind
in school who would paint the AC/DC logo on jean jackets—I was of like scientific hieroglyphics,” she says. “I was struck
like, I can draw a straight line,” he jokes. He started art school by how beautiful they are.”
for graphic design but soon realized he could focus on illustration Today Frances still aims to find the simplest way
instead. “Straight lines look good and all, but every once in a while to represent abstract scientific truths. For this issue’s
[you can] put a curve in it.” For Fuchs, illustration is about looking feature on a class of new shapes by science writer
deeper into the science behind the story and choosing imagery that Elise Cutts, “I tried approaching the illustrations to
“opens up another question” beyond what is in the article itself. just let the geometry sing,” she says. Frances is also
a fine artist, and her multimedia work often focuses
on the human form. Since she came out as a trans
woman five years ago, her art has completely trans-
“The way we think about our formed. “Along with the disorienting joy of that time,
I realized that so much of my fine art was me trying to
ancient relationships to horses make a golem of myself,” she says. After that, “I
became way more interested in just the mess of exis-
is very much the on-the-ground
Thomas Fuchs
tence.” In 2023 she had her first solo art exhibition

since coming out as trans. “For me, life is an experi-
reality for folks today.” —William T. Taylor ment,” Frances says. “That’s how I want to live it.”
LETTERS
[email protected]
CURBING HUNGER PANGS structure and function to GLP-1 but much

I enjoyed “Turning Down the Food Noise” more durable and longer-lasting. Exendin-4
[The New Science of Diet, Health and served as the template for the new class of
Appetite], Lauren J. Young’s article on the GLP-1 drugs, first as diabetes drug exenatide
influence of satiety pathways on food and more recently semaglutide.
intake and how glucagonlike peptide 1
(GLP-1) receptor agonists such as Wegovy SEEING SPOKEN WORDS
can intervene successfully. In 2002 I took I was thrilled to read “Speech Transforms
part in a phase 3 trial of Axokine, a drug into Text I ‘See’ ” [Mind Matters], Emily
candidate from Regeneron that also acted Makowski’s article on ticker-tape synes-
to suppress the desire to overeat. Axokine thesia. Since childhood, I have seen the
was never approved by the U.S. Food and words I and others speak appear and
Drug Administration because it failed to scroll before my eyes, much like a ticker
meet the trial’s endpoint for weight loss tape. I remember being surprised that not
across all the participants. everyone experienced this. My parents
July/August 2024
It had a dramatic effect on me when were always amused by my ability to
I was in the active arm of the trial, how- recite the spellings of words backward.
ever: I lost about 90 pounds within around of the University of Cambridge. Yeo As mentioned in the article, I find it
nine months. For whatever reason, I was a explained that gastric bypass makes the difficult to concentrate on reading if there
superresponder. Hence, I have followed stomach smaller and the gut shorter in are conversations, TV or music with
the development of other appetite block- length to reduce food absorption, which lyrics in the background. Like Makowski,
ers with great interest, although I have not leads to weight loss. But the rearrangement I won spelling bees in primary school—so
found it necessary to use them. Satiety of sections of the small intestine, a primary often that my third grade teacher revised
drugs truly can be life changers. source of GLP-1, also changes gut hormone the rules to allow for multiple winners. To
JOHN P. MOORE WEILL CORNELL production. “Suddenly food is delivered my knowledge, I have never met anyone
MEDICINE AND SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN’S further down the gut in a less [digested] else with ticker-tape synesthesia.
BOARD OF ADVISERS form than it would normally be,” Yeo said. ANNE PRUCHA WINTER SPRINGS, FLA.
“As a result, different hormones are
I recognized the sensations people reported released, including GLP-1.” Several studies I’ve experienced this same speech-to-text
in Young’s article—not from GLP-1 drugs show that GLP-1 levels increase almost conversion for as long as I can remember. I
but from my gastric bypass surgery 19 years immediately after gastric bypass surgery— thought everyone experienced this until a
ago. I was first aware of a change at Thanks- sometimes nearly 10 times higher—before conversation with friends in college let me
giving. I had a small portion, then noticed the recipient has lost any weight. These know that, nope, I was fairly unique. This
everyone at the table was going for seconds findings suggest that GLP-1’s influence on was the first time I’d ever stumbled across
and thirds. I was surprised that I had no satiety may play an important role in the something written about the phenomenon.
desire to do that. I went on to lose almost surgery’s weight-loss effects. Thank you for writing about ticker-tape
200 pounds, and I’ve kept it off without In response to Zelman: Scientists have synesthesia and giving me a name for my
feeling I needed to use my willpower. Have long investigated ways to develop drugs from mental closed-captioning!
the researchers in the article investigated potent chemicals of various venomous crea- SCHUYLER V. KENTUCKY
possible GLP-1 changes in my cohort? tures, such as snakes, cone snails and lizards
ALAIN MORIN VIA E-MAIL like the Gila monster. Research in the 1980s ASTEROID BENNU
suggested that Gila monster venom stimu- “An Asteroid’s Secrets,” by Robin George
In discussing the search for longer-lasting lated the pancreas, later inspiring endocri- Andrews, describes the material sampled
structures of GLP-1, Young says that nologist John Eng to break down the molecu- from the near-Earth asteroid bennu as
success was found in the saliva of the Gila lar recipe of the saliva. That’s how he discov- having much in common with the geology
monster. I am certain that saliva was not ered exendin-4, a peptide that was similar in of our own planet. That makes me wonder
tested because someone said, “Well, let’s
test the Gila monster; we’ve tested every-
thing else.” Could you kindly explain how
in heaven or through what scientific “Thank you for writing about ticker-tape
method this finding was made?
STEPHEN M. ZELMAN NEW YORK CITY synesthesia and giving me a name
YOUNG REPLIES: Morin’s observation
for my mental closed-captioning!”
came up during my interview with Giles Yeo —SCHUYLER V. KENTUCKY
8 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N DECE M bER 2 02 4
®
ESTABLISHED 1845
whether the asteroid could actually be from EDITOR IN CHIEF Laura Helmuth
Earth, a relic of the huge collision that MANAGING EDITOR Jeanna Bryner COPY DIRECTOR Maria-Christina Keller CREATIVE DIRECTOR Michael Mrak
created our moon. The article says that EDITORIAL

CHIEF FEATURES EDITOR Seth Fletcher CHIEF NEWS EDITOR Dean Visser CHIEF OPINION EDITOR Megha Satyanarayana
“some of the sample’s microscopic grains
reveal” that bennu is older than the sun, FEATURES
SENIOR EDITOR, SUSTAINABILITY Mark Fischetti SENIOR EDITOR, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY Madhusree Mukerjee
which is of course older than the moon. but SENIOR EDITOR, MEDICINE / SCIENCE POLICY Josh Fischman SENIOR EDITOR, TECHNOLOGY / MIND Jen Schwartz
SENIOR EDITOR, SPACE / PHYSICS Clara Moskowitz SENIOR EDITOR, EVOLUTION / ECOLOGY Kate Wong
how do those ancient grains confirm ben-
NEWS
nu’s age? Couldn’t they be material accreted SENIOR EDITOR, SPACE / PHYSICS Lee Billings ASSOCIATE EDITOR, TECHNOLOGY Ben Guarino
over the billions of years the asteroid has SENIOR EDITOR, HEALTH AND MEDICINE Tanya Lewis
SENIOR EDITOR, MIND / BRAIN Gary Stix
ASSOCIATE EDITOR, SUSTAINABILITY Andrea Thompson
ASSOCIATE EDITOR, HEALTH AND MEDICINE Lauren J. Young
spent roaming our solar system? SENIOR OPINION EDITOR Dan Vergano ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR Sarah Lewin Frasier
SENIOR NEWS REPORTER Meghan Bartels ASSOCIATE NEWS EDITOR Allison Parshall
STEVE WISE CHARLOTTE, N.C.
MULTIMEDIA
CHIEF MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Jeffery DelViscio CHIEF NEWSLETTER EDITOR Andrea Gawrylewski
ANDREWS REPLIES: For Bennu to have MULTIMEDIA EDITORS Kelso Harper, Fonda Mwangi CHIEF AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Sunya Bhutta
ASSOCIATE ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Arminda Downey-Mavromatis
come from Earth, scientists would expect
ART
the sample to have chemical signatures SENIOR GRAPHICS EDITOR Jen Christiansen PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR Monica Bradley DIGITAL ART DIRECTOR Ryan Reid
ASSOCIATE GRAPHICS EDITOR Amanda Montañez ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITOR Liz Tormes
that are a very, very close match to those
of Earth or even the moon—and that’s not COPY AND PRODUCTION
SENIOR COPY EDITORS Angelique Rondeau, Aaron Shattuck ASSOCIATE COPY EDITOR Emily Makowski
what they’re seeing. Water-rich objects are MANAGING PRODUCTION EDITOR Richard Hunt PREPRESS AND QUALITY MANAGER Silvia De Santis
actually very common in the solar system, CONTRIBUTORS

EDITORS EMERITI Mariette DiChristina, John Rennie
so Bennu being hydrated isn’t that strange. EDITORIAL Rebecca Boyle, Amy Brady, Katherine Harmon Courage, Lydia Denworth, Lauren Gravitz, Ferris Jabr,
Lauren Leffer, Michael D. Lemonick, Robin Lloyd, Maryn McKenna, Steve Mirsky, Melinda Wenner Moyer,
But getting pristine asteroid material from George Musser, Sarah Scoles, Dava Sobel, Claudia Wallis, Daisy Yuhas
an ancient water world is very exciting. ART Edward Bell, Violet Isabelle Frances, Lawrence R. Gendron,
Nick Higgins, Kim Hubbard, Katie Peek, Beatrix Mahd Soltani
The sample of Bennu was taken from
EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT SUPERVISOR Maya Harty EDITORIAL WORKFLOW AND RIGHTS MANAGER Brianne Kane
below its surface. And these grains have
clear chemical traces that show they weren’t SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN CUSTOM MEDIA
forged by our sun. EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Cliff Ransom
CHIEF MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Kris Fatsy
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Wojtek Urbanek
SENIOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Ben Gershman SENIOR EDITOR Dan Ferber
SENIOR ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Dharmesh Patel SENIOR PUBLISHING MANAGER Samantha Lubey
ROUND AND ROUND WE GO

PRESIDENT Kimberly Lau
“There Is Too Much Trash in Space,” by the PUBLISHER AND VICE PRESIDENT Jeremy A. Abbate VICE PRESIDENT, COMMERCIAL Andrew Douglas
Editors [Science Agenda], discusses the VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCT AND TECHNOLOGY Dan Benjamin VICE PRESIDENT, CONTENT SERVICES Stephen Pincock
problem of orbital debris. Half a century CLIENT MEDIA SOLUTIONS

HEAD, PUBLISHING STRATEGY AND COMMERCIAL OPERATIONS Suzanne Fromm MARKETING PROGRAM MANAGER Leeor Cohen
ago my colleagues and I had a small nasa DIRECTORS, INTEGRATED MEDIA Matt Bondlow, Stan Schmidt PROGRAMMATIC PRODUCT MANAGER Zoya Lysak
DIRECTOR, CONTENT PARTNERSHIPS Marlene Stewart DIGITAL ADVERTISING OPERATIONS MANAGER Lizzie Ng
contract to look at ways to get rid of such
PRODUCT & TECHNOLOGY
debris. We took the unusual step of not DIRECTORS Jason Goldstein, Nico Halpern ENGINEERS Kenneth Abad, Hector Coronado, Ruben Del Rio,
asking for follow-on funding because we PRODUCT MANAGERS Ian Kelly, Miguel Olivares
DIGITAL PRODUCER Isabella Bruni
Michael Gale, Akwa Grembowski, Grace Millard,
Negin Rahbar, Katherine Shelley, Stephen Tang, Tan Tran
could not think of anything that would DATA ANALYSTS Jackie Clark, Britney Ngaw
work. Shortly after that I also managed a CONSUMER MARKETING

DIRECTOR, MARKETING Christopher Monello-Johnson
contract called Space Industrialization, in MARKETING MANAGER Charlotte Hartwell
MARKETING COORDINATOR Justin Camera
which we wrestled with that same problem MARKETING AND CUSTOMER SERVICE ASSISTANT Cynthia Atkinson
and devised only a partial solution. In our ANCILLARY PRODUCTS
plan, an entrepreneur could lease a “pad” ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Diane McGarvey
CUSTOM PUBLISHING EDITOR Lisa Pallatroni
and pay for provided utilities at a space-
CORPORATE
based facility. If they went broke, manage- COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER Kevin Hurler HEAD OF COMMUNICATIONS, U.S. Eseohe Arhebamen-Yamasaki
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CHARLES GOULD LAS VEGAS, NEV. ADVERTISING PRODUCTION CONTROLLER Michael Revis-Williams
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DEC E M bER 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.COM 9

OCEANS
Deep
Knowledge
Strange “biotwang” near the
Mariana Trench identified
RECORDED BY UNDERWATER micro-

phones, the unexplained sound—a low,
sonorous grunting followed by a squeaky,
mechanical echo like a frog burping in
space—first rumbled through a computer
speaker about a decade ago. baffled re-
searchers called it the “biotwang.”
“You’ve got this low-frequency portion,
like a moan,” says Lauren Harrell, a data
scientist at Google’s AI for Social Good
team, adding her own impression of a
hearty groan. “Then you have the high-
er-frequency component that sounds, to
me, like the original Star Trek Enterprise
ship—the ‘bip boo, bip boo’ sound.”
Autonomous underwater gliders first
encountered the odd noise in 2014 echoing
near the miles-deep Mariana Trench in the
western Pacific Ocean. Researchers couldn’t
identify its source, but they had a theory.
“There are enough other Star Wars–sound-
ing whale calls that they guessed it was
made by a baleen whale,” says Ann Allen, a
research oceanographer at the U.S. National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
but, she adds, “anybody who’s not familiar
with whales would never think this was
made by an animal.”
Confirming which marine creature the trench of the same name, noaa re- After identifying the source, the scien-
makes a particular unusual noise isn’t easy: searchers saw an enigmatic baleen species tists reviewed years’ worth of audio data
Nature Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo
it requires a person on a boat to see and iden- called the bryde’s whale (Balaenoptera from underwater hydrophones to figure
tify the source at exactly the same time the edeni) 10 times. These rarely observed out where this specific whale sound had
sound is heard. “It takes a lot of time, a lot of whales have a vast range spanning much of previously been heard. but according to
effort and a fair amount of luck,” Allen says. the ocean, making them hard to study. On Allen, noaa’s growing database has more
That’s how Allen, Harrell and their col- nine of the occasions when bryde’s whales than 200,000 hours of such recordings.
leagues finally solved the biotwang mys- turned up, the researchers also heard the “It’s so much data that it’s simply impossi-
tery, which they describe in Frontiers in biotwang. “Once, it’s a coincidence,” Allen ble to analyze [manually],” says Olaf Mey-
Marine Science. While surveying whales off says. “Twice is happenstance. Nine times, necke, who studies baleen whales as a
the Mariana Islands, an archipelago near it’s definitely a bryde’s whale.” research fellow at Griffith University in
BOTH BLIND AND SPECTACULAR GRAVITY ROBOTS SENSE
SIGHTED PEOPLE LEARN LENS REVEALS FAR-OFF SURROUNDINGS
ECHOLOCATION P. 13 GALAXIES P. 16 USING FUNGI P. 17
DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE
The elusive Bryde’s whale produces

an artificial-sounding “biotwang.”
Australia and wasn’t involved in the study. ing algorithms to look for certain frequen- cause scientists couldn’t easily tell differ-
When analyzing audio data for another cies using image recognition. ent populations of the elusive whales
project, Allen had been “flabbergasted” by The new study lays out the evidence as- apart. In 2016, after a strong El Niño led to
the huge volumes of information to slog sociating biotwangs with bryde’s whales in a shift in the location of the whales’ food
through. At one point, she says, her dad the western North Pacific. The data sug- (largely krill, sardines and anchovies),
suggested, “Just get Google to do it for you.” gest that the animals the researchers stud- there were lots of biotwangs—even in the
So Allen reached out to company staff, and, ied are members of a distinct bryde’s northwestern Hawaiian Islands, an area
to her surprise, they agreed. Google pro- whale population and showed where in the these whales ventured into only under cer-
vided AI tools that helped to speed up her ocean they were found during different tain climate conditions. This correlation
analysis by transforming audio data into an seasons and years—something that had could mean that their movements are at
image called a spectrogram and then train- previously been challenging to discern be- least partially determined by their prey’s

ADVANCES
distribution, which changes with environ- counterpart, La Niña, potentially undergo over time and between populations. but
mental conditions. changes,“these whales will have to travel because the tools are open source, other
Once scientists know where and when farther—and they may have to work a little scientists can use them to discover more
these whales travel, Harrell says, AI mod- harder to find food,” Allen says. about whale language. “We seem to be so
els could “connect those data to climate The data-processing technology isn’t detached from, or simply have no access
and environmental factors” and thus sup- perfect. “These algorithms can only search to, this amazing acoustic underwater
port protection efforts. As climate change for a frequency they know,” Meynecke world,” he says. “I think it’s about time
worsens and El Niño and its cold-water says. baleen whale vocalizations change that we change that.” —Melissa Hobson
BIOMECHANICS Grounded running in birds has puzzled through a human lens, then [grounded
scientists because humans mimicking the running] seems like a really weird and kind
Goofy behavior use quite a bit more energy to
achieve a running pace than we do with our
of dumb thing to do because it seems really
energetically costly,” says Armita R. Manaf-
Running habitual rapid movement style, called aeri-

al running. but research by van bijlert and
his colleagues in Science Advances finds that
zadeh, a biomechanist at Yale University.
“It’s actually a pretty smart thing to do
when you have the anatomy of a bird.”
A silly-looking strategy birds aren’t foolish for using grounded run- Van bijlert says the research may also
lets birds pick up the pace ning—even though they may look silly. inform scientists’ understanding of birds’
For the study, the scientists used a com- long-lost ancestors: dinosaurs. He suspects
WHEN HUMANS want to move fast—bar- puter model of a Common Emu (Dromaius that especially dinosaurs that are closer
ring speed-walking races—we pick up our novaehollandiae) to show that the bird’s relatives of birds, such as the petite veloci-
feet. but when birds need to get some- posture makes grounded running more ef- raptors, might have chased down their
where quickly without flying, they tend to ficient than aerial running at certain speeds. prey like nightmare agents of the Ministry
always keep one foot on the ground, lead- by varying virtual emus’ leg muscle and of Silly Walks. but more simulations are
ing to a strange-looking gait that scientists tendon anatomy, the simulations showed needed to determine whether bipedal
call “grounded running.” two strategies for reducing energy expen- dinosaurs, including the fearsome Tyran-
“Most people won’t even probably real- diture during faster movement: either nosaurus rex, also might have practiced
ize that they’ve seen a bird use grounded keeping legs relatively straight during the grounded running, Manafzadeh says. She
running,” says Pasha van bijlert, an evolu- running cycle or keeping one foot on the adds that she hopes the new research re-
tionary biomechanics graduate student at ground as much as possible. Humans take minds scientists to be curious about how
Utrecht University and Naturalis biodi- the first route, but birds can’t—so they use other species experience life on Earth. “If
versity Center in the Netherlands. “Some grounded running instead. (Humans we try to interpret the diversity of animal
Paradox,” by Pasha A. van Bijlert et al., in Science Advances, Vol. 10; September 25, 2024 (reference)
Source: “Muscle-Controlled Physics Simulations of Bird Locomotion Resolve the Grounded Running
of the times that you see a bird walking in asked to run in a crouched position will in- locomotion through a human-centric lens,”
a weird way, they’re actually not walking; stinctively switch to grounded running as she says, “we’re going to miss out on lots of
they’re running—you can tell from the fact well; give it a try if you’re interested.) really cool and equally viable ways of mov-
that they’re bouncing.” “If we think about bird locomotion ing around the world.” —Meghan Bartels
Staying
Grounded
Birds have a crouched
posture, with their hips and
knees tucked into their
feathered bodies. Because
of this alignment, running
birds exhibit a peculiar
tendency to keep one foot
on the ground throughout
their entire running cycle. In
humans, the lack of an aeri-
al phase in which both feet
leave the ground requires
more energy to sustain, but
in birds, grounded running
saves energy.
1 2 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N DECE M bER 2 02 4 Graphic by Brown Bird Design

In REASON
We Trust
At this season of the

WINTER SOLSTICE
Echo Chamber may REASON prevail!
twice a week over 10 weeks. They started by
teaching participants to produce mouth
Brains can clicks, then trained them on three tasks. The Join the nation’s largest
association of freethinkers
be trained to first two involved judging the size or orienta-
tion of objects. The third involved navigating (atheists and agnostics)
“see” sound virtual mazes, which participants moved
through with the help of simulated click-plus-
working to keep religion
out of government.
echo sounds tied to their positions.
NEUROSCIENCE
Human echolocation has Both groups improved on all the tasks..
at times allowed people “This study adds a significant contribution Call 1-800-335-4021
to ride bikes or play basketball despite be- to a growing body of evidence that this is a
ing completely blind from a very young age. trainable, nonexotic skill that’s available to
These echolocators typically perceive their both blind and sighted people,” says San-
environment by clicking sharply with their tani Teng, a psychologist at the Smith-Ket-
tongues and listening to differences in the tlewell Eye Research Institute in San Fran-
sounds reflected off objects. cisco, who studies echolocation and braille. Join now or get a FREE trial
Brain-imaging studies reveal that expert During brain scans before and after train- membership & bonus issues
echolocators display responses to sound in ing, participants also performed a task that of Freethought Today,
their brain’s primary visual region, and re- involved recognizing mazes, with and without FFRF’s newspaper.
searchers have speculated that long-term in- click echoes. After training, both groups
put deprivation could lead to visual regions showed increased auditory cortex activation
being repurposed. “There’s been this strong in response to sound in general, as well as
tradition to think of the blind brain as differ- higher gray matter density in auditory areas.
ent, that it’s necessary to have gone through Most surprisingly, after training, both
that sensory loss to have this neuroplastic- blind and sighted participants also showed
ity,” says Lore Thaler, a neuroscientist at visual cortex activation in response to audible
Durham University in England. echoes. “We weren’t sure if we would get this
Thaler co-led a 2021 study showing that result in sighted people, so it was really re-
both blind and sighted people could learn warding to see it,” Thaler says. She suspects
echolocation with just 10 weeks of training. that rather than just processing visual data,
For more recent work in the journal Cerebral this brain area takes in information from var-
Cortex, she and her colleagues examined ied senses that aid spatial understanding.
the brain changes underlying these abili- Three months after the 2021 study, a fol-
ties. After training, both blind and sighted low-up survey found that 83 percent of blind
people displayed responses to echoes in
their visual cortex, a finding that challenges
participants who had learned echolocation
reported improvements in independence and ffrf.org
the belief that primary sensory regions are well-being. The researchers are working on
wholly sense-specific. disseminating the training more widely, Thal-
FFRF is a 501(c)(3) educational charity.
The researchers trained 14 sighted and 12 er says: “It’s a powerful sensory tool for peo- Deductible for income tax purposes.
blind people for between two and three hours ple with vision impairments.” —Simon Makin
Illustrations by Thomas Fuchs

ADVANCES
CHEMISTRY
Peek Inside
A food dye temporarily
renders skin transparent
IN MERE MINUTES, smearing mice with

a common food dye can make their skin al-
most as transparent as glass.
For a study in Science, researchers spread
a solution of tartrazine, a common coloring
for foods, drugs and cosmetics, onto living
mice to turn a portion of their tissues
clear—creating a temporary window that
revealed their blood vessels, muscles and
internal organs. The procedure has not yet
been tested in humans, but it may someday
offer a way to view and monitor injuries or
diseases without the need for specialized
imaging equipment or invasive surgery.
SCIENCE IN IMAGES found—such as the peachy orange that Skin, like most mammalian tissue, is
would have been the universe’s first visible highly opaque because its mix of water and
Multihued color if humans had been around to see it.
“It’s a story of light and all the creative
densely packed lipids, proteins, and other
essential molecules scatters light in all direc-
Universe paths that it can take in its journey to your

eyeball,” says Mudge, who curates a science
subscription box called Matter. And then
tions. “The concept is similar to bubbled wa-
ter,” says the study’s lead author, Zihao Ou, a
physicist at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Photographs provide there are the paths it can’t take: one section Water and air are transparent separately, but
a colorful view across of the book details views our visual systems mixed together they form cloudy microbub-
scientific disciplines can’t naturally perceive, including the “for- bles, Ou adds. Think of a rushing river or a
bidden” colors you’d get by processing red crashing wave. The clarity changes because
and green wavelengths simultaneously. water and air molecules have different re-
HUMANITY IS LUCKY to reside on a planet Above you can see a simulation of Van- fractive indexes—the amount of light bent
circling a star with plentiful radiation, il- tablack, a paint containing tiny carbon while passing through an object or sub-
luminating the world around us in reflect- nanotubes that squirrel away 99.6 percent stance. The fats and proteins in rodent or
ed wavelengths of light. These wave- of the light that touches them, removing human skin typically have higher refractive
lengths—a portion of which we experience details of shape and shadow and rendering indexes than the water, creating a contrast
as color—have long warned us of danger 3D objects into indistinct blobs. The paint that you can’t see through.
and enticed us to closely inspect the objects was invented by a materials scientist but In the new study, Ou and his colleagues
we encounter. exclusively licensed to a particular artist, looked for light-absorbing molecules that
In a new photo book, The Universe in 100 so it’s “forbidden” in a much more prosaic could make the various refractive indexes
Colors, science enthusiasts Tyler Thrasher way—one reason the book’s authors had to within the layers of skin more similar, essen-
and Terry Mudge take readers on a tour of digitally edit the cicada pictured here to tially reducing the amount of scattered light.
Tyler Thrasher from The Universe in 100 Colors
color across scientific disciplines—from demonstrate the effect themselves. The team investigated 21 different syn-
things most people will never see in day-to- In art and science, “the goal of both is to thetic dyes before landing on the highly ab-
day life (such as the black color of the brain’s make observations about the world around sorbent tartrazine, more commonly known
dopamine precursors, a lack of which can us and communicate something,” says as Yellow No. 5. The zingy lemon-yellow
lead to Parkinson’s disease) to ubiquitous Thrasher, who describes himself as a “mad coloring is approved by the U.S. Food and
(Sasquatch Books, 2024)
backdrops (for instance, the green porcelain scientist artist.” And “when you combine Drug Administration for use in limited
that gives chalkboards their color). Some the two, when you start to bring creative quantities and is commonly found in chips,
are fanciful: the drab color routinely used to expression to science, I think you get closer sodas, candies, butter, vitamins and drug
paint rental apartments is called “landlord to what a lot of people call alchemy.” tablets. Tartrazine in solution increases the
white,” for example. Still others are pro- —Sarah Lewin Frasier refractive indexes for red and yellow light,
Fundamentals
First Fund
and it absorbs most light at wavelengths in related techniques could potentially assist in
An ETF
the near-ultraviolet and blue spectra. When early skin-cancer detection and make la-
Symbol KNOW
the dye is applied to mouse skin, these com- ser-based tattoo removal more straightfor- Your money
bined effects reduce the scattering of light ward. They could also make veins more vis- Carefully managed
that gives the tissue its usual opacity. ible for drawing blood or administering flu- Abstract
The Fundamentals First Fund, an ETF, is part
“The higher the absorption, the more ef- ids via a needle, he says—especially in older owner of approximately 100 publicly traded
ficient the molecule is,” Ou explains. The people with veins that are difficult to locate. worthy companies, and it owns publicly
fda’s limits on chemicals and additives The strategy may also be a more com- traded debt. These worldwide companies are
have caused the food industry to look “for pelling option than the use of imaging vital, important, useful, or just plain nice to
have around, and most have been pursuing
chemicals that are extremely efficient,” technologies such as magnetic resonance their business course for decades. We
even in small amounts, he says. imaging (MRI) and ultrasound for some individually select these companies with
The researchers tested various concen- experiments, including live-animal stud- care and in a manner as to spread our risk
trations of the dye on hydrogel samples that ies. So says Oregon Health and Science so that no single company event can cause
more than a bruise. Mason Capital has
mimic human tissues’ optical distribution University dermatologist Rajan Kulkarni, managed money this way for more than
and on slices of raw chicken breast. They who worked on a 2014 study in which re- three decades. If you are more specifically
then gently massaged the dye into the skin of searchers replaced the lipids in whole or- interested in who we are, how we do it, and
how you might participate, read on.
anesthetized mice until it was absorbed. In gans and animals with clear hydrogel to
less than 10 minutes the team began to see see inside. “It would give you the ability to www.FundamentalsFirstFund.com
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Investors should consider the investment objectives, risks,
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spreading it onto a leg exposed muscles. Us- terms of a proof of concept, it’s really fan- prospectus or summary prospectus with this and other
information about the Fund, please call 617-228-5190 or visit
ing high-resolution laser imaging, the scien- tastic. Clinically, it remains to be seen.” our website at www.fundamentalsfirstfund.com
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system, small units in muscles called sarco- adverse side effects in the mice after the
meres and, when the dye was applied to the tartrazine was removed, although Ou says
scalp, even structures of the brain’s blood it could cause temporary damage to skin Gentlemen, it's time to
vessels. If the tartrazine wasn’t washed off, tissue. He adds that this dye and similar,
the effect lasted about 10 to 20 minutes be- more efficient molecules must be further upgrade your wallet.
fore the skin returned to its original state. tested for human safety. Tartrazine can "Excellentfycra�ed. . {,ts the front pocket perfectly."
Related research has focused on using cause allergic reactions. And although the -ManofMany
already transparent materials that absorb coloring is fda-approved, the agency has THOUSANDS
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into the skin, including glycerol and fruc- strict limits on amounts used in products. REVIEWS
tose solution. Those molecules can also re- In the study, the mice were able to tolerate
duce light scattering but are “not as effi- the highest concentration used, 0.6 molar,
cient [as tartrazine] because they are not during the short testing periods. but “hu-
‘colored’ enough,” says study co-author man skin is about 10 times thicker than
From “Achieving Optical Transparency in Live Animals with Absorbing Molecules,”
Guosong Hong, a materials science engi- [that of ] mice, which means that the time
neer at Stanford University. Other ap- required for diffusion is probably much
proaches that remove essential molecules greater—a few minutes for mice is going to Back pocket wallets are badly designed
in tissues rather than adding new ones probe hundreds of minutes for humans,” Ou - they're easy targets for pickpockets and
a surefire way to ruin your back. That's
duce similar effects but can be done only in says. “We hope that with our initial work,
why we reinvented the wallet, for a more
by Zihao Ou et al., in Science, Vol. 385; September 6, 2024
nonliving animals or biopsied tissue. there will be more follow-up proposing comfortable and more secure everyday.
Although it is far from human trials, the new molecules that are going to be more Our Rogue Front Pocket Wallet is
new process may someday have helpful efficient and safer for human application.” built to perfectly fit your front pocket,
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ADVANCES
The Carousel Lens (center) bends the

light of seven background galaxies.
ASTRONOMY ferent path. If a “transient” event, such as for the Hubble Space Telescope to image
a supernova, occurs in any one of those the location, revealing the Carousel Lens
Epic Lineup galaxies, astronomers here will have up to
four views of it at slightly different times.
at high resolution.
William Sheu, an astrophysics gradu-
An ultrarare gravity lens “If we had a supernova exploding, we ate student at the University of California,
would have as many images of the super- Los Angeles, and lead author of a new
peers through space nova as we have images of the source,” says study about the discovery in the Astro-
and time cosmologist Nathalie Palanque-Dela- physical Journal, says analysis of the Hub-
brouille, director of Lawrence berkeley Na- ble images could reveal even more back-
AN ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE alignment of tional Laboratory’s physics division, which ground galaxies that have been magnified
galaxies that forms a giant magnifying lens took part in the lens’s discovery. “That by the gravity of the same foreground gal-
DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys/LBNL/DOE & KPNO/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA

could give astronomers an unprecedented would provide just amazing information.” axy cluster.
deep view of the universe. Careful observations of both the fore- Gravitational lensing follows Einstein’s
The Carousel Lens—named for its con- ground cluster—which may itself be made 1916 general theory of relativity, which
centric circular patterns, like the reflections up of hundreds of galaxies—and the back- predicted that gravity would bend light;
in a fun-house mirror—incorporates a clus- ground galaxies can help astronomers bet- the first such lens was found in 1979. bos-
ter of galaxies about five billion light-years ter understand how dark matter and dark ton University astronomer Tereasa brain-
from Earth whose gravity is so intense that it energy behave, as well as more about the erd, who was not involved in the discovery,
magnifies the light of seven galaxies behind universe’s ancient past. The farthest back- says the lenses have become powerful tools
it, between 7.6 billion and 12 billion light- ground galaxy is so distant that it must for studying many of the open questions of
years away. This phenomenon, called gravi- have developed in an early phase of the the cosmos.
tational lensing, occurs only when galaxies universe, which most scientists think is “This is an especially remarkable ob-
line up precisely from our perspective. around 13.7 billion years old. ject,” brainerd says. “It’s the result of out-
As seen from Earth, the massive gravi- Researchers used artificial-intelligence standing good luck that the lens and the
tational lens creates multiple images of six systems to find potential gravitational seven background galaxies are almost per-
of the seven background galaxies, each of lenses by sorting through millions of ga- fectly lined up along our line of sight.”
whose light arrives to us by a slightly dif- lactic survey images. They then arranged —Tom Metcalfe
World's Favorite Puzzle
Mushroom Power machines that harvest ripe fruit, for instance,

or add nitrogen to arid soil. His team began
Fungal sensors with light sensing for a simpler proof-of-con-
guide robots cept experiment.

