The Day the Dinosaurs Died

A young paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth. “It’s like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark."

If, on a certain evening about sixty-­six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour. Sixty hours later, the asteroid hit. The air in front was compressed and violently heated, and it blasted a hole through the atmosphere, generating a supersonic shock wave. The asteroid struck a shallow sea where the Yucatán peninsula is today. In that moment, the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began.

A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.

Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth.

The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling.

The damage had only begun. Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.

Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.

Today, the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth’s sediment as a stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook. This is called the KT boundary, because it marks the dividing line between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. (The Tertiary has been redefined as the Paleogene, but the term “KT” persists.) Mysteries abound above and below the KT layer. In the late Cretaceous, widespread volcanoes spewed vast quantities of gas and dust into the atmosphere, and the air contained far higher levels of carbon dioxide than the air that we breathe now. The climate was tropical, and the planet was perhaps entirely free of ice. Yet scientists know very little about the animals and plants that were living at the time, and as a result they have been searching for fossil deposits as close to the KT boundary as possible.

One of the central mysteries of paleontology is the so-called “three-­metre problem.” In a century and a half of assiduous searching, almost no dinosaur remains have been found in the layers three metres, or about nine feet, below the KT boundary, a depth representing many thousands of years. Consequently, numerous paleontologists have argued that the dinosaurs were on the way to extinction long before the asteroid struck, owing perhaps to the volcanic eruptions and climate change. Other scientists have countered that the three-metre problem merely reflects how hard it is to find fossils. Sooner or later, they’ve contended, a scientist will discover dinosaurs much closer to the moment of destruction.

Locked in the KT boundary are the answers to our questions about one of the most significant events in the history of life on the planet. If one looks at the Earth as a kind of living organism, as many biologists do, you could say that it was shot by a bullet and almost died. Deciphering what happened on the day of destruction is crucial not only to solving the three-­metre problem but also to explaining our own genesis as a species.

On August 5, 2013, I received an e-mail from a graduate student named Robert DePalma. I had never met DePalma, but we had corresponded on paleontological matters for years, ever since he had read a novel I’d written that centered on the discovery of a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex killed by the KT impact. “I have made an incredible and unprecedented discovery,” he wrote me, from a truck stop in Bowman, North Dakota. “It is extremely confidential and only three others know of it at the moment, all of them close colleagues.” He went on, “It is far more unique and far rarer than any simple dinosaur discovery. I would prefer not outlining the details via e-mail, if possible.” He gave me his cell-phone number and a time to call...

DePalma’s find was in the Hell Creek geological formation, which outcrops in parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, and contains some of the most storied dinosaur beds in the world. At the time of the impact, the Hell Creek landscape consisted of steamy, subtropical lowlands and floodplains along the shores of an inland sea. The land teemed with life and the conditions were excellent for fossilization, with seasonal floods and meandering rivers that rapidly buried dead animals and plants.

Dinosaur hunters first discovered these rich fossil beds in the late nineteenth century. In 1902, Barnum Brown, a flamboyant dinosaur hunter who worked at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, found the first Tyrannosaurus rex here, causing a worldwide sensation. One paleontologist estimated that in the Cretaceous period Hell Creek was so thick with T. rexes that they were like hyenas on the Serengeti. It was also home to triceratops and duckbills. (...)

Today, DePalma, now thirty-seven, is still working toward his Ph.D. He holds the unpaid position of curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, a nascent and struggling museum with no exhibition space. In 2012, while looking for a new pond deposit, he heard that a private collector had stumbled upon an unusual site on a cattle ranch near Bowman, North Dakota. (Much of the Hell Creek land is privately owned, and ranchers will sell digging rights to whoever will pay decent money, paleontologists and commercial fossil collectors alike.) The collector felt that the site, a three-foot-deep layer exposed at the surface, was a bust: it was packed with fish fossils, but they were so delicate that they crumbled into tiny flakes as soon as they met the air. The fish were encased in layers of damp, cracked mud and sand that had never solidified; it was so soft that it could be dug with a shovel or pulled apart by hand. In July, 2012, the collector showed DePalma the site and told him that he was welcome to it. (...)

The following July, DePalma returned to do a preliminary excavation of the site. “Almost right away, I saw it was unusual,” he told me. He began shovelling off the layers of soil above where he’d found the fish. This “overburden” is typically material that was deposited long after the specimen lived; there’s little in it to interest a paleontologist, and it is usually discarded. But as soon as DePalma started digging he noticed grayish-white specks in the layers which looked like grains of sand but which, under a hand lens, proved to be tiny spheres and elongated ­droplets. “I think, Holy shit, these look like microtektites!” DePalma recalled. Micro­tektites are the blobs of glass that form when molten rock is blasted into the air by an asteroid impact and falls back to Earth in a solidifying drizzle. The site appeared to contain micro­tektites by the million.

As DePalma carefully excavated the upper layers, he began uncovering an extraordinary array of fossils, exceedingly delicate but marvellously well preserved. “There’s amazing plant material in there, all interlaced and interlocked,” he recalled. “There are logjams of wood, fish pressed against cypress-­tree root bundles, tree trunks smeared with amber.” Most fossils end up being squashed flat by the pressure of the overlying stone, but here everything was three-dimensional, including the fish, having been encased in sediment all at once, which acted as a support. “You see skin, you see dorsal fins literally sticking straight up in the sediments, species new to science,” he said. As he dug, the momentousness of what he had come across slowly dawned on him. If the site was what he hoped, he had made the most important paleontological discovery of the new century.

by Douglas Preston, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Richard Barnes

Finding Peter Putnam

The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind

The neighborhood was quiet. There was a chill in the air. The scent of Spanish moss hung from the cypress trees. Plumes of white smoke rose from the burning cane fields and stretched across the skies of Terrebonne Parish. The man swung a long leg over a bicycle frame and pedaled off down the street.

