Scientific American - August 2022

AUGUST 2022 SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.
COM
The New Race
to the Moon
Florence
Nightingale,
Data Explorer
COVERIE S
DIS ET H
INSIDE
FROM
STEALTH
MIGRATIONS
DEEP
SEAFLOOR
SURPRISES
GHOSTLY
BIOLUMINESCENCE
LIFESAVING
SEA
DRUGS
ean
What the oc out
s ab
is teaching u
h
life — on Eart
and beyond
Au g u s t 2 0 2 2
VO LU M E 3 2 7, N U M B E R 2
28
28 DISCOVERIES FROM THE DEEP

SPECIAL REPORT
30 The Mystery ways that affect every organism on the

of Milky Seas planet. By Katherine Harmon Courage
Scientists are beginning to understand 56 Healing Waters
an eerie phenomenon that has Compounds that sea creatures make
bewildered seafarers for centuries. to defend themselves could yield life-
By Michelle Nijhuis saving medicines. By Stephanie Stone
40 Every Inch of the Seafloor 65 Dynamic Seas
High-tech mapping is finding surprising How the ocean organizes itself.
underwater formations everywhere. By Mark Fischetti, Skye Moret,
Solvin Zankl/NPL/Minden Pictures (d eep sea shrimp, Sergestes species)
By Mark Fischetti Jen Christiansen and Kelly J. Benoit-Bird

48 Stealth Migrations 70 Turning the Tide
Trillions of tiny animals may be coor Discoveries keep revising our long-held ON THE C OVE R
The wunderpus octopus
dinating their daily movements in views of life. By Timothy Shank is transparent when it is
a juvenile and becomes
S PAC E E X P LO R AT I O N
reddish or rust-colored
72 The New Race to the Moon with white bands as it
Commercial spacecraft are vying to land on the lunar surface, but can they kick-start matures. The adult, only
a new space economy? By Rebecca Boyle nine inches long or so,
lives in the sand in relatively
H I S TO RY O F S C I E N C E shallow water and can
change its appearance
78 Florence Nightingale’s Data Revolution to ward off predators.
The celebrated nurse improved public health through her groundbreaking use Photograph by
of data storytelling. By RJ Andrews Yung-Sen Wu.
August 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 1

4 From the Editor
6 Letters
8 Science Agenda
Exploration inspires us, gives us hope for a better future—
and saves lives. By the Editors
10 Forum
The U.S. used the Marshall Islands as a nuclear testing
ground. It’s time to finish cleaning it up.
By Hart Rapaport and Ivana Nikolic´Hughes
12 Advances
00
8 Worldwide shifts in psilocybin’s legal status. A chemical
hit to mason bees’ attractiveness. Human eye cells
revived after death. Flying dinosaurs launch from water.
24 Meter
A poet recalls her father’s prop plane flight into the
eye of a storm to study hurricanes. By Sandy Solomon
26 The Science of Health

Diabetes screening tests are inaccurate for many
people of color. B
y Claudia Wallis
86 Mind Matters
One brain region helps us create a consistent and
lasting identity. By Robert Martone
00
12 88 Reviews
Signals of animal intelligence. Dissolving the barriers
of memory. A medicinal history of booze. Stories of the
Milky Way told through autobiography. By Amy Brady
90 Observatory
Influential carbon-reduction models rely on tech
that doesn’t exist. By Naomi Oreskes
91 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago

By Mark Fischetti
92 Graphic Science
Snapshots of the human genome over time reveal
how scientists pieced together our full genetic code.
86
00 By Clara Moskowitz and Martin Krzywinski
Scientific American (ISSN 0036-8733), Volume 327, Number 2, August 2022, published monthly by Scientific American, a division of Springer Nature America, Inc., 1 New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New York, N.Y. 10004-1562.
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2 Scientific American, August 2022

FROM
THE EDITOR Laura Helmuth is editor in chief of S cientific American.
Follow her on Twitter @laurahelmuth
Sea Surprises
The textbook view of the oceans stratifies them into layers
according to depth. As Fischetti describes on page 65, that’s just
one way to slice it. Scientists are increasingly realizing that
We humans may think of ourselves, or possibly beetles, as typical other qualities are just as important for understanding ocean
Earthlings, but to a first approximation, life on Earth exists in the zones: salinity, light, color, temperature, even life-forms. The
sea. And what spectacular life! Our special package on the oceans eye-opening graphics by Skye Moret and Scientific American
is teeming with images of eerie, delicate, elaborate, glowing and senior graphics editor Jen Christiansen offer a new inspiring
occasionally kind of frightening creatures that have rarely been view of the ocean.
seen by terrestrial species. The in-depth report, which starts on Mystery, discovery and surprise. As deep-ocean biologist
page 28, was guided by sustainability senior editor Mark Fischetti Timothy Shank writes on page 70, the ocean is full of diverse life,
along three main themes: mystery, discovery and surprise. unexpected chemistry and weird physics—and there’s still so
One of the most common abilities on Earth is a mystery we’re much to learn.
just now solving: bioluminescence. As author Michelle Nijhuis You may have heard that we know more about the surface
shares on page 30, recent surveys show that most organisms in of the moon than the structure of the seafloor, but as Fischetti
the ocean are able to glow. This ability evolved independently details on page 40, with new marine mapping and the release of
across phyla, using different chemical processes and for different private data, that soon won’t be true (if it ever was).
purposes, transmitting light-based messages even on the seafloor. What’s next for the moon? There’s a race among nations and
Ocean creatures live much more three-dimensional lives than various billionaires to send missions, and possibly people again,
people realized, surging vast distances from the deep ocean to- to the moon, which is a lot more difficult than sending a rocket
ward the surface in search of food. This “diel migration”—by an to space. Author Rebecca Boyle reports on page 72 that scientists
estimated 10 billion tons of animals—moves carbon and other are cautiously optimistic—there’s a lot of research to be done on
elements through the oceans and the world, as contributing the moon, and new partnerships with private companies could
editor Katherine Harmon Courage explains on page 48. The stun- actually lead to an exciting time of lunar exploration.
ning images for this story and throughout the package were gath- Clear, dramatic graphics have the power to change the world.
ered by photography editor Monica Bradley. Florence Nightingale launched the modern era of public health
Sea-dwelling creatures are exposed to a lot of pathogens, and and public health messaging with her depictions of death and
they have evolved an astonishing variety of chemical defenses disease during the 1853–1856 Crimean War. They helped to rev-
to protect themselves. These chemicals have the potential to treat olutionize medical practices around the world and saved count-
human diseases, and as science journalist Stephanie Stone less lives (page 78). Our graphics editors at Scientific American
reports on page 56, some have been turned into treatments for are always striving to present complex, mind-bending and some-
various types of cancer, chronic pain and C OVID, with many times invisible phenomena using engaging graphics, building on
more deep-sea drugs in development. Nightingale’s work.
BOARD OF ADVISERS
Robin E. Bell Jonathan Foley John Maeda
Research Professor, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Executive Director, Project Drawdown Global Head, Computational Design + Inclusion, Automattic, Inc.
Columbia University Jennifer A. Francis Satyajit Mayor
Emery N. Brown Senior Scientist and Acting Deputy Director, Senior Professor, National Center for Biological Sciences,
Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering Woodwell Climate Research Center Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
and of Computational Neuroscience, M.I.T., Carlos Gershenson John P. Moore
and Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia, Harvard Medical School Research Professor, National Autonomous University of Mexico Professor of Microbiology and Immunology,
Alison Gopnik Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Vinton G. Cerf
Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor Priyamvada Natarajan
Chief Internet Evangelist, Google
of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley Professor of Astronomy and Physics, Yale University
Emmanuelle Charpentier
Lene Vestergaard Hau Donna J. Nelson
Scientific Director, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology,
Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics, Professor of Chemistry, University of Oklahoma
and Founding and Acting Director, Max Planck Unit for the
Harvard University Lisa Randall
Science of Pathogens
Hopi E. Hoekstra Professor of Physics, Harvard University
Rita Colwell Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Harvard University Martin Rees
Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland College Park Astronomer Royal and Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics,
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge
Co-founder, Urban Ocean Lab, and
Kate Crawford Co-founder, The All We Can Save Project Daniela Rus
Director of Research and Co-founder, AI Now Institute, Christof Koch Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering
and Distinguished Research Professor, New York University, Chief Scientist, MindScope Program, Allen Institute for Brain Science and Computer Science and Director, CSAIL, M.I.T.
and Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research New York City Meg Urry
Meg Lowman
Nita A. Farahany Director and Founder, TREE Foundation, Rachel Carson Fellow, Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Yale University
Professor of Law and Philosophy, Director, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, and Research Professor, Amie Wilkinson
Duke Initiative for Science & Society, Duke University University of Science Malaysia Professor of Mathematics, University of Chicago
4 Scientific American, August 2022 Illustration by Nick Higgins

LETTERS
editors@sciam.com
“I do not read S
cientific American f or
the book reviews, but I recognize one that
is beautifully written.”
robert hunt southern methodist university
reversal. If it took place instantaneously, 2014, one of the main topics was about a
birds would be none the wiser because their near miss that actually occurred in July
compass is not sensitive to the polarity of 2012: a large coronal mass ejection was
the magnetic field. But the reversal typical- detected passing Earth by the STEREO-A
ly takes several thousand years, during satellite. It was suggested that it could
which time the local magnetic field intensi- have had a much larger impact than the
ty can be very much smaller than it is to- Carrington Event. The 2012 event missed
day. Perhaps the birds would simply rely us by one week.
on other directional cues until the magnet- Steve Senger P
rince George,
ic field settled down again. British Columbia
April 2022 In response to Alexander: Tracking de-
vices usually employ frequencies well be- DON’T SLEEP ON THIS OFFER
yond 100 megahertz, which are very un- In “Nap Like a Genius,” Bret Stetka writes
FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATORS likely to affect the birds’ magnetic compass. about recent research on Thomas Edison’s
“The Quantum Nature of Bird Migration,” Frequencies within the range that can af- practice of jolting himself from the edge of
by Peter J. Hore and Henrik Mouritsen, fect their compass could indeed falsify re- sleep to boost creativity. I tried Edison’s
describes the biophysical underpinnings sults. Usually the transmitters are active sleep-interruption technique by holding a
of how the animals navigate. This article only intermittently and for very short pe- copy of Scientific American as I started a
is fascinating. I believe that Earth’s mag- riods, however. Therefore, even if they used nap, waiting to reach the N1 stage. When
netic north pole shifts position every so the critical frequencies, there might be no the magazine fell to the floor, I woke with a
often. How would this affect the ability of significant effect on the birds’ orientation. revelation: “It’s time to renew your subscrip-
birds to migrate successfully? tion.” The true genius appears to lie within
Steven Sverdlik D allas, Tex. CRITICAL ACCLAIM your subliminal marketing department.
I do not read S cientific American f or the Jay Lynch P
ittsburgh, Pa.
Radio-frequency (RF) transmitters are in- reviews, but I recognize one that is beau-
creasingly attached to birds to track their tifully written. Omar El Akkad’s review of TRAUMA AND THERAPY
movements. The sizes of transmitters and Emily St. John Mandel’s novel S ea of Tran- In “The Long Shadow of Trauma” [Janu-
the methods of attaching them have had quility u nder the heading “Half-Lived ary 2022], Diana Kwon describes the his-
unfortunate physical impacts on birds, Years” [Recommended] is a piece that can tory of the stigmatized diagnosis of bor-
which are gradually being addressed stand alone as an essay on our times and derline personality disorder (BPD) and the
through design improvements. But in light the literature emerging from them. He question of whether it should be recast as
of the eye-opening findings presented in should be commended for it. a trauma-related condition. As two psy-
Hore and Mouritsen’s article, it seems we Robert Hunt chologists who have treated many trauma-
also need to be concerned about RF fields Director of Global Theological Education, tized and BPD patients and supervised
generated by tracking transmitters and Perkins School of Theology, hundreds of psychotherapists in training,
how those fields might impact birds’ su- Southern Methodist University we appreciate the clarity and depth of
premely delicate natural compass. Kwon’s reporting. Not every aspect of this
Mike Alexander P alo Alto, Calif. CLOSE SOLAR ENCOUNTERS complex topic could possibly be addressed
“The Threat of Solar Superflares,” by Jona- in one article, but there are two points we
THE AUTHORS REPLY: To answer Sverd- than O’Callaghan [December 2021], discuss- feel are important to emphasize.
lik: Earth’s magnetic field does indeed shift, es instances within the past 10,000 years in First, one of American clinical psychol-
and pole reversals occur from time to time which immense flares from the sun have ogist Marsha Linehan’s most brilliant in-
(the last one was almost 800,000 years ago). caused geomagnetic storms on Earth, in- sights about the treatment of BPD is that
We know that birds are capable of calibrat- cluding the massive 1859 Carrington Event psychotherapists themselves must receive
ing their magnetic compass with informa- and a far stronger storm around a.d. 775. support and supervision to be effective
tion from the sun. If they do this every day, It should be noted that at the National treatment providers. BPD patients are dif-
it does not matter where the magnetic poles Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra- ficult. Psychotherapists are human. Very of-
are. No one knows what happens during a tion’s Space Weather Workshop in April ten, they, too, have been traumatized and

ESTABLISHED 1845
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Laura Helmuth
Maria-Christina Keller Michael Mrak
invalidated, and they may retaliate against COPY DIRECTOR CREATIVE DIRECTOR
EDITORIAL
patients who “invalidate” them by failing CHIEF FEATURES EDITOR Seth Fletcher CHIEF NEWS EDITOR Dean Visser CHIEF OPINION EDITOR Megha Satyanarayana
to improve in treatment. The hostility to- FEATURES
SENIOR EDITOR, SUSTAINABILITY Mark Fischetti SENIOR EDITOR, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY Madhusree Mukerjee
ward these patients mentioned in the arti- SENIOR EDITOR, MEDICINE / SCIENCE POLICY Josh Fischman SENIOR EDITOR, TECHNOLOGY / MIND Jen Schwartz
cle is not only the consequence of a differ- SENIOR EDITOR, SPACE / PHYSICS Clara Moskowitz SENIOR EDITOR, EVOLUTION / ECOLOGY Kate Wong
ence in the therapist’s theoretical ap- SENIOR EDITOR, MIND / BRAIN Gary Stix
NEWS
ASSOCIATE EDITOR, TECHNOLOGY Sophie Bushwick
proach; it is a consequence of the therapist’s SENIOR EDITOR, SPACE / PHYSICS Lee Billings ASSOCIATE EDITOR, SUSTAINABILITY Andrea Thompson
SENIOR EDITOR, HEALTH AND MEDICINE Tanya Lewis ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR Sarah Lewin Frasier
countertransference left untreated. MULTIMEDIA
CHIEF MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Jeffery DelViscio SENIOR EDITOR, AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT Sunya Bhutta
Second, a psychiatric diagnosis is based SENIOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Tulika Bose SENIOR EDITOR, COLLECTIONS Andrea Gawrylewski
on a model of disease entities causing ill- ART
ness. In the case of viruses, this model is SENIOR GRAPHICS EDITOR Jen Christiansen PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR Monica Bradley ART DIRECTOR, ONLINE Ryan Reid
ASSOCIATE GRAPHICS EDITOR Amanda Montañez ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITOR Liz Tormes
clearly useful. In the case of psychological
COPY AND PRODUC TION
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MANAGING PRODUCTION EDITOR Richard Hunt Silvia De Santis
ful in supporting less blame and shame, and PREPRESS AND QUALITY MANAGER
CONTRIBUTOR S
more compassion, from society in general. EDITORS EMERITI Mariette DiChristina, John Rennie
For the purpose of effective treatment, EDITORIAL Amy Brady, Katherine Harmon Courage, Lydia Denworth, Ferris Jabr,
Anna Kuchment, Michael D. Lemonick, Robin Lloyd,
however, diagnoses are poor guides. Mod- Steve Mirsky, Melinda Wenner Moyer, George Musser, Ricki L. Rusting,
els based on continua, such as the intensity Dava Sobel, Claudia Wallis, Daisy Yuhas
ART Edward Bell, Violet Isabelle Francis, Lawrence R. Gendron, Nick Higgins, Kim Hubbard, Katie Peek, Beatrix Mahd Soltani
of the individual’s experienced trauma and EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT SUPERVISOR Maya Harty SENIOR EDITORIAL COORDINATOR Brianne Kane
invalidation, genetic and temperamental
vulnerability, etcetera, may be more accu- SCIENTIFIC A MERIC AN CUS TOM MEDIA
rate and useful. As Peggy Wang, a person Cliff Ransom
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, CONTENT SERVICES CREATIVE DIRECTOR Wojtek Urbanek
Kris Fatsy
MULTIMEDIA EDITOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR Ben Gershman
who’d been diagnosed with both BPD and ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Dharmesh Patel ACCOUNT MANAGER Samantha Lubey
complex post-traumatic stress disorder, was
quoted as noting in Kwon’s article, “The la-
beling is not the issue.” PRESIDENT
Kimberly Lau
Lake McClenney and EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT Michael Florek VICE PRESIDENT, COMMERCIAL Andrew Douglas
Rob Neiss C alifornia PUBLISHER AND VICE PRESIDENT Jeremy A. Abbate VICE PRESIDENT, CONTENT SERVICES Stephen Pincock
CLIENT MARKE TING SOLUTIONS

MARKETING DIRECTOR, INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERSHIPS AND CUSTOMER DEVELOPMENT Jessica Cole
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DIRECTOR, INTEGRATED MEDIA Matt Bondlow
The keep-cool reflective paint described BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Stan Schmidt
in “Cool Color,” by Sophie Bushwick [Ad- HEAD, PUBLISHING STRATEGY Suzanne Fromm
vances; August 2021], looks like a useful CONSUMER MARKETING & PRODUC T
DEVELOPMENT TEAM LEAD Raja Abdulhaq
product for those of us living in a hot, sun- SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER Ian Kelly
SENIOR WEB PRODUCER Jessica Ramirez
ny climate. Bushwick quotes materials sci- SENIOR COMMERCIAL OPERATIONS COORDINATOR Christine Kaelin
entist Yuan Yang noting that manufactur- MARKETING COORDINATOR Justin Camera
ers of such material will need to figure out ANCILL ARY PRODUC TS
ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Diane McGarvey
“how to make sure that the paint stays CUSTOM PUBLISHING EDITOR Lisa Pallatroni
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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
Next Frontiers
Exploration is fundamental to science
and a fundamental human trait
By the Editors
Schoolbooks typically present explorers as intrepid individuals

who, at the behest of colonizing leaders, sail wooden ships to new
lands, ride on horseback across uncharted mountains or slash
their way through the jungle. But today most explorers who are
making fundamental discoveries are scientists. And whether the
frontiers are minuscule, like the human genome, or massive, like
our deepest oceans, we still have much left to learn about planet
Earth. The quests that modern scientists pursue rival anything in
a history book or an adventure novel.
Exploration is science in its most basic form—asking questions
of the natural world and, we hope, using the answers for the bet-
terment of everything on Earth. stressed by the enormous pressures there. But eventually a more
Some unknown territories are emergent: human conscious- stress-resistant deep-submergence vehicle, the Limiting Factor,
ness or why trillions of bacteria floating on the ocean suddenly allowed investor and undersea explorer Victor Vescovo to reach
glow in unison across more than 100 square miles. Frontiers can trench bottoms numerous times.
be cultural, too, and we must explore with respect. Now there are roughly 4,000 autonomous Argo floats across
Exploration has great value. It inspires us, widens our knowl- the world’s oceans that dive down to 2,000 feet and resurface every
edge and gives us hope for a better future. And the practical pay- 10 days, gathering data about basic physical traits such as water
offs can be plenty. Some are even lifesaving. Scientists who spent temperature, salinity and pressure. Programmable vessels great-
decades exploring what was in the atmosphere found that over ly expand our reach and reduce the risk to the people involved in
time the concentration of carbon dioxide was rising. Without that exploration, allowing for the kind of discovery that the human
discovery, we humans would now be living like the proverbial frog body might limit. The Argo consortium will also deploy dozens of
in a pot of gradually heating water, unsure why the environment sensors every year that will gather biological and chemical data,
around us is changing, and slowly boiling to death. leading to new observations about marine life.
In the early 2000s Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman of the Other institutions plan to deploy swarms of autonomous under-
University of Pennsylvania were studying fundamental molecules water vehicles that will search the seas in unison, sending data to
called messenger RNA (mRNA) in humans and realized that a few guide ships that forward the information to researchers on shore,
adjustments could prevent the molecules from causing inflamma- who then can redirect the swarms. Ocean research groups have
tion. Then, in 2017, Weissman and Norbert Pardi, also at Penn, dis- made it a priority to openly share their discoveries and data with
covered how to modify mRNA to neutralize an invading virus. the public, to be more inclusive of people who live along waters
When COVID struck, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna rapidly cre- being explored, and to inspire the next generation of young scien-
ated two powerful vaccines for the virus—using mRNA. Weissman tists. Anyone can go along for the ride—we can all be explorers.
says he and his co-explorers met several unexpected hurdles, but Many commercial ventures are involved in exploration. May-
each one made them only more determined to convert their dis- be one day you’ll put on your virtual-reality goggles, connect with
coveries into something helpful. an online adventure company and rent a video-equipped remote
The human drive to overcome challenges is an essential aspect vehicle that explores the Great Barrier Reef from above for sever-
of the human drive to explore. As Robert Ballard, who discovered al hours at your direction. Or the desert at the height of bloom.
the wreck of the RMS T itanic in 1985 and was part of the team that Or a rain-forest canopy.
found the first deep-sea hydrothermal vents, told us recently: “The Captain James T. Kirk began each episode of the original Star
ocean is a formidable place. I was almost killed several times. But Trek television series by saying, “Space, the final frontier.” Not nec-
the human spirit is indestructible.” Ballard turned 80 in June and essarily. We still have plenty to discover right here on Earth, and
in May spent two weeks on an expedition in the Pacific Ocean. we eagerly await surprises from the newest worlds we find.
That drive to take on challenges often spurs innovation. Tech-
nological advances have always helped the intrepid, and the inven-
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E
tions keep coming. Early human submersibles that reached the Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
bottom of the deepest ocean trenches made the trip just once, or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
8 Scientific American, August 2022 Illustration by Martin Gee

FORUM Hart Rapaport is a researcher at Columbia
University’s K=1 Project, Center for Nuclear
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 Studies. Ivana Nikolić Hughes is a senior
lecturer in chemistry at Columbia Universi-
ty. She is president of the Nuclear Age
Peace Foundation.
crete shell covering more than 100,000 cubic yards of nuclear

waste on an island of Enewetak Atoll, is at risk because of rising
sea levels. Leakage from the dome will likely increase, and high-
er tides threaten to break the structure open.
To better understand the effect of nuclear testing on the
islands, scientists at the Department of Energy have conducted a
wide range of studies. We believe their work has missed critical
pieces. Rather than taking simple, direct measurements of gam-
ma radiation, the doe has consistently relied on simulations. Still,
the military has notably cleaned up some parts of Enewetak Atoll.
For several years our group has gone to the Marshall Islands
to research the fallout of this nuclear testing. We have published
our findings to ensure that independent information exists to
safeguard the well-being of affected communities.
Considerable contamination remains. On islands such as Biki-
ni, the average background gamma radiation is double the max-
imum value stipulated by an agreement between the govern-
ments of the Marshall Islands and the U.S., even without taking
into account other exposure pathways. Our findings, based on
gathered data, run contrary to the doe’s. One conclusion is clear:
absent a renewed effort to clean radiation from Bikini, families
Clean Up the forced from their homes may not be able to safely return until
the radiation naturally diminishes over decades and centuries.
Beyond plutonium and uranium, strontium 90 is a radioiso-
Marshall Islands tope of concern in the Marshall Islands. It can cause leukemia
and bone and bone marrow cancer and has long been a source
of health concerns at nuclear disasters such as Chernobyl and
Restoring the islands is a matter Fukushima. Despite this, the U.S. government’s published data
of environmental and social justice don’t speak to the presence of this dangerous nuclear isotope.
By Hart Rapaport and Ivana Nikolić Hughes We have tested sediment from two bomb craters in the north-
ern Marshall Islands and found consistently high values of stron-
Russia’s placement o f its nuclear arsenal on high alert during tium 90. Although detecting this radioisotope in sediment does
the war in Ukraine has unearthed fears of nuclear holocaust. As not neatly translate into contamination in soil or food, the find-
governments across the world consider their own roles in less- ing suggests the possibility of danger to ecosystems and people.
ening the risk of nuclear war, the U.S. cannot excuse itself. We More than that, cleaning up strontium 90 and other contam-
should talk about stemming a future nuclear impact, but equal- inants in the Marshall Islands is possible. Congress should appro-
ly important is reckoning with our past. priate funds, and a research agency, such as the National Science
Between 1946 and 1958 the U.S. nuclear testing program Foundation, should initiate a call for proposals to fund indepen-
drenched the Marshall Islands with firepower equaling the ener- dent research with three aims. We must first further understand
gy yield of 7,000 Hiroshima bombs. Cancer rates have doubled the current radiological conditions across the Marshall Islands;
in some places, displaced people have waited decades to return second, explore new technologies and methods already in use for
to their homes, and radiation still plagues the land and waters future cleanup activity; and, third, train Marshallese scientists,
of this Pacific island nation. The U.S. must prioritize the restora- such as those working with the nation’s National Nuclear Com-
tion of these islands and the resettlement of their people as a mission, to rebuild trust on this issue.
matter of human rights and environmental justice. What the U.S. Through the collective work of dozens of researchers rather
has done so far is simply not enough. than a small group of scientists at the doe, remediation efforts
The tests most gravely affected four atolls in the north of the across the world will benefit. The Marshallese people and oth-
nation: Bikini (seen here in 1946), Enewetak, Rongelap and Utirik. er affected communities have told us for decades just how dan-
In the first two cases, members of the U.S. military resettled com- gerous nuclear weapons are. Let’s heed their warnings before
munities prior to testing, whereas people on Rongelap and Utirik it is too late.
Bettmann/Getty Images
left after fallout from tests reached them. Today only Enewetak
and Utirik have substantial permanent populations; refugees from
Bikini and Rongelap are still unable to return home safely. Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
In addition, the structural integrity of the Runit Dome, a con- or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com

ADVANCES
The molecule psilocybin is found in

hallucinogenic “magic mushrooms.”