Translating a signal into motion for the
rolling and starfish-shaped robots presented
The fungal network hidden units own challenges. Beyond their electrical re-
ROBOTICS
der fleshy, white king oyster action to light, fungi produce a baseline cur-
mushrooms doesn’t just sprout elegant ap- rent as they digest sugar; for the study, lead
petizers. It can also serve as a keen robotic author Anand Kumar Mishra, also at Cornell,
sensor, helping to pilot a wheeled bot and a experimented with both minimizing and ex- AI has a good model for
squishy, star-shaped hopping one. ploiting this extra information. In the latter immediate thought. Not so
Oyster mushrooms’ rootlike mycelial case, robots reacted to all signals but moved much for sequential thought.
threads generate voltage spikes when faster in response to those prompted by UV Evolution provides the example
flashed with ultraviolet light. In an experiment light, which were larger. Mishra imagines that of a mouse searching a maze.
for Science Robotics, researchers used this this model could come in handy for robots This mental skill can be trained
process to direct fungal tendrils, grown in a that might need to stop, slow down or switch with a spatial puzzle like the
petri dish, to activate robots’ motors via at- directions in response to nitrogen-deficient Zobrist Cube, which has 20,000
tached electrodes. pockets in agricultural fields. puzzles graded from easy to
These bots join a family of machines In future work, Shepherd and Mishra hope hard in a 52-page code book.
known as biohybrids. Successes so far to grow fungi throughout their robots so the
range from a silicone-based jellyfish that devices can sense light or chemicals from
uses cardiac cells to propel itself in water to every direction. If wired a particular way, the
a two-legged robot powered by laborato- robots could also respond to these stimuli
ry-grown skeletal muscle. Most of these ef- locally: fungus-controlled fruit pickers, for
forts use animal tissue in place of mechani- example, might extend multiple arms to the
cal motors; the new study uses a radically locations of different ripe peaches. The sci-
different organism’s superpowers and thus entists will also investigate the longevity of
expands engineers’ toolboxes, says Rashid the fungal tendrils.
Bashir, a biohybrid researcher at the Univer- For now Shepherd and Mishra are just
sity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who was glad that the proof-of-concept experiment Untitled-1 1 10/19/22 12:25 PM
not involved with the new study. succeeded. “We really had no idea where to
Fungi are inexpensive to maintain and ex- start,” Mishra explains, “because these ro-
cel at detecting subtle shifts—not only in bots were the first of their kind.” It took the
light but also in nutrients and gases such as team three years to design one that could
carbon dioxide and ammonia, says senior startle in response to UV light. Watching the Wonders of Science
study author Robert F. Shepherd, an engi- mechanical starfish scamper across the ta-
neer at Cornell University. Shepherd dreams ble for the first time, Shepherd himself felt
in a Flash.
of agricultural uses for fungi-powered bots: keenly “alive.” —Saima S. Iqbal Tune into our podcast—Science
Quickly—for fresh takes on today’s
most fascinating science news.
Scientific American is a registered trademark

of Springer Nature America, Inc.
6/11/24 2:15 PM
ADVANCES
ASTROPHYSICS sion, tiny quantum fluctuations in space’s Study lead author Tung X. Tran, then
density would have grown larger, and some an undergraduate student at the Massa-
Mini spots might have become so dense that they
collapsed into black holes scattered
chusetts Institute of Technology, built a
computer model of the solar system to see
Monsters throughout the cosmos. If dark matter

were fully explained by such black holes,
their most likely mass, according to some
how the distance between Earth and
nearby objects would change after a black
hole flyby. He found that such an effect
Missing dark matter could theories, would range from 10 17 to 10 23 would be most noticeable for Mars, whose
be atom-size black holes grams—about that of a large asteroid, distance from Earth scientists know
packed into the size of an atom. within about 10 centimeters. A black hole
BLACK HOLES the size of an atom that If primordial black holes are responsible in the middle of the predicted mass range,
contain the mass of an asteroid may be fly- for dark matter, one probably zips through weighing 10 21 grams, would produce one
ing through the inner solar system about the solar system about every 10 years, ac- meter of variation in 10 years, Tran says—
once a decade. Theoretically created just cording to a recent study in Physical Re- “way above the threshold of precision that
after the big bang, these examples of so- view D. And if such a black hole comes near we can measure.”
called primordial black holes could ex- a planet or a large moon, it should nudge the If scientists detect a disturbance, they
plain the missing dark matter thought to body off course enough for the change to be must determine whether the planet was
dominate our universe. And if they sneak measurable by current instruments. “As it pushed by a black hole or just a plain old
by the moon or Mars, scientists should be passes by, the planet starts to wobble,” says asteroid. by tracking the wobble pattern
able to detect them, a new study shows. study co-author Sarah R. Geller, a theoret- over time, they can trace the culprit’s tra-
Such black holes could have arisen eas- ical physicist now at the University of Cali- jectory and predict where it will head in
ily right after the universe was born, when fornia, Santa Cruz. “The wobble will grow the future. “We’d need to convince our-
space is thought to have expanded hugely over a few years, but eventually it will damp selves that it’s really a black hole by telling
in a fraction of a second. During this expan- out and go back to zero.” observers where to look,” says study
co-author benjamin V. Lehmann of M.I.T.
Asteroids should be visible by telescope
and would probably orbit on the same
plane as the planets. A primordial black
hole, in contrast, would be coming from
far away with a trajectory likely to differ
from an asteroid’s.
Another potential way to look for pri-
mordial black holes in the solar system
would be to analyze the fine movements of
asteroids such as bennu, which has been
tracked very precisely by the ongoing
space mission OSIRIS- REx (Origins,
Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identi-
fication, and Security-Regolith Explorer).
After reading the new study, “I think we
can try to dig into OSIRIS-REx data to see
if we can see this effect,” says Yu-Dai Tsai,
a particle physicist at Los Alamos National
Laboratory. Tsai and his colleagues stud-
ied how the probe’s bennu measurements
could be used to look for other forms of
dark matter in a recent paper in Nature
Communications Physics.
Primordial black holes are an increas-
ingly appealing solution to the puzzle of
Photo 12/Getty Images
dark matter, an invisible form of mass that

physicists think makes up most of the mat-
ter in our universe. because they can “see”
Tiny black holes may regularly streak through our solar system. this substance only through its gravita-
tional effects on regular matter, its identity
ADVANCES
has remained elusive as many favored the-

ories have failed to pan out. for decades
physicists thought dark matter was likely to
take the form of so-called weakly interact-
ing massive particles (WimPs). Yet gener-
ations of ever more sensitive experiments
meant to find these particles have come up
empty, and particle accelerators have also
seen no sign of them. “everything is on the
table because WimPs have been put in such
a corner, and they were the dominant par-
adigm for decades,” says astrophysicist
Kevork n. Abazajian of the University of
california, irvine, who wasn’t involved in
the Physical Review D study. “Primordial
black holes are really gaining popularity.”
Physicists are also recognizing that
Ghost Image Quantum entanglement
dark matter may not interact with regular
matter through any force other than grav-
reveals plants in action
ity. Unlike WimPs, which could also touch Imagine watching a measurement with much more precision than
QUANTUM PHYSICS
regular matter through the weak nuclear time- lapse video of an infrared camera could achieve. Meanwhile
force, black holes would be detectable only a garden you had filmed over the course of a the infrared photons traveled to the plant box,
through their gravitational pull. “Given year: you’d see details of flowers transition- but not all of them were counted: the plant
that we are still searching for the correct ing from day to night and season to season. absorbed some percentage of photons at a
Scientists would love to watch similar tran- given spot. A computer logged the position of
way to detect dark matter interacting with
sitions on a molecular scale, but the intense a pixel only when a photon hit both the cam-
ordinary matter, it is particularly import-
light used to snap microscopic pictures of era and the counter simultaneously, revealing
ant to explore probes based on the gravita- plants disrupts the processes biologists how much infrared light made it through each
tional force it produces, which is the only want to observe—especially at night. In the point. This way, the researchers could con-
interaction of dark matter whose strength journal Optica, physicist Duncan Ryan of struct an image of a leaf using photons that
is already known and the only interaction Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and never touched it, essentially forming an infra-
we are sure exists,” says theoretical physi- his colleagues recently demonstrated a tool red image on a visible camera. “It’s like a game
cist tim m. P. tait of U.c. irvine, who was for imaging live plant tissues while exposing of Battleship,” Ryan says.
also not involved in the study. them to less light than they’d receive under Ghost imaging has proved successful in
the stars. capturing pictures of simpler test designs.
that same issue of Physical Review D
A technique called ghost imaging, first But for low-light-transmission samples such
also happened to include a paper about a demonstrated in 1995, involves splitting a as plants, microscopic features often differ
different team’s search for signs of primor- light source to create two streams of photons in absorption by just a few percent. The new
dial black holes flying near earth. the re- with different wavelengths at precisely the study was possible because of an extremely
searchers’ simulations found that such sig- same times and locations. Each pair of pho- sensitive detector developed at LANL that
nals could be detectable in orbital data from tons is entangled—a quantum phenomenon tracks the arrival of each infrared photon with
Global navigation Satellite Systems, as well that allows researchers to infer information trillionth-of-a-second precision—letting the
as gravimeters that measure variations in about one particle in a set by measuring the scientists map leaf tissues and peer into live
other. Thus, a sample can be probed at one plants’ nighttime activities. “We saw [leaf
earth’s gravitational field. the two papers
wavelength and imaged at another. pores called] stomata closing as the plants
are complementary, says David i. Kaiser of For plants, that means researchers can re- reacted to darkness,” Ryan says.
m.i.t., a co-author of the study on inter- cord visible-light photons, whose position Ghost imaging “creates possibilities for
planetary distance measurements. can be measured accurately, and get knowl- long-timescale dynamic imaging that does
Although these black holes could be edge about infrared photons that interact not damage live samples,” says laser spec-
passing relatively nearby, the chances that with water-rich molecules important to bio- troscopy and quantum optics researcher
one could move through a human body are logical functions in the plants. In the new Audrey Eshun of Lawrence Livermore Na-
incredibly low. if that were to happen to you, study, the team directed a stream of infrared tional Laboratory, who calls the new inves-
photons at a plant in a transparent box with a tigation a “truly innovative study.”
though, it wouldn’t be fun: as the tiny black
photon counter behind it, and at the same These kinds of observations make it
hole moved through you, it would tug every-
time they aimed those particles’ visible coun- possible to track how plants use water and
thing toward it, crushing cells together in terparts at an empty box at the same distance sunlight throughout their circadian cycle.
a deadly fashion. its minuscule volume, with a multipixel camera behind it. Each visi- “We’re watching plants react to their envi-
however, would at least prevent you from ble photon directed at the empty box hit a pix- ronment,” Ryan says, “and not to our obser-
getting sucked in. —Clara Moskowitz el and was detected in its exact location—a vations of them.” — Rachel Berkowitz
Dec e m ber 2 02 4 Sc i e n t i f ic A m er ic A n.com 19

ADVANCES
Wolfgang Kaehler/Alamy Stock Photo

White-browed Sparrow-
Weaver nests and roosts
ANIMAL BEHAVIOR was in “how short or long the structures effect of, say, genetic differences, because
are,” says study lead author Maria C. Tello- they don’t have really good genetic infor-
Cultural Ramos, a cognitive ecologist at the Univer-
sity of Hull in England. Tube width also
mation on all the individuals in these
groups,” she says. “I think there’s a lot left
Construction varied between groups. Furthermore,

each group maintained the same architec-
tural style over time—and when outsiders
to be done, and I think this paper will in-
spire future research in a really good way.”
—Gennaro Tomma
Culture may play a role joined, they adapted to this style.
in birds’ nest architecture To examine why the groups built differ-
ently, the team analyzed factors that can
FROM LONG AND WINDING MIGRATION determine a nest’s size and shape for a MATH PUZZLE
flights to intricate songs and clever tool use, given bird species: weather conditions,
many bird behaviors are known to be trans-
mitted socially and persist across genera-
tree height, individuals’ body size and ge-
netic relatedness. (If closely related birds Get in Line
tions—what scientists define as animal build similar structures, for instance, one By Heinrich Hemme
“culture.” Now a study suggests culture might assume a genetic element.) Yet none
might play a role in avian architecture, too. of these factors seemed to play a relevant
Researchers analyzed more than 400 role in shaping how the Kalahari sparrows 1
structures built by 43 different groups of
White-browed Sparrow-Weavers in the
built their nests, the researchers report
in Science.
12
Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. These “Then we say, ‘Okay, so what is left?’” 132
birds live communally, and the entire co- Tello-Ramos explains. She and her col-
hort works together to build a nest and leagues proposed that cultural transmis- 4132
multiple roosts from grass. The group’s sion might be key to nest building. “In our
54132
Adapted from Spektrum der Wissenschaft
dominant female then lays eggs in the nest, paper, we haven’t gotten there yet with ex-
which has a long, tubelike entrance. Indi- periments, but we have very good clues
vidual birds slumber nearby in the U- that that might be it,” she says. 541632
shaped roosts, which have both an en- “These are important questions that
trance and an exit. are understudied,” says Christina Riehl,
5417632
The scientists found that different gath- an evolutionary biologist at Princeton Uni- The numbers in this triangle are
erings of birds, even those living only a few versity. She’s not convinced the study’s arranged according to a certain system.
meters from one another, built very differ- data are enough to fully rule out genetic What would the next row be?
ent tube structures. The biggest difference influence. “They can’t actually look at the
ARCHAEOLOGY
When
Horse
Became
Steed
Archaeological and genetic discoveries topple

long-standing ideas about the domestication
of equines BY WILLIAM T. TAYLOR
T HE WORLD WE LIVE IN WAS BUILT ON HORSEBACK. Many people today rarely
encounter horses, but this is a recent development. Only a few decades ago
domestic horses formed the fabric of societies around the globe. Almost every
aspect of daily life was linked to horses in an important way. Mail was delivered
by postal riders, people traveled by horse-drawn carriage, merchants used
horses to transport goods across continents, farmers cultivated their land with horse-
power, and soldiers rode horses into battle.
Scholars have long sought to understand how the
unique partnership between humans and horses got its
start. Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that
horses were gradually domesticated by the Yamnaya
people beginning more than 5,000 years ago in the
grassy plains of western Asia and that this develop-
ment allowed these people to populate Eurasia, carry-
ons by early members of the human family comes from
horse-rich archaeological sites such as Schöningen in
Germany, dating to some 300,000 years ago. The
unique lakeshore environment there preserved not
only the remains of a band of horses but also the im-
maculately crafted wood spears that humans used to
dispatch them. For millennia wild horses remained a
ing their early Indo-European language and cultural dietary staple for early Homo sapiens living in northern
traditions with them. Eurasia. People were keen observers of these animals
Now new kinds of archaeological evidence, in con- they depended on for food: horses featured promi-
junction with interdisciplinary collaborations, are nently in Ice Age art, including in spectacular images
Heritage Images/Getty Images (top); Emma Usmanova ( left ); William T. Taylor ( right ) (opposite page)
overturning some basic assumptions about when—and rendered in charcoal on the limestone walls of France’s
why—horses were first domesticated and how rapidly Chauvet Cave more than 30,000 years ago.
they spread across the globe. These insights dramati- Tracking the transition from this ancient preda-
cally change our understanding of not only horses but tor-prey connection to early domestication—which
also people, who used this important relationship to includes such activities as raising, herding, milking
their advantage in everything from herding to warfare. and riding horses—can be challenging. Researchers
This revised view of the past also has lessons for us to- studying the deep past rarely have the luxury of writ-
day as we consider the fate of endangered wild horses ten documents or detailed imagery to chronicle chang-
in the steppes. And it highlights the essential value of ing relationships between people and animals. This is
Indigenous knowledge in piecing together later chap- especially true in the Eurasian steppes—the cold, dry,
William T. Taylor ters of the horse-human story, when domesticated remote grasslands where scientists suspect that the
is an archaeozoologist horses moved from Eurasia into the rest of the world. first horse herders emerged, which stretch from east-
at the University of ern Europe nearly to the Pacific. In the steppes, cul-
Colorado Boulder. He The genus Equus, which includes horses, asses and tures have long been highly mobile, moving herds to
studies the relationship
Mark Harvey (preceding pages);
between people and zebras, originated around four million years ago in fresh pastures with the changing seasons. Their way of
animals, with a focus North America. Over the next few million years its life left behind archaeological assemblages that can be
on horse domestication. members began dispersing across the beringia land shallow, poorly preserved and difficult to study. In-
Taylor is author of bridge between what is now Russia and Alaska and deed, much of what we know about the origins of horse
Hoof Beats: How Horses
Shaped Human History
into Asia, Europe and Africa. Horses are among hu- domestication comes from a single, powerful scientific
(University of California manity’s oldest and most prized prey animals. Perhaps source: the bones of ancient horses themselves.
Press, 2024). the first indisputable evidence for hunting with weap- As an archaeozoologist, I seek to understand the
Horses served as muses for Ice Age people, who captured their likenesses in spectacular works
of art, such as the images in France’s Chauvet Cave that date to more than 30,000 years ago (top).
But it wasn’t until much later that people domesticated horses, as evidenced by burials at sites such
as Novoil’inovskiy in Russia dating to the early second millennium B.C.E. (bottom left). Burials of
horses and chariots establish that early domesticated horses were used for transport (bottom right).

Horses on the Move 1 WILD HORSE DISPERSAL FROM NORTH AMERICA
Horses originated around four million years ago A n c ie

n t Sh ore l
in North America. Over the next few million years in e
they began crossing the Beringia land bridge r s e D is p e r s al Beringia
Beringia
W il d H o
between what is now Russia and Alaska into Asia,
Europe and Africa. Spears and horse bones from Schöningen
Schöningen
the site of Schöningen in Germany show that
early humans were hunting horses some 300,000
years ago. It was not until hundreds of thousands Final wild horse distribution
of years later that people domesticated horses. (Pleistocene)
Archaeologists long held that the Yamnaya people
were the first to domesticate horses, starting
after 6,000 years ago, based on evidence from
sites such as Deriyevka in Ukraine and others.
New genomic analyses, however, indicate
that the ancestors of modern domestic horses
originated in the Black Sea Steppe around
2200 B.C.E. Some of the earliest archaeological 3 CONTINUED DISPERSAL OF HORSES BY SEA AND LAND
traces of horse domestication come from sites
associated with Russia’s Sintashta culture.
By the middle of the second millennium B.C.E.,
00 CC.EE.
yy 114400
domestic horses had reached civilizations from
Egypt and the Mediterranean to Scandinavia ggee b
b
Rraann
and East Asia. Later, people transported them to h o r se
tiiccH
the Sahel savanna of Africa, the Great Plains of
mmeesst
o
North America, the Pampas of South America, DDo
and island nations of Australasia and the Pacific.
Di
sp e
r s a l o f h o r s e s by s e a
origins of domestication through the study A stronger, more scientific understand- The Deriyevka horse seemed to tie to-
of horse bones from archaeological sites. In ing of horse domestication began to take gether a number of loose threads in scien-
the early days of this kind of scientific in- shape in the 1990s. building on the work of tists’ understanding of ancient Eurasia. be-
quiry into domestication, some researchers some earlier scholars, archaeologist David ginning after 6,000 years ago, during a pe-
looked for patterns in the size, shape or fre- Anthony of Hartwick College in New York riod called the Eneolithic (also sometimes
quency of these bones over time. The basic State and his colleagues identified direct ev- known as the Copper Age), large human
logic behind this approach is that if horses idence for domestication in horse remains, burial mounds known as kurgans appeared
were living in close contact with people, publishing their findings in Scientific Amer- across much of eastern and central Europe
their bones might have become more wide- ican. When horses are used by people for and the western steppes. Over the years
spread or more variable in shape and size transportation, they sometimes develop a many archaeologists and scholars hypoth-
than in earlier periods, whether because particular pattern of damage on their teeth esized a connection linking kurgans, the
people were breeding them for particular from the equipment that is used to control spread of Indo-European languages and the
traits or because they were putting the them. This damage, known as bit wear, can first horse domestication. Specifically, they
horses to work in ways that altered the an- often be seen on the lower second premolar proposed that the Yamnaya people tamed
imals’ bodies over the course of their life, of horses ridden with metal mouthpieces, or horses in the black Sea steppes and then
among other factors. bits. Anthony and his colleagues found bit swept across Eurasia on horseback, bring-
but it turns out that looking for these wear in an ancient horse from a Ukrainian ing their burial customs and an early form
types of patterns in the archaeological rec- site known as Deriyevka, which was thought of Indo-European language—which is be-
ord is a little bit like reading tea leaves. to have been home to an archaeological cul- lieved to have given rise to many languages
Changes in the shape or number of horse ture known as the Yamnaya people. Al- spoken today, including English. On the
bones found at ancient sites could be caused though the Deriyevka horse had not been heels of Anthony’s discovery, this frame-
by any number of other things, from envi- directly dated, its association with the Yam- work, known as the kurgan hypothesis,
ronmental change to shifting human diets naya culture suggested that herders in the gained wide currency in academic literature
or even sampling errors. At best, these indi- Eurasian steppes might have been raising and popular consciousness.
cators give us only an indirect way to trace and riding domestic horses by the fourth Unfortunately, the Deriyevka horse was
the origin of herding or riding. millennium b.c.e. or even earlier. not what it seemed. A decade later direct
26 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N DECE M bER 2 02 4 Maps by Daniel Huffman

2 DOMESTICATION AND INITIAL WAVES OF HORSE DISPERSAL
A
I
S
S
U
pe
R
mm
f d oo e set isc thiocr sHeo
s rses
r e and o f D
ep
S ps i o
if fu
A
D St
I
EUROPE e rn L
East
O
Botai W e s t e
Botai N
G
Sintasha
Sintashta rn S te O
ppe
B la c k S e a sseess M
e oorr
Deriyevka S tepp
Deriyevka t i c hH
EEaarrllyy Dd o m e s
A
N
H I
C
EGYPT
I N D I A
radiocarbon dating of the remains showed terials, archaeologists began to discuss the es, those chosen for slaughter are either
that the animal wasn’t nearly as old as An- relevance of botai’s horses to the question very young or very old because breeding-
thony thought. Instead it had lived and died of early domestication. age animals are needed to ensure the herd’s
sometime in the early first millennium Early on, the botai domestication debate fertility and survival. Marsha Levine and
b.c.e., when domestic horses and horse- was a spicy one. First Anthony and his col- her colleagues pointed out, however, that
back riding were already widespread and leagues suggested that the strange surface botai’s bone assemblage consisted mainly
well documented. but rather than rejecting shape of some botai teeth was also a form of of the remains of mostly healthy adults.
the kurgan hypothesis entirely, archaeolo- bit wear, hinting that the botai horses were Moreover, the site contained large numbers
gists continued to explore other ani- ridden. Soon, though, Sandra Olsen, now at of breeding-age females, as well as some
mal-bone assemblages from the western the University of Kansas, identified the fetal and neonatal horses from pregnant
steppes dating to around the same period, same features in wild horses, meaning they mares. The slaughter of these animals
searching for horse bones to validate the could not be taken as proof of domestica- would be devastating to the fertility of a do-
idea. During this search one site in particu- tion on their own. Scholars also looked at mestic herd, but evidence of it is common
lar drew renewed interest: botai, located in contextual aspects of the botai site, includ- in archaeological sites where wild animals
northern Kazakhstan. ing the architectural layout, speculating were hunted for food.
botai sits some distance east of the that post holes and backfilled pit houses This healthy disagreement over domes-
Yamnaya homeland. Despite lacking any filled with organic material could be left- tication at botai was temporarily quashed
obvious cultural connections to the Yam- over traces of corrals and corral cleaning. in 2009, when a high-profile publication in
naya, botai is also located in the western Still, other scientists remained skepti- the journal Science brought together new
steppes, and like Deriyevka, it dates to the cal—for good reason. Some botai horses evidence apparently showing that people
fourth millennium b.c.e. Most interesting, were found with harpoons directly embed- from botai milked and rode horses. The
the animal-bone assemblage recovered ded in their ribs, obviously killed by hunt- authors looked at the shape of the bones of
from excavations at botai contained huge ers. An even bigger problem with connect- horses at botai and argued they were sim-
numbers of horses. In fact, among thou- ing botai to domestication, though, was the ilar to the modern domestic horse, Equus
sands of animal bones from botai, almost all age and sex patterns among the animals caballus. Using emerging techniques for
were from horses. Working with these ma- found at the site. In a managed herd of hors- the study of ancient biomolecules, scien-

tists also analyzed ceramic shards from
botai and found residues that seemed to
have come from ancient horse fats. These
residues, though not diagnostic of milk on
their own, had anomalous isotope values,
suggesting they could have originated
from milk.
The most important new argument,
though, was that some botai horses dis-
played a different kind of tooth damage
that the researchers said could be more
securely linked to use of a bridle. With new
results from botai strengthening con-
fidence in the idea of horse domestication
during the fourth millennium b.c.e. ,
the kurgan hypothesis returned to para-
digm status.
n The decade and a half since botai
I revived the kurgan hypothesis, our ar-

