Scientific American February 2017

SPEAKING IN WHISTLES WHATS WRONG WITH COSMIC INFLATION?
PAGE 60 PAGE 32
WORKOUTS
AND
WEIGHT LOSS
Learn the surprising evolutionary reason why exercise alone
wont shed poundsand what to do about it
S
PLU
PREVENTING
THREATS TO CROPS
Airborne microbes critical role PAGE 40
WHAT IS A KILOGRAM?
Science seeks new ways
to ensure accuracy PAGE 46
MEDICAL SCANS
A shortage of rare atoms ScientificAmerican.com
imperils disease imaging PAGE 68 2016 Scientific American FEBRUARY 2017
Fe b r ua ry 2 0 17
VO LU M E 3 1 6 , N U M B E R 2
46
E VO L U T I O N M E T R O LO G Y
26 The Exercise Paradox 46 Mass Hysteria
Why dont hours spent on a tread The world-standard kilogram
mill translate to pounds lost? is a19th-century artifact that
The answer has much to do with sits, decaying, in a vault in Paris.
our ancestral past and how evolu Its about to be retired.
tion gave us our most distinctive By Tim Folger
traits. By Herman Pontzer NEUROSCIENCE
C O S M O LO G Y 54 Deep-Space Deal Breaker
32 Pop Goes the Universe Cosmic radiation could be more
Recent measurements of the damaging to astronauts brains
cosmos dont seem to jibe with than thought. Its a big obstacle
the widely accepted theory to the prospect of travel to Mars
of inflation. We need some new and beyond. B y Charles L. Limoli
ideas. By Anna Ijjas, Paul J. L I N G U I S T I C S
Steinhardt and Abraham Loeb 60 The Whistled Word
B I O LO G Y Before the smartphone or even
40 High-Flying Microbes Morse code, some rural peoples
spoke long distance by whistling. ON THE C OVER
Aerial drones and chaos theory
We take it for granted that physically active
are among the tools that re By Julien Meyer
people burn more calories then sedentary folks.
searchers are using to explore H E A LT H But studies show that daily energy expenditures
the many ways that micro 68 Blind Medicine are largely the same regardless of activity level.
The findings help to explain why hitting the gym
organisms spread havoc to far- Millions of patients depend on
to lose weight does not work and raise intrigu
flung regions of the world. aradioactive substance that is ing questions about human evolution.
By David Schmale and Shane Ross being phased out. By Mark Peplow Illustration by Bryan Christie.
Photograph by Richard Barnes February 2017, ScientificAmerican.com 1
2016 Scientific American

4 From the Editor
5 Letters
7 Science Agenda
Science matters: an open letter to the new president.
By the Editors
8 Forum
The incoming Trump administration could cut green
house gases and achieve its economic goals all at once.
By Michael E. Mann and Susan Joy Hassol
10 Advances
Slowing man-made earthquakes. Light-controlled
8 microscopic bots. A new Antarctic greenhouse. Mercury
levels dip in tuna. How to ditch dust-mite allergies.
22 The Science of Health
Popular heartburn medicines may be risky over
the long term. By Karen Weintraub
24 TechnoFiles
How to stamp out fake news. B
y David Pogue
72 Recommended
Amnesia, art and love. Cannibalism and us. Testosterone
myths. The modern way of death. B y Clara Moskowitz
73 Skeptic
Imagine there is nothingcan you do it?
By Michael Shermer
10
74 Anti Gravity
Climate change acceptance mirrors the history
of medical hygiene. By Steve Mirsky
75 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago
76 Graphic Science
The arithmetic arcs of great literature. B
y Mark Fischetti
ON THE WEB
Trumps First 100 Days

cientific American e xplores the potential impact
S
of the newly elected presidents first 100 days in office
on science and technology.
Go to www.ScientificAmerican.com/feb2017/first-100
73
Scientific American (ISSN 0036-8733), Volume 316, Number 2, February 2017, published monthly by Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc., 1 New York Plaza, Suite 4500, New York, N.Y. 10004-1562. Periodicals postage
paid at New York, N.Y., and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post International Publications Mail (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 40012504. Canadian BN No. 127387652RT; TVQ1218059275 TQ0001. Publication
Mail Agreement #40012504. Return undeliverable mail to Scientific American, P.O. Box 819, Stn Main, Markham, ON L3P 8A2. I ndividual Subscription rates: 1 year $49.99 (USD), Canada $59.99 (USD), International $69.99 (USD).
Institutional Subscription rates: Schools and Public Libraries: 1 year $84 (USD), Canada $89 (USD), International $96 (USD). Businesses and Colleges/Universities: 1 year $399 (USD), Canada $405 (USD), International $411 (USD).
Postmaster: Send address changes to Scientific American, Box 3187, Harlan, Iowa 51537. R eprints available: write Reprint Department, Scientific American, 1 New York Plaza, Suite 4500, New York, N.Y. 10004-
1562; fax: 646-563-7138; reprints@SciAm.com. Subscription inquiries: U.S. and Canada (800) 333-1199; other (515) 248-7684. Send e-mail to scacustserv@cdsfulfillment.com. P rinted in U.S.A.
Copyright 2017 by Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.
Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American maintains a strict
policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
2 Scientific American, February 2017

FROM
THE EDITOR Mariette DiChristinais editor in chief of Scientific American.
Follow her on Twitter @mdichristina
From Workouts animals, we use a lot of calories. In addition to overturning our

commonsense notions, the findings provide further insights
to Far Out
about why our kind has been so extraordinarily successful, be
coming the dominant force on the planet. By the way, to be clear,
we should all exercise. Regular activity does help our inner en
gines run right, and it has some nifty perks
Many people I know ( including members in elevating mood and improving cogni-
of my family) feel exercise is a time-con- tion. But enabling weight loss regardless
suming, unpleasant chore, and they dread of diet? Not so much. Turn to page26.
it. The need to change into other clothes, to The knowledge that we have had the
frequently take a block of time out of busy capability to rule over our own world has
lives, and to get dirty and fatigued: they inspired the idea that we would someday
find it all unappealing. But Ive always en also come to live on other planets. To be
joyed the hard work and even the satisfac- sure, that knowledge encompasses healthy
tion of earning the next days sore muscles. amounts of romanticism, a sense of adven-
And I indulged myself with a slight sense ture and even concerns about having suffi-
of pride in knowing not only that I was cient options to ensure our species long-
helping the biological machinery that pro- term survival. Un fortunately, the easy
motes health but also that I got a nice side problems of longer space journeys include
benefit of being able to eat cookies because such seeming trivialities as escaping Earths
Id burned extra calories. gravity with rockets, building airtight ships
Wrong. Or, at least, not entirely right. As with enough air to breathe, and carrying
science shows over and over again, our in huge amounts food and water. A much
tuitive notions about how things work often dont stand up in harder challenge is one that Hollywood never told you about:
the face of data and careful analysis. The benefits of exercise are the perils to the brain from cosmic radiation, which neurosci-
a case in point. In this issues cover story, The Exercise Paradox, entist Charles L. Limoli describes in Deep-Space Deal Break-
anthropologist Herman Pontzer describes a surprising and fasci- er, starting on page 54. Will it prove to be the barrier to our
nating result of evolution: humans burn about the same number conquering the final frontier? One thing is certain: our innate
of calories regardless of activity level. And compared with other human ambition and ingenuity mean we wont stop trying.
BOARD OF ADVISERS
Leslie C. Aiello Kaigham J. Gabriel Christof Koch Martin A. Nowak Terry Sejnowski
President, Wenner-Gren Foundation President and Chief Executive Officer, President and CSO, Director, Program for Evolutionary Professor and Laboratory Head
for Anthropological Research Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Allen Institute for Brain Science Dynamics, and Professor of Biology and of Computational Neurobiology
Harold Skip Garner of Mathematics, Harvard University Laboratory, Salk Institute for
Roger Bingham Lawrence M. Krauss
Robert E. Palazzo Biological Studies
Co-Founder and Director, Executive Director and Professor, Director, Origins Initiative,
Primary Care Research Network Dean, University of Alabama at Michael Shermer
The Science Network Arizona State University
Birmingham College of Arts and Sciences Publisher, Skeptic m
agazine
and Center for Bioinformatics and Morten L. Kringelbach
Arthur Caplan Carolyn Porco Michael Snyder
Genetics, Edward Via College Director, Hedonia: TrygFonden
Director, Division of Medical Ethics, of Osteopathic Medicine Leader, Cassini Imaging Science Professor of Genetics, Stanford
Department of Population Health, Research Group, University of Oxford University School of Medicine
Michael S. Gazzaniga Team, and Director, CICLOPS,
NYU Langone Medical Center and University of Aarhus Space Science Institute Michael E. Webber
Director, Sage Center for the Study
Vinton Cerf Steven Kyle Vilayanur S. Ramachandran Co-director, Clean Energy Incubator,
of Mind, University of California, and Associate Professor,
Professor of Applied Economics and Director, Center for Brain and Cognition,
Chief Internet Evangelist, Google Santa Barbara Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Management, Cornell University University of California, San Diego
George M. Church David J. Gross University of Texas at Austin
Robert S. Langer Lisa Randall
Director, Center for Computational Professor of Physics and Permanent Steven Weinberg
David H. Koch Institute Professor, Professor of Physics,
Genetics, Harvard Medical School Member, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Director, Theory Research Group,
Department of Chemical Harvard University
Rita Colwell Physics,University of California, Santa Department of Physics,
Barbara (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2004) Engineering, M.I.T. Martin Rees University of Texas at Austin
Distinguished University Professor, Astronomer Royal and Professor
Lene Vestergaard Hau Lawrence Lessig (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979)
University of Maryland College Park of Cosmology and Astrophysics,
Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor, Harvard Law School George M. Whitesides
and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School Institute of Astronomy, University Professor of Chemistry and
of Applied Physics, Harvard University John P. Moore
of Public Health of Cambridge Chemical Biology, Harvard University
Danny Hillis Professor of Microbiology and
Richard Dawkins John Reganold Nathan Wolfe
Co-chairman, Applied Minds, LLC Immunology, Weill Medical
Founder and Board Chairman, Regents Professor of Soil Science Director, Global Viral Forecasting
Daniel M. Kammen College of Cornell University
Richard Dawkins Foundation and Agroecology, Washington Initiative
Class of 1935 Distinguished Professor M. Granger Morgan State University
Drew Endy Anton Zeilinger
of Energy, Energy and Resources Group, Hamerschlag University Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs Professor of Quantum Optics,
Professor of Bioengineering, and Director, Renewable and Appropriate Engineering and Public Policy, Director, The Earth Institute, Quantum Nanophysics, Quantum
Stanford University Energy Laboratory, University Carnegie Mellon University Columbia University Information, University of Vienna
Edward W. Felten of California, Berkeley Miguel Nicolelis Eugenie C. Scott Jonathan Zittrain
Director, Center for Information Vinod Khosla Co-director, Center for Chair, Advisory Council, Professor of Law and of Computer
Technology Policy, Princeton University Partner, Khosla Ventures Neuroengineering, Duke University National Center for Science Education Science, Harvard University
Illustration by Bomboland (running figure);

4 Scientific American, February 2017 Illustration by Nick Higgins (DiChristina)

LETTERS
editors@sciam.com
The Drug Enforce- neither speculative nor conspiratorial to

say that even the best scientific institutions
ment Agencys operate in a political environment, and
claim that heroin when they vie for funding and influence,
their goals might diverge from what is best
has no medical appli- for the populaceand for science. This is
cation ignores a long the cold reality of what happens when sci-
ence meets human ambition. Journalists
history of utility and dont serve our readers if we fail to keep
responsible use. check on the institutions that influence our
lives and expend our nations treasure.
thomas w. filardo a nn arbor, mich.
The degree to which embargoes hamper
that second function is a matter of debate
even within the science journalism com-
from 2014 or earlier, and no evidence is giv- munity. But as my article shows, close-
en that the fda has continued the practice. hold embargoes influence coverage to the
Can Seife provide any proof that the point where correspondents are unable to
close-hold embargo has caused real harm get independent (and necessary) voices be-
October 2016 or damage outside of hurt pride from ex- fore going to press. Unless journalists have
cluded journalists? What we need from the full freedom to exercise their critical
Scientific American these days is a con- function, they risk becoming little more
SCIENCE JOURNALISM certed effort to promote scientific and ac- than glorified public relations profession-
In How to Spin the Science News, Charles ademic institutions, not demonize them. als. And I truly hope that is not what the
Seife criticizes the practices of close-hold And we need it to provide factual and ev- vast majority of the audience wants or ex-
embargoesin which sources for an arti- idence-based information rather than pects from S cientific American.
cle restrict access to particular publica- speculative conspiracy theories that erode
tions and require that reporters not con- the publics trust in academic pursuits. PERSONALIZED THERAPY
tact other, unapproved sources before a Darcy Cordell The Right Pill for You, Dina Fine Ma-
particular datein science journalism. via e-mail rons article on personalized genetic med-
There are too many pop-science jour- icine, was a long-overdue breath of fresh
nalists who misconstrue stories. How I cannot think of a more fundamentally air. I would like to add another important
can scientific institutions ensure that distressing situation than the muzzling use of genetic drug matching, or pharma-
their evidence-based information makes of the scientific press as described in this cogenomics: the possibility of stratifying
it to the public and that journalists do article. The close-hold embargo has no patients in clinical trials based on their
not prop up a dissenting, unscientific place in scientific institutions of the gov- genomic variability. An approach that is
opinion in the name of so-called bal- ernment or academia. limited to the individuals with a high po-
ance? Perhaps they have found a solution Thomas J. Martin tential to respond to a drug may take far
in the close-hold embargo. Woodbridge, Va. less time and save patients and insurers
Seifes examples of embargoes include large sums of money.
fairly harmless stories, such as the Cali- SEIFE REPLIES: Cordells statement that Mehrdad Nadji
fornia Institute of Technology giving par- Scientific American needs to make a con- Professor of pathology
ticular journalists early access to a new certed effort to promote scientific and aca- University of Miami
finding because it wanted excellent re- demic institutions, not demonize them,
porters to cover it. Another is the unrep- underscores a fundamental disagreement MEDICAL USE VS. ABUSE
resentative case of a researcher with a his- that people have about the role of the press Our Senseless Pot Laws, by Carl Hart
tory of bad sciencewho was not acting when reporting on science. The implicit, [Forum], criticizes the Drug Enforcement
as part of a large governmental institu- and widely held, argument on one side is Administration for declining to reclassify
tiongiving early, close-hold access to a that the prime function of the science jour- marijuana from its status as a Schedule I
dubious paper. The paper was retracted, nalist is to promote the statements of drug, defined as one with no currently
as expected. Most of the examples are from mainstream scientific institutions and accepted medical use and a high potential
the Food and Drug Administration, such as scientists, the better to inform the citizen- for abuse. That language is at direct odds
one regarding a laudable antismoking ry and defeat pseudoscience. not only with Harts and others cited re-
campaignlargely seen as a successand That is a good part of what we do, but it search on cannabis and its several thera-
another listing invited journalists from is not our only role. Science journalists are peutic effects but also in ignorance of
across the political spectrum, including expected to be critical of authorities, wheth- nontrivial facts from other advanced na-
the Wall Street Journal a nd Politico. All are er or not we generally approve of them. It is tions pharmacopeia.
February 2017, ScientificAmerican.com5

LETTERS
editors@sciam.com
ESTABLISHED 1845
EDITOR IN CHIEF AND SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT

Mariette DiChristina
EXECUTIVE EDITOR Fred Guterl Michael Mrak
DESIGN DIRECTOR
The ScheduleI drug diacetylmorphine, MANAGING EDITOR Ricki L. Rusting DIGITAL CONTENT MANAGER Curtis Brainard COPY DIRECTOR Maria-Christina Keller
or heroin, provides a clear example of the EDITORIAL

Dean Visser Michael D. Lemonick
deas denial politics. It is called diamor- NEWS EDITOR OPINION EDITOR
TOPIC EDITORS
phine in the U.K. and elsewhere. The U.K. Mark Fischetti Josh Fischman Seth Fletcher Gary Stix
SUSTAINABILITY LIFE SCIENCES PHYSICAL SCIENCES and TECHNOLOGY MIND / BRAIN
has used it for severe pain for decades, SENIOR EDITORS
and it is still prescribed today. The deas Christine Gorman BIOLOGY / MEDICINE Clara Moskowitz SPACE / PHYSICS Kate Wong EVOLUTION
MANAGING MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Eliene Augenbraun MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Steve Mirsky
claim that it has no medical application SPANISH-LANGUAGE EDITOR Debbie Ponchner (ScientificAmerican.com/espanol)
ignores a long history of utility and re- EDITOR AT LARGE Claudia Wallis
sponsible use and aims a slur at responsi- ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Lee Billings SPACE / PHYSICS Larry Greenemeier TECHNOLOGY Dina Fine Maron BIOLOGY / MEDICINE Annie Sneed SUSTAINABILITY
ble practitioners from other nations. Amber Williams ADVANCES ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Sunya Bhutta COLLECTIONS EDITOR Andrea Gawrylewski
The current opiate overdose epidemic ART

ART DIRECTOR Jason Mischka SENIOR GRAPHICS EDITOR Jen Christiansen PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR Monica Bradley ART DIRECTOR, ONLINE Ryan Reid
in the U.S. is being met with myriad po- ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR Liz Tormes ASSISTANT GRAPHICS EDITOR Amanda Montaez
tential remedies, but this effort cannot COPY AND PRODUC TION
SENIOR COPY EDITORS Michael Battaglia, Daniel C. Schlenoff COPY EDITOR Aaron Shattuck
be successful if the fundamental defini-
MANAGING PRODUCTION EDITOR Richard Hunt SENIOR PRODUCTION EDITOR Michelle Wright
tions on which it is based are so devoid PREPRESS AND QUALITY MANAGER Silvia De Santis
of cogent scientific basis. D I G I TA L

SENIOR EDITORIAL PRODUCT MANAGER Angela Cesaro TECHNICAL LEAD Nicholas Sollecito
Thomas W. Filardo PRODUCT MANAGER Cianna Kulik DIGITAL PRODUCTION MANAGER Kerrissa Lynch WEB PRODUCTION ASSOCIATES Ian Kelly, Eli Rosenberg
Retired director of clinical research CONTRIBUTOR S

Ethicon Endo-Surgery EDITORIAL David Biello, W. Wayt Gibbs, Ferris Jabr, Anna Kuchment, Robin Lloyd, George Musser, Christie Nicholson, John Rennie
ART Edward Bell, Bryan Christie, Lawrence R. Gendron, Nick Higgins
Ann Arbor, Mich.
EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATOR Ericka Skirpan SENIOR SECRETARY Maya Harty
STEM EDUCATION PRESIDENT

Thank you for pressing the case for the hu- Dean Sanderson
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT Michael Florek Jack Laschever
manities as part of the educational curric- EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL ADVERTISING AND SPONSORSHIP
PUBLISHER AND VICE PRESIDENT Jeremy A. Abbate
ulum in Science Is Not Enough [Science M ARKE TING AND BUSINE SS DE VELOPMENT
Agenda]. I am currently winding down a MARKETING DIRECTOR, NATURE RESEARCH GROUP
Eileen Long
long (40-year) career as a biostatistician. MARKETING DIRECTOR, INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERSHIPS AND
The one skill that was most valued by my CUSTOMER DEVELOPMENT Jessica Cole
ONLINE MARKETING PRODUCT MANAGER Zoya Lysak
various employers over the years was not I N T E G R AT E D M E D I A S A L E S
my mathematics abilities but the fact that I SENIOR INTEGRATED SALES MANAGERS Jay Berfas, Matt Bondlow
SENIOR ADMINISTRATOR, EXECUTIVE SERVICES May Jung
wrote very well. I can thank all of my En
CONSUMER MARKETING
glish teachers for encouraging this. VICE PRESIDENT, CONSUMER MARKETING Christian Dorbandt
Dave Bodycombe ASSOCIATE CONSUMER MARKETING DIRECTOR Catherine Bussey
SENIOR CONSUMER MARKETING MANAGER Lou Simone
via e-mail CONSUMER MARKETING OPERATIONS MANAGER Kay Floersch
MARKETING AND CUSTOMER SERVICE COORDINATOR Christine Kaelin
ANCILL ARY PRODUC TS

The editors accuse Kentucky governor ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Diane McGarvey
Matt Bevin of proposing a STEM-only cur- CUSTOM PUBLISHING EDITOR Lisa Pallatroni
RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS MANAGER Felicia Ruocco
riculum because he advocates state subsi-
C O R P O R AT E
dies for students in scientific disciplines DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL DIGITAL DEVELOPMENT Richard Zinken HEAD OF COMMUNICATIONS, USA Rachel Scheer
David Barnstone
and not the humanities. No one is advocat- COMMUNICATIONS AND PRESS OFFICER
PRINT PRODUC TION

ing that we abolish the humanities. This is SENIOR PRODUCTION MANAGER Christina Hippeli
a prudent use of resources to encourage ADVERTISING PRODUCTION CONTROLLER Carl Cherebin PRODUCTION CONTROLLER Madelyn Keyes-Milch
students to pursue a career where their

LE T TER S TO THE EDITOR
employment prospects are brightest. I say
Scientific American, 1 New York Plaza, Suite 4500, New York, NY 10004-1562 or editors@sciam.com
this as the father of a daughter with a mas- Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that we cannot answer each one.
ters in anthropology, a mountain of stu- Join the conversation onlinevisit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter.
dent debt and bleak job opportunities. H O W T O C O N TA C T U S
Greg Daniels Subscriptions Reprints Permissions
Sun Valley, Calif. For new subscriptions, renewals, gifts, To order bulk reprints of articles For permission to copy or reuse material:
payments, and changes of address: (minimum of 1,000 copies): Permissions Department, Scientific
U.S. and Canada, 800-333-1199; Reprint Department, American, 1 New York Plaza, Suite 4500,
ERRATUM outside North America, 515-248-7684 or Scientific American, New York, NY 10004-1562; randp@SciAm.com;
www.ScientificAmerican.com 1 New York Plaza, www.ScientificAmerican.com/permissions.
Under the Sea of Enceladus, by Frank Please allow three to six weeks for processing.
Submissions Suite 4500,
Postberg, Gabriel Tobie and Thorsten To submit article proposals, follow the New York, NY Advertising
Dambeck, incorrectly referred to a mil- guidelines at www.ScientificAmerican.com. 10004-1562; www.ScientificAmerican.com has electronic
Click on Contact Us. 212-451-8877; contact information for sales representatives
lion kilometers per hour as about 1 per- We cannot return and are not responsible reprints@SciAm.com. of Scientific American in all regions of
cent of light speed. It is 0.1percent. for materials delivered to our office. For single copies of back issues: 800-333-1199. the U.S. and in other countries.

SCIENCE AGENDA
O PINI O N A N D A N A LYS I S FR OM
S C IENTIFIC A MERIC AN S B OA R D O F E D ITO R S
A Letter to ance coverage for the millions who have obtained it already.
Earth and climate: nasas ability to observe Earth helps us un-
Washington
derstand the way changing sea levels impact our defense forces
and how groundwater shortages affect our farmers, not just to
grasp the scope of global warming. We need to maintain both
the money and the expertise to continue high-quality observa-
Political leaders must spend the next tions, no matter which agency carries them out.
four years solving tough problems based Clean energy: T he U.S. needs to implement the Clean Power
on shared values, not divisive ones Plan for power plantsunder court review this winteras part of
our commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, made
By the Editors during the international COP21 climate agreement in Paris.
Natural resources: G roundwater supplies, essential for crop ir-
Dear President Trump and members of Congress: rigation and drinking water, are threatened by pollution. Protect
As you took office in January, you came face-to-face with them by giving the Environmental Protection Agency the resourc-
pressing problems involving science, medicine and technology es to enforce newly enhanced laws governing toxic substances
that directly affect our countrys health, wealth and security. and chemical safety, as well as the Safe Drinking Water Act.
They have often been ignored by your predecessors or simply Cybercrime: C riminals have stolen important private
kicked down the road in a meaningless way. information about Americans from government agen-
Your critics fear that you will do some- cies, such as the Office of Personnel Management,
thing more dangerous: not simply de- and private companies, such as Yahoo. Organiza-
fer crucial decisions but actively pro- tions that hold such data must be made to shore
mote policies that ignore overwhelm- up their digital vulnerabilities, either through
ing scientific evidence about climate policy that dictates specific high-level se-
change, vaccines, national security curity measures or through penalties if
and other issues. Some statements such measures are not taken. The presi-
both from you as the incoming president must also seek international coop-
dent and from majority party repre- eration in combating attacks, given the
sentatives in Congress about such lack of borders that exist online.
topics have been worrisome. Space: Appoint a nasa administrator
But you have the opportunity to and determine the countrys future
make real changes for the good of the space plans on a long-term basis,
whole nation, with actions using fact- not one that changes with every
based approaches and common ground. election. Appoint a board of
We do not expect politicians elected on scientists charged with devel-
broad promises to shrink government and oping these goals, with terms
undo regulations to agree with us about that exceed those of an indi-
the value of all policies. We are sure, how- vidual president or Congress.
ever, that you would agree with Presi-
dent DwightD. Eisenhower, who, when These are not simple tasks,
mobilizing the U.S. to deal with new especially in a nation with the
threats in a postWorld War II world divided political values seen in
and a changing economy, told the na- the popular vote count of the
tion that love of liberty means the guarding of ev- November presidential election.
ery resource that makes freedom possiblefrom But another president, the one who succeeded
the sanctity of our families and the wealth of our Eisenhower, inspired this country to choose to do things
soil to the genius of our scientists. The actions we list below not because they are easy but because they are hard. That
not only guard those resources but will help them flourish. chief executive, John F. Kennedy, told us that the tough chal-
lenges measure the best of our energies and skills. When we
Health costs: S tart by giving Medicare, the nations largest in succeed at them, when we craft policies that benefit our soil
surance program, the power to negotiate prices with pharma- and rely on our science, they bring out the greatness in us all.
ceutical companies. Government on the federal and state level
also needs to continue efforts to make health care affordable by
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E
reforming the Affordable Care Act to eliminate double-digit Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
premium price hikes and by maintaining inexpensive insur- or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
Illustration by Scott Brundage February 2017, ScientificAmerican.com 7

FORUM
C OMM E N TA RY O N S C IE N C E IN
T H E N E W S FR OM T H E E X PE R T S
Michael E. Mann is professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University.