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
• Beetle iridescence scares

away predators
• The first plants sprout in soil brought
back from the moon
• Loud shrimp lure oysters to new reefs
• AI aids diagnosis of devastating
olive tree disease
P H A R M AC O LO G Y
Mushrooms’
Legal Trip
As psilocybin research ramps
up, the drug’s status under
the law is shifting
Magic mushrooms a re undergoing a
transformation from illicit recreational
drug to promising mental health treat-
ment. Numerous studies have reported
positive findings using psilocybin—the
mushrooms’ main psychoactive com-
pound—for treating depression as well
as smoking and alcohol addiction, and for
reducing anxiety in the terminally ill.
Ongoing and planned studies are testing
the drug for conditions that include opioid
dependence, PTSD and anorexia nervosa.
This scientific interest, plus growing social
acceptance, is contributing to legal changes
in cities across the U.S. In 2020 Oregon
passed statewide legislation decriminalizing
magic mushrooms, and the state is building
a framework for regulating legal therapeutic
use—becoming the first jurisdiction in the
world to do so. For now psilocybin remains
illegal and strictly controlled at the national
level in most countries, slowing research. But
an international push to get the drug reclas-
sified aims to lower barriers everywhere.
After a flurry of research in the 1950s
and 1960s, psilocybin and all other psyche-
delics were abruptly banned, partly in
response to their embrace by the counter-
culture. Following the 1971 United Nations
Convention on Psychotropic Substances,
psilocybin was classed in the U.S. as a
Schedule I substance—defined as having
Yarygin/Getty Images
“no currently accepted medical use and

a high potential for abuse.” Psilocybin pro-
duction was limited, and a host of adminis-
trative and financial burdens effectively
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
Psilocybin Status in the U.S.
ended study for decades. “It’s the worst
censorship of research in history,” says Illegal throughout Illegal with potential Decriminalized in Decriminalized
David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist court-based exceptions certain locations throughout
at Imperial College London. Seattle Washentaw County
Despite these legal hurdles, the current Port Townsend Ann Arbor
research resurgence has seen Nutt and Detroit
Wash. N.H.
others exploring how psilocybin changes
the brain’s connectivity patterns: reducing Mass.
Ore.
connections within the usual networks Mich. Somerville
while increasing links between less con- Cambridge
nected regions. Just this year a study Washington, D.C.
Northampton
showed that treatment involving psilocy- Colo. Easthampton
Calif.
bin led to sustained network alterations,
which seemed to correlate with reduced N.M.
depression symptoms. Two organizations Oakland
are beginning final rounds of trials for psi- Santa Cruz
locybin’s use for depression, which could Arcata Denver
lead to the substance’s first approval by
the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
As news of psilocybin’s promise spreads,
several U.S. cities have passed measures family history of schizophrenia or bipolar the psilocybin-containing lumps of under-
decriminalizing magic mushrooms. This is disorder. “All our decisions revolve around ground material that eventually sprout
not the same as legalization; the molecule consumer safety,” says Oregon State Uni- them, better known as truffles. This loop-
and the mushrooms themselves remain ille- versity mycologist Jessie Uehling, who hole has paved the way for numerous thera-
gal, but prosecuting people for their posses- chairs the board’s product subcommittee. peutic retreats, but little organized research.
sion or use is deprioritized or discouraged. “We want to know that we’re avoiding all Portugal has famously decriminalized all
In 2019 Denver voters passed a ballot the potential risks and creating the safest drugs. Some countries ban the mushrooms
measure that prohibits using city money environment for people.” The centers will but not their spores, because the latter do
to prosecute people for magic mushroom– focus on fungi and natural preparations not contain psilocybin. Others simply do not
related offenses. City councils soon took rather than the synthetic psilocybin used in enforce their laws on magic mushrooms.
similar steps in Oakland and Santa Cruz clinical trials so far, Gukasyan notes. The 1971 U.N. treaty has a clause allow-
in California and in Ann Arbor, Mich. In Regardless of local decriminalization, U.S. ing countries to exempt traditional Indige-
November 2020 voters in Washington, researchers must still abide by federal nous uses of psychedelic plants. Indigenous
D.C., passed a ballot measure making natu- Schedule I regulations. The International people in some South American countries
ral psychedelics one of law enforcement’s Therapeutic Psilocybin Rescheduling Initia- have used psychedelics for centuries and
lowest priorities. Cities and counties in tive, a coalition of research and advocacy have fought governments for their right to
Michigan, Massachusetts, California and organizations, aims to get the World Health engage in related ceremonies. There is
Washington State have followed suit. Organization to conduct a review of the rel- even a religious organization in New Mex-
As part of Oregon’s legislation, the evant evidence for reclassifying the drug. ico, the Oratory of Mystical Sacraments,
state health authority created a scientific “It’s inconceivable the WHO could now say that claims members can legally use magic
advisory board to recommend regulations psilocybin doesn’t have medical value. It can mushrooms in certain circumstances.
for psilocybin service centers, such as des- work where other drugs have not,” Nutt says. “This idea that psilocybin is helpful for
ignating mushroom species and prepara- Various laws already facilitate research mental health conditions is not a new one.
tions to use and production standards to and treatment in some countries. Canada There are thousands of years of history of
follow. These centers, which can apply for classifies magic mushrooms as Schedule III, efficacious treatment; it’s just in a different
licenses starting next January, will not so penalties are lower, and certain research knowledge format,” Uehling says. “We’re
claim to treat depression but will aim to and trials are granted exceptions. A Cana- trying hard here in Oregon to honor that
improve general well-being. dian charity called TheraPsil has a fast-track knowledge system.”
“My worry is that people won’t necessarily process for end-of-life psilocybin therapy. Public perceptions of psilocybin are
get that distinction . . . and turn up with hor- Some countries such as Jamaica never changing, and as increasing interest gener-
rible, treatment-resistant depression, expect- made magic mushrooms illegal, although ates more evidence, this trend looks set to
ing an expert in treating that condition,” says the psilocybin molecule often is. Research accelerate. “It’s a thrilling time to be a mycol-
Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist Natalie is limited in most of these places, but many ogist,” Uehling says. Many are waiting to see
Gukasyan, who led a recent psilocybin trial. have thriving “psychedelic retreat” indus- what happens in Oregon, she adds: “Other
Oregon’s advisory board is determin- tries that are not medically regulated. The states will come up with variations on—
ing how best to train facilitators and Netherlands has specifically banned the hopefully—what we get right, and also on
screen clients for risk factors, such as a mushrooms—but its laws don’t mention what needs to be changed.” —Simon Makin
14 Scientific American, August 2022 Graphic by Amanda Montañez

B I O LO G Y
Dazzling
Defenses
Beetles’ shifting colors offer
both camouflage and warning
Flashy iridescent shells might not seem with artificial glossy and matte green shells Kjernsmo speculates that this might help
like the best evolutionary strategy for bugs and a color-shifting shell with matte varnish. explain why so many insects are irides
trying to avoid hungry birds. But in recent They baited the shells with mealworms, then cent—it “allows them to be protected in
years biologists have shown that irides- offered this buffet to day-old domestic chicks. many different contexts.”
cence—lustrous shifts in color, depending The chicks scarfed down mealworms This hypothesis might also explain why
on the angle of view—can actually camou- under matte green shells, but they hesi- these beetles evolved to use iridescence
flage green jewel beetles among sun-dap- tated when encountering glossy shells and rather than a more typical warning color
pled leaves. And now a study published in both color-changing types. A previous such as bright red or orange, often used
Animal Behavior suggests iridescence has study showed that birds shy away from by insects that have poison as a backup
another protective quality: birds seem to be glossiness, but the specific avoidance of defense. For this jewel beetle species,
innately wary of these color changes. shifting colors was not previously docu- which does not have chemical defenses,
The study authors say this is the first time mented, the researchers say. the extra attention drawn by traditional
iridescence, as opposed to simple glossiness Johanna Mappes, a University of Hel- warning colors might not be worth it; bet-
or bright colors, has been shown to deter sinki biologist who worked on the earlier ter to blend in when possible.
predators. “It’s actually the changeability, the study but was not involved with the new More research is needed to discern
very hallmark of iridescence, that is impor- one, praises the way Kjernsmo’s team con- why iridescence frightens birds. The bee-
tant for this protective function,” says Karin trolled for each type of shell finish, “espe- tles might be mimicking other iridescent
Kjernsmo, a researcher at the University of cially creating matte iridescence signals— insects that do have chemical defenses,
yod67/Alamy Stock Photo
Bristol in England and the study’s lead author. it’s really genius.” the researchers suggest, or the changes
To test how birds reacted to iridescent The new findings suggest iridescence is might simply confuse predators—if a bee-
beetles’ varying colors, Kjernsmo and her an evolutionary two-for-one deal: it helps tle’s color shifts, a predator might not be
colleagues set out glossy, color-shifting S ter- the jewel beetles hide, but it also scares off able to classify it as safe or dangerous.
nocera aequisignata jewel beetle shells, along predators that manage to spot them. — Kate Golembiewski
A N I M A L B E H AV I O R
been studied as extensively but were two distinct components of male horned
Buzzkill thought less likely to be harmful.

Samuel Boff, lead author of the new
mason bees’ courtship ritual. A male typi-
cally vibrates his thorax alluringly and
study in the Journal of Applied Ecology, and also relies on his scent to attract females.
Common farm fungicide
his colleagues wanted to know whether Exposure to the fungicide lowered the
makes male mason bees fenbuconazole—typically applied to wheat, vibrational frequency (possibly by influenc-
unappealing to females apples and grapes—might subtly affect ing muscle contractions) and additionally
bees. “We did [the study] because this fun- altered the males’ chemical profiles,
Like the opposite o f a good perfume, a gicide is used often,” says Boff, an ecologist changing their scent. Females seemed
chemical humans use to protect crops may at the University of Würzburg in Germany. put off by these changes; they preferred
have the unexpected side effect of making “We did not expect to find an effect.” unexposed males. The study authors spec-
certain bees less attractive to mates, poten- But there was, in fact, a surprising ulate that such female mating avoidance
tially threatening populations of these cru- effect: fenbuconazole exposure altered could reduce populations of horned mason
cial pollinators. bees and other species with similar mat-
The common pesticide fenbuconazole ing systems.
is classified as relatively safe for bees The study “is important because it’s
because it specifically targets fungi (which giving us a mechanism for decline,” says
are taxonomically very different from bees) Susan Willis Chan, a bee researcher at
and because exposure to it does not typi- the University of Guelph in Ontario, who
Cerez/EyeEm/Getty Images
cally kill bees directly. Previous research was not involved with the study. “It’s a
had found that insecticides deemed “low great paper.” Boff hopes his team’s findings
risk” for bees can still impact their devel- will prompt more scrutiny of fungicide use
opment, feeding behavior and learning; and possibly lead to alternative pest-con-
fungicides such as fenbuconazole had not trol methods. —Darren Incorvaia

ADVANCES
Arabidopsis grows from simulated

(left) and actual lunar soil (right).
S PAC E S C I E N C E
longer missions will require a sustainable fight off pathogens, minimize environmen-
One Small source of food. “All of human exploration
has been driven by the ability to keep crews
tal stress and absorb crucial nutrients such
as nitrogen. Lunar regolith lacks a natural
Sprout fed,” says Gil Cauthorn, an Osaka, Japan–
based researcher with the Astrobotany
microbiome, and so the plants struggled
to take in nutrients and manage stress.
Scientists grow first-ever International Research Initiative. Plus, regolith can become extremely
seedlings in Apollo moon dirt Ferl’s recent work, published in Com- dense, like cement, when water is added.
munications Biology, o ffers an important “It’s difficult to get that stuff to not become
Twelve grams o f the moon arrived at first step in that journey, ultimately proving a rock,” says Cauthorn, who was not
Robert Ferl’s laboratory in an undeco- that plants can grow in moon soil. The involved in the new study.
rated UPS box. seedlings failed to truly thrive, however, Adding extra nutrients or composting
Ferl, a horticulturist at the University indicating that any future lunar farmers crops to foster microbe growth could
of Florida, had waited more than a decade will need to fertilize their regolith. improve plants’ prospects. And North,
for that moment. The small box of dirt, To test the moon soil, Ferl and his team who has studied plant growth in simulated
postmarked from nasa, held some of the divvied up the samples into 12 pots of 900 Martian conditions, suspects the moon still
last remaining unopened samples of moon milligrams apiece and planted seeds from offers more fertile ground than the Red
dust, called regolith, collected by A pollo Arabidopsis thaliana, a hardy relative of Planet’s rusty soil. That’s because Martian
astronauts. Despite months of practice, mustard and cabbage. All the seeds suc- regolith is full of perchlorate, an oxidative
Ferl recalls, he lifted the sample with trem- cessfully germinated, but the seedlings compound that can be harmful to plants
bling hands. “It’s freaky, scary stuff,” he had difficulty with the next growth stage: and animals alike.
says. “I mean, what happens if you drop establishing a healthy root system. The Ferl hopes to continue studying how
that?” Ferl and his team were about to Apollo sprouts were stunted and stressed, life might take hold in otherwise barren
become the first researchers to grow not only by the salt- and metal-rich regolith soils, with an eye toward both boosting
plants in actual lunar soil. but also by its lack of water and microbes. humanity’s prospects off the planet and
The experiment was green-lit as part Helpful microbes are among the most improving agriculture in nutrient- and
of a lunar research boom fueled by nasa’s important components of any soil used for water-depleted soils here at home. But
Artemis program, which aims to send planting. “They play a huge role,” says for now he and his fellow researchers
UF/IFAS/Tyler Jones
humans back to the moon later this decade. Gretchen North, a plant physiological are grateful to experiment with one of
This time around nasa wants to build an ecologist at Occidental College, who was the only bits of lunar soil on Earth. “For
outpost there as a dress rehearsal for future not involved in the study. Symbiotic bacte- us,” he says, “it was—and continues to be—
voyages to Mars. Scientists anticipate such ria help plants regulate growth hormones, a real privilege.” —Joanna Thompson

V I S UA L S C I E N C E
Sight Unseen
Researchers restore electrical
activity in human retinas after death
Few biological facts seems eem as irrevocable as

brain death. It has long been assumed that
when we die, our neurons die with us. But a
new study on the neuron-packed tissue of the
eye is beginning to challenge that dogma.
In the new work, researchers restored elec-
trical activity in human retinas—the light-sen-
sitive neural tissue that sits at the back of our
eyes and communicates with our brains—from
recently deceased organ donors. This achieve-
ment, reported in N ature, o
Nature, offers
ffers a better way
to study eye diseases such as age-related mac-
ular degeneration, a leading cause of vision
loss and blindness. It could also lay the ground-
work for reviving other types of neural tissue
and perhaps—one day—for retinal transplants.
Most retina studies are done in animals, pri-
marily mice. But mouse retinas lack the macula,
a key region found in human eyes that picks out
fine details, so they are not an ideal model.
Human eye tissue from autopsies often takes
hours to obtain and is dead before scientists can
study its function. But what if you could revive it?
When Yale University researchers showed
in 2019 that rudimentary electrical activity
could be restored in pig brains after death,
University of Utah vision scientist Frans Vin-
berg, Scripps Research retinal surgeon Anne
Hanneken and their colleagues were inspired
to study whether retinal tissue could also be
restored postmortem.
For the study, the researchers first tested
how long mouse retinas could send electrical
signals after the animals were euthanized. They
were able to restore this activity up to three
hours later—and found that a lack of oxygen
was the main factor in irreversible loss of func- The Ultimate Software for Graphing & Analysis
tion. They then investigated human eyes that
the researchers obtained from organ donors Over 500,000 registered users worldwide in:
very soon after brain or cardiac death. The sci-
entists transported the eyes to the laboratory in ■ 6,000+ Companies including 20+ Fortune Global 500
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then exposed the retinal tissue to dim light and
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tissue. They were able to reestablish electrical
activity in light-sensitive cells called photore-
ceptors, as well as in the neurons these cells
30+ years serving the scientific and engineering community.
connect to, in the donor eyeseyes—if
—if the eyes were
obtained less than 20 minutes after death. Of ®
course, the eyes could not “see,” because they

were not connected to a brain, Hanneken notes.
www.originlab.com
For a 60-day FREE TRIAL, go to OriginLab.Com/demo and enter code: 9246
ADVANCES
But the results showed it was possible to

restore not just individual retinal cells but
the communication between them.
“What’s most exciting is this really
could become a model for studying visual
physiology in human retinas, in health and
in aging and in disease,” says Joan Miller,
chief of ophthalmology at Mass Eye and
Ear and ophthalmology chair at Harvard
Medical School, who was not involved
with the new study. Macular degeneration,
for example, has so far been difficult to
study because living human eye tissue has
been impossible to access. Using this new
technique, scientists could study healthy
and diseased donor eyes to understand Close-up of the retina in a human eye
their function and test treatments.
The team’s findings also suggest it may might be able to recover in the brain,” tance of donor tissue to basic science. “We
be possible to revive other types of neural Hanneken says. The study additionally are very thankful for the donors and their
stanley45/Getty Images
tissue. “The retina is a window to the brain, raises the prospect of retinal transplants, families,” Vinberg says. “We hope this will
so if you can restore communication in the although those are likely still very far off, encourage people . . . to check that box in
retina after death, it makes you pause and the researchers say. their driver’s license and also be willing to
consider what kind of communication you This new work illustrates the impor- donate tissues for research.” —Tanya Lewis
E C O LO G Y the sounds of healthy ecosystems—sounds that oyster larvae navigated toward
Oyster GPS
that have become increasingly rare as reefs recorded shrimp sounds and settled on
fall silent and ships dominate the ocean hard surfaces nearby. Larvae had difficulty
soundscape. Oysters lack ears but sense locating those surfaces without the sounds
Shrimp sounds could lure baby sound vibrations, so the team wondered if playing or with boat noise disrupting them.
bivalves to build new reefs the larvae could follow a sonic beacon of The researchers say luring oyster larvae
their own: the crackle of snapping shrimp. to potential reef sites could offer an alterna-
Oyster reefs once carpeted much of the tive to expensive, labor-intensive measures
seafloor, filtering water, stabilizing shore- such as sending divers to ferry larvae to
lines and providing habitats for a vast array their new homes. “There is a cost and effort
of life. But in the past 200 years net-drag- in raising oysters,” notes marine scientist
ging fishing boats have destroyed most of Terry Palmer of Texas A&M University–
these reefs around the world. Now, in the Corpus Christi, who works on oyster con-
Journal of Applied Ecology, r esearchers at servation but was not involved with the
Australia’s University of Adelaide reveal study. He says the new method might be
a curious fact that may help rebuild useful in conjunction with providing sur-
such formations: baby oysters follow faces for reef building, especially in areas
the sounds of shrimp. with relatively few of the animals.
Australian flat oysters’ microscopic And this sound technique might
larvae drift in currents and swim with eventually help more than just oysters.
hairlike cilia, searching for a hard surface— “They’re really the building blocks of the
ideally a thriving reef made of shells from southern reefs,” says University of Adelaide
other oysters—to cement themselves to for marine biologist Brittany Williams, the
the rest of their lives. If no established reef study’s lead author. Where oysters go,
is nearby, the babies float aimlessly over more life will follow. And although tricking
the sandy seafloor; only a lucky few find larvae into settling on a lifeless reef might
homes on stray rocks. Conservation scien- These reef-dwelling creatures snap their seem like a cruel bait and switch, rest
tists have tried to start new reefs by intro- claws to unleash jets of water that stun assured: the plankton and algae that oys-
ducing limestone boulders for larvae to prey, producing a staticky-sounding, ters eat are nearly omnipresent in the water,
settle on, but most remain lost at sea. 210-decibel cacophony—as loud as a rock so the bivalve trailblazers won’t starve
Previous studies demonstrated that concert. In their laboratory and in an while they wait for the rest of the reef com-
other sea creatures can navigate toward ocean experiment, the scientists found munity to arrive. —Kate Golembiewski
18 Scientific American, August 2022 Illustration by Thomas Fuchs