chaeozoological tool kit for understand-
ing ancient horses has grown by leaps and
bounds. And one by one these new tech-
niques and discoveries have begun to erode
the connections between botai and horse
domestication. In a recent study, my col-
leagues and I analyzed dozens of wild
horses from Ice Age sites across North
America. Our research showed that the key
features interpreted as evidence of bridle
and bit use at botai were probably the result
of natural variation rather than horse rid-
ing or horse equipment.
Moreover, we now know that many oth-
er aspects of horse riding can leave a recog-
nizable signature in an animal’s teeth and
bones. Halters, saddles and harnesses can
make distinctive marks. And different ac-
tivity patterns, from heavy exertion to con- late fourth millennium b.c.e. These same er horse species that still survives today,
finement, also have identifiable impacts. techniques have shown no evidence of in- known as Przewalski’s horse. Przewalski’s
For instance, the pressure from mounted teraction between Yamnaya people and horse is a close relative of domestic horses
riding or from pulling a carriage or chariot botai, however. but one that has never been managed as a
can each cause unique problems in a horse’s Likewise, new techniques for recover- domestic animal in recorded history.
vertebral column or lower limbs. Even ear- ing ancient proteins from human dental Some scientists remain convinced that
ly veterinary practices such as dentistry are plaque have shown no evidence of horse botai has some connection to early domes-
sometimes visible in the archaeological milk in the diet of the people who lived at tication but now suggest that the site rep-
record. So far none of these more reliable botai. In fact, horse milk apparently didn’t resents an earlier, failed effort at taming
indicators of domestication have been become widespread in western Asia until and control of Przewalski’s horse. In their
found in botai horses. the first millennium b.c.e., 3,000 years 2018 study, Gaunitz and her colleagues
We can also look to DNA for clues. Im- after the Yamnaya and botai. went so far as to argue that modern Prze-
provements in ancient-DNA sequencing The most devastating blow to the kur- walski’s horses might be the escaped de-
Sven Zellner/Agentur Focus/Redux (top);
now allow scientists to reconstruct partial gan hypothesis came accidentally from a scendants of domesticated botai horses, a
or whole genomic sequences from archae- 2018 genomic study by Charleen Gaunitz of conclusion that many others in the scientif-
ological remains. Analysis of DNA from the University of Copenhagen, Ludovic ic community felt was unsupported.
J. Bayarsaikhan (bottom)
ancient people and animals has yielded Orlando of the Center of Anthropobiology The botai debate has had important
some rather remarkable findings, docu- and Genomics of Toulouse in France and real-world impacts for Przewalski’s horse.
menting, for example, the migration of their colleagues that showed botai horses In the 20th century Przewalski’s horses
Yamnaya people from eastern Europe as far were not the ancestors of domestic horses went extinct in the wild, and zoo popula-
east as Siberia and Mongolia during the at all. Rather they were members of anoth- tions dwindled almost to the single digits.
bones from across Eurasia has all but dis-
proved the kurgan hypothesis. Such data
show us that important cultural develop-
ments in the fourth millennium b.c.e.—
including the Yamnaya migration and
the dissemination of kurgans and Indo-
European culture—probably took place
many centuries before the first horses were
domesticated, aided by the spread of other
livestock such as sheep, goats and cattle
and the use of cattle to pull wagons. Mean-
while many steppe people still hunted wild
horses for meat.
New genomic analyses led by Pablo Lib-
rado of the Institute of Evolutionary biology
in barcelona and Orlando indicate that the
ancestors of modern domestic horses origi-
nated in the black Sea steppes around
2200 b.c.e., nearly 2,000 years later than
previously thought. Although we do not yet
know exactly the details of their initial do-
mestication, it is clear based on the timing
that these horses belonged to post-Yamnaya
culture. Patterns in the ancient genomes
suggest that in the early centuries of domes-
tication, the horse cultures of the western
steppe were selectively breeding these ani-
mals for traits such as strength and docility.
This revised timeline for horse domesti-
cation is part of a growing body of evidence
that casts the Yamnaya legacy in a new light.
Early Indo-European cultures such as the
Yamnaya are sometimes portrayed in popu-
lar culture in a nationalist manner, with
links drawn between their supposed domes-
tication of the horse, impressive transconti-
nental migrations, and cultural dominance.
Recent archaeological and genetic insights into horse domestication have relevance for understanding
the horse-human relationship today. Discoveries of an ancient saddle and other tack in Mongolia show that
Now science indicates that the Yamnaya
steppe cultures helped to invent technology that is still in use (bottom left). Horses from the site of Botai probably didn’t domesticate horses at all,
are now known to have belonged to a wild horse species, Przewalski’s horse, that was hunted for food. and their migrations were not necessarily
Conservation efforts are currently underway to restore this highly endangered species (top left). Horses heroic conquests. For example, new genom-
have figured prominently in the traditions and values of the Lakota and many other Native Nations across
ic data show that by around 5,000 years ago
the Great Plains and Rockies (right).
Yamnaya migrants reached as far as central
Mongolia, where they are known as the Afa-
In recent decades these horses have re- walski’s horses “aren’t wild after all” and nasievo culture. Although these migrants
turned from the brink through a careful are instead domestic escapees. Narratives may have helped spread sheep, goats and
captive-breeding program, and they have like these are no longer supported by the cattle into East Asia, initially it seems their
Courtesy of the Global Institute for Traditional Sciences
been reintroduced into some areas of Cen- archaeological data and can imperil ongo- impact was limited to a few mountain re-
tral Asia. This past June a new band of ing protection, conservation and resto- gions of the eastern steppe. After the Yam-
Przewalski’s horses from the Prague Zoo ration of habitat for this highly endan- naya arrival, it would be almost 2,000 years
was released into the grasslands of central gered species. before horses showed up in the region. And
Kazakhstan, marking the first return of genomic analyses suggest that their Afa-
this species to the region in two centuries. despiTe some lingering conTroversy nasievo descendants had little lasting ge-
In the long term, the success and fund- over botai, the available data emerging netic effect on later populations.
ing of such conservation projects may from new scientific approaches to studying The revelation that people domesticated
hinge heavily on public support, making it the past paint a much clearer picture of horses much later than previously thought
imperative to get the story straight. Media horse domestication than we’ve ever had resolves what was always a nagging prob-
attention around botai has sometimes before. The recent spate of genomic se- lem with the kurgan hypothesis. If horses
generated headlines suggesting that Prze- quencing and radiocarbon dating of horse were domesticated in the Eneolithic, why

did it take centuries for much of their im- revealing the ways that horses and horse- allows us to trace the spread of domesticat-
pact to show up in the archaeological re- back riding helped humans form networks, ed horses out of Eurasia as people trans-
cord? Under the kurgan model, researchers trade routes and empires linking the an- ported them to such places as the Sahel sa-
often framed horse domestication as a grad- cient world in new ways. vanna of Africa, the Great Plains of North
ual development to explain why it took so On horseback, people traveled steppe America, the Pampas of South America,
long for horses to move beyond the steppes networks and the Silk Roads to move goods, and even island nations of Australasia and
and revolutionize trade and conflicts, for plants, animals, ideas and even early pan- the Pacific, where horses shaped cultures
instance. When we look at our records of demic diseases across Eurasia and beyond. across more recent periods. This work is
the past with this revised time frame for These emerging transcontinental connec- showing some surprising results.
horse domestication in mind, there appears tions can be directly observed in the archae- Recently I worked with a large team of
to be the rapid, disruptive and dynamic de- ological record. In Mongolia, a royal tomb scientists, scholars and Indigenous knowl-
velopment we expected to see after all. from the early steppe kingdom of the Xiong- edge keepers to see what archaeology, ge-
In our new understanding it seems that nu dating to somewhere around 100 b.c.e. nomics and Indigenous knowledge systems
almost as soon as people tamed horses, was found to contain a silver plate with a pic- could tell us about the history of domesti-
they began using them for transport. Some ture of the Greek demigod Hercules on it. cated horses in the U.S. The prevailing view
of the earliest robust archaeological evi- Historical records document expeditions among Western scientists was that Native
dence of horse domestication comes from from China to Central Asia’s Ferghana Val- American peoples did not begin caring for
burials of horses paired with chariots dated ley in search of horses, an early step in the horses until after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680,
to around 2000 b.c.e. at sites associated formation of the Silk Roads trade routes, when Pueblo people in what is now New
with Russia’s Sintashta culture. Radiocar- and during the height of the Tang Dynasty, Mexico overthrew Spanish colonizers.
bon-dating and genetic records show that a thriving trade sent horses from the Tibetan Through our collaboration we found that
within only a few centuries domestic hors- Plateau and the Himalaya to lowland China Native nations from across the Plains and
es spread over huge swaths of the Eurasian in exchange for tea. Recent DNA sequencing Rockies adopted horses at least a century
continent. In some cases, their expansion of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia earlier than was ever chronicled in Europe-
was peaceful: as availability of horses grew pestis suggests that the earliest strains of the an historical records. This finding confirms
across the steppes, new people incorporat- virus that devastated Europe first emerged perspectives preserved in some oral tradi-
ed horses, herding and transport into their deep in deserts, mountains and steppes of tions and Tribal histories and mirrors our
way of life. In other instances, domesticat- Central Asia before spreading along the scholarship from similar archaeological
ed horses reached new locales through de- horse-powered steppe corridors and Silk contexts in Patagonia.
structive conquests by marauding chario- Roads in the early 14th century. Many Indigenous horse cultures, for
teers. Some cultures riding this wave of The corridors and connections that an- whom a connection with horses is a source
horse-drawn expansion were Indo-Euro- cient equestrians forged persist today: An- of strength, resilience and tradition, are
pean; others weren’t. cient travel routes across the Mongolian now drawing on collaborative and interdis-
by the middle of the second millennium steppe are now receiving makeovers with ciplinary archaeological scholarship in their
b.c.e., horsepower had reached civiliza- Chinese financing to serve as high-speed efforts to correct narratives, conserve tradi-
tions from Egypt and the Mediterranean to highways for motor vehicle transit. Even tional horse lineages and secure a place for
Scandinavia in the north and Mongolia and the state highway I take for my daily com- horses in our changing world.
China in the east. In many cases, the arrival mute in boulder, Colo., got its start as a In many ways, the disappearance of
of horses upended the balance of power. 19th-century postal road. horses from daily life in the past century has
For example, when horses first arrived in New archaeology discoveries show that been as rapid and jarring as their initial do-
China during the late Shang dynasty, steppe cultures helped to invent or spread mestication 4,000 years ago. In most cor-
around 3,200 years ago, they were mostly a important technologies that improved con- ners of the world speedy mechanization has
novelty for the elite. but within little more trol over horses and are still used today. In replaced trails with pavement and horse
than a century a rival power, the Western Mongolia, my collaborators and I have dis- transport with engine-powered or electric
Zhou, was able to marshal its strength and covered immaculately preserved ancient alternatives. These days, along the Front
skill in chariotry to bring a dramatic end to tack from some 1,600 years ago. This riding Range of the Rockies, people wearing jeans
Shang rule. In very short order, horses went technology, which includes a wood frame and cowboy hats once designed for life in
from being a steppe curiosity to the founda- saddle and iron stirrups, shows that steppe the saddle are more likely to be found shop-
tion of authority for one of the largest civili- cultures helped to develop these equestrian ping at Whole Foods than slinging lassos.
zations of East Asia. devices, which gave riders greater seat sta- but the threads linking our ever chang-
In addition to clearing up these early bility and the ability to brace or stand in the ing present to the distant past are never far
chapters of the human-horse story, scien- saddle—significant advantages when it if you know where to look. Resolution of
tific archaeology has also un- came to mounted warfare. some of the most urgent problems of the
covered connections between FROM OUR ARCHIVES These tools became a standard 21st century—from saving endangered spe-
The Origin of
the horse cultures of the distant Horseback Riding. part of horse equipment in cul- cies to conserving cultural knowledge and
past and our world today. Ar- David Anthony, Dimitri Y. tures all over the world, from the traditions—will require a clear-headed and
chaeological discoveries and Telegin and Dorcas caliphates of Islam to the Viking scientifically grounded understanding of
Brown; December 1991.
genomic data from the steppes ScientificAmerican. explorers of the high Arctic. the millennia-long relationship between
and deserts of Central Asia are com/archive Archaeological science also human and horse.
Timothy Allen/Getty Images
A nomadic family
corrals livestock
on horseback in
Central Mongolia.
MATHEMATICS
Mathematicians have discovered a new kind

of shape with connections to nature and art
BY ELISE CUTTS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JELLE WAGENAAR
TESSELLATION
REVELATION
Photographs of 3D-printed shapes show soft cells
derived from space-filling polyhedra. Blue is derived
from a truncated octahedron, and green is from a cube.

H OW FEW CORNERS CAN A SHAPE HAVE and still tile the plane?” mathema-
tician Gábor Domokos asked me over pizza. His deceptively simple
question was about the geometry of tilings, also called tessellations—
arrangements of shapes, called tiles or cells, that fill a surface with no
gaps or overlaps. Humans have a preoccupation with tessellation that dates back at least to
ancient Sumer, where tilings featured prominently in architecture and art. but in all the
centuries that thinkers have tinkered with tiles, no one seems to have seriously pondered
whether there’s some limit to how few vertices—sharp corners where lines meet—the tiles
of a tessellation can have. Until Domokos. Chasing tiles with ever fewer corners eventually
led him and his small team to discover an entirely new type of shape.
It was the summer of 2023 when Domokos and I sat searchers identified the new shapes, they began to see
at a wood picnic table at the black Dog, a cozy spot for them all over the place—in nature, art and architec-
pizza and wine just a few blocks from the budapest ture. The results have now been published in the jour-
University of Technology and Economics, where nal PNAS Nexus.
Domokos is a professor. He reached across the table to Although soft cells hadn’t been categorized by
grab a paper pizza menu and flip it over, revealing a mathematicians before—no one had noticed or named
blank underside, and gestured to me to grab a pen. The them in an academic paper—they abound in art and
midsummer sky was taking on shades of orange and nature, from the architecture of Zaha Hadid, “Queen
indigo as I filled the menu with triangles. Domokos of the Curve,” to the forms of zebra stripes. Krisztina
watched expectantly. “You’re allowed to use curves,” Regős, Domokos’s graduate student, found the first
he finally said. I started filling the page with circles, natural 3D soft cell tucked away in the chambers of the
which of course can’t fill space on their own. but nautilus shell, an object that’s become iconic for show-
Domokos lit up. “oh, that’s interesting!” he said. casing the convergence of math and biology. “They
“Keep going, you can mix shapes. Just try to keep the were in front of our eyes the whole time,” Regős says.
average number of corners as low as possible.” This connection to such a famous shape led Domokos
I kept going. My page of circles filled with increas- to fear that his group would be scooped. He swore his
ingly desperate, squiggly forms. Domokos’s pizza collaborators to secrecy until their discovery was
Margherita had long since disappeared, but he wasn’t ready to be published. (It came out in September.) At
quite ready to leave. A quick glance at my crude the end of his lesson over pizza, he even took the paper
drawing wasn’t enough to determine its average menu, folded it up and pocketed it. Just to be safe.
number of corners, let alone the minimum possible. In retrospect, it should have been obvious that soft
but the right answer must have been something less cells exist, says mathematician Joseph o’Rourke of
than the triangle’s three—otherwise, the question Smith College, who wasn’t involved in the study. but
would be boring. to think to ask such a question, “to even imagine that
That observation seemed to satisfy the mathema- you can tile space with no vertices,” he says, is original.
tician, who revealed that the real answer is two. “That’s “I found that quite surprising and very clever.”
an easy question,” he said. “but what about 3D?” “This is a tool that can reasonably describe, at least
Now, more than a year after that evening at the to me, a wide range of more physically relevant things
pizza shop, Domokos has the answer. Finding it was than just polyhedrons stuck together,” says mathemati-
Elise Cutts an exciting, frustrating challenge that ultimately led cian Chaim Goodman-Strauss of the University of Ar-
is a science writer him and three colleagues to discover “soft cells,” kansas, an expert on tiling. “Just look at the foam in a
based in Austria. shapes that can fit together to completely fill a flat sur- glass of beer, and you’ll know they’re onto something.”
She has written for face or a three-dimensional space with as few corners
Scientific American,
Quanta, National
as possible. In two dimensions, soft cells have two cor- Years ago Domokos developed a mathematical tool
Geographic, and ners bridged by curves. but in 3D, these curvy, almost for describing tessellations based on their average prop-
other outlets. organic forms have no corners at all. once the re- erties rather than the shapes of individual cells. The idea
grew out of work on natural mosaics, such as cracked PeoPle have been imagining 3D tessellations at
rock faces. Using averages captures the essence of the least since Plato’s time. He built his model of the uni-
tessellation without imposing unnatural rigidity. verse around tessellations of the five regular convex
As Domokos and Regős explored the rules govern- solids: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron
ing the average properties of mosaics, they realized and dodecahedron. Tessellations of the first four
something: it didn’t seem possible to get the average shapes should build the classical elements of earth, air,
number of vertices (corners) per tile below two. From water and fire, respectively, Plato figured. The dodeca-
there it wasn’t much of a leap to realize that a mono- hedron was the stuff of the cosmos. Plato was wrong
tile—a tile that fills the plane only with copies of itself, about more than this esoteric cosmology. only the
such as the regular hexagons of a honeycomb or squares cube can actually fill 3D space as a monotile—with ex-
of a checkerboard—couldn’t have fewer than two ver- act copies of one shape—without gaps and overlaps
tices. This rule hadn’t been recognized before. (unless the space itself is curved). but cubes squished
When Domokos and Regős couldn’t find any pre- and stretched into parallelepipeds (shapes with six
vious work on the subject, the duo realized they had parallelograms for faces) can fill space, too. And in
something interesting on their hands. but they felt out 1885 Russian crystallographer Evgraf Fedorov cata-
of their geometric depth when it came to translating loged a set of five shapes called the parallelohedra—3D
their discovery into a formal mathematical rule. They forms that can be packed together without any rota-
recruited geometer Ákos G. Horváth, who also works tion. These shapes include the cube and the hexagonal
at the budapest University of Technology and Eco- prism familiar from honeycombs, as well as the more
nomics, to their cause. esoteric rhombic dodecahedron, elongated dodecahe-
Horváth soon devised an algorithm that could warp dron and truncated octahedron.
polygonal tilings of the plane into tilings of shapes All these shapes are polyhedra with flat faces and
with just two vertices. Using it, the team devised straight edges. but 3D shapes with curves can fill
rounded, soft, two-vertex tiles from regular tilings of
triangles, hexagons and rectangles. The hexagonal Regular Convex Solids
tiles they used look like hexagons that have had two
corners stretched out and the rest ground down to
rounded nubs. The square-derived tiles are more di-
verse. one looks like a deformed square, but the others
resemble shingles, fish scales, lentils and the flukes of
whales. The two types of tiles derived from triangles
look a bit like a hill and a ship’s sail. Tetrahedron Cube Octahedron
Then, Domokos says, “we started to fantasize about
what it is in 3D.”
A Selection of 2D Two-Vertex Tiles
Regular triangulation
Icosahedron Dodecahedron
Ákos G. Horváth and Krisztina Regős; February 6, 2024; arXiv:2402.04190 (tile reference)
Parallelohedra
“Soft Cells and the Geometry of Seashells,” by Gábor Domokos, Alain Goriely,
Rectangular grid
Parallelepiped Hexagonal prism
Honeycomb grid
Truncated Rhombic Elongated rhombic

octahedron dodecahedron dodecahedron
Graphics by Violet Frances (3D) and Jen Christiansen (2D) DEC E M bER 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.CoM 35
space, too—although the ready examples are only When the trio eventually identified a space-filling
slightly bent and have obvious corners. Tellingly, the 3D shape with just two corners, Domokos thought
known examples all emerged from questions about they’d found their answer. “I got completely obsessed
nature, not abstract mathematics. In 1887 british with this whole thing,” he says. “And I wrote a paper
mathematician William Thomson, also known as Lord proving that the minimum number [of corners] in
Kelvin, posed a puzzle: What arrangement of cells or three dimensions is two.” The proof grew out of a sim-
bubbles of equal volume minimizes the surface area of ple assumption that Domokos thought was trivial. but
the interfaces between them? In other words, what is as months came and went, he slowly started to realize
the optimal foam? that the assumption wasn’t so minor after all—and it
Kelvin’s first solution was a tessellation of slightly might even be wrong. “He wanted to send this article
warped truncated octahedra. In a 1994 paper, physi- to me and Ákos for Christmas. Then for New Year’s
cists Denis Weaire and Robert Phelan, both then at Eve. And then later and later,” Regős recalls, fighting
Trinity College Dublin, beat Kelvin’s structure with a back a grin. “And then he found an example with zero.
tessellation of two different warped polyhedra. And So that was that.” The shape was itself a proof: in three
in 2018 a team of biophysicists led by Luis M. Escu- dimensions, it is possible to tessellate space with ob-
dero of the University of Seville and Javier buceta of jects that have no corners at all.
the Institute for Integrative Systems biology in Spain
discovered a new shape called a scutoid, resembling Space-Filling 3D Shape
a warped honeycomb, which the body’s epithelial with Two Corners
cells assume to pack optimally in tissues that need to
bend and curve. Still, no one seems to have asked how
few corners a space-filling solid can have. The Hun-
garian team’s leap to 3D was, at first, a leap of faith.
“We had not the faintest idea. Not even a hunch,”
Domokos says.
The Kelvin Structure

A monohedric tiling Space-Filling 3D Shape
with No Corners
The Weaire-Phelan Structure

A polyhedric tiling
with two cells
Ákos G. Horváth and Krisztina Regős; February 6, 2024; arXiv:2402.04190 ( reference)

Finding that first soft cell answered one question and
opened up countless more. The researchers wondered,
for instance, whether space-filling shapes with exactly
one corner could exist. Domokos eventually found one.
When he sketched it out on a blackboard for Regős and
Tiling with Scutoids
Horváth, they were “disgusted,” he says. It was an ugly
Escudero and
Buceta’s discovery shape—a warped form with no symmetries that looks
like something dreamed up by an alien. but somewhere
in that ugliness, Regős glimpsed possibility. “I just saw
it one day and realized,” she says. “We can do this edge-
bending thing and create the softness.”
Regős’s intuition was that she could create soft cells
by bending the edges of normal, pointed polyhedra. At
each vertex where three edges met, she’d grab two edges
and coerce them into curves that ran parallel to the re-
maining edge where the vertex was before. A closed o’Rourke explains. “but here you’re very much in ge-
solid in 3D space must enclose 4π degrees of curvature, ometry. And yet you need this combinatorial condi-
which are usually concentrated at vertices. Regős was tion. So I find that very nice.”
smearing out that curvature over edges instead. “It took
days and days and days to convince me that what she’s s theY came to understand the mathematics of
doing is not completely rubbish,” Domokos says.
Regős had trouble describing her method for bend-
ing edges in mathematical language. but then she re-
A 2D soft cells, the mathematicians began to real-
ize that the shapes existed beyond their sketches
and notes. “They were right under our noses,” Domokos
alized the process could be boiled down to an easily says. The team started to see planar mosaics of two-ver-
solved 2D problem from graph theory. Every polyhe- tex tiles everywhere, from muscle tissue to zebra stripes.
dron has a dual—another polyhedron whose faces once, on a walk through budapest, Regős even saw
correspond to its edges and vice versa. The team them in the curvy crisscross of a metal safety grate.
showed that if it’s possible to find a path along the At the same time, the trio was finding more and
edges of a polyhedron’s dual that visits each of its ver- more 3D soft cells—Regős added warped versions of
tices exactly once—what’s called a Hamiltonian cir- four parallelohedra, as well as tetrahedra, to Domokos’s
cuit—it’s also possible to warp that shape into a cor- first shape, a warped cube. but the researchers strug-
nerless, space-filling soft cell. gled to identify these 3D soft cells in the real world. That
changed when, about a year after Domokos first found
Dual Polyhedra the edge-bent cube, he realized he’d seen it somewhere
before—not in nature but in architecture.
About a decade earlier, architect Viki Sándor and a
group of students at the University of Vienna had con-
cocted an unusual design for a Cirque du Soleil perfor-
mance center. The building was never constructed, but
it got some attention in architectural circles. Its fun-
damental building block was a shape that looks almost
exactly like Domokos’s cubic soft cell.
Sándor’s project started as a warm-up exercise
around the theme of “balance,” says the architect, now
at the Austrian Institute of Technology. The building
With that condition set, Horváth could finally write had to be modular, so they divided it into cubic blocks,
a mathematical 3D edge-bending algorithm. by map- each to be designed by a different person. by coinci-
ping an infinite category of polyhedral tilings to soft dence, the design was inspired by a self-balancing
tilings, he proved the existence of an infinite class of shape called the gömböc, discovered in 2006 by
soft cells. In other words, for every polyhedron—a 3D Domokos and structural mechanics researcher Péter
shape with flat polygonal faces—that could fill space Várkonyi. Sándor and her teammates liked the göm-
with itself, there must also be a curved soft cell. böc’s contrast of thinness and fatness and wanted a
To o’Rourke, the edge-bending algorithm is the similar shape that would fit different modules to-
most beautiful and significant part of the paper. The gether. They found their answer in the C-shaped
elegance comes from uniting two entirely different curves of a tennis ball. “If you cut along the C-shape,
fields of mathematics. Hamiltonian circuits are purely then you get a very thin and a very fat element. And the
combinatorial (having to do with the mathematics of gömböc follows this principle,” Sándor says. Cutting
counting)—they have “nothing to do with geometry,” curved surfaces into tubes or prisms turned out to be
Non-Space-Filling Space-Filling
Non-Soft
Soft
DEC E M bER 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.CoM 37

a good method for constructing soft cells—not just in sity of oxford who had studied chambered seashells.
theory or design but also in nature. Domokos was nervous to tell anyone outside his small
group about the project, especially now that they’d dis-
egős founD the first natural 3D soft cell in a covered soft cells inside the nautilus shell—a favorite
R flash of intuition. one day out of the blue she

e-mailed Domokos a picture of a cross section of
a nautilus shell. Domokos replied that it was a nice ex-
form among mathematicians fond of natural shapes.
It would have been easy to scoop their idea and publish
it first. but Domokos had known Goriely for decades,
ample of 2D soft cells. Regős wrote back: no, they were so he decided to take a risk and call him. Not long after,
3D soft cells. “It doesn’t look soft at all,” Domokos he and Regős were on a plane headed for oxford.
thought. “I mean, it has corners.” but Regős was insis- Goriely was immediately gripped by the discovery
tent. So Domokos bought two nautilus shells and pre- of soft cells within the nautilus shell. “I find it is quite
sented them to Regős and Horváth for inspection. natural for shapes in nature to go that way because
They played with the shells for 30 minutes or so before forming sharp corners is very costly,” Goriely says.
giving up. Even if they could convince themselves just biological cells are soft, and surface tension will natu-
by looking at the shells, Domokos says, “you cannot rally round them off unless the organism expends
send in a shell to a paper as an attachment.” energy to build rigid structures that can hold pointier
shapes. And cells within a living thing want to fill
Cross Section of a Nautilus Shell space efficiently with few gaps.
In their three frantic days at oxford and the
months that followed, Goriely and the Hungarians
identified more and more examples of soft cells in na-
ture and art. Zebra stripes, river estuaries, cross sec-
tions of onions, seashells, heads of wheat, red blood
cells, plants and fungi all resembled 2D soft cells. And
in architecture, 2D soft cells lend futuristic, organic
forms to many buildings by architect Zaha Hadid.
They also appear in sketches of tatami and clothing by
Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, who made the
famous 1831 painting The Great Wave off Kanagawa,
as well as in the art of Victor Vasarely, the “grandfa-
ther” of the optical art movement.
Goriely helped the team find another example of
3D soft cells, too: the chambers of ammonite shells.
The idea might have died there if not for a freely Then Regős concocted a geometric model that pro-
available set of micro CT scans published by the duces shapes similar to the seashell examples from
D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum at the University first principles. Soft cells like those in the nautilus shell
of Dundee in Scotland. Domokos found the scans on- are easily made by intersecting a prism with curved
line and spent hours “crawling around inside” the surfaces—an echo of the process Sándor and her team
shells, looking for corners. He couldn’t find any. used to design the Cirque du Soleil building. “What’s
Ákos G. Horváth and Krisztina Regős; February 6, 2024; arXiv:2402.04190 ( nautilus references)
nice is that architects have intuitively reached that
Nautilus 3D Soft Cell [process] also,” Goriely says. “From our understand-
ing, they’ve reached it with the same types of require-
ments: they wanted to soften the structure.”
the work estabiishes a “useful vocabulary” for
exploring soft shapes, Goodman-Strauss says—a vo-
cabulary that opens up new mathematical questions.
What categories of soft monotiles exist? What groups
of soft shapes can and cannot tile space? Domokos
wonders how softness relates to aperiodicity, the abil-
ity to tile a plane without creating a repeating pattern.
The discovery of the first aperiodic monotiles—single
shapes that fill space with only copies of themselves
but never repeat a pattern—made headlines last year.
Domokos and Regős were curious about what would
happen if they applied their edge-softening algorithm
No one on the team knew the first thing about shells. to the “spectre” tiling, the first truly aperiodic mono-
but Domokos knew someone who did: Alain Goriely, tile. but they were surprised to discover that its soft-
a physicist and applied mathematician at the Univer- ened version couldn’t tile a plane alone.
like to establish the reasons they are so common in A 3D-printed soft
2D Spectre Tiles nature. “A lot of the paper is about visual similarity, cell derived from
a hexagonal prism
and that’s very unusual,” he says. Exploring this link
further appears promising, though, Kaplan says. “I do
like the motivation: just the simple claim that nature
doesn’t like sharp features, so let’s investigate that
“A Chiral Aperiodic Monotile,” by David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan and
from a mathematical perspective. It’s a nice opening

gambit from which you can develop a rich theory.”
Chaim Goodman-Strauss; May 28, 2023; arXiv:2305.17743 ( spectre tile reference)
And the concept of soft cells could turn out to be

useful down the line, Goodman-Strauss says—“not
necessarily to the biologists of today but the biologists
30 years from now.” Perhaps the mathematics of soft
cells will ultimately capture something real about soft
matter—the malleable materials that make up most of
our world, from the blood in our veins to the liq-
Arkansas’s Goodman-Strauss and Craig S. Kaplan uid-crystal display you might be reading on right now.
of the University of Waterloo in ontario, who both con- Questions about soft geometry are particularly
tributed to the discovery of the first aperiodic mono- tricky to study because they tend to defy disciplinary
tiles, didn’t find it surprising at all. Mathematicians are boundaries. Domokos struggled for months to find a
just starting to explore aperiodic monotiles, and there journal that would publish the team’s “outlandish”
are many questions left to answer, Kaplan says. manuscript mixing math, art and biology. That’s not
Despite the seeming ubiquity of soft cells in nature, surprising to Goodman-Strauss. Asked where he FROM OUR ARCHIVES
The Missing Piece.
the link between the mathematics of these shapes and thinks soft cells belong in the scientific landscape, he Craig S. Kaplan;
biology is, for now, just a visual observation. Domokos doesn’t skip a beat. “I think,” he says, “the only answer January 2024. Scientific
admits that this is a weak point of the work and would is it belongs to the future.” American.com/archive