It was 1987 in Houma, Louisiana, and he was headed to the Department of Transportation, where he was working the night shift, sweeping floors and cleaning toilets. He was just picking up speed when a car came barreling toward him with a drunken swerve.

A screech shot down the corridor of East Main Street, echoed through the vacant lots, and rang out over the Bayou.

Then silence.

 

The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver. There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper. His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t.

His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr, and two blocks from the crash, in his run-down apartment, where his partner, Claude, was startled by a screech, were thousands of typed pages containing a groundbreaking new theory of the mind.

“Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,” Wheeler said in 1991. And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science.

Robert Works Fuller, a physicist and former president of Oberlin College, who worked closely with Putnam in the 1960s, told me in 2012, “Putnam really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Yet he’s completely unknown.”

That word—unknown—it came to haunt me as I spent the next 12 years trying to find out why.

The American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia, with its marbled floors and chandeliered ceilings, is home to millions of rare books and manuscripts, including John Wheeler’s notebooks. I was there in 2012, fresh off writing a physics book that had left me with nagging questions about the strange relationship between observer and observed. Physics seemed to suggest that observers play some role in the nature of reality, yet who or what an observer is remained a stubborn mystery.

Wheeler, who made key contributions to nuclear physics, general relativity, and quantum gravity, had thought more about the observer’s role in the universe than anyone—if there was a clue to that mystery anywhere, I was convinced it was somewhere in his papers. That’s when I turned over a mylar overhead, the kind people used to lay on projectors, with the titles of two talks, as if given back-to-back at the same unnamed event:

Wheeler: From Reality to Consciousness

Putnam: From Consciousness to Reality

Putnam, it seemed, had been one of Wheeler’s students, whose opinion Wheeler held in exceptionally high regard. That was odd, because Wheeler’s students were known for becoming physics superstars, earning fame, prestige, and Nobel Prizes: Richard Feynman, Hugh Everett, and Kip Thorne.

Back home, a Google search yielded images of a very muscly, very orange man wearing a very small speedo. This, it turned out, was the wrong Peter Putnam. Eventually, I stumbled on a 1991 article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly newsletter called “Brilliant Enigma.” “Except for the barest outline,” the article read, “Putnam’s life is ‘veiled,’ in the words of Putnam’s lifelong friend and mentor, John Archibald Wheeler.

A quick search of old newspaper archives turned up an intriguing article from the Associated Press, published six years after Putnam’s death. “Peter Putnam lived in a remote bayou town in Louisiana, worked as a night watchman on a swing bridge [and] wrote philosophical essays,” the article said. “He also tripled the family fortune to about $40 million by investing successfully in risky stock ventures.”

The questions kept piling up. Forty million dollars?

I searched a while longer for any more information but came up empty-handed. But I couldn’t forget about Peter Putnam. His name played like a song stuck in my head. I decided to track down anyone who might have known him.

The only paper Putnam ever published was co-authored with Robert Fuller, so I flew from my home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Berkeley, California, to meet him. Fuller was nearing 80 years old but had an imposing presence and a booming voice. He sat across from me in his sun-drenched living room, seeming thrilled to talk about Putnam yet plagued by some palpable regret.

Putnam had developed a theory of the brain that “ranged over the whole of philosophy, from ethics to methodology to mathematical foundations to metaphysics,” Fuller told me. He compared Putnam’s work to Alan Turing’s and Kurt Gödel’s. “Turing, Gödel, and Putnam—they’re three peas in a pod,” Fuller said. “But one of them isn’t recognized.” (...)

Phillips Jones, a physicist who worked alongside Putnam in the early 1960s, told me over the phone, “We got the sense that what Einstein’s general theory was for physics, Peter’s model would be for the mind.”

Even Einstein himself was impressed with Putnam. At 19 years old, Putnam went to Einstein’s house to talk with him about Arthur Stanley Eddington, the British astrophysicist. (Eddington performed the key experiment that proved Einstein’s theory of gravity.) Putnam was obsessed with an allegory by Eddington about a fisherman and wanted to ask Einstein about it. Putnam also wanted Einstein to give a speech promoting world government to a political group he’d organized. Einstein—who was asked by plenty of people to do plenty of things—thought highly enough of Putnam to agree.

How could this genius, this Einstein of the mind, just vanish into obscurity? When I asked why, if Putnam was so important, no one has ever heard of him, everyone gave me the same answer: because he didn’t publish his work, and even if he had, no one would have understood it.

“He spoke and wrote in ‘Putnamese,’ ” Fuller said. “If you can find his papers, I think you’ll immediately see what I mean.” (...)

Skimming through the papers I saw that the people I’d spoken to hadn’t been kidding about the Putnamese. “To bring the felt under mathematical categories involves building a type of mathematical framework within which latent colliding heuristics can be exhibited as of a common goal function,” I read, before dropping the paper with a sigh. Each one went on like that for hundreds of pages at a time, on none of which did he apparently bother to stop and explain what the whole thing was really about...

Putnam spent most of his time alone, Fuller had told me. “Because of this isolation, he developed a way of expressing himself in which he uses words, phrases, concepts, in weird ways, peculiar to himself. The thing would be totally incomprehensible to anyone.” (...)

Imagine a fisherman who’s exploring the life of the ocean. He casts his net into the water, scoops up a bunch of fish, inspects his catch and shouts, “A-ha! I have made two great scientific discoveries. First, there are no fish smaller than two inches. Second, all fish have gills.”

The fisherman’s first “discovery” is clearly an error. It’s not that there are no fish smaller than two inches, it’s that the holes in his net are two inches in diameter. But the second discovery seems to be genuine—a fact about the fish, not the net.

This was the Eddington allegory that obsessed Putnam.

When physicists study the world, how can they tell which of their findings are features of the world and which are features of their net? How do we, as observers, disentangle the subjective aspects of our minds from the objective facts of the universe? Eddington suspected that one couldn’t know anything about the fish until one knew the structure of the net.