PA L E O N TO LO G Y
feet. Analyzing these structures let the
Water researchers determine how the pterosaur

could have used them to take off.
Launch Prior research indicates pterosaurs

were not strong swimmers, Habib notes—
Pterosaurs could have vaulted so this fossil’s soft tissues “are best inter-
preted as water-launch adaptations” rather
into flight from the water
than swimming gear. These structures
Ever since p pterosaur
terosaur fossils were discov- offer the first physical evidence that ptero-
ered more than two centuries ago, paleon- saurs could take off using quad launch, he
tologists have wondered how these gawky- says; until now the best evidence came
looking reptiles launched themselves into from biomechanical models of skeletons.
the air. Experts have recently focused on a The skin impressions along the arms sug-
“quad launch” hypothesis, which envisions gest that, when folded, the pterosaur’s
pterosaurs rocking back and forth on their wings could help the reptile push off from
arms to jump into the air using a pole vault– the water’s surface. The researchers found
like motion, whether from land or water. that the wings and webbed feet combined
Direct physical evidence of this technique would have been enough to propel the ani-
has been elusive, but now a small pterosaur mal from a resting position.
from the Jurassic rocks of Germany is help- Most modern birds use their muscular
ing solve the mystery. legs to spring into the air. But pterosaurs
The sparrow-sized fossil, described by had different proportions and would have
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles behaved differently, says University of
paleontologist Michael Habib and his col- Edinburgh pterosaur researcher Natalia
Scientific Reports, features
leagues in Scientific features Jagielska, who was not involved in the new
unusually well-preserved bones and skin study. Knowing that soft tissues like the Help FFRF fight the religious
impressions of a pterosaur type called an
aurorazhdarchid. The paleontologists used
pterosaur’s can be preserved in the fossil
record, Jagielska adds, “is a great reason
war against reproductive
a process known as laser-stimulated fluo- for scanning other exquisitely preserved rights and keep religion out
rescence to detect the fossilized tissues, fossils with lasers and seeing if they can
including a wing membrane and webbed tell us aa different story.”
different story.” Riley Black
—Riley
— of government.
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Fossil showing pterosaur
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skeleton and soft tissues
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ADVANCES

F L U I D DY N A M I C S
Science
in Images
By Joanna Thompson
Imagine the perfect ocean wave: a wall of water

swells and curls in on itself before breaking dra-
matically near the shore. Catching such a wave
would be any surfer’s dream—and the physics
underneath its churning surface is just as mind-
blowing as the ride.
As an ocean wave coils, it creates a hollow
tube made of spinning water. If you could peek
under the surface, you would see numerous
small, thin twisters known as rib vortices looping
around this primary vortex. Scientists have only
recently begun to investigate why and how these
beautiful, delicate secondary eddies form.
“Basically there’s a separation that occurs,”
says Christine Baker, a fluid mechanics researcher
at the University of Washington. When a wave
begins to break, tiny aerated regions along
the leading edge cause a few streams to sepa-
rate from the main vortex. These streams
twist themselves into rib vortices as they pick
up momentum.
“We often make the analogy of a figure
skater,” says Jim Thomson, an oceanographer
at the University of Washington. Initially a wave’s
rib vortices are wide bands of water that twist
slowly like figure skaters spinning with their arms
outstretched. But as the wave travels forward,
Thomson explains, its ribs corkscrew into thin
filaments—an effect similar to when figure skat-
ers tuck in their arms. “They rotate faster and
faster,” he says. This rotation stretches the sepa-
ration between the main vortex and its mini vor-
tices as they loop and grow.
Baker’s work uses a combination of computer
calculations and physical experiments to investi-
gate how these vortices sweep trash and pollu-
tion from the shore out into the ocean. Until the
past decade or so few people in the scientific
community paid much attention to rib vortices,
partly because they are difficult to photograph,
the researchers say—the ephemeral twists
require a high-resolution camera and precise
timing to capture. In addition, modern computer
simulations are finally complex enough to model
them. “We often don’t study things or see things
until we have the tools to do so,” Thomson says.
Clark Little
To see more, visit ScientificAmerican.com/science-in-images

ADVANCES
ENVIRONMENT
levels of this lipid when infected than did
Branching a widespread variety known for its hardi-

ness. For both tree types, Dentamet kept
Out infected individuals’ lipid levels lower.

Study co-author Massimo Reverberi,
AI takes on a disastrous a molecular plant pathologist at Sapienza
University of Rome, says the two tree vari-
olive tree disease
eties behaved a bit like people with stron-
An aggressive plant pathogen that wipes Using a machine-learning algorithm to sift ger or weaker immune systems fighting off
out olive trees is projected to cost Italy bil- through the trees’ metabolic data, they the flu. “Our hypothesis is that it’s ‘personal’
lions of euros over the next 50 years. Xylella are learning which trees tend to get sicker in some ways,” he says. Further developing
fastidiosa—a bacterium named for its picki- than others—and how to choose trees to the algorithm could help the researchers
ness when grown in the laboratory—was treat instead of chopping them down. The diagnose infection severity by measuring
detected in southern Italy in 2013. It is now work is detailed in Frontiers in Plant Science. lipid concentrations. Less severe infections
designated a “quarantine organism” in Xylella m
akes complex fatty acids called could then be managed with Dentamet,
the European Union: infected trees, some lipids to use as key signaling molecules, and and only the worst cases would have to be
hundreds of years old, must be cut down the trees manufacture their own lipids in culled. Knowing how trees respond to
to prevent the disease from spreading in response to infection. The researchers col- Xylella infection will also direct the search
places such as Italy’s Apulia region. lected twig samples from 66 trees and used for additional treatments and identify more
“We are obliged to destroy X ylella- their algorithm to compare lipid profiles resistant tree varieties, Scala adds.
positive plants, but people in Apulia don’t along with infection status, tree variety, and University of Salento chemist Fran-
want to destroy them,” says Valeria Scala, whether each tree had been treated with cesco Paolo Fanizzi, who was not involved
Cosimo Calabrese/Getty Images

a plant pathologist at Italy’s Council for Dentamet, a metallic mixture that relieves in the new study, says it represents “a
Agricultural Research and Economics. Xylella s ymptoms but is not a cure. promising methodology that could give
As scientists, she says, “we have to live The team found that one particular some relief to this painful economic situa-
between two worlds.” So Scala and her lipid type appeared at greater concentration in the southern part of Apulia.”
colleagues are looking for ways to fight tions in infected plants. An olive variety “We have to survive together with bacte-
Xylella w
ithout killing every infected tree. native to hard-hit Apulia showed higher ria,” he adds. —Maddie Bender
ITALY EGYPT
IN THE NEWS For the first time, scientists retrieved a human genome New analysis of a space rock found in the desert in 1996
Quick from volcanic ash–encrusted remains found in the ancient

city Pompeii. They identified the individual as a man in his
suggests it was forged in a rare “type Ia” supernova
explosion. The violent event most likely occurred some
Hits 30s, with markers for spinal tuberculosis, and they also
analyzed the bones of an accompanying woman over 50.
4.6 billion years ago on the outskirts of our solar system.
PHILIPPINES
By Joanna Thompson
A species of P yralidae m
oth
last recorded in 1912 was
MEXICO
discovered in a passenger’s
Although the annual monarch
luggage in the Detroit airport.
butterfly migration has been in
Several moth larvae had
decline for three decades, ento-
apparently stowed away in
mologists confirmed that east-
a bag of medicinal tea, which
ern monarchs’ wintering
the traveler purchased in
grounds in Mexico increased in
the Philippines.
area by 35 percent since last year.
The insects may be adapting to
SOLOMON ISLANDS
climate change, experts suggest.
nasa satellite imaging
BOLIVIA captured activity indicating
Using lidar, a laser-based remote sensing technology, multiple eruptions from the
archaeologists uncovered traces of 11 Indigenous villages CAMBODIA underwater volcano Kavachi.
from 1,500 years ago. These settlements were connected Cambodian environmental officials have asked the In addition to being geologic
by a complex series of roads and bridges to two large, public to stop picking carnivorous, distinctively ally active, the site is home to
previously known cities called Landivar and Cotoca. shaped “penis plants.” These rare, insect-consuming a thriving shark population—
For more details, visit
plants are found only in shallow, nutrient-poor soils earning it the superb nick
www.ScientificAmerican.com/aug2022/advances in some of the country’s remote mountain regions. name “sharkcano.”

METER
Edited by Dava Sobel
My Father Flies into a Hurricane

They fly from the Caribbean sun into
the storm’s spiraling arms; their turbo prop
jolts and shudders. Across his window, streaks
of rain begin. They’re flying into darkness,
the plane all fumes and metal shell, he thinks,
as they head for the eye. All along, they’re dropping
instruments to map vertically
pressure, temperature, wind direction
and speed, data in three dimensions plus time.
He’s read about these trips: to enter the gyre’s

racket of wind and rain, the crew harness
themselves in place. Between them and death,
two pilots’ strength—no parachutes; ejecting
futile in winds like these. He’s wanted to feel
how frail humans are against the force
of atmosphere, to feel its energy,
a bow to what he’s studied all these years:
his, the fifth American doctorate
in meteorology. The War made the field:

so many forecasts crucial to success in invasions
or bombing raids. He judged jet stream effects,
then returned, afterwards, to equations—physics
of air and water, the way they interact—
but he’s wanted to go inside the living fact.
The Center called him once the storm had blown
past St. Lucia, Haiti, Jamaica, its eye
sliding between Cuba and the Yucatán.
Towards the eye wall, the storm grows wild—

winds strongest, noise loudest, no turning
around. He wonders why he’s left the ground
as the plane pulls, jerks, falls and climbs
in the hurricane’s judder and thrash. Updraft
(pressed hard against his seat) and down
(dropping many feet abruptly; his stomach
turning). Stowed gear rattles at the latches.
Updraft (harder, longer) and down (harness
cuts into his shoulders as he’s thrown about).

He wants out; he wishes he hadn’t asked.
And just as he thinks he can’t stand more,
they’re through the wall, which rises behind,
a cliff of cloud, steeper than a stone canyon
and deeper. They turn in the light, sun overhead
in the calm, open space inside the eye,
then spiral down to look for a sailboat reported
lost. No way to see a thing so small

Sandy Solomon lives in Nashville, Tenn., where she is writer in residence in the Creative
Writing Program at Vanderbilt University. Her poetry collection, P ears, Lake, Sun, r eceived the
Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her poems have also
appeared in the New Yorker, t he New Republic, t he Times Literary Supplement, and many other
publications in the U.S. and the U.K.
in such high waves. He’s surprised how tiny the plane’s

whirring sounds after the din in transit.
He thinks of how, on the ground, birds sing
in this brief reprieve. But here he can see the edge:
the plane must turn into the hurricane
again, cross the wall, cross into
disturbance, only now they know:
this one’s big. They’ve got air pressure
readings lower than any they’ve seen.
A category five, they reckon, and strengthening:

winds hitting 190 miles per hour.
They cut through the wall, adrenaline high.
No escape. Only the wind’s unholy
engine, its sharp shifts in all directions.
So long as the pilots’ combined strength can keep
the plane level and on course (they fight for control),
so long as the plane holds together (it cracks
and creaks), so long, he thinks, as his nerve holds . . .
But unlike the first half of this flight, when chaos

deepened the further they went, now however
wild the wind, they know it lessens; the battering
eases. They cross into sun: below them, glints
on the ocean’s surface. But since they’ve mapped the winds,
crossed the eye wall, over and back, they know
more. Which saps pleasure in rediscovered
calm. He finds his body’s damp—shirt soaked
and stinking; he finds standing again an effort.
On his wall he’s hung the storm’s huge spiral

and the date: August 7, 1980.
From space, the satellite registered its shape—
almost fetal, outsized head around
an eye, wisps of arms as if a sonogram
had gathered this “Allen” before landfall,
his massive fetch, the sum of possible destructions;
the given: thrum of wind and roiling waters
and the taken, 269 souls.
Fifth then among Atlantic hurricanes

on record, that’s the flight he asked to join.
And why, I wonder, do I imagine him now?
Perhaps I fancy a kind of bliss at the core
of disorder—a blue-sky temporary respite:
assurance that all this trouble will blow over.
How then can we account for ourselves, my father
and I, then and now, as we cut across asphalt
NASA/Science Source
to head home through tangles of evening traffic?

As if nothing has happened.

THE SCIENCE Claudia Wallis is an award-winning science journalist
OF HEALTH whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Time, Fortune
and the New Republic. S he was science editor at Time a nd
managing editor of S cientific American Mind.
1.4 percent of white Americans have blood glucose levels in the

diabetic range, so the researchers were shocked to find that the
rate was about double for Hispanics and even higher among Black
and Asian Americans. They concluded that to detect diabetes
equally across all these groups, you would need to test Asian Amer-
icans with a BMI of 20 and Black and Hispanic individuals with a
BMI of just 18.5—measures considered to be in the healthy range.
In a second analysis, the investigators looked at diabetes prev-
alence by age and concluded that to match the efficacy of screen-
ing white people at 35, providers would need to screen Hispanic
Americans at 25, Asian Americans at 23 and Black Americans at
21. Medicine has been eliminating race-based scoring that made
some tests, such as an assessment of kidney function, less sensi-
tive to disease in Black people. But in the case of diabetes screen-
ing, the one-size-fits-all standard may be the problem.
Because diabetes is a complex disease involving diet, life habits,
genetics and psychosocial factors, it’s not easy to say why vulnera-
bility would vary among demographic groups. There is some evi-
dence that Asian Americans have more abdominal fat at lower body
weights than do people of other ethnicities, which raises risk. “A lot
of studies suggest it’s better to measure the waist-hip ratio instead
of using BMI [to assess risk],” says Quyen Ngo-Metzger of the Kai-
ser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine. Chronic stress
Unequal has also been linked to diabetes risk, she says, and that could
include the stress of experiencing racism.
Diabetes Care Ngo-Metzger, who was the uspstf’s scientific director from
2012 to 2019, notes that “most studies of diabetes were done in
middle-aged white individuals,” and that’s what screening stan-
U.S. screening guidelines miss dards were based on. She argues that they should be revised. “The
study found that you would miss so many Blacks, Hispanics and
too many people of color Asians when you use these guidelines. I think it’s a disservice.”
By Claudia Wallis The uspstf is unlikely, however, to revisit its guidelines soon,
usually waiting three to five years, says Michael J. Barry of Massa-
Rahul Aggarwal was in medical school when he got the surpris- chusetts General Hospital, a task force vice chair. The uspstf is
ing news that his mother—a fit woman in her 40s—had been diag- committed to health equity, he says, but it needs more evidence
nosed with type 2 diabetes. “I always thought of diabetes as a dis- that altering its recommendations would result in better long-term
ease of people at higher weights and with certain lifestyle outcomes for patients—an issue the new study does not address.
practices,” he recalls, “but my mom was an Indian American wom- Still, it seems obvious that detecting—and treating—diabetes
an with a healthy weight and good diet and exercise practices.” earlier in communities where it is often missed would lead to
Aggarwal, now a clinical fellow at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical improved health. Harvard University cardiologist Dhruv Kazi,
Center in Boston, began thinking about how diabetes seems to senior author on the A nnals s tudy, points out that diabetes takes
disproportionately affect certain ethnic and racial groups. Those an outsize toll on Americans of color. “Black individuals with dia-
musings were the seed of an eye-opening study published earlier betes are more than twice as likely to end up on dialysis than white
this year in the Annals of Internal Medicine. It quantified diabe- individuals with diabetes,” he notes. They are also more likely to
tes risk in minority groups to determine if current screening rec- lose limbs and vision to undertreated diabetes. Kazi attributes these
ommendations are equitable. Spoiler alert: they are not. tragic disparities to “structural” inequities such as poor access to
The current standard was released in 2021 by the U.S. Preven- health care, high-quality food and opportunities for exercise.
tive Services Task Force (uspstf), which issues evidence-based Like Ngo-Metzger, Kazi would like to see screening guidelines
guidance on disease prevention. The recommendation is to test better reflect individual risk factors that include race and ethnic-
adults aged 35 to 70 for diabetes if they are overweight or obese, ity. Without such changes, he says, insurers may refuse to cover
defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of 25 kg/m2 or more. diabetes testing in people who have a BMI below 25 or who are
Aggarwal and his collaborators looked at the lowest-risk individ- younger than 35. Fixing larger social inequalities would require
uals eligible for screening under that rubric: 35-year-olds who are major changes, Kazi concedes, “but making screening more equi-
just barely overweight (with a BMI of 25). Within this cohort about table is a good place to start.”
26 Scientific American, August 2022 Illustration by Fatinha Ramos

Discoveries
from the
Deep
DISCOVERIES
FROM THE
DEEP
Advances in robotics, sensing

and genomics are accelerating
discovery in the darkest ocean
depths. Scientists are finding
a more sophisticated, life-filled
place than they ever expected
“Put a human in the sea, and they are pretty

useless,” says marine ecologist Kelly J.
Benoit-Bird of the Monterey Bay Aquarium
Research Institute. “They can’t breathe.
They can only see as far as the end of their
outstretched arm. They can’t make any
sense of the sounds they hear.”
Maybe that’s why, since humans have been on Earth,
the sea has been an enigma to us. The oceans cover 71 per-
cent of Earth’s surface, and by volume they provide 99 per-
cent of the planet’s living space. Yet we still know little
about the life within.
That’s changing, rapidly. Aided by autonomous under-
water vehicles, advanced sensing technology and fast,
mobile genome-sequencing machines, scientists and explor-
ers are finding all kinds of inspiring surprises. We’ve assem-
bled some of the most fascinating recent discoveries, from
the sea’s surface to the seafloor.
— Mark Fischetti, Senior Editor
Flip Nicklin/Minden Pictures
TINY NAVIGATORS
ooplankton fill the seas, but they don’t just drift along with
Z
the currents, as once was thought. They react and move as
water conditions change, driving the ocean’s food web and
much of its daily life.

THE
MYSTERY
OF
MILKY
SEAS
Scientists are beginning to understand
an eerie phenomenon that has
bewildered seafarers for centuries
By Michelle Nijhuis

DISCOVERIES
FROM THE
DEEP
MANY MARINE CREATURES

emit light, providing one clue
as to why the sea’s surface can
sometimes appear ghostly white.
Michelle Nijhuis is author of B eloved Beasts: Fighting for Life
in an Age of Extinction ( W. W. Norton, 2021), a history of the
modern conservation movement. She lives in Washington State.
o n January 30, 1864, the Confederate warship CSSAlabama e ntered what

its captain described as a “remarkable patch of the sea.” The A
me,” Semmes recounted in a memoir.

At first he thought that the pale, constant glow indi-
cated a submerged ridge, but a weighted line the crew
dropped over the gunwale sank for 600 feet without
hitting bottom. “Around the horizon there was a sub-
dued glare, or flush, as though there were a distant illu-
labama,
sailing southwest along the Horn of Africa, was one of several Confeder-
ate vessels cruising the world’s oceans during the U.S. Civil War, weak-
ening the Union by raiding its merchant ships. Formidable pirates though
they were, Captain Raphael Semmes and his crew were spooked by
the sea they encountered that January evening. “At about eight p.m., there
being no moon, but the sky being clear, and the stars shining brightly, we suddenly passed from
the deep blue water in which we had been sailing, into a patch of water so white that it startled
hundred years later Pliny the Elder described light-emit-

ting species of mollusks, jellyfish and mushrooms, add-
ing that the Black Forest of central Europe was rumored
to glow with bioluminescent birds (such rumors, though
often repeated, were unfortunately never confirmed).
mination going on, whilst overhead there was a lurid, Around 1370 Egyptian zoologist Al-Damiri included
dark sky,” Semmes wrote. “The whole face of nature bioluminescent insects in his zoological dictionary. And
seemed changed, and with but little stretch of the imag- in 1492, during his fateful approach to the Bahamas,
ination, the A labama m ight have been conceived to be Christopher Columbus observed glimmers of light in the
a phantom ship, lighted up by the sickly and unearthly ocean—an occurrence that scientists now surmise was
glare of a phantom sea.” The A labama t raveled through produced by bioluminescent marine worms of the genus
the eerie water for several hours, finally exiting the Odontosyllis, which periodically rise to the water’s sur-
patch as abruptly as it had entered it. face en masse to perform a circular mating “dance.” In
Semmes’s firsthand description is one of the earli- the late 1800s, after centuries of speculation, scientists
est reliable accounts of such a sea, and it has become a confirmed that bioluminescence results from an oxida-
valuable, though inadvertent, contribution to science. tion reaction between an enzyme and its substrate within
Now, after combining dozens of historical reports with animal and plant cells. Basic questions remained, how-
state-of-the-art satellite data, researchers are close to ever: no one knew what prompted different organisms
solving one of the ocean’s most persistent mysteries— to glow or what purpose the light might serve.
its vast, ephemeral displays of ghostly living light. Most accounts of bioluminescence, on land and at
sea, describe blue-green flashes and gleams, sometimes
Henley Spiers/Minden Pictures (p receding pages)
SILENT DREAD stimulated by disturbance, as with Aristotle’s rod. But

The cold radiance emitted by fireflies, some species of reports such as that of Captain Semmes suggested a very
fungi and various sea creatures is called biolumines- different phenomenon. The seawater plied by sailors
cence. Although it is one of the oldest subjects of scien- was suffused with steady white light, not bluish bursts,
tific study, it is also among the most elusive. Mentions of and the glow often stretched for miles. These “milky
animal light appear in ancient poetry and songs from seas” were rare enough, and strange enough, that peo-
many cultures. In the third century b.c.e., Aristotle ple widely considered them to be tall tales—more plau-
noticed that if he struck the surface of the sea with a rod, sible than mermaid encounters, perhaps, but just barely
the water sometimes produced a bright blue flash. Three so. Herman Melville, in his 1851 epic M oby-Dick, p
or-