BURIED
AT
SEA
CLIMATE CHANGE
Changing the ocean’s chemical

and biological makeup could force it to
pull vast amounts of planet-warming
carbon from the atmosphere.
But is that a line we want to cross?
BY JAIME B. PALTER
ILLUSTRATION BY EGLĖ PLYTNIKAITĖ
E VERY OCEANOGRAPHER I KNOW who is studying the con-
troversial idea of coaxing the ocean to absorb extra car-
bon dioxide from the atmosphere remembers the
moment they decided to start this contentious work.
For me, it came during the Pacific Northwest heat wave
of June 2021, which sent temperatures soaring above 49 degrees Celsius
(120 degrees Fahrenheit) and set boreal forests ablaze.
I had spent years studying ocean circulation and
Earth’s carbon cycle but not marine carbon dioxide
removal (mCDR)—techniques for reducing CO2 in the
oceans so they, in turn, can draw more CO2 from the
air. Nevertheless, just before the heat wave began, I
offered to help organize a virtual panel discussion on
world would warm by at least another degree. I de-
cided mCDR research was important. If it ultimately
showed that the methods were futile or hazardous, the
research could prevent prolonged investment in a false
hope. If the work revealed safe ways to stimulate the
ocean to take up more CO2 , then those could be new
mCDR for an ocean research conference. Most of the tools to help stabilize the climate.
questions that arose during the session were about
fears that such research could create a moral hazard, starting in the 1950s, scientists began analyzing
allowing people to claim that drawing down CO 2 air bubbles trapped in ice cores drilled from the Green-
lessens the urgency of reducing fossil-fuel emissions. land and Antarctic ice sheets to understand climate
During the panel, a First Nations scholar from the history. by the 1980s they realized that the world’s
University of british Columbia, Candis Callison, oceans could inhale or exhale enough CO2 to substan-
talked about how to involve local shoreline communi- tially contribute to Earth’s long-term cycles of ice-
ties where ocean field trials might be conducted. Cal- sheet expansion and retreat across continents. The
lison was a brilliant voice, helping the scientists un- leading hypothesis at that time for the seesawing of
derstand more about public discourse on climate carbon concentrations in the ocean over thousands of
change. Just days later wildfires flared up and dam- years was that the surface water contained iron, which
aged several First Nations reserves—including the blew in from arid landscapes during cold periods, and
Jaime B. Palter home, Callison informed me, where her relatives its levels regulated phytoplankton growth across the
is an oceanographer lived. This tragic event vividly reminded me of the seas. More iron would cause more growth, which
and associate professor dangers we already faced after one degree C of global would pull more CO2 from the air. Oceanographer John
at the University of
Rhode Island’s Graduate warming. The tragedies could become much worse, Martin of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in Cal-
School of Oceanography. given that even optimistic scenarios indicated the ifornia proposed that artificially fertilizing the ocean
with iron could influence climate. At a 1988 meeting
at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Mas-
Oceanographers are still debating
sachusetts, Martin voiced what would become one of how to prove whether any ocean
the most memorable quotes in oceanography: “Give
me half a tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age.” strategy can effectively remove
Martin’s iron hypothesis prompted more than a
dozen artificial iron-enrichment experiments be-
CO2 from the atmosphere.
tween 1992 and 2009. Researchers released iron on the
ocean’s surface and tracked for days or weeks how the seas. Also in June, start-up Equatic began engineering,
area’s water chemistry and organisms changed. Re- in Quebec, for a demonstration-scale plant that alters
sults confirmed that iron enrichment could lead to a seawater chemistry to absorb more CO2 .
phytoplankton bloom when other conditions were
favorable. Whether or not oceanographers considered Water at the ocean’s surface routinely ex-
these experiments “geoengineering,” the studies changes gases with the atmosphere. Nitrogen, oxygen,
yielded extraordinary insight into the interacting bi- CO2 , and other trace gases each exert a part of the atmo-
ological and chemical processes that could alter cli- sphere’s overall pressure. In the ocean, CO2 also exerts
mate on long timescales. a partial pressure, along with water and other mole-
Serious concerns about interfering with nature cules. When the partial pressure of CO2 in the ocean is
grew, however, and nations worldwide signed a 2008 lower than its partial pressure in the atmosphere, CO2
amendment to the London Convention. It prohibited dissolves in seawater as wind pushes air against the
further ocean-fertilization experiments beyond waves. The air and water seek an equilibrium in their
“small-scale, scientific research studies within coastal CO2 levels. As society’s carbon emissions intensify, the
waters,” which chilled enthusiasm for such work. For atmospheric CO2 partial pressure increases, and more
the next decade researchers conducted studies mostly of the gas is moved into the ocean. Most of the incoming
in virtual oceans, using models. CO2 reacts with seawater to form bicarbonate and car-
Several events started to thaw scientists’ cold bonate, which—like salt in the ocean—remain dis-
views. The 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting solved in the water column for millennia. Since the in-
warming to 1.5 degrees C set off a slew of studies about dustrial revolution more than 150 years ago, the ocean
how much worse two degrees C of warming would be has absorbed approximately 25 percent of human CO2
for ecosystems and for society. The research revealed emissions, a great service that has significantly slowed
that every fraction of a degree of avoided warming the pace of climate change.
offers protection from serious dangers, including in- The goal of all the mCDR strategies is to lower the
creasingly extreme heat, drought, and loss of terres- partial pressure of CO2 in the ocean’s surface layer, us-
trial and marine biodiversity. Even though break- ing either chemical or biological means. One category
throughs in renewable energy had slowed emissions’ of chemical mCDR has the wonky name “ocean alka-
tremendous rise, carbon removal would also be needed linity enhancement.” Alkalinity is the water’s ability
to stabilize the global climate. to neutralize acids. About 99 percent of the atmo-
Against this backdrop, the National Academies of spheric CO2 the ocean absorbs becomes bicarbonate
Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report or carbonate, and this percentage can go higher when
on mCDR in 2022 that outlined six major strategies the water is more alkaline. Therefore, when an alkaline
and the research required to evaluate them. The doc- substance dissolves in seawater, the reaction reduces
ument provided social acceptance for marine scien- the partial pressure of CO2 , allowing the water to ab-
tists to pursue such work. Companies were looking for sorb more from the air. Spreading pulverized alkaline
ways to buy credible carbon credits on a large scale, rock such as limestone or olivine across the ocean or
adding to the urgency. In 2022 financial services com- on beaches, as Vesta did in June, can raise alkalinity.
pany Stripe and several large corporations committed In a second category of chemical mCDR, called di-
to buying $1 billion of credits for carbon removal and rect ocean removal, seawater is pumped into a floating
permanent storage, on land and in the sea, to help or onshore facility that extracts CO2 and transports it
guarantee demand that could accelerate the develop- for commercial use or stores it underground. The water
ment of carbon-reduction technologies. is then pumped back into the sea, ready to absorb more
Progress has begun in earnest. The National Oceanic CO2 from the air. Researchers are trying a variety of
and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Depart- technologies to extract the carbon, such as electrodial-
ment of Energy have both held competitions for pro- ysis, which forces water through a membrane, similar
posals on mCDR science. Research is underway across to how desalination plants operate. Captura is one
the world. In June 2024 a company called Vesta spread company that is pursuing this approach.
8,200 metric tons of crushed olivine—rock dust—on biological techniques depend primarily on plant
the ocean just offshore of North Carolina to try to absorb life, large and small. One approach is to cultivate mac-
CO2 directly from the water. Vesta was the first company roalgae such as kelp—often compared with planting
with a federal permit to test carbon removal from U.S. trees on land. As the plants grow, they store carbon in

Can the Oceans Help BIOLOGICAL METHODS
Solve Climate Change? MICROALGAE FERTILIZATION

Phytoplankton take in sunlight, CO and nutrients to grow. Fertilizing
Because atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are at danger- surface water with nutrients such as iron can enhance growth and
ous levels and society continues to emit huge quantities of CO 2, therefore CO consumption. As phytoplankton die, they sink to the
scientists are examining different ways to pull it from the air. The seafloor, sequestering the carbon there.
world’s oceans naturally absorb about 25 percent of human CO2
emissions. Altering the sea’s biology or chemistry could stimulate
it to soak up more, although the methods’ effectiveness could be
Phytoplankton
difficult to verify and could threaten ecosystems.
CO2
HOW SEAWATER ABSORBS CO2 FROM THE AIR

The turbulent sea surface and atmosphere routinely exchange gases, Iron
maintaining an equilibrium in CO2 levels.
When the partial

pressure of CO2 in
CO2 molecule Water the ocean is lower than
molecule it is in the atmosphere, Dead phytoplankton
more CO2 from the air
dissolves into the water.
H Carbon
O
H
O
C
O
ARTIFICIAL UPWELLING
Instead of fertilizing surface water, pumps can bring nutrients there
from deep water, stimulating algae growth and CO absorption.
Pump
Phytoplankton
CO2
CO2 reacts with sea-
water to form bicarbon-
ate and carbonate,
Water which remain dissolved
H in the water column. H
O
H
O
O
C C H
O O
O Nutrients
Dead
Bicarbonate phyto-
Dissolved CO2 H
O plankton
C H Carbon
O O H
O
C
Carbonic acid O O
Carbonate
Graphic by Ben Gilliland

CHEMICAL METHODS
MACROALGAE CULTIVATION OCEAN ALKALINITY ENHANCEMENT

As marine plants grow, they store carbon in their tissues. Cultivating Spreading alkaline material such as crushed limestone can raise
macroalgae such as seaweed could draw more CO from the ocean, the water’s alkalinity (the ability to neutralize acids), allowing it
allowing it to extract more from the air. Dead algae sink and take the to convert more dissolved CO into bicarbonate and subsequently
carbon with them. draw more from the air.
Crushed limestone
CO2
Macroalgae CO2
limestone
Greater alkalinity,
more CO2 absorbed
BLUE CARBON RESTORATION DIRECT OCEAN REMOVAL

Mangrove trees, salt-marsh plants and seagrasses breathe in CO Pumps can bring seawater into an onshore (or floating) facility
and can store carbon in their roots and surrounding sediment. Restoring that extracts CO and stores it. The deficient water is sent back
these “blue carbon” habitats can reduce CO levels in the air. to the ocean where it can absorb more airborne CO.
Mangroves Carbon extraction

and storage
CO2
CO2
Seagrasses
Salt-
marsh
plants
Carbon
Pump
Seawater with
less carbon
Seawater

their tissues. For sequestration, the plants would be carbon remains safely sequestered from the atmo-
sunk to the seafloor, where the carbon might settle in sphere. Phytoplankton enriched by iron might bloom,
sediment or remain dissolved in deep ocean waters. and a portion of their carbon-rich biomass may sink
Some scientists are continuing to experiment with below the surface. but if microbes consume that car-
the original fertilization approach to boost micro- bon or it returns to its dissolved form, the carbon may
algae—the tiny, single-celled phytoplankton that are again enter the atmosphere in a matter of months or
ubiquitous in the sea. Nutrients such as iron, phospho- years, lowering the durability of the intervention.
rus or nitrogen would be added to the sea surface, where This past May I attended a meeting of scientists,
they could prompt phytoplankton to photosynthesize engineers, philanthropists and government represen-
and therefore grow faster than they otherwise would. tatives to discuss every angle of ocean alkalinity en-
The hope is that when these phytoplankton die and hancement. We eagerly scrutinized the first results
sink, the carbon stored within their cells will remain in from a field trial in Halifax Harbor off Nova Scotia, led
the deep ocean. Another biological approach is artificial by a company called Planetary Technologies and aca-
upwelling: pumps would move nutrient-rich water demic partners at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
from the ocean’s interior toward the surface to try to The trial involved water that a shoreline power plant
boost macroalgae or microalgae growth. was discharging into the harbor after it had been used
for cooling, a routine practice. Researchers added al-
ceanographers are still debating how to kaline compounds to the outflow pipe and measured
O prove whether any mCDR strategy can effec-

tively remove CO2 from the atmosphere. With
enough boats, sensors and people, we can measure the
the added alkalinity in the inner harbor. but because
the signal was diluted beyond that area, they could
only estimate the total carbon removal, using a tested
effect of an mCDR deployment on the surface water ocean model. The early results suggest the trial suc-
and then calculate the increased ocean uptake of CO2 cessfully removed carbon that would have remained
while the effect is still detectable. For any longer pe- dissolved in the water without the work. And because
riod, we would need to rely on models because the wa- that carbon is now stored in the ocean largely as bicar-
ter that was initially altered would be stirred by ocean bonate, it should be stable for thousands of years—
currents over a wide region and diluted below the level a highly durable result.
of detectability. The ocean already stores 50 times as To assess additionality and durability in the vast
much CO2 as the atmosphere, but it is highly variable and turbulent ocean, the research community will
in space and time, so directly measuring the total ad- have to depend on a blend of direct observations and
ditional carbon from an mCDR intervention is nearly modeling because the complete impact of any mCDR
impossible. Ironically, the same traits mean some deployment will play out over months or years. It will
mCDR methods could move a substantial amount of occur over areas of ocean too extensive to be directly
atmospheric CO2 into the ocean while barely perturb- observed and at levels too small to detect. A whole new
ing the ocean’s background state. generation of “applied ocean biogeochemists” is
The work to track these effects has become known needed for this task.
as monitoring, reporting and verification. The goal is to
try to monitor the carbon removed over time and report scientists must also assess whether a technique
those results to a third party for independent verifica- would endanger ecosystems or communities and
tion. In direct ocean removal, for example, instruments weigh risks against any potential benefits. Large off-
at the extraction facility would measure the CO2 re- shore kelp farms, for example, could disrupt local
moved from seawater, and water samples collected ecology or interfere with fisheries. For direct ocean
from the nearby ocean, along with models, would track carbon removal, companies would need plans to safely
the additional carbon uptake at sea. Quantifying the store or sell the CO2 produced as a waste product. Elec-
carbon inside dead phytoplankton sinking to the sea trochemical technologies would filter and pump large
bottom would be much harder. volumes of seawater, and the machinery could suck in
Of course, rigorous monitoring, reporting and ver- and destroy small plants and animals. Every approach
ification would also be needed if companies and orga- has trade-offs, but so does leaving CO2 in the atmo-
nizations are to pay for carbon credits—say, $300 for a sphere to cause ongoing warming.
metric ton of sequestered CO2. The first issue is that we Researchers considering biological methods have
need to be sure the CO2 would not have been removed the difficult challenge of proving that large-scale ma-
from the atmosphere without the intervention. We call nipulation of the ecosystem is safe. The history of hu-
this property an intervention’s additionality. For exam- mans tinkering with ecosystems is littered with fail-
ple, if kelp cultivation creates a thick mat of seaweed at ures. Consider the importation of South American
the surface, but that growth creates a sunshade that cane toads to Australia. The toads were brought to eat
slows photosynthesis in phytoplankton that would have beetles feeding on sugar cane but became a toxic pest
lived a bit deeper, then the net change in ocean uptake and national menace. It is difficult to predict every po-
of CO2—the additionality—might be zero. tential pitfall in open environments. Some of the basic
The second issue is durability: how long captured problems we might look for when considering unin-
tended consequences of biological mCDR are the ac-
cidental stimulation of harmful algal blooms that can
Not emitting CO2 is the most
poison shellfish, the expansion of oxygen-poor “dead
zones” that can suffocate fish, and ecosystem effects
reliable solution, but if the last
on the food web, including fisheries. 10 percent of reductions is
We would also have to assess whether biological
methods pursued in one place could cause problems in
difficult, ocean removal could help.
another. If we spread iron on the ocean surface, more
phytoplankton will also consume other nutrients they hard to imagine that such a big increase would not have
need to grow, such as nitrate and phosphate. Across any major unintended consequences.
the Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica, strong Answering the scaling question cannot be left to
westerly winds create upwellings of vast nitrate and oceanographers alone. We must evaluate all the engi-
phosphate reservoirs from the deep ocean, which sug- neering, energy and economic challenges associated
gests that is where iron fertilization could be most ef- with deployment. Community engagement is needed
fective. Ocean currents carry those upwelled nutrients to understand whether society is willing to interact
across the globe, however, sustaining up to 75 percent with the ocean in this way. And, ultimately, if mCDR
of ocean photosynthesis in low latitudes. If iron fertil- passes all the tests and has social acceptance, some
ization prompts phytoplankton to consume these nu- entity or market would have to pay for it.
trients in the Southern Ocean, marine ecosystems
throughout the rest of the world would be robbed of What can We reasonably ask of the ocean? The
this nutrition—a serious ecological issue. And reduced 37 billion metric tons of CO2 we emit every year consti-
growth worldwide would probably mean less CO2 tutes a tiny percentage of Earth’s voluminous atmo-
drawn naturally from the air; in the end, there might sphere, yet it has an outsize impact on our climate. Not
be little additionality. emitting the gas in the first place is a far simpler,
An mCDR technique that removes additional car- cheaper and more reliable solution than finding a tech-
bon, stores it durably and is safe must also pass one nology to pull this trace gas out of the atmosphere.
other test: Can it scale? The world emits more than but even if we could halve emissions within the
37 billion metric tons of CO2 annually. If we don’t want coming decade and slash emissions by 90 percent just
to bail out a sinking ship with a teacup, we should look 20 years later, we will still face roughly 50–50 odds of
for strategies that can remove about a billion metric overshooting 1.5 degrees C of global warming, the goal
tons a year. How might the options stack up? that almost every nation agreed to in the Paris Agree-
Ocean alkalinity enhancement could hypotheti- ment. If the last 10 percent of emissions remained
cally reach tens of billions of metric tons a year, if eval- difficult to eliminate, warming would proceed indefi-
uated solely on the availability of appropriate rock that nitely on a slower but still risky trajectory toward ice-
could be ground into alkaline powder. Logistically, sheet collapse and tens of meters of sea-level rise. We
however, it would be most efficient if the rock were are researching mCDR so strategies might someday
spread by ships already sailing along existing mari- help society solve the final few percent of problems.
time transport routes, and models suggest this ap- We must be honest when assessing promises and
proach would cut the potential to approximately one perils. At the Ocean Sciences Meeting—a leading con-
billion to three billion metric tons of CO2 drawdown ference of oceanographers from around the world—
per year. held last February in New Orleans, it seemed to me
Moreover, the mining and grinding of huge vol- that everyone was talking about mCDR. Many scien-
umes of rock requires substantial energy and comes tists expressed cautious hope that further research
with its own social and ecosystem impacts on land. might prove ocean alkalinity enhancement is safe and
Nearly seven billion metric tons of limestone (an al- cost-effective; it is the most likely to be scalable and
kaline rock) are mined and crushed for agricultural durable. Many researchers were skeptical that biolog-
and other applications every year, so the world would ical methods could be proved safe, verifiable or scal-
need a new industry equally as large to clean up a frac- able. Still, with the need to slow climate change feeling
tion of our CO2 pollution problem. increasingly urgent and given how much these studies
An evaluation of biological methods starts with the might teach us about the ocean itself, interest in fur-
estimate that, worldwide, less than 10 billion metric ther research remains high.
tons of CO2 in the surface ocean naturally ends up Engaging in mCDR research requires a tremendous
sinking to the bottom every year within macroalgae amount of hope. The techniques matter only if all our
and microalgae that die—deep enough to remain in other efforts to mitigate climate change—from renew-
the ocean for at least 100 years. To remove an addi- able energy to more walkable cities—reduce carbon
tional billion tons of CO2 that won’t quickly reenter the emissions to a small fraction of what they are today. FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Out of Thin Air.
atmosphere, a biological method would have to in- Only if we slow the gushing faucet of emissions to a Alec Luhn; September
crease the total amount of biological material sinking trickle can mCDR possibly open the drain enough to 2024. Scientific
into the planet’s deep seas by about 10 percent. It is stop the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere. American.com/archive

Hypochondria’s
HEALTH
Intense health anxiety is a true

mental illness and can take lives.
The good news is it’s treatable
BY JOANNE SILBERNER
ILLUSTRATION BY DEENA SO’OTEH
Serious Toll
T O DESCRIBE THE DESTRUCTIVE EFFECTS of
heartbeat a person wrongly interprets as a brewing

heart attack. the fast beats may be driven by over-
whelming, incapacitating anxiety.
Hal rosenbluth, a businessman in the Philadelphia
intense health anxiety
to his young doctors in training at columbia University irving
medical center in new York city, psychiatrist brian fallon likes
to quote 19th-century english psychiatrist Henry maudsley: “the
sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep.”
that weeping from other parts of the body may
come in the form of a headache that, in the mind of its
sufferer, is flagging a brain tumor. it may be a rapid
area, says he used to seek medical care for the slightest

symptom. in his recent book Hypochondria, he de-
actually two syndromes. one is illness anxiety disor-
der, fallon says, in which the general idea of a sickness
prompts excessive fear and preoccupation. the second
syndrome is somatic symptom disorder, in which peo-
ple worry about actual symptoms—a rapid heartbeat,
say, or high blood pressure. the leading psychiatry
handbook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders, now uses these two more specific di-
agnoses. (When referring to aspects that both condi-
scribes chest pains, breathing difficulties and vertigo tions have in common, i use the word “hypochondria,”
that came on after he switched from a daily diabetes which is widely used by doctors and many patients, or
drug to a weekly one. He ended up going to the hospital the phrase “intense health anxiety.”) in addition, a new
by ambulance for blood tests, multiple electrocardio- feature of hypochondria has garnered attention: cyber-
grams, a chest x-ray, a cardiac catheterization and an chondria, in which people spend an inordinate amount
endoscopy, all of which were normal. rosenbluth’s wor- of time on the web researching medical conditions they
ries about glucose levels had led him to push for the new think they might be suffering from.
diabetes drug, and its side effects were responsible for Studies have also pointed to more effective treat-
many of his cardiac symptoms. His own extreme anxi- ments. Short-term cognitive-behavioral therapy
ety had induced doctors to order the extra care. (cbt) provides people with techniques to more rigor-
Hypochondria can, in extreme cases, leave people ously evaluate the causes of their concerns—particular
unable to hold down a job or make it impossible for them physical responses, in the case of somatic symptom
to leave the house, cook meals, or care for themselves disorder, or general fears about contracting a disease,
and their families. recent medical research has shown for illness anxiety—and quell their spiraling sense of
that hypochondria is as much a real illness as depression terror. Antidepressant drugs also help. Dismissing a
and post-traumatic stress disorder. patient with comments such as “it’s all in your head,”
Joanne Silberner, this work, scientists hope, will convince doctors however, only makes things worse.
a freelance journalist, who believed the disorder was some kind of character
has been covering
medicine since the flaw that their patients are truly ill—and in danger. A EstimatEs of hypochondria’s frEquEncy range
start of the HIV epidemic. study published just last year showed that people with from as high as 8.5 percent to as low as 0.03 percent in
A co-founder of the hypochondria have higher death rates than similar but medical settings. the coViD pandemic, which com-
Association of Health- nonafflicted people, and the leading nonnatural cause bined a real health scare with isolation and more time
care Journalists and
a former NPR health
of death was suicide. it was relatively rare, but the to ruminate, may have pushed the incidence up. in Aus-
reporter, she lives heightened risk was clear. tralia, it jumped from 3.4 percent before the emergency
near Seattle. the research has also shown that the condition is to 21.1 percent during it.
the ancient Greeks thought hypochondria origi- mates that about 20 to 25 percent of hypochondria
nated in a region of the body just under the rib cage cases are illness anxiety disorder, and the rest are so-
that produced “black bile,” an ill-defined substance matic system disorder.
that caused a variety of physical ailments. eventually Hypochondria may, at first glance, seem to be a ver-
hypochondria came to be associated with the nervous sion of a related problem: obsessive compulsive disor-
system, and in the early 20th century Sigmund freud der, or ocD. both are marked by intrusive thoughts and
termed it an “actual” neurosis. He tied it, as he did distressing fears. there are differences, however. Some
many things, to feelings of guilt and sexual repression. people with ocD may have intrusive thoughts about
it wasn’t until the 1990s, after clinical treatment stud- getting an illness, but these individuals usually also have
ies with talk therapy and drugs, that psychiatrists other manifestations of ocD, such as an extreme need
stopped linking hypochondria to guilt about sexual for order or symmetry. Among people with hypochon-
and aggressive feelings. dria, their fear is primarily of having an illness.
Despite the pain and anguish it causes, “for centu- cyberchondria, the latest manifestation of the dis-
ries, hypochondria was deemed a fashionable, even a order, has been the topic of more than 100 medical
desirable disorder,” perhaps as a sign of an intellectual, publications. (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
thoughtful disposition, according to hypochondria hasn’t officially recognized it yet.) this version in-
reference material from the Wellcome collection. volves more than opening a laptop and checking Dr.
Some of the most revered minds have claimed to Google—it interrupts people’s lives, taking away from
have the disorder, complete with mournful descrip- time with their families or work and increasing their
tions. there’s this from James boswell, 18th-century anxiety. in 2016 fallon and his colleagues asked 731
biographer of english writer Samuel Johnson: “A Hy- volunteers about “online symptom searching” and
pochondriack [sic] fancies himself at different times about their level of health anxiety. those at the lower
suffering death in all the various ways in which it has end of the illness anxiety scale tended to feel better
been observed and thus he dies many times before his after checking their symptoms online, but not so for
death.” Avowed hypochondriac and 18th-century Ger- those with higher anxiety. “contrary to their belief,”
man philosopher immanuel Kant noted that hypo- fallon says, “checking the internet for answers only
chondria was not a “really existing disease” but an makes them feel worse.”
apprehension. twentieth-century french philosopher in one study of cyberchondria in Germany, half the
Jacques Derrida, convinced throughout his life that his people who used symptom-checker apps qualified as
death was imminent, used to say, “Life will have been having hypochondria. frequent users of such apps, if
so short.” He died of pancreatic cancer at 74. they had the disorder, were likely to be unsettled by
much of the more modern research was done by what the apps told them. A study of nurses in turkey
Arthur barsky, now a professor of psychiatry at brig- showed that cyberchondria coincides with an obses-
ham and Women’s Hospital in boston. in the 1970s he sion with healthy eating, and a study of medical stu-
was doing his psychiatry training at massachusetts dents in egypt revealed an association with smart-
General Hospital. Primary care doctors would stop phone addiction.
him in the hallway or at lunch to ask him about pa- treating any kind of hypochondria is a challenge
tients with headaches, dizziness, fatigue, palpitations for doctors. they’ve got to rule out organic disease, and
or shortness of breath. “they keep coming back,” if they do but the patient keeps coming back, it can be IF YOU NEED HELP:
barsky remembers the doctors complaining, “but i’ve frustrating. back in 1991 barsky and several of his col- If you or some-
done everything i can.” leagues asked patients in a large medical clinic what one you know
barsky searched the medical literature and couldn’t they thought of their physicians, and they also asked is struggling or
find much to guide clinicians. He decided to dig in, and those physicians what they thought of their patients. having thoughts
eventually he published a series of defining papers on the patients with hypochondria were less satisfied of suicide, help
the nature and epidemiology of hypochondriasis and with their physicians than were other patients in the is available.
treatments for the illness that, along with work by Pe- clinic. And perhaps not surprisingly, their physicians Call the
ter tyrer of imperial college London, provided a more reported that those patients were more frustrating to 988 Suicide &
accurate scientific basis for treating the disease. the care for and less likely to listen to them. Crisis Lifeline
American Psychiatric Association eventually decided clinical trials have shown that hypochondria as a at 988
to divide the condition into illness anxiety disorder whole, and somatic system disorder in particular, can
and somatic symptom disorder. fallon, who was a con- be successfully treated with cbt or with antidepres- use the online
sultant to the committee of psychiatrists behind the sants that improve the availability of the neurotrans- Lifeline Chat
renaming, says a major reason for jettisoning the old mitter serotonin (known as SSris). A combination of at 988lifeline.
category was that it focused on the absence of medical the two also works. more than 30 years ago, soon after org/chat
explanations for symptoms, and that enhanced the the first SSri, Prozac, went on the market, fallon tried or contact the
stigma when such a label was attached to a patient’s it on a patient who was very unhappy about being sent Crisis Text Line
chart. the two new descriptions are about actual to a psychiatrist. “He had a dramatic improvement,” by texting
symptoms, such as unusual thoughts and behaviors fallon says, which inspired the psychiatrist to test it in TALK to 741741.
related to a person’s medical concerns. fallon esti- a small trial. Just over 60 percent of the patients im-