That’s what Putnam set out to do: come up with a description of the net, a model of “the structure of thought,” as he put it in a 1948 diary entry.

At the time, scientists were abuzz with a new way of thinking about thinking. Alan Turing had worked out an abstract model of computation, which quickly led not only to the invention of physical computers but also to the idea that perhaps the brain, too, was a kind of Turing machine.

Putnam disagreed. “Man is a species of computer of fundamentally different genus than those she builds,” he wrote. It was a radical claim (not only for the mixed genders): He wasn’t saying that the mind isn’t a computer, he was saying it was an entirely different kind of computer.

A universal Turing machine is a powerful thing, capable of computing anything that can be computed by an algorithm. But Putnam saw that it had its limitations. A Turing machine, by design, performs deductive logic—logic where the answers to a problem are contained in its premises, where the rules of inference are pregiven, and information is never created, only shuffled around. Induction, on the other hand, is the process by which we come up with the premises and rules in the first place. “Could there be some indirect way to model or orient the induction process, as we do deductions?” Putnam asked.

Putnam laid out the dynamics of what he called a universal “general purpose heuristic”—which we might call an “induction machine,” or more to the point, a mind—borrowing from the mathematics of game theory, which was thick in the air at Princeton. His induction “game” was simple enough. He imagined a system (immersed in an environment) that could make one mutually exclusive “move” at a time. The system is composed of a massive number of units, each of which can switch between one of two states. They all act in parallel, switching, say, “on” and “off” in response to one another. Putnam imagined that these binary units could condition one another’s behavior, so if one caused another to turn on (or off) in the past, it would become more likely to do so in the future. To play the game, the rule is this: The first chain of binary units, linked together by conditioned reflexes, to form a self-reinforcing loop emits a move on behalf of the system.

Every game needs a goal. In a Turing machine, goals are imposed from the outside. For true induction, the process itself should create its own goals. And there was a key constraint: Putnam realized that the dynamics he had in mind would only work mathematically if the system had just one goal governing all its behavior.

That’s when it hit him: The goal is to repeat. Repetition isn’t a goal that has to be programmed in from the outside; it’s baked into the very nature of things—to exist from one moment to the next is to repeat your existence. “This goal function,” Putnam wrote, “appears pre-encoded in the nature of being itself.”

So, here’s the game. The system starts out in a random mix of “on” and “off” states. Its goal is to repeat that state—to stay the same. But in each turn, a perturbation from the environment moves through the system, flipping states, and the system has to emit the right sequence of moves (by forming the right self-reinforcing loops) to alter the environment in such a way that it will perturb the system back to its original state.

Putnam’s remarkable claim was that simply by playing this game, the system will learn; its sequences of moves will become increasingly less random. It will create rules for how to behave in a given situation, then automatically root out logical contradictions among those rules, resolving them into better ones. And here’s the weird thing: It’s a game that can never be won. The system never exactly repeats. But in trying to, it does something better. It adapts. It innovates. It performs induction.

In paper after paper, Putnam attempted to show how his induction game plays out in the human brain, with motor behaviors serving as the mutually exclusive “moves” and neurons as the parallel binary units that link up into loops to move the body. The point wasn’t to give a realistic picture of how a messy, anatomical brain works any more than an abstract Turing machine describes the workings of an iMac. It was not a biochemical description, but a logical one—a “brain calculus,” Putnam called it.

As the game is played, perturbations from outside—photons hitting the retina, hunger signals rising from the gut—require the brain to emit the right sequence of movements to return to its prior state. At first it has no idea what to do—each disturbance is a neural impulse moving through the brain in search of a pathway out, and it will take the first loop it can find. That’s why a newborn’s movements start out as random thrashes. But when those movements don’t satisfy the goal, the disturbance builds and spreads through the brain, feeling for new pathways, trying loop after loop, thrash after thrash, until it hits on one that does the trick.

When a successful move, discovered by sheer accident, quiets a perturbation, it gets wired into the brain as a behavioral rule. Once formed, applying the rule is a matter of deduction: The brain outputs the right move without having to try all the wrong ones first.

But the real magic happens when a contradiction arises, when two previously successful rules, called up in parallel, compete to move the body in mutually exclusive ways. A hungry baby, needing to find its mother’s breast, simultaneously fires up two loops, conditioned in from its history: “when hungry, turn to the left” and “when hungry, turn to the right.” Deductive logic grinds to a halt; the facilitation of either loop, neurally speaking, inhibits the other. Their horns lock. The neural activity has no viable pathway out. The brain can’t follow through with a wired-in plan—it has to create a new one.

How? By bringing in new variables that reshape the original loops into a new pathway, one that doesn’t negate either of the original rules, but clarifies which to use when. As the baby grows hungrier, activity spreads through the brain, searching its history for anything that can break the tie. If it can’t find it in the brain, it will automatically search the environment, thrash by thrash. The mathematics of game theory, Putnam said, guarantee that, since the original rules were in service of one and the same goal, an answer, logically speaking, can always be found.

In this case, the baby’s brain finds a key variable: When “turn left” worked, the neural signal created by the warmth of the mother’s breast against the baby’s left cheek got wired in with the behavior. When “turn right” worked, the right cheek was warm. That extra bit of sensory signal is enough to tip the scales. The brain has forged a new loop, a more general rule: “When hungry, turn in the direction of the warmer cheek.”

New universals lead to new motor sequences, which allow new interactions with the world, which dredge up new contradictions, which force new resolutions, and so on up the ladder of ever-more intelligent behavior. “This constitutes a theory of the induction process,” Putnam wrote.