His most recent book, with Tom Toles, is The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial
Climate Trumps
Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (Columbia University
Press, 2016). Susan Joy Hassol is director of the nonprofit Climate Communication. She
recently co-authored (Un)Natural Disasters: Communicating Linkages between Extreme
Everything
Events and Climate Change, in the World Meteorological Organizations Bulletin.
actly where such points of no return are until weve passed them.
The new administration could cut Every year that we delay action, we increase the risk of crossing
greenhouse gases and achieve dangerous thresholds, and we commit our generation and our
its economic goals all at once childrens to more devastating outcomes.
Second, because emissions anywhere result in climate change
By Michael E. Mann and Susan Joy Hassol everywhere, we are part of a community of nations that must
work together to tackle this global problem. The U.S. has always
Of all the potential actions in Donald Trumps forthcoming prided itself on being a leader, not a laggard. We were one of the
presidency, none will have more long-lasting effects than those first nations, along with China, to ratify the Paris Agreement,
on climate change. Just four days after the Paris climate agree- which is part of a larger international treaty signed by George
ment went into forcethe first comprehensive global deal to re H. W. Bush in 1992 (the United Nations Framework Convention
duce heat-trapping pollutionthe U.S. elected a president who on Climate Change). The Paris Agreement has rules, which we
has called climate change a hoax and vowed to cancel the Paris agreed to, including that once in effect, no country can withdraw
accord. Trump has said he would block the Clean Power Plan, from the agreement for at least four years. If our new president
which would reduce utilities greenhouse gas emissions and is at were to pull out, our country would be an international outlaw,
the heart of the U.S. commitment to the agreement. And he with consequences for our status among nations. We would also
promises to reinvigorate the fossil-fuel sector, just when global be relinquishing the leadership that prompts China and other
energy production is moving rapidly in the opposite direction, nations to reach for more ambitious emissions reductions. In
toward clean, inexpensive, renewable sources. stead the U.S. would become an impediment to progress.
Not only would this agenda be disastrous for climate, it Finallyand perhaps this is where all Americans can find
would actually undermine Trumps ability to achieve his own common groundthe clean energy revolution is well under way.
primary goals. First, climate change is not like other issues that The rest of the world is no longer debating climate change; it is
can be postponed from one year to the next. The U.S. and world moving on with a rapid transition to carbon-free energy. Do we
are already behind; speed is of the essence because climate want to be left behind in the great economic revolution of the
change and its impacts are coming sooner and with greater fe- 21st century? Or do we want to compete in the clean energy race,
rocity than anticipated: 2016 was the hottest year on record by improving our international competitiveness and making our
a large margin, and 2015 and 2014 set the previous records. Ex- nation even greater? Do we want to buy solar panels and wind
treme weather events such as heat waves and heavy downpours turbines from China, or do we want to manufacture and sell
are becoming more frequent and severe, as are related fires, them to China and everywhere else?
droughts and floods. If the U.S. is to accomplish what Trump says he wants for our
Warming is also causing sea level to rise at faster rates. At nationeconomic growth, job creation, improved infrastructure
high tide, ocean water stands in the streets of coastal cities such and international respectthen we need to lead the world in clean
as Miami, and it taints groundwater. The coastal threat of stron- energy research, development and deployment. In doing so, we
ger and more destructive hurricanes is growing, too. The costs would also be keeping our air and water clean, making our busi-
of these increasingly common events are reaching into the bil- nesses more efficient, improving our health and protecting our
lions of dollars. Most frightening are the likely childrens future. Surely, these are values we can all agree on.
tipping points in the climate system
thresholds beyond which unstop Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
pable feedbacks kick in. or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
We dont know ex-
PONGSAKORN JUN Getty Images

ADVANCES
1 2
In the U.S., seismic activity and oil and gas production (1) have risen hand in hand over the past decade. Although most of
the man-made tremors are small, the frequency of the quakesand the damage they have incurredhas rattled residents in
several states. Researchers, including from the University of Colorado Boulder (2) , are seeking ways to quell the rumbling.
PRAGUE, OKLA., March 2015 COYLE, OKLA., Jan. 2016

D I S PATC H E S FR OM T H E FR O N TIE R S O F S C IE N C E , T E C H N O LO GY A N D M E D I C IN E IN S ID E
Primate-based medical research meets

the data-transparency movement
Microscopic drug-delivering bots
How to pick strawberries at the bottom
of the world
The psychologist who treats rangers on
the front lines of antipoaching efforts
ENERGY
Man-Made
Solutions
for Man-Made
Quakes
In a relatively short time,
scientists have devised
ways to manage human-
induced earthquakes
In Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas a nd a hand-

ful of other states, oil and gas production
has triggered a surge of earthquakes unlike
anything scientists have ever seen. Oklaho-
ma once had an average of one or two
earthquakes a year, but in 2015 it had near-
ly 900. Meanwhile the rate of earthquakes
in the central and eastern U.S.long con-
sidered seismically quieter parts ofthe
countryrose from 29 a year to more
than 1,000.
The quakes have caused injuries, dam-
aged homes and spawned class-action
lawsuits. But given that oil and gas produc-
tion is not expected to stop anytime soon,
these seismic events probably wont either.
In response, academic researchers, the fed-
eral government, energy companies and
regulatory agencies have mobilized to try
to reduce the frequency and strength of
induced earthquakesand a series of
recent papers and other findings shows
they have made rapid progress, although
many questions remain.
Scientists have understood since the
McLOUD, OKLA., Feb. 2016 PAWNEE, OKLA., Sept. 2016 1960s that injecting fluid into the ground at
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter

ADVANCES
high pressure can cause earthquakes. In published in October 2016 in G eophysical

most cases, it is not hydraulic fracturing Research Letters. L und Snee hopes that
(or fracking) of oil- and gas-bearing rock companies and regulators will pair these
that sets off tremors but the related pro- stress maps with fault maps to under-
cess of wastewater injection. For instance, stand where wastewater injection will
oil wells in Oklahomawhether they are most likely cause earthquakesand then
fracked or notproduce 10 or more bar- steer clear of those areas.
rels of groundwater for every barrel of oil. One limitation of this study is that
Companies separate the water and other many earthquakes in Texas and Oklahoma
by-products from the oil and inject it back have occurred on previously unmapped
into the ground via wastewater wells (a faults. Energy companies, however, may be
step designed to protect soil and surface able to use the Stanford teams data
water). But these injections can cause because they often have a better under-
pressure that induces earthquakes by standing of the subsurface than academic
counteracting the friction that holds faults scientists or regulators. It doesnt solve
TEC HNOLOGY
together. As Oklahoma and many other the problem, but it sure takes a big step
states entered the most recent energy
boom, the amount of fluid pumped into
toward solving the problem, says Heather
DeShon, a seismologist at Southern Meth- Learn Morse
wastewater wells grew rapidly. odist University in Dallas who studies
human-induced earthquakes. Code, Semi
In todays economic
Researchers are also investigating
the benefits of installing dense networks consciously
reality, whether of seismic monitors that could detect
tiny earthquakes near wells. This could
Wearable computers delivering
wastewater injection allow companies or regulators to take tactile cues may offer a way
should continue quick action to reduce injection volumes tolearn manual skills without
paying much attention
is off the table. before the quakes grow larger, and Texas
is currently installing such a network.
Meanwhile some scientists suggest Learning Morse code, w ith its tappity-tap
In todays economic reality, whether injecting waste liquid only into layers rhythms of dots and dashes, could take far
wastewater injection should continue is off of the ground that are naturally sealed less effortand attentionthan one might
the table. Researchers at Stanford Univer- off from deep faults. Other experts are think. The trick is a wearable computer that
sity have turned instead to the question also making progress in figuring out engages the sensory powers of touch,
ofwhere t he injections should occur. So far exactly how much injection pressure dif- according to a recent pilot study. The results
they have mapped the natural geologic ferent areas can tolerate before inducing suggest that mobile devices may be able to
stresses throughout Oklahoma and Tex- seismic activity. teach us manual skills, almost subconscious-
asthe states with the largest populations As scientists investigate pragmatic ly, as we go about our everyday routines.
at risk from human-induced quakesand solutions, Oklahoma is still shaking. State Ph.D. student Caitlyn Seim and comput-
PRECEDING PAGES: JPAT CARTER Getty Images (pumping unit, Coyle, McLoud); RJSANGOSTI Getty Images (field researcher);
have discovered that only a fraction of seismologist Jake Walter says the various er science professor Thad Starner of the
faults hold the potential to slip in the pres- new findings will help in the long run, but Georgia Institute of Technology tinker with
ence of moderate pressure increases. he is focused on finding shorter-term haptics, the integration of vibrations or oth-
NICK OXFORDRedux Pictures (Prague); DAVID BITTON A PPhoto (P awnee); THIS PAGE: GETTY IMAGES
The team found that faults oriented in answers. Since 2015 Oklahoma has er tactile cues with computing gadgets. Last
a certain direction, relative to natural tec- slashed injection volumes and, in some September at the 20th International Sym-
tonic stresses in the ground, are the ones cases, suspended wastewater disposal posium on Wearable Computers in Heidel-
most primed to become active. Faults that near seismic zones in an effort to mitigate berg, Germany, they announced that they
are critically stressedthat is, under the quakes. Although the states earth- had programmed Google Glass to passively
enough natural force coming from just quake rate subsequently slowed in 2016, teach its wearers Morse codewith prelim-
the right directionsmay require a sur- the events have grown stronger in magni- inary signs of success.
prisingly small amount of additional force tude. Why? One explanation may be that For the study, 12 participants wore the
to rupture. (Compare this to a brick lying as high-pressure pockets from wastewa- smart glasses while engrossed in an online
on a table. If you press down on the brick, ter injections continue to spread under- game on a PC. During multiple hour-long
it wont move. Nudge it from the side, ground like a drop of water on a paper sessions, half the players heard Google
however, and it will slide across the table.) towel, they encounter new and some- Glasss built-in speaker repeatedly spelling
That pressure can be as little as a few times larger faults. So even though there out words and felt taps behind the right ear
pounds per square inch (psi), says Jens- has been progress, Walter says, Were (from a bone-conduction transducer built
Erik Lund Snee, a Ph.D. candidate at Stan- not out of the woods yet. into the frames) for the dots and dashes
ford and lead author of a Texas stress map Anna Kuchment corresponding to each letter. The other six

New Version!
participants heard only the audio, without the

corresponding vibrations.
After each run of game playing, all the
players were asked to tap out letters in Morse
code using a finger on the touch pad of the
smart glasses; for example, if they tapped
dot-dot, an i would pop up on the visual
display. The brief testing essentially prompted
them to try to learn the code. After four one-
hour sessions, the group that had received
tactile cues could tap a pangram (a sentence
using the entire alphabet) with 94 94percent
percent
accuracy. The audio-only group eventually
achieved 4747percent
percent accuracy, learning solely
from their trial-and-error inputs.
The work shows that it is possible to
teach a system of typing without the user
paying much attention to it, Starner says.
Passive haptic learning could help users
quickly master new text-entry methods for
accessory keyboards or an eyes-free, Morse
codelike system of taps on a smart watch, he
adds, noting: That might really change how
people use mobile and wearable devices.
The results are also exactly congruent
with other effects of passive haptic learning
that the researchers have found in past studies,
Seim says. For example, the group has devel-
oped computing gloves that deliver vibrations
to the fingers to teach the muscle memories
for playing a piano song or typing Braille.
Although it was small scale, the experi- Over 100 New Features & Apps in Origin 2017!
ment demonstrates how wearable computers For a FREE 60-day
could permit users to go about your daily Over 500,000 registered users worldwide in: evaluation, go to
businessand while you do that, you can get 6,000+ Companies including 20+ Fortune Global 500 OriginLab.Com/demo
information to actually learn things, says 6,500+ Colleges & Universities and enter code: 9246
Paul Lukowicz of ofthe
the German Research Cen- 3,000+ Government Agencies & Research Labs
ter for Artificial Intelligence, who was not
involved in the study. Now if only listening to
Mandarin in your sleep could impart fluency.
25+ years serving the scientific & engineering community
IIngfei
ngfei Chen
ScientificAmerican.com 13
2016 Scientific American 2016 Scientific American

ADVANCES
Dive Deep into
Special
Editions
Explore over 50 single-topic
special editions at
scientificamerican.com/ In 2015 the nih
collections decided to end all
chimp biomedical
research. Many
retirees were sent
to Chimp Haven
in Keithville, La.
inKeithville,
ETHICS
To Treat Primates More

Humanely: Transparency
Scientists look to open-data initiatives to lessen the burden
of research on our closest animal relatives
Last year Congress issued a moral call to action when it ordered the National Institutes
of Health to reevaluate its ethical oversight of government-funded primate research.
ofHealth
Although the scientific community widely sees nonhuman primates as essential for
advances in biomedicine (they have facilitated major gains in the fights against AIDS and
neurological diseases such as Parkinsons, for example), researchers agree more can be
done to treat the animals more humanely and conduct research less wastefully. To that
end, the nih gathered prominent scientists and ethicists last September to discuss the
future of primate-based researchand they agreed that data sharing is the way forward.
Researchers could reduce experiments on nonhuman primates by studying data that
have already been collected to answer new questions, says David OConnor, a pathologist
at the University of WisconsinMadison. OConnor is walking the walk: his laboratory
atthe
studies the Zika virus in primates, and he immediately posts all the results online. The goal
is to figure out ways to combat Zika as quickly as possible without placing an undue bur-
den on research primates.
The Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science, which uses rhesus macaques to
study the molecular basis of brain development, also makes all results public. OConnor
says this practice should be more widespread so that researchers who are using this
scarce but vital resource can learn as much as possible from as few animals as necessary.
Still, he is skeptical that data sharing will catch on because it would require a change in
normative behaviorsciences strong culture of secrecy, in which data are kept under
wraps until they are published in a peer-reviewed journal.
One step toward full transparency is to follow the lead of human clinical trials, says
Christine Grady, a bioethicist at the nih. U.S. law requires most clinical trials to register
online and make their results public, even if a study fails or is inconclusive. This ensures
MELANIE STETSON FREEMAN Getty Images
that other re researchers can learn from a trial regardless of its resultsa move that could
also safeguard primates against being used for the same thing twice.
Nancy Haigwood, director of the Oregon National Primate Research Center, also says
Collections data sharing is the way of the future. Her center hosts 4,800 primatesincluding macaques,
ba
baboons and squirrel monkeysto study a variety of human diseases. She currently con-
Copyright 2016 by Scientific American, a division of
Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.
tributes results from her center to OConnors Web site. I dont see a downside, she says.
We have to share data more quickly. Monique
Monique Brouillette
Untitled-36 1
14
12/19/16 11:24 AM

T EC H N O LO GY hydroxide charges and the bristles produce
Bots in Your positive hydrogen ions. As the ions move to

balance the uneven distribution of charge, Keel-billed Toucan
Bloodstream
uid with them, causing the micro
they pull fluid Join the smart shoppers and experienced
swimm
swim mer
er to move toward the lightstem- travelers who have chosen Caravan since 1952
rst, like adart.
first, a dart.
Chemists create micro swimmers As a test, researchers placed a swimmer
that can be controlled by light in liquid on a glass slide and guided it with
ultraviolet light to spell out the word
Microscopic machines tthat hat swim through nano. The 11-micron-long motor could 8-Day Guided Tour $1195
the bloodstream to deliver drugs or perform cover about a millimeter in two minutes Includes all hotels, meals, and activities.
minor surgeries have been a dream of scien scien- slow for medical applicationsbut Tang Fully guided from start to finish.
re-
tists for decades. In the past 15 years re geome-
says they are now designing new geome
searchers have created micro-engine vari vari- tries to speed up the swimmers. This Costa Rica: Caravan Tour Itinerary
magne-
ants that rely on chemical reactions, magne unique way of precisely controlling speed
Day 1. Bienvenidos!
tism or vibration for thrustbut they often and direction is amazing, says Smuel SnSn-
Your tour begins in TM
motor around erratically. The main chal chal- chez, a nanoroboticist at the Max Planck
San Jos, Costa Rica.
lenge is guiding them to where they are Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart,
needed, says University of Hong Kong who was not involved in the research. Day 2. Explore active Pos Volcano and
chemist Jinyao Tang. Tang and his team have This work is an early glimpse at medical hike the Escalonia Cloud Forest Trail.
made progress on that front with a micro robots that doctors could navigate through Day 3. Cruise on the Rio Frio river.
swimmer that can be smoothly and precise precise- apatients
a patients body from the outside with a Relax and soak in volcanic hot springs.
ly steered with the help of light. focused beam of light, Tang says. The devic
devic-
As reported in the December 2016 es currently run on ultraviolet lightbut the Day 4. Hike the Hanging Bridges and
Nature
N Nanottechnology,
ature Nano echnology, t the
he researchers researchers are now working on micro visit Leatherback Turtle National Park.
bottlebbrush-shaped
built bottle rush-shaped microparticles swimmers that respond to a near-infrared Day 5. Free time today at beach resort.
with silicon stems and titanium dioxide wavelength, which can penetrate a few cen cen-
Day 6. Cruise on the
bristle heads. Both materials absorb timeters of tissue. For applications deeper in
Tarcoles River. Float
photons, so when light is shined on the the body, surgeons could control the bots
through a mangrove
microparticle, the stem generates negative with optical fibers.
bers. PPrachi
rachi Patel
forest. Bird watching
and crocodile spotting.
Led by Light, Microscopic Swimmers Could Deliver Drugs Day 7. Visit the world famous Manuel
Antonio National Park. Hike through
rainforest and spectacular beach coves.
Head (gold) Silicon nanowire TiO2 bristles
Day 8. You return with great memories.
Platinum Hasta la vista!
nanoparticle
See Detailed Itinerary at Caravan.com.
Choose An Affordable Tour +tax,fees

Guatemala with Tikal 10 days $1295
Costa Rica 8 days $1195
Light Panama & Canal 8 days $1195
BY BAOHU DAI ET AL., IN NATURE NANOTECHNOLOGY, VOL. 11; DECEMBER 2016
source
Nova Scotia, P.E.I. 10 days $1395
SOURCE: PROGRAMMABLE ARTIFICIAL PHOTOTACTIC MICROSWIMMER,
Canadian Rockies 9 days $1695

Stem Grand Canyon, Zion 8 days $1495
(turquoise)) California Coast 8 days $1595
Orientation Movement Mount Rushmore 8 days $1395
o chemical reactions
Light sets off The TiO2 bristles give the head of the micro
New England, Foliage 8 days $1395
on the surface of the micro swimmer, swimmer more surface area than the stem,
producing ions (charged particles). The head so more positive ions are produced than
produces positive ions, and the stem generates negative ones. As the ions seek to rebalance Brilliant, Affordable Pricing
negative ones. More ions are produced on the the distribution of charge, the swimmer moves Arthur Frommer, Travel Editor
illuminated side than the shaded side, and this stem-rst toward the light.
stem-first
asymmetry causes the swimmer to turn so that FREE Info Guide
it is oriented parallel to the path of the light. The #1 (800) CARAVAN
In Value caravancom
Illustration by Brown Bird Design ScientificAmerican.com 15

Guided Tours Since 1952
ADVANCES
UKRAINE
UKRAINE CHINA
CHINA
I N T H E N EWS A 360-foot-tall steel and concrete hangar now covers rst clinical trial to employ cells edited by the
The first
Quick
Chernobyls reactor 4, site of the 1986 nuclear meltdown. genetic tool CRISPR/Cas9 is now under way in China.
The structure replaced a leaking shield that was installed Three more are scheduled to begin next month. In all
Hits immediately after the disasterand should prevent more modied immune cells
four, humans are injected with modified
radioactive debris from escaping. ght targeted cancers.
that researchers hope will fight
MEXICO
MEXICO INDONESIA
INDONESIA
Archaeologists discovered that Particulate pollution from
the famed Kukulcn pyramid at wildres in 2015
a string of wildfires
Chichn Itz is made up of three may have led to as many as
an-
pyramids nested within one an 17,270 premature deaths
struc-
other. They theorize the struc from respiratory illness
ture was built in three phases: across Southeast Asia,
the innermost pyramid during according to a new report.
the years aA.dD. 550800, the The fires
res were intentionally
8001000
middle layer in 8001000 set to clear land but grew
and the outermost layer in out of control and burned
10501300. 6.4 million
through at least 6.4million
SPAIN
SPAIN acres. They most likely
Scientists in the Canary Islands had to halt research projects for two months were exacerbated by drier
while waiting for a shipment of 29 transgenic mice. Commercial airlines to El Nio weather.
than usual ElNio
For more details, visit
www.ScientificAmerican.com/
the islands had decided to stop transporting laboratory animals, citing
feb2017/advances safety concerns. A military plane eventually delivered the goods.
T:8.125
2016 Scientific
S:7.625 American
Be the breakthrough.
Breakthroughs are the patients participating in clinical trials,
the scientists and doctors working together to advance the
fight against cancer, and the brave survivors like Tonya who
never give up. Lets be the breakthrough. To learn about
appropriate screenings and clinical trials or to help someone
with cancer, go to su2c.org/breakthrough.
#cancerbreakthrough
Tonya Peat
Cancer Survivor
Morgan Freeman
SU2C Ambassador
Executive Producer
of the documentary,
The C Word
Stand Up To Cancer is a program of the Entertainment Industry Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.
16 Scientific American, February 2017 Please talk to your healthcare provider about appropriate screenings for your age, sex, family history and risk
TheCWordMovie.com factors; and about clinical trials that may be right for you. Photo by Nigel Perry
C L IMATE C HA NGE
16,316 cubic 32,235

kilometers April
Icy Retreat
September
29,907 The extent of ice loss aatt the top of
the world, as seen by satellites, is liter-
ally the tip of the iceberg. Although
27,153 the Arctic ice caps shrinkage is often
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/data
expressed in terms of area, the change

in volume is just as striking. Between
24,097
SOURCE: PIOMAS MONTHLY ICE VOLUME DATA, 1979PRESENT, POLAR SCIENCE CENTER,
1980 and 2016 the amount of summer

1980 22,458 ice in cubic kilometers has decreased
by an estimated 72 72percent.
percent. The num-
13,815 1990 bers for 2016 only buttressed the trend:
ice hit record lows for the months of
October and November. The Arctic
11,084 2000
may be free of ice by midcentury if
we continue emitting greenhouse
4,742 2010 gases at the current rate, says Juli-
2016 enne Stroeve, a researcher at the U.S.
National Snow and Ice Data Center.
4,529 RyanF.
Ryan F. Mandelbaum
Graphic by Amanda Montaez
Access Scientific
American anytime,
anywhere. SOLO OR 2 DEVELOPS
PERSON PLAY! SPATIAL SKILLS!
ZOBRIST CUBE
TM
20,000 Puzzles in a Box!

33 POLYCUBE PIECES & 52 PAGE CODE BOOK
Never get bored by a cube assembly puzzle

again. Each code in the code book specifies
a different set of pieces that assemble into
a cube. The codes are sorted by difficulty
from easy to hard. There are even two
Download the App for iOS and Android sections of simple puzzles for children.
Extra pieces allow two player competition,
all packed in a beautiful box.
1 (855) 962-7478 www.ZobristCube.com Ages 6 - Adult
Untitled-17 1 12/14/16 5:11 PM

Zobrist_Zobrist_Cube.indd 1 February 2017, ScientificAmerican.com17
ScientificAmerican.com 17
3/20/15 2:18 PM

ADVANCES
E N GI N E E R I N G
time. To beat the odds, Zabel has
Fruits for turned to the growing method

known as aeroponics, which
the Frozen eliminates the need for

soil (greenhouses at the
American and Australian
A new Antarctic-proof
stations use this method,
greenhouse heads too). Instead fruit and
south to polar scientists veggie plants will sit
on racks with their
In the endless winter t hat roots hanging in the air,
is Antarctica, the picture of where they receive a
decadence is a juicy strawberry. spritz of nutrient-rich
Research scientists at the Neu mist every few minutes.
mayer III polar station may soon Extra carbon dioxide
be so lucky as to count the treat will be pumped into the
and other fresh fruits and vegeta 75-degree F greenhouse for
blesas part of their diets: engineers enrichment, and 42LED lamps
at the German Aerospace Center will be tuned to the red and blue
are currently building them a year- wavelengths that plants thrive on,
round greenhouse. giving the greenhouse a purplish glow.
Called Eden ISS, the closed-system, Biting into a ripe fruit or vegetable
20-foot-long shipping container will head to fresh flavors to the packaged foods that could boost morale for the 10 crew
Antarctica in October. The project is now in make up the typical diet of an Antarctic members set to overwinter at Neumayer
its final phase; next month Paul Zabel, the scientist. We are focused on pick-and-eat III next season. But the garden is more
future caretaker of the greenhouse, and his cropsplants that dont need any post than a treat for polar scientists, Zabel
colleagues will begin a trial of the garden processing, Zabel says. says. Ultimately the project is designed
inBremen. In simulated Antarctic isolation, Cultivating greens in the Antarctics to test techniques for efficiently cultivat-
they plan to grow between 30 and 50 dif hostile conditions requires extreme mea- ing plant-based food in even more
ferent species, including tomatoes, peppers, surestemperatures on the Ekstrm Ice extreme environments, such as on the
lettuce and strawberries, as well as herbs Shelf can drop to 22degrees Fahrenheit, International Space Station orMars.
such as basil and parsley that could add and the sun disappears for months at a Megan Gannon
ENV IRONMENT
[This]
tells me we dont just have
to wring our hands about the
high level ofmercury in these fish.
There is something we can do about
it and get pretty quick results.
Nicholas Fisher, a marine biogeochemist at Stony Brook University and
co-author of a recent study that found mercury levels in Atlantic bluefin tuna
decreased by 19percent between 2004 and 2012. Fisher and his colleagues
directly linked the decline to reduced mercury emissions in North America
Atlantic bluefin tuna most of which is attributable to an industry shift away from coal.
GETTY IMAGES
18 Scientific American, February 2017 Illustration by Thomas Fuchs

IN REASON WE TRUST
I can indeed hardly

see how anyone ought
to wish Christianity
to be true; for if so
the plain language
H E A LT H of the text seems to
show that the men
Go West, Allergy who do not believe
Sufferers will be everlastingly
Dust mites dont like the arid punished. And this is
regions of the U.S. a damnable doctrine.

Creative Commons License
Join the nations largest association of

Its possible to escape ssome
ome tree and weed freethinkers (atheists, agnostics) working
allergies by moving to a new town, state or to keep religion out of government.
region, and the same may be true of dust-mite For a free sample of FFRFs newspaper,
allergies. The microscopic arachnidswhich Freethought Today, phone
leave behind feces and corpses that can trigger 1-800-335-4021
allergic responses and asthmaare sparse CHARLES DARWIN FFRF is a 501(c)(3) educational charity
across large swaths of the Great Plains and
Mountain West, according to a new survey of Freedom From Religion Foundation
the arthropods that inhabit our homes.
With the help of citizen scientists, research- FFRF.ORG/reason-must-prevail
ers from North Carolina State University and the
University of Colorado Boulder analyzed arthro- ADVERTISEMENT
pod DNA found in 732 dust samples collected

FFRF_IN_Reason_We_Trust(Darwin).indd 1 12/18/15 12:47 PM
from interior door frames throughout the U.S.
Amid their data on many other species, the sci- Digital access
entists found that the eastern U.S. and the West Search s using any
hive computer or
Coast are dust-mite utopias, whereas much of The Arc sue mobile device
is
the western interior may be a comparative des- for any 45
since 1 8
ert. Why? Because mites need high humidity to
survive. (They cannot drink; instead they absorb
moisture from the air to stay hydrated.)
EnjoyAll-Access!
Lead author Anne Madden cautions that
just because samples from parts of the West
tested negative for dust mites, it does not mean
those areas are devoid of the critters. Even in Read any issue, any year, on any device. Subscribe now at:
dry regions, mattresses and carpetsas well as
furniture moved from humid areasmay har-
scienticamerican.com/all-access
bor dust-mite colonies, says David Miller, who
studies the links between damp housing and
health at Carle ton University in Ottawa and
Carleton
was not involved in this study.
An estimated 20million
20 million Americans suffer
from allergies to these tiny creatures. If youre
allergic to dust mites, living in dry-land America
and Canada and in high elevations is absolutely
a good thing, Miller says. But you dont have to 12 new print
move across the country to escape: encasing and digital
issues a year
etty Images
mattresses and pillows in allergen-proof covers,

Getty
laundering sheets once a week and vacuuming

BOB SACHA G
frequently with a machine fitted with a HEPA fil-

ter will help banish the bugs. Jennifer Frazer Copyright 2015 by Scientic American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.
Untitled-23 1 ScientificAmerican.com 1912/15/16

February 2017, ScientificAmerican.com19 11:58 AM

ADVANCES
Increasingly militaristic antipoaching

efforts in Africa often put rangers in risky
or even life-threatening situations.
Q&A to fall asleep and have increased startle

reflexes. I train them to feel less stressed by
The Trauma controlling their breathing and muscle ten-
sion. I also take a narrative approach, ask-
of Saving ing them, for example, to tell me a story

about the worst thing that has happened
Animals tothem. I ask how that made them feel and

then point out that these stressful symp-
A clinical psychologist treats toms are normal and that they survived the
shell-shocked rangers engaged incident. To deliver anxiety relief, you have
to get them to understand that they are
inAfricas poaching wars
actually alive, that they have come through.
Poachers across Africa k illed more than Are there many psychologists
24,000 elephants and 1,300 rhinos in 2015 post-traumatic stress disorder? performing similar services?
alonebut animals are not the only victims Susanna Fincham: Rangers are trained to No, not at all. Previously people focused
of the illegal wildlife trade. An estimated conserve wildlife, and in the past firearm more on the soldier role of rangers rather
1,000 rangers have been killed in the line use was limited to controlling trouble ani- than on their well-being. The need is only
ofduty over the past decade, and that figure mals. But starting around 2006, poaching now being recognized. Theres also still
will likely grow: 82percent of the 570 rang- began escalating to the point that rangers strong stigma in South Africa of seeing a
ers the World Wildlife Fund recently sur- now must aim their firearms at other psychologist, especially for men. But now
CLOCKWISE: TONY KARUMBA Getty Images;GETTY IMAGES; MICHAEL GOTTSCHALK Getty Images
veyed in 12 African countries said that they humans. In Kruger National Parkone more senior rangers are seeking assistance,
have faced life-threatening circumstances. ofthe places where I workthere are daily so were chipping away at that wall. Ive
The so-called war on poaching also takes insurgencies by poaching cartels that are seen approximately 120 rangers since 2011,
apsychological tollone that experts are structured, organized and well equipped. and I also speak with family members
only beginning to recognize. Susanna Finch Its a case of guerilla warfare, and danger about their concerns. There are as many
am, a clinical psychologist in Sabie, South isextremely high. As a result, rangers are as25,000 rangers throughout Africa.
Africa, is one of the first to investigate the exposed to a great deal of trauma.
mental health issues plaguing rangersand What is next for you and the rangers?
to devise ways of treating them. She recent- How do you mitigate those issues? Im developing a culturally sensitive thera-
ly spoke with Scientific American about the I use counseling techniques to try to help peutic strategy specifically for rangers,
particular challenges she sees. Edited rangers avoid becoming victims of PTSD. and Id like to collate and publish all the
excerpts follow. Rachel Nuwer This entails careful clinical assessment of information Ive found so its available for
their emotional state. One step is psycho- anyone who wants to use it. Long term,
Scientific American: Why are education, or the impartment of knowl- Iwould also love to see a special indepen-
rangers especially prone to edge about the bodys response to trauma, dent unit of psychologists and social work-
developing anxiety, depression and including why they sweat, shake, struggle ers established for rangers.