proved. Subsequent larger, double-blind studies by to a heavily advertised drug and his subsequent hy-
fallon and others showed Prozac’s benefits, though at peranxiety on having repeatedly watched a promis-
somewhat lower rates. ing advertisement.
cbt for hypochondria can take different forms, all Whatever the cause, hypochondria is associated
of which rely on identifying ways that health anxiety with a certain level of innumeracy, or trouble grasping
limits a patient’s ability to function and developing a risk levels—difficulty perhaps compounded by anxi-
plan the person can put into action when the disabling eties about those risks. tobias Kube, a psychologist
thoughts hit. A therapist might get a patient ready with currently at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau
stress-reducing breathing techniques to apply when in Germany, found this out when he was working with
needed. Another option is being prepared to recognize barsky at Harvard medical School. in a study, they
bad thoughts and practicing good replacement compared 60 people with hypochondria and related
thoughts. if a woman is convinced the pain in her leg is disorders to 37 volunteers without the conditions. the
cancer, for example, she can restructure the worry into researchers asked the participants how worried they’d
a plan that includes contacting her doctor if pain con- be if they were told they had a certain chance of having
tinues. A therapist may also suggest she stop asking or not having a particular medical condition. if told
other people to share their symptoms with her. to consider a one-in-10 or a one-in-100 or a one-in-
barsky and fallon teamed up to compare Prozac 100,000 chance of having something, people with in-
alone, cbt alone, the two together and a placebo med- tense health anxiety disorders reported greater con-
ication. they were aiming for an improvement of cern than did volunteers without the conditions.
25 percent or more on two scales that measure the dis- “Patients still think, okay, it may be unlikely, but it’s
order. After about six months the combination of still possible,” Kube says.
Prozac and cbt came out on top with 47 percent im- People with intense health anxiety also were more
provement. results for the groups that received a sin- worried than the other group if they were told they had
gle treatment type were about equal, averaging a a 90 percent chance of not having a disease, although
42 percent improvement—12 percentage points better this more positive framing of risk prompted less con-
than the placebo group. cern. And people with hypochondria-related disorders
After hypochondria was divided into two diagno- were also more concerned by frequency numbers—say,
ses, fallon went back to this study. He found that pa- one in 100—than by the same value presented as a per-
tients he could classify as having somatic symptom centage, such as 1 percent.
disorder appeared to do noticeably better with Prozac So does innumeracy cause hypochondria, or do the
than with cbt. for those with illness anxiety disorder, fears and anxieties associated with hypochondria
results tentatively suggested that cbt worked better make understanding odds difficult? “i suppose that
than Prozac. that may be, fallon says, because people both directions are possible,” Kube says. “but i con-
in the group with somatic symptom disorder had sub- sider it more likely that hypochondria causes the diffi-
stantially more depression and anxiety than those in culties with interpreting likelihoods of medical diag-
the group with illness anxiety disorder. noses.” He reasons that finding out there is a low like-
lihood of having a disease diverges so much from the
thE causE (or causEs) of either condition remains patient’s fears that the person hears only that a chance
a mystery. A slew of genes have been associated with does exist. instead of being relieved, they figure some-
depression, but this discovery hasn’t happened for hy- thing must be wrong.
pochondria. if there is a genetic cause, it isn’t likely to this inability to take comfort was supported by a
be a simple one. When a trait appears more often in second study. the same team asked 129 people—some
identical twins (who share a genetic profile) than in with hypochondria and related issues, some with
fraternal twins, it’s reasonable to think genes rather depression and some without either condition—to
than environment are to blame. A canadian study pub- watch a videotape of a doctor being reassuring about
lished nearly 20 years ago compared rates of health gastroenterological complaints. After watching the
anxiety in fraternal and identical twins. earlier studies talk, people with hypochondria still reported more
had suggested that genes can explain about a third of concern than those in the other groups.
the burden of health anxiety, but these researchers these challenges in evaluating information have
found that some of the hallmarks of health anxiety implications for doctor-patient discussions. “Doctors
(treatment seeking and fear of illness, pain and death) can’t rely on simply explaining that it’s unlikely and
were at most “modestly heritable.” then expecting patients to be fine,” Kube says. When
experts in the field suggest that vulnerable people someone with hypochondria hears they have a one-
may be lured into full-bore illness by commercialism in-100 or even a one-in-1,000 chance, they may end
in our medical system. “every symptom is significant up convinced that they are that one unlucky person.
if you listen to television,” barsky says. “Pharmaceu- Kube and his co-authors suggest that doctors empha-
tical companies are telling us every day when we turn size to their worried patients their high chances of not
on the television that we should go to our doctors having a particular disease rather than their low
and check things out.” rosenbluth blames his switch chances of having it.
ffEctivE trEatmEnts could be lifesaving, as
“It’s not so much death that’s often
E indicated by a study in Sweden. the research
started when, several years ago, psychologist Da-
vid mataix-cols of the Karolinska institute wondered
feared,” says patient Annalisa
just how far the consequences of hypochondria could Barbieri, “but being ill, being
go. “these people suffer enormously over many, many
years,” he says. “And yet no one had actually looked— dependent, the loss of control.”
do they die?” He realized he had a powerful database
to help him answer the question. concerns. finding the best way for doctors to talk with
Sweden has detailed health and demographic rec- patients who have hypochondria will improve their
ords that include whether a patient has ever been diag- lives, according to experts in the field. Kube, in Ger-
nosed with hypochondria by a specialist. mataix-cols many, is exploring optimal approaches to these conver-
and his colleagues checked the death rate among all sations. He plans to study in more detail how doctors
4,129 people with a diagnosis of hypochondria between can best frame “likelihood” statistics and how they can
1997 and 2020 (an undercount, he says; he suspects better communicate probabilities. He also wants to test
doctors in Sweden are reluctant to label their patients the effect of a physician’s demeanor by asking volun-
with a stigmatized condition). they compared that teers to watch videotapes of doctors demonstrating
number with the rate among 41,290 demographically varying levels of warmth and competence.
matched control subjects and reported their results last Some of the researchers in the Swedish early-death
December in JAMA Psychiatry. study plan to train medical personnel on how to recog-
they found a hazard ratio for death of 1.69, meaning nize cases of hypochondria earlier and how to get those
a nearly 70 percent increase in the probability of death patients into treatment. other scientists in Sweden
in the hypochondria group from both natural and unnat- have already shown that computer-based information
ural causes over the course of the study. Suicide was the on health anxiety combined with telehealth sessions
primary cause of unnatural death. mataix-cols empha- with therapists can help as much as face-to-face ther-
sizes that although the fourfold increased suicide risk apy encounters. they looked at how 200 patients did
they found is alarmingly high, the absolute risk in the with either face-to-face sessions or online self-help
population with hypochondria was still quite low. Sui- modules and occasional e-mail check-ins. in both
cide occurred, in fact, in fewer than 1 percent of people groups, hypochondria dropped about 13 points on a
with the condition. “People should not be panicking like, 0- to 54-point scale after 12 weeks of treatment.
‘oh, my God, i’m going to die because of my hypochon- family members and friends can also help someone
dria’—this is not the message they should get,” he says. they know and love who is overcome by obsession and
rather the message he would like repeated is that hypo- fear about health. “expressing empathy first and then
chondria is a serious condition that should be treated. offering to help the person connect with resources can
the results of mataix-cols’s study startled fallon and be a good approach,” says clinical psychologist Jessica
barsky—neither has lost a patient with hypochondria to borelli of the University of california, irvine. “that
suicide. barsky notes that people with hypochondria are might look like, ‘i’ve noticed that you have a lot of wor-
hunting for a disease to match their symptoms so the dis- ries about your health, and that sounds really hard. i’d
ease can be treated; they’re not looking to die. like to help you find some support. is that something
Annalisa barbieri, a 58-year-old woman in england you are open to?’”
with hypochondria, has feared she had Parkinson’s borelli saw her first patient with hypochondria
disease, liver cancer, and other illnesses. “it’s not so about 20 years ago and has seen many since. if you know
much death that’s often feared but the dying, the being someone who has hypochondria, she says, it might be
ill, the being dependent, the unknown, the loss of con- helpful to offer them a suite of options—perhaps assis-
trol,” she says. After cbt, barbieri learned to reframe tance in scheduling an appointment with a therapist or
and replace these terrifying thoughts with more real- medical doctor or help organizing errands or cooking
istic assessments of her body. today, she says, the mon- if an illness obsession has driven them to let things
strous anxiety inside her mostly sleeps. it does re- slide. Sometimes making life seem more manageable
awaken during times of stress, such as the kind she felt can help people begin to function in a healthier way.
recently after her mother and several other people died When a person has been doctor hopping for years,
in a short period. She rolls out what she learned during looking in vain for a medical diagnosis, a therapist
her cbt: to separate out assumptions from facts and to might be where to start. there also may be real but
make a plan. it takes work, she says, and it does work. unexamined medical issues at the root of a patient’s
anxiety, borelli notes. if a person has not seen a pri-
rosEnbluth found writing his book about his con- mary care doctor—some people’s fear of hearing bad FROM OUR ARCHIVES
dition cathartic, and the antianxiety medication he news keeps them away, for instance—helping them to Cyberchondriacs Just
Know They Must Be
reluctantly takes has helped. He says he’s able to think find a physician, schedule a visit, and even offering to Sick. Charles Schmidt;
things through with the help of a new doctor, who often go with them would be a good first step away from un- April 5, 2019. Scientific
spends 45 minutes per visit hearing out rosenbluth’s reasonable fear. American.com/archive

The Afterlives
of Oil Rigs
The steel “jackets” that

support California’s offshore
oil platforms are covered in
millions of organisms and
provide habitat for thousands
54
of fishes.
SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N DECE M BER 2 02 4
SUSTAINABILITY
Off the California coast,

decommissioned oil platforms
are some of the most productive
marine fish habitats in the
world. Should they be removed
or allowed to stay?
BY ASHER RADZINER

E VEN BEFORE I COULD MAKE OUT THE SILHOUETTE of Platform Holly on the
foggy horizon, I could see and smell oil. Ripples of iridescent liquid
floated on the sea’s surface, reflecting the cloudy sky. but the oil wasn’t
coming from a leak or some other failure of the rig. Milton Love, a biol-
ogist at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California,
Santa barbara, explained that it was “kind of bubbling up out of the seafloor.” our boat,
less than two miles from the central California coast, was sailing above a natural oil seep
where the offshore energy boom first began.
For thousands of years the Chumash, an Indige-
nous group native to the region, identified these oce-
anic seeps and their naturally occurring soft tar,
known as malak, which washed up on the shore. Six-
teenth-century European explorers noted oil off the
permanently severed Platform Holly from its market.
Venoco, the oil company that owned Holly at the
time, was not responsible, but it was bankrupted by the
event. because Holly is positioned within three miles of
the coast, it was transferred into the hands of the Cali-
coast of modern-day Santa barbara, and in the 1870s fornia State Lands Commission (SLC) in 2017. The SLC
the U.S. oil boom reached California. In the late 1890s is now responsible for managing the process of decom-
the first offshore oil wells in the world were drilled missioning the platform and determining its fate.
from piers off of Summerland beach; 60 years later the According to platform-decommissioning consul-
state’s first offshore oil platform was deployed to drill tant John bridges Smith, a former leasing specialist
the Summerland offshore Field. with the bureau of ocean Energy Management who
Since then, 34 other oil platforms have been in- counts ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron
stalled along the coast, and more than 12,000 have among his clients, Holly and the eight other platforms
been installed around the world. These hulking pieces whose leases are terminated or expired will be decom-
of infrastructure, however, have finite lifetimes. Even- missioned by the end of the decade. based on the origi-
tually their oil-producing capacities tail off to the point nal contracts between the oil companies and the state
where it is no longer economically viable to operate and federal governments, which date to the 1960s, this
them—that, or there’s a spill. Today 13 of California’s means the structures will have to be fully removed. In
27 remaining offshore platforms are what’s known as December 2023 the bureau of Safety and Environmen-
shut-in, or no longer producing oil. tal Enforcement recommended that all 23 California
Platform Holly is among the dead platforms await- platforms standing in federal waters be fully removed.
ing their afterlives. At the time of its installation in Doing so will incur a great expense. That’s true ev-
1966, everyone knew a platform situated directly over erywhere but especially in California, where some of
a natural oil and gas seep was going to be a success. the platforms are in very deep water. According to one
Joe Platko (preceding pages);
Milton Love (opposite page)
Asher Radziner And for nearly five decades it was. Then, in 2015, conservative estimate, completely removing all of Cal-
is a freelance writer a corroded pipeline near Refugio State beach owned ifornia’s platforms would cost the responsible oil com-
from Venice, Calif. by Plains All American Pipeline cracked, spilling panies $1.5 billion. Smith says these companies would
He recently graduated
from Brown University
142,800 gallons of crude oil into the Santa barbara prefer to delay that process for as long as possible.
with a degree in environ Channel. The spill killed sea lions, pelicans and perch, Some environmental groups in California, meanwhile,
mental science. among other creatures; closed fisheries and beaches; and are pushing to hold them to the speediest timeline.
Platform Holly, located off the
coast of Santa Barbara, Calif.
Offshore oil Love, who has spent the past three decades study- various merits and risks of different removal strate-
infrastructure in ing the aquatic life that now calls southern California’s gies. The results determine a platform’s final resting
California acts as
oil platforms home, would prefer a third alternative. place, which in most cases has been in a scrap metal
a nursery for certain
fish species. In the decades since they were installed, the steel yard. A platform’s support structure is called its
support structures of California’s oil platforms have jacket—hundreds of vertical feet of woven steel that is
become vibrant ecosystems isolated from fishing pres- affixed to the bottom of the ocean. Most of the time en-
sures—de facto marine sanctuaries. Rather than being gineers will use explosives to sever a platform jacket
removed, aging fossil-fuel infrastructure and its seren- from the seafloor. The steel is then hauled to shore for
dipitously associated habitats can be salvaged in the disposal and recycling. Decommissioning is consid-
ocean as state-managed artificial reefs. The entire top- ered complete when a platform has been removed
side—the above-water portion of steel, offices and down to 15 feet below the mud line and the seafloor has
cranes—and shallow section of a rig are removed, but been returned to preplatform conditions.
part of the submerged base may remain. A pathway for Most of the offshore oil platforms that have ever
doing so already exists in the U.S. and has been success- been built were installed in the Gulf of Mexico—more
fully followed 573 times in the Gulf of Mexico. Similar than 7,000 since 1947. More than 5,000 of those have
examples can be found around the world, from Gabon since been removed. In the 1980s oil companies and
to Australia. because Holly is already owned by the recreational fishing associations pushed for an alterna-
state, not an oil company, its transition could illumi- tive outcome that would both be cheaper and help to
nate how to evaluate the fate of rigs worldwide based bolster struggling fish populations. In 1984 the U.S.
on science, not politics. Congress passed the National Fisheries Enhancement
Act, providing for the creation of the National Artificial
hen an oil platform is decommissioned, Reef Plan, which allowed oil platform operators to do-
W the process goes like this: First, in a phase

known as plugging and abandoning, its oil
nate decommissioned rigs to states as “artificial reefs.”
In the following years Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi,
Bob Evans
wells are filled with concrete and sealed. Next, scientists Florida and Alabama each passed the necessary legisla-
conduct an environmental review and consider the tion and established their own State Artificial Reef Pro-
grams. These were, and still are, funded by oil and gas up with two ways to make a living: one, be a fisherman,
contributions and the interest earned on those pay- and the other, be connected with oil and gas,” bull says.
ments. The program hasn’t replaced full removals; be- In 2001 bull moved back to her native California,
tween 1987 and 2017 only 11 percent of all decommis- and she arrived at U.C.S.b. in 2016. Her experience
sioned oil platforms off Louisiana were partially re- studying the state’s platforms and coming to under-
moved. but in deeper waters, the story is different: of the stand the surrounding politics has shown her that the
15 structures decommissioned in depths greater than differences in platform strategy between California
400 feet, 14 have been partially removed, or “reefed.” and Louisiana are multifold. “There are factions, espe-
When a platform is partially removed, its topside cially in Santa barbara, that absolutely despise oil and
is taken to shore. To avoid creating a navigational haz- gas companies,” bull says. This animosity, she ex-
ard, the first 80 to 85 feet of its jacket closest to the plains, makes the rigs-to-reefs process a harder sell.
surface are either brought ashore or laid along the sea It’s not unwarranted. on January 28, 1969, a blowout
bottom. Finally, the remaining jacket—whether it is at Union oil’s Platform A in the Santa barbara Channel
15 feet of steel or hundreds—is either left in place or spilled 100,000 barrels of crude oil into the Pacific
severed from the seafloor and towed to an approved ocean. black tar covered beaches for dozens of miles
reefing site. Liability for the reefed structure gets and killed thousands of birds and marine mammals. At
transferred from the oil company to the state, and the the time, it was the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
oil company donates 50 percent of its cost savings The spill prompted the first Earth Day and the cre-
(from doing a partial removal versus a full removal) ation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It
to the state. This process, colloquially referred to as also spawned numerous environmental nonprofits in
rigs-to-reefs, has successfully bolstered fish popula- the Santa barbara region, including Get oil out! and
tions in the Gulf. the Environmental Defense Center. Development of
Ann Scarborough bull, a U.C.S.b. biologist who new oil fields off the coast of California halted and
studies the ecology of offshore oil platforms and renew- didn’t resume until 1982.
able energy installations, worked in the Gulf of Mexico Then California’s first decommissionings began. In
on offshore oil and gas regulation for 14 years. She ar- 1988 Texaco successfully removed Platforms Helen and
rived in 1975, when her husband took a job in the highly Herman. In 1996 Chevron removed Platforms Hope,
profitable offshore oil industry. When it came to oil plat- Heidi, Hilda and Hazel from the Santa barbara coast—
form ecology, “the Gulf of Mexico hadn’t been studied,” but not completely. The cuttings piles—gigantic mounds
bull says. She took a job as a chief scientist for the U.S. of rock debris, mud, and other hydrocarbon detritus
Minerals Management Service, which has since been discharged by the drilling process—underneath all four
reorganized into the bureau of ocean Energy Manage- platforms were allowed to remain.
ment, and received funding to research the communi- Linda Krop, now chief counsel for the Environ-
ties of fish and invertebrates dwelling underneath the mental Defense Center, was then a law clerk with the
platforms. on her frequent trips offshore, it became organization. The group wasn’t too happy that Chev-
clear to her that the rig jackets provided habitat that was ron had seemingly gotten around the obligations of its
vital to the region’s economy. original contracts, which required full removal of its
Lutjanus campechanus, commonly known as the platforms and restoration of the local environment to
northern red snapper, is one of the most frequently its natural condition.
caught species in the Gulf ’s recreational fishing indus- In the nearly three decades since, Krop has worked
try. A long-lived apex predator, it is mostly sedentary as an attorney holding oil companies accountable for
in its adult phase and restricted to reef habitats. Until their environmentally destructive actions. She had her
the mid-20th century, the primary fishing grounds for greatest court victory in 2016, achieving the termina-
red snapper were off the western coast of Florida and tion of 40 federal oil leases offshore. Krop is firmly
in the waters south of the Florida Panhandle. against the prospect of reefing off California. “The fish
Just as populations in the fish’s historical range were are going to be fine if the platforms go away,” she says.
being depleted by overfishing and trawling, red snap- “They’re not going to disappear.”
per began to shift and expand west across the entirety
of the Gulf. Thousands of oil platforms were being in- in July 2023 i visited Holly with Milton Love on an
stalled across the northwestern and north- central especially foggy morning. After a 30-minute boat trip
Gulf. Decades of research have shown that with natural from the Santa barbara Harbor, its skeletal outline be-
reefs few and far between, red snapper were using the gan to emerge from the mist. From a distance Holly
oil platforms as a kind of outpost, which allowed their resembled a skull with barred teeth and low, hollow
population size to expand significantly. eyes, but up close it was an eight-story scaffolding of
As drilling operations multiplied, commercial and steel beams, pylons and old shipping containers.
recreational reef-fishing industries grew in tandem. Holly hasn’t produced oil for a decade, but the whir-
Surveys from the early 1980s indicated that one quarter ring and beeping of generators and cranes was still too
of fishing trips were associated with oil and gas struc- loud to speak over. People in construction vests milled
tures. “This whole society in the Gulf of Mexico grew about the upper decks, ostensibly monitoring the

wells’ recent plugging procedure and shoring up the Mussels dominate the platform jacket in the first 40
platform. brown sea lions were flinging themselves feet of water, forming three-inch crusts around the sub-
from the ocean onto the platform’s lower decks, howl- merged legs and beams. barnacles and bivalves extend
ing and jostling for space. Love told me that what we even deeper. When these creatures die or are dislodged
were seeing was only a small piece of the action. The by a storm, they sink to the feet of the gargantuan struc-
real story, he said, was hidden below the waterline, tures and form shell mounds up to 220 feet in diameter
where the mechanical noise dims and is replaced by the and rising upward of 20 feet from the seafloor. both
crackle of shrimp and fish nibbling at the reef. among the decaying shell mounds and throughout the
The platform jackets are covered in millions of or- crisscrossing beams of the platforms’ midwater sec-
ganisms and provide habitat for thousands of fish. tions, juvenile rockfish of the region proliferate.
Some of California’s 27 platforms are relatively small; Trapped within these shell mounds, however, are the
Holly stands in only 211 feet of water. others, such as piles of toxic drill cuttings. Until the late 1970s, regula-
the Exxon-built Harmony, stand in depths up to 1,198 tion to properly dispose of cuttings was fairly loose, and
feet. Imagine the Empire State building extending up operators would often deposit the debris on the seafloor.
from the ocean floor, blossoming with mussels and In a 2001 study, surface sediments from the shell mound
scallops and sea anemones, providing food to legions of Platform Hazel, installed in 1958, were found to be
of fish. According to a 2014 paper co-authored by Love, lethal to 50 percent of tested shrimp within 96 hours of
these platforms are among the most productive marine exposure. Recently installed platforms don’t appear to
fish habitats in the world and, per cubic meter of sea- have the same problem, perhaps because most cuttings
floor, are more productive than any natural reef. must be hauled to shore. In one study, cuttings piles be-
In 2019 the Gulf recreational fishing community took low platforms installed before stricter regulation were
more than 50 million trips and caught 332.5 million fish. found to contain 100 times more volatile organic com-
but recreational fishing off the coast of California is no- pounds than a newer platform, Gina, installed in 1980.
where near as big. And because of the more than 120,000 Love and his colleagues wanted to know if the con-
acres of natural rock reef along the state’s coast and Chan- tamination from cuttings extended to the water col-
nel Islands, the amount of habitat area generated by the umn around the shell mound. In 2013 they published
rigs does not significantly alter the total regional habitat a paper that found California’s platforms—regardless
area or increase the carrying capacity of the fish popu- of age—were not contaminating their associated fish
lation. In contrast, the Gulf platforms contribute populations. “We looked at fishes that live around
30 percent of their region’s total “reef ” habitat area. platforms—not just Holly but throughout southern
Love argues that California’s platform ecosystems are California—and compared the heavy metal concen-
vital for different reasons. After finishing his Ph.D. and trations with fishes of the same species on nearby nat-
landing at U.C.S.b. as a research biologist, Love received ural reefs,” he says. “There was no statistical differ-
funding from the National biological Survey; he wrote ence between what we saw.”
a book called The Rockfishes of the Northeast Pacific and Still, people like Krop at the Environmental Defense
set out to study how oil platforms functioned as fish hab- Center are not convinced any oil infrastructure should
itats. “Most of the money has always been from the be allowed to stay in the ocean. “If we need to build
federal government,” Love says. but a “small percent- some [more] artificial reefs, then let’s do it the right
age” came from Chevron and ExxonMobil. way,” she says. California has been building its own ar-
Love’s early work laid the foundations for others to tificial reefs since 1958, when the state’s Department of
research the structures as well. In a 2014 study, quan- Fish and Wildlife placed 20 automobile bodies in the
titative marine ecologist Jeremy T. Claisse, now at Cal- waters of Paradise Cove off Malibu. Such artificial reefs
ifornia State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and his tend to be spread over many acres in relatively shallow
colleagues revealed that along the coast of southern waters. Platform jacket reefs, in contrast, are not even
California, jacket habitats don’t just support millions technically artificial reefs and exist as habitats of ex-
of tunicates, barnacles, rock scallops and shrimp; they treme vertical complexity and dimension. They are
can be sites of fish production. That means many fishes smaller in area yet more productive on average.
living on and around the legs grow up there and may In 2003 Mark Carr of the University of Califor-
either spend the entirety of their lives at one platform nia, Santa Cruz, wrote that there are few natural rock
or travel elsewhere, bolstering fish populations nearby. reefs at the depths of the California oil platforms and
bocaccio and cowcod rockfish of southern Califor- none with comparable physical characteristics. If the
nia’s natural reefs are economically important and at goal is to contribute to overall reef area, their value
one point were considered overfished. In 2006 Love is “minuscule.” If, however, the intent is to preserve
found that California’s offshore oil platforms contrib- their unique habitats, their value is “100 percent.”
ute 20 percent of the young bocaccio rockfish that Love has a more irreverent perspective on their
survive each year across the species’ entire geographic value. “As a biologist, I just give people facts,” he says.
range, which stretches from Alaska to baja California. “but I have my own view as a citizen, which is: I just
The platforms operate essentially as nurseries, he think it’s criminal to kill huge numbers of animals be-
says, incubating the next generation. cause they settled on a piece of steel instead of a rock.”
any countries around the world are stationed in shallow waters. but in the eastern state of Sea anemones live
M coming up on the decommissioning of their

platforms for the first time. According to Am-
ber Sparks of blue Latitudes, a company that consults
Victoria, 23 Exxon platforms in the bass Strait are in
depths up to 525 feet—these structures are too far from
land to be seen over the horizon and are not fished be-
on the shell mounds
that form under the
platform legs.
for governments worldwide regarding the environ- cause of rough water conditions.
mental effects of their platform-decommissioning Norman says Australia does not have an official rigs-
practices, there is no international standard for how to-reef program, but in 2023 Exxon applied for permits
an oil platform should be reefed. to partially remove 13 of its platforms. The company, he
Globally, the process is often ad hoc. off the coast of says, withdrew its application this summer after a wave
Gabon, for instance, high-biodiversity habitats under- of media reports featured criticism of partial removal.
neath more than 40 active oil platforms are included As of August 2024, all of Holly’s 30 wells were fully
in a system of marine national parks. In Malaysia, an plugged and abandoned. Jennifer Lucchesi, executive
oil platform has been converted into a resort for scuba director of the California State Lands Commission,
divers. With the assistance of Chevron, Thailand es- says the facility is being “hardened” so it won’t need
tablished an artificial reef program and reefed seven 24-hour staffing as it moves into “caretaker” status.
platforms near Koh Pha-Ngan in 2020. In waters off Now studies of Holly’s subsurface biology are looking
the U.K., five platforms have been approved for partial at the platform’s effects on its local marine environ-
removal, but no full platform jacket has been reefed, ment to inform the creation of an environmental im-
and no rigs-to-reef program exists. A 2017 study eval- pact report, which will review the likely net outcomes
uated the possibility of transforming one U.K. rig into of full removal versus partial removal versus no action.
a hub for harvesting wave energy. The “biological study” component is being prepared
According to Francis Norman, managing director of by Love, bull and their colleagues at U.C.S.b.
the nonprofit Center of Decommissioning Australia, oil companies are interested in platform reefing be-
there is large demand from recreational fishing com- cause of money, not fish. Partial removal is far cheaper
Bob Evans
munities for artificial reefs—at least off the coast of than full removal. Reefing the California platforms in-
Western Australia, where more than 40 platforms are stead of eradicating them would net the companies a

savings of $150 million and generate $600 million for
the state. (Actual costs and savings for removal are
likely to exceed these projections by at least a factor of
four.) Still, not a single California platform operator
has applied to begin the rigs-to-reef process. Smith
believes the hesitancy results from differences in pol-
icy. Legislation in the Gulf States asks for 50 percent of
an oil company’s cost savings to be paid to a state in
most cases; in California, it’s 80 percent. And whereas
in the Gulf liability transfers to the state, in California
it essentially stays with the responsible oil company.
Previous attempts, in 2015 and 2017, to amend the leg-
islation in California failed. Krop says groups like hers
“would not support making the state liable,” and
Smith says that would make reefing “unworkable” for
the oil companies. When approached for a comment,
Chevron wrote: “We are still finalizing our decision on
this issue.”
Smith believes the most likely outcome for Califor-
nia’s aging offshore infrastructure will be not full re-
moval or partial removal but indefinite delays. oper-
ators are supposed to submit decommissioning plans
two years before a lease ends, but operators for six
offshore platforms whose leases ended in 2015 still
have not followed through.
oil platforms were designed to be productive for 20
to 30 years, but some are still producing oil after 45
years. No one knows how long they might stand. In one
scenario, maintenance may not be properly kept up.
This isn’t hard to imagine: Platform Holly fell into a
state of disrepair following its operator’s bankruptcy,
and ExxonMobil, a prior operator, paid millions to
refurbish the platform so it could support the equip-
ment required to plug and abandon its dormant wells.
In a soon-to-be-published paper on the topic of
delay, Smith discusses a worst-case scenario in which
poor maintenance and corroded steel cause a plat-
form to collapse during an earthquake or storm. A
pile of steel legs, crossbeams and submerged topside
offices would rest like a shipwreck on the seafloor.
Most of the midwater organisms would be gone, as
would those associated with the lengthy vertical wa-
ter column. but Love says organisms associated with
complex bottom habitats would perhaps flourish.
Rockfish and lingcod would swim around the jagged,
anemone-covered pieces of broken platform legs and
rusted steel, past scurrying crabs, exploring their re-
configured home.
In another world, you could see oil companies
keeping up with maintenance indefinitely. To prevent
the steel legs from rusting and collapsing, they could
continue applying zinc anodes to the steel bars, allow-
ing the zinc to rust instead of the legs. “The marine
habitat will change with climate change, of course, as
FROM OUR ARCHIVES everywhere will,” Love says. but the sea lions would
Advanced Offshore stick around on the lower decks, as would the black-
Oil Platforms. Fred S.
Ellers; April 1982.
smith damselfish in the shallow waters. The plat-
Joe Platko
ScientificAmerican. forms’ topsides, steadfast off the Santa barbara coast,

com/archive would be a reminder of an oil-ridden past.
When a decommissioned
platform is removed,
so, too, goes habitat area
for sea lions and
certain
DEC E M BER 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC fish species.
A N.COM 63
The
Rewards
of Curiosity
PSYCHOLOGY
Learning blossoms in a sweet spot