A MILKY SEA
sprawling across
almost 40,000
square miles
of ocean south
of Java in sum-
mer 2019 was
captured by
sensitive night-
vision satellites;
it lasted 45 days.
trayed them as bad omens, describing a mariner’s “silent, ing concentrated enough to produce a continuous glow.
superstitious dread” on entering a “midnight sea of milky Finally, milky seas had been established as a scientific
whiteness,” as if “shoals of combed white bears were phenomenon with a biological cause. But to understand
swimming round him.” In Jules Verne’s novel Twenty where, when and exactly why they occurred, researchers
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, written almost two needed more data than serendipity could provide.
decades later, the fictional submarine pilot Pierre Aron-
nax is less perturbed by his voyage through a milky sea SAILING OVER SNOW
in the Bay of Bengal, calmly informing his assistant that For the U.S. Navy, m
arine bioluminescence is a practical
“the whiteness which surprises you is caused only by the concern because a patch of bright seawater can outline
presence of myriads of infusoria, a sort of luminous lit- a submarine, turning it into an easy target. In the early
tle worm, gelatinous and without color.” 2000s Steven Miller, an atmospheric scientist then at
Verne’s pilot was on the right track, but it would be the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, Calif.,
more than a century before science began to catch up began to wonder whether satellite sensors could detect
with science fiction. In July 1985 a U.S. Navy research ves- bioluminescence from above. The only sensors capable
sel encountered a milky sea off the Arabian Peninsula. of observing visible light at night were those in the Oper-
The scientists onboard, who were conducting a broad ational Line Scan (OLS) system that flew on U.S. Air
study of marine bioluminescence, were equipped for this Force satellites. Miller knew that most surface displays
stroke of luck, and they quickly collected seawater sam- of marine bioluminescence were much too small to reg-
ples for inspection. In addition to the dinoflagellates, ister on the sensors, so, on a whim, he searched the
NOAA/Colorado State University/CIRA
copepods and other types of plankton associated with the Internet for mentions of widespread bioluminescence.
familiar, flashing displays, the samples contained biolu- He turned up a description of milky seas on the Web site
minescent bacteria. The researchers suggested that milky Science Frontiers, an idiosyncratic catalog of “unusual &
seas occurred after algae colonies on the water’s surface unexplained” happenings then maintained by physicist
bloomed and died. When the dead algal cells ruptured, William R. Corliss.
they released lipids subsequently consumed by bacte- Miller, his curiosity piqued, began to collect eyewit-
ria, which then multiplied furiously, eventually becom- ness accounts. Among them was a relatively recent report

from a British merchant ship, the S S Lima, which had eventually identifying a dozen events that were not clouds
sailed through a milky sea along the Horn of Africa on or airglow, were invisible during the day and drifted with
January 25, 1995. “The bioluminescence appeared to the currents over multiple nights. One 2019 event,
cover the entire sea area, from horizon to horizon,” read detected just south of Java, was visible for at least 45
the L ima’s log entry, “and it appeared as though the ship nights and covered almost 40,000 square miles—an area
was sailing over a field of snow or gliding over the clouds.” the size of Kentucky. Its multiweek persistence suggests
When Miller pulled up the OLS images from the that the DNB sensor could be used to dispatch research-
Lima’s location on that date, he initially saw nothing. ers to newly formed milky seas in time to conduct dives
But when he zoomed in, he saw a faint, comma-shaped in them. “[There’s] only so much you can do from space-
smear. “It looked like a finger smudge, but it moved as borne measurement,” Miller says. “You can’t get into the
I moved the figure,” he remembers. Miller found that water, you can’t see the vertical structure of the glow
the edges of the smudge matched the coordinates noted within water, you can’t sample the critters, you can’t mea-
in the ship’s log as it entered and exited the milky sea, sure the detailed chemistry. [For] all these things, you
which covered nearly 5,500 square miles. When he need to be in the middle of it to truly understand.”
examined OLS images from the days immediately before While Miller waits for the chance to be in the mid-
and after the Lima’s encounter, he found the same dle of a milky sea, he continues to expand his collection
smudge, rotating counterclockwise in concert with local of sightings. A recent addition comes from Sam Keck
ocean currents. “Okay,” Miller thought, “we c an s ee bio- Scott, who in the summer of 2010 helped to sail a
luminescence from space.” restored Dutch ketch from Malta to Singapore, crossing
Miller got in touch with Steven Haddock, a marine the Arabian Sea. One evening in late July, as Scott began
biologist at the nearby Monterey Bay Aquarium Research his watch, he noticed an odd radiance in the air. After a
Institute (MBARI), to share his findings. Like Miller, Had- few minutes he realized that even though the sky was
dock had never seen a milky sea firsthand, but he was completely dark he could see the boat’s sails and hull;
familiar with the phenomenon, especially because one the entire ocean had brightened and seemed to be shin-
of his mentors, marine biologist Peter Herring (now ing from within. Scott and his crewmates sailed through
retired), had cataloged hundreds of descriptions of milky the milky sea for about four hours, exiting it even more DEEP-SEA
seas dating back to Captain Semmes and the Alabama. suddenly than they had entered. “We knew it was bio- inhabitants
Haddock, who primarily studies bioluminescence in jel- luminescence of some kind, but it was on this wild, wild produce an
lyfish, had spent much of his career trying to get as close scale, unlike anything I’d ever seen before,” Scott recalls. amazing array
as possible to bioluminescent organisms using crewed of biolumines
or remotely operated deep-sea submersibles. He and BURGLAR ALARM cence to
communicate,
Miller began to collaborate. From a distance, s cientists have proposed various
attract mates
Although the OLS detection from 1995 had been hypotheses about how milky seas form. Investigators on
or prey, or con-
something of a fluke—the product of Miller’s persistence the 1985 navy expedition theorized that the biolumines-
fuse predators.
and a fortuitous satellite position—Miller hoped a new, cent bacteria they collected had congregated around an
Counterclock-
more sensitive low-light visible-spectrum instrument algal bloom. Other sleuths have since suggested that the
wise from top
Jerome Mallefet/Minden Pictures; David Shale/Minden Pictures; David Shale/Minden Pictures; Jerome Mallefet-FNRS/
called the day-night band (DNB) sensor would allow a steady glow results from “quorum sensing,” the ability
left: a green
systematic survey of milky seas. The sensor, launched in of bacteria to communicate through chemical signaling.
Minden Pictures; Jerome Mallefet-FNRS/Minden Pictures; Solvin Zankl/Minden Pictures (c lockwise from top left)
brittle star;
2011, now rides on two satellites more than 500 miles Once their density is high enough to produce a percep-
a firefly squid
above Earth’s surface, each orbiting the planet daily. tible collective glow, they sustain a continual shine. But
whose under-
More than 100 times as sensitive as the OLS, the DNB why? Some biologists think bioluminescence in other
side glows to
can easily pick up the gleam of a milky sea. But it can marine organisms helps them attract food or mates or camouflage it
also pick up the faint “airglow” produced by the absorp- functions as a kind of burglar alarm, flashing when they against the
tion of ultraviolet light in the upper atmosphere, some are under attack in hopes of attracting the predators of water above
of which is reflected by clouds. “There were clouds every- their predators. The glow of quorum sensing in bacte- when seen by
where. The airglow is emitting upward, and sometimes ria may act as a different invitation: when a colony runs enemies below;
it makes this really diffuse, widespread veil of light,” low on food in the open water, it may glow to encourage a viperfish;
Miller explains. Differentiating bioluminescence from nearby fish to come and consume the bacteria, conse- two hatchetfish;
these other phenomena, he adds, “took us many years quently sustaining the bacteria in their guts. a dragonfish;
of looking at what seemed like very noisy imagery.” The decade of DNB data complicates the idea that and the belly
Thanks to the long history of sightings by mariners, milky seas occur most frequently in winter and late sum- of a pearlside.
Miller and Haddock knew that the occurrences of milky mer. The peaks in milky-sea formation do appear to be Dots along the
seas peaked in winter and summer and that they were strongest in the northwestern Indian Ocean when win- belly are photo-
most often reported in the northwestern Indian Ocean, ter and summer monsoons trigger phytoplankton blooms phores—organs
where both the A labama a nd the L
ima h ad encountered by bringing deep, cold, nutrient-rich water to the sea sur- that produce
them, as well as around Indonesia, in particular near the face. Farther east, however, milky seas may be set up by light through
island of Java and in the Banda Sea. Narrowing his search the Indian Ocean Dipole, an El Niño–like pattern of sea- chemical reac-
to these seasons and locations, Miller analyzed DNB data surface temperatures associated with cool, dry conditions tions or symbi-
collected on moonless nights from 2012 through 2021, and strong winds in the eastern Indian Ocean between otic bacteria.

May and October. The satellite data also suggest an expla- sponge that was not only new to science but the first doc-
nation for why the glow occasionally seems to extend to umented case of bioluminescence in its phylum.
some depth, creating the perception among mariners that Given that the ocean is the largest living space on
their ship is suddenly floating in light: Miller found that the planet, the two analyses suggest that biolumines-
several milky seas occurred in the relative calm between cence is one of the predominant ecological traits on
large ocean eddies, where a combination of currents and Earth. “It’s not something far away that you’ll never see
temperature gradients can isolate a column of seawater in your life,” Martini says. “At sea, everything is glow-
from the surrounding ocean, putting it at a standstill. ing—you just have to pay attention.” For Martini, Had-
Such conditions, he hypothesizes, could foster superdense dock, Widder and the few other marine biolumines-
bacterial populations whose quorum sensing extends ver- cence researchers, the pervasive glow only increases
tically as well as horizontally to adjacent colonies, mag- their interest in its ecological functions, evolutionary
nifying the depth and breadth of the resulting milky sea. history, chemistry and genetics—and their excitement
Miller and Haddock hope the DNB sensors’ ability to about the high-definition underwater cameras and
detect—and, in time, perhaps predict—milky seas will advanced genetic sequencing that offer new ways of
allow researchers to quickly head out to the ocean and accessing a once all but inaccessible world.
collect samples to test hypotheses. Until then, milky seas Humans have benefited greatly from bioluminescent
are unlikely to give up their lingering mysteries. species. Medical and biological researchers frequently
use green fluorescent protein, which biologists isolated
EVERYWHERE AGLOW from bioluminescent jellyfish in the 1960s, as a visual
The secrets o f milky seas persist in part because much marker of proteins and the components of living cells.
larger questions remain about the nature, function and Widder is using bioluminescent bacteria to identify pol-
extent of bioluminescence itself. Since most biolumines- lution hotspots in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon, one of
cent organisms live in the ocean, many at great depths, the most diverse estuaries in North America. Fertilizer
observing bioluminescence firsthand has required con- and pesticide runoff from farms and lawns, as well as
siderable resources—and not inconsiderable risk. Marine leakage from sewage and septic systems, has been poi-
biologist Edith Widder, who founded the Ocean Research soning the lagoon for decades, and the pollution has
and Conservation Association in 2005, began her pioneer- accumulated in its sediments. Because most pollutants
ing bioluminescence studies in the 1980s. She recounts interfere with bacterial respiration and therefore with
her numerous and occasionally hair-raising submersible bacterial bioluminescence, Widder and her colleagues
experiences—including a life-threatening leak at a depth have taken sediments from the lagoon and mixed them
of 350 feet—in her 2021 book, Below the Edge of Darkness. with bioluminescent bacteria in the lab to determine the
“I’ve spent a lot of my career in submersibles, operating relative concentrations of pollutants throughout the
in the dark” because only very recently have cameras been lagoon—knowledge that helps in monitoring, mitigation
able to perceive both the light and the color of biolumi- and restoration efforts.
nescence, she told me. “It’s absolutely, breathtakingly Although applications are expanding, the ability of
beautiful, and finally [other people are] getting to see it.” marine organisms to benefit from their own biolumines-
Widder and other researchers who have managed to cent capacity is under threat. The rush to mine valuable
take deep-sea voyages have known for decades that bio- metals from the ocean floor is expected to tremendously
luminescence is a common ability. But the first reliable impact not only the seabed but the entire deep sea, where
estimate of its occurrence came in 2017, when Haddock the water is typically clear enough for bioluminescent
and Séverine Martini, then a postdoctoral researcher at organisms to communicate with one another across hun-
MBARI and now at the Mediterranean Institute of Ocean- dreds of feet. When robotic mining vehicles scrape the
ography, published an analysis of 17 years of video obser- seafloor, they kick up clouds of sediment. After machines
vations collected by remotely operated vehicles off the pump collected material to the surface and remove the
California coast. From more than 350,000 observations, fist-sized, metal-rich nodules, they dump the remaining
which included more than 500 groups of organisms, mud and silt back into the sea, again clouding once trans-
taken at depths from just below the surface to nearly parent water—inevitably disrupting communication
13,000 feet, Martini and Haddock concluded that at least among the bioluminescent organisms and interfering
three quarters of the organisms were capable of biolumi- with their ability to find food and mates.
nescence. The percentage remained remarkably consis- “In the context of ocean ecology and ocean health, it’s
tent at different ocean depths. In a 2019 study, they found important to understand how widespread and widely
that about a third of the organisms living on the ocean used [bioluminescence] is,” says Haddock, who co-au-
floor are bioluminescent. Martini identified a carnivorous thored a 2020 paper on the ecological effects of deep-sea
mining. “If you do something that’s going to affect that
David Shale/Minden Pictures
process, it’s going to have all these ripple effects that we

FROM OUR ARCHIVES can only now start to appreciate.” The glowing seas that
Luminous Animals. Thomas R. R. Stebbing; S cientific American Supplement, November 30, 1895. so terrified generations of mariners have taken no victims
and left no traces; the cloudy seas created by humans,
s c i e n t if i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a zi n e /s a
however, could permanently dim the ocean’s light.

THE BLACK SEADEVIL,
which lies in wait as deep as
13,000 feet, has a transpar-
ent lure rising from its head.
Bacteria living inside the
lure glow to attract prey.
It is unclear how the fish
controls the emissions.

DISCOVERIES
FROM THE
DEEP
ANGEL, MONSTER
hen sea angels hunt, they transform
W
into monsters. The free-swimming slugs,
less than an inch long, store six jellylike
“arms” known as buccal cones inside
their heads (left). When they sense prey—
for example, a nearby sea butterfly—
muscles in their core contract, causing
Alexander Semenov
the arms to shoot out (right) and grab the

target, in milliseconds. They can also
tear a victim’s body out of its shell for
easier consumption.

Mark Fischetti i s a senior editor
for sustainability at Scientific American.
EVERY INCH
OF THE
SEAFLOOR
High-tech mapping is finding surprising
underwater formations everywhere
By Mark Fischetti
Illustrations by Maceij Frolow
O
ceanographers are fond of saying that we know more about the moon’s surface than
we do about Earth’s seafloor. It’s true. As of 2017, only 6 percent of the global seabed
had been mapped, typically by ships with sonar instruments sailing back and forth
in straight lines across a local section of sea.
But since then, nations have become eager to chart the sea- governments, industries and research institutions everywhere.
floor within their own “exclusive economic zones,” which reach Public release of previously private bathymetric data is helping
200 nautical miles from their shores, in part to look for critical to widen the areas plotted. And uncrewed, remotely operated
minerals they can scrape up using big mining machines. The vehicles fitted with sonar that can zoom around underwater for
other push is Seabed 2030—an effort to map Earth’s entire sea- days at a time are speeding the pace of mapping. By June 2022
floor by 2030, run jointly by the Nippon Foundation and the non- an impressive 21 percent of the world’s seafloor had been charted.
profit General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans. The more experts map, the more surprises they find—such as the
The goal is to collect and stitch together mapping done by three unexpected, unusual formations revealed here.

DISCOVERIES
FROM THE
DEEP
REEF TOWER
SOUTH PACIFIC, 50 MILES EAST OF CAPE YORK
PENINSULA, AUSTRALIA
Scientists at James Cook University in Australia were charting
underwater habitats just beyond the northern end of the
Great Barrier Reef using multibeam sonar when they came
on a freestanding coral reef tower 1,640 feet tall—taller than
the Empire State Building. The base of the wedge, shaped like
a shark fin, is almost a mile across, and the tip is only 130 feet
below the sea surface. Subsequent dives by a remotely
operated vehicle showed the tower was teeming with fish
and exhibited no signs of the coral bleaching that has
tormented the Great Barrier Reef.

MILLION MOUNDS
CORAL PROVINCE
NORTH ATLANTIC, 100 MILES EAST
OF GEORGIA, U.S.
Investigators at the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration have finished
mapping the “million mounds” deep-sea
province. Thousands of coral mounds,
each 30 to 300 feet high, blanket 11,000
square miles of ocean floor, making it the
largest deep-sea coral ecosystem ever
discovered. At a depth of 2,000 to 2,600
feet, the seafloor receives no sunlight, so
the white corals don’t house symbiotic
algae that give shallow reefs their color.
When old corals in the mounds die, their
skeletons provide the foundation for new
corals; some mounds have been growing
for thousands of years.

RYDER GLACIER SILL
ARCTIC OCEAN, SHERARD OSBORN FJORD,
NORTHWESTERN GREENLAND
Geologists at Stockholm University were puzzled about why
the front edge of Ryder Glacier, at the Sherard Osborn Fjord,
was losing less ice than the faces of other Greenland glaciers.
Using multibeam sonar on an icebreaker in the fjord, they
discovered two parallel sills of bedrock (red), separated by
a basin, that cross the fjord. The inner sill, about 3.8 miles
across and 1,600 to 1,900 feet high, blocks relatively warm
Atlantic Ocean water from reaching the glacier and melting
its underside, slowing the glacier’s demise.

DISCOVERIES
FROM THE
DEEP
BLACKOUT EATER
eclusive telescopefish live nearly a mile
R
below the ocean’s surface, where they
feed on bioluminescent creatures. They
orient themselves vertically to pick out
the silhouettes of prey swimming
overhead, then strike with their nasty
jaws. Whenever they ingest a glowing
Danté Fenolio/Science Source
meal, they risk lighting up from within,

broadcasting their location to their own
predators. To stay hidden in the dark
waters, the fish have evolved an opaque
stomach that acts like a built-in blackout
curtain after they have eaten.

STEALTH
MIGRATIONS
Trillions of tiny animals may be coordinating their daily
movements in ways that affect every organism on the planet
By Katherine Harmon Courage

DISCOVERIES
FROM THE
DEEP
TRILLIONS OF ZOOPLANKTON migrate

every night from the ocean’s depths up
to the surface and back. Each species has
its own rhythm, which can vary based on
age, season and sex.

Katherine Harmon Courage is an independent science
journalist and contributing editor for Scientific American.
She is author of O ctopus! The Most Mysterious Creature
in the Sea ( Current, 2013) and C ultured: How Ancient Foods
Feed Our Microbiome (Avery, 2019).
E very evening around the world trillions of zooplankton, many smaller than
a grain of rice, hover hundreds of feet below the surface of the sea, waiting
for their signal. Scientists long considered these tiny animals to be drifters,
passive specks suspended in the ocean, moved by the whims of tides and cur-
rents. And yet, just before the sun disappears, the swarms begin to rise on a
clandestine journey to the surface.
As they climb, clusters of other zooplankton join in: copepods, salps, krill
and fish larvae. The multitudes remain near the surface at night, but just as the first beams of
morning light begin to cascade across the sea, they are already turning back down to the deep.
As sunset and sunrise slide from east to west every 24 hours—across the Pacific Ocean, then the
Indian, the Southern and the Atlantic—swarm after swarm make the same upward journey,
retreating as daylight returns.
Humans are mostly unaware of this daily aquatic movement,
known as diel vertical migration, but it’s the largest routine
There are all kinds of crosscurrents and eddies. Now, with
increasingly sophisticated sonar, underwater autonomous vehi-
migration of life on Earth. Current estimates indicate some cles and advances in DNA sequencing, researchers are starting
10 billion tons of animals make these excursions every day. Some to understand those details. The specifics will help answer ques-
of them ascend from more than 3,000 feet below. It’s an aston- tions that have implications for the oceanic food web, the global
ishing feat. For a quarter-inch fish larva, making a one-way ver- carbon budget and the very nature of life on Earth.
tical trip of 1,000 feet is the equivalent of a human swimming
more than 50 miles—in just an hour or so. During the trip these DANCES OF THE DEEP
animals pass through zones of ocean where the conditions are Early recordings of diel migration date to World War II, when
wildly different. At 1,000 feet the water is roughly 39 degrees ships and submarines using sonar to sweep the oceans for enemy
Fahrenheit—maybe 20 degrees colder than the surface—and the subs detected something odd—parts of the seafloor seemed to be
pressure is about 460 pounds per square inch, more than 30 moving up and down, creating a deep “scattering layer” that
times what it is up top. Why would huge numbers of tiny ani- reflected the sonar signals. The layer fluctuated twice a day by as
tonaquatic/Getty Images (p receding pages)
mals make such an arduous trip every day? much as 3,000 feet—shifts that seemed to defy logic. In 1945
The short answer is to eat—and to avoid being eaten. During oceanographer Martin Johnson embarked on a research ship to
the day vulnerable zooplankton hide from predators such as sample plankton at various times and depths over 24 hours. “From
squid and fish in the dark depths. When night begins to fall, they these preliminary observations there appears to be some direct
rush to the surface to feed on phytoplankton—the microscopic correlation of the planktonic animals with the scattering layer,”
aquatic plants that live in the top few hundred feet of water— Johnson wrote. The proposal that the layer was composed of liv-
under cover of night. ing creatures raised more questions than it answered, however.
But this is just the prevailing wind of vertical migration. Answering those questions proved difficult. The animals

involved are tiny, their passage happens in the dark and the deep many. In 2016 Wirtz and his colleagues were looking to describe
ocean is tough to access. Tracking swarms of flea-size organisms how the distribution of different phytoplankton matched up with
through the lightless depths is trickier than following migrating different ocean environments. But he noticed that the circula-
whales across hemispheres. By the 1990s researchers had learned tion of ocean water alone wouldn’t bring enough nitrogen and
enough to describe the diel migration as a cloud of organisms phosphorus from the depths to feed the ocean’s vast and essen-
rising and falling in unison. Higher-resolution sonar picked up tial blanket of phytoplankton at the surface.
individual clusters of animals and more subtle movements up Scientists had known for decades that many species of phy-
and down. Even today, though, sonar-based surveys can’t distin- toplankton can move—some by changing their buoyancy by shed-
guish which tiny animals are on the move. Sampling the zoo- ding fats or changing their dimensions and others by whipping
plankton, as Johnson did, can haul up the organisms for identi- their tail-like flagella. Wirtz mulled this over as he looked more
fication, but it blurs the nuances of time and location that could broadly at the oceans’ profile: the top is filled with sun but few
indicate where each animal was in its journey. nutrients. The bottom does not get enough sunlight for photo-
Despite these challenges, new research is revealing hidden synthesizers to live on, yet it harbors an abundance of nutrients.
intricacies of the mass migration. For one thing, the process is So, he thought, why w ouldn’t t hese plants use their evolved loco-
intimately tied to what’s happening in the skies. When the sun motive abilities to commute between the two spaces? In fact, he
is absent for weeks at a time during polar winters, some of these says, “there is not an easy other explanation.”
animals realign their migrations with cycles of the moon. Solar By Wirtz’s estimates, it’s possible that half of marine phyto-
eclipses can cue them to start swim-
ming toward the surface. Zooplankton
living below 1,000 feet, where light
intensity is just 0.012 percent of what
To pinpoint which species are moving
it is at the surface, may shift their ver-
tical position by as much as 200 feet
when and where, scientists are
as passing clouds change the trace
amounts of light reaching them,
combing the water column for the
explains Deborah Steinberg, chair of
biological sciences at the Virginia
genetic traces of transitory organisms.
Institute of Marine Science. She real-
ized this during a research cruise, even though the light changes plankton species undertake a regular vertical migration of dozens
at the surface were not apparent to her or her colleagues. “From to 100 feet, shuttling nutrients from below and solar energy from
our perspective on the ship, every day of the cruise was overcast, above. These microscopic organisms might take hours, days or even
gray and drizzly,” she and her colleagues noted in a 2021 paper. weeks to complete the journey, some reproducing along the way,
But the zooplankton somehow registered the subtle changes in thereby allowing their descendants to carry on the mission. This
light far underwater. idea presents a radical change in how scientists might think of phy-
Autonomous vehicles equipped with cameras and collection toplankton, which they often consider as more of a chemical com-
devices that allow them to pair images with chemical signatures pound than individual living organisms with varied behaviors.
from the water column have begun to offer new, animal’s-eye Laboratory work confirms not only that marine plants move
views of migration. For example, Kelly J. Benoit-Bird of the Mon- vertically but also that their behavior is more sophisticated than
terey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in California we had thought. One team at Washington State University set up
and Mark Moline of the University of Delaware sent an autono- 6.5-foot-tall saltwater tanks with dinoflagellate phytoplankton,
mous underwater vehicle 1,000 feet down into the Catalina Basin then introduced predatory copepods to one of the tanks. When
off southern California to take sonar measurements of vertically the scientists replicated typical day-night light cycles, they saw
migrating zooplankton. The echoes it returned were stunning: the hungry copepods making the traditional nighttime ascent
they revealed that the zooplankton were organized in well- and daytime descent. The phytoplankton in both tanks did the
defined clusters, tightly assembled by kind and migrating opposite—swimming up during the “sunlit” day and down at
together in carefully timed ascents. night, probably to maximize their sunlight exposure and mini-
“We need to start thinking about this not just as a bulk pro- mize their risk of being eaten by the night-feeding zooplankton.
cess but as an individual and species-by-species sort of thing,” To the researchers’ amazement, though, they saw that the sin-
Benoit-Bird says of vertical migration. And the adventurous zoo- gle-celled plants in the tower with the copepods routinely
plankton are not alone in the nightly commute. “So many ani- retreated even deeper than usual at night, putting more distance
mals use this as a strategy,” Benoit-Bird says. Octopus, lantern- between themselves and the enemies above. No one knows how
fish, siphonophores and other motley deep-sea creatures also the phytoplankton sense their predators’ behavior. But as the
make the nightly trek to avoid their own predators and to find researchers noted in their paper in M arine Ecology Progress
food—in their case, the other migrators. Series, “This newly reported behavioral response  ... could have
important ecological consequences.”
PLANTS ON THE MOVE
Animals might n ot be the only ones making routine vertical ALTERING THE CARBON BUDGET
migration. Kai Wirtz is a professor and ecosystem modeler at one consequence o f phytoplankton migration is the extent of
Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon’s Institute of Coastal Systems in Ger- climate change. In 1995 Steinberg and other scientists were try-