THE SCIENCE
OF HEALTH
Stomach Upset problems. A reduction in vitamin B12, for example, might leave
the brain more vulnerable to damage, says Britta Haenisch, an
author of the J AMA Neurology study and a neuropharmacolo-
Doctors and patients are grappling gist at the Bonn campus of the German Center for Neurodegen-
erative Diseases. Last spring clinicians at the Houston Method-
with the unsettling finding that chronic ist Research Institute reported another plausible explanation
use of popular heartburn medicines for how PPIs might lead to these unexpected health issues: they
picked up signs that the drugs act not only in the stomach but
may be riskier than was thought elsewhere in the body, too.
By Karen Weintraub These discoveries leave patients and doctors alike wonder-
ing who should and should not use proton-pump inhibitors
Over-the-counter packages o f Nexium, Prevacid and Prilosec long term. At this point, we dont have enough data to weigh
tell you to take the pillsknown to doctors as proton-pump in one risk versus the other, says Kyle Staller, a leading gastroen-
hibitors, or PPIsfor just two weeks at a time unless otherwise terologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. But he and oth-
directed by a physician. Yet drugs of this best-selling class pre- ers are feeling their way forward.
vent heartburn and ease related ailments so well that patients
particularly those who suffer from a condition called GERD P ROTON PUMPS
(gastroesophageal reflux disease)are often advised to take the Some amount of acid is, of course, crucial for the stomach to
medications for years. By decreasing acid production in the break down food. Specialized cells that dot the stomachs inner
stomach, the agents prevent the caustic liquid from backing lining pump out hydrogen ions, or protons, which, from a
upor refluxinginto the esophagus, where it can cause pain chemical point of view, are what make the stomachs juices so
and can damage the food tubes delicate lining. acidic. As the name implies, proton-pump inhibitors reduce
In recent years, though, safety questions have been raised acid in the stomachand thus reflux into the esophagusby
about prolonged use of the blockbuster drugs. (The medications shutting down many of these cellular pumps. The shutdown is
appear to be safe when taken for a short period, as directed.) permanent, but the drugs are not cures, because the cells re
Some studies, for example, have linked
continuous treatment with proton-pump
inhibitors to serious infections caused by
the bacterium C lostridium difficile. P
re-
sumably something about lowering the
acid environment of the stomach allows
the pathogens to survive when they other-
wise might not. Other investigations sug-
gest long-term changes in the stomachs
acid content can lead to improper absorp-
tion of several vitaminssuch as B12and
minerals, triggering bone loss, among oth-
er ill effects.
Perhaps the biggest surprise came last
year when two studies linked the regular
use of proton-pump inhibitors to condi-
tions that were seemingly unrelated to the
acid levels of the stomach. One of the stud-
ies, published in JAMA Neurology, found
that the drugs increased the risk of devel-
oping dementia, including Alzheimers
disease; the other, published in JAMA In
ternal Medicine, suggested a greater risk
of kidney problems.
The papers did not prove that PPIs
cause the problems. But some researchers
have nonetheless suggested possible mech-
anisms by which long-term use of the
drugs could trigger dementia or kidney
22 Scientific American, February 2017 Illustration by Augusto Zambonato

Karen Weintraub is a freelance health and science journalist
who writes regularly for the N
ew York Times, S TAT
(www.statnews.com) and USA Today, a mong others.
place lost pumps. Another popular class of drugs known as H2 opposed to cell cultures. Researchers also need to explore other
blockers (Tagamet among them) also limit acid production but factors that could account for the link between PPIs and de
in a different, less powerful way. Antacids, such as Tums, neu- mentia, heart disease or kidney problems. After all, some of the
tralize stomach acids but are even less potent, useful only for most well-known risks for these conditions are smoking, obesity
occasional, mild discomfort. and a high-fat diet, which, as it happens, also increase the likeli-
The effectiveness of PPIs has fueled a huge surge in their hood of acid reflux. In this case, use of drugs could be a marker
use since their release in the 1980s. Today they are available for certain unhealthy habitsversus a new, additional cause for
both over the counter and by prescription, and Nexium re these conditions.
mains one of the most prescribed medications in the world.
The studies reported in 2016 grew out of earlier hints that D ECISIONS, DECISIONS
such chronic use could affect the brain and kidneys. One 2013 Without conclusive data, p hysicians and patients have to bal-
study in P LOS ONE, for instance, found that proton-pump in ance the need to prevent the ill effects of excess stomach acid
hibitors can enhance the production of beta-amyloid proteins, and reflux with the desire to avoid potentially seriousif theo-
a hallmark of Alzheimers. Three years later the J AMA Neurology reticalside effects from long-term use of PPIs.
study, which included 74,000 Germans older than 75, found Many doctors worry that reports of potential side effects will
that regular PPI users had a 44percent higher risk of dementia scare away patients who have a real need for the medication.
than those not taking PPIs. Some people with GERD, for example, suffer from such misera-
Similarly, worries about kidneys emerged from evidence that ble heartburn without PPIs that they struggle with daily life.
people with sudden renal damage were more likely
to be taking PPIs. In one 2013 study in B MC Nephrol
ogy, for example, patients with a diagnosis of kid- Gather and evaluate as much
ney disease were found to be twice as likely as the
general population to have been prescribed a PPI.
information as possibleand be
The 2016 study of PPIs and kidney disease, which
followed 10,482 participants from the 1990s through
prepared to change course.
2011, showed that those who took the drug suffered
a 20 to 50 percent higher risk of chronic kidney disease than Untreated acid reflux also carries risks besides acute pain. Stud-
those who did not. And anyone who took a double dose of PPIs ies have shown that it may, over time, alter the lining of the
every day had a much higher risk than study subjects who took esophagus in a way that increases the risk for a condition called
a single dose. Barretts esophagus, which can, in turn, be a precursor to cancer.
The 2016 Houston Methodist study that suggests a new Reducing acid is thought to help reduce the risk. (It is also possi-
explanation for a link between PPIs and Alzheimers or kidney ble to get Barretts esophagus or cancer without having had any
problems looked at cells that were grown in culture. It showed reflux symptoms, however.)
that besides acting on cells in the stomach, the drugs also affect Whenever one of Stallers patients at Mass General says he or
certain cells that normally line blood vessels. she wants to stop taking a PPI, he likes to perform a simple test.
As with many other cells in the body, those in blood vessel He has the person stop taking the medication for a week and
walls need to make acid so that they can break down and get rid substitutes Tagamet or another H2 blocker. (Stopping a PPI cold
of abnormal or damaged proteins. The cells safely store the acid turkey, without adding another drug, typically causes a rebound
in special internal compartments, which essentially serve as effect, pushing the stomach to produce even more acid than it
molecular garbage dumps. If, however, a cells internal trash is otherwise would.) He also recommends cutting back on acidic
not broken downas occurs if acid levels are too lowbits of and spicy food for the length of the test. Then he sees if the
microscopic detritus start to pile up. A cell overflowing with its patient is still bothered by heartburn at the end of a week, espe-
own garbage cannot function properly and quickly becomes cially during the day, when gravity should help prevent acid from
damaged. We actually showed these rubbish piles accumulat- rising up into the throat. The persistence of heartburn indicates
ing in the cells, says John Cooke, a cardiovascular researcher the presence of a more severe problem, Staller says. And thus, the
at Houston Methodist and one of the study authors. The result- benefit of taking a daily PPI outweighs the risks in such cases.
ing problems can become particularly severe wherever many The calculus, obviously, is different for everyone. For Vicki
blood vessels are foundas is the case in the brain and kidneys. Scott Burns, a childrens book author in Bolton, Mass., PPIs are
Indeed, some recent studies have also hinted at a possible con- the lesser of two evils. She says her quality of life is vastly bet-
nection between long-term use of PPIs and damage to another ter on the drugs. Others might reach an alternative conclusion.
organ with lots of blood vessels, the heart. In the end, Staller and other health experts advise patients and
Though reasonable, Cookes conclusion cannot be considered their physicians to gather and evaluate as much information
proved. Proof would require more study of the effect of proton- as possible before making a decisionand to be prepared to
pump inhibitors on the vasculature in animals or humans, as change course if new evidence comes to light.

TECHNOFILES David Pogueis the anchor columnist for Yahoo
Tech and host of several NOVA miniseries on PBS.
How to Stamp philosophical. Identifying the truth is complicated, Face

book CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in response to the phenom-
Out Fake News

enon of fake news. While some hoaxes can be completely
debunked, a greater amount of content, including from main-
stream sources, often gets the basic idea right but some details
wrong or omitted. An even greater volume of stories express
New algorithms will helpbut users opinions that many will disagree with and flag as incorrect
skepticism is the ultimate weapon even when factual.
By David Pogue So yes, the headline about the pope was clearly fake. But
what about rumor and gossip stories? How can anyone know if
Pope Francis Shocks World, E ndorses Donald Trump for theyre true? Or what about satire stories from, for example, the
President. FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Onion and the New Yorkers Andy Borowitz? Neither makes any
Dead of Apparent Murder-Suicide. Rush Reveals Michelles attempt to deceive, and yet both are often passed around online
Perverted Past After She Dumps on Trump. Those headlines as fact by people who suffer from, ahem, humor-deficit disorder.
didnt come from the N ew York Times o r CNN; they were likely Once fake news became a headline, both Google and Facebook
written by teenagers in Macedonia. Those fake news stories stopped accepting advertising relationships with fake-news sites.
were written as clickbait, designed to draw readers to fake- There goes the financial incentive of those Macedonian teenagers.
news sites, where the Balkan teens made money by selling ads. And despite Zuckerbergs initial assertion that its extremely
If last falls election will go down in history as the Election unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election, Facebook
of Unintended Consequences, those fake stories are no excep- is taking more steps to fight the problemby making it easier to
tion. They wound up circulating copiously on Twitter and report fake stories, for example, and considering the addition of
Facebook; on the latter, the top-20 fake stories actually trig- warning labels to stories that readers have flagged as phony.
gered more clicks than the top-20 real ones. Fake news became But heres the thing. Remember the first time it became pos-
fodder for ugly partisan warfare online, too. Worst of all, it sible to assemble customized news pages (like Google News),
might have affected the presidential election results. Remem- where you saw news stories pertaining to your interests and
ber, 44percent of U.S. adults get their news from Facebook. nothing more? People worried that wed never be exposed to sto-
You wouldnt think that fake news would be controversial. ries that we might have stumbled onto when flipping, say,
Surely we all agree that something as important as a presiden- through a newspaper.
tial election should be based on truth. Cant we just ask Facebook Well, the Facebook problem is a thousand times worse. On
and Twitter to block fake news? social media sites, you decide whose posts you want to read.
We can, but they cant. The problem isnt technologicalits On Facebook, theyre your friends; on Twitter, theyre people
you choose to follow. In both cases, youre following like-mind-
ed people, whose opinions you prefer. In other words, youre no
longer choosing topics you want to read about; now youre
choosing which s lant o n the news you want to see. Youre build-
ing your own echo chamber.
All of this helps explain why the let the community decide
approach to filtering out bogus stories is problematic. For
everyone in your echo chamber who flags a story as fake, the
parallel universe on the other side of the hyperpartisan divide
will mark it as true.
If we ever decide to do this presidential election thing again,
the fake news stories will still be around. But three things will
be different, all hopeful signs. First, Facebook and Google will
have removed the ad-revenue incentive for publishing them.
Second, Facebooks planned new policies and algorithms will, at
least, screen out some of the deliberately misleading stories.
Above all, well be more cynical. Having lived through the
first major fake-news election cycle and then spent four years
talking about it, maybe well be more discerning next time.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE

READ MORE ABOUT FAKE NEWS:
scientificamerican.com/feb2017/pogue
24 Scientific American, February 2017 Illustration by Thomas Fuchs

The

Exercise
Paradox EVO LU T I O N
Studies of how the human engine

burns calories help toexplain why
physical activity does little tocontrol
weightand how our species acquired
some ofits most distinctive traits
By Herman Pontzer
IN BRIEF
Conventional wisdom h olds that physically active peo-

ple burn more calories than less active people do.
But studies show that traditional hunter-gatherers,
who lead physically hard lives, burn the same number of
calories as people with access to modern conveniences.
The discovery that human energy expenditure is tightly
constrained raises questions about how our large brain
and other energetically demanding traits evolved.
Comparisons with energy expenditure in great apes
suggest that the human metabolic engine has evolved to
get more work done to support our costly features.

Illustration by Bomboland

Still Herman Pontzer is an anthropologist at Hunter
College. He studies energy expenditure in humans
no
and great apes to test hypotheses about the evolution
of human physiology and anatomy.
graffe. Four of us had

been walking half
the day, tracking a wounded giraffe that Mwasad,
a Hadza man in his late 30s, shot the evening
It was karma. Dave and I, along with anthropologist
Brian Wood from Yale University, had spent the past
month living with the Hadza, conducting the first direct
before. He hit it in the base of the neck from measurements of daily energy expenditure in a hunter-
gatherer population. We enlisted a couple of dozen Had-
about 25 yards with a steel-tipped, wood arrow za women and men, Mwasad among them, to drink
smeared with powerful, homemade poison. Hadza small, incredibly expensive bottles of water enriched in
are traditional hunter-gatherers who live off two rare isotopes, deuterium and oxygen 18. Analyzing
the concentration of those isotopes in urine samples
ofwild plants and animals in the dry savanna from each participant would allow us to calculate their
wilderness of northern Tanzania. They know the bodys daily rate of carbon dioxide production and thus
landscape and its residents better than you know their daily energy expenditure. This approach, known as
the doubly labeled water method, is the gold standard in
your local Trader Joes. Mwasad had let the giraffe public health for measuring the calories burned each
run to give the poison time to work, hoping to day during normal daily life. It is straightforward, com-
find it dead in the morning. An animal that size pletely safe and accurate, but it requires that partici-
pants drink every last drop of the enriched water. We
would feed his family and his camp for a week had taken pains to make clear that they must not spill,
but only if he could locate it. that they had to finish the dose completely. Mwasad
seemed to have taken that message to heart.
Mwasads sly joking aside, my colleagues and I have
Mwasad led our partyDave Raichlen from the University learned a lot about how the human body burns calories through
of Arizona, a 12-year-old Hadza boy named Neje and meout of our work with the Hadza. Together with findings from investiga-
camp just after daybreak. Dave and I were of little use in this tors who study other populations, our research has revealed some
endeavor. Mwasad had invited us along as a friendly gesture surprising insights into human metabolism. Our data indicate
and for the extra help to carry the butchered animal back to that, contrary to received wisdom, humans tend to burn the same
camp should our search effort succeed. As anthropologists who number of calories regardless of how physically active they are.
study human ecology and evolution, we jumped at the opportu- Yet we have evolved to burn considerably more calories than our
nity to tag alongHadza mens tracking abilities are legendary. primate cousins do. These results help to explain two puzzles that
It certainly beat the prospect of a long day in camp spent fid- might seem disparate at first but are, in fact, related: first, why
dling with research equipment. exercise generally fails to aid weight loss and, second, how some
We walked hard for an hour through a pathless, rolling sea of humanitys unique traits arose.
of golden, waist-high grass, dotted with brush and thorny aca-
cia trees, directly to the bloody patch where the giraffe was THE CALORIE ECONOMY
struck. That bit of navigation in itself was quite a trick, like Researchers who are interested in human evolution and ecology
someone leading you to the middle of a 1,000-acre wheat field often focus on energy expenditure because energy is central to
to show you where he had once dropped a toothpick and then everything in biology. One can learn a lot about any species by
nonchalantly reaching down to pick it up. Hour on hour, track- measuring its metabolism: life is essentially a game of turning
ing the wounded animal under a relentless sun ensued as we energy into kids, and every trait is tuned by natural selection to
followed ever more tenuous signs. maximize the evolutionary return on each calorie spent. Ideally,
Still no giraffe. At least I had water. We sat in the shade of the study population lives in the same environments in which the
some bushes just after midday, taking a break while Mwasad pon- species originally evolved, where the same ecological pressures
dered where the injured creature might head. I had a quart or so that shaped its biology are still at work. That is difficult to achieve
leftenough, I figured, to get through the heat of the afternoon. with human subjects because most people are divorced from the
Mwasad, however, had not brought any water with him, as is typ- daily work of acquiring food from a wild landscape. For nearly all
ical of the Hadza. As we packed up to restart the search, I offered the past two million years, humans and our ancestors have been
him a drink. Mwasad gave me a sideways look, smiled and pro- living and evolving as hunter-gatherers. Farming only got going
ceeded to drink the entire bottle in one long pull. When he fin- about 10,000 years ago; industrialized cities and modern technol-
ished, he casually handed me the empty bottle. ogy are only a few generations old. Populations such as the Had-

za, one of the last hunter-gatherer populations left in the world, ly hard folks such as the Hadza work, it seems impossible to imag-
are key to understanding how our bodies evolved and functioned ine otherwise. Many in public health go so far as to argue that this
before cows, cars and computers. reduction in daily energy expenditure is behind the global obesity
Life for the Hadza is physically demanding. Each morning the pandemic in the developed world, with all those unburned calo-
women leave the grass huts of camp in small groups, some carry- ries slowly accumulating as fat. One of our motivations for mea-
ing infants on their back in a wrap, foraging for wild berries or suring Hadza metabolism was to determine the size of this ener-
other edibles. Wild tubers are a staple of the Hadza diet, and wom- gy shortfall and see just how deficient we Westerners were in our
en can spend hours digging them out of the rocky ground with daily expenditure. Back home in the U.S. after a hot and dusty
sticks. Men cover miles each day hunting with bows and arrows field season, I lovingly packed the vials of Hadza urine on dry ice
they make themselves. When game is scarce, they use simple and sent them away to the Baylor College of Medicine, home of
hatchets to chop into tree limbs, often 40 feet up in the canopy, to one of the best doubly labeled water laboratories in the country,
harvest wild honey. Even the children contribute, hauling buckets imagining the whopping calorie totals they would reveal.
of water back from the nearest watering hole, sometimes a mile or But a funny thing happened on the way to the isotope ratio
more from camp. In the late afternoon, folks wend their way back mass spectrometer. When the analyses came back from Baylor,
to camp, sitting on the ground and talking around small cooking the Hadza looked like everyone else. Hadza men ate and burned
fires, sharing the days returns and tending to the kids. Days roll about 2,600 calories a day, Hadza women about 1,900 calories a
along like this through dry and wet seasons, ad millennium. daythe same as adults in the U.S. or Europe. We looked at the
But forget any romantic notions of some lost Eden. Hunting data every way imaginable, accounting for effects of body size, fat
and gathering is cerebral and risky, a high-stakes game in which percentage, age and sex. No difference. How was it possible? What
the currency is calories and going bust means death. Men such as were we missing? What else were we getting wrong about human
Mwasad spend hundreds of calories a day hunting and tracking, biology and evolution?
a gamble that they hope will pay off in game. Savvy is just as criti-
cal as stamina. Whereas other predators can rely on their speed LIES MY FITBIT TOLD ME
and strength to obtain prey, humans have to outthink their quar- It seems so obvious and inescapable that physically active people
ry, considering their behavioral tendencies and scouring the land- burn more calories that we accept this paradigm without much
scape for signs of game. Still, Hadza men land big game like gi critical reflection or experimental evidence. But since the 1980s
raffes only about once a month. They would starve if Hadza wom- and 1990s, with the advent of the doubly labeled water method,
en were not executing an equally sophisticated, complementary the empirical data have often challenged the conventional wis-
strategy, using their encyclopedic knowledge of local plant life to dom in public health and nutrition. The Hadza result, strange as
bring home a reliable bounty every day. This complex, coopera- it seemed, was not some thunderbolt from the blue but more
tive foraging is what made humans so incredibly successful and is like the first cold drop of water down your neck from a rain that
the core of what makes us unique. had been building, ignored, for years.
Researchers in public health and human evolution have long The earliest doubly labeled water studies among traditional
assumed that our hunter-gatherer ancestors burned more calo- farmers in Guatemala, the Gambia and Bolivia showed their
ries than people in cities and towns do today. Given how physical- energy expenditures were broadly similar to those of city dwell-
FINDINGS
Gas Guzzlers
a Human Populations
b Humans vs. Apes
VOL.7, NO. 7, ARTICLE NO.E40503; JULY 25, 2012 (left); METABOLIC ACCELERATION AND THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN
SOURCES: HUNTER-GATHERER ENERGETICS AND HUMAN OBESITY, BYHERMAN PONTZER ETAL., IN P LOS ONE,
5
Experts have assumed that physically active Western female Average Humans Average
Western male
Total Energy Expenditure (thousands of calories per day)
energy Chimpanzees Great apes energy

ATURE, VOL.533; MAY 19, 2016 (right)
people burn more calories than less active

Hadza female expenditure* and bonobos expenditure*
folks. But direct measurements of energy
4 Hadza male Gorillas
expenditure in modern-day hunter-gatherers
Orangutans
in the developing world and comparatively
sedentary populations in the U.S. and Europe
3

reveal similar results a . If human metabo-
BRAIN SIZE AND LIFE HISTORY, BYHERMAN PONTZER ETAL., IN N
lism is so tightly constrained, how did our big

brain, long life span and other energetically
costly features that distinguish us from our pri- 2
mate relatives evolve? Humans consume and
expend hundreds of calories a day more than

great apes b , suggesting that our metabolic 1
engine changed to burn energy faster, thus
powering our expensive traits.
*To account for differences in energy expenditure arising from body 0
size, Western averages are calculated at Hadza body sizes, and 0 25 50 75 100 0 25 50 75 100
great ape averages are calculated at average human body size. Lean Body Mass (kilograms) Lean Body Mass (kilograms)
Graphic by Jen Christiansen February 2017, ScientificAmerican.com29

ers. In a study published in 2008, Amy Luke, a researcher in
public health at Loyola University Chicago, took this work a
step further, comparing energy expenditure and physical activ-
ity in rural Nigerian women with that in African-American
women in Chicago. Like the Hadza study, hers found no differ-
ences in daily energy expenditure between populations, despite
large differences in activity levels. Following up on that work,
Lara Dugas, also at Loyola, along with Luke and others, ana-
lyzed data from 98 studies around the globe and showed that
populations coddled by the modern conveniences of the devel-
oped world have similar energy expenditures to those in less
developed countries, with more physically demanding lives.
Humans are not the only species with a fixed rate of energy
expenditure. On the heels of the Hadza study, I piloted a large
collaborative effort to measure daily energy expenditure among
primates, the group of mammals that includes monkeys, apes,
lemurs and us. We found that captive primates living in labs
and zoos expend the same number of calories each day as those
in the wild, despite obvious differences in physical activity. In
HADZA HUNTER-GATHERERS in Tanzania spend hundreds ofcal-
2013 Australian researchers found similar energy expenditures
ories a day on activity yet burn the same total number ofcalories
in sheep and kangaroos kept penned or allowed to roam free. as city dwellers in the U.S.
And in 2015 a Chinese team reported similar energy expendi-
tures for giant pandas in zoos and in the wild.
For a more granular look, comparing individuals instead of us alive. Saving energy on these processes could make room in our
population averages, I recently joined Luke and her team, in daily energy budget, allowing us to spend more on physical activi-
cluding Dugas, to examine activity and energy expenditure in a ty without increasing total calories spent per day. For example,
large, multiyear analysis known as the Modeling the Epidemio- exercise often reduces inflammatory activity that the immune sys-
logical Transition Study (METS). More than 300 participants tem mounts as well as levels of reproductive hormones such as
wore accelerometers similar to a Fitbit or other fitness tracker estrogen. In lab animals, increased daily exercise has no effect on
24 hours a day for an entire week while their daily energy ex daily energy expenditure but instead results in fewer ovulatory
penditure was measured with doubly labeled water. We found cycles and slower tissue repair. And extremes may lead some ani-
that daily physical activity, tracked by the accelerometers, was mals to eat their own nursing infants. Humans and other crea-
only weakly related to metabolism. On average, couch potatoes tures seem to have several evolved strategies for keeping daily
tended to spend about 200 fewer calories each day than people energy expenditure constrained.
who were moderately active: the kind of folks who get some All of this evidence points toward obesity being a disease of
exercise during the week and make a point to take the stairs. gluttony rather than sloth. People gain weight when the calories
But more important, energy expenditure plateaued at higher they eat exceed the calories they expend. If daily energy expendi-
activity levels: people with the most intensely active daily lives ture has not changed over the course of human history, the pri-
burned the same number of calories each day as those with mary culprit in the modern obesity pandemic must be the calo-
moderately active lives. The same phenomenon keeping Hadza ries consumed. This should not be news. The old adage in public
energy expenditure in line with that of other populations was health is that you cant outrun a bad diet, and experts know
evident among individuals in the study. from personal experience and lots of data that just hitting the
How does the body adjust to higher activity levels to keep dai- gym to lose weight is frustratingly ineffective. But the new sci-
ly energy expenditure in check? How can the Hadza spend hun- ence helps to explain why exercise is such a poor tool for weight
dreds of calories a day on activity yet burn the same total num- loss. It is not that we are not trying hard enough. Our bodies have
ber of calories a day as comparatively sedentary people in the been plotting against us from the start.
U.S. and Europe? We are still not sure, but the cost of activity per You still have to exercise. This article is not a note from your
se is not changing: we know, for example, that Hadza adults mom excusing you from gym class. Exercise has tons of well-doc-
burn the same number of calories to walk a mile as Westerners umented benefits, from increased heart and immune system
do. It could be that people with high activity levels change their health to improved brain function and healthier aging. In fact, I
behavior in subtle ways that save energy, like sitting rather than suspect that metabolic adaptation to activity is one of the reasons
standing or sleeping more soundly. But our analysis of the METS exercise keeps us healthy, diverting energy away from activities,
data suggests that although these behavioral changes might con- such as inflammation, that have negative consequences if they go
tribute, they are not sufficient to account for the constancy seen on too long. For example, chronic inflammation has been linked
in daily energy expenditure. to cardiovascular disease and autoimmune disorders.
HARRY HOOK Getty Images
Another intriguing possibility is that the body makes room for The foods we eat certainly affect our health, and exercise
the cost of additional activity by reducing the calories spent on paired with dietary changes can help keep off unwanted pounds
the many unseen tasks that take up most of our daily energy bud- once a healthy weight has been reached, but evidence indicates
get: the housekeeping work that our cells and organs do to keep that it is best to think of diet and exercise as different tools with
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE Learn more about the evolution of human metabolism at ScientificAmerican.com/feb2017/pontzer