between challenge and frustration
BY LYDIA DENWORTH
ILLUSTRATION BY PETER RYAN
T HE WORLD IS FULL OF THINGS TO LEARN.Where to start? How to choose what to
pay attention to? What motivates someone to seek new knowledge?
The desire to learn is partly a preference for novelty: we tend to seek out new
information and experiences, and that adds to what we know. We also like to
reduce uncertainty. Information can bring food, safety, relationships, and other
physical rewards. but scientists now believe these drives combine into a more complicated
urge that can be critical to learning, even when—perhaps especially when—there’s no
immediate payoff. We are just curious.
We’re often curious in a particular way: we want to learn more This link between curiosity, which occurs moment to
about things we already know a little bit about. “You can think of moment, and the longer timescales of development and evolu-
curiosity as the process that guides the acquisition of knowl- tion is a new way of thinking, says Pierre-Yves Oudeyer of French
edge,” says neuroscientist Celeste Kidd of the University of Cal- research institute Inria in bordeaux. Setting your own goals
ifornia, berkeley. We internally track how well we are learning, seems to increase motivation and let learning blossom in a sweet
or our learning progress, and learning comes more easily and is spot between challenge and frustration. Russian educational
more enjoyable when curiosity is high. Following our instincts psychologist Lev Vygotsky called it “the zone of proximal devel-
appears to be a particularly rewarding way to explore the world. opment.” but until recently, little attention has been paid to what
“If you feel positive after learning something, then you now might be happening cognitively to make curiosity’s sweet spot
understand the joy of learning, which motivates you to learn next so, well, sweet.
time,” says educational psychologist Kou Murayama of the Uni-
versity of Tübingen in Germany. All humAns know what it is to be curious, and we generally
Kidd and Murayama are among many investigators, in fields think of it as a positive trait, associating it with intrinsic motiva-
as diverse as neuroscience, education, psychology and computa- tion, creativity and open-mindedness. Influential early thinkers
tional science, who are curious about curiosity. This new research captured important aspects that are still thought to hold true. In
focuses less on curiosity as an individual trait—one that many 1966 psychologist Daniel berlyne recognized that curiosity could
scholars and artists possess, as do you, the reader of an article on relate to perception, such as when we notice a visual incongruity
curiosity—and more on the variable state of being curious. Each like a zebra among horses, and it could be specific or wide-rang-
of us is capable of curiosity, but what sparks and sustains it? ing. In 1994 behavioral economist George Loewenstein theorized
Scientists are piecing together the brain processes that under- that curiosity was caused by the need to fill an information gap.
lie the wide-eyed wanting-to-know we generally think of as Comprehending how curiosity works, Kidd says, means
being curious. They are identifying how the brain homes in on understanding “how people form their beliefs about the world
novelty, copes with uncertainty, triggers reward networks and and how they change their minds.” A deeper analysis of the neu-
solidifies memory. Researchers are also beginning to see why ral underpinnings and role of curiosity could potentially show
curiosity can be so consequential. teachers how to reach students more effectively, enable computer
The instinct can be dangerous on occasion—curiosity scientists to program artificial-intelligence systems to learn effi-
famously killed the cat—but overall, it seems to encourage explo- ciently, and alleviate suffering from some mental disorders.
ration in ways that promote survival. Gathering Knowing how to facilitate curiosity about other kinds
information even when its purpose is unclear allows Lydia Denworth of people and cultures may even help make the world
us to build more accurate mental models of our world, is an award-winning a kinder place.
says comparative psychologist Victor Ajuwon of the science journalist and Curiosity didn’t get a lot of scientific attention
contributing editor for
University of Cambridge, who studies elements of Scientific American. She until now, because it is difficult to define. Are all urges
curiosity in rats, goldfish and cuttlefish. “That is is author of Friendship to know driven by curiosity? In a review published
going to be useful for you in the future,” he says. (W. W. Norton, 2020). earlier this year, Jamie J. Jirout of the University of
Virginia and her co-workers posit that curiosity “must arise from reward. The dopamine link “seems to resonate with this idea that
an internal desire for information” for its own sake. So, for exam- curiosity is an internal reward, and then definitely it’s a motiva-
ple, a child asking why a rainbow happens is probably driven by tor,” says cognitive neuroscientist Jacqueline Gottlieb of Colum-
curiosity if they just saw one—but not if the question is prompted bia University’s Zuckerman Institute.
by a science exam the next day. (Nor is curiosity the craving to To work out that information itself is rewarding, neuroscien-
know the outcome of a biopsy, which can be more like dread.) tists have had to show how the brain distinguishes between phys-
Some researchers study information seeking as a whole without ical rewards and information. Such work started in monkeys, the
trying to separate out curiosity. first other species in which scientists, who fear anthropomorphic
Curiosity can on occasion be disconcerting, even distressing. overreach, have felt confident claiming curiosity exists. (No sur-
People desperate to know, for example, the secret behind a magic prise to fans of Curious George.) Neuroscientist benjamin
trick have been willing to accept mild electric shocks as the price Hayden of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues set up
of satisfying their curiosity sooner. And arguments in pubs led an an experiment in which monkeys got water as a treat, and the
executive at the Guinness brewery to create the company’s epon- researchers gave them the opportunity to find out ahead of time
ymous book of records and then distribute its first copies in whether that reward was coming. The monkeys chose to get a
drinking establishments, the better to settle future disagreements heads-up 80 to 90 percent of the time and were even willing to
immediately. (Have you ever wondered what a beer company and lose out on larger rewards to know. They are saying, in effect,
the world’s largest ball of string had to do with each other?) “I’m so curious that I want this information now,” Hayden says.
More often, though, curiosity is delicious. Studies show we Mice appear to show the same tendencies, according to a study
happily avoid spoilers so as not to lose out on the fun of an by psychologist Jennifer bussell, a postdoctoral researcher at the
unfolding drama. If you missed the Super bowl or the series Zuckerman Institute. Moreover, in both monkeys and mice, neu-
finale of Succession, you probably went well out of your way to rons in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which is involved in an
keep from finding out what happened too soon. Nowadays we all early stage of decision-making, responded differently to water
carry digital reference libraries in our pockets, and we have a rewards and to cues—information—that predicted those
hard time resisting the need to use them as soon as a nagging rewards. The OFC neurons encode details such as the amount of
question arises. Researchers measure the tip-of-the-tongue feel- water as independent variables to be compared later, rather like
ing, which heightens curiosity, by assessing the strength of the raw material that will feed into their choice.
urge to google an answer. (Appropriately, they also liken the “There’s probably a drive that evolved to learn new stuff and
feeling to “mild torment.”) gather information because 99 percent of the time in the natural
It’s probably the anticipation of an answer that feels delecta- world, for an animal, information is useful,” bussell says. “Evolu-
ble. Higher levels of curiosity lead to higher levels of activity in tionarily, you have to nudge the creature to come out of its burrow,
areas such as the striatum, which is involved in the release of even if it’s afraid that there’s a predator coming.” If the brain builds
dopamine, the neurotransmitter most associated with feelings of a system that regards gathering information and reducing uncer-
What Counts Extern

al Cur
iosity
as Curiosity? al Curios
ity
or seek
Curiosity is difficult to define Intern Explore n
o
y tivated info ti
rm a
because it overlaps with other Qualit ally mo
Intrinsic formation
Lisa K. Son, in Nature Reviews Psycholog y, Vol 3; August 2024; restyled by Jen Christiansen
concepts. A child’s curiosity to seek

in
“Curiosity in Children across Ages and Contexts,” by Jamie J. Jirout, Natalie S. Evans and
about why a leopard has spots Interest

different
might develop into a broader or think Try things in
ledge gaps tip le wa ys
interest in animals, for example. Creativity Identify know or m ul
rent ways
Conversely, having an interest in new or diffe
in animals can lead someone to
Open-mindedness
wonder why flamingos are pink.
Being curious also goes along Open to things unknown or Observe others;
with positive qualities such as different ways of knowing ask for others’ ideas
open-mindedness and intellec- Intellectual humility
tual courage.
Comfortable with
Scientists also find curiosity and mistake risk of failure
s;
hard to study because it can be Intellectu
al courag limits to on acknowledge Ask questions;
hard to observe. Jamie J. Jirout e e’s own kn persist after fa
owledge ilure
of the University of Virginia
and her colleagues hold that Critic Challen
al thin g
curiosity has an internal aspect,
king challe e or change o
nge th wn thin
e accu king;
the desire to know, and an racy o
f claim Questio
external one, the behaviors s n things
verbally
involved in pursuing that urge.

tainty as rewarding, “that kind of solves the problem,” she says. Even babies who can’t speak yet are aware of gaps in their knowl-
Reflecting the evolutionary significance of curiosity, the work edge. And Kidd has found that when children are uncertain, they
of taking the raw material encoded by the OFC neurons and continue to try to learn more and to store what they learn. Once
integrating the two different kinds of values—information and they feel they understand something, they lose interest.
physical rewards—occurs in a small, ancient structure in the In an influential 2012 study, Kidd and her colleagues showed
midbrain called the lateral habenula, according to a 2024 study seven- to eight-month-old infants animated scenes of objects
by neuroscientist Ilya Monosov and others at Washington Uni- popping out of boxes. She used an eye tracker to measure how
versity in St. Louis. The lateral habenula, which exists across long the scenes engaged the babies’ attention and found they
many species, assesses the relative importance of possible moti- preferred to look at scenes with an intermediate level of com-
vations, Monosov says. “In your daily life, you rarely make deci- plexity. Not too predictable and a little bit surprising proved to
sions based on either physical reward or secondary rewards, like be just right. (The researchers called it the “Goldilocks Effect.”)
money alone or information seeking alone,” he says. Instead our In a 2022 paper, Kidd and her colleagues observed the same pref-
brains do the complicated work of comparing our concrete erence for intermediate complexity in monkeys, suggesting
needs and our curiosity—Should I go to bed now and get enough it is widespread.
sleep or finish reading the whodunit?—and weighing one
against the other. he AppeAl of informAtion of intermediate complexity—
Other parts of the brain also grapple with uncertainty. In a
2024 study, Gottlieb and her colleagues explored perceptual
curiosity by having participants view sets of images of animals
T carrying just the right level of intrigue—makes sense as grist
for the learning mill. It seems to represent an opportunity
to add to what we know in accessible ways. To test the idea that
and inanimate objects, such as a walrus and a hat. The brain learning progress is a piece of the curiosity puzzle, Oudeyer took
clearly distinguishes animate from inanimate objects with neu- the unusual step of bringing curiosity to computers. “building
ronal signals that Gottlieb calls the equivalent of “barcodes,” a machines that are curious was exotic and strange 20 years ago,”
feature the researchers wanted to use. The images also varied in he says. but it can be an efficient way to tackle big challenges,
their clarity from easily identifiable to completely mysterious. maybe even as big as getting to another planet someday.
When people were confident about what they were looking at, Computers, of course, are not curious beings; they are compi-
the barcodes in the visual parts of their brains flashed clear sig- lations of wires, motors and sensors. In 2016, when Google Deep-
nals: animate or inanimate. but when people weren’t sure, the Mind made headlines by building a computer that beat an
signals fell somewhere in between. And when the signals from 18-time world titleholder at the complex Chinese game Go, that
the vision area reached the frontal cortex, where decisions get computer still relied on a cutting-edge search capability and data
made, they triggered either confidence or curiosity. “The more fed into it about possible moves. but as people improved at build-
uncertain this visual part of their brain was, the more curious ing AI, they started asking whether there was a better way to have
people said they were,” Gottlieb explains. computers learn complicated things. One answer would be to
Curiosity also primes memory circuits, the better to retain the give them curiosity—or programming that mimics the thought
new information. Presented with trivia questions—What beatles patterns behind curiosity-driven exploration. That’s just what
single lasted longest on the charts? What is the only known place Oudeyer and his colleagues did.
on Earth where trees have square trunks?—participants in a Torso the robot has a blue head, blue arms and a blue upper
2014 study rated their curiosity about the answers. (Don’t worry, body attached to a wood base, and it is programmed to explore its
I’ll share them at the end.) Then, in a functional magnetic reso- surroundings as a child would. It learns how objects interact by
nance imaging machine, they had to wait 14 seconds to get those playing with them. Two joysticks are mounted to Torso’s base. On
answers. While waiting, they were shown neutral images of a coffee table, a circular, rimmed arena ringed with lights con-
faces. Later, people were better able to remember answers to tains a tennis ball and a smaller robot called Ergo, which looks
questions that had stoked their curiosity—and, oddly, they were like a chunky desk lamp.
also more likely to recall faces that were paired with those ques- Unlike humans and other animals, robots can be programmed
tions. The brain imaging revealed increased activity in the hippo- to model the behavior of an ideal agent and test popular theories
campus, critical to creating memories. Matthias Gruber of Car- of how we explore. Do we keep track of prediction errors—that is,
diff University in Wales, lead author on that study, has called how right or wrong our guesses about outcomes are? Yes, but a
curiosity “a vortex” that pulls in not just what you wanted to robot programmed to do only that was distracted by its own
know about but incidental information around it. movements in irrelevant ways (imagine waving repeatedly in
Anyone who’s been subjected to their barrage of “why” ques- front of a window to learn how each arm movement relates to the
tions knows that children possess powerful curiosity. The rudi- color of the cars going by outside). Do we zero in on novelty or
mentary elements of their curious brain circuits seem to be uncertainty? Yes, but absent other motivations, those led to ran-
present early. Studying curiosity in babies shows how these cir- dom and disorganized behavior in machines.
cuits are already poised to guide knowledge acquisition through- Torso learned fastest and most efficiently when programmed
out life, according to Kidd. babies are driven to maximize learn- to pursue curiosity. The robot could produce movements and
ing from their environment and seem to recognize that surprising perceive its environment and was instructed to find correlations
events represent an opportunity. They show a strong preference between the two, though without specific aims. Instead Torso
for highly informative stimuli—a human face is more appealing was to search for opportunities for learning and follow where
than a toy truck, and infant-directed speech is more alluring than they led. “He’s basically told, your only goal is to try to find goals
nonhuman sounds. babies are also intrigued by anything new. for which you are making progress,” Oudeyer says. In effect, as
Torso gains knowledge, it is saying something like, Hmm, that’s both curious and efficient? Correct guesses are rewarding, and
interesting, let’s build on that. It is the algorithmic version of rein- errors are instructive, but do people monitor how much they are
forcement learning, or practicing. “A child needs to practice to be learning and use that information to decide what to do next? In
able to learn,” Oudeyer says. “What makes it practice? Its moti- this case, yes, they did. Participants monitored both their per-
vational system. Curiosity is one of the fundamental dimensions centage of correct responses and their improvement over time.
of motivational systems that push organisms to explore and to “It becomes obvious that what we should value is learning,” Gott-
learn new things.” lieb says. In other words, high certainty alone is less useful than
When programmed this way, Torso first moved its left the transition between high and low uncertainty. Curiosity is
hand—a lot. Then it discovered the left joystick and moved it what helps us make that shift.
forward, backward, left and right. Eventually it made the con- but curiosity also shifts over time. Although conventional
nection between moving the joystick and moving Ergo, which wisdom says people get less curious as they grow older, studies
moved the ball. Moving the ball changed the color of the lights show that it’s more accurate to say curiosity adapts to what peo-
from blue to yellow to pink. After 15 to 20 hours of exploration, ple know about the world. When you walk into the Louvre in
Torso worked out how to move Ergo in every direction, how to Paris, are you more likely to swing through all the galleries, mak-
move the ball and how to light up the arena. To the researchers’ ing sure to hit the most popular exhibits? Or do you prefer to lose
surprise, the robot even worked out that the cup at the end of yourself for an hour in one wing? Your choice most likely will
Ergo’s lamplike arm could cover the ball and effectively hide it, depend on your age, Tübingen’s Murayama says. In an experi-
which Torso proceeded to do, looking an awful lot like a shell- ment conducted with almost 500 visitors to the London Science
game hustler working a crowd on the sidewalk. Museum who were aged 12 to 79, he found younger people took a
Such experiments are evidence for a positive feedback loop broad approach and older people a narrower but deeper ap -
between curiosity and learning. “Focus on learning activities proach, viewing more facts on fewer topics in a citizen science
that are neither too easy nor too difficult, the ones where you exhibit. “Older adults have more knowledge, and knowledge is
have maximum improvement in speed, which will progressively really a driver of curiosity.”
get you to more and more complicated and yet learnable activi-
ties,” Oudeyer says. As scientists come to understand curiosity better, they may
also better understand some mental health disorders in which its
torso’s progress closely mirrored the developmental trajec- circuits may be disrupted. In depression, for example, curiosity
tories children use as they learn about tools or language. As the is dampened, whereas in obsessive-compulsive disorder the
brain continues to develop, so does the sophistication of its desire to reduce uncertainty is overwhelming.
approach to curiosity. A 2024 study of more than 100 four-year- The research has more immediate implications in the class-
olds found that they relied on learning progress as well as nov- room. It’s well known that curiosity has a positive influence on
elty to explore during a touchscreen game. And Gruber has learning outcomes and student enjoyment. Multiple efforts are
found that compared with younger children, adolescents are underway to leverage the new findings to strengthen both things.
better able to process cognitive conflict (that is, uncertainty) and In 2024 the French government began giving primary school
appraise incoming information in the higher-order areas of the students a peer-reviewed educational technology based on Oud-
prefrontal cortex. eyer’s work. The program generates personalized questions
As for adult humans, we hang out in a sweet spot, Kidd says. driven by what each child wants to learn. Compared with mate-
“We’re much more invested in watching more episodes of a show rial that teachers created by hand, the AI-designed material led
where we know the characters [and] understand something to more efficient learning and higher student motivation because
about the plot than starting something entirely new,” she says. they built on a child’s own interests.
Even in studies where participants get paid to be curious, their There may be useful ways to boost adult curiosity, too. Several
brains aren’t very curious about things that fall outside this satis- researchers are working on programs based on learning progress
fying mental place. but when they are deeply engaged, in what’s that help older adults hone their attentional skills. but anyone
sometimes called a state of flow, learning progress is guiding can take advantage of the sweet spot, Kidd says. “Just even
them. It clearly feeds their curiosity. understanding that having some knowledge will make it easier to
In a 2021 experiment published in Nature Communications, acquire more knowledge can be helpful,” she says. It can get you
Oudeyer and Gottlieb, who are frequent collaborators, and their to “sit and try to focus more on that first book that lets you break
colleagues created a set of four online games. Each game had in” to a new subject.
families of monsters that varied in size, color, number of eyes, And understanding that confidence and curiosity are related
and so on. The goal? Discover the hidden rules that dictate which probably affected your level of curiosity about the nuggets of
of eight foods each family of monsters likes to eat. The easiest trivia I sprinkled through this story. Maybe you knew that the
game had a one-dimensional rule: tall family members like pizza, most popular exhibit at the Louvre is the Mona Lisa or guessed
and short ones like broccoli. Two more games had progressively that the beatles’ most durable hit was Hey Jude. but I suspect you
more complicated rules that were harder to pick up on: with two were very curious about those odd-shaped trees. Yes, there really
dimensions, for instance, tall monsters with three eyes like pizza, are trees with square trunks—in Anton Valley in Panama.
and short monsters with two eyes like broccoli. The fourth game
had no rule; it was entirely random and unlearnable. FROM OUR ARCHIVES
The question was how the nearly 400 players would organize No Spoilers, Please! Abby Hsiung, Jia-Hou Poh, Scott Huettel
their exploration as they worked out the rules. How could they be and Alison Adcock; September 2024. ScientificAmerican.com/archive

SCIENCE AGENDA OPINION AND ANALYSIS FROM SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN’ S BOARD OF EDITORS
Book Bans Harm Kids library shelves are trying to limit the flow
of information. Their efforts aim to un
dermine democracy; they would create
Censoring what children read deprives them an electorate of young people who will
of reality and the chance to feed their curiosity not question authority, build alliances
and develop empathy BY THE EDITORS with people who have less political power,
or challenge the status quo. Knowledge
is power. book bans go against the very
nature of an open, civil society. Whether
through the legal system, the ballot box
or our voices, we must uphold educa
tional freedom and support knowledge.
We must stop the censoring of books.
Censorship has a shameful history in
the U.S. The infamous 1873 Comstock Act
made it illegal to mail works considered to
be obscene, such as pamphlets about birth
control. James Joyce’s Ulysses was banned
in the country in the 1920s, and the U.S.
Postal Service burned copies. More re
cently, conservatives have bowdlerized
the history and science children learn in
schools, altering depictions of slavery,
rejecting textbooks that reference climate
change and challenging evolution.
In 2023 the American Library Associa
tion documented more than 1,200 cases of
efforts to ban library books. Petitioners
targeted more than 4,200 books for re
moval from schools and libraries. The
most contested books of 2023 include
classics such as Toni Morrison’s The Blu-
est Eye, modern novels and graphic novels
about growing up LGbTQ+, a book about
teen health, and another about human
trafficking. PEN America, a nonprofit that
advocates for free expression in literature,
OOKS ARE A GIFT, opening a door to the wide world. noted more than 3,300 efforts to ban
B but not if you live in one of the U.S. communities where

local school boards or state officials have cast certain
books as scary monsters that harm children with words
and ideas.
Organized conservative groups in many communities are
censoring books from school and public libraries, claiming that
some themes aren’t ageappropriate for children, never mind
books in schools during the 2022–2023
academic year. In some places, books on
cancel alert have included works by Judy
blume and Margaret Atwood and, in one
case, a book about body positivity aimed
at preschoolers.
Why is it so scary to just let kids read?
the context. They target books on health, climate change, psy Education researchers Gay Ivey of the
chology, and other science they find distasteful or antithetical University of North Carolina at Greens
to their way of thinking. They try to criminalize teachers and boro and Peter Johnston of the Univer
librarians who dare to give kids a chance to indulge their curios sity at Albany studied four classrooms
ity. Under the guise of protecting children from harm, they vow where teachers let teens choose what they
to defund public libraries and alter school curricula. wanted to read from a long list of books.
but it’s the book bans themselves that cause the most harm, The students’ reading scores improved,
robbing youngsters of opportunities to think critically, explore they say, but teachers saw even more pos
ideas and learn about experiences different from their own. The itive outcomes. The students talked to
people responsible for moving books from classrooms and one another about themes in the books
70 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N DECE M bER 2 02 4 Illustration by Thomas Fuchs

FORUM COMMENTARY ON SCIENCE IN THE NEWS FROM THE EXPERTS
they read, developed compassion and

empathy for the characters and their
struggles, and thought about choices and
Birds That Offer
consequences. In addition, their mental
health improved.
Lessons in
In one survey, nearly 40 percent of
children, especially those from under Urban Survival
represented ethnic backgrounds, said
The ability of Great Tits to thrive in cities
reading about characters they could iden
tify with boosted their confidence. Yet can teach humans how to live alongside wildlife
nearly half of children ages eight to 11 BY ANDERS BRODIN
said they had trouble finding such books.
In some states, bookbanning efforts
are nestled into other bills with seem
ingly virtuous goals. In Missouri, for ex LTHOUGH ITS NAME might be Great Tits. Contrary to expectations, the
ample, Senate bill 775, enacted in 2022,
looks to protect children from sexual
abuse and trafficking, but embedded
within the law is a passage that criminal
izes teachers and librarians for giving
students “explicit sexual material,” with
wording so broad that it could include
A unknown (and blushinducing) urban birds had consistently lower levels
to some Americans, the Great of CORT than forest birds. This finding is
Tit is one of the most familiar even more remarkable when you consider
bird species in Europe and that urban populations are denser than
Asia—and one of the most intriguing. forest ones, which should increase com
The species shows a cognitive capacity petition for territories and food and hence
that is amazing for a slight bird weighing ramp up stress.
books on health or sex education. only 18 grams. It produces false alarms to Such exceptions may be more com
Rebecca Wanzo, a professor at Wash scare other birds off seed feeders and mon than one would think. Another for
ington University in St. Louis who studies knocks on kitchen windows to get feeders est bird, the European blackbird, a close
graphic novels, which are some of the most refilled. On cold winter days Great Tits relative of the American Robin, has suc
frequently banned books, says denying drum on beehives, whereupon the bees cessfully colonized suburban habitats in
children and teens access to the panoply of will come walking out, easy prey for the Europe in a similar way as the Great Tit.
ideas in books creates people who “don’t hungry birds. In combination with the A study at 10 pairs of urban and rural
know what they don’t know.” She says bird’s broad food preferences, its clever sites across Europe showed that levels of
some students who take her classes are ness has resulted in an unusual response stress hormones were consistently lower
shocked by the alternative explanations to urbanization. in the urban blackbird populations than
her lectures and reading lists provide for by “unusual,” I mean that Great Tits in forest ones.
different aspects of human existence. not only get by but thrive. And their suc Great Tits belong to the family Paridae
So where does this leave us? cess at city living offers some lessons on and are relatives of North American
Some teachers are keeping canceled how we humans can better get along with chickadees but almost twice their size.
books in secret drawers. Some schools in not just Great Tits but also our other ur They are colorful and perky, and they fre
more open districts are introducing the ban animal neighbors. quently become tame when rewarded
idea of reading clubs focusing on banned Urbanization, which involves land de with treats. Not surprisingly, they have
books. Librarians are questioning what velopment, is an increasing problem for been the subject of the highest number of
they are allowed to put on shelves instead wild animals the world over. Stressors scientific studies among all wild birds.
of promoting what’s there. Parents who such as pollution, noise, artificial light and Adaptability has also allowed Great
want their kids to have a thorough educa the lowerquality food found in cities are Tits to colonize a habitat that is in stark
tion are trying to fight back against well considered unhealthy for animals. Studies contrast to an urban one. Originating in
funded and politically motivated advo of urbanization in birds, in the temperate deciduous for
cates of book bans. cluding my research, are usu Anders Brodin ests of Eurasia, the little bird
The kids who can are speaking up for ally designed to elucidate its is a professor of ecology is now common in boreal co
books and libraries. It is up to us to help detrimental effects, with some at Lund University in niferous forests at northern
Sweden. He has studied
them, as well as the ones who can’t. book interesting exceptions. To cognition in parids latitudes. The species colo
bans are antithetical to free speech and gether with Hannah Watson, a for more than 40 years, nized northern Sweden in the
free thought. They are antidemocratic, colleague at Lund University having been first early 1900s during the con
antiscience and antievidence. Reading in Sweden, I measured levels intrigued by an article struction of railroads. bird
in Scientific American
this editorial with no one looking over of corticosterone, or CORT, a in 1983 about food feeding has a long tradition
your shoulder is your fundamental right. common stress hormone in hoarding and memory in this country, and the rail
Our children deserve the same. birds, in 188 urban and rural in them. builders took a liking to the