In notebooks, in secret, using language only he would understand, Putnam mapped out the dynamics of a system that could perceive, learn, think, and create ideas through induction—a computer that could program itself, then find contradictions among its programs and wrangle them into better programs, building itself out of its history of interactions with the world. Just as Turing had worked out an abstract, universal model of the very possibility of computation, Putnam worked out an abstract, universal model of the very possibility of mind. It was a model, he wrote, that “presents a basic overall pattern [or] character of thought in causal terms for the first time.”

Putnam had said you can’t understand another person until you know what fight they’re in, what contradiction they’re working through. I saw before me two stories, equally true: Putnam was a genius who worked out a new logic of the mind. And Putnam was a janitor who died unknown. The only way to resolve a contradiction, he said, is to find the auxiliary variables that forge a pathway to a larger story, one that includes and clarifies both truths. The variables for this contradiction? Putnam’s mother and money.

by Amanda Gefter, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: John Archibald Wheeler, courtesy of Alison Lahnston.
[ed. Fascinating. Sounds like part quantum physics and part AI. But it's beyond me.]

An Incredible Privilege and a Daunting Task

Darkness had fallen and the tide was rolling in, lapping at the heels of the team of people who were quickly disassembling the big whale, piece by piece, bone by bone.

The young humpback, 26 feet long and 20,000 pounds in all (roughly the size of a small school bus), had become entangled in crabbing gear and had beached itself along the central Oregon coast over the weekend. After two days of efforts to save the whale failed, it was euthanized. After that, it was up to the Siletz tribe to take the whale carcass apart.

Lisa Norton, who works as the chief administrative officer for the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and who is also an experienced elk hunter, helped organize the harvest and has been speaking on behalf of the team who worked for nearly 12 hours on the beach Tuesday.

This was the first time in generations that the Siletz tribe has harvested a whale, she said. Nobody in the tribe had ever done it before, and nobody could remember the last time it happened. Ancestors of some of the 30 bands that make up the tribe were prolific whalers, but those cultural practices had long been suppressed by the U.S. government. The Siletz tribe has only recently regained its fishing and hunting rights (the tribe still needed a special permit to harvest the humpback).

“We recognized the importance of what could be with this,” Norton said. “I prefer to think of it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we can learn from.”

It was also an enormous undertaking.

“Exhausting would be an understatement,” she said.

The young humpback whale came ashore north of Yachats on Saturday afternoon. Over the next 48 hours, people flocked to the beach to help the still-living whale, despite urges from the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network not to do so. Online, thousands watched a livestream of the event, pouring out their sympathies for the animal in Facebook comments.

Meanwhile, 50 miles up the coast, Siletz tribal members were gathered at the Chinook Winds Casino Resort for the tribe’s annual Restoration Powwow, which celebrates the restoration of the tribe’s federal recognition in 1977. Word about the whale spread around the powwow, where some prayed and danced for the whale, Norton said.

On Monday, when it was clear the humpback would not survive and would ultimately need to be euthanized, Oregon State Police (who had previously worked with Siletz hunters) reached out to the tribe about the possibility of harvesting the animal. The tribe rushed to secure the proper permits and assembled a team of hunters to take apart the whale.

“What an incredible privilege and a daunting task,” Norton said. “The folks that stood up and said ‘We could do this’ were very brave. And what they did was a very important piece to the next chapter of this whale.” (...)

Before anyone cut into the animal, they smudged and prayed over its body. They honored the animal for its sacrifice. They offered thanks to the bounty it provided. They asked Creator to guide their hands.

“That is what you do,” Norton said. “As experienced hunters we always give thanks to what has been provided.”

Some members of the team had stayed up late Monday night, researching the bone structure of humpback whales, which parts should be taken, how to cut into the animal. Once on the beach, they also relied on their own instinct as hunters. But the whale was very different from an elk, Norton said, and not just because it was 30 times as big.

The team already knew that unlike the tribe’s ancestors, they wouldn’t harvest any meat from the whale. Since the animal had been chemically sedated and euthanized, everyone was concerned the meat wouldn’t be safe for human consumption. But there was still plenty to harvest. The team took all the whale’s blubber, thousands of pounds of it, as well as virtually all its bones. They also separated the head so they could later harvest the baleen, the keratin structure that helps the whale filter feed in the ocean.

As they worked into the night, the tribe got a helping hand from Tru-North Construction, local contractors who were on site with heavy equipment. The contractors used an excavator to dig a trench for the whale meat and organs that wouldn’t be used and helped maneuver the animal around for the team of harvesters. The company also provided a flatbed truck so tribal members wouldn’t have to transport the blubber and bones in their own cars — a godsend, Norton said. (...)

When the sun rose over the beach the next morning, the spot where people had spent days trying to save the dying whale was now a mess of meat and skin — food for the foragers that would clean it all up.

To some, it may seem like a gruesome end to a tragic story, Norton said, but for the tribe it was a heartfelt experience that honored the life so many had tried to save.

“As we were processing and collecting these materials, folks were telling us the stories of how strong this whale was,” Norton said. “That story will stay with each of those pieces that are then put back out in the world.”

The tribe has not yet decided what, exactly, they’re going to do with the animal parts. They plan to render the blubber down to oil, but they’re first going to check to make sure it isn’t toxic. Whale bones have historically been used to make tools or art, which are possibilities, Norton said, and baleen can be used to decorate regalia. One elder told her that a large whale vertebra makes a nice stool, but she said it probably wouldn’t go with her home décor.

“We anticipate that this process is going to continue for a year or two until it’s done,” Norton said.

by Jamie Hale, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Mark Graves via

[ed. Fortunately this whale was relatively fresh - old bloated ones can be barf-inducing. I can only imagine the frantic discussions and conflicted feelings many tribal members felt when suddenly given this opportunity and told ' have at it'. The tension between ancestral obligations and long forgotten skills, between 'hunters' and googlers, logistics. Some might have never seen a whale before. Panic at the casino!]

I Taught an Octopus to Play Piano in 6 Months

via: YouTube
[ed. It's been said that if there are intelligent aliens on earth, octopuses are probably the best candidates. Too bad they're so tasty.]