different strengths. Exercise to stay healthy and vital; focus on evolved to burn energy faster and get more done than our ape rel-
diet to look after your weight. atives. Human evolution was not entirely without trade-offs: our
digestive tract is smaller and less costly than other apes, which
ENERGY BUDGETS AND EVOLUTION need a large, energetically expensive gut to digest their fibrous,
Even as the recent science i n metabolic adaptation helps to clar- plant-based diets. But the critical changes that make us human
ify the relation between exercise and obesity, a constrained, adap- were fueled by an evolutionary shift in our metabolic engine.
tive metabolism leaves researchers with larger, existential ques-
tions. If daily energy expenditure is virtually immobile, how could SHARED FORTUNES
humans evolve to be so radically different from our ape rela- At some point in the late afternoon, our path bent toward camp,
tives? Nothing in life is free. Resources are limited, and investing Mwasad looking ahead instead of searching the ground. We
more in one trait inevitably means investing less in another. It is were heading home sans giraffe. Here was the fundamental dan-
no coincidence that rabbits reproduce prodigiously but die young; ger in the high-energy human strategy: coming home empty-
all that energy plowed into offspring means less for bodily main- handed was both more likely and more consequential. Many of
tenance and longevity. Tyrannosaurus rex c an thank its big head the energy-rich foods we need to fuel our faster metabolisms are
of nasty teeth and powerful hind limbs for its puny arms and inherently difficult to obtain in the wild, increasing the energy
hands. Even dinosaurs couldnt have it all. cost of finding food and heightening the risk of starvation for the
Humans flout this bedrock evolutionary principle of austerity. men and women out foraging and their kids back at camp.
Our brains are so large that, as you sit reading this article, the Happily for Mwasad, humans have evolved a few tricks to
oxygen from every fourth breath you take is needed just to feed keep starvation at bay. We are the only species that has learned
your brain. Yet humans have bigger babies, reproduce more to cook, which increases the caloric value of many foods and
often, live longer and are more physically active than any of our makes them more efficient to digest. Our mastery of fire converts
ape relatives. Hadza camps are full of cheerfully chaotic children otherwise inedible root vegetablesfrom Trader Joes yams to
and hale, hearty men and women in their 60s and 70s. Our ener- wild Hadza tubersinto veritable starch bombs. We have also
getic extravagance presents an evolutionary puzzle. Humans are evolved to be fat. We know this all too well from the obesity crisis
so genetically and biologically similar to other apes that research- in the West, but even Hadza adults, lean by any human standard,
ers have long assumed that our metabolisms are similar, too. But carry twice as much fat as chimpanzees idling away in zoos.
if energy expenditures are as constrained as our Hadza study and Problematic though it may be in our modern era, our propensity
others suggest, how could an inflexible, apelike metabolism pro- to store fat most likely coevolved with our faster metabolism as a
cess all the calories needed to support our costly human traits? critical energy buffer to survive lean times.
In the wake of our broad, comparative primate energetics As the sun sat heavy and orange just above the trees, we melt-
study, my colleagues and I began to wonder whether humans ed back into camp, Dave and I toward our tents, Mwasad and
adaptive suite of energetically costly traits was fueled by a Neje to their families huts, each one of us glad to be home. De
wholesale evolutionary change in metabolic physiology. We spite the lost giraffe, no one went hungry that evening. Instead,
had found in that study that primates burn only half as many with little fanfare or conscious effort, the camp deployed our spe-
calories a day as other mammals do. The reduced metabolic cies most ingenious and powerful weapon against starvation:
rates of primates correspond with their slow rates of growth sharing. Sharing food is so fundamental to the human experi-
and reproduction. Perhaps, conversely, the faster reproduction ence, the common thread of every barbecue, birthday, bar mitz-
and other expensive traits of humans were linked to the evolu- vah, that we take it for granted, but it is a unique and essential
tion of an increased metabolic rate. All that was needed to test part of our evolutionary inheritance. Other apes do not share.
this idea was getting a bunch of frenetic chimpanzees, wily bono- Beyond our nutritional requirements and fixation with fat,
bos, phlegmatic orangutans and skittish silverback gorillas to perhaps the most profound impact of our increased energy expen-
carefully drink doses of doubly labeled water without spilling and diture is this human imperative to work together. Evolving a fast-
to provide a few urine samples. In a scientific tour de force, my er metabolism bound our fortunes to one another, requiring that
colleagues Steve Ross and Mary Brown, both at Lincoln Park Zoo we cooperate or die. As I sat with Dave and Brian, recounting the
in Chicago, worked with caretakers and veterinarians from more days adventures over tinned sardines and potato chips, I realized
than a dozen zoos across the U.S. to pull that off. It took a couple I would not have had it any other way. No giraffe, no problem.
of years, but they accumulated enough data on great ape energy
expenditure to provide a solid comparison with humans.
M O R E TO E X P L O R E
Sure enough, humans burn more calories each day than any of
our great ape relatives. Even after accounting for effects of body Hunter-Gatherer Energetics and Human Obesity. H erman Pontzer etal. in
PLOS ONE, Vol. 7, No. 7, Article No. e40503; July 25, 2012.
size, activity level and other factors, humans consume and expend
Constrained Total Energy Expenditure and Metabolic Adaptation to Physical
about 400 more calories a day than chimpanzees and bonobos Activity in Adult Humans. H erman Pontzer etal. in Current Biology, V
ol.26, No. 3,
do; differences with gorillas and orangutans are larger still. Those pages 410417; February8, 2016.
extra calories represent the extra work our bodies do to support Metabolic Acceleration and the Evolution of Human Brain Size and Life History.
larger brains, produce more babies and maintain our bodies so Herman Pontzer etal. in Nature, V
ol.533, pages 390392; May 19, 2016.
we live longer. It is not simply that we eat more than other apes FROM OUR ARCHIVES
(although we do that, too); as we know all too well, piling extra
Food for Thought. W
illiam R. Leonard; December 2002.
calories into a body that is not equipped to use them only results
in obesity. Our bodies, right down to the cellular level, have s c i e n t i f i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a z i n e /s a

POP
COSMOLOGY
goes the
universe
THE LATEST ASTROPHYSICAL MEASUREMENTS,
COMBINED WITH THEORETICAL PROBLEMS, CAST DOUBT
ON THE LONG-CHERISHED INFLATIONARY THEORY
OF THE EARLY COSMOS AND SUGGEST WE NEED NEW IDEAS
By Anna Ijjas, Paul J. Steinhardt and Abraham Loeb
32 Scientific American, February 2017 Photographs by The Voorhes

O
on march 21, 2013, t he European Space
Agency held an international press confer- Anna Ijjas is the John A. Wheeler postdoctoral fellow at
ence to announce new results from a satel- the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. She studies
the origin, evolution and future of the universe and the
lite called Planck. The spacecraft had nature ofdark matter and dark energy.
mapped the cosmic microwave background
(CMB) radiation, light emitted more than
Paul J. Steinhardt is Albert Einstein Professor in Science
13billion years ago just after the big bang, at Princeton University and director of the Princeton
in better detail than ever before. The new Center for Theoretical Science. His research spans
problems in particle physics, astrophysics, cosmology
map, scientists told the audience of journal- and condensed matter physics.
ists, confirms a theory that cosmologists
Abraham Loeb is chair of the astronomy department at
have held dear for 35years: that the uni- Harvard University, founding director of Harvards Black Hole
verse began with a bang followed by a brief Initiative and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation
at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
period of hyperaccelerated expansion
known as inflation. This expansion
smoothed the universe to such an extent
that, billions of years later, it remains near-
ly uniform all over space and in every ger. Yet even now the cosmology community has not taken a
direction and flat, as opposed to curved cold, honest look at the big bang inflationary theory or paid sig-
like a sphere, except for tiny variations in nificant attention to critics who question whether inflation hap-
pened. Rather cosmologists appear to accept at face value the
the concentration of matter that account proponents assertion that we must believe the inflationary the-
for the finely detailed hierarchy of stars, ory because it offers the only simple explanation of the observed
galaxies and galaxy clusters around us. features of the universe. But, as we will explain, the Planck data,
added to theoretical problems, have shaken the foundations of
this assertion.
The principal message of the press conference was that the
Planck data perfectly fit the predictions of the simplest infla- FOLLOWING THE ORACLE
tionary models, reinforcing the impression that the theory is To demonstrate inflations problems, we will start by following
firmly established. The book on cosmology seemed to be closed, the edict of its proponents: assume inflation to be true without
the team suggested. question. Let us imagine that a professed oracle informed us
Following the announcement, the three of us discussed its that inflation definitely occurred shortly after the big bang. If
ramifications at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astro- we were to accept the oracles claim as fact, what precisely
physics. Ijjas was then a visiting graduate student from Germa- would it tell us about the evolution of the universe? If inflation
ny; Steinhardt, who had been one of the original architects of truly offered a simple explanation of the universe, you would
inflationary theory three decades ago but whose later work expect the oracles declaration to tell us a lot about what to
pointed out serious problems with its theoretical foundations, expect in the Planck satellite data.
was spending his sabbatical at Harvard; and Loeb was our host One thing it would tell us is that at some time shortly after
as chair of the astronomy department. We all remarked on the the big bang there had to have been a tiny patch of space filled
meticulously precise observations of the Planck team. We dis- with an exotic form of energy that triggered a period of rapidly
agreed, however, with the interpretation. If anything, the accelerated expansion (inflation) of the patch. Most familiar
Planck data disfavored the simplest inflation models and exac- forms of energy, such as that contained in matter and radiation,
erbated long-standing foundational problems with the theory, resist and slow the expansion of the universe because of gravita-
providing new reasons to consider competing ideas about the tional self-attraction. Inflation requires that the universe be
origin and evolution of the universe. filled with a high density of energy that gravitationally self-
In the years since, more precise data gathered by the Planck repels, thereby enhancing the expansion and causing it to speed
satellite and other instruments have made the case only stron- up. It is important to note, however, that this critical ingredient,
IN BRIEF
The latest measurements o f the cos- mosthe idea that space expanded ex- CMB (although it can be made to pre- The data suggest c osmologists should
mic microwave background (CMB), the ponentially in the first moments of time. dict almost any outcome). It would also reassess this favored paradigm and con-
universes oldest light, raise concerns Inflation typically produces a different generate primordial gravitational waves, sider new ideas about how the uni-
about the inflationary theory of the cos- pattern of temperature variation in the which have not been found. verse began.

C O S M O L O G I C A L D ATA
Snapshot of the Infant Universe

This map from the Planck satellite launched by the European Space that the pattern of hot and cold spots here is consistent with this
Agency shows the cosmic microwave background (CMB)the old- notion. Yet the theory can actually produce any pattern and typically
est observable light in the universewhich offers the best picture yet generates a larger variation in temperature than this map shows.
of the infant cosmos. Blue areas of the sky represent spots where the Furthermore, if inflation took place the CMB should contain evidence
temperature of the CMB, and thus the early universe, was cooler, and ofcosmic gravitational wavesripples in spacetime caused by the
red regions reflect warmer locales. Proponents of inflation, a theory early stretchingyet it does not. Instead the Planck data reveal that
suggesting the cosmos expanded rapidly in its first moments, claim the real story of our universes history is still wide open.
Hot spots
(red)
Cold spots
(blue)
referred to as inflationary energy, is purely hypothetical; we tionary energy would thereby be transcribed into a pattern of
have no direct evidence that it exists. Furthermore, there are lit- slightly hotter and colder spots in the cosmic microwave back-
erally hundreds of proposals from the past 35 years for what the ground light, which preserves a record of those times. Over the
inflationary energy may be, each generating very different rates ensuing 13.7 billion years, the tiny density and temperature vari-
of inflation and very different overall amounts of stretching. ations in the cosmos would condense under the influence of
Thus, it is clear that inflation is not a precise theory but a highly gravity to form a pattern of galaxies and large-scale structures.
flexible framework that encompasses many possibilities. That is a good start, though somewhat vague. Could we pre-
But what could the oracles assertion tell us that is true for all dict the numbers and arrangements of galaxies throughout
the models, independent of the specific type of inflationary ener- space? The degree to which space is curved and warped? The
gy? For one thing, we could be sure from our basic knowledge of amount of matter, or other forms of energy, that makes up the
quantum physics that the temperature and density of matter current universe? The answer is no. Inflation is such a flexible
throughout the universe after inflation ends must vary some- idea that any outcome is possible. Does inflation tell us why the
what from place to place. Random quantum fluctuations in the big bang happened or how the initial patch of space was created
concentration of inflationary energy on subatomic scales would that eventually evolved into the universe observed today? The
be stretched during inflation into cosmic-sized regions with dif- answer, again, is no.
COURTESY OF ESA AND PLANCK COLLABORATION
fering amounts of inflationary energy. According to the theory, If we knew inflation to be true, we would also not be able to
the accelerated expansion ends when the inflationary energy predict much about the hot and cold spots observed by the
decays into ordinary matter and radiation. In places where the Planck satellite. The Planck map and earlier studies of the CMB
inflationary energy density (the amount of inflationary energy in indicate that the pattern of hot and cold spots is nearly the same
a cubic meter of space) is slightly greater, the accelerated expan- no matter how close in you zoom, a property that scientists call
sion would last slightly longer, and the density and temperature scale invariance. The latest Planck data show that the devia-
of the universe would be slightly higher when the inflationary tion from perfect scale invariance is tiny, only a few percent, and
energy finally decays. The quantum-induced variations in infla- that the average temperature variation across all spots is rough-

ly 0.01 percent. Proponents of inflation often emphasize that it ance in the pattern of hot and colds spots in the CMB and the
is possible to produce a pattern with these properties. Yet such failure to detect cosmic gravitational wavesare stunning. For
statements leave out a key point: inflation allows many other the first time in more than 30 years, the simplest inflationary
patterns of hot and cold spots that are not nearly scale-invariant models, including those described in standard textbooks, are
and that typically have a temperature variation much greater strongly disfavored by observations. Of course, theorists rapid-
than the observed value. I n other words, scale invariance is pos- ly rushed to patch the inflationary picture but at the cost of
sible but so is a large deviation from scale invariance and every- making arcane models of inflationary energy and revealing yet
thing in between, depending on the details of the inflationary further problems.
energy density one assumes. Thus, the arrangement Planck saw
cannot be taken as confirmation of inflation. A SKIER ON A HILL
Notably, if we knew inflation had occurred, there is one fea- To fully appreciate the impact of the Planck measurements, it
ture we could be fairly certain of finding in the Planck CMB helps to take a close look at the inflationary models that propo-
observations because it is common to all the simplest forms of nents of inflation are putting forward, warts and all.
inflationary energy, including those presented in standard text- Inflationary energy is thought to arise from a hypothetical
books. At the same time that quantum fluctuations produce field, called the inflaton, analogous to an electric field, that per-
random variations in inflationary energy, they also produce ran- meates space and has a strength (or value) at every point in
dom warps in space that propagate as waves of spatial distor- space. Because the inflaton is hypothetical, theorists are free to
tion across the universe once inflation ends. These disturbanc- imagine that the inflaton is gravitationally self-repulsive to cause
es, known as gravitational waves, are another source of hot and the expansion of the universe to accelerate. The strength of the
cold spots in the cosmic microwave background radiation, albe- inflaton field at a given point in space determines the inflation-
it ones that have a distinctive polarizing effect (that is, the grav- ary energy density there. The relation between the strength of
the field and the energy density
The simplest inflationary models,

can be represented by a curve
on a graph that looks like a hill
including those described in standard

[see box on opposite page]. Each
of the hundreds of inflationary
textbooks, are strongly disfavored

energy models that have been
proposed has a precise shape
by observations. Of course,
for this hill that determines the
properties of the universe after
theorists rapidly rushed to patch

inflation is overfor instance,
whether or not the universe is
the inflationary picture but at the

flat and smooth and has nearly
scale-invariant temperature and
cost ofmaking arcane models.

density variations.
Since the release of the
Planck data, cosmologists find
themselves in a situation much
itational waves cause light to have a certain preferred orienta- like the following scenario: Imagine you live in an isolated town
tion for its electric field, depending on whether the light comes set in a valley bounded by hills. The only people that you have
from a hot or cold spot, or some place in between). ever seen in the town are residents, until one day a stranger
Unfortunately, the search for inflationary gravitational waves appears. Everyone wants to know how the stranger got to your
has not panned out. Although cosmologists first observed hot town. You consult the town gossip (aka the local oracle), who
and cold spots with the COBE (COsmic Background Explorer) claims to know that she got here by skiing. Believing the gossip,
satellite in 1992 and with many subsequent experiments, in you consider that there are only two hills that lead to your val-
cluding even more recent Planck satellite results from 2015, ley. Anyone reading the guidebook would know the first hill,
they have not found any signs of the cosmic gravitational waves which can be easily accessed using a ski lift. All pistes there have
expected from inflation, as of this writing, despite painstaking a steady decrease; the visibility and snow conditions are gener-
searches for them. (On March 17, 2014, scientists at the BICEP2 ally good. The second hill is completely different. It is not
experiment at the South Pole announced the detection of cos- included in any standard skiing guidebook. No wonder! Its top
mic gravitational waves but later retracted their claim when is known for avalanches. The one path down to your town is
they realized they had actually observed a polarization effect challenging because it begins on a flat ridge that suddenly ends
caused by dust grains within the Milky Way.) Note that these at a steep cliff. Furthermore, there is no ski lift. The only con-
expected cosmic gravitational waves have nothing to do with ceivable way of starting to ski down this hill is first to jump
the gravitational waves created by merging black holes in the from a plane and, using a parachute, land at a particular place
modern universe found by the Laser Interferometer Gravita- on the ridge (with inches of precision) and hit with just the right
tional wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015. velocity; the slightest mistake would lead the skier off-track
The Planck satellite resultsa combination of an unexpect- toward a distant valley or trap the skier on top of the hill; in the
edly small (few percent) deviation from perfect scale invari- worst case, an avalanche might begin before the skier reaches

the ridge so that the person would not T WO V E R S I O N S O F A T H E O RY
survive. If the town gossip is right that
the stranger arrived by skiing, it is only Inflation as a Ski Slope
reasonable to conclude that she came
If inflation took place, it must have been triggered by a hypothetical inflationary
down the first hill.
energy, caused by a field called the inflaton that would have permeated space.
It would be crazy to imagine anyone
Different versions of inflation theory propose different relations between the strength of
taking the second path because the
the inflaton field and the density of inflationary energy. Two of those relations are plotted
chances of successfully reaching the town
here. One (blue at left) is akin to the traditional textbook models of inflation; the other
are infinitesimal compared with the path
(pink at right) requires very special starting conditions and thus seems implausible. This
down the other hill. But then you notice
analogy with two ski hills offers an idea of why the second class of modelsthe kind of
something about the stranger. She has no
inflation that has not been ruled out by recent datais hard to swallow.
ticket for the ski lift attached to her jack-
et. Based on this observation and the
This steady slope, reflecting a sharp rise in the
town gossips continued insistence that
energy density and corresponding totraditional models
the stranger arrived on skis, you are of inflation, resembles an easily skiable hill. These These versions of the theory,
forced to the weird conclusion that the models paint aplausible picture for how inflation might called plateau models, require highly
stranger must have taken the second have gotten started because they begin with inflationary unlikely circumstances for inflation
mountain. Or perhaps she did not ski in energy set at a sensible threshold (akin toastarting to startthe inflaton field would
point specified by a ski lift) and evolve in a steady and have to take on just the right value at
at all, and you need to question the reli-
predictable way (like a smooth downhill slope), but they just the right time to trigger inflation.
ability of the town gossip. conflict with the latest astrophysical data. Such models are akin to a ski hill that
Analogously, if a professed oracle in was prone to avalanches and would
formed us that the universe evolved to its require a skier to be dropped from
present condition via inflation, we would ahelicopter and land on a very
ex
pect an inflationary energy density precise starting point.
curve like the hill described in the guide-
High
books because it has a simple shape from

top to bottom, the fewest adjustable para
meters and the least delicate conditions
necessary for starting inflation. Indeed,
up until now, the textbooks on inflation-
ary cosmology have almost all presented
energy curves of this simple, uniform
shape. In particular, the energy density
Energy Density
along these simple curves steadily in

creases as the field strength changes so
that it is possible to have an initial value
of the inflaton field for which the infla-
tionary energy density is equal to a num-
ber called the Planck density (10120 times
greater than the density today), the total
energy density available when the uni-
verse first emerged from the big bang.
With this advantageous starting condi-
Low
tion in which the only form of energy is

inflationary, accelerated expansion would High Low High
begin immediately. During inflation, the Strength of Inaton Field
strength of the inflaton field would natu-
rally evolve so that the energy density
slowly and smoothly decreases following
the curve down to the valley where the curve bottoms out, corre- energy density curve shaped like the second hill, the one with
sponding to the universe we inhabit today. (We can think of this high avalanche risk and a low, flat ridge ending with a steep cliff
progression as the inflaton field skiing down the curve.) This is down to a valley. Instead of a simple, ever rising shape, such an
the classic story of inflation presented in textbooks. energy curve would rise sharply (forming a cliff ) away from its
But the Planck observations tell us this story cannot be right. minimum until it suddenly flattened out along a plateau (form-
The simple inflationary curves produce hot and cold spots with ing a ridge) at an energy density that is a trillion times less than
a larger deviation from scale invariance than observed and the Planck density available immediately after the big bang. In
gravitational waves strong enough to have been detected. If we that case, the inflationary energy density would comprise an
continue to insist that inflation happened, the Planck results infinitesimal fraction of the total energy density after the big
require that the inflaton field skied down a more complicated bang, far too small to cause the universe to inflate right away.
Illustration by Brown Bird Design February 2017, ScientificAmerican.com37

Because the universe is not inflating, the inflaton field is free Not only does inflation require starting conditions that are diffi-
to begin with any initial value and change at breakneck speed, cult to obtain, it also impossible to stop inflation once it gets
like the skier jumping from the helicopter. Yet inflation can only going. This snag traces back to the quantum fluctuations in
start if the inflaton field eventually reaches a value correspond- spacetime. They cause the strength of the inflaton field to vary
ing to a point along the plateau and if the inflaton field changes from place to place, resulting in some spots in space ending
very slowly. Just as it is treacherous for the skier dropped from inflation earlier than others. We tend to think of quantum fluc-
high altitudes to land on the flat ridge at the right velocity to ski tuations as tiny, but as early as 1983, theorists, including Stein-
smoothly down, so it is nearly impossible for the inflaton field to hardt, came to realize that large quantum jumps in the inflaton
reduce its speed at just the right rate and at the right value of field, though rare, could totally change the inflationary story.
the field to begin inflation. To make matters worse, because the Large jumps can increase the strength of the inflaton field to
universe is not inflating during this period after the big bang values much higher than average, causing inflation to last much
when the inflaton speed is slowing, any initial warps or uneven- longer. Although large jumps are rare, the regions that undergo
ness in the distribution of energy throughout the universe will them expand enormously in volume compared with regions
increase; when they grow large, they prevent inflation from that do not undergo them and quickly dominate space. Within
starting no matter how the inflaton evolves, just as an avalanche instants, an area that stops inflating becomes surrounded and
can block the skier from a smooth downhill ski no matter how
perfect the trajectory from the helicopter to the ridge.
In other words, by accepting the oracles word and insisting
that inflation occurred, you would be forced by the Planck data
to the weird conclusion that inflation started with a plateaulike
energy density curve despite all its problems. Or maybe at this
point you would question the oracles credibility.
THE MULTIMESS
There is, of course, no oracle. W e should not just accept the
assumption that inflation happened, especially because it does
not offer a simple explanation of the observed features of the
universe. Cosmologists should evaluate the theory by adopting
the standard scientific procedure of estimating the odds that
inflation occurred given what we observe about the universe. In
this respect, it is undoubtedly bad news that current data rule
out the simplest inflationary models and favor more contrived
ones. But truth be told, the latest observations are not the first
problem encountered by inflation theory; rather these results
have sharpened and added a new twist to established issues.
For example, we should consider whether it is reasonable
for the universe to have had the initial conditions necessary for
any k ind of inflationary energy whatsoever. Two improbable
criteria have to be satisfied for inflation to start. First, shortly
after the big bang, there has to be a patch of space where the
quantum fluctuations of spacetime have died down and the
space is well described by Einsteins classical equations of gen- dwarfed by regions still inflating. The process then repeats. In
eral relativity; second, the patch of space must be flat enough most of the swelled region, the inflaton field strength will
and have a smooth enough distribution of energy that the infla- change in a way that causes the energy density to decrease and
tionary energy can grow to dominate all other forms of energy. inflation to end, but rare large quantum jumps will keep infla-
Several theoretical estimates of the probability of finding tion going in some places and create even more inflating vol-
a patch with these characteristics just after the big bang sug- ume. And so the process continues, ad infinitum.
gest that it is more difficult than finding a snowy mountain In this way, inflation continues eternally, generating an infi-
equipped with a ski lift and well-maintained ski slopes in the nite number of patches where inflation has ended, each creat-
middle of adesert. ing a universe unto itself. Only in these patches where inflation
More important, if it were easy to find a patch emerging has stopped is the expansion rate of space slow enough to form
from the big bang that is flat and smooth enough to start infla- galaxies, stars, planets and life. The worrisome implication is
tion, then inflation would not be needed in the first place. Re that the cosmological properties of each patch differ because of
call that the entire motivation for introducing it was to explain the inherent randomizing effect of quantum fluctuations. In
how the visible universe came to have these properties; if start- general, most universes will not turn out warp-free or flat; the
ing inflation requires those same properties, with the only dif- distribution of matter will not be nearly smooth; and the pat-
ference being that a smaller patch of space is needed, that is tern of hot and cold spots in the CMB light there will not be
hardly progress. nearly scale-invariant. The patches span an infinite number of
Such issues are just the beginning of our problems, however. different possible outcomes, with no kind of patch, including
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE Read about advances in bounce theories at S cientificAmerican.com/feb2017/inflation

one like our visible universe, being more probable than another. already large and classical (that is, described by Einsteins gen-
The result is what cosmologists call the multiverse. Because eral theory of relativity), and it bounces before it shrinks to a
every patch can have any physically conceivable properties, the size where quantum effects become important. As a result, there
multiverse does not explain why our universe has the very spe- is never a stage, like the big bang, when the entire universe is
cial conditions that we observethey are purely accidental fea- dominated by quantum physics, and there is no need to invent a
tures of our particular patch. quantum-to-classical transition. And because there is no infla-
And perhaps even this picture is too rosy. Some scientists tion during the smoothing to cause regions that undergo rare,
dispute whether any patches of space evolve into regions like large quantum fluctuations to blow up in volume, smoothing via
our observable universe. Instead eternal inflation may devolve contraction does not produce multiple universes. Recent work
into a purely quantum world of uncertain and random fluctua- has produced the first detailed proposals for describing how the
tions everywhere, even where inflation ends. We would like to universe could have transitioned from contraction to expansion,
suggest multimess as a more apt term to describe the unre- enabling the construction of complete bouncing cosmologies.
solved outcome of eternal inflation, whether it consists of an
infinite multitude of patches with randomly distributed proper- NONEMPIRICAL SCIENCE?
ties or a quantum mess. From our perspective, it makes no dif- Given the issues w ith inflation and the possibilities of bouncing
ference which description is correct. Either way, the multimess cosmologies, one would expect a lively debate among scientists
does not predict the properties of our observable universe to be today focused on how to distinguish between these theories
the likely outcome. A good scientific theory is supposed to ex through observations. Still, there is a hitch: inflationary cosmol-
plain why what we observe happens instead of something else. ogy, as we currently understand it, cannot be evaluated using
The multimess fails this fundamental test. the scientific method. As we have discussed, the expected out-
come of inflation can easily change if we vary the initial condi-
PARADIGM SHIFT tions, change the shape of the inflationary energy density curve,
Given all these problems, the prospect that inflation did not oc or simply note that it leads to eternal inflation and a multimess.
cur deserves serious consideration. If we step back, there seem Individually and collectively, these features make inflation so
to be two logical possibilities. Either the universe had a begin- flexible that no experiment can ever disprove it.
ning, which we commonly dub the big bang, or there was no Some scientists accept that inflation is untestable but refuse
beginning and what has been called the big bang was actually a to abandon it. They have proposed that, instead, science must
big bounce, a transition from some preceding cosmological change by discarding one of its defining properties: empirical
phase to the present expanding phase. Although most cosmolo- testability. This notion has triggered a roller coaster of discus-
gists assume a bang, there is currently no evidencezeroto sions about the nature of science and its possible redefinition,
say whether the event that occurred 13.7 billion years ago was a promoting the idea of some kind of nonempirical science.
bang or a bounce. Yet a bounce, as opposed to a bang, does not A common misconception is that experiments can be used
require a subsequent period of inflation to create a universe like to f alsify a theory. In practice, a failing theory gets increasingly
the one we find, so bounce theories represent a dramatic shift immunized against experiment by attempts to patch it. The
away from the inflation paradigm. theory becomes more highly tuned and arcane to fit new obser-
A bounce can achieve the same end as a bang plus inflation vations until it reaches a state where its explanatory power
because before the bounce, a span of slow contraction extending diminishes to the point that it is no longer pursued. The explan-
for billions of years can smooth and flatten the universe. It may atory power of a theory is measured by the set of possibilities it
seem counterintuitive that slow contraction has the same effect excludes. More immunization means less exclusion and less
as rapid expansion, but there is a simple argument that shows it power. A theory like the multimess does not exclude anything
must be so. Recall that without inflation, a slowly expanding uni- and, hence, has zero power. Declaring an empty theory as the
verse would become increasingly curved, warped and nonuni- unquestioned standard view requires some sort of assurance
form with time from the effects of gravity on space and matter. outside of science. Short of a professed oracle, the only alterna-
Imagine watching a film of this process run backward: a large, tive is to invoke authorities. History teaches us that this is the
highly curved, warped and nonuniform universe gradually con- wrong road to take.
tracts and becomes flat and uniform. That is, gravity works in Today we are fortunate to have sharp, fundamental ques-
reverse as a smoothing agent in a slowly contracting universe. tions imposed on us by observations. The fact that our leading
As in the case of inflation, quantum physics amends the sim- ideas have not worked out is a historic opportunity for a theo-
ple smoothing story in bounce theories as well. Quantum fluctua- retical breakthrough. Instead of closing the book on the early
tions change the rate of contraction from place to place so that universe, we should recognize that cosmology is wide open.
some regions bounce and begin to expand and cool before others.
Scientists can construct models in which the rate of contraction
gives rise to temperature variations after the bounce that are con-
sistent with the pattern of hot and cold spots observed by the Inflationary Paradigm in Trouble after Planck 2013. Anna Ijjas etal. in P hysics
Planck satellite. In other words, contraction before a bounce can LettersB, Vol.723, Nos.45, pages 261266; June 25, 2013.
do what inflation was supposed to do when it was first invented. FROM OUR ARCHIVES
At the same time, bouncing theories have an important
The Inflation Debate. Paul J. Steinhardt; April 2011.
advantage compared with inflation: they do not produce a
multimess. When the contracting phase begins, the universe is s c i e n t i f i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a z i n e /s a