FORUM
birds, nailing up their leftover pork fat at

the entrances to the huts where they slept. Understanding animal cognition is
As the railroads extended northward, the
Great Tits followed. Nowadays they are
important because of the concern
common in this habitat, but when the cold about keeping wild animals in captivity.
winter takes hold, they leave the forests
and emerge at bird feeders in nearby possible ways, especially from humans. animals that we consider to be even more
towns and farms. The cognitive skills of the Great Tit have cognitively advanced.
Cognition in the Paridae family is inter been important for its successful coloniza If you aren’t sold yet on the incredible
esting, and not only because of the achieve tion of new habitats. And understanding cognitive skills of the Great Tit, here’s an
ments of that single species. In general, animal cognition has become important other piece of evidence: they are masters
members of this family possess the largest because of the growing concern about the of vocal mimicry. Compared with well
relative brain sizes of all small birds. Differ ethics of keeping wild animals in captivity. known mimics such as mockingbirds and
ent species practice one of two entirely dif Scientists disagree on many questions in European Starlings, Great Tits have an
ferent wintering strategies. All American volving the awareness of animals: Is it justi ability so rare that it may pass unnoticed. It
species, such as chickadees, and their close fiable, for example, to keep cognitively ad is the way they use their mimicry that is
relatives in the Old World, such as Willow vanced animals such as apes and dolphins impressive. Whereas other species mimic
and Marsh Tits, are largescale food hoard in captivity for our own entertainment? with the sole purpose of making their
ers. These species are spatialmemory The more we learn about animal cog songs more impressive, the Great Tit will
specialists that store many thousands of nition, the better we will be able to an mimic other birds only when it might offer
food items, all in separate locations, as swer such questions. Considering the some advantage and never in its own song.
winter food. The Great and Eurasian blue cognitive ability of a small bird such as For example, it may imitate the sounds of
Tits, in contrast, do not store food at all. the Great Tit, there should be room for almost any other songbird in a neighboring
Curious and innovative, they instead ob much reflection when we think about the location to expand its own territory. The
tain food in all possible and seemingly im confined spaces in zoos where we keep neighbor bird will then avoid the Great
Tit’s range, believing that it is already occu
pied by a competitor of its own kind.
Great Tits may also strategically mimic
Great Tit a call that warns of predators. The most
significant peril for small birds at a feeder
is an airborne predator that attacks at
high speed, such as a falcon or hawk.
When one is nearby, all small birds talk
the same language. A highpitched seeee
will make all birds at a feeder take off in
panic. In Aesop’s fable about the boy who
cried wolf, a shepherd boy gives false
alarms by repeatedly screaming, “Wolf!”
when there is no wolf present, just to fool
the villagers into rushing to his rescue.
When a wolf eventually does attack the
sheep, no one comes to help because the
villagers believe the cry is just another
false alarm. The boy did not benefit from
his trickery. The clever Great Tit, how
ever, does precisely this, sounding false
alarms and actually gaining from it: by
scaring the other birds off, the Great Tit
gains exclusive access to the feeder.
Mike Lane/Alamy Stock Photo
What can we learn from this? birds

as intelligent as the Great Tit and other
urbansurvivor species will find food we
leave for them and places to make our ac
quaintance if we give them just a little
room to use their smarts.
MIND MATTERS EDITED BY DAISY YUHAS
Reconnecting In a paper published in Nature Commu-

nications Psychology, we examined how
many people have an old friend whom they
with Old Friends care about but have lost touch with and
how willing they are to reach out to this
People may be reluctant to reach out, person. In a series of seven studies con-
ducted with more than 2,400 participants,
but both sides are gratified when they reconnect
we discovered that people are surprisingly
BY LARA B. AKNIN AND GILLIAN M. SANDSTROM reluctant to reconnect, although there are
strategies for overcoming that feeling.
We began by asking 441 university stu-
dents in Canada whether they had some-
AKE A LOOK at the contact list on can think of someone we care about but one with whom they had lost touch and, if
T your phone. Chances are that you

have dozens of names and num-
bers, but you’re in touch with
only a small subset of those peo-
ple on a regular basis. Sure, some dormant
entries may be functional, such as those
for veterinarians or car-repair shops. But
with whom we have lost touch.
Research from across the social scienc-
es has consistently shown for decades
that social relationships are critical for
our mental and physical health. Indeed,
having at least one person to count on in
times of need is one of the top predictors
so, how willing they were to call, text or
e-mail this person now and in the future.
An overwhelming majority (91 percent)
identified such a connection. People were
neutral about the idea of contacting this
person in the future, however, and even
less willing to do so at the time.
some contacts are probably friends who of life satisfaction around the globe. As To explore this hesitation, we asked the
Grace Cary/Getty Images
have faded from your life for no particular a result, we may expect people to go to same people about various barriers to
reason. Whether it be the childhood friend great lengths to maintain their social con- reaching out. These participants had many
who had a baby, the colleague who trans- nections. Yet some inevitably wane, trans- concerns, but they worried most that their
ferred to a new department or the thought- forming active friendships into dormant old friend might not be interested in hear-
ful neighbor who moved away, many of us contact-list entries. ing from them and that it would be awk-
THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH
ward to speak after so much time had who would reach out to an old friend. We
passed. In other words, people seemed to were stumped—until we realized that
worry about being an imposition in their many obstacles participants identified
Everyday
friend’s life. This worry is most likely un- when thinking about the task were simi-
founded; research shows that friends lar to the ones that prevent people from
Concussions
we’ve lost touch with appreciate hearing talking to strangers. Hidden brain injuries
from us more than we think. This similarity made us wonder wheth- are surprisingly common.
In fact, we discovered that if people er the passage of time makes old friends
could get past their worries, they were in- feel like strangers. So we tested this idea.
New diagnostics may
deed interested in reconnecting. When we In one study, we asked 288 people how improve outcomes
asked 199 young adults to think about ei- willing they were to engage in various ev- BY LYDIA DENWORTH
ther getting in touch with an old friend or eryday actions, such as picking up gar-
hearing from one, they preferred the lat- bage, booking a dentist appointment, lis-
ter. It’s not that people are uninterested tening to a favorite song from childhood
but rather that they are reluctant to initi- and, critically, talking to a stranger. Sure IFTEEN YEARS AGO I slipped on a
ate these interactions.
could encourage them to call or write to an

enough, people were no more willing to
So we conducted two experiments with reach out to an old friend than they were to
more than 1,000 people to see whether we pick up garbage or talk to a stranger.
but here is the good news: one of us
old friend. This proved surprisingly tricky (Sandstrom) has worked on an interven-
even though we tried to make it as easy as tion shown to ease anxieties about con-
possible. We recruited only people who versing with strangers. We decided to
F wet patio deck and fell backward,
slamming the back of my skull into
a pillar. I saw stars and briefly felt
nauseated. but I picked myself up,
checked that I wasn’t bleeding and went
about my day. The back of my head was
sore for a few days, but there weren’t any
were able to think of an old friend whom adapt that approach—which entails prac- lingering effects, and I didn’t see a doctor.
they wanted to reconnect with and who ticing specific social interactions—to the Still, those symptoms I did have might
they thought would be happy to hear from case of reconnecting with old friends. We have been signs of a concussion, the com-
them. Moreover, we made sure that par- asked some of our study participants to mon term for a mild traumatic brain injury
ticipants had their friend’s contact infor- complete a three-minute warm-up exer- (TbI). Such injuries are a lot more com-
mation, and we gave them a few minutes cise in which they sent messages to cur- mon than you might think and may cause
to draft a message. rent friends and acquaintances. Mean- long-term problems. When more than
Despite these favorable conditions, while others—our control group—simply 600 average middle-aged people in the
fewer than a third of people sent the mes- scrolled through social media. Afterward U.K. and Ireland were asked careful ques-
sage. Yet people who did reported greater we encouraged everyone to contact an old tions about past incidents in which they
feelings of happiness immediately after- friend. only about a third of people in might have hit their heads, a full third
ward than those who didn’t. the control group sent a message, consis- turned out to have suffered a TbI of some
In addition to providing a supportive tent with our previous experiments. but kind. And nearly three million people in
context, we tried to make the task even about half the people in the warm-up the U.S. are officially diagnosed with a TbI
easier for people in several different ways. group did so. We think that practicing the every year in emergency departments and
We told some of our participants not to behavior involved in reaching out to oth- hospitals. About 75 to 80 percent of their
overanalyze the situation and just press ers reminded people of how simple it is to injuries are described as mild.
“send.” We encouraged others to take send a message and how enjoyable it can but “mild,” it turns out, can have con-
their friend’s perspective and think about be to connect. sequences years later for many people. For
how much they would appre- Social relationships are a example, in 2023 the multicenter TRACK-
ciate receiving a note from an Lara B. Aknin key source of happiness, but TbI study revealed that out of more than
old friend. We tried to down- is a professor of social they fade for any number of 1,200 people, 33 percent of those with mild
play the fear of rejection by psychology and director reasons. That said, reaching TbI and 30 percent of those with moderate
suggesting that participants of the Helping and out may lead to greater happi- or severe TbI showed deterioration one
Happiness Lab at
should not expect to receive a Simon Fraser University ness and may be easier after to seven years after injury. Complaints
response and instead should in British Columbia. warming up. So go through can include problems sleeping, headaches,
feel good about having per- Gillian M. Sandstrom the contact list on your phone and memory and psychiatric issues. Long
formed an act of kindness by is a senior lecturer in the and message a few folks you term, a TbI can lead to dementia, and it
sending a message. psychology of kindness talk to often—and then find may also trigger several types of cardio-
None of these interventions at the University of someone you haven’t spoken vascular disease.
Sussex in England and
were successful. Nothing we director of the Sussex to in a while and have been Doctors have misunderstood or mis-
tried seemed to move the nee- Center for Research missing and try to get hold of diagnosed these problems because of an
dle on the number of people on Kindness. them, too. old way of looking at and thinking about

THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH
as well as blood biomarker results and

possibly imaging results. The biomarkers
are proteins released in the brain in re-
sponse to injury; new technology can mea-
sure concentrations of these proteins in the
bloodstream. The U.S. Food and Drug Ad-
ministration has approved two tests, for
the proteins GFAP and UCHL1, that can
predict whether intracranial lesions are
present in the brain and whether a CT scan
is warranted to confirm them.
Someone with no visible changes in im-
aging and low blood biomarkers would be
told that their recovery prognosis was
good. Someone with more worrisome indi-
cators might be told to follow up with spe-
cialists over months or even years. Physi-
cians would adjust these risk assessments
based on modifiers—for example, a person
with a history of mental health issues is at
higher risk than someone without.
“What we need to do is pay more atten-
tion to what happens in the months and
years after injury,” says neurologist David
Sharp of Imperial College London. “The
way to do that is to do blood tests for par-
ticular things we think are relevant.”
And nonprotein biomarkers are turn-
ing up too. Neuroscientist Audrey Low of
the University of Cambridge and the Mayo
Clinic used imaging to uncover signs of ce-
rebral small-vessel disease, a risk factor for
concussions. For 50 years physicians by ninds, experts are proposing a new sys- dementia. one such sign, tiny chronic
have relied on symptoms they observe, tem of diagnosis and classification that brain hemorrhages called microbleeds,
such as loss of consciousness and motor provides neurobiological detail instead of a was associated with past TbIs. The more
or verbal changes, and on patient reports vague term such as “mild.” Called the TbIs a person had, the more likely they
to classify traumatic brain injury as mild, CbI-M model, it includes clinical symp- were to have had these microbleeds. “Im-
moderate or severe. but this system isn’t toms (C), blood-based biomarkers (b), plementing more standardized tools to
very accurate at predicting either short- imaging (I) and modifiers (M). The last screen for traumatic brain injury could be
or long-term outcomes. item includes social determinants of a way to pick these up,” Low says. Such
Experts have been pushing for change health such as access to care. screening also will allow doctors to better
for several years. A 2022 National Acade- If doctors use this model, they will assess the risk of dementia.
mies report listed reclassification of these have to approach concussions and their Fortunately, health-care providers now
three grades, based on stronger evidence, treatment differently. breast cancer pa- take mild TbI far more seriously than in the
as its first recommendation. “We know tients, for instance, are not told that their past, when you’d have been told “you’ve
these terms are not accurate; they’re not cancer is mild or severe but are informed had your bell rung, and you’re fine,” says
precise. In fact, they can actually be prob- of the exact size of the tumor, whether it neuropsychiatrist Thomas W. McAllister
lematic for patients,” says Nsini Umoh, is estrogen-receptor-positive, and so on. of the Indiana University School of Medi-
who is the TbI program direc- People with a potential TbI cine. Thanks in part to modern concussion
tor at the National Institute Lydia Denworth could get that level of detail. protocols—which call for several days of
of Neurological Disorders and is an award-winning Under the proposed guide- cognitive and physical rest, followed by
Stroke (ninds). science journalist and lines, they will get a TbI score other supervised treatments—most pa-
contributing editor for
Now the field is doing some- Scientific American. She on a scale based on their re- tients do feel better in a few weeks or
thing about the problem. After is author of Friendship sponsiveness to a clinician’s months if diagnosed properly. And the
a January 2024 meeting hosted (W. W. Norton, 2020). questions (as they do today), new methods should help even more.
76 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N DEC E M bER 2 02 4 Illustration by Jay Bendt

REVIEWS EDITED BY AMY BRADY STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION
1. Publication title: Scientific American. 2. Publication number: 509-530.
3. Filing date: 10/01/2024. 4. Issue frequency: monthly, except for a combined
July/August issue. 5. Number of issues published annually: 11. 6. Annual
subscription price: U.S. and its possessions, 1 year, $79.00; Canada, 1 year,
Oak Origins: From Acorns to Species and the Tree duce with an Engelmann oak. Hipp con- $89.00; all other countries, 1 year, $99.00. 7. Complete mailing address of
of Life by Andrew L. Hipp. Illustrated by Rachel D. trasts this knack with humans’ inability to known office of publication: Scientific American, One New York Plaza, Suite
Davis. University of Chicago Press, 2024 ($35) 4600, New York, NY 10004-1562, USA. 7a. Contact person: Karen Dawson;
procreate with chimpanzees, even though
telephone: (917) 460-5373. 8. Complete mailing address of the headquarters
In many parts of the world, if our evolutionary split was far more recent. or general business office of the publisher: Scientific American, One New York
you take a walk in the woods, Oaks’ capacity to hybridize without Plaza, Suite 4600, New York, NY 10004-1562, USA. 9. Full names and com-
you are likely to encounter merging brings out fascinating nuances plete mailing address of publisher, editor and managing editor: Publisher,
an oak tree. With 425 species in the so-called Tree of Life. This visual Jeremy A. Abbate, Scientific American, One New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New
worldwide, their collective metaphor separates species into distinct York, NY 10004-1562, USA. Editor, Laura Helmuth, Scientific American, One
abundance may lead one to branches. But look closely at the oaks’ New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New York, NY 10004-1562, USA. Managing Edi-
tor, Jeanna Bryner, Scientific American, One New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New
believe these trees are some- section, Hipp says, and “you will find
York, NY 10004-1562, USA. 10. Owner: Springer Nature America, Inc., One
what unremarkable—a fixture we take for strands of gossamer trailing between the New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New York, NY 10004-1562, USA. 11. Known
granted. But Andrew L. Hipp, a botanist and branches, genes moving between lineages.” bondholders, mortgagees and other security holders owning or holding 1 per-
research director at the Morton Arboretum He gently guides readers through cent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: none.
in Illinois, reveals that oaks are a dynamic these complexities, laying the groundwork 12. Tax status: has not changed during preceding 12 months. 13. Publication
and essential part of the forest. for lucid explanations about the trees’ title: Scientific American. 14. Issue date for circulation data: September 2024.
Oaks have been on naturalists’ radar evolution and biology. In one analogy, he 15. Extent and nature of circulation: a. Total number of copies (net press run):
average number of copies of each issue during preceding 12 months: 225,776;
for some time. In On the Origin of Species, compares oaks’ prodigious potential for number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 215,711.
Charles Darwin highlighted European oaks genetic recombination with the extensive b. Paid circulation (by mail and outside the mail): (1 ) mailed outside-county
as an example of species variation. The postproduction tape-splicing that created paid subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541 (include paid distribution above
advent of DNA technology, though, offered Miles Davis’s song “Pharoah’s Dance.” nominal rate, advertiser’s proof copies and exchange copies): average number
a sharp new lens on what Hipp calls one of Oaks are primed with genetic flexibility of copies of each issue during preceding 12 months: 144,591; number of
oaks’ “superpowers”: their ability to breed that allows them to solve ecological prob- copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 139,983. (2 ) mailed
in-county paid subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541 (include paid distribu-
with other oak species while still maintain- lems. But the current rise in global tem-
tion above nominal rate, advertiser’s proof copies and exchange copies): av-
ing some of their original genetic qualities. peratures far outpaces its fastest previ- erage number of copies of each issue during preceding 12 months: 0; number
After oaks first appeared—56 million ous climb, posing a problem even these of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. (3 ) paid distribu-
years ago—they expanded their range, “protean” adapters cannot solve without tion outside the mails, including sales through dealers and carriers, street
adapting to diverse environments through human intervention. Hipp’s work shows vendors, counter sales and other paid distribution outside USPS®: average
natural selection. They began to diverge into that conserving oak species will preserve number of copies of each issue during preceding 12 months: 34,525; number
distinct species at least 45 million years ago. invaluable nodes in our genetic web. of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 31,991. (4 ) distribu-
tion by other classes of mail through the USPS (e.g., First-Class Mail®): aver-
Yet a California scrub white oak can repro- —Dana Dunham age number of copies of each issue during preceding 12 months: 0; number
of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. c. Total paid dis-
tribution (sum of 15b (1 ), (2 ), (3 ) and (4 )): average number of copies of each
End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland: of Birnbaum’s choices intact, including issue during preceding 12 months: 179,116; number of copies of single issue
A New Translation by Haruki Murakami. Translated the names of the secretive Calcutecs and published nearest to filing date: 171,974. d. Free or nominal rate distribution
by Jay Rubin. Everyman’s Library, 2024 ($30) (by mail and outside the mail): (1 ) free or nominal rate outside-county includ-
their criminal rivals, the Semiotics.
ed on PS Form 3541: average number of copies of each issue during preceding
First translated from the Jap- Rubin has chosen to revert the title’s
12 months: 111; number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing
anese in 1991 by Alfred Birn- order in English to that of the original date: 53. (2 ) free or nominal rate in-county copies included on PS Form 3541:
baum, Haruki Murakami’s Japanese, giving primacy to the better average number of copies of each issue during preceding 12 months: 0; num-
award-winning 1985 novel is of Murakami’s settings, the mysterious ber of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. (3 ) free or
a tale of two worlds. One is walled town called End of the World. Here nominal rate copies mailed at other classes through the USPS (e.g., First-Class
a clever pastiche of cyberpunk the translator’s decisions matter consid- Mail): average number of copies of each issue during preceding 12 months:
and detective tropes where erably, with Rubin choosing “heart” (in- 0; number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. (4 ) free
or nominal rate distribution outside the mail (carriers or other means): aver-
rival syndicates secretly vie for dominance; stead of Birnbaum’s “mind”) for the appar-
age number of copies of each issue during preceding 12 months: 3; number
the other is a surreal fantasy where “old ently difficult-to-translate kokoro, which of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 14. e. Total free or
dreams” are read from the skulls of myste- Rubin explains actually “straddles the full nominal rate distribution (sum of 15d (1 ), ( 2 ), (3 ) and (4 )): average number
rious one-horned creatures. In a new trans- territory” of mind, heart and morality. of copies of each issue during preceding 12 months: 114; number of copies of
lation, longtime Murakami translator Jay Ru- Although the relative limitations of En- single issue published nearest to filing date: 67. f. Total distribution (sum of
bin restores, at the author’s request, roughly glish occasionally risk reduced complexity, 15c and 15e): average number of copies of each issue during preceding 12
months: 179,230; number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing
100 pages of previously excised material. the resulting language often still moves, as
date: 172,041. g. Copies not distributed: average number of copies of each
This new material noticeably lengthens when one narrator pledges his emergent issue during preceding 12 months: 46,546; number of copies of single issue
the novel but doesn’t significantly increase dream-reading skills to help his romantic published nearest to filing date: 43,670. h. Total (sum of 15f and 15g ): average
its pleasures—pleasures one reaches only interest recover her lost heart, her missing number of copies of each issue during preceding 12 months: 225,776; number
by wading through too much juvenile erotica kokoro: “The heart is not like raindrops,” of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 215,711. i. Percent
and misogyny, including a novel-length de- he promises. “It doesn’t fall from the sky, paid (15c divided by 15f times 100): average number of copies of each issue
piction of a 17-year-old character termed the indistinguishable from other things ... I’ll during preceding 12 months: 99.94%; number of copies of single issue
published nearest to filing date: 99.96%. 16. Total circulation does not in-
“fat girl,” whose body composition and sex- find it for sure. Anything and everything is
clude electronic copies. 17. Publication of statement of ownership: If the
ual possibility are central preoccupations. here, and anything and everything is not publication is a general publication, publication of this statement is re-
Still, Murakami fans will enjoy the chance to here.” As it is when Murakami’s two sto- quired. Will be printed in the December 2024 issue of this publication.
read the novel in a form closer to the author’s rylines finally come together, it’s where 18. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete.
original intent and make comparisons be- mind, heart and morality converge that I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on
tween the familiar Birnbaum and Rubin’s End of the World and Hard-Boiled Won- this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may
newer effort. Rubin nonetheless keeps many derland is at its best. —Matt Bell be subject to criminal sanctions (including fines and imprisonment) and/
or civil sanctions (including civil penalties). Signature and title of Editor,
Publisher, Business Manager or Owner: (signed) Karen Dawson, Head of
Logistics, Americas. Date: 10/01/2024.
MATH
Here’s how it works. Check out the black-

and-white map of the contiguous U.S.
WA at the left. It looks a little bare-bones. To
MT VT ME
ND make maps more vivid and clearly high-
OR MN
NH light their borders, cartographers tend to
ID SD WI NY MA color in the regions.
WY MI RI Naturally, we don’t want neighboring
PA CT
NE IA NJ states to have the same color, because that
NV OH
UT IL IN DE would make the boundaries more confus-
CA CO WV MD
MO VA ing. Under this constraint, we used four
KS KY colors to fill in the black-and-white map.
NC
TN Could we have done it with only three?
AZ OK
NM AR SC Might other maps require five or six?
MS AL GA The map in this problem doesn’t need
TX LA to correspond to real geography—any
partitioning of a flat surface into distinct
FL regions qualifies. The question, given any
such map, is how many colors are required
to fill in each region so that no two adja-
WA cent regions have the same shade. Some
MT VT ME ground rules: Each distinct region must be
ND
OR MN contiguous (technically Michigan violates
NH this rule in U.S. maps because Lake Mich-
ID SD WI NY MA
WY MI igan severs the state into two disconnect-
RI
PA CT ed parts). For two regions to count as adja-
NE IA NJ
NV OH cent, they must share some length of con-
UT IL IN DE
CA CO WV MD tiguous border; touching at a single point
VA
KS MO
KY (or discrete set of points) doesn’t qualify.
NC For example, Utah and New Mexico touch
TN
AZ OK at only one corner and so do not count as
NM AR SC
neighbors for our purposes.
MS AL GA
With the rules established, here are
TX LA some questions with surprising answers.
In this map, no two Suppose I printed out a large poster with a
adjacent states are FL
colored in the same hue.
complicated map containing a few thou-
sand regions. How long would it take you
to determine whether the map could be
colored with two colors? Three colors?
Four colors? You don’t necessarily need to
The Map Color find a coloring scheme; just decide wheth-

er it exists for each number of colors. Curi-
Conundrum ously, although the task seems nearly iden-

tical for all the numbers, it requires radi-
cally different amounts of time to complete
How a doodler’s problem sparked Jack Murtagh for each. Using the best-known methods:
is a freelance math writer
a controversy in math BY JACK MURTAGH and puzzle creator.
He writes a column on ● Deciding whether two colors suffice
mathematical curiosities would take about an hour. To do it, pick
N 1852 MATHEMATICIAN Francis Guthrie asked a seemingly for Scientific American out any region and color it, say, red.
I
and creates daily
simple question that triggered endless dispute, left a trail of puzzles for the Morning This forces all the region’s neighbors
overturned publications in its wake and culminated in a res- Brew newsletter. into your second color, say, blue. In
olution that has stretched the very tenets of math. The conun- He holds a Ph.D. in turn, all their neighbors become red
drum that stirred up so much trouble was: What is the theoretical computer and so on, propagating through the
science from Harvard
minimum number of colors needed to color a map so that no University. Follow him map. Eventually you either encounter a
neighboring states or other designated areas have the same hue? on X @JackPMurtagh conflict where neighboring regions
78 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N DECE M bER 2 02 4 Graphics by June Kim

share a color, in which case no “two- the counties of England. He suspected this stand this way for almost a century more.
coloring” exists, or the colors spread rule would generalize to any map, but al- Although nobody could find a map re-
through the entire map conflict-free, in though any kindergartner could under- quiring five colors, no one could rule out the
which case you’ve found a valid color- stand the question, neither he nor his col- possibility of one, either. because there are
ing. A back-of-the-envelope calcula- leagues could prove it. It was clear that three an infinite number of maps, one could nev-
tion with 3,000 regions at a rate of one colors wouldn’t always hack it, as evidenced er check each of them individually. A key
second per coloring yields 50 minutes by the circle diagram below, where every re- step toward a solution involved reducing
of time well spent. gion borders every other one. the problem to a finite set of cases that could
● Suppose the map can’t be filled with be checked individually. The leap from in-
only two colors. Deciding whether finite to finite seems vast, but the monstrous
three colors suffice would take longer. number of cases to check still far exceeded
The afternoon would pass you by. The what any person could manually process.
weeks would peel off the calendar as So mathematicians Kenneth Appel and
you furiously scribbled endless config- Wolfgang Haken, then both at the Univer-
urations, searching for one that works. sity of Illinois, turned to a daring idea: pro-
To carry forth, you’d have to pass down gram a computer to process them instead.
the ongoing task to your children and In 1976, after years of fine-tuning and more
they to their children. Generations of than 1,000 hours of computer time, their
lives devoted to nothing other than algorithm finished exhaustively checking
finding a three-coloring of this map every case, and the four-color theorem was
wouldn’t put a dent in the workload as established. It was the first major theorem
the sun inevitably engulfed Earth in to use a computer in its proof.
some billions of years and put an end to The math world lit ablaze with equal
the silly endeavor, leaving us barely parts celebration and dismay. one of Appel
closer to an answer. and Haken’s colleagues, William Tutte of
Determining whether an arbitrary but nobody could find a map that the University of Waterloo in ontario, re-
map has a three-coloring is hard. Here required five colors. Stymied by the prob- joiced that they “smote the kraken.” others
“hard” is a technical term indicating lem, mathematician Augustus De Morgan despised the thought of computers en-
that it falls into a class of computational grew obsessed with it and concluded that croaching on human ingenuity. The affair
problems renowned for their time-con- a new axiom—which in math is a state- also posed a philosophical problem in the
suming difficulty, called NP-complete ment that is assumed to be true without math community. Does a proof that can’t
problems. For problems in this class, we proof, from which more complicated be verified by humans count as a proof at
don’t know any faster methods than statements can be derived—must be add- all? Many expected the work to eventually
more or less brute-force searching ed to the foundations of math to resolve be retracted like both the alleged proofs
through every possible solution. That Guthrie’s conjecture. that preceded it. The New York Times even
search space grows exponentially as the The fevered frustration ostensibly end- refused to report on the announcement at
size of the problem increases. For a small ed in 1879, when a proof emerged that four first because proofs of the four-color theo-
map with only a few regions, we could colors always suffice. This was underscored rem “were all false anyway.”
afford to exhaustively look through ev- by a second, independent proof a year later. Multiple attempts to refute the com-
ery possible three-coloring until we find With the matter settled and accolades dis- puter-assisted proof failed in the follow-
one that works (or conclude that there tributed, captivated mathematicians re- ing decades. Mathematicians have since
isn’t one). but the number of ways to as- turned to their usual research pursuits— drastically simplified the proof and veri-
sign three colors to maps with thousands except for some. Eleven years after the pub- fied the computer code, but to this day no
of regions is so astronomical that it ren- lication of the first proof, both proofs were proof of the theorem derived without the
ders exhaustive searches hopeless. overturned, and the slippery four-color aid of computers is known. And although
● And four colors? Well, that takes about theorem reverted to the four-color conjec- the four-color theorem has become widely
one second or the time you need to say ture. Percy John Heawood of Durham Uni- accepted as a fact, a yearning lingers over
“yes” because every map can be colored versity in England, who exposed a hole in it. A computer program that systematical-
with four colors. This outcome is the the original proof, made some progress, ly analyzes reams of configurations does
infamous and long-disputed four-col- however, by proving that five colors always not explain exactly why every map can be
or theorem. suffice for filling any map. filled with four colors. Even though math-
This left the math world in a rather em- ematicians now welcome computers as
When Guthrie first conjectured the barrassing position. A problem so seem- partners in discovery, they are still search-
four-color theorem in 1852, he noticed that ingly simple had one of two answers—four ing for a more illuminating proof of this
he needed only four colors to properly fill or five—but which was correct? It would colorful puzzle.

THE UNIVERSE
A pair of far-distant colliding spiral galaxies,
The Milky Way’s Fate as seen by NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space
telescopes. A similar fate may await our own Milky
Way billions of years from now if it collides with
Will our galaxy ever collide with its neighbor? our nearest neighboring spiral galaxy, Andromeda.
BY PHIL PLAIT nearby galaxies are taken into consider
ation, the chance of the Milky Way collid
ing with Andromeda is only about 50 per
COSMIC TRAIN WRECK may be looming in our future. cent. A decent likelihood, though nowhere
A The Andromeda galaxy, a near twin of our Milky Way,

is barreling toward us. You can already see it coming if
you know where to look—Andromeda’s great spiral
appears as a fuzzy smudge, faint but larger than the full
moon, in Earth’s late summer and autumn skies in the Northern
Hemisphere. Over the eons, as our neighboring galaxy ap
proaches, it will grow larger in the heavens until it engulfs our
near a sure bet.
The Milky Way is a flattish disk galaxy
that is about 120,000 lightyears wide. It
contains hundreds of billions of stars, as
well as clouds of gas and dust, assorted
dead stars, and one very large black hole at
its center. It’s also surrounded by a colos
entire view—at which point it will physically collide with our gal sal halo of old stars and invisible dark
axy, spawning chaos and flinging stars asunder in the resulting matter. The total mass of the Milky Way is
merger and perhaps even ejecting our own solar system into approximately 1.5 trillion times the mass
ASA, ESA and Hubble Heritage Team (STScI)
intergalactic space. of the sun. Our galaxy is immense.

Or this might not happen. It’s hard to say. Andromeda is much the same but per
Although a lot of research indicates a potential collision be haps 30 percent more massive. The galaxy
tween these two colossal structures—and certainly there’s been Phil Plait is located across a vast reach of intergalac
no shortage of reporting on the possibility over the years—the is a professional tic space, about 2.5 million lightyears
galactic smashup is by no means inevitable. In fact, an interna astronomer and science away from us. Andromeda and the Milky
communicator in Virginia.
tional team of European scientists contests the idea. In a (not yet He writes the Bad
Way are the two biggest members of the
peerreviewed) research paper posted on the preprint server Astronomy Newsletter. Local Group, a small clutch of about 100
arXiv.org, the researchers show that when the effects of other Follow him on Beehiiv. galaxies, most of which are much smaller
and fainter. The two next largest are the
Triangulum galaxy (M33), which is about Although Andromeda is headed mostly
2.7 million lightyears from the Milky
Way (and only 700,000 lightyears from
toward us, it may also be moving to the
Andromeda; they lie close together in the side. If this lateral shift is large enough,
night sky), and the Large Magellanic
Cloud (LMC), a satellite of the Milky Way the galaxy could miss us.
that is about 160,000 lightyears away.
These four dominate the Local Group. tic mergers can be quite ostentatious oc Milky Way and Andromeda, they found
In galaxy clusters—large collections of currences. They’re not usually great places the galaxies collided slightly less than
hundreds or thousands of galaxies—we to have a habitable planet. half the time. It’s almost a coin flip: heads
see members colliding fairly often. The This naturally raises the question of means a collision, and tails gives us a close
gravitational interactions between galax whether Andromeda and the Milky Way pass but avoids an actual merger—al
ies can draw them together in a cosmic are doomed to merge. Early studies of though the interaction will cause a some
dance that can take the better part of a Andromeda showed that (unlike nearly what less disruptive version of the chaos
billion years to complete. Two interacting every other galaxy in the universe) it’s described earlier.
galaxies usually first make a close pass blueshifted, meaning it’s moving through What’s also new in this study is the
and then circle back and slam into each space toward the Milky Way. This motion inclusion of both M33 and the LMC, both
other sometime later. The two can merge, isn’t subtle: the galaxy is approaching at a of which are massive enough to gravita
forming a single, larger object that even staggering speed of about 110 kilometers tionally affect the trajectories of their
tually settles into a cottonball shaped per second. much larger siblings. Including just the
elliptical galaxy. That makes it seem like a collision is in LMC reduces the chance of a crash to only
That simple summary belies the mind evitable. How could something approach about 30 percent—it orbits the Milky Way,
crushing chaos of such an event, however. ing so fast not score a hit? The answer is and in most cases, it essentially pulls us to
A close pass can stretch the pair of galaxies that although Andromeda is headed mostly the side just enough to dodge a collision.
like taffy as each gravitationally grasps at toward us, it may also be moving to the Adding M33 in, however, pulls us back
the other, drawing out streams of gas and side. If this lateral shift—astronomers call toward Andromeda, once again giving us
stars called tidal tails, which can be hun it transverse velocity—is large enough, the even odds of an impact.
dreds of thousands of lightyears long. galaxy could miss us. That’s better than inevitability but
Angular momentum causes the tidal tails The problem is measuring that trans perhaps not terribly reassuring. If you
to curve gracefully as the two galaxies verse motion. Andromeda is a long way prefer to breathe easier, note that if this
swing by each other. This process also away, and its apparent motion across the tryst does happen, it won’t occur for
steals orbital energy from the galaxies, sky is incredibly small. It was only very re roughly another eight billion years. by
allowing them to slow, drop back toward cently that astronomers were able to mea then the sun will have evolved past its red
each other and merge. The pandemonium sure this tiny movement at all. The uncer giant stage, cooked Earth and shrunk
involved in the collision can drastically tainties are still large, but the overall into a white dwarf. That’s cold comfort,
change the orbits of stars, hurling some transverse velocity indicates that Androm I know.
toward the galactic center or flinging them eda and the Milky Way will, at the very On the other hand, collisions and merg
far out into the galactic suburbs. least, experience a close pass. How close, ers such as this one are how galaxies grow.
Worse, the myriad gas clouds orbiting we can’t yet say. The Milky Way is a bruiser among galax
in a galaxy are huge—some are hundreds The new research takes that into ac ies, and it got here by what is essentially
of lightyears wide. They very much can count. The scientists created computer galactic cannibalism. And despite the
collide, and when they do, they can col simulations of the motions of the two gal chaos, the future merged object—which
lapse and form lots of stars, creating tre axies and ran them forward in time to see some astronomers call Milkomeda—may
mendous outbursts of energy. Not only whether a collision will occur. The team for a time be rejuvenated, with millions of
that, but enormous amounts of dust and took a different approach than others had new stars born in the aftermath. (To be
gas can be dislodged to plummet toward in the past, running the simulations over honest, I’m not a fan of the name Milko
each galaxy’s central supermassive black and over again, changing the input param meda, but I can’t think of anything better.
hole, piling up just outside to form an eters a little bit each time—for example, Andromeway is way worse.)
infernally hot accretion disk. As all that increasing or decreasing the velocities a There are bleaker fates. And again, this
accumulated material approaches its final tad—to cover the uncertainties in the crash may not happen at all. As time goes
plunge into the black hole’s maw, it can measured numbers. on and astronomers make more observa
blast out more energy than all the stars in This approach builds up statistical tions of Andromeda, we’ll get better data,
both galaxies combined. models, giving a likelihood of collision. and we’ll know for certain what literally
So despite taking eons to unfold, galac When the researchers did this for just the lies ahead.