THE ZOOPLANKTON MENAGERIE comprises a wild array change direction and start studying diel migration. And she had
Solvin Zankl/Minden Pictures; Sergio Hanquet/Minden Pictures; Sergio Hanquet/Minden Pictures (top row, left to right);
Solvin Zankl/Minden Pictures; Flip Nicklin/Minden Pictures; Sinclair Stammers/Minden Pictures (bottom row, left to right)
of tiny animals. Clockwise from top left: A crab larva known an inkling that it might hold part of the carbon answer.
as a megalopa from the Atlantic Ocean; a blue and orange On the ocean’s surface, phytoplankton suck an enormous
plankton from the Canary Islands; a sea butterfly also from amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but they release
the Canary Islands; an arrow worm, found in all oceans, much of it right back into the air, often within days. As migrat-
from the surface to the deep; a blue bioluminescent plankton ing zooplankton swim up at night and eat these marine plants,
from the Arctic Ocean; and a buglike copepod from the Atlantic they become a kind of biological conveyor, transporting carbon
deep sea, common in tropical regions. down into the deep sea, where it can get sequestered for hun-
dreds or thousands of years.
ing to piece together the global carbon budget—the amount of To study this crucial movement of carbon, Michael Stukel, a
carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere and the amount plankton and marine biogeochemistry researcher at Florida State
pulled from it, in part by marine ecosystems. The numbers University, spends a lot of time peering through a microscope at
weren’t adding up; more carbon was disappearing from the zooplankton’s fecal pellets. Individual excretions are small, but
ocean surface than they could account for. Then Steinberg got when they happen on such an enormous scale, they take on global
a look into the darkness. biogeochemical significance.
As part of her research, done at the Bermuda Institute of Fecal pellets from vertical migrators, rich in carbon, descend
Ocean Sciences, Steinberg would often dive during the daytime, through the water column. They are joined by other sinking bio-
and she became well versed in the local fauna. But then she got logical particles, creating “marine snow” that slowly drops to the
to take a night dive. She plunged off the side of a small boat above deep seafloor. Together with the swimming zooplankton carry-
13,000 feet of dark water and soon found “it was a totally differ- ing their carbon-loaded dinners back down with them, this global
ent community. I was in the water with animals of every single sequestration of carbon means the planet is “not as hot as it oth-
kind,” she recalls, her voice still ringing with excitement more erwise would be,” Stukel says.
than a quarter of a century later. That night was her cue to Estimates of the amount of carbon sequestered by migrating

robust,” she says. To capture usable images and video, the team
needs a robot that can swim and produce light—both of which
could easily interfere with their subjects’ behavior. “That’s a huge
concern,” Katija acknowledges. One stealthy strategy is to use
red light, which most of these creatures can’t see, and a cruising
mode that minimizes turbulence. Researchers are also turning
to satellites in space that can observe the density of animals that
come up to feed at night without the risk of disturbing them.
Equipped with lidar—laser-based remote sensing technology—
they can peer into the water as far down as 65 feet.
To pinpoint which species are moving when and where, sci-
entists are also combing the water column for the genetic traces
of transitory organisms. One team dropped large seawater-sam-
pling bottles at various depths from its research ship as it drifted
in the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, the researchers were tak-
ing sonar readings of the life below. From the samples, they
sequenced strands of DNA to deduce what organisms had been
where—and when. The results, published in 2020, revealed poorly
resolved spots in the concurrent sonar readings. Although sonar
data suggested fish and other relatively large targets accounted
for much of the moving biomass, the DNA indicated that cope-
pods and gelatinous zooplankton had a much greater presence.
What researchers need most, they agree, is a global network
of ocean monitors that can watch these processes day in and
day out to more fully understand the ocean’s systems before
humans further disrupt them. For example, large-scale fishing
has been done almost exclusively in the ocean’s surface layer,
augmented more recently by bottom trawling. But now some
countries, including Norway and Pakistan, are issuing commer-
cial fishing permits for the middle swath of ocean, in part to suck
in the diel migrators and process them into food for farmed fish
and for fish oil.
Expanding dead zones and rising oxygen-minimum zones in
ocean water are also squeezing these animals out of livable day-
time habitats. And climate change is decreasing the mixing of
water layers in the open ocean, bringing fewer nutrients to phy-
organisms vary widely because so much about the diel migra- toplankton. Fewer phytoplankton means less food for migrating
tion remains a mystery. Better data will improve climate mod- zooplankton. All of which means the scientists studying these
els, which in turn will improve understanding of how climate animals are under growing pressure. “It’s not often that we have
change will alter these organisms’ behaviors—and, subsequently, the chance in history to understand a system before it’s
the climate again. “You run into these big questions for human- exploited,” Benoit-Bird says. “I feel like we’re kind of racing
ity, for climate, that we can’t answer, and a fair number of them against the clock.”
relate to these migrators,” says Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist To better understand the movements of trillions of copepods,
at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. krill and other elusive migrators, this summer Benoit-Bird and
her colleagues will return to sea. She hopes their expedition with
BALANCING ACT underwater robots, sonar, imaging and environmental DNA can
Answers to the remaining big questions about these migrators help them learn how these tiny animals self-organize during the
are likely to come from work such as that happening in Kakani day—rising and falling, tightening and loosening in swarms to
Katija’s lab at MBARI. There she’s adding stereoscopic cameras stay connected with networks of other species.
and vision algorithms to autonomous vehicles so they can care- In the meantime, the sun will continue to rise and set. As it
fully track the movements of specific migrators. She can now does, an untold number of animals will follow the underwater
train a vehicle and turn it loose to locate an animal and trail it tides of darkness and light, eating, excreting and modulating the
for hours. very balance of elements on our planet.
Katija’s team is training the technology on gelatinous crea-
tures such as siphonophores, which look like ghostly worms.
Because these animals have semitransparent tissue and move FROM OUR ARCHIVES
quickly and unpredictably, siphonophores are hard for an auton- The Basis of Aquatic Life. Leon Augustus Hausman; December 1924.
omous vehicle to keep sight of, but that’s what Katija wants:
“We’re trying to understand how to make these systems more

INTIMIDATOR
female blanket octopus unfurls her
A
iridescent cape. Scientists suspect that
the membranous webbing helps to
deter would-be predators by making
the octopus appear larger and more
intimidating. The female can grow to
six feet long and up to 40,000 times
heavier than the male, which is smaller
Mike Bartick
than a Ping Pong ball—one of the

most extreme sex differences in the
animal kingdom.

DISCOVERIES
FROM THE
DEEP

HEALING
WATERS
Compounds that sea creatures make to defend themselves
could yield lifesaving medicines
By Stephanie Stone
Photographs by Devin
56 Scientific American, August 2022 Oktar Yalkin
DISCOVERIES
FROM THE
DEEP
ESEARCHERS from
R
the Scripps Institu
tion of Oceanography
wade through sea
grass beds near
San Diego (opposite
page). The scientists
collect microbes
there for study and
store them in ultra
cold freezers at their
lab (this page).

Stephanie Stone is an award-winning science journalist and
video producer who covers biodiversity, sustainability and
human health. She is a co-founder of bioGraphic magazine.
A
fter completing six long rounds of
chemotherapy, 75-year-old Pedro
R. L. received the news he and his
family had been hoping for: his
chronic lymphocytic leukemia was
in complete remission. But while
his body was still recovering, he
contracted COVID-19. He was admitted to the Quirón-
salud Madrid University Hospital on January 30, 2021.
Initial treatments failed, and by February 25 he had
developed severe pneumonia. That’s when his doctor,
Pablo Guisado, recommended they try plitidepsin, a
potent antiviral compound in a phase 3 clinical trial
for treating hospitalized COVID patients.
Plitidepsin comes from a place few drugmakers
would have predicted: the seafloor around Es Vedrá, an
uninhabited rocky island off the southwestern coast of
Ibiza, Spain. Back in 1988, Madrid-based pharmaceuti-
cal company PharmaMar organized an expedition to
the storied site, an abrupt outcrop thought to have
inspired Homer’s tale in The Odyssey about singing
sirens luring sailors to their death. While diving on a
reef packed with purple corals and red sea fans, scien-
tists pulled a comparatively uninspiring invertebrate cer angle because cancer drugs tend to be more profit-
creature from a rocky slope 36 meters deep—a translu- able than antivirals. After decades of research and test-
cent, pale-yellow tunicate, Aplidium albicans, t hat ing, in 2018 Australia approved plitidepsin as a treat-
resembled a wad of discarded facial tissues. ment for multiple myeloma.
The researchers were interested in tunicates because When the COVID pandemic hit, company scientists
they filter-feed on plankton by continuously drawing quickly proved that plitidepsin was effective against
water through their barrel-shaped bodies. Along with SARS-CoV-2 in both laboratory cultures and mice, and
their food, they pull in viruses and other pathogens, so it outperformed competing antivirals in preclinical,
they need strong chemical defenses to fight off infec- head-to-head trials. In 2020 PharmaMar launched a
tious organisms—and that makes them promising phase 1-2 clinical trial for hospitalized COVID
patients
sources for medicines. that concluded in 2021. The results were dramatic:
By 1990 PharmaMar had isolated a compound from 74 percent of the patients with moderate disease recov-
the A. albicans specimen that was active against both ered fully within a week of their first dose. The phase 3
cancer and virus cultures. PharmaMar pursued the can- trial is due to finish by December. In May, PharmaMar

virologist Jose Jimeno said plitidepsin appeared to be ven, to treat late-stage breast cancer. And a venom pep- FREEZER RACKS
superior to other COVID antivirals. Its impact on Pedro tide from a cone snail, C onus magus, led to Prialt, a house 18,000
R. L. was impressive; after two courses of treatment, chronic pain drug. microbe strains
his pneumonia and the rest of his symptoms had Corals, sea slugs, marine worms and mollusks have collected over
cleared completely. also yielded promising compounds. “For the past 600 30 years. Scien
Today, worldwide, there are 21 approved drugs that million years these invertebrates have been living in this tists grow the
were sourced from the sea, most of them isolated from microbial soup that’s like a petri dish,” says marine ecol- strains in cul
invertebrates. Another tunicate, Ecteinascidia turbi- ogist Drew Harvell of Cornell University, explaining their tures, test their
nata, w hich attaches to submerged mangrove roots, need for robust defenses. An average liter of seawater biological prop
yielded the molecular mixture that led to Yondelis, a contains about one billion bacteria and 10 billion viruses. erties and may
sarcoma and ovarian cancer drug, and Zepzelca, which Although scientists first assumed most marine inverte- sequence their
targets small-cell lung cancer. A black sponge that brates evolved their own weapons, they have learned genomes look
encrusts tidal pool rocks in southern Japan, H alichon- over the past few decades that the majority of these ing for exploit
dria okadai, p roduced a drug, now marketed as Hala- defensive substances are actually produced by microbes able genes.

living symbiotically within the creatures’ tissues. Last
year, for instance, a team led by Samar Abdelrahman of
the Georgia Institute of Technology tested five species of
sea slugs from the Red Sea and found bacteria that pro-
duced antibacterial, antifungal and anticancer agents.
Drug discovery scientists—who for decades focused
on land-based biology because it was more familiar and
easier to access—now widely recognize that microbes,
which dominate the ocean’s biological diversity, are the
most likely sources of marine-derived medicines. Of 23
new drugs currently in clinical trials, 16 are produced
by microbes, and another four come from invertebrates
that probably owe their resilience to symbiotic mi
crobes. In recent years scientists have isolated thou-
sands of promising compounds from marine microbes,
the diversity of which reflects the vast variability of
marine conditions. “On land, microbes dry out; they
have trouble maintaining a fluid balance,” Harvell says.
“But the oceans are a much more permissive, welcom-
ing environment.”
Yet for most approved marine drugs, the process has
taken decades, partly because of insufficient funding
and partly because isolating, testing and producing
large quantities of novel compounds is time-consum-
ing. Fortunately, recent advances in genomics, chemis-
try and computation are enabling scientists to be more
targeted and efficient in the search for lifesaving med-
icines from the sea.
GENE TARGETS
In 1989 Paul Jensen brought sediments from the Baha-
mian seafloor back to his lab at the Scripps Institution
of Oceanography to mine them for medically useful bac-
teria. It wasn’t easy. His first challenge was to grow
marine bacteria in lab conditions that are, at best, an
approximation of those in the ocean. Then, when some
species grew, he had to persuade them to produce at
least a few of the molecules in their arsenal, even
though they weren’t subject to the same stimuli they
would face in their natural environment.
Despite these hurdles, Jensen eventually discovered
a new species of bacteria, S alinispora tropica, t hat pro- sequencing the DNA of entire communities of organ-
duced a novel cancer-killing molecule. That compound, isms in a sample—revealed still more hidden potential.
now marketed as marizomib, has just completed a Scientists started to find compound-encoding gene
phase 3 trial as a drug for glioblastoma, the deadly brain clusters in species they hadn’t even cultured in the lab.
cancer that claimed the lives of John McCain and Beau Today Jensen is also looking directly for molecules
Biden. It is currently awaiting approval from the Food instead of the microbes that produce them. On four
and Drug Administration. Marizomib is a powerful occasions over the past year, postdoctoral researchers
example of the potential for marine bacteria to yield on his team have waded into the seagrass beds off San
new medicines, but the process took more than three Diego’s Point Loma peninsula to submerge sheets of
decades, motivating Jensen and others to look for bet- tiny, absorbent beads, called resins, that pull organic
ter approaches. molecules out of seawater. Back in the lab, Jensen ana-
By the early 2000s genomics had transformed their lyzes the samples for bioactive compounds—chemicals
work. The first full genome sequences for marine that can act on a living organism.
microbes, including S. tropica, r evealed that species He already has a hit: a compound with an unusual
that produced just a few compounds in lab cultures carbon skeleton that includes a group of enzyme-reac-
could usually make many more; some of them had doz- tive molecules Jensen thinks could act “as something
ens of compound-encoding gene clusters in their DNA. like a warhead.” This novel structure might function
Within a few years metagenomics—the process of very differently than existing medicines do. “I think it’s

going to kill cells,” Jensen predicts. “Now we’re hoping salis a nd Pseudonocardia oceani, t hat produce antimi- PAUL JENSEN
to get a sense of what its target might be.” crobial compounds. On land, members of the same (left) has been
Next, he will need to match the compound to its pro- genus live symbiotically with fungus-growing ants, pro- investigating
ducer. Enormous databases of marine microbial ducing antibacterial and antifungal molecules that ocean com
genomes and bioactive compounds, along with the deter pathogens from invading the ants’ fungal gardens. pounds for
computing power necessary to correlate them, are It’s not a stretch to imagine that the marine cousins potential drugs
enabling scientists to link chemicals to genes efficiently. could yield anti-infective drugs. for decades.
Katherine Duncan, a marine microbial chemist at the One of the greatest challenges scientists such as A researcher
University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, is a pioneer of Duncan and Jensen face is figuring out which molecu- from his lab
this approach, which she calls pattern-based genome lar discoveries warrant the most attention. Nadine (right) dips a
mining. The technique has become possible only Ziemert, a microbiologist at the University of Tübin- sheet studded
recently. “We just haven’t had the tools to compare data gen in Germany, has developed a tool to help research- with absorbent
sets of this size,” she says. ers mine genomes in a more targeted way by looking resin beads that
Duncan is now using this technique to analyze dark for resistance genes. Any organism that produces a can pull organic
molecules out
sediment cores pulled from the ocean floor 4,000 to toxic molecule must have some mechanism for protect-
of seawater.
4,500 meters deep off the coast of Antarctica. The early ing itself from its own weapon—usually by making a
results are tantalizing: The samples include at least two modified copy of the toxin’s cellular target that can
new species of marine bacteria, P seudonocardia abys- resist its attack.

Ziemert’s tool, called the Antibiotic Resistant Tar-
get Seeker, allows researchers to access a database of
more than 10,000 bacterial genomes—or upload their
own—and run a search for resistance genes related to
specific cell functions. The database will become more
valuable as it grows, especially as researchers acceler-
ate their work to sequence the genomes of species from
extreme, underexplored environments. Ziemert’s tar-
get seeker has shown such promise that start-up com-
pany Hexagon Bio has built a similar tool to mine fun-
gus genomes for promising compounds.
NEW ANTIBIOTICS
Targeted genome mining couldn’t come at a better time.
The COVID pandemic has highlighted the need for a
deeper pool of drugs to treat emerging infectious dis-
eases. There is also a desperate need for new drugs to
treat established diseases. Many bacterial infections,
including pneumonia, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, blood
poisoning and various foodborne diseases, have become
harder—and in some cases, impossible—to treat be
cause of rising microbial resistance to antibiotics. Pub-
lic health officials widely recognize antibiotic resistance
as one of the gravest threats facing humanity.
Because almost all antibiotics come from terrestrial
microbes, it seems clear that marine microbes, which
are greatly understudied, hold the potential to address
this crisis. University of Sydney chemist Richard Payne
is particularly excited about their ability to treat tuber-
culosis, caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. “Over
the last 10 years TB has been the greatest killer among
infectious diseases,” Payne says, “and with all the efforts
that have gone to COVID, we’ve gone backward with
our control of TB.” An antibiotic that targets a differ-
ent TB protein than past drugs is needed.
That’s exactly what Payne found in a bacterium from
Shinyang Beach on Jeju Island, South Korea, a horse-
shoe of white sand on a small peninsula best known for
its ideal windsurfing and kitesurfing conditions. The
compound, ohmyungsamycin A, prevents M. tubercu-
losis from properly disposing of its waste proteins, ulti-
mately killing the cell. And when Payne created a set of
chemical analogs—slightly altered, chemically synthe-
sized molecules that could be produced in volume—one
of them was so potent that it completely sterilized a lab-
grown tuberculosis colony in three days. The drug has
already proved effective in infected zebra fish and is
moving on to trials in mice.
Finding and developing new antibiotics have largely
fallen to academics in recent decades because the drugs
sell at such low prices that pharmaceutical companies
lack the financial incentive to pursue them. The same
math applies to treatments for many neglected tropi-
cal diseases, including malaria. In 2012 Scripps chem-
ist William Gerwick isolated a molecule called carma-
phycin B from a tuft of cyanobacteria growing on a
boat’s mooring line in a Curaçao harbor. He chemically
synthesized a set of analogs that he tested against can-
cer cells, a frequent first line of research.

A MARINE
invertebrate
recently cap
tured by a sub
mersible in the
deep sea off
southern Cali
fornia (2,500
meters down)
remains frozen,
waiting to
be identified.

SALINISPORA The results were not spectacular, so Gerwick turned On a recent expedition to the central Pacific Ocean’s
bacteria from his attention to other projects. Recently, however, a col- Phoenix Islands archipelago onboard the Schmidt
the sea, cultured league suggested that they test his analogs on malaria Ocean Institute’s research vessel, F alkor, Anna Gauth-
in a lab dish, pro parasites, and this time the outcome was striking. “One ier became one of the first scientists to sample deep-sea
duce a cancer- of them was exquisitely reactive against malaria,” Ger- bacteria from the islands. Gauthier, a doctoral student
killing molecule wick says. Moreover, it wasn’t toxic to human cells. at Harvard University, planned to conduct immune
marketed as Gerwick now has funding to explore carmaphycin B response experiments during the expedition, so she
marizomib that as a new antimalarial drug. Whether or not it eventu- didn’t immediately freeze bacteria she pulled from the
has just com ally becomes an approved medicine, the discovery is a sea, which is the usual practice. Instead she started cul-
pleted phase 3 reminder about the possibilities stored in the thou- turing the organisms onboard the ship.
trials as a drug sands of bioactive marine compounds scientists have The technique provided an unintended benefit:
for glioblas already identified. survivorship was far higher than in traditional, lab-
toma, a deadly Carmaphycin B is also a reminder that technologi- based cultures of defrosted specimens. Eighty percent
brain cancer. cal advances alone won’t deliver new drugs; serendip- of the bacteria she grew were so different from those
ity and a willingness to capitalize on it are often typically encountered by mammals that they didn’t
required. On the day that Gerwick’s former student trigger an immune response from mammalian cells.
Joshawna Nunnery collected the cyanobacteria from The finding, though still far from leading to a medical
the mooring line, she was supposed to be diving else- advance, has tantalizing potential for immunothera-
where. But when her lab mate and diving partner con- pies and vaccines.
tracted dengue fever, she had to cancel those plans and The promise of new lifesaving medicines, paired
resorted to snorkeling near the research station instead. with rising public health crises, offers tremendous moti-
Opportunities to capitalize on such serendipity are vation for scientists such as Duncan in Glasgow. “I know
increasing as investment in ocean exploration grows. people who have been on last-line antibiotics and were
resistant,” she says. “My grandma died from sepsis.
Everyone has stories like that.”
FROM OUR ARCHIVES Duncan hopes those stories may change within the
Can We Save the Corals? Rebecca Albright; January 2018. next decade. “The marine environment is hugely undis-
covered,” she marvels. The next plitidepsin is out there
in the ocean. It might already be in a lab.