TAKEOFF: Investigators
launch a drone modified
to collect airborne micro
organisms from a field
near Blacksburg, Va. hi
B I O LO GY

igh-
flying
microbes
Aerial drones and chaos theory help researchers explore the
many ways that microorganisms spread havoc around the world
By David Schmale and Shane Ross
Photographs by Adam Ewing

David Schmale is a professor in the
department of plant pathology, physiology
The air around us is and weed science at Virginia Tech.
teeming with microscopic Shane Ross is an associate professor

of dynamical systems and fluid dynamics
life. With every breath in the department ofbiomedical engineering

and mechanics atVirginia Tech.
we take, we inhale thou

sands of bacteria, viruses
and fungi. Scientists have known for
almost 150 years that some ofthese airborne
microbes cause disease in plants, domestic
animals and people. More recently, we have
learned that microorganisms may also affect
the weather by allowing water to freeze at
warmer temperatures and triggering the onset
of precipitation. Astonishingly, a few of these
microbes drift on large currents of air to cross
oceans and continents. New tools and technol 1
ogy are helping investigators learn more about
where these organisms originate, how they
spread and the often unexpected ways in which crobes might travel with the wind and how they might help
they affect our world during their travels. trigger rain, snow and other forms of precipitation.
Eventually our work may enable agricultural officials to mon
itor disease-causing microorganisms in the air, predict where
For more than a decade the two of us have been chasing they might travel and thus identify which fields to treat or quar
some of the pathogens that are particularly harmful to agricul antine. Such information will allow farmers to decide, among
tural crops, causing billions of dollars in losses around the globe other things, which crop varieties to plant or when to spray fun
every year from a wide range of ailments, including blight and gicides or other compounds to protect their yields. We have
poisoning by toxins. One of us (Schmale) studies the aerobiology focused much of our research on one pathogen in particular,
of microorganisms that cause plant disease; the other (Ross) Fusarium graminearum, a fungus that has spread farther and
develops mathematical models that describe and predict how faster over the past few decades than ever before thanks in part
currents of air move across short and long distances. We teamed to climate change and no-till practices that have increased crop
up in 2006 to trace the routes by which plant pathogens spread residue in fields, allowing the infection to persist from one year
from one field, region or continent to the next. to the next. Whenever agricultural experts, ourselves included,
To that end (and unique to our collaboration), we deploy a worry that further global warming could significantly threaten
small fleet of airborne drones equipped with sampling devices the worlds food supply in the near future, we are thinking about
to collect and analyze the microbes from the lower atmosphere. the explosive spread of this and other fungi that render grains
Every sampling mission turns up a wide range of interesting unfit for consumption.
organismsmany either not well studied or previously un
known to science. We have developed new tools for understand TOXINS IN YOUR FOOD
ing the long-distance transport of microorganisms in the atmo Many people are unaware o
f just how devastating disease-causing
sphere and formed new hypotheses about how far some mi microbes can be to agriculture. One of the worst plant ailments
IN BRIEF
One of the most w idely devastating crop ailments is Because the fungus that causes FHB travels through ous weather systems for tens to hundreds of kilometers
fusarium head blight (FHB), which primarily affects the air, the authors deployed drones and developed so- along intricate and ever changing highways in the sky.
barley, oats and other small grains and which has phisticated simulations to try to determine how far The work m ay eventually help farmers protect their
been spreading into new regions of the globe in a these pathogens can travel. The latest findings show crops by monitoring the spread of plant pathogens
changing climate. that these microorganisms can be transported by vari- and determining the most effective countermeasures.

op on these residues and forcibly dis
charge F usarium spores into the air.
These spores, in turn, land on the new
ly emerging anthers of wheat and silks
of corn. The spores germinate, and the
fungus spreads through the plant, ulti
mately leading to the accumulation of
mycotoxins in the grain. The cross-
contamination from one crop to anoth
er is why agriculture extension agents
advise farmers to avoid planting wheat
in fields immediately after they have
been used to grow corn or other crops
that are susceptible to FHB.
WALLS OF AIR
One of the goals o f our collaborative
research is to understand how micro
organisms are transported over long
distances in the atmosphere. As a first
step, we decided to measure how far
F. graminearum can move through
the air from an infected field over the
course of a day or night.
2 With funding from the U.S. Wheat
and Barley Scab Initiative and the Vir
3 ginia Small Grains Board, we conduct
ed a series of experiments in commer
is fusarium head blight (FHB, com cial wheat fields in Virginia. We took
monly referred to as scab), which one particular strain of F. gramin
bleaches the heads of wheat, barley, earum t hat we had isolated from else
oats, and other small grains and fills where in the state and characterized it
the kernels with chemicals called down to the level of its DNA. In this
mycotoxins. When ingested in large way, we could distinguish it from the
enough amounts, these mycotoxins strains that already existed in the
make people and livestock very sick, fields that we were about to study.
often causing them to vomit. Because Then we spread cornstalks infested
grain containing the toxins often can with our test fungus over an area
not be separated from healthy grains, about the size of half a hectare and set
harvested crops must be tested and out a series of petri plates to capture
destroyed if they contain more than a any potential F usarium s pores at vari
trace amount of toxins. FLIGHT PLAN: D rones used to study ous distances on the ground from the
Several different species of the fun microbes in the lower atmosphere carry site of inoculation.
gal genus Fusarium c ause FHB around specially adapted petri dishes that can be In one set of experiments, we re
the world. Fusarium asiaticum has opened and closed from the ground (1). covered spores from our test strain
long been a problem in central China, A drone flies a preprogrammed route (2) . almost one kilometer from where it
from which it has recently begun And a spore collected from the air grows had originally been released. But
spreading northward. F .graminearum into a pure culture of Fusarium in the lab (3) . there was no telling how much farther
is predominant in the U.S., where it some of the spores might have trav
wreaked havoc in corn in the 1970s, eled because one kilometer was the
causing many pigs to become sick (this outbreak led to the dis limit of our recovery effort. At any rate, it now seemed clear
covery of the mycotoxin deoxynivalenol, which causes pigs to that Fusarium spores could travel much farther than most
vomit and refuse to eat their feed). Because controlling FHB is so researchers had previously anticipated.
expensive, it has rendered the planting and harvesting of wheat Rather than just continuing to distribute petri plates on the
increasingly unprofitable in many states in the U.S. where wheat ground farther and farther afield around the state to look for our
is commonly grown. unique F usarium s pores, we decided to search for microorgan
F. graminearum s urvives winter by hiding out in plants that isms in the air above the fields we studied. The higher up we found
are left lying on the ground after the previous years harvest. In the microbes, the more likely we could turn to some of the com
the spring and summer, fungal structures called perithecia devel plex mathematical calculations that meteorologists use to track

BASICS weather to determine how far they could theoretically travel.
Thus, we customized a number of drones (unmanned aerial
Walls of Air vehicles) with unique sampling devices to collect and analyze
microorganisms during flight. With funding from the Emerging
The movement of air, like that of other fluids, creates certain Frontiers and Dynamical Systems programs of the National Sci
patternssuch as the Atlantic jet streamwhose shape is ence Foundation, we used the drones to collect some of the
influenced by temporary walls, known as Lagrangian coher- F. graminearum spores that were already floating over our
ent structures, or LCSs, made of air. These features fall into heads in Virginia. Analyzing the resulting data suggested that
two main categories: walls that mostly attract air currents some of these fungi had been airborne for several hourslong
(and any particles they contain) and walls that mostly repel enough to have been stirred by large-scale weather patterns
nearby parcels ofair. The complex mathematics that governs spanning hundreds of kilometers.
these structures (depicted below in blue and orange) deter- Further investigation revealed that short-lived, invisible
mines whether a mass of particlessuch as fungal spores moving walls of air play a major role in determining how far

eventually scatters all along the walls surface 1 or forms these fungi travel and where they land. These atmospheric fea
acolumn on either side ofthe LCS 2 . tures, formally known as Lagrangian coherent structures (LCSs),
arise whenever different currents of air (or any other fluid, for
that matter) run into one another or travel around an obstacle,

1 Attracting LCS
such as a mountain or the wing of an airplane. The currents ini
tial direction and speed at the moment of contact determine
where various air particles will travel next, creating patterns
that can be simulated by computers, using the complex mathe
matics of chaos theory and a specialized branch of physics
known as nonlinear dynamics.
As you might expect, these temporary walls of air drive
much of the weather we see on any given day. Intricate, ever

2 Repelling LCS
changing LCS patterns have been shown to shape, concentrate
and divide the air over the Atlantic Ocean, for example, in such
a way that the winds of a hurricane either gather strength or dis
sipate as the storm moves over the water. Less extensive interfac
es determine how airborne pathogens climb, dive and swirl
through a valley, sometimes landing on one farm but not the ad
joining property. By tracking LCSs over time and space, we have
formulated hypotheses about where various microbial threats
LCS Walls Create Different Patterns of Airflow to a particular region are likely to come from and where they
The intersection of an attracting LCS (blue) with a repelling one (orange) might go next. As we get better at developing this information,
creates a particular flow of air known as a saddle point. In the example below, farmers may find it as useful to consult our microbial forecasts
two groups of particles that start fairly close to each other travel hundreds
as they do the weather report.
of miles in opposite directions once they hit the center of the saddle point.
Fusarium fungi are just the tip of the iceberg. Because mi
crobes travel through the atmosphere, they clearly do not respect
international boundaries. A deadly strain of wheat stem rust
(Ug99) has been bouncing around the African continent from its
origins in Uganda since the late 1990s; growers in Australia and
North America are particularly worried about its potential arrival
via regular atmospheric currents over the Indian and Atlantic
oceans, respectively. Soybean rust initially rode into the U.S. from
South America on Hurricane Ivan in 2004; it currently hides out
in the U.S. South during the winter and makes its annual entry
into the Northeast and the Midwest via predictable air routes
each growing season (the fungus is unable to survive harsh win
ters). A coalition of agricultural stakeholders has even estab
lished a national monitoring network to keep tabs on this patho
gens seasonal spread every year.
Intriguingly, many of these microbes could not survive such
long journeys through the atmosphere on their own. For one
thing, prolonged exposure to the ultraviolet radiation of the sun
can kill them. But microbes that manage to attach themselves to
dust particles can be shielded from the suns sterilizing glare. Sci
entists such as Dale Griffin of the U.S. Geological Survey have
documented several well-established lanes of global dust trans
44 Scientific American, February 2017 Illustration by Emily Cooper

port, which connect Africa to Europe and Asia, for example, or
Asia to the U.S. Indeed, an estimated hundreds of millions of
tons of Saharan dustand their attendant microbesland in
Florida every year. Besides setting off hazy days and stunning
sunsets, these dust clouds could unleash serious ecological de
struction in their wake. Recent work has suggested that some
causal agents of coral disease in the Caribbeanaspergillosis of
sea fans in particularmay have been transported in African
dust. The increasing desertification of northwestern Africa com
pounds the danger as more and more marginally arid land turns
to dust that can bear and shield a greater number of plant-killing
microbes half a planet away.
WIND AND WATER

Microbes do not just spread disease w hile traveling in the sky.
They may also help create the weather over land, lakes and
oceans. Meteorologists have long known that hail, snow and
rain typically fall from the sky only after the formation of tiny
ice crystals in clouds. Whether a snowflake or a raindrop forms
around the ice depends on certain environmental conditions,
including the presence of particlessuch as sootthat allow
water to freeze at warmer temperatures than usual. (Pure water
freezes at temperatures as low as about 38 degrees Celsius.)
In 1982 David Sands of Montana State University and his
colleagues posited that something elsenamely the bacterium
Pseudomonas syringaecould also serve as the nucleus for ice
crystals in the atmosphere. Subsequent research hinted at a
possible mechanism. Certain strains of P. syringae p roduce a MICROBE CATCHERS: R oss (left) and Schmale (right) study
particular protein on the cells surface that traps water mole the transport of microorganisms along highways in the sky.
cules in such a way that they start creating a crystal lattice. On
the ground, strains producing these ice-forming proteins can
cause frost damage to crops. But the microbes can also soar Ultimately we hope to combine what we have learned about
aloft into clouds where the temperature is far below zero de microorganisms in water droplets with our calculations about
grees C. If enough of these bacteria produced sufficient ice- Lagrangian coherent structures to describe what happens in the
nucleating proteins in the sky, Sands thought, they could con air immediately above the surface of lakes, rivers and oceans.
ceivably trigger the formation of raindrops or snowflakes. We have already begun collecting microbes over water using
Or at least that is the idea. Since Sandss paper, researchers teams of unmanned boats and aerial drones. The mathematical
have found plenty of P. syringae in bulk samples of rain and equations needed to describe the mixing of microbe-laden air
snow. Whether the microbes are primarily responsible for the and water from crashing waves, sweeping winds or even the
onset of precipitation or mostly tagging along for the ride is splashing impact of rain are more complex than anything we
tough to prove. Ski resort operators are not waiting for a defini have attempted so far. Because water covers about 70percent of
tive answer, however: many of them use commercial ice nuclea the planet, however, we have no doubt that what we find will
tors that contain bits of P
.syringae t o create artificial snow dur reveal fascinating new ways that microbes travel the globe.
ing warm winter days.
Sandss hypothesis inspired us to see if we could find any other M O R E TO E X P L O R E
microorganisms in the atmosphere that might initiate precipita
Mycotoxins in Crops: A Threat to Human and Domestic Animal Health.
tion. Supported by the Dimensions of Biodiversity program of the DavidG. SchmaleIII and GaryP. Munkvold in Plant Health Instructor. P ublished online
National Science Foundation, research conducted by Schmale and 2009. www.apsnet.org/edcenter/intropp/topics/Mycotoxins/Pages/default.aspx
his colleagues has shown that microbes associated with precipita Life in the Clouds. L esleyEvans Ogden in BioScience, Vol.64, No.10, pages 861867;
tion are far more diverse than originally expected. In Virginia, October 2014.
Boris Vinatzer and Schmale have collected many different types of Highways in the Sky: Scales of Atmospheric Transport of Plant Pathogens.
David G. Schmale III and Shane D. Ross in Annual Review of Phytopathology, V ol. 53,
bacteria and fungi in the atmosphere and in precipitation that can pages 591611; August 2015.
serve as ice nucleators, at least in the lab. And the diversity of The Surprising Importance of Stratospheric Life. C helsea Wald in Nautilus, No. 37,
microbes associated with precipitation appears to differ depend Chapter 1; June 2, 2016.http://nautil.us/issue/37/currents/the-surprising-
ing on geographical location. A better understanding of why each importance-of-stratospheric-life
of these microbes predominates in different regions could help us FROM OUR ARCHIVES
better predict weather patterns. And perhaps we could eventually
Walls of Water. Dana Mackenzie; July 2013.
use some of these microorganisms to develop tools for making it
rain in arid regions or areas beset by drought. s c i e n t i f i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a z i n e /s a
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE Watch Schmale describe different ways that microbes surf the air at ScientificAmerican.com/feb2017/drone

HYSTERIA
ME TROLOGY
MASS
THE LONG-
RUNNING
EFFORT TO
DITCH THE
DECAYING,
19TH-
CENTURY
ARTIFACT
THAT
DEFINES
THE
KILOGRAM
NEARS ITS
CONCLUSION
By Tim Folger
46 Scientific American, February 2017 Photographs by Richard Barnes

KIBBLE BALANCES, s uch as the
U.S. National Institute of Standards and
Technologys NIST-4, compare electrical
and mechanical power. They are
finicky and central to the
kilogram-redefinition process.

Tim Folger writes for National Geographic, Discover a nd
other national publications. He is also the series editor for
The Best American Science and Nature Writing, an annual
anthology published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
As he approached the security checkpoint at

Washington Dulles International Airport one after
noon last April, Jon Pratt felt on edge. Stuffed in his
camera bag were four solid-metal cylinders, the sorts
ofobjects guaranteed to draw the scrutiny ofwary one may have come over and rubbed
Homeland Security tsa staff. Each cylinder weighed their hands all over the kilograms.
Such handling would have spoiled
exactly one kilogram. One of thema gleaming many months of careful work devoted
platinum-iridium alloy about half the size ofa can to measuring the kilograms to an accu-
oftunawas worth at least $40,000. (The price of racy of a few parts per billion. Pratt was
taking the cylinders to the Internation-
platinum currently hovers around $1,000 per troy al Bureau of Weights and Measures
ounce, a common unit for precious metals.) The other (BIPM) in Svres, a city just across the
three consisted offinely machined stainless steel. Seine from Paris. A few months later
metrologists there would compare them
pratts mission: Deliver them safely with identical metal cylinders from
three other countries, along with a one-
and untouchedto a colleague in kilogram sphere of highly purified sili-
aParisian suburb.
con manufactured at Germanys nation-
al metrology laboratory. It was the lat-
est step in a historic shift in the way the
world measures mass.
Pratt held documents from the National Institute of Stan- Since 1889, the same year the Eiffel Tower opened, the kilo-
dards and Technology meant to ease his way through security. gram has been defined by the mass of a platinum-iridium cyl-
The paperwork explained that he carried four official U.S. kilo- inder kept underneath three nested glass bell jars in a vault at
gramsthe reference masses that serve as the basis for all the BIPMs headquarters. The International Prototype Kilo-
weight measurements in the countryand specified that the gram, aka IPK or L e Grand K, is the ur-kilogram from which
kilograms should not be touched or removed from their pro- all other national mass standards are derived. The kilogram is
tective canisters. an anomaly; it is the last unit of measurement still tied to a
A slender former punk rocker, Pratt runs nist s Quantum physical objectbut not for much longer. By the end of 2018
Measurement Division in Gaithersburg, Md. The tsa guy was Le Grand K w ill be deposed, and the kilogram will have a new
giving me a bit of a hard time, he says. But then he read all definition based on Plancks constant, a fixed quantity from
the literature, and it became this cool thing that made his quantum theory related to the amount of energy carried by a
day. After a few minutes, Pratt was waved through and board- single particle of light, or photon.
ed the flight for the seven-hour trip to Paris, which presented Why force L e Grand K into retirement? For years metrolo-
another dilemma: What to do with his costly carry-on if he gists have wanted the accuracy and reliability of an interna-
needed to get up? Should he keep the bag with him at all times, tional mass standard linked to a fundamental constant of the
as some colleagues had advised? I will admit that I left it universe rather than a Victorian-era lump of cosseted metal.
parked beneath the seat in front of me while I went to the bath- But there is a more pressing reason for the change: Le Grand K
room, Pratt says. So it was out of my sight briefly, and some- appears to be losing mass. Once every 30 years or so L e Grand
IN BRIEF
Since 1889 the kilogram has been defined by refer- But the ur-kilogram is losing mass. That, in part, is This year t he process of redefinition, which involves
ence to a single platinum-iridium cylinder held in a why the General Conference on Weights and Mea- the official metrology laboratories of five nations and
secret vault in Paris. It is the last unit of measurement sures decided in 2011 to redefine the kilogram by peg- some of the most difficult measurements in all of sci-
still tied to a physical artifact. ging it to a quantum-mechanical constant. ence, enters its final phase.

K20, t he U.S. national
K is removed from its vault for cleaning and kilogram, is now cali rived from it as well. We are now at the point
for comparison with six official copies, or te- brated against the where we would see values of fundamental
moins (witnesses), which are kept in the International Proto- constants change because the IPK changes,
same vault. When the first two temoins w ere type Kilogram in Paris. Stock says. And that makes no sense.
compared with L e Grand K in 1889, both After redefinition,
metrologists will
matched the original. But measurements THE NEW STANDARD
instead use the NIST-4.
made shortly after the World War II and The kilogram is the latest of the metric sys-
again in 1992 found that the copies out- tems seven basic units to be revamped, but it
weighed L e Grand K s lightly. It seems implau- will not be the last. Besides the kilogram, the
sible that the copies would all somehow gain mass while Le International System of Units, or SI, comprises the meter, the
Grand K remained unchanged. There is, of course, a more like- ampere (for electric current), the second, the candela (a mea-
ly explanation. We could assume, says BIPM director Michael sure of the intrinsic brightness of a light source), the mole
Stock, that the International Prototype Kilogram is losing (which relates the weight of a substance to the number of at-
some mass. That uncertainty is one of the reasons the General oms it contains), and the kelvin (for temperature).
Conference on Weights and Measuresthe governing body of Two of the SI units were redefined decades ago. In 1983 the
the bureaudecided in 2011 to establish a new mass standard. meter, formerly gauged by the distance between two lines
No one knows why Le Grand K might be shedding weight. It etched in a solid platinum-iridium bar stored in the same vault
is far too valuable to undergo tests that might provide answers. as L
e Grand K, became instead the distance traveled by light in
The mystery presents real problems. As technology advances in 1/299,792,458th of a second. And with the advent of improved
the decades ahead, precision measurements of mass on the mo- atomic clocks in the 1960s, the secondwhich had been defined
lecular scale and below will become routine in a wide range of in- as a fraction of a daywas reset in terms of a specific frequency
dustries. We will want to have ways to measure microgram of microwave radiation emitted from a cesium atom. The mole,
masses with at least three-digit resolution, Pratt says. And with kelvin and ampere are all slated for an overhaul in 2018 as well.
an artifact kilogram, things get really uncertain at small scales. The current (so to speak) state of the ampere is especially
Le Grand Ks shortcomings are not limited to measure- odd. Its official definition, part of which involves two infinitely
ments of mass. Units of force and energy are ultimately de- long, one-dimensional, massless wires, is so abstract that it

BASICS
Changing Currently Defined in Terms of Physical Constants
Measures Unit: Meter Unit: Second Unit: Candela

Abbreviation: m Abbreviation: s Abbreviation: cd
The International System of Measures: Length Measures: Time Measures: Luminosity
Units (SI), otherwise known as
Current definition Current Current definition
the metric system, rests on a definition (established in 1979):
(established in 1983):
foundation of seven base units. The distance light travels in (established A candela is the luminous
(Another 22 units are built from a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 in 1967): intensity, in a given direction,
those seven.) In 2018 the Inter- of a second. The second is of a source that emits mono
national Committee for Weights the duration chromatic radiation of fre
Historical note: of 9,192,631,770 quency 540 1012 hertz and
and Measures is expected to
When the French Academy of periods of the radiation that has a radiant intensity in
redefine the majority of the base Sciences proposed the metric corresponding to the transition that direction of 1/683 watt per
units in the biggest overhaul of system in 1791, it defined the between the two hyperfine steradian, which is the SI unit
the metric system since 1960. meter as one ten-millionth levels of the ground state of for a solid angle.
The move would tie the seven of one fourth of Earths circum the cesium 133 atom.
base units to invariant natural ference, which in turn was Historical note:
defined as a meridian that runs Historical note: In the early 20th century the U.S.,
constants. The meter, the from the North Pole to the The original definition is the France and the U.K. defined the
second and the candela will equator throughwhere familiar one: a second was candela by referring to the lumi
remain essentially the same, elseParis. 1/86,400 of the mean solar day, nosity of a carbon-filament lamp.
but the other four will be funda- or the time it takes Earth to In 1933 metrologists made the defin
mentally reconceived. rotate relative to the sun. The nition more precise by basing it on
committee gave the second its blackbody radiation. Such a defini
current, quantum-mechanical tion was adopted in
definition in 1967. 1948 and later re
placed with the
current one.
cannot be replicated in a lab. That will change in 2018 when varied from one town to the next, burdening the country with
the ampere is redefined in terms of the charge of an electron, more than 700 different units of measurement. A toise, for ex-
an advance made possible by the development of nanotechnol- ample, was the equivalent of an English fathom: the distance
ogy devices capable of counting individual charged particles between a mans outstretched arms. But a Parisian toise ( which
moving through a circuit. equaled 72 p ouces) might not have matched one used in Mar-
If we look to the next redefinitions, they might include a seilles. Savants,
as the French then called their scientists,
quantum mechanically based candela for light and maybe an sought to end the chaos by creating a new system for all people,
optical definition of the second instead of a microwave defini- for all time, a motto memorialized on a contemporary plaque.
tion, says Alan Steele, Canadas chief metrologist. But those Their idea in 1791 was that the standards should be based
are at least 15 years away. Maybe longer. on natural and invariable phenomena, says Richard Davis, a
The redefinition of the kilogram is the centerpiece of an ef- retired director of the BIPMs mass division, which is responsi-
fort to create a truly universal system of measurement that is ble for maintaining Le Grand K. Were still doing that, he
not bound to parochial, earthly conventions. In principle, the says. The difference is that now metrologists are turning to
new units would make sense to intelligent beings anywhere, natural constants that really are invariant.
from here to Andromeda. For metrologists, these are heady We are sitting in Stocks office in the Pavillon de Breteuil,
times. This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, Steele says. The an elegant 17th-century building on a verdant hilltop overlook-
last time we attempted anything this fundamental was when ing the Seine in Parc de Saint-Cloud, once a royal hunting re-
the meter was redefined. This is the time to be a chief metrolo- serve for French kings. Marie Antoinettes rose garden is still
gist, Ill tell you that. Its not like world peace or anything, but carefully tended here. It has been the headquarters of the in-
its pretty cool. ternational bureau since the Meter Convention of 1875, a treaty
signed by 17 nations.
THE VAULT Did you notice the island on the left as you walked across
Le Grand K w
as not the first official kilogram. It has a predeces- the bridge to Svres this morning? Davis asks. The island, he
sor, made during the French Revolution, when the entire metric says, once housed a Renault factory that built tanks for the
system was born. Before the revolution, local custom deter- German army in World War II. American bombers repeatedly
mined nearly all of Frances weights and lengths. Standards targeted it. After one bombing run rattled the Pavillon de
50 Scientific American, February 2017 Illustration by Nigel Holmes