Getting Jacked Is Simple

It’s actually really simple to get jacked. That’s not to say it’s easy- just that the complexity of the challenge is trivial, requiring only time and energy to succeed.

Now, you’re probably raising your eyebrows at this claim. Everywhere you look, there are personal trainers, fitness influencers, nutritionists, and even exercise scientists with conflicting information. Go to any gym, and you’ll see different people doing wildly different exercise routines. Surely, that implies building muscle is a complicated subject? Well, no. For 2 reasons:

1. The fitness industry thrives on misinformation, because all the money is made in selling supplements, accessories, and ‘personal training expertise’ that have no scientific legitimacy

2. Most people are cognitive misers who actively avoid mentally demanding tasks and refuse to read anything academic

The result is a very large proportion of fitness enthusiasts have essentially no idea what they’re doing, and even the somewhat knowledgeable ones are still full of misinformation. So, how do we cut through the noise?

Getting Jacked

Think of getting jacked as something like this formula:

GettingJacked = Time * (0.6x + 0.3y + 0.1z)

X is your adherence to primary concepts, y is your adherence to secondary concepts, and z is your adherence to tertiary concepts. Primary and secondary concepts are a collection of just a handful of relatively simple ideas that require little financial investment. If you just focused on these, you would find getting jacked to be relatively straightforward. But tertiary concepts, predominantly supplements, are innumerable, complex, and require tons of money.

The entire fitness industry is built around obfuscation such that the tertiary concepts can be promoted and sold. And it works wonderfully for making money- but terribly for our motivation to actually get into the gym and train properly.

The paradox of choice is a concept introduced by psychologist Barry Schwartz which suggests that the more options we have, the less satisfied we feel with our decision. This phenomenon occurs because having too many choices requires more cognitive effort, leading to decision fatigue and increased regret over our choices.

The sheer amount of conflicting information out there certainly makes it difficult to know who to listen to, but it also actively discourages people from getting into fitness at all. And even if you were able to expertly navigate this whole industry of tertiary concepts to find the absolute optimal program, that would still represent just 10% of your results! Nearly everyone should be ignoring Z entirely and instead focusing their efforts on the simple stuff in X and Y.

But what is this simple stuff, you might be wondering? Fortunately, unlike in decades past, we no longer have to rely on the ‘bro-science’ of anecdotes and dubiously extrapolated study conclusions. On the contrary, in the age of information we now have robust research data on what actually matters for getting jacked.

Primary Concepts (60% of Results)

1. Progressive Overload

The most important concept is progressive overloading, which is simply increasing your weight resistance over time as your body adapts. Muscle growth is a continuous cycle: the body adapts to a given stress, and to continue improving, that stress (e.g., weight, reps, sets) must be gradually increased, forcing the body to adapt again. No matter what exercises you’re doing, or for how long, or with what intensity, the most important thing is that you need to constantly be increasing the challenge. Going to the gym every week for 3 years curling the same 20lb dumbbell isn’t going to do anything. But if you’re curling 30lb at the end of year 1, 40lb at the end of year 2, and 50lb at the end of year 3, guess what- you’re getting jacked.

2. Train to Failure (1 RIR)

You also need to be really pushing yourself hard in the gym, because it’s specifically the last few reps right before your muscles fail that seem to drive results. Modern studies have consistently shown that training to 1 rep-in-reserve (RIR)- continuing a set until you have only enough strength left to complete 1 more final rep- maximizes strength gains and muscular hypertrophy while limiting risk of injury. Basically, keep lifting until you have doubts about whether or not you can complete another rep. If you can squat 100lb for 10 reps, for 3 sets in a row, then that first set was almost certainly not being trained to 1 RIR. What those 3 sets should look like is something like 10 reps, 8 reps, 6 reps- despite you giving it maximum effort on every set. This indicates that you were indeed pushing yourself close to failure and fatiguing yourself in the process.

3. Consume Sufficient Protein

It’s a trope that gym bros are obsessed with protein, but this is for good reason. Muscle growth cannot occur without sufficient protein. And relatively high amounts of protein are required in order to optimize muscle growth. Studies suggest increasing protein has a significant impact on muscle growth up to about 1.6-2.2g/kg (0.7-1g/lb) of body weight with substantially diminishing returns after that. The International Society of Sports Nutrition currently suggests consuming a slightly lower range of 1.4-2.0 g/kg. In other words, if you’re hitting anywhere close to 1g/lb of body weight of daily protein, you’re getting the full benefits. It doesn’t matter much where the protein comes from, though great sources include grilled chicken, Greek yogurt, and protein powder. It also doesn’t matter much how you split this protein up throughout the day, though there is some evidence that protein intake of no more than 40g per meal is optimal. But, in general, just focus on hitting the absolute numbers and the rest will follow.

4. Abs are made in the gym, and revealed in the kitchen

The final basic concept is that nobody can admire your muscle if you’re fat.9 Building muscle mass is step 1, but step 2 is cutting down to a low enough body fat to reveal that muscle. Overall appearance even at the same leanness can vary depending on individual skeletal structure, body fat distribution, and muscle mass- but nonetheless this is what fairly muscular men and women look like at various body fat percentages.

The American Council on Exercise (ACE) has the following classifications for body fat %.