DISCOVERIES
FROM THE
DEEP
DYNAMIC SEAS
How the ocean organizes itself
Editor: Mark Fischetti
Graphics: Skye Moret and Jen Christiansen
Consultant: Kelly J. Benoit-Bird,
Science Chair, Monterey Bay
Aquarium Research Institute
THE CLASSIC PROFILE
Numerous diagrams depict the ocean as
a layer cake made up of five standard zones that
are defined by depth and are uniform worldwide.
The typical cross section, which is admittedly handy,
is shown below. In reality, however, the ocean is
much more dynamic and varied.
Pressure at sea level is
S
1 atmosphere (atm)
EARCH “OCEAN ZONES” ONLINE, and you
Sunlight typically will see hundreds of illustrations that
penetrates
to 200 meters depict the same vertical profile of the
Zone sea. The thin, top layer is the “sun-
Sunlight light” or epipelagic zone, which receives
200 m (epipelagic) enough light for photosynthesis by phyto-
656 feet Twilight plankton, algae and some bacteria. Below it
1,000 m (mesopelagic) is the twilight zone, where the light fades but
0.6 mile is still strong enough for some animals to see
by and where many animals make their own
200 atm light through bioluminescence. Next is the
(2,000 m) Midnight midnight zone, with no measurable light, fol-
(bathypelagic) lowed by the relentlessly cold abyss. Finally,
there are the incredibly deep seafloor
400 atm
(4,000 m) trenches known as the hadal zone, named
4,000 m after Hades, Greek god of the underworld.
2.5 mi In this classic view, the amount of light
and the water pressure—which increases
steadily with depth—largely define which
600 atm Abyssal
creatures live where. Those factors are
(6,000 m)
important, but so are water temperature,
salinity, amounts of oxygen and nitrogen,
and the changing currents. Data collected
worldwide have revealed that ocean dynam-
Seafloor ics, and ocean life, are far more complex
Trench Hadal
than we thought, surprising us again and
again as we explore.

A New View of the Sea
SALINITY North Atlantic Earth has one interconnected ocean. Data from five locations that vary
Alique eossitempora in latitude and distance from the shore reveal how much temperature,
aspiciis et prat aliquis salinity, oxygen and nitrogen—a key nutrient for plants and animals—
Surface
sim res moditasim can diverge among the seas.
fugia nissequibus
aborro esequib
SALINITY
usciandel ium LIGHT PENETRATION
velectumque
The volupta
North Atlantic Sunlight determines how deep photo
Depth Indian Ocean LIGHT PENETRATION
iscore
thedoloria
saltiestcus
ocean, synthesis
Alique can occur,aspiciis
eossitempora yet a greater
et pratlocal
perspelibus near
particularly et faccabo
the 1,000 abundance
repellabTrade
id quisque meters aliquis sim resofmoditasim
organismsfugia
and their
surface. windssus waste products
nissequibus aborrocanesequib
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usciandel
expernam
carry away abo. Ut dus
evaporating 0.6 mile Penetration depth variescore
withdoloria
location
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abo.isUt
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behind when 2,000 m
inciendfreezes.
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1.2 mi
Salinity, in practical
salinity units (psu)
33.2 36.7
Low High 3,000 m

1.9 mi
NITROGEN
NITROGEN
Surface water tends
Alique eossitempora
to be low in nitrogen
aspiciis et prat aliquis
because the element
sim res moditasim
is consumed by the 4,000 m
fugia nissequibus
many photosynthesiz 2.5 mi
aborro esequib
ing phytoplankton
usciandel ium
there. In the Southern Data from
velectumque volupta
Ocean, water that is Nov. 2003
core doloria cus
more uniformly dense
perspelibus et faccabo
from top to bottom
repellab id quisque sus
helps to distribute
expernam abo. Ut dus
nitrogen evenly.
ex estraestis apero qui
cuserspelibus
Each et
sphere indicates a measurement at that
quisque sus expernam
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abo.top
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dushundred
ex meters of the water column. 4,000 m
estrumaestis apero qui
cuserspelibus 2.5 mi
42.7 et
micromoles per kilogram
faccabo repellab id
0.04 µmol/kg
quisque sus expernam
abo. Ut dus ex
TEMPERATURE
TEMPERATURE
Warm water reaches deeper in equatorial regions such as the Indian
Ocean. The transitionaspiciis
Alique eossitempora between et warmer surface
prat aliquis sim reswaters and colder
moditasim fugia 5,000 m Data from
deep waters aborro
nissequibus happens at increasingly
esequib usciandelshallower depths toward
ium velectumque voluptathe
core 3.1 mi Jan. 2004
poles (Southern
doloria Ocean).etOn
cus perspelibus average,
faccabo worldwide
repellab temperature
id quisque in the
sus expernam
top
abo.700 meters
Ut dus has risen
ex estrum by about
inciend 0.8apero
aestis degreequiCelsius since 1971.
cuserspelibus et
faccabo repellab id quisque sus expernam abo. Ut dus ex estrum
0.5˚C 26.1˚C
32.9˚F 79.0˚F DISSOLVED OXYGEN
Oxygen DISSOLVED OXYGEN
levels are high at the surface, where water
mixesAlique
with aireossitempora
and photosynthesis
aspiciisisetextensive. Low
prat aliquis sim res
Cold Hot concentrations
moditasimoccurfugiawherever
nissequibusbacteria
aborroconsume
esequibtoo
Each bubble represents
muchusciandel
oxygen asium theyvelectumque
decompose small creatures.
volupta core doloria
a sample analyzed
Colder water,
cus as in theetSouthern
perspelibus faccaboOcean,
repellabcanid contain
quisque sus Data from
from a discrete depth.
muchexpernam
more oxygen abo.byUtvolume.
dus ex In the past
estrum 50 years
inciend aestis Aug. 2005
oxygen levels
apero quiworldwide have et
cuserspelibus decreased
faccabo an average
repellab id of
316 µmol/kg
2 percquisque
ent, andsuslevels in some abo.
expernam tropical regions
Ut dus have
ex estrum
dropped by upaestis
inciend to 40apero
percent
quibecause
cus of warming. 11 µmol/kg

SURFACECOLOR
SURFACE COLOR UPWELLING
UPWELLING
“Aqua eossitempora
Alique blue” is an appealing
aspiciisvision,
et pratbut the ocean’s
aliquis sim ressurface
moditasimcolorfugia
varies quite a bit aborro
nissequibus The ocean
Alique varies in time
eossitempora as welletasprat
aspiciis space. On the
aliquis simwestern coasts
res moditasim
globally.usciandel
esequib A greaterium
concentration
velectumque of phytoplankton full of chlorophyll,
volupta core doloria for example,
cus perspelibus addsrepellab
et faccabo of continents, steady
fugia nissequibus windsesequib
aborro along the shore, inium
usciandel combination
velectumque with
idmore green.
quisque susAnd the Ut
exper. more
dusbiologically productive
ex estrum inciend aes aexpernam
region is, abo.
the less clearexthe
Ut dus water.inciend
estrum Earth’s
voluptarotation, can push
core doloria cussurface water out
perspelibus to sea, letting
et faccabo deepidwater
repellab
aestis apero qui cuserspelibus et faccabo repellab id quisque sus eus expernam abo. Ut rise. This “upwelling”
quisque sus expernam along California’s
avolupta corecoast brings
doloria cus cold water rich
perspelibus etin
Surface Chlorophyll nutrients such asUt
faccabo repbo. nitrate
dus extoestrum
the surface, where
inciend it fuels
aestis aperophytoplank
qui
Concentration ton blooms, which
cuserspelibus consumerepellab
et faccabo oxygen.idThe winds sus
quisque tendexpernam
to last for seven
abo.
(milligrams per cubic meter) to
Ut10dus
days
exbefore
estrumrelaxing,
inciend allowing surface
aestis apero qui water
cus to warm again.
California Coast
0.01 20
Relaxed state Upwelling event (7 to 10 days)
Salinity Nitrate Temperature Oxygen
Central Pacific
Surface
5m
10 m
20 m
1,000 m
0.6 mi 30 m
60 m
80 m
100 m
2,000 m
psu µmol/kg µmol/kg
1.2 mi
Maximum 34.09 31.9 12.1˚C / 53.8˚F 280.2
Data from Minimum 33.22 2.5 8.5˚C / 47.3˚F 60.1

May 2007
3,000 m
THRIVING LIFE
1.9 mi THRIVING LIFE
Water deeper than the sunlight zone accounts for more than
We can bracket a spot on one of these water columns, if that’s
90 percent of Earth’s living space. It is home to the largest animal
useful. eossitempora aspiciis et prat aliquis sim res moditasim
communities on the planet—largest in biomass and in numbers
fugia nissequibus aborro eat aliquis sim res moditasim fugia
of individuals. Scientists estimate that the dark seas may hold
nissequibus aborro esequib usfugia nissequibus aborro eat
a million undescribed species.
aliquis sim res moditasim fugiciandel ium velectumque volupta
3,000 m core doloria cus perspelibus et faccabo repellab id
1.9 mi CONVEYOR BELT
Gigantic masses of water with the same density slowly circulate
THERMOCLINE
along an established route. Cold, salty water near the North
Alique eossitempora
Atlantic surface—richaspiciis
in oxygenet prat aliquis
but low sim res moditasim
in nutrients—sinks and
fugia nissequibus
creeps aborro
along the esequibtoward
sea bottom usciandel
the ium velectumque
Indian and then
volupta core
Pacific doloriaa cus
Oceans, perspelibus
circuit et faccabo
that can take reta core
1,000 years. Along
doloria cus perspelibus
the way, organisms useet faccabo repellaband
up the oxygen, id quisque
decayingsus
life
4,000 m expernam abo. Utcreating
adds nutrients, dus ex estrum inciend aestis
the oxygen-poor, apero qui
nutrient-rich
2.5 mi cuserspelibus et faccabo
waters of the global deeprepellab id quisque
ocean, notably sus
the Pacific.
North Atlantic
Indian Ocean
5,000 m
3.1 mi
Sources: World Ocean Atlas 2018,
by Tim P. Boyer et al., NOAA National
Centers for Environmental Information.
h ttps://www.ncei.noaa.gov/archive/ Central Pacific
accession/NCEI-WOA18. A ccessed June
2022 (d ata plotted on columns) ; “Global
Maps of Forel–Ule Index, Hue Angle
and Secchi Disk Depth Derived from
21 Years of Monthly ESA Ocean Colour
Climate Change Initiative Data,” by
Data from 6,000 m
Dec. 2005
Jaime Pitarch et al., in E arth System
Science Data, V ol. 13; February 2021
Southern Ocean
3.7 mi (photic zone reference); “A World of
Chlorophyll,” image created by Jesse
Allen, NASA Earth Observa t ory, using
data provided by SeaWiFS Project,
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
and ORBIMAGE (s ea-surface color refer California Coast
ence) ; “The Global Importance of the
Southern Ocean and the Key Role of Its
Freshwater Cycle,” by Michael P. Mere
dith, inOcean Challenge, V ol. 23; 2019
(g lobal ocean conveyor belt reference) August 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 67
DIVE KINGS
ing penguins nest in massive colonies—
K
sometimes with hundreds of thousands
of birds—on sub-Antarctic islands. They
do not build nests. Instead they keep
each egg warm on the top of their feet.
Tui De Roy/Minden Pictures
The males take the first incubation shift,

which can last for weeks, while the
females venture to the sea for a well-
earned meal. Measuring about three feet
tall, the kings are the second-largest of all
penguins, eclipsed only by the emperors.

DISCOVERIES
FROM THE
DEEP

Timothy Shank is a biologist, director of the Molecular Ecology
and Evolution Lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,
and co-leader of the Deep-Ocean Genomes Project.
TURNING
THE TIDE
Discoveries keep revising our long-held views of life
By Timothy Shank
for more than 50 years deep-sea exploration has been a continuous fount of discoveries
that change how we think about life in the ocean, on dry land and even beyond our planet.
Consider the following three events.
On October 16, 1968, a cable tethering the submersible discovered a significant hydrothermal vent ecosystem on the East
lvin t o a research ship located 100 miles off Nantucket broke.
A Pacific Rise. The system had been destroyed by a seafloor erup-
The sub sank to the seafloor more than 5,000 feet below; the tion just a few years earlier, yet it had already been bountifully
crew of three escaped safely. Nearly a year later, when a team recolonized. A bologna sandwich might decay so slowly in the
brought Alvin b ack to the surface, the biggest surprise was that deep that you could eat it a year later, but it turned out that bio-
the crew’s lunch—bologna sandwiches and apples in a plastic logical processes in the deep sea could be extremely fast as well.
box—was strikingly well preserved. Bacteriological and bio- Each new ocean discovery that disrupts old dogma rein-
chemical assays proved it. Someone even took a bite. Subse- forces a much larger truth: the ocean is far more complex—and
quent experiments in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institu- much more intertwined with our own lives—than we ever
tion laboratory where I’m writing this article found that rates imagined. For much of the 20th century, for example, scientists
of microbial degradation in the retrieved samples were 10 to maintained that the deep ocean was a harsh, monotonous place
100 times slower than expected. This discovery, and others, led of perpetual darkness, frigid temperatures, limited food and
to the conclusion that metabolic and growth rates among deep- extreme pressure—conditions that should make complex forms
sea organisms were much slower than those of comparable spe- of life impossible. But new tools for observing, sensing and
cies at the ocean’s surface. sampling the deep ocean, such as increasingly sophisticated
In 1977 scientists diving in the restored Alvin made another underwater vehicles with high-definition camera systems, have
historic discovery—the first in-person observations of life demonstrated that biodiversity in the darkest depths may rival
around hot, hydrothermal vents rising from the seafloor. This that of rain forests and tropical coral reefs. These missions
sighting overturned the long-held view that our entire plane- have further revealed that the depths are far from uniform; like
tary food web was built on photosynthesis—using sunlight’s kangaroo habitat in Australia and tiger lands in Asia, they are
energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into complex car- home to evolutionarily distinct biogeographic regions.
bohydrates and oxygen. The hydrothermal organisms, and the We are beginning to appreciate how connected these realms
entire ecosystem, thrived in pure darkness, converting chemi- are to our own. The rapid three-dimensional change of condi-
cals in the vent fluid into life-sustaining compounds through a tions such as temperature, salinity and oxygen concentration in
process we now call chemosynthesis. the deep ocean and the currents and eddies that establish the
If that revelation wasn’t surprising enough, an expedition I boundaries of these provinces are expected to fundamentally
was part of in 1993 exposed an earlier mistaken belief. We had change as the effects of human activity reach ever farther below

DISCOVERIES
FROM THE
DEEP
THE ORPHEUS from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution terized by misfolded proteins. In addition, decoding the genes
is designed to maneuver autonomously and in swarms of vehicles that govern traits we see in deep-sea animals, such as those that
at the deepest depths and to land to collect samples on the fly. stave off errors in DNA replication, transcription and transla-
tion, might be used in therapies for cancer and other afflictions.
the surface. Already lobsters are moving to deeper, colder waters The greatest paradigm that ocean exploration may tear
and molting at different times of the year. Commercially impor- down is that Earth represents the sole example of life in the
tant groundfish such as cod and haddock are migrating pole- universe. Life might have existed on Mars when it hosted liquid
ward in search of more suitable habitat. water, and the fact that Earth and Mars have shared ejected
We are seeing that the ocean’s biogeographic boundaries are material in the past means we could have exchanged the build-
neither immutable nor beyond the imprint of humans. In stud- ing blocks of life. But the discovery of chemosynthetic life on
ies, more than half of sampled hadal organisms—those living in Earth and the more recent finding of perhaps 13 liquid-water
the deepest parts of the ocean, beyond 20,000 feet—had plas- oceans underneath the icy shells of moons such as Jupiter’s
tics in their gut. PCBs, which were banned in the U.S. in 1979 Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus—places that may have been too
Evan Kovacs/© Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
and phased out internationally as part of the Stockholm Con- distant to have shared life-bearing material with Earth in the
vention beginning in 2001, are also common in tissues of ani- past—raise the possibility of a second, independent genesis of
mals from the extreme bottoms of the sea. life. And if life can form twice in one solar system, then it could
We are also starting to learn that life in the deep might have be anywhere we look in the heavens.
things to teach us. Deep-sea fish produce biomolecules called os
molytes that permit cellular functions, such as the precise fold-
ing and unfolding of proteins, to proceed unimpeded by crush-
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
ing water-column pressures exceeding 15,000 pounds per square Team Players. J effrey Marlow and Rogier Braakman; November 2018.
inch. Medical researchers have determined that some of these
molecules could help treat Alzheimer’s disease, which is charac-

ASTROBOTIC’SPeregrine lander is due to launch
to the moon by the end of 2022. It will carry a mix
of science experiments and private payloads.

S PA C E E X P L O R AT I O N
The New
Race
to the
Moon Commercial spacecraft are vying
to land on the lunar surface, but can
they kick-start a new space economy?
By Rebecca Boyle
Illustrations by Don Foley

Rebecca Boyle is an award-winning freelance journalist
in Colorado. Her forthcoming book W alking with the Moon:
Uncovering the Secrets It Holds to Our Past and Our Future
(Random House) will explore Earth’s relationship with its
satellite throughout history.
O ne day last December, John Walker Moosbrugger, a 25-year-old

project manager for the lunar robotics start-up Astrobotic, sat in
front of the company’s clean room and watched as an instrument
older than him was attached to a moon lander. The vehicle, called
Peregrine, was a four-legged, foil-wrapped canister as big as a hot
tub. The instrument—Surface and Exosphere Alterations by Land-
ers, or SEAL—was a shoebox-sized sensor designed to study how
a spacecraft’s landing disturbs moon dust. Peregrine is scheduled to launch later this year—and
it is just one of many missions that private companies are scrambling to send up after years of
preparation. Since its founding in 2007 as a scrappy competitor for the now defunct Google Lunar
XPRIZE, Astrobotic had been working on its lander and signing deals with companies that wanted
to put instruments on it, planning for a launch eventually. But in 2018 nasa came calling with a
funding scheme that would turn Astrobotic into one of several moon ferries by the middle of this
decade. Since then, Walker has been readying payloads like SEAL. “All of a sudden, in late Octo-
ber, [nasa representatives] started showing up,” Walker says. “Everything got very real.”
Sometime in the next four or five months, the first American et in 2006, and since 2012 it and other private companies such
moon missions in half a century will make a return to Earth’s as Northrop Grumman have been flying cargo to the Interna-
satellite. The arrivals won’t be human—at least not yet—and they tional Space Station—and more lately, crew. In 2021 the long-
won’t even be government-built. The coming lunar fleet will con- delayed era of regular private space tourism arrived as billion-
sist of private spacecraft carrying science experiments and oth- aires and celebrity customers started riding rockets into near-
er cargo for paying customers, including nasa. Astrobotic’s Per- Earth space.
egrine lander is due to ride on United Launch Alliance’s new Vul- But going to the moon is a much taller order. Rockets that can
can Centaur rocket, scheduled to make its inaugural voyage reach the moon must burn more fuel than normal launches to es-
before the end of 2022. Competing lunar start-up Intuitive Ma- cape Earth’s orbit and enter a lunar trajectory, and the journey
chines is set to launch its lunar lander, Nova-C, on a SpaceX Fal- takes about three days, as opposed to a few minutes to reach Earth
con 9 rocket, also by the end of this year. A dozen more firms are orbit. Although companies such as SpaceX have plans for crewed
expected to follow in the next six years, carrying cargo that rang- ships to the moon, none have made it past the prototype phase,
es from a magnetometer and supplies for a future lunar base so for now the new moon race is being pioneered by small com-
camp to small amounts of cremated human remains. panies such as Astrobotic.
These will be just the latest firsts in a gradual ramping up of nasa has not gotten out of the spacecraft business; its Arte-
the commercial space economy. SpaceX launched its first rock- mis program, a sister to the Apollo missions, aims to return hu-