Still to Be Redefined
Unit: Kilogram Unit: Ampere Unit: Mole

Abbreviation: kg Abbreviation: A Abbreviation: mol
Measures: Mass Measures: Electric current Measures: Amount
ofsubstance
Current definition Current definition
(established in 1889): (established in 1946): Current definition
For now the kilogram is still de The amperes current definition, Unit: Kelvin (established in 1971):
fined by reference to Le Grand K, which involves, among other Abbreviation: K The mole is the amount of
the platinum-iridium cylinder things, two straight parallel Measures: Temperature substance of a system which
hidden in a vault in Paris. conductors of infinite length, of contains as many elementary
negligible circular cross section. . . Current definition entities as there are atoms in
placed 1 meter apart in vacuum, (established in 1967): 0.012 kilogram of carbon 12.
is impossible to replicate exactly Today one kelvin is equivalent
in the lab. to 1/273.16 of the thermodynamic Proposed redefinition:
temperature of the triple point The moles link to the kilogram
Proposed redefinition: of waterthe combination of would be severed, and the unit
The ampere would be simplified temperature and pressure at would be defined by fixing the
by fixing the numerical value for which ice, water vapor and liquid numerical value for the Avogadro
the charge carried by one proton water can coexist. constant, which refers to the
(the fundamental constant known number of molecules, atoms
Proposed redefinition: as the elementary charge). Proposed redefinition: or any other small,
If efforts remain on schedule, in Basing the kelvin on a fixed value discrete quantities
2018 the kilogram will be pegged for the Boltzmann constant, of matter in
to Plancks constant, a fixed which relates the average kinetic one mole
quantity from quantum theory energy of a gass molecules of substance.
that specifies the amount with its absolute temperature,
of energy carried by a single would improve the accuracy
particle of light, or photon. of extremely low- and high-
temperature measurements.
Breteuil, L e Grand K was placed in a special shockproof con- its c aveau, or vault, which requires the presence of three peo-
tainer. Although the t emoins h ad been evacuated to an under- ple to open three locks that are arranged vertically. Inside the
ground safe in the Bank of France for most of the war, the Me- vault sits a large safe with a combination lock that holds the L e
ter Convention specified that Le Grand K m ust always remain Grand K, w hich rests under the three nested bell jars. The safe
at the bureau. also shelters the six copies. Only three people in the world hold
When L e Grand K w as removed from its vault after the war, keys to the vault: the BIPM director, the director of the Nation-
in 1946, for cleaning and comparison with the six copies, it al Archives in Paris and the president of the International
was found to be 30 micrograms lighter than the temoins. B y Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM), which supervis-
the time of the next cleaning, 45 years later, the difference had es the bureaus work. Because each key is different, all three of-
increased to 50 microgramsthe weight of a flys wing. ficials must be present to unlock the vault.
Fifty microgramsover a century, Stock says, as we look Im only the second person outside of Europe in the histo-
at a graph of the changes on his office computer. You can see ry of the Meter Convention of 1875 thats been elected presi-
its very small. For now, he says, the discrepancy does not dent of the CIPM, says Barry Inglis, an Australian electrical
present any practical difficulties. But if we continued like engineer. I asked them what happens if Im traveling home
this, one day this would lead to problems. over the Indian Ocean and the plane goes down: How are you
In the realm of nanotechnology, 50 micrograms is a huge guys going to manage? But Im sure theres a locksmith that
number. Moreover, the uncertainty in the kilograms mass could pick the old lock without too much trouble.
would ripple through a long chain of fundamental units: the Few of the bureaus staff have ever glimpsed Le Grand K,
metric unit of forcethe newtonis defined in terms of the and there are rumors that its official photographs depict a
kilogram, and the newton, in turn, defines the joulea unit of stunt double. Ive seen it once, says Susanne Picard, who has
energyand the joule defines the watt, and so on. Ultimately a worked at the BIPM since 1987. The three key holders open the
small question mark would taint nearly every measurement of vault once a year to look atbut not touchLe Grand K to
the physical world. make sure it is, well, still there.
Cleaning and comparing L e Grand K w ith the test masses After entering the inner sanctum of L e Grand K, a techni-
is not a routine taskespecially because it has been done only cian picks up the shiny cylinder with chamois-padded tongs
four times since 1889. First Le Grand K must be removed from and carries it to a cleaning station, where it is rubbed with a

chamois cloth soaked with alcohol and ether,
followed by a rinse from a jet of doubly dis-
tilled water. A final puff of nitrogen gas re-
moves any remaining water droplets. The en-
tire process takes about an hour. The bureau
has experimented with different cleaning
techniques on test massesusing ultraviolet
radiation, for examplebut those methods
actually made the alloy too c lean. They seem
to remove more dirt than our technique,
Stock says. But afterward the mass is unsta-
ble because it is so clean that the surface be-
comes highly reactive. And that would only
make L e Grand K less reliable as a standard,
so the bureau remains committed to its
chamois-rub-and-water-rinse method.
After their baths, Le Grand K a nd the te-
moins a re taken to a clean room and put on a
device called a mass comparator, a $500,000
instrument that can measure differences in
mass as small as one microgram. The mass
comparator and 10 so-called working stan-
dard kilograms are the workhorses of the
BIPMs mass division; they are used for most
day-to-day calibrations, with L e Grand K and
the temoins trotted out only once every few
decades for verifying national prototype kilo
grams from different countries.
As the conversation with Davis and Stock
winds down, I ask them if I can see the out-
side of the vault where L e Grand K r esides; I
know there is no chance of seeing the regal
master cylinder itself. They burst into laugh-
ter, shaking their heads: No, no, no, no!
Its not the first time weve been asked,
Davis says.
It is here on the grounds, right? I ask.
Yes, Davis answers, that much is pub-
lic knowledge.
METROLOGISTS
A TOUGH MEASUREMENT study participants will reverse the process
Stephan Schlamminger
Soon Le Grand K w ill be a historical curiosity, and use their national kilograms at their
and Jon Pratt pose with
and the new international definition of mass home facilities to fine-tune their measure-
the NIST-4 Kibble bal-
will be based on Plancks constant. Plancks ment of Plancks constant. The exacting new
ance, seen here with its
constant includes units of both energy and value for Plancks constant will then be used
450-kilogram vacuum
time and can be expressed in terms of mass to permanently redefine the kilogram.
dome in place.
by massaging the equation E = mc2. Like G
, Most of this work will involve the use of an
the gravitational constant, Plancks constant exceedingly complex device called a Kibble
arises from theory, but its numerical value balance. Until last year, Kibble balances were
can be determined only by experiment. And with better in- known as watt balances. Metrologists decided to rename them
struments, our measurements of natural constants are steadi- after the death of their inventor, British physicist Bryan Kibble,
ly improving. in 2016. Kibble-balance experiments are so difficult that in 2012
To make the transition to the new quantum standard, the the journal N
ature listed them among the five toughest under-
BIPM devised a two-part strategy. First, the national metrology takings in physics, right up there with detecting the Higgs bo-
labs of five different countries will fix a numerical value for son or gravitational waves.
Plancks constant, weigh their national kilograms in terms of One day last May, Stephan Schlamminger of nist drove me
that value and then see how well their kilogram measurements to the white two-story building on the edge of the institutes
match. This is the test that the bureau ran last summer. Assum- woodsy 235-hectare campus that houses the older of its two
ing the results, expected early this year, are satisfactory, the Kibble balances, now essentially mothballed since the comple-
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE For more on metrology, visit S cientificAmerican.com/feb2017/kilo

tion of a newer model in 2014. Its like the L ittle House on the The precession of Earths axis must be included, too, along
Prairie, Schlamminger jokes as we pull up in front of the iso- with tides. If you dont correct for tides, Schlamminger says,
lated structure. It is here that most of nist s measurements of its about a 100-parts-per-billion error. Despite its complexi-
Plancks constant occurred, and the new model will work in ty, he observes, the device reminds him of something from an-
much the same way. other era. When his team was measuring Plancks constant,
Any resemblance to a farmhouse vanishes when we step in- valves had to be opened and closed in careful order; the pres-
side. The interior looks like a setting for a steampunk novel, sure inside tanks full of liquid helium had to be checked con-
with walls sheathed in copper all the way to the second-floor stantly. You felt as if you were driving a steam engine,
ceiling. See all the brass hardware? Schlamminger says. No Schlamminger adds, yet you were doing experiments measur-
iron. The copper and brass shield the instrument from exter- ing quantum-mechanical quantities!
nal magnetic fields. But the magnetic fields generated inside
the building are powerful enough to erase credit cards. In the AU REVOIR, LE GRAND K
middle of a room on the first floor stands a tall support column What happens next depends on the results from last years test.
with a superconducting magnet at its base. When operating, Kilogram measurements by three of the five participating na-
the magnet is cooled with liquid helium. tional metrology labs must match within 50 microgramsthe
The actual balance mechanism is on the second floor. It con- current fly-wing uncertainty in the mass of Le Grand K. A fter
the pilot study results are published, work on the re-
definition will begin in earnest.
If all goes well, the kilogram will then be de-
Kibble-balance experiments fined in terms of Plancks constant. The BIPM has
are so difficult that the journal set stringent standards for the redefinition: not
only must all the measurements of Plancks con-
Nature listed them among stant agree to within 50 parts per billion, but at
least one must have an uncertainty below 20 parts
the five toughest undertakings per billiona level the Canadians have already sur-
passed. For the redefinition to take effect in 2018,
in physics, right up there with all the new measurements of Plancks constant
must be accepted for publication by July 1, 2017.
detecting the Higgs boson or And what of L e Grand K? It will remain in its
vault. Given the complexity of Kibble balances,
gravitational waves. though, we probably have not seen the last of kilo-
gram artifacts. Rather than regularly making ardu-
ous Kibble-balance measurements, the worlds me-
sists of a half-meter-wide aluminum wheel mounted vertically trology labs will, in the decades ahead, use a new generation of
with balance pans suspended by wires from either side. Dur- prototypes for day-to-day work. The new prototypes are al-
ing measurements, one balance pan holds a kilogram mass; a ready taking shape at the bureau. But they will be calibrated
coil of wire is suspended directly below that same pan by three by Kibble balances, not L e Grand K.
four-meter-long rods. The pan on the other side of the balance So is this the end of the story? Do we now have a kilogram
holds a counterweight and an electric motor. Two distinct op- for all people, for all time? Stock is reserving judgment.
erating modes of the balance are needed to acquire all the val- One of my predecessors, a Nobel laureate named Charles
ues used in the equations that link mass to Plancks constant. Edouard Guillaume, thought the present kilogram would work
In weighing mode, the downward gravitational force on the for 10,000 years, he says. This was of course overly optimis-
test mass is exactly offset by a magnetic field generated by tic. Im not sure this will be the last redefinition, but it should
running a current through the coil suspended below the pan. be good for some time. Maybe not for the next 10,000 years.
In velocity mode, the test mass is removed from the pan, and
the coil is lifted by the motor in the opposite pan at a steady
velocity through a magnetic field created by the balances M O R E TO E X P L O R E
superconducting magnets, which induces a voltage in the mov- The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That
ing coil. Transformed the World. K en Alder. Free Press, 2002.
The current measured in the weighing mode and the in- Frontier Experiments: Tough Science.Nicola Jones in N ature, V
ol.481,
pages 1417; January 5, 2012. www.nature.com/news/frontier-experiments-
duced voltage from the velocity mode are then plugged into
tough-science-1.9723
equations from quantum theory that relate current, voltage How to Build Your NIST D.I.Y. Watt Balance. V ideo. National Institute of Standards
and electrical resistance to Plancks constant. In short, start- and Technology, August 26, 2015. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oST_krdqLPQ
ing with a known mass of one kilogram, the Kibble balance Atlas Obscura Web page on the last original meter in Paris:
can determine Plancks constant. Then, with an accurate value www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-last-original-standard-metre
for Plancks constant in hand, the balance can be used to mea- FROM OUR ARCHIVES
sure mass without the need for any kind of physical artifact.
Weighty Matters. Ian Robinson; December 2006.
For accurate results, Schlamminger and his colleagues need
to account for local fluctuations in air pressure and gravity. s c i e n t i f i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a z i n e /s a

NEUROSCIENCE
NEW STUDIES
SHOW COSMIC
RADIATION
COULD BE EVEN
MORE DAMAGING
TO ASTRONAUTS
BRAINS THAN
WE THOUGHT.
CAN HUMANITY
STILL LIVE AND
TRAVEL AMONG
THE STARS?
By Charles L. Limoli
DE E P - S PA C E
DE A L
BREA KE

Illustration by Chris Malbon
R 2016 Scientific American
FF
Charles L. Limoli is a neuroscientist and radiation biologist
at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine.
Hestudies cognitive impairments resulting from a variety
ofcancer treatments as well as space radiation.
or millennia humans have gazed into the night sky and dreamed of traveling
to the stars. Now that people have walked on the moon and lived in orbit on the
space station, it seems inevitable that we will venture farther, to Mars, the rest
of the solar system and beyond. The dream is common to many cultures and
occupies the space agencies of nations around the world.
Yet we know that space is dangerous. Every time astronauts POWERFUL PARTICLES
leave Earth, they face extreme cold, the lack of an atmosphere, Cosmic radiation is perniciouswe cannot see or feel it, yet it
microgravity and radiation exposure. These hazards have seemed fills every inch of what looks like empty space and can do signif-
mostly surmountable so farmere engineering problems to be icant damage to human tissue. Most dangerous to astronauts
figured out and risks that brave space travelers willingly take on. are galactic cosmic rays (GCRs), charged atomic nuclei flying at
Yet new research, by myself and others, has shown that the radia- nearly the speed of light that astronomers think originated in
tion in space may be more damaging than we thought, particular- the supernova remnants of dead stars. In addition to GCRs,
ly to the fragile yet vital human brain. Although scientists have which pervade the cosmos as a uniform field, our sun also ejects
known about the radioactive nature of space for decades, only protons (ionized hydrogen) of multiple energies. Although pro-
recently has evidence emerged of how serious the effects of radia- tons constitute most of the radiation in space, because of their
tion are on the brain and how long they last. lighter mass they cause considerably less damage to our bodies
By irradiating mice, my colleagues and I have measured sig- compared with heavier particles. Most important, all these par-
nificant and enduring cognitive impairment that is likely to ticles possess sufficient energy to traverse the hulls of spacecraft
translate to humans as well, potentially endangering the success and the bodies of astronauts. Whereas the magnetic fields sur-
of space missions. Although astronauts on the relatively low- rounding planet Earth protect terrestrial inhabitants by deflect-
flying International Space Station are largely shielded from the ing most of these cosmic particles away from the surface, travel
worst effects by their perch within the edges of Earths atmo- beyond the magnetosphere leads to unavoidable exposure and
sphere, they run the risk of some cognitive damage. The dangers the unfortunate consequences of these particles interactions
for voyagers to Mars and beyond, however, could be grave. with human tissue.
We currently have a limited ability to mitigate these perils. The problem with cosmic radiation is that when these parti-
Improved shielding for spacecraft could block some radiation, cles pass through the human body, they leave behind some of
but no known material is lightweight enough to be practical. their own energy that ionizes atoms in the tissuethat is,
Drugs that could fight the effects of radiation inside the body knocks electrons off the atoms, causing them to turn from neu-
are only in the early stages. Unless we find a successful solution, tral atoms into charged ions. The charged particles then move
humanitys dreams of journeying throughout the solar system along their own trajectories, knocking more electrons loose and
and beyond may be forever out of reach. generating secondary tracks, causing a widening trail of damage.
IN BRIEF
Space travel has a lways been dangerous, but new re Scientists irradiated m ice with charged particles sim Better shielding for spacecraft and space suits or
search shows that cosmic radiation is even more harm ulating the radiation astronauts get in space and found drugs that protect the brain will be necessary to allow
ful to the brain than we knew. both behavioral declines and neural damage. humanity a future among the stars.

The heavier the radiation particle, RESEARCH FINDINGS
the more energy it will have and the
more atoms it will ionize.
The redistribution of these elec-
Space Brain
trons causes some atoms to break Cosmic radiation m ay harm astronauts
brains more than previously thought. Medial
their molecular bonds, damaging pro prefrontal
teins, lipids, nucleic acids and other Scientists exposed mice to an onslaught of
cortex
vital molecules in the cells and tis- charged particles mimicking those that fly
sues of the body. This removal of elec- through space and measured both behavioral
trons forms free radicalsatoms or performance and physical damage. The
molecules that lack the full comple- damage was revealed by brain imaging.
ment of electrons to fill their atomic Axon of
orbitals, making them highly reactive connecting
and eager to pair with other electrons neuron
from adjacent atoms or molecules to Neuron Synapse
fill up their orbitals. The free radicals Spacelike radiation damaged a region cell body
can then react with other molecules of the mouse brain called the medial
prefrontal cortex, which is associated Dendrite
in the body, turning them into new
chemicals that do not serve their orig- with memory. In this area, neuron
inal purpose. When radicals encoun- protrusions called dendritic spines
ter DNA, for example, they can break decreased in size and number.
apart its sugar phosphate backbone
or damage the nucleic acid bases.
Scientists measure radiation expo- Before Radiation After Radiation
sure in absorbed dosesthe energy Dendrites receive chemical
lost by the radiation and deposited in signals from other neurons.
the body (per unit of body mass). The Eight weeks after exposure
SI unit for absorbed dose is the gray to 30 centigrays of radia-
(Gy), where 1 Gy is one joule per kilo- tion, the mice showed a
gram. Radiation also comes in differ- 20 to 40percent reduction
ent qualities, which refers to the in the number of dendritic
density of ionization it produces per spines (yellow), small
unit dose. Scientists characterize ra branches off the main
diation types by their linear energy dendrite shaft that enable
transfer (LET), or the amount of ener- learning and memory.
gy lost per distance traveled. For ex
ample, a dose of high LET radiation is
more dangerous than the same dose
of low LET radiation because it leaves behind more energy and presents considerable challenges. One of the only places in
thus causes more atoms to ionize. The resultant damage is there- which we can run experiments simulating space radiation is the
fore more difficult for the cell to repair and recover from. Because nasa Space Radiation Laboratory, a facility nasa and Brookhav-
many of the radiation types encountered in GCRs have a relative- en National Laboratory commissioned in 2003 on Long Island.
ly high LET, this characteristic has important implications for There large particle accelerators speed up ions of various mass-
SOURCE: WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR BRAIN ON THE WAY TO MARS, BYVIPANK. PARIHAR ETAL.,
deep-space travel, which we will discuss later. es to velocities approaching those of space radiation. Experi-
Energetic heavier radiation particles can leave tracks of high- menters, including myself, place targetsin our case, micein
er radical density and increased destruction from ionizations the path of this radiation and measure its effects. These tests
compared with particles of lower mass. At the molecular level, we can show us how specific types of cosmic radiation, at various
INSCIENCE ADVANCES, VOL.1, NO.4, ARTICLE NO.E1400256; MAY1,2015
find nanometer-wide regions of high radical density that can doses, affect living tissue.
lead to relatively small volumes containing a large number of Recently we exposed six-month-old mice to low doses (0.05to
damaged sites on critical molecules. Thus, heavier charged parti- 0.30Gy) of charged particles (oxygen and titanium, for instance)
cles produce much higher yields of these regions of clustered and tested their behavior. The mice completed tasks called novel
damage compared with photon radiation (such as x-rays and object recognition (NOR) and object in place (OiP) to evaluate
gamma rays). It is this density of damage that makes space radi- how the radiation affected their memory and thinking. First, the
ation more dangerous than traditional types of ionizing radia- rodents explored an empty box around three feet square. Then
tion found on Earth. we introduced Legos, rubber ducks and other toys to the box and
let the mice wander around a bit more. Laterin some trials after
RE-CREATING SPACE ON EARTH just minutes and in others after hours or a daywe switched the
Despite the ubiquity of charged particles in space, reproducing objects for new toys (NOR) or changed the location of the toys
these types of radiation fields on Earth to study their effects (OiP). A smart, healthy animal will seek out novelty and spend
Illustration by Emily Cooper February 2017, ScientificAmerican.com57

more time exploring the new toy or location than objects that plexity, a critical parameter that can be compared with the
have stayed the same, whereas an impaired mouse will spend less branches of a tree. And our recent study, which we published in
time poking around. Such tests have proven to be reliable indica- 2015 in Science Advances, a lso found that very low doses of
tors of various types of hippocampal (memory and learning) and charged particles can elicit significant and persistent losses in
cortical (thinking) functions. We measure an animals perfor- dendritic complexity.
mance through what is called a discrimination index, calculated Moreover, these changes occurred at a specific region of
as the time spent at the novel object or location divided by the the brain termed the medial prefrontal cortex, a spot known
total time spent exploring both new and old situations. to be involved in memory, which we suspected might be
Our experiments with the NOR and OiP tasks showed that damaged based on our behavioral testing. This is not to say
irradiation significantly lowers a mouses discrimination index. that other regions of the brain were not damaged or that
After six weeks, the performance of mice exposed to these doses other neural circuitry was not impaired, but our findings
demonstrate the benefits of combining
behavioral studies with brain imaging
to connect the cognitive decline we see
Scientists are developing with structural changes to specific areas

of the brain.
drug and dietary counter We built on the initial imaging with
further high-resolution analysis to search
measures that could mitigate for evidence of other structural altera-
the worst effects ofradiation

tions such as dendritic spinessmall
(less than one micron, or a fraction of the
on the brain. Yet all these

width of a human hair)protrusions
from the main shaft of the dendrite that
efforts are in early stages, enable learning and memory. If dendrites

are branches on a tree, dendritic spines
and none has the potential are like the leaves on the branches. Den-
dritic spines contain the synaptic machin-
to be a cure-all. ery that allows dendrites to receive neu

ronal signals, and they come in different
shapes that help in various jobs. Our past
work with x-rays and protons and more
(5 and 30 cGy, or centigrays) had dropped by about 90 percent, recent work with charged particles have revealed a marked sen-
changes that were surprisingly consistent regardless of dose. Fur- sitivity of dendritic spines to irradiation. And we found that
thermore, very recent tests indicated that these effects last 12, 24 dendritic spine density, or the number of spines per unit length,
and even 52 weeks after exposure. The results suggest that expo- significantly decreased after short periods (10 days) and longer
sure to similar levels of cosmic radiation may prove problematic times (six weeks) following a mouses exposure. These serious
to astronauts engaged in critical decision making, problem solv- and persistent effects attest to the capability of charged parti-
ing and other vital mission activities. cles to elicit structural changes of consequencechanges that
compromise neurons ability to mediate neurotransmission by
TRIMMING THE NEURAL TREE reducing the number of synaptic connections in the brain.
My colleagues and I also followed up these behavioral tests by To further underline that the changes in mices behavior re
imaging brain sections from the irradiated mice. Energetic sulted from the changes we found in their neurons, we plotted
charged particles traveling through the brain have the poten- individual performance against dendritic spine density in the
tial to profoundly change neuronal circuitry. We wanted to ob same animal. Our data revealed that as dendritic spine density
serve any specific physical damage that might correlate with decreased, so, too, did cognitive ability. Individual animals ex
the behavioral changes we found. To do so, we used mice that had hibiting the poorest performance (that is, reduced curiosity or
been genetically altered so that their brains contained brightly exploration of novelty) also possessed the lowest dendritic
fluorescent neurons that showed up in high-resolution microsco- spine densities, suggesting that disruption of cognition was at
py. We collected a series of fluorescent images of various depths least in part related to reduced numbers of dendritic spines.
in specific brain areas that we then merged and stitched togeth- These data provide the first evidence linking structural damage
er to create a three-dimensional representation of the brain. to the adverse behavioral outcomes observed in animals ex
Our imaging showed significant changes to parts of neurons posed to cosmic radiation.
called dendrites. These are the fingerlike protrusions from the These results help to confirm what nasa has suspected for
main cell body that receive chemical signals from other neurons years: radiation may be harmful to astronauts cognitive perfor-
(similar protrusions called axons transmit signals). Past studies mance. Until now, these fears had been based in large part on
from our laboratory have found that sparsely ionizing (low LET) the clinical literature documenting a range of cognitive effects
x-ray and gamma-ray radiation caused significant reductions in in patients surviving cranial radiotherapy for treatment of brain
the length, area and branching of dendrites over 10 and 30 days. cancer. Yet in the past scientists have been hesitant to extrap
Collectively we call these changes a reduction of dendritic com- olate these outcomes to astronauts in space because these are
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE Listen to a podcast on space radiation at ScientificAmerican.com/feb2017/radiation

different populations being exposed to different types of radia- vated solar activity and wear helmets and space suits designed
tion at different doses. In the clinic, a typical daily dose (2 Gy) to maximize protection from radiation exposure while space-
would exceed most estimates of the radiation dose incurred walking or even sleeping. It would take a radically better protec-
during a round-trip to and extended stay on Mars. Interplane- tive material than any that currently exist to make a significant
tary dose rates are about 0.48 mGy, or milligrays, a day during improvement, though.
the roughly 360-day round-trip transit and half that rate dur- Scientists are also developing drug and dietary countermea-
ing an expected stay of one year or more on Mars (because the sures that astronauts could take on a regular schedule or after
planets bulk blocks the radiation coming from below). acute radiation exposure (following a major solar storm, for ex
Although the total radiation doses used in the clinic are much ample) that could mitigate the worst effects of radiation on the
higher than those found in space, the x-rays and gamma rays brain. Antioxidant formulations, for example, have shown
typically used to treat tumors are sparsely ionizing (low LET), promise for limiting some of the damage done to mice exposed
whereas the charged particles we worry about in space are to spacelike radiation. Researchers have also made progress in
densely ionizing (high LET). For this reason, we have not been designing chemicals that can bolster brain circuitry to help
able to make strong comparisons between the outcomes in can- maintain function after damage has occurred. Yet all these
cer patients and those we expect in astronauts. efforts are in early stages, and none has the potential to be a
Our work adds new support to the notion that space radia- cure-all. The best we can hope is to reduce, rather than elimi-
tion is harmful to astronauts brains, but important caveats still nate, damage. We must also continue to research cosmic radia-
persist. Although our experiments used doses of radiation simi- tions effects on the brain, as well as the entire body, to elucidate
lar to what space travelers would experience, we were unable to more completely the short- and long-term health risks associat-
deliver those doses at the same rate that astronauts would re ed with prolonged exposure.
ceive. In space, astronauts would receive the radiation over the Our discoveries point to a concern about deep-space travel
course of many months to years, underscoring the protracted that has perhaps been underappreciated compared with other
nature of cosmic radiation exposure. Because we had only limit- dangers. The risk of radiation-induced cancer, for instance, is
ed time at the accelerator facility, we had to deliver the same better known but may actually be of lesser importance because
dose over a matter of minutes. This large difference in rate of the long time it takes for most radiogenic cancers to develop.
might raise doubts about our results because one could suppose We have shown, however, that even small amounts of cosmic
that cells would have time to repair and recover when the dose radiation cause neuronal damage and cognitive defects in mice
was delivered slowly. In fact, the difference in dose rate is not and are very likely to do so in humans as well.
likely to have a strong effect, because the total dose is low (in The persistence of these radiation-induced changes is
other words, particles fly through infrequently), the space parti- another cause of worry. Scientists have seen no sign that dam-
cles of most concern are high LET radiation (which produces aged dendritic complexity and spine density can repair them-
severe cellular damage that is hard to recover from no matter selves after cosmic radiation exposure, and whereas it is pre-
how quickly it is delivered) and, finally, most areas of the brain mature to refer to such changes as permanent, we have no
cannot generate new neurons easily, which further hinders evidence that neurons recover from this type of injury. There-
recovery. And although our findings pertain to rodents, not fore, until researchers find specific interventions that can
humans, we have no reason to think a human neuron would promote and hasten the healing of the irradiated brain tissue,
respond differently in any significant way to cosmic radiation our best options appear limited to protecting our existing neu-
than our mices neurons did. ral circuitry.
Cosmic radiation exposure may well represent one of the more
OUR FUTURE IN SPACE? significant obstacles to Mars travel and even more so for longer
To send humans out into the solar system, we face daunting hur- deep-space missions required to explore more distant worlds. Al
dles. Astronauts will need larger, more powerful rockets than though some may consider these findings controversial, it re
those currently available to reach Mars and other bodies in our mains difficult to dismiss these data and their potential implica-
solar system, and they will need habitats once they arrive and tions for the space program. Does this mean we are forever bound
the ability to use resources at their destination to make water to Earth? Perhaps not. These results may simply represent yet
and rocket fuel. We must now add to this list of challenges the another obstacle that humankind must meet and surpass as we
need to protect space colonists from radiation, which may prove prepare to embark on what may prove to be humanitys most
the hardest barrier to overcome. daunting challenge and perhaps even its greatest success.
The first way we might tackle the problem is via shielding
that stops the radiation before it can do any damageplaced
either on spacecraft and habitats or in space suits or clothing. At M O R E TO E X P L O R E
the moment, the only way scientists know how to shield against Space Radiation Risks to the Central Nervous System. F rancisA. Cucinotta etal.
radiation is with extremely heavy and thick materials such as inLife Sciences in Space Research, V ol.2, pages 5469; July2014.
lead. These do the trick, but they are utterly impractical in space What Happens to Your Brain on the Way to Mars. V ipanK. Parihar etal. in S cience
because they are so heavy and would require too much rocket Advances, V ol.1, No.4, Article No. e1400256; May2015.
fuel to launch. Efforts are now under way to design advanced FROM OUR ARCHIVES
shielding materials and engineering controls that can enhance
The Biological Effects of Low-Level Ionizing Radiation. ArthurC. Upton; February 1982.
a hulls defense on certain regions of a spacecraft. Astronauts
could retreat to these more protected areas during times of ele- s c i e n t i f i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a z i n e /s a

L I N G U I ST I C S
THE
Before the smartphone or even Morse code, some rural peoples spoke long

WIRELESS COMMUNICATION: I n the Greek
village of Antia, Kiriakoula Yiannakari demon
strates how to whistle a message to neighbors.
whistled WORD
distance by whistlinga means of communicating that still fascinates linguists
By Julien Meyer
Photographs by Eirini Vourloumis February 2017, ScientificAmerican.com61

Julien Meyer is a linguist and bioacoustician at the French
National Center for Scientific Research and at the GIPSA-lab
inGrenoble, France. His research focuses on phonetics, language
cognition, and language and rural communities. He runs
the Icon-Eco-Speech project and is a co-founder of the World
Whistles Research Association, which documents and
safeguards whistled languages.
One spring morning

Panagiotis Kefalas
was in the tavern he owned in the tiny Greek
village of Antia when he received a call from
his friend Kyria Koula. Kefalas was planning
tohave breakfast at her home some 200 meters
from his tavern. The call did not begin with
the sounding of a mobile ring tone. Instead
itreached directly from Koulas mouth to
Kefalass ears, arriving in the form ofaseries
of high-pitched whistles.
Welcome, what do you want? Koula trilled.