Today’s beauty standards for ‘jacked’ tends to fall somewhere around 12% for men and 20% for women- just making it into the ‘athletes’ category. Most amateur fitness enthusiasts dramatically overestimate how lean they actually are. At 12% body fat for men, you should be seeing:

• Defined abs visible when flexed, with a noticeable “V-cut” above the hips

• Clear separation between muscle groups, such as rear delts to side delts

• Increased vascularity with prominent and visible veins on the arms and shoulders

• Sharper facial features, particularly noticeable around the jawline

And at 20% body fat for women:

• Muscle definition pops when flexed, particularly in shoulders and quads

• Flat stomach (but without sharply segmented abs)

• Little excess fat, mostly in hips, thighs, and buttocks- with a smaller waist

• Sharper facial features, noticeable around the jawline and cheekbones

Secondary Concepts (30% of Results)

If you’re following the above concepts perfectly, it literally does not matter what else you will do- you will get jacked. But if you really want to optimize your routine, here are a few other concepts to consider.

by Dylan, Chaotic Neutral |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Clam Control

via:

David Littschwager, Seawater sample
via:

Biologists Announce There Absolutely Nothing We Can Learn From Clams

WOODS HOLE, MA—Saying they saw no conceivable reason to bother with the bivalve mollusks, biologists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution announced Thursday that there was absolutely nothing to be learned from clams. “Our studies have found that while some of their shells look pretty cool, clams really don’t have anything to teach us,” said the organization’s chief scientist, Francis Dawkins, clarifying that it wasn’t simply the case that researchers had already learned everything they could from clams, but rather that there had never been anything to learn from them and never would be. “We certainly can’t teach them anything. It’s not like you can train them to run through a maze the way you would with mice. We’ve tried, and they pretty much just lie there. From what I’ve observed, they have a lot more in common with rocks than they do with us. They’re technically alive, I guess, if you want to call that living. They open and close sometimes, but, I mean, so does a wallet. If you’ve used a wallet, you know more or less all there is to know about clams. Pretty boring.” The finding follows a study conducted by marine biologists last summer that concluded clams don’t have much flavor, either, tasting pretty much the same as everything else on a fried seafood platter.

by The Onion |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Monsters From the Deep

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA ~ Rebecca R. Helm

***

"From the darkness of the deep, the mother rose slowly, her great body pulsing with effort, while the calf clung close to her side. The faint shimmer of the surface light caught on something twisting in her jaws—long pale arms, still trembling, a giant calamari dragged from the black abyss.

The calf pressed its head against the mother’s flank, curious, its small eye turning toward the strange, sprawling catch. Around them, the other whales gathered, a circle of giants, each click and creak of their voices carrying through the water like an ancient council.

The mother released a cloud of ink the squid had left behind, now dissipating in ghostly ribbons. She let the prey dangle for a moment before tearing a piece free with a practiced shake of her head. The calf tried to imitate, nudging the slack arms of the squid, but only managed to tangle its mouth in the trailing suckers. The adults rumbled with what could only be described as laughter.

High above, a shaft of sunlight pierced the water, illuminating the drifting arms of the squid like banners in the deep. The feast had begun, but it was also a lesson—the calf’s first glimpse of the abyss’s hidden monsters, and of the power its mother carried up from the dark world below."

via: here and here

Plastic-Eating Fungus

A fungus from the Amazon rainforest can break down polyurethane plastic without oxygen. It's the first organism discovered with this capability, and it can survive using plastic as its only food source.

Most plastic waste ends up deep in landfills where oxygen doesn't reach, precisely where this fungus thrives. Polyurethane persists for centuries in these environments. It's everywhere: mattresses, insulation foam, shoe soles, adhesives, car parts. Annual global plastic production exceeds 400 million tons. Less than 10% gets recycled.

Pestalotiopsis microspora was discovered in 2011 in Ecuador's Yasuní National Forest, isolated from plant stems. The endophytic fungus lives inside plant tissues without harming its host. Laboratory testing revealed its remarkable ability: it degrades plastic equally well with or without oxygen present.

The fungus secretes an enzyme that breaks apart the chemical bonds holding polyurethane together. In laboratory tests, concentrated enzyme extracts can completely break down polyurethane polymer in under an hour. The fungus also produces a second enzyme that degrades PET plastic, splitting it into simpler compounds the fungus then consumes as food.

What makes this significant? Other plastic-degrading organisms need oxygen to function. When tested without oxygen, fungi like Lasiodiplodia and Pleosporales slowed down or stopped working. P. microspora maintained the same performance. This ability to work without oxygen directly addresses the actual problem—plastic buried in oxygen-depleted landfill depths.

The enzyme production is adaptive. When the fungus grows in a basic environment with only plastic available, it ramps up enzyme output. These enzymes spread through the surrounding material, breaking down plastic well beyond where the fungus itself is growing. The enzyme breakdown converts long-lasting polymer into simple compounds the fungus uses as food.

This fungus offers a biological solution that works precisely where the problem exists, in oxygen-depleted landfills where an ever-increasing amount our plastic waste collects.

by Sam Knowlton, The Confluence |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Always a good reason to preserve natural habitats - who knows what other plants have undiscovered special properties? See also: A fungus that eats polyurethane (Yale Magazine).]

***

AI Overview:

Q. How long does it take Pestalotiopsis microspora to eat plastic?

Pestalotiopsis microspora can degrade plastic in a matter of weeks to months, with experiments showing significant degradation in as little as two weeks and over 60% breakdown in six weeks under ideal conditions. The specific timeframe varies, with some sources noting a few months for complete digestion in certain projects.

Ask Not Why You Would Work in Biology, But Rather: Why Wouldn't You?

There’s a lot of essays that are implicitly centered around convincing people to work in biology. One consistent theme amongst them is that they all focus on how irresistibly interesting the whole subject is. Isn’t it fascinating that our mitochondria are potentially an endosymbiotic phenomenon that occurred millions of years ago? Isn’t it fascinating that the regulation of your genome can change throughout your life? Isn’t it fascinating that slime molds can solve mazes without neurons? Come and learn more about this strange and curious field! (...)

But I’d like to offer a different take on the matter. Yes, biology is very interesting, yes, biology is very hard to do well. Yet, it remains the only field that could do something of the utmost importance: prevent a urinary catheter from being shunted inside you in the upcoming future.