mans to the lunar surface by 2025. The agency has been work- One former competitor, an Israeli start-up called SpaceIL, even-
ing on its own new moon rocket, the Space Launch System, since tually made it to the moon, albeit with an unplanned crash land-
2011, and scientists still plan new missions under its planetary ing in April 2019. But in vying for the prize, several companies had
exploration programs. But outsourcing these smaller, near-term built lander prototypes and rovers that could theoretically deliv-
missions to industry is part of nasa’s modern strategy of paying er all kinds of cargo to the moon, in some cases much more cheap-
private companies to take on some of the load. nasa officials say ly than a traditional nasa mission. They included Astrobotic, an-
a commercial lunar market will increase competition, drive down other outfit called Moon Express, and even smaller firms such as
prices and ensure people will keep going back to the moon re- Micro-Space. After the competition ended, many of these compa-
gardless of who occupies the White House. For their part, the nies continued working on their landers, rovers and instruments,
companies hope that their nasa-subsidized cargo deliveries will in Astrobotic’s case even lining up customers for eventual trips.
jump-start a new economic boom, the way the transcontinental Eyeing those companies and the success of COTS, nasa cre-
railroad spurred Western development in 19th-century Ameri- ated the $2.6-billion Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS)
ca. This time the rush would be for moon metals, water and he- program in 2018, arguing that a high-risk, high-reward scheme
lium—materials that could become precious if rockets were to would enable more science for nasa’s dollar while encouraging
start launching out into the solar system from a lunar base station. a fledgling lunar marketplace to take off. Under CLPS—usually
In the meantime, science missions that have been lingering called “clips”—nasa pays private companies to build landers, rov-
for years or otherwise had little chance of reaching space are ers and other instruments and to carry science experiments on
poised to make it to the moon. The SEAL instrument, for exam- them. This time, Zurbuchen figured, the odds were probably bet-
ple, is a spare copy of one built in 1996 for a different mission. It ter than in 2007: lunar technology was more advanced, and there
didn’t fly then, but now, thanks to this private-public moon rush, were more rockets capable of making the trip to the moon.
it should get its chance. Geopolitics also helped CLPS get off the ground. Zurbuchen
Lunar scientists are watching this activity with a mixture of was able to secure that $2.6 billion in part because of Trump’s
skepticism and hope. “I’m still pretty early in my career, and this moon ambitions and in part because of American fears of Chi-
is the second or third time I’ve been told we’re going back to the na’s rise in space. In December 2020 a Chinese lander and rover
moon,” says Angela Stickle, a planetary scientist at Johns arrived at the moon’s south pole, collecting samples that were
Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “But I think it later returned to Earth. “We have every reason to believe that we
is real this time. The launches are on the books, they’ve been paid have a very aggressive competitor in the Chinese, going back to
for, and that’s something we’ve never had before.” the moon with taikonauts,” nasa administrator Bill Nelson said
Of course, the sustainability of any private enterprise depends in November 2021, referring to Chinese astronauts. “And it’s the
on making money, and the prospects for a gold rush on the moon position of nasa, and I believe the United States government,
are still speculative. Is there really a lasting market for commer- that we want to be there first.” Suddenly, Lunar XPRIZE compet-
cial lunar landers? That depends on who you ask—and on what itors such as Astrobotic were back in the game, carrying the fire
the new fleet of robots is able to pull off. for American space interests. “In 2018 there was a Chinese lunar
mission and zero U.S. lander missions on contract,” says Dan
Private moon missions are arguably the inevitable next step in Hendrickson, vice president of business development at
a process that nasa set in motion 17 years ago, with the creation Astrobotic. “Fast-forward to 2021: there are now seven Ameri-
of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) pro- can lunar lander contracts in place. It’s a sea change.”
gram. COTS was nasa’s plan to pay private companies to devel- nasa missions typically fall into one of three classes. Flagship
op ships that could fly to the space station after the retirement missions such as the Mars rovers or the James Webb Space Tele-
of the space shuttles. nasa spent $500 million over five years to scope take up the most money and the most attention. They are
help SpaceX and Orbital Sciences develop new rockets and car- usually decades-long, multibillion-dollar projects run by teams
go ships. The program was a success, leading to new reusable of scientists and engineers from across the space agency and uni-
launchers and vehicles that reliably bring supplies to the space versity partners. Missions that are slightly smaller fall into a class
station. SpaceX has since completed 156 launches of Falcon 9 called New Frontiers, and they are capped at $850 million. The
rockets, developed with nasa seed money, and in 2020 the com- Discovery missions are the leanest, with a cost cap of $450 mil-
pany began flying human astronauts to the station, too. lion. Launching any of these missions requires years of planning
The commercial cargo program’s legacy may have been on and preparation, and not every mission is chosen; scientists may
Thomas Zurbuchen’s mind in December 2017, when the Trump try for a good portion of their career before landing a Discovery
administration announced a program aimed at returning to the mission or getting an instrument on a New Frontiers spacecraft.
moon. Trump wanted to send astronauts there by 2024, and Zur- The CLPS program is different. A single commercial lander
buchen, the astrophysicist in charge of nasa’s science mission might carry a dozen payloads that have nothing to do with one
directorate, saw an opportunity to add to nasa’s science budget another. Scientists who would otherwise spend years preparing
at the same time. He began asking, “Whatever happened to the a Discovery mission proposal could instead submit a simple sci-
companies that competed in the ill-fated Google Lunar XPRIZE?” ence instrument for a CLPS mission, meaning faster scientific
The competition, which Google and the XPRIZE Foundation return for less money. “You don’t have to spend 15 years build-
created in 2007, would have awarded $20 million to the first pri- ing a spacecraft when you can do it in two,” Stickle says.
vately financed moon lander. The program ended after a decade As of April 2022, CLPS had awarded contracts for seven de-
without a winner; getting to the moon was just too difficult and liveries from four companies: Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines,
expensive to make the comparatively meager purse worthwhile. Firefly Aerospace and Masten Space Systems. Astrobotic’s Pere-

even whether a body like the moon is vital for the eventu-
al origin of life.
The first few CLPS experiment awards went to sci-
entific instruments that were simple and cheap. In
some cases, nasa looked for spares like SEAL that
were sitting on a shelf, maybe canceled from
previously proposed missions or left over from
other spacecraft. Robert Grimm, a planetary
scientist at the Southwest Research Insti-
tute, who is building multiple instruments
to fly on different landers, says one agency
official joked with him, “We’re so desper-
ate for payloads, we’ll send rocks back
to the moon.”
On its first mission, set for the fourth
quarter of 2022, Astrobotic’s Peregrine
Lunar Lander will carry two dozen pay-
loads—including the SEAL instrument—
to Lacus Mortis, a hexagonal lava plain
on the northeastern face of the moon’s
near side. One of Intuitive Machines’ No-
va-Cs will carry six payloads to Oceanus
Procellarum, a vast dark plain on the west-
ern edge of the moon. The other is set to
bring a mass spectrometer and a drill called
PRIME-1 that will extract and sample lunar
ice from the south pole region. Later missions
will attempt more daring sites with more in-
teresting geological features and will bring in-
struments to study the moon’s magnetic field and
FIREFLY AEROSPACEhopes its Blue Ghost spacecraft geology, among other goals. Astrobotic even won a
will be among the first private vehicles to reach the moon. $199.5-million contract to deliver a large rover called
VIPER, a major science mission that will prospect for wa-
grine and two Intuitive Machines Nova-C landers are up first, ter at the south pole in 2023.
scheduled to launch in late 2022. David Blewett is a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins
“We went from 50 years of nothing going to the moon to sev- University Applied Physics Laboratory whose mission was se-
en deliveries scheduled over the next three and a half years,” lected in June 2021 for a 2024 flight. His project, called Lunar
Chris Culbert, who manages the CLPS program at the nasa John- Vertex, will investigate the magnetic anomaly in a region called
son Space Center, said at a panel discussion in November 2021. Reiner Gamma, which contains a bright surface marking shaped
like a tadpole. The swirl has been known since the Renaissance,
Experiments won’t be the only cargo on the first private lunar but scientists debate how it formed. Some theories suggest the
missions. Astrobotic’s manifest includes items from, among oth- moon’s magnetic field changed the motion of the surface dust,
ers, the Mexican Space Agency, which is launching the first lu- whereas another postulates that a collision with a comet’s tail
nar instruments from Latin America; a Japanese company called modified the lunar surface. Lunar Vertex will study the paisley-
Astroscale, sending a time capsule of messages from children pattern area for about one lunar day—13 Earth days—to deter-
around the world; and two firms promising to fly cremated hu- mine the swirl’s magnetic properties, origin, and more.
man remains to the lunar surface on behalf of family members Under the traditional nasa mission-selection process, Lunar
who want a celestial send-off for their loved one. Vertex would have been part of a $450-million spacecraft. In-
But if the missions land safely, they will also pull off a lot of stead it’s flying for $30 million as one of a handful of instruments
science, possibly answering some of the most urgent questions onboard the scrappy Intuitive Machines lander. The hardware
we still have about the moon. Researchers debate how exactly itself is also cheaper and simpler than a typical planetary sci-
our satellite formed, and when. They question the nature of ence mission—Nova-C is a slender five-footed hexagon about the
moonquakes, weathering by the solar wind, and the extent and size of a British telephone booth. Brett Denevi, a planetary sci-
nature of lunar water. Scientists don’t know for sure why the entist at the Applied Physics Laboratory, is overseeing the de-
moon’s near side and far side appear so different. Solving these sign of the mission’s camera. “For Lunar Vertex, the detectors
riddles about the moon would help us understand how people are literally like cell-phone camera detectors,” she says.
might live and work there someday. But even more broadly, in- Grimm has instruments heading to the Schrödinger basin,
vestigating these questions will help us understand how Earth an impact crater on the far side that features a peak ring—a pla-
and its companion formed, how the sun evolved, and perhaps teau or secondary ring inside a crater’s rim that is a hallmark of

large impacts. The Schrödinger mission will carry a lunar seis- clients was Malaysia—and American agencies such as the De-
mometer—the first to land on the moon since Apollo and the first fense Department. For the moon, potential commercial custom-
on the far side—along with a drill, to study the inside of the moon. ers are not quite so obvious, says Matthew Weinzierl, a profes-
Grimm says they will provide a fuller picture of the moon’s inte- sor at Harvard Business School who studies the economics of
rior heat and structure, helping to resolve how the satellite space. “What’s the big upside?” he says. “Where is the big demand
came to be. going to come from, for visions of a marketplace on the moon
Other experiments scheduled for launch in the next six years with people walking around? That’s exactly the tension I wres-
will study how spacecraft landings affect lunar regolith, scour- tle with and, I’m guessing, people in the industry wrestle with.
ing spacecraft and habitats. They will investigate the radiation There are definitely people hoping that tourism, manufacturing,
environment on the moon; study its carbon dioxide, methane things like that will pan out.” Yet Weinzierl adds that Earth is
and other volatile substances; search for water ice; and monitor full of unfettered capital, and space offers one new place to park it.
radio waves at the surface, informing plans for radio telescopes
to be built on the moon in the future. All these missions will an- Lunar scientists tend to be of two minds about the prospect of
swer key research questions, demonstrate new technologies, pre- cheap, frequent private flights to the moon. Several leading lu-
pare scientists and astronauts for eventual human arrivals, and, nar researchers are calling for more transparency and better
if industry partners get their wish, stimulate a new kind of lu- planning. “I think there are mixed feelings,” Stickle says.
nar economy. Since Apollo, lunar exploration has relied on a sometimes
awkward symbiosis between the jingoism and swagger inherent
The investors and entrepreneurs working in this iteration in human spaceflight and the more goal-oriented, pragmatic ap-
of the private space industry aren’t all motivated by scientific proach of scientific exploration. “The interesting thing about lu-
curiosity, of course. They’re out to make money, from lunar nar science is that it often does get caught up in these bigger is-
resources and the proliferation of people and businesses inter- sues that are not necessarily driven by science,” Denevi says. Even
ested in those resources. But the value of that lunar material is those who are excited to get their experiments on the first pri-
still hypothetical. vate flights acknowledge that CLPS could undercut big, bold nasa
Take lunar water, which may be plentiful inside permanently lunar missions. Some scientists I spoke with pointed to this as
shadowed craters. With time and effort, the water theoretically the elephant in the room, noting that the numerous small CLPS
could be split into its constituent parts, oxygen and hydrogen, to missions might not allow for the kind of science that can be done
be used for rocket fuel. Yet mining lunar water will be profitable best with a larger mission.
only if the moon eventually hosts an active launch pad that al- Community leaders are trying to prepare their colleagues
lows a solar system exploration economy to arise. Furthermore, for the opportunities CLPS poses while remaining aware of pos-
creating the infrastructure to convert water to rocket fuel on an- sible pitfalls, says Amy Fagan, chair of the Lunar Exploration Anal-
other celestial body will be difficult, even if the market for it exists. ysis Group and a lunar scientist at Western Carolina University.
Most investors say there’s money to be made on the moon Some lunar scientists are thinking a few steps ahead of CLPS, ei-
long before it becomes a mining outpost, though. “If that was the ther because they’re concerned about hurting their chances for a
whole story, then I’d be very nervous,” says Chad Anderson, man- nasa Discovery mission or because they’re just eager to do more.
aging partner at venture capital firm Space Capital, which in- The flip side, Fagan says, is that CLPS may be more resilient
vested in Astrobotic in 2016. Anderson tracks investment in in the face of budget cuts or politics than larger and more expen-
space-related enterprises and says that $258 billion has been sive purely governmental projects. So far the Biden administra-
poured into 1,688 such companies since 2013, evidence that vention has adopted the Artemis program begun under Trump and
ture capitalists see ample opportunity beyond the bonds of Earth. has continued funding CLPS contracts, which surprised some
Anderson says this wave of experiments could lead to a prof- lunar scientists who are accustomed to shifting political winds
itable cycle in which the first instruments make promising finds, whenever a new president takes office. “It’s tremendous that we
leading to more questions and ultimately to new interest from had an administration change and yet Artemis is still there,” Fa-
prospectors who want to locate and extract whatever the moon gan says. “Clearly, there’s a recognition that it’s important to go
has to offer. “The CLPS program is a very elegant way of stimu- back to the moon.”
lating a market and stimulating multiple companies in a mar- Whereas Apollo was a demonstration of American brainpow-
ket,” he says. “In a mining analogy, an economy builds around er and geopolitical might, these new missions half a century lat-
people going out to look for gold, and you’re going to start sell- er will showcase the country’s present version of government-
ing them picks and shovels and overalls.” In the moon’s case, the subsidized capitalism, ultimately sharing the control—and the
shovels are things like communications capability and solar pow- credit—with entrepreneurs. Scientists who just want to under-
er, which are commodities a lander provider can sell for a fee. stand more about Earth’s companion world should get their an-
Hanh Nguyen, a graduate student at the London School of swers no matter who launches the ships. The moon, silent and
Economics who studies public policy with an interest in the com- foreboding as ever, will not discriminate.
mercial space industry, says government funding might spur a
new market. “I think as the government provides opportunity
for some companies to develop their products,” she says, “other FROM OUR ARCHIVES
companies will see a need for services or products they can fill in.” Missions to the Moon. Set Reset; July 2019.
SpaceX had a built-in customer base, however, including oth-
er countries’ governments—Nguyen noted that one of its early

RJ Andrews is a professional data storyteller. He is editor
of the Information Graphic Visionaries book series and author
of its volume on Florence Nightingale. Visit VisionaryPress.com
to learn more and follow him on Twitter @infowetrust
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
Florence
Nightingale’s
Data
Revolution
The celebrated nurse improved public health
through her groundbreaking use of data storytelling
By RJ Andrews
I British Library Imaging Services; Hulton Archive/Getty Images (Nightingale)

n the summer of 1856 Florence Nightingale sailed home from war furious. As the nursing
administrator of a sprawling British Army hospital network, she had witnessed thousands
of sick soldiers endure agony in filthy wards. An entire fighting force had been effectively
lost to disease and infection. The “horrors of war,” Nightingale realized, were inflicted
by more than enemy bullets.
Nightingale had earned the moniker “Lady with the Lamp” slog. Many government leaders accepted the loss of common sol
by making night rounds on patients, illuminated by a paper lan diers as inevitable. They wrongly believed, for example, that com
tern. She was serving in the Crimean War, where Britain fought municable diseases were caused by unavoidable realities—the
alongside France against the Russian invasion of the Ottoman weather, bad diet and harsh work conditions. And the poor qual
Empire. The causes of the soldiers’ torment were numerous: ity of army data made it impossible to know exactly how soldiers
incompetent officers, meager supplies, inadequate shelters, over died. Patient outcomes varied depending on whether you asked
crowded hospitals and cruel medical practices. the officer who lost fighters, the ferryman who shuttled the sick,
Nightingale arrived back in London determined to prevent the doctor who treated invalids or the adjutant who buried bodies.
similar suffering from happening again. It would be an uphill Resolute, Nightingale set out to sway the minds of generals,

DRAFT DIAGRAM
urviving drafts of Nightingale’s diagrams give a rare
S
peek into her team’s creative process. Drawn by gov-
ernment clerks, these drafts show how the team refined
original ideas to improve information design. They also
reveal that the mechanical precision of the final litho-
graphs was not present in the original references.
This early sketch gives a preview of one of Nightingale’s
most famous graphics (shown in its final form on
page 84), which reveals how army deaths from
preventable diseases (blue) outnumbered hospital
deaths from wounds (red).
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE w as photographed in London

a few months after returning home from war. At around
this same time, she began working with data and charts.

medical officers and parliamentarians. ing complex arguments that required CONTEXT
Their poor data literacy muted statistical heavy work from the audience, she ightingale’s firsthand experi-
N
arguments that could have oriented them focused her narrative lens on specific ences in the Crimean War drove
toward the facts. Nightingale, with her claims. It was more than data visualiza her passion for health reform.
quantitative mind, had to persuade people tion—it was data storytelling. Here she leads a group on
with common understanding but uncom Nightingale’s stories showcased how horseback to view the siege of
mon standing. Her prime target through poor sanitation and overcrowding caused Sevastopol (1), the Crimean
out this effort was the head of the British unnecessary death. She constructed her War’s culminating conflict.
Army, Queen Victoria. arguments from easy-to-understand com Nightingale’s graphics departed
With public attention drifting away from parisons. For instance, Nightingale bril from the standard visualizations
the concluded war, Nightingale knew that liantly framed army mortality by contrast of the time, such as this black-
the opportunity for reform was fleeting. She ing it with civilian mortality. She showed and-white bar chart of soldier
worked 20-hour days, mostly behind the how, for example, peacetime soldiers liv mortality (2). In contrast, her
scenes, writing letters, wrangling data and ing in army barracks died at higher rates charts (3) amplified the data
publishing anonymously. She did not do it than civilian men of similar ages. Her story by comparing soldier (red)
alone—a circle of experts, including states graphics made it impossible to deny the and civilian (black) mortality
men, statisticians and scientists, united with realities represented by the data: army rates using horizontal bars,
her to break the policy makers’ inertia and administration needed dramatic reform. making the chart’s labels easier
ineptitude. The team focused its campaign Nightingale’s diagrams received broad to read. Nightingale’s letters
on promoting sanitary reform: fresh air, coverage in the press. Within months after reveal that she was the one who
clean sewers and less crowding. the first batch was published, the issue of designed the chart form,
Nightingale’s key persuasion tactic was overcrowded barracks was debated in data and text.
to convey statistics in exciting ways. I both houses of Parliament, which moved
recently conducted the first in-depth to reform the sanitary conditions of the
study of how Nightingale created and army. This resolution was backed by four
used data visualization, and I share my subcommissions focused on sanitary con
research in the forthcoming book F lorence struction, health codes, a military medi
Nightingale, Mortality and Health Dia- cal school and military statistics. Within
grams ( Visionary Press). I studied corre a couple of years the quality of British
spondence that details Nightingale’s infor Army data soared under the leadership of
mation-design process, hand-drawn draft a Nightingale ally. The new data-collec
diagrams never before seen by the public tion operation—eventually lauded as the
and a complete catalog of her information best in Europe—also proved the success
graphics. We can now appreciate better of the sanitary reforms: mortality from
than ever what an innovator Nightingale preventable disease among soldiers
was and how her techniques foreshad declined to less than that in the compara
owed how data graphics would become ble civilian population. Nightingale cele
essential to public understanding and de brated this milestone with a final Crimean
bate today. War diagram, published in 1863.
Recognizing that few people actually Her campaign’s biggest impact on civil
read statistical tables, Nightingale and her ian public health took another decade to
Special Collections, History & Special Collections for the Sciences (clockwise from top)
Wellcome Collection; Internet Archive archive.org/details/b21365210; UCLA Library
team designed graphics to attract atten materialize. The reforms Nightingale

tion and engage readers in ways that other fought for were finally codified in the Brit
media could not. Their diagram designs ish Public Health Act of 1875. The legisla
evolved over two batches of publications, tion established requirements for well-built
giving them opportunities to react to the sewers, clean running water and regulated
efforts of other parties also jockeying for building codes. The law and the precedent
influence. These competitors buried stuffy it set worldwide would be driving forces—
graphic analysis inside thick books. In along with the development of vaccines
contrast, Nightingale packaged her charts that conferred immunity to diseases and
in attractive slim folios, integrating dia artificial fertilizer that boosted crop yields—
grams with witty prose. Her charts were in doubling the average human life span
accessible and punchy. Instead of build during the following century.
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Florence Nightingale. I. Bernard Cohen; March 1984.


1
2 3

1
DATA CRAFTWORK
Nightingale collaborated with physician and medical statistician
William Farr on her first batch of diagrams. They included bar
charts, area charts and circular diagrams (1). This diagram shows
the British Army’s monthly mortality rate across the war. The small
circle at the center of the composition represents the mortality
rate for similar groups in the city of Manchester, England, where
living conditions and general health were poor at the time, which
helped readers grasp the extreme mortality rate in the army.
HANDS-ON LEADER
UCLA Library Special Collections, History & Special Collections
he civilian data came from Farr’s vaults at the General Register

T
Office (GRO). The army data were assembled from half a dozen
for the Sciences (top); Wellcome Collection (bottom)
sources who had recorded deaths during the war. An extant army
record (2) indicates the nonstandardized data that Nightingale
helped to wrangle. Farr’s team of GRO clerks assisted with data
analysis; they also drafted the diagrams. Nightingale managed and
funded diagram lithography, printing and distribution. Her edits,
which survive in correspondence and on diagram drafts, reveal a
leader engaged with the project from conception through produc-
tion. Although these first diagrams attracted attention, the circular
diagrams contained a visual encoding flaw that caused large values
to appear overexaggerated. Nightingale and her team corrected
2
the mistake in their second batch of graphics.

DATA STORYTELLING—THE PROBLEM
Nightingale’s second batch of visualizations was her most stunning graphic achieve-
ment. The three-diagram set was originally issued in a confidential report to Queen
Victoria. After the sanitation reformers were attacked in an anonymous pamphlet,
Nightingale and her team repackaged the diagrams with a final rebuttal for public
consumption. These graphics form a narrative that exposed the problem (too many
deaths), revealed its cause (preventable disease) and offered lifesaving solutions (san-
Harvard Library
itary reform). The first diagram, shown here, emphasizes the problem by comparing
the monthly rate of army mortality across two years (radiating wedges) with the aver-
age mortality rate in the city of Manchester (inner circle).

DATA STORYTELLING—THE CAUSE
ightingale’s best-known diagram is this colorful depiction of causes of mortality,
N
illustrated by overlapping wedges. Part of the chart’s enduring success is attributable
to its strange yet interesting form; others at the time presented similar data in con-
ventional line graphs, to little effect. As the middle story element of her visual argu-
ment, it elevated two comparisons. The first shows that deaths from preventable
diseases (blue) greatly outnumbered hospital deaths from wounds (red). The second
comparison, repeated from the first diagram, is between the first year (right) and sec-
ond year (left) of the war. It shows that mortality declined significantly between the
two years, which are linked by a jagged line, and encourages readers to wonder what
occurred to make such a difference.
Harvard Library

DATA STORYTELLING—THE SOLUTION
he third diagram completed the story by focusing attention on the moment when
T
a team of sanitation engineers began fixing Nightingale’s hospital. The mortality rate
decreased greatly with the “commencement of sanitary improvements.” In her quest
to highlight sanitary reform in this graphic, Nightingale left out other factors that
probably played a role, including a reduction in hospital overcrowding and the end of
a miserably cold winter. Furthermore, the sanitary improvements to the hospital did
not magically happen in one day; they were the result of several months of work clear-
ing filth, rebuilding sewers and installing ventilation flues. The radiant diagram is an
information-design wonder: its wedge angles vary to accommodate the different
record-collection periods for its source data.