Kefalas pursed his lips and whistled back:
after all, carry much farther than shouts and spare the vocal
Please, I would like to eat.
cords. Even today the pensioners of this village at the southern
All right, Koula replied.
end of Greeces second-largest island, Euboea, sometimes use
I would like scrambled eggs, Kefalas volunteered.
this efficient pretechnological form of wireless communication
from house to house to convey news, gossip or extend a break-
A visitor to Antia would have come away perplexed. The fast invitation.
beginning of the first phrase, welcome (kals irthate i n roman- I recorded the conversation between Kefalas and Koula in
ized Greek), sounded like the lewd catcalltweet, tweeo May 2004. Since the early 2000s I have been studying whistled
except that the drawn-out second syllable rose sharply in pitch. speech in remote mountains and dense jungle across the globe.
Some accounts contend that the now dying tradition of whis- In that time, I and my colleagues from diverse institutions have
tled speech, still maintained by Antias few dozen residents, come across many previously undiscovered whistled languages.
served for centuries as the best way for sheep or goat herders We have also measured the amazing distances that whistled
there to communicate from one hillside to another. Whistles, words can travel and have gained an understanding of how
IN BRIEF
Before electronic communications b e Herodotus m entioned whistled lan New investigations have discovered Linguists h ave tried to promote interest
came a ubiquitous part of people's guages in the fourth book of his work the presence of whistled speech all over in these languagesand schools in the
lives, rural villagers created whistled The Histories, but until recently lin the globe. About 70 populations world Canary Islands now teach its local vari
versions of their native languages to guists had done little research on the wide communicate this way, a far great ant. A whistled language represents both
speak from hillside to hillside or even sounds and meanings of this now en er number than the dozen or so groups a cultural heritage and a way to study
house to house. dangered form of communication. that had been previously identified. how the brain processes information.

TECHNICAL PROWESS d isplayed by Antia's Georgia Yiannakari
meets with approval from Maria Kefala (1, in pink), an expert transla-
tor of whistled Greek. Yiannis Tsipas (2, in middle) hopes to pass
along whistling expertise he learned from his parentshis mother
Aristi is at his sideto his son, Vassilis.
1 2
blowing air through lips can convey full sentences, as well as but by a compressed stream of air from the mouth that swirls in
how the brains of recipients manage to decode the words. turbulent vortices at the edge of the lips. Just as in ordinary
speech, the whistlers tongue and jaw move to form different
A SLOW BEGINNING words, but the range of movement is more constrained. All that
I originally became interested in these languages almost 20 years changes is the pitch of the whistle; in contrast, when people
ago after reading a 1957 Scientific American article about a ver- speak, the timbre (what distinguishes one sound from another
sion called Silbo Gomero, which is still spoken on La Gomera, one apart from pitch and loudness) may change, too.
of Spains Canary Islands. I decided I wanted to know more and In the end, the whistled words conveyed in the village of Antia
made it the focus of my doctoral work beginning in 2003. are still Greek. Linguists sometimes liken a whistle to a whisper,
Back when the article appeared, very few researchers had any in that both are alternative ways of speaking the same language
interest in studying whistled languages, even though such speech without using the vibration of the vocal cords. Linguist Andr
had been known since ancient times; Herodotus mentioned Ethi- Classe, author of the S
cientific American a rticle that inspired me,
opian troglodytes who spoke like bats in Melpomene, the fourth termed whistled talk a natural informational skeleton in
book of his work T he Histories. B
y 2003 interest had picked up, describing its bare-bones nature. He noted that the intelligibility
but few linguists had done research on the sounds and meanings of whistled speech does not always match that of spoken lan-
conveyed by whistled speech, and most studies had investigated guage, but it comes close.
only Silbo Gomero. In my early investigations, I found intriguing documents from
The term whistled language is somewhat of a misnomer. travelers, colonial functionaries, missionaries and anthropolo-
Whistled speech, in fact, is not a separate language or dialect gists that described 12 or so whistled languages. These clues led
from a native tongue but rather an extension of it. Instead of me to suspect that other whistled counterparts of spoken lan-
using the voice to speak the Greek words B or na ho omelta? guages existed around the world.
(Can I have scrambled eggs?), those same words are articulat- In the early 2000s I therefore set about with my colleague
ed as whistles. The sounds of the words just undergo a profound Laure Dentel to undertake 14 months of fieldwork visiting places
shift; they are generated not by the vibrations of the vocal cords where some evidence indicated that this practice still occurred.

B I OAC O U S T I C S
Physics of Pucker and Blow Sound waves generated by whistling fall within the frequency range
that engineers and psychologists have found to be optimal for
Whistled speech is an alternative form of a native languagesuch detection by the ear. A whistle is a single-frequency band in this area
of spectrum that is easier to detect by the human ear than the
as Greek, Turkish or Spanishthat conveys words using a com-
complex waves produced by ordinary spoken speech, which span
pressed stream of air that swirls in tiny vortices at the edge of the amuch broader frequency range.
lips. A whistled language lacks the harmonics of the voice. Yet the
lone, modulated, narrow band of frequencies for representing vow-
els and consonants in a nontonal language, such as Greek, still fulfills
the essential characteristics of a language. It thus allows for nontra-
ditional exploration of the cognitive capacities of the human brain.
16
Maximum amplitude for whistled speech: 120 dB 15

Maximum amplitude for shouted speech: 100 dB Whistling has a maximum ampli
tude (volume) of 120 decibels, 14
Vocal cords tire compared with 100 decibels
at 90100 dB for shouted speech. Ashout at 13
100decibels quickly tires the
Amplitude (dB)
(yellow)
vocalcords. 12
11
Transition from normal
to shouted speech at 10
70-80 dB (gray)
Frequency (kilohertz)
Speaking 9
range
When sounds propagate under ideal con- High-frequency 8
ditions, they lose approximately six decibels sound wave
each time the distance from the source 7
Obstacle
doubles. Also, an acoustic signal bounces
off obstacles, such as the ground and tree 6
trunks. Spoken speech consists of a broad Ideal range
Scattering for intelligibility
set of frequencies, and a particular band 5
within that range scatters differently from
another when coming into contact with
Propagation 4
aphysical object. A whistle, meanwhile,
encodes all the linguistic information com-
municated in a single narrow band. Low- 3
Whistling
frequency sounds resist scattering by range
physical barriers, such as dense vegeta- Low-frequency 2
tion, an acoustic property that allows them sound wave
to propagate farther. 1
0
Range of natural
Time
Vowel (blue) Consonant (white) backgound noise
SOURCE: WHISTLED LANGUAGES: A WORLDWIDE INQUIRY ON HUMAN WHISTLED SPEECH,
Each type of whistled speech, such as Spanish Silbo of the Canary Islands, has a system of pro-
nouncing vowels and consonants that approximates the spoken one by varying whistled pitch
orbreaking the flow of air. In this way, most information encoded in vowels and consonants is
Pitch
Psame el vino conveyed through variations in frequency and amplitude. Normal speech also relies on timbre
to identify vowels and consonants, which fade at a distance. In contrast, whistlers can clearly
enunciate phrases such as Pass me the wine and be heard from far away.
BY JULIEN MEYER. SPRINGER-VERLAG, 2015
The acoustic characteristics

ofwhistling allow the sound toextend Shouted
up to 10 times farther than shouted speech
speechadistance that can reach
several kilometers in valleys and other 500 meters
Whistled speech
areas that transmit sound well.
5,000 m
64 Scientific American, February 2017 Graphic by Amanda Montaez

Subsequently, I joined with a network of colleagues to conduct tle was still intelligible at 700 meters. Though not a whistling
new field studies all over the world. I have, as part of this effort, record, that measurement demonstrated the relative advantage of
documented the whistled speech of the Waypi in the Amazon whistling under average conditions that included some back-
jungle, in collaboration with linguist Elissandra Barros da Silva ground noise and a light wind.
in Brazil and anthropologist Damien Davy in French Guiana. For linguists, the study of whistled speech has helped demon-
With Dentel, I have studied the Akha and the Hmong in South- strate the capacity of the human brain to recognize words and
east Asia and with linguist Rachid Ridouane, the Tamazight Ber- sentences in an acoustic signal that carries less information than
bers in Moroccos Atlas Mountains. In 2009, moreover, Dentel, that produced by the human voice. A given whistles single fre-
linguist Denny Moore and I began a five-year collaboration at quency lacks the harmonics of the voice. Yet even this lone modu-
the linguistics division of the Emilio Goeldi Museum of Par in lated frequency fulfills the essential requirements of an actual
Belm, Brazil. Our job was to chronicle the whistled language of language in clearly communicating information. Whistled speech
the Gavio people in the Amazonian state of Rondnia. is therefore an important means to explore the cognitive capaci-
Our research endeavors have brought to bear the latest tools ties of our brain to communicate in an untraditional way.
in linguistics and acoustics and used methods from many fields, Decades ago bioacoustician Ren-Guy Busnel, with whom I
among them phonetics, psycholinguistics, bioacoustics and socio have collaborated since the beginning of my doctoral work,
linguistics. We borrowed, for instance, the recording methods
bioacousticians use for studying animal communication in the
wild because these are well suited for studying whistled commu-
nication over large distances.
Our research discovered ways people convey words with
Acoustical analysis
whistles. The whistler may pucker the lips, finger whistle, or
of whistles indicates
that, under highly
blow into a leaf or a simple wood flute. Some speakers combine
different techniques depending on how far they wish to send a
message. Words are constructed from these sounds depending
on whether the spoken language from which the whistled one
is derived uses changes in tone to convey differences in mean-
favorable conditions,
ing, such as in Mandarin and Cantonese, or whether tones do
the sound carries
over a distance of
little more than let the speaker add stress to a word, as they do
in Greek or Spanish. In a tonal language, a whistles rising pitch
several kilometers.
mirrors the ascending inflection of the spoken tone. In nonton-
al languages, however, a whistles unchanging pitch represents
a vowelan i might be communicated with a high-pitched
whistle, whereas an e might sound at a lower pitch. The whis-
tler forms consonants in either language class by modulating
how abruptly the sound is altered when changing from one conducted a study on whistled speech perception among villag-
pitch to another. ers of Kusky in the mountains of northeastern Turkey. Using
the whistled form of Turkish known as the language of the
CENSUS TAKING birds, townspeople over short distances could recognize indi-
Our inquiry s o far has managed to locate about 70 populations vidual words around 70 percent of the time, compared with a
who use whistled speech, most hailing from isolated mountain- 95 percent rate for ordinary spoken words. They could even
ous or densely vegetated locations. That number is just a frac- detect an entire sentence about eight out of 10 times in that sit-
tion of the worlds 7,000 languages, but it far exceeds the previ- uation when people were far enough apart that they could not
ously recorded tally. In all these places, whistled languages are see one anothers faces clearly. This study inspired me to begin
used mainly, as earlier work suggested, to project messages another, published in 2013, in which I, along with my col-
beyond shouting distancesbut they have other uses as well. leagues, investigated intelligibility of spoken words as distanc-
They can assist in courtship rituals within the confines of a es increased between a speaker and listener. The results showed
town. They can be used to communicate in a noisy setting or to that at a separation of 17 meters, word recognition drops to
trade secrets in the presence of nonwhistlers. (You have to hide 70 percent. We also found that the best-recognized consonants
because the police are on the way.) And they can help hunters (sibilants that resemble whistlelike sounds) are still recognized
land prey; in the Amazon jungle, animals recognize the human at rates above 90percent up to 33 meters away. Combined with
voice but not whistles. Busnels work on whistled Turkish, these results suggest whis-
Acoustical analysis of whistling used for long-distance com- tled speech is more efficient than ordinary spoken speech when
munication shows that, under favorable weather and topographi- interlocutors are communicating across medium distances of
cal conditions, a whistle can travel several kilometers. The fre- 20 to 30 meters.
quency spans 0.9 to four kilohertz, almost exactly the range de Also in the realm of linguistics, I was curious about how readi-
termined by telecommunications engineers to be best for picking ly a person can learn some of the rudiments of whistled speech.
out accurately the component sounds that make up words. In one Traditionally, the skill is taught shortly after a child learns to talk,
experiment we performed in a valley near the French Alps, spo- but we decided to investigate the initial steps of whistled-speech
ken speech carried 40 meters, shouts 200 meters, whereas a whis- learning in adults. I asked 40 university French- and Spanish-

CARTO GRAPHY
Where the World Speaks in Whistles

In the past 15 years the number of known whistled languages research continues, more whistled languages will be discovered,
has expanded to about 70 from the dozen or so initially identified provided that their traditional ways of living are not threatened
byanthropologists, missionaries, travelers, and the like. The ones by modernity. Often they are used to communicate over long
that have been studied or recorded are noted on the map. As distances in mountainous and forested areas.
Siberian Yupik
Barnese Turkish
Spanish
Greek
Kickapoo
Spanish Tamazight Bai Yi
Tepehua Spanish Chepang Hmong
Mazatec Chin Akha
Mixtec Chinantec Moor
Jola Lele Bench
Moba Bumbita,
Waypi Ewe Banen Ari Muan, Wam
Abau Abu
Pirah Gavio
Ashninka Karaj Narak
Telefol
Suru Folopa
Tupari
Boror
Ach
Whistled language used

Areas of dense vegetation
speaking students to listen to Silbo Gomero. We found that the story. Onur Gntrkn of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany
students readily distinguished an obvious component of any recruited speakers of the Turkish whistled language to test the
Spanish whistled wordthe vowels a, e, i or o (u is whis- conventional notion that the brains left hemisphere is where
tled as o in Silbo Gomero)and that the Spanish students were most language processing occurs. Earlier studies had shown
a little more accurate than the French ones. Both groups of stu- that the left hemisphere is, in fact, the dominant language cen-
dents categorized correctly the vowels far above chance, though ter for both tonal and atonal tongues as well as for nonvocalized
not as well as a trained Silbo speaker. click and sign languages. Gntrkn was interested in learning
Recent studies
LEFT AND RIGHT BRAIN
The neurobiology of whistling is one area that remains largely SOURCE: WHISTLED LANGUAGES: A WORLDWIDE INQUIRY ON HUMAN WHISTLED SPEECH,
reveal that whistled

unexplored. Researchers have only begun to observe what hap-
pens in the brains language centers when a person speaks via
languages can
whistles. But we have made some progress. One 2005 study pub-
lished in N
ature by Manuel Carreiras, then at the University of
expand our under

La Laguna on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and his colleagues
reported brain areas underlying language comprehensionthe
standing of the
temporal regions of the left hemisphereare activated in well-
BY JULIEN MEYER. SPRINGER-VERLAG, 2015
trained whistlers when they listen to Silbo Gomero. The finding
way the brain

implied that these same known language-related areas could
process words from a simple auditory input consisting of chang-
processes auditory
es in pitch (akin to a musical melody) in experienced whistlers,
though not in people unfamiliar with whistled speech.
Another investigator wanted to know whether the concen-
tration of brain activity in the left hemisphere was the whole nformation.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE Listen to whistled Greek at S cientificAmerican.com/feb2017/whistler Map by Mapping Specialists

CURLING the back of
the tongue enables
Antia's Kiriakoula
Yiannakari to speak
to other villagers
in whistled Greek.
how much the right hemisphereassociated with the process- and Research Association of Silbo Canario Hautacuperche, an
ing of melody and pitchwould also be recruited for a whistled organization that provides whistled-speech courses, even contrib-
language. He and his colleagues reported in 2015 in Current uted by launching an app called Yo Silbo to train people by listen-
Biology that townspeople from Kusky, who were given simple ing to correctly whistled sentences.
hearing tests, used both hemispheres almost equally when lis- If similar efforts take hold, whistling for your supper could
tening to whistled syllables but mostly the left one when they become more than a saying. It would preserve a form of expres-
heard vocalized spoken syllables. This result needs further con- sion that is giving new insight into how simple high-pitched
firmation in other whistled languages but provides a challenge tones can be molded to communicate complex thought.
to the prevailing idea that the left hemisphere is dominant in
language comprehension. M O R E TO E X P L O R E
These studies demonstrate that whistled languages can help
Typology and Acoustic Strategies of Whistled Languages: Phonetic Comparison
expand knowledge of the way the brain processes information. I and Perceptual Cues of Whistled Vowels. J ulien Meyer in J ournal of the
currently promote these research efforts as a member of two orga- International Phonetic Association, V ol. 38, No. 1, pages 6994; April 2008.
nizations. The World Whistles Research Association has been in The Study of Tone and Related Phenomena in an Amazonian Tone Language:
place since 2002, and a new endeavor on whistled speech was Gavio of Rondnia. D enny Moore and Julien Meyer in L anguage Documentation &
Conservation, Vol. 8, pages 613636; 2014.
launched in 2015 by my laboratory (GIPSA-lab) at the French
Whistled Languages: A Worldwide Inquiry on Human Whistled Speech. J ulien
National Center for Scientific Research. Meyer. Springer-Verlag, 2015.
Scientists studying whistled languages may also receive a boost Whistled Turkish Alters Language Asymmetries. O nur Gntrkn et al. in Current
from nascent efforts to preserve these unique forms of communi- Biology, Vol. 25, No. 16, pages R706R708; August 17, 2015.
cation as part of the cultural heritage of various peoples. The World Whistles Research Association: www.theworldwhistles.org
Canary Islands were ahead of the pack in that regard. In 1999 they FROM OUR ARCHIVES
made teaching of Silbo Gomero mandatory in primary schools on
The Whistled Language of La Gomera. A ndr Classe; April 1957.
the island of La Gomera. They also set up a formal government
Saving Dying Languages. W
. Wayt Gibbs; August 2002.
program to develop whistling teachers. The desire to revive Silbo
has since inspired a series of initiativesfor instance, the Cultural s c i e n t i f i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a z i n e /s a

INSIDE JOB: S cans for thyroid or
bone cancer, such as this one, rely on
arare isotope called technetium 99m.

BLIND
H E A LT H
MEDICINE Millions of patients depend on a rare radioactive form

of one element to scan them for disease. But the old
nuclear reactors that make it are shutting down
By Mark Peplow
The man with radioactive atoms flowing through Now these precious pictures are endangered. The radioactive
his veins seems calm. He moves onto a gurney and lies still as it atoms coursing through this patients foot got their start at an old
slides into a humming, doughnut-shaped scanner at Vancouver nuclear reactor thousands of kilometers away in Chalk River, On-
General Hospital. His foot hurtsa lotand the machine takes tario. On October 31, 2016, that reactor stopped making the
sharp 3-D snapshots of bones and soft tissue within by imaging source material for the isotope. At that moment North America
these atoms, their radiation shining brightest where there is in- was left with no domestic source of this vital medical tool, and
creased blood flow to the injury. 20 percent of global production disappeared. Chalk River will
This kind of bright beacon does not just illuminate feet. shut down completely in a few years. And the problem gets worse.
More than 30million times a year, all over the world, scans that Very nearly all of the world supply comes from just six re-
use these atoms track the irregular beat of damaged hearts, un- search reactors. Four of them are more than 50 years old and in-
cover deadly cancers and explore brains devastated by stroke. creasingly prone to breakdowns. Two reactors, in Belgium and
These pictures rely on an obscure isotope called technetium the Netherlands, now account for half of global capacity and will
99m, used in an imaging process called single-photon emission be shuttered in the coming decade. New nuclear plants are
computed tomography. The injected technetium gives doctors planned but could take more than a decade to complete. Last
an unmatched window into the body, allowing them to pin- September the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineer-
point damage or disease so they can save patients lives. These ing, and Medicine rang a loud alarm with a report saying there
images can show finer detail than other tests, and the radiation was a substantial chance of shortages in the near future.
dose is extremely low and safe. Doctors are worried. Its something we need on a daily basis,
IN BRIEF
SCIENCE SOURCE
An obscure radioactive a tom, technetium 99m, is es- The world supply is running out as aging nuclear reac- Researchers are racing t o develop new methods using
sential for lifesaving medical scans. tors that produce material to make this atom shut down. particle accelerators and other machines to fill the gap.

says Eric Turcotte, a nuclear medicine specialist at the Universi- S cience journalist Mark Peplow wrote about nanotechnology
ty of Sherbrooke in Quebec. These tests are especially useful for inmedicine in the April 2015 issue of S cientific American.
detecting bone cancer or fracturesthe foot patients physicians
were looking for small breaksand for revealing blockages in a
heart patients arteries. They are often given to people with chest
pain or other signs of blood vessel disease. Other techniques pro-
duce blurrier, less exact images or use higher doses of radiation
that pose a greater danger of harm. Benjamin Chow, a cardiolo- Instead of an enormous reactor plant, the technology uses a
gist at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, says that a short- small particle accelerator called a cyclotron, which can fit in the
age would force doctors to fall back on less accurate methods, in- basement of a hospital. The cyclotron smashes protons into a tar-
creasing patient risks, or to skip the tests altogether. get made of a different isotope, molybdenum 100, and the colli-
Worse, cutting back to just a few production sites creates an sion produces technetium 99m at the site. The isotopes short
easily broken supply chain. Almost all of the isotope decays in a half-life means that a single cyclotron can serve only a limited
day and cannot be stockpiled. Each short-lived dose for a patient area. But most of Canadas big cities already host similar ma-
has to be freshly milked from a container holding its source, a chines, so it should be possible to roll out the solution across the
longer-lasting isotope called molybdenum 99. Supplies of that whole country, says Paul Schaffer, an associate lab director and
material need to be flown in every few days from the reactors former head of the nuclear medicine division at Canadas flagship
that make it, halfway around the world. Bad weather and can- cyclotron center, TRIUMF, which developed the method. TRI-
celed flights could mean no scans. If an airport is closed, just UMF, located in Vancouver, ran pilot tests to demonstrate that it
think how vulnerable we are, frets Franois Bnard, a clinician- can make enough technetium 99m during a six-hour cyclotron
scientist at the BC Cancer Agency in British Columbia. run to meet the needsabout 500 scans a dayof the province of
The isotopes production cycle raises another problem: nucle- British Columbia, which has a population of nearly five million.
ar terrorism. To create molybdenum 99, most reactors use weap- Currently the two-meter-wide cyclotron sits in a vault behind
ons-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU). There is a global push a thick steel door at the Vancouver facility of the BC Cancer Agen-
to stop using HEU by 2020 because dangerous people and rogue cy. Two thin metal tubes jut from the machine, carrying beams of
states want to steal it. But converting reactors to use low-en- protons traveling at about one-fifth the speed of light. At the oth-
riched uranium (LEU) means more downtime, and LEU reactors er end lies the target: a thin, flat plate about 10 centimeters long,
ultimately produce less molybdenum99. with a coating of molybdenum 100, housed in an aluminum cyl-
To avert this looming crisis, researchers in the U.S. and Cana- inder. The plate is bombarded for six hours to transform some
da have been racing to develop radically new technologies to proof the molybdenum 100 into technetium 99m. Then it is shot
duce molybdenum 99 and technetium 99m without nuclear re- through an air-pressure tube into a lead-lined work chamber
actors, instead using more nimble particle accelerators and other called a hot cell in another room, where operators separate and
machines. Not only could these techniques avoid shortages, they purify the technetium 99m. The result is a small vial of clear liq-
could also be cheaper and produce much less radioactive waste. uid containing enough of the isotope for hundreds of tests.
Now, with global capacity dropping sharply, the researchers are Vancouver General Hospital and the cancer agency are just
about to find out if their alternatives are up to the challenge. wrapping up a clinical trial using this technetium in real tests on
patients. The generation process generally starts in the early
COMING UP SHORT hours of the morning, and patients can be booked for injections
Doctors already have bitter experience with what happens starting at 1 p.m. The trial results so far indicate that the cyclo-
when molybdenum 99 runs out. Back in 2009 and 2010, both tron technetium is just as safe and effective as the isotopes made
the Canadian and Dutch reactors were off-line for extended pe- with the molybdenum 99 containers.
riods, causing a global shortage that left doctors scrambling to TRIUMF and other ITAP partners launched a company last
find alternative diagnostic tests. The crisis in 2009 was a year to supply the technology to other cyclotrons. Already about
wake-up call for everyone, says Sally Schwarz, president of the 500 medical cyclotrons worldwide have sufficiently powerful
Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging. Diagnos- beams to make technetium 99m in this way, in addition to their
tic tests couldnt be performed, and patients suffered. We dont current tasks such as producing isotopes for positron-emission
want to be in that position again. tomography scans. That existing base is a big advantage, Schaf-
One common fallback for a technetium 99m heart test, for fer says: a new medical cyclotron might have a $5-million price
instance, uses another radioisotope called thallium 201. But this tag, but it costs a tenth of that figure to retrofit an existing ma-
isotope produces blurrier images and doubles the patients radi- chine. In 2014 the British Nuclear Medicine Society recommend-
ation dose, says heart-imaging specialist Venkatesh L. Murthy of ed this approach as the most suitable way to supply technetium
the University of Michigan. And other, nonradioactive methods, 99m, and Schaffer reckons that between 12 and 24 cyclotrons
such as echocardiography, are not as precise. Technetium 99m could meet Canadas entire needs.
hits a sweet spot between resolution, safety and cost, he says.
Sobered by the effects of the shortfall, the Canadian govern- GENERATING ADVANCES
ment soon afterward began the $45-million Isotope Technology South of the Canadian border, in the U.S., however, cyclotrons
Acceleration Program (ITAP) to develop alternative ways to make are not generating as much enthusiasmor technetium. The
technetium 99m. Its leading project may be ready to go online by trouble is that the nations hospitals were among the very first
the end of this year. to build medical cyclotrons, and these older models cannot