Being catheterized is not a big deal. It happens to literally tens of millions of people every single year [ed. Really? Just checked and it's true, at least for millions.]. There is nothing even mildly unique about the whole experience. And, you know, it may be some matter of privilege that you ever feel a catheter inside of you; the financially marginalized will simply soil themselves or die a very painful death from sepsis.

But when you are catheterized for the first time—since, make no mistake, there is a very high chance you will be if you hope to die of old age—you’ll almost certainly feel a sense of intense wrongness that it happens at all. The whole procedure is a few moments of blunt violence, invasiveness, that feels completely out of place in an age where we can edit genomes and send probes beyond the solar system. There may be times where you’ll be able to protect yourself from the vile mixture of pain and discomfort via general anesthesia, but a fairly high number of people undergo (repeated!) catheterization awake and aware, often gathering a slew of infections along the way. This is made far worse by the fact that the most likely time you are catheterized will be during your twilight years, when your brain has turned to soup and you’ve forgotten who your parents are and who you are and what this painful tube is doing in your urethra. If you aren’t aware of how urinary catheters work, there is a deflated balloon at the end of it, blown up once the tube is inside you. This balloon keeps the whole system uncomfortably stuck inside your bladder. So, you can fill in the details on how much violence a brain-damaged person can do to themselves in a position like this by simply yanking out the foreign material.

Optimizing for not having a urinary catheter being placed into you is quite a lofty goal. Are there any alternatives on the table? Not practical ones. Diapers don’t work if the entire bladder itself is dysfunctional, suprapubic tubes require making a hole into the bladder (and can also be torn out), and nerve stimulation devices require expensive, invasive surgery. And none of them will be relied upon for routine cases, where catheterization is the fastest, most reliable solution that exists. You won’t get the gentle alternatives because you won’t be in a position to ask for them. You’ll be post-operative, or delirious, or comatose, or simply too old and confused to advocate for something better.

This is an uncomfortable subject to discuss. But I think it’s worth level-setting with one another. Urinary catheterization is but one of the dozens of little procedures that both contributes to the nauseating amount of ambient human suffering that repeats over and over and over again across the entire medical system and is reasonably common enough that it will likely be inflicted upon you one day. And if catheterization doesn’t seem so bad, there are a range of other awful things that, statistically speaking, a reader has a decent chance of undergoing at some point: feeding tubes, pap smears, mechanical ventilation, and repeated colonoscopies are all candidates.

Moreover, keep in mind that all these are simply the solutions to help prevent something far more grotesque and painful from occurring! Worse things exist—cancer, Alzheimer’s, Crohn’s—but those have been talked about to death and feel a great deal more abstract than the relatively routine, but barbaric, medical procedures that occur millions of times per year.

How could this not be your life goal to work on? To reduce how awful maladies, and the awful solutions to those maladies, are? What else is there really? Better prediction markets? What are we talking about?

To be fair, most people go through their first few decades of life not completely cognizant how terrible modern medicine can be. But at some point you surely have to understand that you have been, thus far, lucky enough to have spent your entire life on the good side of medicine. In a very nice room, one in which every disease, condition, or malady had a very smart clinician on staff to immediately administer the cure. But one day, you’ll one day be shown glimpses of a far worse room, the bad side of medicine, ushered into an area of healthcare where nobody actually understands what is going on. (...)

I appreciate that many fields also demand this level of obedience to the ‘cause’, the same installation of ‘this is the only thing that matters!’. The energy, climate change, and artificial-intelligence sectors have similar do-or-die mission statements. But you know the main difference between those fields and biology?

In every other game, you can at least pretend the losers are going to be someone else, somewhere else in the world, happening to some poor schmuck who didn’t have your money or your foresight or your connections to do the Obviously Correct Thing. Instead, people hope to be a winner. A robot in my house to do my laundry, a plane that gets me from San Francisco to New York City in only an hour, an infinite movie generator so I can turn all my inner thoughts into reality. Wow! Capital-A Abundance beyond my wildest dreams! This is all well and good, but the unfortunate reality of the situation is that you will be a loser, an explicit loser, guaranteed to be a loser, in one specific game: biology. You will not escape being the butt of the joke here, because it will be you that betrays you, not the you who is reading this essay, but you, the you that cannot think, the you that has been shoddily shaped by the last several eons of evolution. Yes, others will also have their time underneath this harsh spotlight, but you will see your day in it too. (...)

Yes, things outside of biology are important too. Optimized supply chains matter, good marketing matters, and accurate securities risk assessments matter. Industries work together in weird ways. The people working on better short-form video and payroll startups and FAANGs are part of an economic engine that generates the immense taxable wealth required to fund the NIH grants. I know that the world runs on invisible glue.

Still, I can’t help but think that people’s priorities are enormously out of touch with what will actually matter most to their future selves. It feels as if people seem to have this mental model where medical progress simply happens. Like there’s some natural law of the universe that says “treatments improve by X% per year” and we’re all just passengers with a dumb grin on this predetermined trajectory. They see headlines about better FDA guidelines or CRISPR or immunotherapy or AI-accelerated protein folding and think, “Great, the authorities got it covered. By the time I need it, they’ll have figured it out.”. But that’s not how any of this works! Nobody has it covered! Medical progress happens because specific people chose to work on specific problems instead of doing something else with their finite time on Earth.

by Abhishaike Mahajan, Owl Posting |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Just can't comprehend the thinking recently for cutting essential NIH and NSF research funding (and others like NOAA). We used to lead the world.]

Do Coconuts Go With Oysters? For Saving the Delaware Shore, Yes.

For the past 50 years, Gary Berti has watched as a stretch of Delaware’s coastline slowly disappeared. Rising tides stripped the shoreline, leaving behind mud and a few tree stumps.

“Year after year, it gradually went from wild to deteriorated,” said Mr. Berti, whose parents moved to Angola by the Bay, a private community in Lewes, Del., in 1977, where he now lives with his wife, Debbie.