Q&A WITH TROY HUNT
Pentester’s NPD breach Check. At the web-

site Have I been Pwned?, launched by Aus-
tralia-based online security consultant
Troy Hunt in 2013, visitors can see whether
their e-mail addresses have been exposed
in data breaches; an offshoot project simi-
larly evaluates passwords.
In its decade-plus of existence, Have
I been Pwned? has ballooned to include six
billion unique e-mail addresses. Each ac-
count has been breached slightly more than
twice on average. “I had no idea it would
become big—I wouldn’t have given it such
a stupid name,” Hunt says. To “pwn” (pro-
nounced “pone” as a pun on “own”) some-
one is to utterly defeat them, per Internet
slang that enjoyed a heyday in the early
2000s. It also means to take unauthorized
control of someone’s computer hardware
or, say, e-mail account.
As Hunt puts it, the risk of a data breach
What Giant Data is simply a cold reality that comes with being
online. If the Internet is the information su-
perhighway, leaks are among the roadside
Breaches Mean for You wreckage. “It’s terrible that we have a road
toll—and objectives toward zero are fantas-
Expert advice for protecting sensitive data tic,” he says. “but while we hurtle around at
BY BEN GUARINO 100 kilometers an hour in metal machines,
this is what’s going to happen.” Hunt talked
with Scientific American about how to
make sense of the potentially alarming
T SOME POINT IN THE PAST YEAR, one or more hackers amount of data involved in massive breach-
A quietly breached a background-checking company called

National Public Data (NPD) and exposed millions of U.S.
Social Security numbers (SSNs), names, phone numbers,
and e-mail and mailing addresses. The accuracy and sig-
nificance of some of these data, much of which NPD had probably
scraped from public governmental records, is questionable. The re-
ality of the leak itself is not: in August, NPD acknowledged an inci-
es and what an increasingly online world
means for our private information.
An edited transcript of
the conversation follows.
Some major data breaches have been

revealed this year, such as the AT&T
dent involving “a third-party bad actor that was trying to hack into breach, which exposed data from
data in late December 2023,” according to a notice on the data-ag- 73 million former and current custom-
gregating company’s website. The stolen information appears to ers. More recently, there was this
have been put up for sale online beginning in the spring. National Public Data fiasco. One clear
It is deeply unpleasant to imagine SSNs and other sensitive difference between those breaches is
information circulating like so much digital plankton along the that NPD was this little-known data
web’s darker currents. And what has spilled out can’t be recalled. aggregator that sells services such as
So what does one do when this happens? background checks—not a big, familiar
You can freeze your credit—preventing anyone from opening a corporation. Maybe there’s no blueprint
new credit account in your name until the freeze is lifted—via the for what a standard data breach is,
major reporting bureaus. (The three main agencies used in the U.S. but you tell me: Is this an unusual case?
are Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.) Such an incident offers a I’m looking at the list of the big breaches in
sobering reminder to practice good password hygiene going for- the Have I been Pwned? database, and of-
Ben Guarino
ward. Don’t reuse passwords—their complexity and uniqueness is an associate
ten they are from the likes of data aggrega-
are powerful—and consider a manager such as 1Password. Amer- technology editor tors. People don’t know who data aggrega-
icans can check whether their SSN was exposed via a tool such as at Scientific American. tors are. Most of us, I think, are not too
82 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N DECE M bER 2 02 4 Illustration by Shideh Ghandeharizadeh

keen on the idea of data aggregation. We critically about big, scary numbers in “The State of Data Breaches.” People
don’t like the idea of organizations siphon- headlines about data breaches? might be surprised to know that
ing up and monetizing our data—without We’ve seen this so many times before. over data-breach laws can have exceptions
our knowledge or informed consent. I’ll the summer we were seeing headlines of related to notification. In Florida,
add that caveat. the biggest password dump ever, which where NPD is based, if a security breach
When an incident like this happens, it’s had 10 billion records. but when bad actors involves more than 500,000 people,
quite frustrating for people because they’re include every word from the dictionary what is legally sufficient is a notice
going, “Who is this organization? Why do and every combination of it, does the aver- “in print and to broadcast media” and
they have my data? What can I do?” And age person have to worry about it? No! “a conspicuous notice on the Internet
really, you don’t have any recourse. Earlier this year there was another one website of the covered entity.”
going around. It’s called the “mother of all How would you improve disclosure?
There are a few standard suggestions breaches.” That was 20 billion records or Disclosure doesn’t necessarily mean letting
for what to do after a breach, such as something. Well, it’s just that someone the individuals know. It’s usually disclosure
placing freezes with credit-reporting siphoned up a whole bunch of breaches to the regulator unless we’re talking about
bureaus and making sure your pass- and put them all together. Add one more, sensitive personal information—health
words are robust. Is there anything else and now you’ve got the bigger mother of data, for example. The carve-out in Austra-
people should be doing? all breaches. lia is that there’s got to be a likelihood of
There’s no discrete thing you can do di- by the same token, the truth is always causing serious harm. The Florida situation,
rectly about this kind of incident. It’s not there in the data. The number of records in like you just mentioned, is a notice. Califor-
like when infidelity dating website Ashley total is an important figure. but without the nia’s got the California Consumer Privacy
Madison got breached, where you should context of what that actually means, it’s Act, but I believe even under that, compa-
change your password and probably have hard to understand it. So I think a much fair- nies can still decide whether or not to notify
a conversation with your spouse or part- er metric is how many people are impacted. individuals in the vast majority of cases.
ner. In this case, it’s all the fundamental And clearly, if it’s just U.S. Social Security There are all of these people who get
stuff you really should be doing anyway. numbers, it’s going to be in the low hundreds pissed when they don’t get told—like, real-
You should have whatever freezes you have of millions at the absolute upper limit. ly, really pissed, understandably! And I’m
available on credit until you actually need sitting here at Have I been Pwned? going,
to apply for it. For identity-theft-monitor- Do we know for sure that every “Well, I’ve got your data. I can let you know.”
ing services, you have to spend some American Social Security number but it shouldn’t be my job, right? I should
money, but it’s not a bad idea. And then, of is in the NPD breach? be completely redundant because organi-
course, use strong, unique passwords and No, we don’t know that for sure. Investiga- zations should notify people early.
multifactor authentication. tive journalist brian Krebs has written some
Then just have that consciousness of good stuff about this. There are lots of dif- You’ve worked on Have I Been Pwned?
“What are the things you should be look- ferent places where these data might be for more than a decade. But let’s look
ing out for that might indicate these data published, and then they all get aggregated ahead. Where are data breaches headed
are being abused?”—phone calls from a together. If you haven’t, for example, been in the next 10 years?
bank, for example, asking about an appli- arrested or ended up in a public record If you think about the factors that lead to
cation you’ve made that you have no idea somewhere, then you may not be in there. data breaches or amplify data breaches,
about. The guidance doesn’t change be- The thing that really frustrates me we’ll have more people. We’ll have more
cause of this breach. It just reinforces it. about this is that clearly NPD had a breach. systems. We’ll have more devices that have
I don’t think there’s any question about that data; we’ve seen a lot of Internet of Things–
There were rumors of the NPD breach anymore. And when you look at its disclo- related data breaches. There are data col-
trickling around for a few months sure notice, there’s basically nothing there. lected from CloudPets toys—teddy bears
before it percolated into the main- The company has really given us nothing of that talk—in Have I been Pwned? We’re
stream media. When it first hit, some any substance. also going down a path where we’re seeing
of the headlines described 2.9 billion [Editor’s note: Scientific American re- a lot of breaches—such as all the ones from
hacked accounts, which was off base. peatedly e-mailed NPD to ask whether it had this year related to cloud data- storage
The breach actually appears to consist taken additional actions to contact affected company Snowflake—where we’re so de-
of 2.9 billion or so rows of data. individuals. The company did not respond. In pendent on external services that a flaw or
Also complicating matters, bad actors a recorded message on its breach hotline, NPD a practice on behalf of threat actors can get
behind a leak or sale might not be says it “will try to notify you if there are further reapplied over and over and over again to
trustworthy—they’ll boast and inflate significant developments applicable to you.”] everyone using that particular platform. So
file sizes or combine already exposed all these factors combine to amplify the
data from multiple breaches to make You wrote about lackluster corporate problems we’re having now. In summary,
a leak look huge. How should we think disclosure in a June blog post entitled I think it’s getting worse.

OBSERVATORY KEEPING AN EYE ON SCIENCE
health disparities in the U.S. (and the role of

corporate America in creating and reinforc
ing many of those disparities), historians
David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz re
count an argument made 99 years ago,
when the fossilfuel industry defended an
activity that would soon kill large numbers
of people: putting lead in gasoline.
by the 1920s many people, most notably
American physician and Harvard University
professor Alice Hamilton, had become con
cerned about occupational exposure to toxic
materials, such as lead, asbestos and mercu
ry. Hamilton was an expert on lead poison
ing, and some states had passed laws to limit
exposure to toxic substances in the work
place, in part based on her work. When the
oil industry decided to add lead to gasoline,
Hamilton was concerned. The situation pit
ted her against some of the biggest names in
Fossil Fuels American business, including industrialists

Charles F. Kettering and Alfred P. Sloan and
oil magnate John D. Rockefeller.
Are Not Essential General Motors engineer Thomas Midg
ley, Jr., had discovered that adding tetra
The industry argues that we can’t live without ethyl lead to gasoline solved the problem of
its deadly products. It is wrong BY NAOMI ORESKES knocking—the noise caused by fuel burning
unevenly or incompletely in an engine.
Midgley worked under Kettering—GM’s
HE FINAL RESULTS are not yet in, a grim fact. Perhaps for this reason, the re head of research—who reported directly to
T but it’s pretty certain that 2024 is sponse of the fossilfuel industry is to shrug
going to be the hottest year on rec its shoulders and insist that, despite all the
ord. Practically every week this climate damage that fossil fuels cause, we
year, we heard of some new daily just can’t live without them. In a white paper
or monthly record being broken, some ex published earlier this year, KinderMorgan,
treme weather event made more extreme which owns and operates pipelines, put it
than it would have been by humancaused this way: “There is an enduring economic
Sloan, GM’s CEO. GM quickly contracted
with Rockefeller’s Standard Oil to put tetra
ethyl lead into gasoline. by 1923 the product
was on the market.
but there was a catch. It had been known
since classical antiquity that lead is highly
toxic; Midgley himself had suffered a bout
climate change. In July exceptional rainfall and social need for fossil fuels that will con of lead poisoning as a result of his research.
led to flooding that triggered deadly land tinue to play a central role in our lives.” Exx Many workers in industrial settings where
slides in the Kerala region of India, killing onMobil’s 2024 Global Outlook declares lead was used became ill or died. So GM and
hundreds of people. In September, Hurri that “oil and natural gas remain vital” be DuPont—which would manufacture the
cane Helene became one of the biggest cause they are “needed for modern life.” tetraethyl lead—agreed the product would
storms to hit the U.S. Fueled by record Everyone involved in the energy and en be marketed simply as “ethyl.”
high ocean temperatures, the storm brought vironment conversation knows any transi It didn’t take long for scientists to voice
torrential rains and massive storm surges tion away from fossil fuels and toward re concerns. According to Rosner and Mar
to the Southeast. At press time, the death newable energy will take time. Indeed, this kowitz, the U.S. surgeon general wrote to
toll from the hurricane had surpassed 230. is why it’s so consequential that the oil and the chair of DuPont asking whether the
Sadly, reports of these events gas industry has worked for de companies had taken public health impacts
Naomi Oreskes
often provoke not shock, sad is a professor of the cades to delay the transition, into account. Midgley admitted that neither
ness or outrage but rather a history of science at which even it now acknowledg DuPont nor GM had collected any relevant
sense of déjà vu, if not ennui. If Harvard University. es is necessary. data, but he nonetheless insisted that the
2024 does prove to be the hot She is author of Why The argument that we can’t amounts that an ordinary person would be
Trust Science? (Princeton
test year ever measured, it will University Press, 2019) live without a dangerous, even exposed to would be harmless.
be the fifth time in less than a and co-author of The Big deadly product is an old one. In In 1925 the surgeon general organized a
decade that we have faced such Myth (Bloomsbury, 2023). their new book on the history of conference of businesspeople, union lead
84 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N DECE M bER 2 02 4 Illustration by Scott Brundage

METER EDITED BY DAVA SOBEL
ers, scientists, doctors and government of

ficials to consider the matter. Given what
Midgley told the surgeon general, one
might expect the representatives of Ameri
can industry to have insisted that lead in
gasoline was safe. Instead they argued it was
essential for the U.S. economy, for industri
al progress, for the American way of life.
Kettering contended that because oil
supplies were limited, anything that im
proved efficiency had to be viewed as indis
pensable. Standard Oil’s lawyers and engi
neers stated at the conference: “Our contin
ued development of motor fuels is essential
in our civilization.”
In later years, industry representatives
and defenders would repeatedly reprise this
theme. True, some workers got sick or even
died, but this was the price of progress. The
editor of the journal Chemical and Metal-
lurgical Engineering asserted that “casual
ties” from lead “were negligible compared
to human sacrifice in the development of
many other industrial enterprises.”
In 1965 California Institute of Technolo The First Bite
gy geochemist Clair C. Patterson estimated
that the blood lead level of many Americans It’s been a billion years since blue green algae sequined
was more than 100 times what it would be lakes and—like a python swallowing a pig—a protist ate one.
from natural causes and well above what I see that pale hunter orbiting gloomy coves
tail whipping mellow waters, then guzzling a necklace
was known to cause at least lowlevel lead
of cyanobacteria—
poisoning. Meanwhile other scientific stud awareness tuned only
ies were proving that even low levels of lead to that earthen, exquisite taste
exposure could cause neurotoxicity, with not knowing that algae eat sunlight
alarming effects on intelligence and behav and pluck electric arcs from water
ior. In 1973 the U.S. began a gradual phase exhaling long tongues of odorless oxygen
out of leaded gasoline. In 2021 Algeria be that suffocate anaerobes all over this earth.
came the last country to ban it. It waits for its meal to die.
But one green bloom burns on
When lead was removed from gas, the
inside, spits flame, survives.
positive effects were dramatic. One study Night ebbs, day breaks
found that between 1976 and 1995, mean And now the protist feels pregnant
American blood lead levels dropped with a tiny sun god.
90 percent. Moreover, the scaremongering Together they tumble over the ocean
predictions of Midgley and Co. did not drunk with the liquors of light
come true. Not only did the American econ each trying to cough up the other
omy not collapse when leaded gasoline for to be alone again and just float sated.
Hundreds of millions of years of wrestling
cars was phased out, but it took only a few
until the captive, now a chloroplast
short years for car manufacturers to rede
packed with pigments,
sign engines to operate with unleaded gas. is fully formed
Leaded gasoline was not essential to civili and engineers a biosphere:
zation, and neither are fossil fuels. What is A garden in the east, just shy of Eden
essential to civilization is that we dramati an apple, another reckless bite, exile
cally reduce our use of coal, oil and gas—the across the jeweled earth
largest contributors to the existential threat Gillian Neimark
of global climate change—and thereby set is a science journalist who also writes poetry and fiction. She launched her children’s imprint,
our planet on a path toward a safer future. Blue Jasper Editions, in 2023 with Forest Joy and Nature Explorers.
Illustration by Masha Foya DEC E M bER 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.COM 85

Trend assessment Level assessment
Progress toward
*
Sub-Saharan Africa
Northern Africa and Western Asia
Overarching legal Central and Southern Asia
Gender Equality Eastern and Southeastern
SouthEastern Asia
frameworks Latin America and the Caribbean
and public life Oceania
How far we’ve come Europe and Northern America
Australia and New Zealand
and still have to go Sub-Saharan Africa
GRAPHIC SCIENCE

TEXT BY CLARA MOSKOWITZ Central and Southern Asia
Violence against Eastern and Southeastern
South-EasternAsia
Asi
GRAPHIC BY FEDERICA FRAGAPANE women Latin America and the Caribbean
Oceania
OceaniA
Europe and Northern America
Target 5.1 Sub-Saharan Africa
ROUND THE WORLD, women Northern Africa and Western Asia
Central and Southern Asia
and girls still face dispropor- Employment and Eastern and Southeastern
South-EasternAsia
Asi
Latin America and the Caribbean
tionate discrimination, poverty economic benefits Oceania
and violence, as well as a lack Australia and New Zealand
of access to education, health Sub-Saharan Africa
care and property ownership, among Central and Southern Asia
other disadvantages. Every year the Eastern and Southeastern
South-EasternAsia
Asi
Marriage and family
A
United Nations agencies U.N. Women Oceania
Latin America and the Caribbean
and U.N. Department of Economic and Australia and New Zealand
Social Affairs track progress toward Sub-Saharan Africa
global gender equality—one of the
Women and girls subjected
U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, Latin America and the Caribbean
to intimate partner violence Oceania
which all U.N. member countries agreed
to try to reach by 2030. The project gathers Australia and New Zealand
Target 5.2
data from government questionnaires
and household surveys and from other Sexual violence against
agencies such as the World Health women and girls
Organization, the World bank and the
U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
The report highlights some important Sub-Saharan Africa
gains: child marriage is declining, Central and Southern Asia
Child marriage among Eastern
Eastern and
and Southeastern
South-EasternAsia
Asi
women make up a slightly larger share women and girls Latin America and the Caribbean
of parliaments and local governments, Oceania
and 56 legal reforms have been enacted Target 5.3

to close the gender gap since 2019. Sub-Saharan Africa
“There’s been some progress to cele- Female genital mutilation/
brate,” says Papa Seck, chief of U.N. cutting
Women’s research and data division. “but
that progress has just not been enough to
get us where we want to be by 2030. Much Sub-Saharan Africa
more can be done and should be done.” Central and Southern Asia
Ratio of unpaid domestic Eastern and Southeastern
South-EasternAsia
Asi
At the current pace of progress, gender Target 5.4 Latin America and the Caribbean
and care work, by sex Oceania
parity in parliaments won’t be achieved Europe and Northern America
Sub-Saharan Africa
until 2063, child marriage will persist Northern Africa and Western Asia
Proportion of seats held Central and Southern Asia
until 2092, and it will take 137 years to Eastern and Southeastern
South-EasternAsia
Asi
by women in national Latin America and the Caribbean
end extreme poverty among women. parliaments Oceania
Sub-Saharan Africa
GOAL 5 Northern Africa and Western Asia
Proportion of seats held Central and Southern Asia
Achieving gender equality, Goal 5, is one of Eastern and Southeastern
South-EasternAsia
Asi
the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Target 5.5 by women in local Latin America and the Caribbean
Others include ending poverty (Goal 1), ending governments Oceania
hunger (Goal 2) and ensuring education for Australia and New Zealand
all (Goal 4). All of the goals are related, and Sub-Saharan Africa
many of their targets overlap—for instance, Northern Africa and Western Asia
achieving gender equality involves ending Women in managerial Eastern and Southeastern
South-EasternAsia
Asi
women’s poverty and hunger and broadening positions Latin America and the Caribbean
their access to education. Goal 5 encompasses Oceania
9 targets and 14 indicators. Australia and New Zealand
Sub-Saharan Africa
Proportion of women Northern Africa and Western Asia
Trend is a measure of how much movement there is Central and Southern Asia
and girls who make Eastern and Southeastern
South-EasternAsia
Asi
toward the goal within a region. Level is a measure of Latin America and the Caribbean
how close a region is to the goal. It’s possible for a informed decisions on Oceania
region to be close to equality but not making rapid reproductive health Europe and Northern America
by UN-Women and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (data)
progress in any direction and to be far from a target Target 5.6 Sub-Saharan Africa
but still making quick strides. Northern Africa and Western Asia
Source: Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The Gender Snapshot 2024, Published
Laws on equal access to Central and Southern Asia
Eastern and Southeastern
South-EasternAsia
Asi
Trend assessment reproductive health, Latin America and the Caribbean
On track or target met information and education Europe and Northern America
Moderate progress but
acceleration needed Ownership or secure
Marginal progress and significant rights over MISSING DATA
acceleration needed agricultural land, by sex Some kinds of progress are difficult to measure. Data may be
Target 5.a missing altogether, or different countries may have inconsistent
Stagnation definitions of, say, what constitutes sexual violence, making it
Laws that guarantee equal impossible to compare statistics.
Regression land rights
World average
Sub-Saharan Africa
Level assessment Central and Southern Asia
Women who own Eastern and Southeastern
South-EasternAsia
Asi
a mobile phone Latin America and the Caribbean
DEC E M BER 2 02 4
Target met or almost met Oceania
Close to target Target 5.b Sub-Saharan Africa
Moderate distance to target Men who own Eastern and Southeastern
South-EasternAsia
Asi
a mobile phone Latin America and the Caribbean
Oceania
Far from target Europe and Northern America
Very far from target Sub-Saharan Africa
Insufficient data Countries with systems Eastern and Southeastern
SouthEastern Asia
Target 5.c
SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.COM
to track gender equality Latin America and the Caribbean
World average Oceania
87
* All regions are as defined in the U.N. geoscheme.
HISTORY COMPILED BY MARK FISCHETTI
50, 100 & 150 Years
MORE ALCOHOL “METHANOL”

FOUND IN SPACE IS A SAFER NAME
1974 “Is there intelligent “Some time ago
1924
life elsewhere in the attention was called 1974, How Many Aces of Spades?: “After a brief glance at this display most
universe? Positive evidence to the coinage of this word people report seeing three. Actually there are five. Because people expect aces
facetiously adduced was that to designate methyl alcohol, of spades to be black, they tend to miss the atypical red ones. Thus do prior
whereas methyl alcohol had commonly called wood alcohol. conditioning and experience influence perception.”
been discovered in interstellar The purpose was to provide a
animal possesses a characteris- one. The yellow color of the
space, ethyl alcohol (the trade designation which would
tic number. Although the nature ordinary gas flame reveals only
potable kind) had not. Clearly not involve the word ‘alcohol’
and behavior of these little chro- a portion of the colors of the
someone had consumed the and consequently detract from
mosome particles are not fully paintings. The reds and yellows
stuff. But in October a group the use of this material as a
understood, it is quite evident are seen well enough, but the
of [researchers] used a highly beverage. In one year in one of
that they have very much if not blues and greens, and their vari-
sensitive spectrometer to our larger cities there were 54
everything to do with determin- ous tints, are sadly distorted,
investigate the dense cloud deaths traceable to the internal
ing the great facts of heredity.” and the artistic effect lost. Lime
of gas and dust designated use of wood alcohol. As soon
light obviates such difficulties.”
Sagittarius B2, a rich source as the word ‘methanol’ had
Levett Ibbetson is credited
of most of the known mole- been accepted by the trade and
with pioneering the use of
cules in space. They discov- users, the number of deaths
limelight in photography. An
ered weak radio emission at in the same locality dropped
oxyhydrogen flame (a mixture
the wavelength of 3.3 millime- to less than 20 in a year. It is
of oxygen and hydrogen)
ters [and] identified it as believed that a great deal more
heated a piece of quicklime
radiation from ethyl alcohol. has been accomplished by this
until it became white-hot,
Ethyl alcohol, composed ingenious device than would
creating incandescence.
of nine atoms (C2H5OH), is have been possible by any
one of the largest and most campaign of education or
complex molecules now known legal enforcements.” SANITARY HOSPITAL WALLS
to exist in interstellar space. “A writer in the London Builder
The substance is spread CHROMOSOMES, NOT JELLY suggests that thick glass might
in a thin vapor throughout “With the microscopic study be easily and cheaply cement-
Sagittarius B2, which is some of the cell and its constituent PAINTINGS BASK ed to the walls of hospitals.
50 light-years in diameter. parts, and the rediscovery of IN THE LIMELIGHT It would be non-absorbent,
One calculation shows that, Mendel’s law in 1900, two for- 1874 “The new and cele- imperishable, easily cleaned,
Scientific American, Vol. 231, No. 6; December 1974
if the ethyl alcohol were merly independent lines of brated painting ‘Roll readily repaired if damaged
condensed, it would come investigation have reinforced Call’ [by Lady Elizabeth Butler] by accident, and unlike paper
to 1028 fifths of a gallon at each other. We now know that is now nightly exhibited in Lon- and paint, would always be
80 proof. Potability, however, living cells are not mere drops don to large audiences, by as good as at first. Glass can
might be a problem; the alcohol of jelly; each contains a com- means of the oxyhydrogen light, be cut or bent to any required
is heavily contaminated with plexity of parts, one of which is or lime light, and all the colors shape. If desired, the plates
substances such as hydrogen the easily dyed speck called the of the picture are brought out may be colored any cheerful
cyanide, formaldehyde and nucleus. The nucleus in turn with marvelous brilliancy, in fact tint. The non-absorbent
ammonia. The discovery brings contains a number of highly with the same perfection as by quality is the most important
the total number of different important microscopic constit- daylight. The idea of illuminat- for hospitals and prisons, and,
kinds of molecules detected uents called chromosomes, of ing art galleries in the evening we should think, is worthy the
in space to 32.” which each species of plant or by the lime light is an excellent consideration of architects.”

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A New Kind

ARCHAEOLOGY CLIMATE CHANGE SUSTAINABILITY

32 TESSELLATION rEVELATION HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY

Less than a century ago most facets of everyday life depended

Photograph by Tony Stromberg

DEC E M BER 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.COM 1

4 FrOm THE EDITOr

ASA, ESA and Hubble Heritage Team (STScI)

75 THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH

AND FEDERICA FRAGAPANE

THOMAS FUCHS ADVANCES, PAGE 10

tence.” In 2023 she had her first solo art exhibition

CURBING HUNGER PANGS structure and function to GLP-1 but much

created our moon. The article says that EDITORIAL

actually very common in the solar system, CONTRIBUTORS

ROUND AND ROUND WE GO

problem of orbital debris. Half a century CLIENT MEDIA SOLUTIONS

work. Shortly after that I also managed a CONSUMER MARKETING

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DEC E M bER 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.COM 9

RECORDED BY UNDERWATER micro-

DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE

The elusive Bryde’s whale produces

DEC E M bER 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.COM 11

Running habitual rapid movement style, called aeri-

1 2 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N DECE M bER 2 02 4 Graphic by Brown Bird Design

At this season of the

Illustrations by Thomas Fuchs

IN MERE MINUTES, smearing mice with

Universe paths that it can take in its journey to your

The Carousel Lens (center) bends the

DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys/LBNL/DOE & KPNO/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA

Mushroom Power machines that harvest ripe fruit, for instance,

guide robots cept experiment.

Scientific American is a registered trademark

Monsters throughout the cosmos. If dark matter

dark matter, an invisible form of mass that

has remained elusive as many favored the-

Dec e m ber 2 02 4 Sc i e n t i f ic A m er ic A n.com 19

Wolfgang Kaehler/Alamy Stock Photo

Construction varied between groups. Furthermore,

Archaeological and genetic discoveries topple

DEC E M BER 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.COM 25

Horses originated around four million years ago A n c ie

26 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N DECE M bER 2 02 4 Maps by Daniel Huffman

DEC E M bER 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.COM 27

n The decade and a half since botai

I revived the kurgan hypothesis, our ar-

DEC E M bER 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.COM 29

Mathematicians have discovered a new kind

DEC E M BER 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.COM 33

A Selection of 2D Two-Vertex Tiles

Parallelepiped Hexagonal prism

Truncated Rhombic Elongated rhombic

The Kelvin Structure

The Weaire-Phelan Structure

Ákos G. Horváth and Krisztina Regős; February 6, 2024; arXiv:2402.04190 ( reference)

DEC E M bER 2 02 4 SC I E N T I F IC A M ER IC A N.CoM 37

R flash of intuition. one day out of the blue she

from a mathematical perspective. It’s a nice opening

ers, scientists, doctors and government of