D I AG N O ST I C T E ST S they fuse to form another element, helium. This merger releases
a neutron. Those neutrons can then trigger fission reactions in
Vital Isotope Uses the LEU target, forming molybdenum99. The company says that
the process produces concentrations of molybdenum 99 that are
The isotope technetium 99m is used in about 30 million medical compatible with existing systems for transporting the isotope
scans every year. More than half of them are tests for potentially and separating, or milking, technetium 99m from it. (Because of
fatal heart and blood vessel problems. Others detect bone the milking process, these canisters are whimsically dubbed
cancer, kidney disease, and more.* moly cows.) In February 2016 SHINE got approval from the
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build its production fa-
Other cility, and it hopes to begin supplying by 2020.
100 Tumor localization
Abscess and infection
PRICE POINTS
Kidney/renal
But smart technology is no guarantee of success. Costs will
Thyroid and parathyroid
80 play a major role. You need to make the product at a competi-
Other cardiovascular
Respiratory
tive price for it to be accepted by hospitals, Bnard says.
Liver and hepatobiliary
Using current methods, technetium 99m costs about $20 to
Bone $25 per dose in North America. That is much lower than the true
60 cost of production, in part because governments paid a large
Percent
share for nuclear reactor fuel, waste handling and the original
price of building the reactors themselves. We became addicted
40 to the fact that governments were subsidizing their operation,
Heart and Schaffer says. That model is unsustainable.
blood ow With the new technology and more private, domestic control
over the supply chain, producers and governments plan to price
20 *Scan uses come from the most recent
overview, a 2009 report by Natural technetium 99m to cover the expenses of maintaining the entire
Resources Canada. Several experts chain. Hospitals in British Columbia are bracing for a 40percent
contacted by Scientific American say
the data have not changed significantly price rise in the next few years, Schaffer says.
0 since that time. Pricing based on full-cost recovery could help the start-ups
get off the ground and stay there. But they also face conflicting
market forecasts. On one hand, aging populations in developed
countries should increase demand for the heart tests that techne-
reach the higher beam energy that is now needed, Schaffer says. tium 99m excels at, and the Chinese market is growing rapidly.
Instead the U.S. Department of Energys National Nuclear Se- On the other hand, in recent years demand for technetium
curity Administration is backing companies with different ma- 99m has actually declined in many countries, according to the
chines. One firm, NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes in Madison, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
Wis., hopes to use an electron linear accelerator (LINAC) to gen- (OECD). The reason? The shortages of 20092010 spurred hospi-
erate high-energy x-rays. These can knock a neutron out of mo- tals to reduce the amount of technetium in each dose. Image
lybdenum 100, transforming it into molybdenum 99, which will quality remained high because of smarter imaging software. As a
decay into technetium. LINACs are easier to license than nuclear result, the OECD projects that if new reactors and new methods
reactors, cost less than cyclotrons and can essentially be bought come online there could be a glut and lower prices by 2021.
off the shelf, says Carl Ross, a retired physicist who worked on But many in the field remain unconvinced that replacement
linear accelerators at Canadas National Research Council. (Ca- reactor capacity will arrive on schedule. If we just rely on reac-
nadian Isotope Innovations, spun out of research funded under tors, well end up in trouble again, says the BC Cancer Agencys
ITAP, is taking a similar approach but is not as far along.) Bnard. To keep the images coming, he believes, new technolo-
Yet for all their advantages, standard linear accelerators pro- gies must come into the picture.
duce lower concentrations of molybdenum 99 than reactors do.
SOURCE: NATURAL RESOURCES CANADA. PRESENTED TO HOUSE OF COMMONS
So NorthStar has developed a completely new system to sepa-

rate technetium 99m from the mixture of molybdenum isotopes
STANDING COMMITTEE ON NATURAL RESOURCES, JUNE 2, 2009
that comes out of its LINACs. Dubbed RadioGenix, it pumps Lessons from the Tc-99m Shortage: Implications of Substituting Tl-201 for Tc-99m
the mixture through a column of resin that absorbs only techne- Single-Photon Emission Computed Tomography. G ary R. Small et al. in
Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging, V ol. 6, No. 5, pages 683691; September 2013.
tium. The molybdenum isotopes can then be recycled for anoth-
Cardiac Stress Testing and the Radiotracer Supply Chain: Nuclear Freeze. V enkatesh
er production run, and the pure technetium can be stripped L. Murthy et al. in JAMA Cardiology, V
ol. 1, No. 5, pages 616617; August 1, 2016.
from the column with a saline wash. The company hopes the sys- Molybdenum-99 for Medical Imaging. N ational Academies of Sciences, Engineering,
tem will be approved for clinical use this year. and Medicine. National Academies Press, 2016.
Another solution, perhaps the most radical approach, comes
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
from SHINE Medical Technologies in Monona, Wis., which
wants to make molybdenum 99 by bombarding a liquid brew of Positron-Emission Tomography. M ichel M. Ter-Pogossian, Marcus E. Raichle and
Burton E. Sobel; October 1980.
LEU with neutrons. Those come from a LINAC that smashes
deuterium into tritium. Both are heavy isotopes of hydrogen, and s c i e n t i f i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a z i n e /s a
Graphic by Amanda Montaez February 2017, ScientificAmerican.com71

RECOMMENDED M O R E TO E X P L O R E
FOR AN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR SCHUTT, VISIT
By Clara Moskowitz scientificamerican.com/feb2017/recommended
Cannibalism:
APerfectly Natural History
The by Bill Schutt. Illustrationsby PatriciaJ. Wynne.
Perpetual Algonquin Books, 2017 (26.95)
Now: Plenty of animals c annibal-

ize one another as part of
A Story mating or child rearing or for
ofAmnesia, simple hunger. That includes
Memory, andLove biology professor Schutt,
by MichaelD. who ate cooked placenta
Lemonick. osso buco as research for this humorous history.
Doubleday, 2017 ($27.95) The storys appetizer is an exploration of cannibal-
ism in nature, such as the practices of fish parents
that swallow mouthfuls of their own eggs or
of spiders that eat their partners abdomen while
copulating. Humans are the books main course.
Sometimes we consume one another under great
duress, such as the famous Donner party, the
19th-century pioneers who ate their dead after
asnowstorm marooned them in the Sierra Nevada
ARTIST Lonnie Sue Johnson created this illustration
for the N
ew York Times b
efore her injury. mountain range. We even eat other humans for
supposed medicinal benefits: pharmacies sold
powdered ancient Egyptian mummies as recently
as 1908; today some mothers consume their own
Lemonick, an editor at S cientific American, delivers a finely observed profile of Lonni Sue placenta for unproved health benefits. The book
Johnson, an artist and musician who developed a rare viral infection of the brain that is enhanced by the charming drawings of Pat
destroyed much of her capacity to recall the past and form new memories. Amazingly, Wynne, whose art has also graced the pages of
the virus left many other parts of her cognition intact, including her speech, exuberant this magazine. Ryan F. Mandelbaum
personality, and ability to write, draw and play the viola. Because she was more accomp
lished before her illness than any other amnesiac previously studied, Johnson has offered Modern Death:
scientists an unparalleled opportunity to learn how memories are made, stored and How Medicine Changed the End ofLife
retrievedfor instance, after becoming sick, she failed to recognize many well-known works by Haider Warraich.
ILLUSTRATION FOR A N EW YORK TIMES C OLUMN, 2007. COPYRIGHT 2007 BY LONNI SUE JOHNSON. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
of art but recalled in perfect detail how to paint a watercolor and describe her technique. St.Martins Press, 2017 ($26.99)
Lemonick details Johnsons willing participation in this research, writing of how she
lightened up sessions in the functional MRI machine by singing to herself. He also introduces Medical advances o ver the
readers to Johnsons mother and sister and the community of neighbors and artists in her past century have given doc-
adopted town of Cooperstown, N.Y., who rallied to her aid, such as by playing music for her tors unprecedented tools to
in the hospital and ensuring that she could continue making art. Christine Gorman stave off death, pushing life
expectancies longer and lon-
ger. But the more we learn about dying and how
to prevent it, the blurrier the line looks between life
Testosterone Rex: the king nor the king makerthe potent, hormonal and death, physician Warraich writes: These days
Myths ofSex, Science, and Society essence of competitive, risk-taking masculinity we cant even be sure if someone is alive or dead
by Cordelia Fine. W.W. Norton, 2017 ($26.95) its often assumed to be. She canvasses the history without getting a battery of tests. Both research
of research showing that testosterones effects and human experience would benefit if we could
The hormone t estosterone are less powerful and predictable than commonly talk more openly about death, he argues. To aid
has taken on almost mythical thought and that male and female brains are not that goal, Warraich demystifies what is known
status in popular conscious- nearly as divergent as popularly believed. Further, and unknown about how cells and bodies die,
ness, often credited with out- she convincingly and entertainingly demonstrates while sensitively grappling with the changing cul-
landish feats, such as causing that, despite stereotypes, such characteristics as tural landscape surrounding the end of life, includ-
the 2008 financial collapse (supposedly because it risk-taking, competitiveness and nurturing are not ing patients who tweet and share the details of their
drove male-dominated Wall Street to extreme lev- essential to one sex over the other and cannot be decline on social media. His story is filled with com-
els of risky behavior). But psychology professor blamed for the lack of equality between males and passionate accounts of the different ways he has
Fine demonstrates that testosterone is neither females in contemporary society. witnessed people meet death in the modern age.

SKEPTIC
Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic magazine V IE W IN G T H E WO R L D
(www.skeptic.com). His book The Moral Arc (Henry Holt, 2015) W IT H A R ATI O N A L E Y E
is out in paperback. Follow him on Twitter @michaelshermer
Imagine
nothing: physical, mental, platonic, spiritual and God. If by
nothing is meant no physical objects or matter of any kind, for
example, there can still be energy from which matter may arise
NoUniverse by natural forces guided by the laws of nature. Physicists, for

example, talk about empty space as seething with virtual parti-
cles, from which particle-antiparticle pairs come into existence
Science contemplates as a consequence of the uncertainty principle of quantum phys-
ics. From this nothingness, universes may pop into existence.
theincomprehensible
Nothing excludes creation ex nihilo. If by nothing is meant
By Michael Shermer
that there is no physical, mental, platonic or nonphysical entity
Imagine nothing. Go ahead. What do you see? I picture dark of any kind, then there can be no God or gods, which means
empty space devoid of galaxies, stars and planets. But not only that there cannot be anything outside of nothing from which to
would there no matter, there would be no space or time either. create something. This negates the Christian theologian argu-
Not even darkness. And no sentient life to observe the nothing- ment that God created the universe e x nihilo, or out of noth-
ness. Just... nothing. Picture that. You cant. ing, based on the English translation of Genesis 1:1 that in
Here we face the ultimate question: Why is there something the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. This is
rather than nothing? I have compiled several responses from a misleading. Recent scholarship has suggested that the Hebrew
number of sources, including a 2013 book by John Leslie and word for creation in Genesis 1:1 is b ara ()a verb that
Robert Lawrence Kuhn entitled T he Mystery of Existence ( Wiley- more accurately translated means to separate or divide.
Blackwell) and Lawrence M. Krausss 2017 book T he Greatest Genesis 1:1 should read, In the beginning God s eparated the
Story Ever ToldSo Far ( Atria Books). heavens and the earth. Separated from w hat i s not indicated.
Nothing is unstable; something is stable. Asking why
there is something rather than nothing presumes noth-
ing is the natural state of things out of which some-
thing needs an explanation. Maybe something is the
natural state of things, and nothing would be the mys-
tery to be solved. In his sweeping narrative, T
he Greatest
Story Ever ToldSo Far, a sequel to his 2012 book A Uni-
verse from Nothing, Krauss notes that Einstein was one
of the first physicists to demonstrate that the classical
notion of causation begins to break down at the quantum
realm. Although many physicists objected to the idea of
something coming from nothing, he observes that this is
precisely what happens with the light you are using to
read this page. Electrons in hot atoms emit photonspho-
tons that didnt exist before they were emittedwhich are
emitted spontaneously and without specific cause. Why is
it that we have grown at least somewhat comfortable with
the idea that photons can be created from nothing with-
out cause, but not whole universes?
Nothing is nonsensical. It is impossible to conceptualize noth-
ingnot only no space, time, matter, energy, light, darkness or One answer has to do with our discomfort with the Coperni-
conscious beings to perceive the nothingness but not even noth- can principle, which holds that we are not special. We prefer
ingness. In this sense, the question is literally inconceivable. religious and anthropic explanations that the universe was cre-
ated and fine-tuned for us because they put humans right back
Nothing is something. It is a logical fallacy to talk about noth-
in the center of the cosmos anthropocentricallyit is all about
ing as if it were a something that ceases to exist. Here we
us. But 500 years of scientific discoveries have revealed that it
bump up against the problem of defining what we mean by
isnt about us. From this fact, we may gain purchase on a per-
nothing and the restrictions that language imposes on the
spective that engages both the religious and scientific impulse
problem. The very acting of talking about nothing makes it a
toward a sense of awe one gains from contemplating nothing.
something. Otherwise, what are we talking about?
Nothing would include Gods nonexistence. In Leslie and
Kuhns taxonomy of nothings, they list what categories of things Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
might be included in something that would be negated by or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
Illustration by Izhar Cohen February 2017, ScientificAmerican.com 73

ANTI GRAVITY
T H E O N G O IN G S E A R C H F O R Steve Mirsky h as been writing the Anti Gravity column since
FU N DA M E N TA L FA R C E S atypical tectonic plate was about 36 inches from its current location.
He also hosts the S cientific American podcast Science Talk.
of Medicine, mockingly told an audience of his fellow physicians,

People say there are bacteria in the air, but I cannot see them.
Of course, bacteria dont care if you believe in them. Infec-
tions caused Garfield to lose almost 100 pounds between
the shooting and his death, and his autopsy showed
that a good part of what was left of him was pus.
Adding insult to literal injury, Hamilton sent
Congress a bill for what well call his services
in the sum of $25,000equivalent to about
$600,000 today. Congress approved a $5,000
payment, which is still about $120,000 in
modern money for not washing your hands.
The Garfield section of Oshinskys book (as
much a history of New York City and of American
medicine as it is of Bellevue) made me think of the
subject considered in this space last month. That
write-up dealt with the revolution in the statistical
analysis of baseball. But the larger issue was, if I may
quote myself, information availability and decision
making in baseball as a microcosm of the larger prob-
lem that a wide array of human enterprises face: insisting on re-
None So Blind
maining stupid when becoming smarter is an option.
Which, speaking of Congress, brings us to the House of Repre-
sentatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. On De-
cember 1 the committees Twitter account announced that global
Disregarding new scientific information temperatures were in fact plummeting and that what they called
can be deadly climate alarmists had clammed up (perhaps in their rapidly
acidifying ocean habitat).
By Steve Mirsky The committees source for this welcome info was Breitbart
News. If you were lucky enough to spend the 2016 presidential
On July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau shot President James Garfield in election campaign in a medically induced coma, Breitbart regu-
the back. On September 19, 1881, Garfield died, with a bullet still larly produces the other stuff that comes out of a cows backside
lodged in fatty tissue behind his pancreas. At his trial, Guiteau besides the greenhouse gas methane.
denied killing the president. Garfield died from malpractice, the The committee chair, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas,
gunman said. His point was made incredibly moot when he was has harassed legitimate climate scientists and does not buy glob-
executed by hanging. But hed made a decent argument. al climate change. He easily could buy it, given that the fossil-
Historian David Oshinsky discusses Garfields medical care in fuel industry has given him more than $600,000. Thats not just
his fascinating new book Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine dirty moneyits full of soot.
and Mayhem at Americas Most Storied Hospital: Had the re- According to Oshinsky, Loomis finally accepted germ theory
sponding physicians ... done nothing more than make Garfield when Robert Koch showed that the tuberculosis bacterium was
comfortable, Oshinsky writes, he almost certainly would have indeed visible, if you used a microscope. Climate change is also
survived. Instead they searched clumsily for the bullet, inserting obvious if you use worldwide surveillance, including that record-
unwashed fingers and filthy probes into the open wound. ed by nasa satellites. But as I write these words, the new presiden-
Two days after the shooting, experts, including Frank Hamil- tial administration is planning to do away with nasas Earth ob-
ton, a surgeon in his late 60s from Bellevue, examined the presi- servation mission becausewhy?its become political. (Dont
dent, without pausing to wash their hands or clean their instru- think about that reasoning too much, or the smoke coming from
ments, Oshinsky notes. Hamiltons age was a factor, with the your ears will further contribute to the greenhouse effect.)
old guard less receptive to newfangled ideas about handwashing This move is like Loomis gouging his eyes out rather than
and instrument cleaning. seeing through the microscope. And we insist on staying stupid
As fellow Bellevue veteran Alfred Loomis put it at the time, ac- when becoming smarter is an option.
cording to Oshinsky, The [germ] theory, which so recently has oc-
cupied medical men, especially in Germany, is rapidly being dis-
proved, and consequently is rapidly being abandoned. Loomis, re- Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
spected enough to also serve as president of the New York Academy or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
74 Scientific American, February 2017 Illustration by Matt Collins

S cienti f ic A m erican O N L I N E
FIND ORIGINAL ARTICLES AND IMAGES IN
50, 100 & 150 YEARS AGO
THE Scientific American ARCHIVES AT IN N OVATI O N A N D D I S C OV E RY A S C H R O NI C L E D IN S c ientific A meric an
scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa Compiled by Daniel C. Schlenoff
F EMBO
RNUA
THRY
1967 Gene
Therapy
Some biologists have wondered if it
War Clouds Looming
If we are drawn into the world war,
we may well prove to be the deci-
era in the history of the organiza-
tion witnessed the completion of
the magnificent edifice located on
might someday be possible to alter sive factor; even though we land 23rd Street, corner of Fourth Ave-
the genetic material of a human be- not a single soldier upon European nue [now called Park Avenue
ing, for example, to supply a deleted soil. Excellent though it may be in South], and represented in the ac-
gene and thereby remedy some met- morale and in its all-round military companying engraving [see illustra-
abolic deficiency. How would one efficiency, our army would be lost 1967 tion]. The style ofarchitecture may
introduce the desired genetic infor- amid the embattled millions of Eu- be designated the revived Gothic,
mation? One possibility that has rope; and our battleships would be embracing the features of the dif-
now received some preliminary ex- superfluous in the North Sea. But ferent schools ofarchitecture of the
perimental support would be to ad- the moment our enormous finan- Middle Ages, which are most appro-
minister a harmless virus that bears cial resources and our vast potenti- priate for our buildings of modern
the required gene. The Shope papil- ality for the manufacture of guns, date. The building was designed by
loma virus, which causes tumors in powder and shells were lined up Mr. Peter Bonnett Wight of this city.
rabbits, also induces the synthesis behind the allied armies, the ulti- The academy sold the building in 1899,
ofa distinctive form of the enzyme mate overthrow of the Central 1917 and it was torn down.
arginase. The question arose Powers would be as certain as the
whether the same effect might be rise and setting of the sun. Words, Words, Words
obtained in human beings, but one Prof. Max Mller quotes the state-
may not infect people with animal
viruses for experimental purposes.
Stanfield Rogers of the Oak Ridge
1867 NAcademy
ational
ofDesign
ment of a clergyman that some
ofthe laborers in his parish had
not 300 words in their vocabulary.
National Laboratory got at the ques- Forty-two years ago the resident Awell-educated person seldom
tion indirectly: the blood of people artists of the city of New York unit- uses more than about 3,000 or
who had worked with, and therefore ed in forming a Drawing Associa- 1867 4,000 words in actual conversation.
been exposed to, the Shope virus tion, having for their object the Shakespeare, who displayed a
was found to be carrying virus in- study of art and social intercourse greater variety of expression than
formation. The Shope virus, Rogers among the members. In 1826 they probably any other writer in any
suggests, is a harmless passenger adopted the name of the National language, produced all his plays
virus in these people. It is possible Academy of Design. An important with about 15,000 words.
that there are other such viruses.
1917 Mosquito
Killers
A report to the French Academy
ofSciences tells of a unique experi-
ment in combating a mosquito
plague. Myriads of mosquitoes in-
fest the rice plantations of Mada-
gascar, and it occurred to Dr. Le
gendre to fight the marsh fever
[malaria] caused by the bite of the
mosquito by introducing into the
watercourses the Cyprin or red
fish [goldfish], which is a glutton
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, VOL. XVI, NO. 7; FEBRUARY 16, 1867
as a devourer of mosquitoes. Dr.

Legendre introduced 500 of these
fishes into the streams of one dis-
trict, and in five months they had
multiplied and destroyed all the
mosquitoes. The natives have found
the red fish very much to their lik-
ing, and they are proving an impor- othic Revival exhibition and classroom space built for the National Academy ofDesign, shown in 1867.
G
tant addition to their stock of food. Other images of grand architecture from 1867 are at www.ScientificAmerican.com/feb2017/architecture
February 2017, ScientificAmerican.com 75

GRAPHIC S c i e n t i f i c A m e r i c a n O N L INE
SCIENCE FOR AN APPRAISAL OF NOVELS ABOUT SCIENCE, GO TO

SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.COM/FEB2017/GRAPHIC-SCIENCE
Novel Math
Arc: Rags to Riches (a rise)
Happiness
Above average
The Winters Tale
Great literature is surprisingly arithmetic

Below average
A good book evokes a variety of emotions as you read. Turns out, though, that
almost all novels and plays provide one of only six emotional experiences from
Beginning of book End beginning to enda rags-to-riches exuberance, say, or a rise and fall of hope
(left). Researchers at the University of Vermont graphed the happiness and sad-
Arc: Man in a Hole (fall to rise) ness of words that occurred across the pages of more than 1,300 fiction works to
Children of the Frost reveal the emotional arcs and discovered relatively few variations.
A different study coordinated by Polands Institute of Nuclear Physics found
that sentence lengths in books frequently form a fractal patterna set of objects
that repeat on a small and large scale, the way small, triangular leaflets make up
larger, triangular leaves that make up a larger, triangular palm frond (below).
Why analyze the mathematics of literature? Vermont applied mathematician
Andrew J. Reagan notes that tons of data from the Human Genome Project
taught us so much more about genes than we knew before. Maybe data can
Arc: Cinderella (rise, fall, rise) teach us more about stories, too. Mark Fischetti
The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow
Crossover
At S cientific Americans request,
Emotional Arcs Vermont researchers analyzed
About 85percent of 1,327 fiction stories in the digitized Project two books from a sentence fractal
Gutenberg collection follow one of six emotional arcs study (bottom) and found that the
a pattern of highs and lows from beginning to end (dark books did fit two of the common
curves). The arcs are defined by the happiness or sadness emotional arcs (colored curves). Do
ofwords in the running text ( jagged plots). All books were books that have the same kind of arc
Arc: Tragedy (a fall) inEnglish and less than 100,000 words; examples are noted. tend to have similar fractal patterns,
Romeo and Juliet too? No one knows yet.
Finnegans Wake The Waves
CORRELATIONS IN NARRATIVE TEXTS, BY STANISAW DROZDZ ETAL., IN INFORMATION SCIENCES, VOL.331; FEBRUARY20, 2016 (fractals)
IN EPJ DATA SCIENCE, VOL.5, NO.1, ARTICLE NO.31; DECEMBER2016 (arcs); QUANTIFYING ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OFLONG-RANGE
SOURCES: THE EMOTIONAL ARCS OF STORIES ARE DOMINATED BY SIX BASIC SHAPES, BY ANDREWJ. REAGAN ETAL.,
Arc: Icarus (rise to fall)
Shadowings
500 Nested, repeating pattern 150 Each vertical

Sentence Length (words)
bar represents
a sentence
250 75
Arc: Oedipus (fall, rise, fall)

The Evil Guest
Beginning of Book End
Fractal Sentence Structure

The order and length of sentences in 113 famous literary works written in different languages
almost always form fractal patterns. Stream of consciousness books such as Finnegans Wake,
by James Joyce, had extreme repetitions. More traditional books such as T he Waves, by Virginia
Woolf, had more moderate repetitions. Both kinds were fractal.
76 Scientific American, February 2017 Graphics by Andrew J. Reagan (emotional arcs) and Jen Christiansen (fractal charts)

Scientific American February 2017

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Scientific American February 2017

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

SPEAKING IN WHISTLES WHATS WRONG WITH COSMIC INFLATION?

Photograph by Richard Barnes February 2017, ScientificAmerican.com 1

2016 Scientific American

Trumps First 100 Days

2 Scientific American, February 2017

2016 Scientific American

From Workouts animals, we use a lot of calories. In addition to overturning our

Illustration by Bomboland (running figure);

2016 Scientific American

The Drug Enforce- neither speculative nor conspiratorial to

February 2017, ScientificAmerican.com5

2016 Scientific American

EDITOR IN CHIEF AND SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT

or heroin, provides a clear example of the EDITORIAL

sponsible use and aims a slur at responsi- ASSOCIATE EDITORS

The current opiate overdose epidemic ART

of cogent scientific basis. D I G I TA L

Retired director of clinical research CONTRIBUTOR S

STEM EDUCATION PRESIDENT

ANCILL ARY PRODUC TS

PRINT PRODUC TION

students to pursue a career where their

6 Scientific American, February 2017

2016 Scientific American

Illustration by Scott Brundage February 2017, ScientificAmerican.com 7

2016 Scientific American

Michael E. Mann is professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University.

8 Scientific American, February 2017

2016 Scientific American

PRAGUE, OKLA., March 2015 COYLE, OKLA., Jan. 2016

10 Scientific American, February 2017

2016 Scientific American

Primate-based medical research meets

In Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas a nd a hand-

J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter

2016 Scientific American

high pressure can cause earthquakes. In published in October 2016 in G eophysical

12 Scientific American, February 2017

2016 Scientific American

participants heard only the audio, without the

2016 Scientific American 2016 Scientific American

To Treat Primates More

2016 Scientific American

Bots in Your positive hydrogen ions. As the ions move to

Choose An Affordable Tour +tax,fees

Canadian Rockies 9 days $1695

Illustration by Brown Bird Design ScientificAmerican.com 15

16,316 cubic 32,235

expressed in terms of area, the change

1980 and 2016 the amount of summer

Graphic by Amanda Montaez

20,000 Puzzles in a Box!

Never get bored by a cube assembly puzzle

1 (855) 962-7478 www.ZobristCube.com Ages 6 - Adult

Untitled-17 1 12/14/16 5:11 PM

2016 Scientific American

Fruits for turned to the growing method

the Frozen eliminates the need for

18 Scientific American, February 2017 Illustration by Thomas Fuchs

2016 Scientific American

I can indeed hardly

Join the nations largest association of

pod DNA found in 732 dust samples collected

mattresses and pillows in allergen-proof covers,

Primate-based medical research meets