MIND MATTERS
Edited by Daisy Yuhas
Creating Our it turns out that each one makes different contributions to
self-related thought. The dorsal section plays a role in distin
Sense of Self
guishing self from other and appears to be task-related, where
as the ventral section, the vmPFC, contributes more to emo
tional processing.
In the SCAN study, the researchers used the self-reference
One brain region helps people effect to assess memories of present and future selves among
maintain a consistent identity people who had brain lesions to the vmPFC. The scientists
worked with seven people who had lesions to this area and
By Robert Martone
then compared them with a control group made up of eight
We are all time travelers. Every day we experience new things people with injuries to other parts of the brain, as well as 23
as we travel forward through time. As we do, the countless con healthy individuals without brain injuries. By comparing these
nections between the nerve cells in our brain recalibrate to groups, the scientists could investigate whether brain lesions
accommodate these experiences. It’s as if we reassemble our in general or those to the vmPFC specifically might affect SREs.
selves daily, maintaining a mental construct of ourselves in All people in the study underwent a thorough neuropsychol
physical time, and the glue that holds together our core identi ogical evaluation, which confirmed that they were within nor
ty is memory. mal ranges for a variety of cognitive assessments, including
Our travels are not limited to physical time. We also exper measures of verbal fluency and spatial short-term memory.
ience mental time travel. We visit the past through our memo The researchers then asked the participants to list adjectives to
ries and then journey into the future by imagining what to describe themselves and a well-known celebrity, both in the
morrow or next year might bring. When we do so, we think of present and 10 years in the future. Later, the participants had
ourselves as we are now, remember who we once were and to recall these same traits.
imagine how we will be. The researchers discovered that people in their control
A study, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affec- group could recall more adjectives linked to themselves in the
tive Neuroscience (SCAN), explores how one particular brain present and future than adjectives linked to the celebrity. In
region helps to knit together memories of the present and other words, scientists found that the self-reference effect
future self. When people sustain an injury to that area, it leads extends to both the future and the present self. Although there
to an impaired sense of identity. The region—called the ventral was some variation in the group—people with brain injuries to
medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)—may produce a fundamen areas other than the vmPFC were somewhat less able to recall
tal model of oneself and place it in mental time. When the re details about their future self when compared with healthy
gion does so, this study suggests, it may be the source of our participants—the self-reference effect still held true.
sense of self. Results were distinctly different, however, for the partici
Psychologists have long noticed that a person’s mind han pants with injuries to the vmPFC. People with lesions in this
dles information about oneself differently from other details. area had little or no ability to recall references to the self,
Memories that reference the self are easier to recall than other regardless of the context of time. Their identification of adjec
forms of memory. They benefit from what researchers have tives for celebrities in the present or future was also signifi
called a self-reference effect (SRE), in which information re cantly impaired when compared with the rest of the partici
lated to oneself is privileged and more salient in our thoughts. pants’ responses. In addition, people with vmPFC lesions had
Self-related memories are distinct from both episodic memory, less confidence about an individual’s ability to possess traits
the category of recollections that pertains to specific events than other people in the study. All of this evidence points to a
and experiences, and semantic memory, which connects to more central role for the vmPFC in the formation and maintenance
general knowledge, such as the color of grass and the charac of identity.
teristics of the seasons. The new findings are intriguing for several reasons. Brain
SREs, then, are a way to investigate how our sense of self lesions can help us understand the normal function of the re
emerges from the workings of the brain—something that multi gion involved. Lesions of the vmPFC are associated with altered
ple research groups have studied intensely. For example, previ personality, blunted emotions, and a number of changes in
ous research employed functional magnetic resonance imaging emotional and executive function. Injury to this area is most
(fMRI), a method that uses blood flow and oxygen consumption often associated with confabulations: false memories that peo
in specific brain areas as a measure of neural activity, to identify ple recite to listeners with great confidence. Although it may be
regions that were activated by self-reference. These studies iden tempting for someone to view confabulations as deliberate or
tified the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) as a brain region re creative falsehoods, people who tell them actually are unaware
lated to self-thought. that their stories are false. Instead it is possible their confusion
This area, the mPFC, can be further divided into upper could stem from misfunctioning memory retrieval and moni
and lower regions (called dorsal and ventral, respectively), and toring mechanisms.

Robert Martoneis a research scientist with expertise
in neurodegeneration. He spends his free time kayaking
and translating Renaissance Italian literature.
More broadly, the study helps us understand how self- ity of the hippocampus alters creative and future imaginings,
related memories—recollections key to maintaining our core which suggests an important role for brain structures support
sense of identity—depend on the function of the vmPFC. But ing memory in imagining the future. In fact, although we often
what about our past selves? Curiously, in previous studies that think of memory as the brain’s accurate and dispassionate re
asked people to consider their past selves, there was no more cording device, some scholars have characterized it as a form
activation of the mPFC than when considering someone else. of imagination.
Our past selves seem foreign to us, as if they were individuals Future thought is a vital component of being human. Its im
apart from us. portance in our culture is embodied in the mythological figure
One idea that scientists have put forward to understand and pre-Olympian god Prometheus (whose name means “fore-
this distinction is that perhaps we are not very kind in our thinker”), patron of the arts and sciences. According to Greek
judgments of our past selves. Instead we may be rather critical legend, he shaped humans out of clay and bestowed them with
and harshly judgmental of our previous behavior, emotions fire and the skills of craftsmanship. These are acts that illus
and personal traits. In these situations, we may use our past trate the power of imagining a novel future. Although there is
primarily to construct a more positive self-image in the pres debate as to whether thinking about the future is an exclu
ent. Put another way, because we may recognize flaws in our sively human feature—birds such as Western Scrub-Jays, for
past self’s behavior, we tend to distance ourselves from the per example, appear to anticipate and plan for future food needs—
son we once were. it is clear that future thought has played a significant role in
Bringing the present and future into the spotlight, then, human evolution. This ability may have contributed to the
is central to understanding the way our brain and thoughts development of language, and it has a key part in human inter
build our current identities. In many ways, it makes sense that actions, where the vmPFC is central to evaluating and taking
the mPFC is important in this process of recalling present de advantage of social context.
tails and imagining future ones that build on our recollections. Now, thanks to this new research, we have a better idea than
The prefrontal cortex, including the mPFC and its subdivi ever about the way a small region within our brains is able to
sions, forms a network in the brain that is involved in future build and hold this core ability to maintain our identity.
planning. That network also includes the hippo campus, a
brain structure that is central to episodic memory formation
and that can track moments as sequential events in time. In Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
past work, researchers have found that manipulating the activ or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
Illustration by Zoe Liu August 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 87

REVIEWS
Edited by Amy Brady
NONFIC TION
Sad Species
Are humans really the smartest animals?
Review by Darcy B. Kelley
Would we, as a species, be better off if we scientists (who are generally considered
were more like other animals? I suspected smart humans) who devote their careers
I’d enjoy reading Justin Gregg’s tour of this to creating artificial intelligence can’t agree
question when he opened with a quote on what intelligence is. Humans basically
from Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett, a book “know it when we see it” and regard intelli-
in one of my favorite science-fiction series: gence as a positive trait. We often look out-
“Mere animals couldn’t possibly manage to ward for extraterrestrial signs of intelligence
act like this. You need to be a human being by seeking messages or signals that come
to be really stupid.” from faraway planets. Curiously, we don’t do
Gregg, an expert on animal cognition, very well with this search on our own planet.
explores what human foibles reveal about Let’s take lying: an overdeveloped hu-
animal intelligence by invoking philosopher man trait that is often employed for advan- The book is a snappy read but lingers:
Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s conun- tage. Gregg argues that the key feature of it left me wondering why we don’t respect
drum, as Gregg sees it, is that he both en- lying is intention. Although there is certainly signals of intelligence from other species—
vied cows and pitied them for the same rea- evidence of deception throughout the ani- and more deeply consider how our own
son: cows do not have an awareness that mal kingdom, our species has the supposed- intelligence works against us.
they will die. Nietzsche was both an intel- ly superlative abilities of language and “the-
lectual genius and a mental wreck—the lat- ory of mind.” But do they serve us well? Are Darcy B. Kelley is Harold Weintraub
ter overcoming the former when, so the we better off? Gregg dives into a fascinating Professor of Biological Sciences
story goes, he witnessed a horse being discussion of the downsides, running from at Columbia University.
whipped in Turin, Italy, and subsequently Jane Austen (“we have daily proof”) to the
suffered a psychotic break. The premise modern onslaught of disinformation. From
here is that being unhappy is the price our here he compares our species with others in If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal:
species pays for intelligence. But how do we terms of “death wisdom” and mortality and hat Animal Intelligence Reveals
W
know if other animals are actually happier? later considers the happiness of bees, as about Human Stupidity
Gregg cheekily points out that even the well as what it means to foresee the future. by Justin Gregg. Little, Brown, 2022 ($29)
I N B R I E F
Meet Us by the Roaring Sea: Doctors and Distillers: The Milky Way:
Novel
A T he Remarkable Medicinal History n Autobiography of Our Galaxy
A
by Akil Kumarasamy. of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails by Moiya McTier.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022 ($27) by Camper English. Grand Central Publishing, 2022 ($27)
Penguin Books, 2022 ($18, paperbound)
Set in a future of eye scans, carbon credits and Moiya McTier assumes the role of cosmic inter-
advanced AI, Akil Kumarasamy’s new novel none- Your favorite cocktail may very well have its roots preter to let our galaxy tell her own story. As a char-
theless feels surprisingly like home—even as it in medicine of generations past. With immense wit acter, the Milky Way is a cross between a Greek
tests the boundaries of self and story. and charm, author Camper English traces millen- goddess and GLaDOS, the artificially
Its protagonist, grieving the recent nia to explore how civilizations used superintelligent computer system from
death of her mother, throws herself fermented and distilled beverages to the Portal video-game series. She gos-
into translating a little-known Tamil do everything from hydrating the sips about other galaxies, teaches us
manuscript about 17 medical stu- workforce to fending off the Black about her past and imparts a primer on
dents who strove to achieve radical compassion Death. English takes a tongue-in- astrophysics, all the while relishing every opportunity
during the Sri Lankan Civil War (dating to 1983– cheek approach to his subject matter, resulting in to throw shade on humankind’s egocentrism and
2009). This and her other portals to shared experi- wildly compelling stories, such as how Buckfast, closed-mindedness. McTier—who in 2021 became
ence—the omnipresent television, a new drug that a tonic wine created by monks to treat colds and the first Black woman to graduate from Columbia
transfers memories—dissolve the barriers of being influenza, became the “U.K.’s version of Four Loko.” University’s astronomy Ph.D. program—dedicates
into a dizzying alchemy of past and present, love It is every bit as entertaining as it is educational. the book “to everyone who’s been made to feel that
and truth, death and memory. —Dana Dunham — Mike Welch they’re not ‘sciencey enough.’” —Maddie Bender
88 Scientific American, August 2022 Illustration by London Ladd

OBSERVATORY Naomi Oreskes i s a professor of the history of science
K E E PIN G A N E Y E O N S C IE N C E
at Harvard University. She is author of Why Trust Science?
(Princeton University Press, 2019) and co-author
of D
iscerning Experts (University of Chicago, 2019).
Wishful Thinking been invented or build a civilization on Mars without first figur-
ing out how to get even one human being there. You’d likely con-
in Climate Science sider me irrational, perhaps delusional. Yet this kind of thinking
pervades plans for future decarbonization.
The IPCC models, for instance, depend heavily on carbon cap-
Influential carbon-reduction models ture and storage, also called carbon capture and sequestration
(either way, CCS). Some advocates, including companies such as
rely on tech that doesn’t exist ExxonMobil, say CCS is a proven, mature technology because for
By Naomi Oreskes years industry has pumped carbon dioxide or other substances
into oil fields to flush more fossil fuel out of the ground. But car-
At last year’s Glasgow COP26 meetings on the climate crisis, U.S. bon dioxide doesn’t necessarily stay in the rocks and soil. It may
envoy and former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry stated that migrate along cracks, faults and fissures before finding its way
solutions to the climate crisis will involve “technologies that we back to the atmosphere. Keeping pumped carbon in the ground—
don’t yet have” but are supposedly on the way. Kerry’s optimism in other words, achieving net negative emissions—is much hard-
comes directly from scientists. You can read about these beliefs er. Globally there are only handful of places where this is done.
in the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change None of them is commercially viable.
(IPCC) Integrated Assessment Models, created by researchers. One site is the Orca plant in Iceland, touted as the world’s big-
These models present pathways to carbon reductions that may gest carbon-removal plant. Air-captured carbon dioxide is mixed
permit us to keep climate change below two degrees Celsius. They with water and pumped into the ground, where it reacts with the
rely heavily on technologies that don’t yet exist, such as ways to basaltic rock to form stable carbonate minerals. That’s great. But
store carbon in the ground safely, permanently and affordably. the cost is astronomical—$600 to $1,000 per ton—and the scale
Stop and think about this for a moment. Science—that is to is tiny: about 4,000 tons a year. By comparison, just one compa-
say, Euro-American science—has long been held as our model for ny, tech giant Microsoft (which has pledged to offset all its emis-
rationality. Scientists frequently accuse those who reject their sions), produced nearly 14 million tons of carbon in 2021. Or look
findings of being irrational. Yet depending on technologies that at carbon capture at the Archer Daniels Midland ethanol plant
do not yet exist is irrational, a kind of magical thinking. That is in Illinois, which, since 2017, has been containing carbon at a cost
a developmental stage kids are expected to outgrow. Imagine if to the American taxpayer of $281 million (more than half the
I said I planned to build a home with materials that had not yet total project cost); at the same time, overall emissions from the
plant have increased. And the total number of people employed
in the project? Eleven. Meanwhile numerous CCS plants have
failed. In 2016 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology closed
its Carbon Capture and Sequestration Technologies program
because the 43 projects it was involved with had all been can-
celed, put on hold or converted to other things.
It’s obvious why ExxonMobil and Archer Daniels Midland are
pushing CCS. It makes them look good, and they can get the tax-
payer to foot the bill. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs
Act, passed last year, contained more than $10 billion for efforts
to develop carbon-capture technologies. In contrast, the act con-
tained merely $420 million for renewable energy—water, wind,
geothermal and solar.
Scaling up solar and wind is going to cost money and will need
to be supported by effective public policies. The big question is,
Why can’t we get those programs? One reason is the continued
obstructive activities of the fossil-fuel industry. But why do sci-
entists accept this hand-waving? My guess is that, frustrated by
the inability of elected officials to overcome the political obsta-
cles, researchers think that getting around the technological ob
stacles will be less difficult. They may be right. But by the time
we know if they are, it may be too late.
Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
or send a letter to the editor: editors@sciam.com
90 Scientific American, August 2022 Illustration by Katie Louise Thomas

S cienti f ic A m erican O N L I N E
FIND ORIGINAL ARTICLES AND IMAGES
50, 100 & 150 YEARS AGO
IN 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 Mark Fischetti
Aug us t
1972 Creation Science

“The stage is being
set for the mandatory teaching of
Mount Everest, Almost
“A few days ago the cables pub
lished a dispatch from General
January 1872. It is interesting to
see, says N
ature, t hat England
took the lead in adaptation of elec
divine creation as a scientific the C. G. Bruce. It reads: ‘Three mem tric illumination to lighthouse
ory on the same footing as evolu bers of the Everest expedition, purposes. (We believe that in the
tion in the public schools of Cali Mallory, Somerville and Norton, United States there is no light
fornia. In 1969 the State Board on May 21 reached an altitude house in which the electric light
of Education modified a new ‘sci 1972 of 26,800 feet, the highest ever is employed.)”
ence framework’ for kindergarten reached by man, and just 2,200
through the 12th grade to require feet below the summit. To have got Acorn Elegance
that recommended textbooks so far in a climb which was merely “An acorn suspended by a piece
present more than one hypothesis a kind of preliminary reconnais of thread within half an inch of
for the origin of the universe, mat sance is a very fine achievement the surface of water in a hyacinth
ter, life and man. The guidelines and seems to augur well for the glass will, in a few months, burst
make it clear that the other final effort.’ The London Times and throw a root down into the
hypothesis is to be creation.” notes, ‘The prospect of reaching water and shoot upwards its
1922 the summit seems now much less straight and tapering stem, with
1922 Topographers
Hike a Lot
“Last year a good many of the keen-
a forlorn hope than it did.’ ”
During a subsequent 1924 attempt to
scale the peak, George Mallory and his
beautiful little green leaves. A
young oak tree, growing in this
way on the mantelshelf, is a very
eyed engineers and their assis partner, Andrew Irvine, disappeared, elegant and interesting object.”
tants making maps for the United last seen less than 1,000 feet from the
States Geological Survey covered summit. Mallory’s body was not found Mineral Water Inquiry
12,311 square miles of territory, until 1999. “It would be a most desirable study
making the total mapped since for a physician of experience to tour
the work began in 1879 equal to
43 percent of the country, exclu
sive of Alaska: 1,301,136 square
1872
1872 Electric
Lighthouses
“The following are the electric
our most renowned mineral waters,
and to accurately ascertain their
real merits. Most of the published
miles. The engineers are estimated lights in England and France with descriptions are by proprietors,
to have tramped an aggregate of the dates they were erected: Dun hotel keepers, or those in their
approximately nine million miles, geness, January 1862; Cape La Heve, interest, who are only concerned
for the average amount of walking France, South Light, December to brag as loudly as possible about
varies, from five miles for every 1863, North Light, November 1866; the virtues of particular sources.
square mile surveyed in ordinary Cape Grisnez, France, February Certain it is that the prolonged use
country to ten or more miles in 1869; Souter Point, England, Janu of any mineral water in health or
rough country.” ary 1871; South Foreland, England, disease is of doubtful efficacy.”
Locomotive Rings True

“A piano seems out of place in a
locomotive workshop, yet there
is no better way of discovering
cracks and defects in the parts
of locomotive machinery than by
striking the metal with a hammer
and comparing the noise of the
vibrations with piano notes. If the
S cientific American, Vol. 127, No. 2; August 1922
metal rings harmoniously with

the piano note, all is well; the least
flaw will result in a discord. Defects
that are hardly noticed by the
1922, GASOLINE: “In 1904, when the automobile was just coming into its own,
ordinary method of hammering
gasoline represented an eighth of the refiner’s business; today it is between a
are at once evident when the quarter and a third. Kerosene, which constituted practically 60 percent of the
piano test is employed. A locomo output, is now less than one eighth. Heavy fuel oil, which shares the internal-
tive that rings true all over is cer combustion field with gasoline and competes with coal in the raising of steam,
tainly fit for service.” has leaped from 16 to 55 percent.”

GRAPHIC SCIENCE In the horizontal bars below, each of the 22 numbered human chromo
Text by Clara Moskowitz | Graphic by Martin Krzywinski somes and two sex chromosomes (X, Y) are divided into regions
(thin vertical stripes) of 1,000,000 bases, or nucleotides. Different
bar lengths reflect the chromosomes’ varying physical lengths, as
demonstrated by these chromosome-pair illustrations. Colors indicate
regions that reached 50, 90 or 99 percent completion in each year.
1 22 X,Y
2000 2001 2002
1
2
3
4
5
6 In 2002
7
8 40% of the
9 genome flipped
10
11 Completion from to 99% coverage.
12 previous years is About 70% was
13
14 carried over in gray. completed at this level.
15
16 2000 2000 2001 2001 2002
17
18 50% 50% 50%
19 90% 90% 90%
20
21 99% + 99% + 99% +
22
X Y
2003 2004 2006

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15 In 2003 chromosomes
16
17 1–5 and 12 received new In 2006 less than 1%
18 coverage, whereas 13, 14 From 2004 to 2013 updates of the genome flipped
19
20 and 19–22 saw little change. were relatively minor. coverage status.
21
22
X Y
2009 2013 2022

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16 In 2022 scientists added
17 By 2009 about 80% of By 2013 about 8%
18 regions had been sequenced of the genome was 251,330,818 bases for a totally
19
20 to 99% or better. not sequenced at all. gapless genomic sequence.
21
22 a Human Genome,” by Sergey Nurk et al., in S cience, Vol. 376; April 2022
X Y
Sources: UCSC Genome Browser; “The Complete Sequence of
3,117,275,501 Bases, 0 Gaps

After 22 years, scientists have deciphered our genetic code
The human genome is at last complete. Researchers have been of new genes, including genes involved in immune responses and
working for decades toward this goal, and the Human Genome those responsible for humans developing larger brains than our
Project claimed victory in 2001, when it had read almost all of a primate ancestors. “Now that we have one complete reference, we
person’s DNA. But the stubborn remaining 8 percent of the genome can understand human variation and how we changed with respect
took another two decades to decipher. These final sections were to our closest related species on the planet,” says geneticist Evan
highly repetitive and highly variable among individuals, making Eichler of the University of Washington, one of the co-chairs of
them the hardest parts to sequence. Yet they revealed hundreds the Telomere-to-Telomere consortium that finished the genome.

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AUGUST 2022 SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.

28 DISCOVERIES FROM THE DEEP

30 The Mystery ways that affect every organism on the

By Mark Fischetti Jen Christiansen and Kelly J. Benoit-Bird

August 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 1

26 The Science of Health

91 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago

2 Scientific American, August 2022

4 Scientific American, August 2022 Illustration by Nick Higgins

6 Scientific American, August 2022

CLIENT MARKE TING SOLUTIONS

white after 30 years of use.” That problem C O R P O R AT E

John Grabinar B eersheba, Israel

August 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 7

Schoolbooks typically present explorers as intrepid individuals

8 Scientific American, August 2022 Illustration by Martin Gee

crete shell covering more than 100,000 cubic yards of nuclear

10 Scientific American, August 2022

The molecule psilocybin is found in

12 Scientific American, August 2022

• Beetle iridescence scares

“no currently accepted medical use and

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

14 Scientific American, August 2022 Graphic by Amanda Montañez

Buzzkill thought less likely to be harmful.

August 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 15

Arabidopsis grows from simulated

16 Scientific American, August 2022

Few biological facts seems eem as irrevocable as

course, the eyes could not “see,” because they

But the results showed it was possible to

E C O LO G Y the sounds of healthy ecosystems—sounds that oyster larvae navigated toward

18 Scientific American, August 2022 Illustration by Thomas Fuchs

Water researchers determine how the pterosaur

Launch Prior research indicates pterosaurs

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August 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 19

20 Scientific American, August 2022

Imagine the perfect ocean wave: a wall of water

To see more, visit ScientificAmerican.com/science-in-images

August 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 21

Branching a widespread variety known for its hardi-

Out infected individuals’ lipid levels lower.

Cosimo Calabrese/Getty Images

Quick from volcanic ash–encrusted remains found in the ancient

22 Scientific American, August 2022

My Father Flies into a Hurricane

He’s read about these trips: to enter the gyre’s

in meteorology. The War made the field:

Towards the eye wall, the storm grows wild—

cuts into his shoulders as he’s thrown about).

24 Scientific American, August 2022

in such high waves. He’s surprised how tiny the plane’s

A category five, they reckon, and strengthening:

But unlike the first half of this flight, when chaos

On his wall he’s hung the storm’s huge spiral

Fifth then among Atlantic hurricanes

to head home through tangles of evening traffic?

August 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 25

1.4 percent of white Americans have blood glucose levels in the

AUGUST 2022 SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.

team designed graphics to attract atten materialize. The reforms Nightingale