But in 2023, an extensive restoration effort converted a half-mile of shoreline from barren to verdant. A perimeter of logs and rolls of coconut husk held new sand in place. Lush beds of spartina, commonly known as cordgrass, grew, inviting wading birds and blue crabs.

Together, these elements have created a living shoreline, a nature-based way of stabilizing the coast, to absorb energy from the waves and protect the land from washing away. 

Mr. Berti had never seen the waterfront like this before. “The change has just been spectacular,” he said.

Before

After

The practice of using natural materials to prevent erosion has been around for decades. But as sea levels rise and ever-intensifying storms pound coastlines, more places are building them.

The U.S. government counts at least 150 living shorelines nationwide, with East Coast states like Maryland, South Carolina and Florida remediating thousands of feet of tidal areas. Thanks to the efforts of the Delaware Living Shorelines Committee, a state-supported working group, Delaware has led the charge for years. (...)

“The living component is key,” said Alison Rogerson, an environmental scientist for the state’s natural resources department and chair of the living shoreline committee.

The natural materials, she said, provide a permeable buffer. As waves pass through, they leave the mud and sand they were carrying on the side of the barrier closer to the shore. This sediment builds up over time, creating a stable surface for plants. As the plants grow, their roots reinforce the barrier by holding everything in place. The goal is not necessarily return the land to how it was before, but to create new, stronger habitat.

More traditional rigid structures, like concrete sea walls, steel bulkheads and piles of stone known as riprap, can provide instant protection but inevitably get weaker over time. Bulkheads can also backfire by eroding at the base or trapping floodwaters from storms. And because hardened structures are designed to deflect energy, not absorb it, they can actually worsen erosion in nearby areas.

Though living shorelines need initial care while they start to grow, scientists have found they can outperform rigid structures in storms and can repair themselves naturally. And as sea levels rise, living shorelines naturally inch inland with the coastline, providing continuous protection, whereas sea walls have to be rebuilt.

When the engineers leave after creating a gray rigid structure, like a sea wall, “that’s the strongest that structure is ever going to be, and at some point, it will fail,” said David Burdick, an associate professor of coastal ecology at the University of New Hampshire. “When we install living shorelines, it’s the weakest it’s going to be. And it will get stronger over time.”

And just as coastal areas come in all shapes and sizes, so do living shorelines. In other places that the committee has supported projects, like Angola by the Bay and the Delaware Botanical Garden, brackish water meant that oysters wouldn’t grow. Instead, the private community opted for large timber logs while the botanical garden built a unique crisscross fence from dead tree branches found on site. (...)

Sometimes, an area’s waves and wind are too powerful for a living shoreline to survive on its own, Mr. Janiec said. In these situations, a hybrid approach that combines hard structures can create a protected zone for plants and oysters to grow. And these don’t need to be traditional sea walls or riprap. Scientists can also use concrete reef structures and oyster castles to break up waves while allowing wildlife to thrive.

Gregg Moore, an associate professor of coastal restoration at the University of New Hampshire, said homeowners often choose rigid structures because they don’t act on erosion until the situation is urgent. When it comes to a person’s home, “you can’t blame somebody for wanting to put whatever they think is the fastest, most permanent solution possible,” he said. (...)

“Living shorelines are easier than people think, but they take a little time,” Mrs. Allread said. “You have to trust the process. Nature can do its own thing if you let it.”

by Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Erin Schaff

[ed. Streambank and coastal restoration/rehabilitation using bioengineering techniques has been standard practice in Alaska for decades (in fact, my former gf wrote the book on it - literally). I myself received a grant to rehabilitate 12 state park public use sites on the Kenai River (see here and here) that were heavily damaged and eroding from constant foot traffic and boat wakes. Won a National Coastal America Award for innovation. As noted here, most people want a quick fix, but this is a better, long-term solution.]

Jane Goodall Chronicled the Social Lives of Chimps, Dies at 91

Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, who earned scientific stature and global celebrity by chronicling the distinctive behavior of wild chimpanzees in East Africa — primates that made and used tools, ate meat, held rain dances and engaged in organized warfare — died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 91.

Her death, while on a speaking tour, was confirmed by the Jane Goodall Institute, whose U.S. headquarters are in Washington, D.C.

The British-born Dr. Goodall was 29 in the summer of 1963 when the National Geographic Society, which was financially supporting her field studies in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in what is now Tanzania, published her 7,500-word, 37-page account of the lives of Flo, David Greybeard, Fifi and other members of the troop of primates she had observed.

The article, with photographs by Hugo van Lawick, a Dutch wildlife photographer whom she later married, also described her struggles to overcome disease, predators and frustration as she tried to get close to the chimps, working from a primitive research station along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika

On the scientific merits alone, Dr. Goodall’s discoveries about how wild chimpanzees raised their young, established leadership, socialized and communicated broke new ground and attracted immense attention and respect among researchers. Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist and science historian, said her work with chimpanzees “represents one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.”

On learning of Dr. Goodall’s documented evidence that humans were not the only creatures capable of making and using tools, Louis Leakey, the paleoanthropologist and Dr. Goodall’s mentor, famously remarked, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

Long before focus groups, message discipline and communications plans became crucial tools in advancing high-profile careers and alerting the world to significant discoveries in and outside of science, Dr. Goodall understood the benefits of being the principal narrator and star of her own story of discovery.In articles and books, her lucid prose carried vivid descriptions, some lighthearted, of the numerous perils she encountered in the African rainforest — malaria, leopards, crocodiles, spitting cobras and deadly giant centipedes, to name a few. Her writing gained its widest attention in three more long articles in National Geographic in the 1960s and ’70s and in three well-received books, “My Friends, the Wild Chimpanzees” (1967), “In the Shadow of Man” (1971) and “Through a Window” (1990).

Dr. Goodall’s willingness to challenge scientific convention and shape the details of her arduous research into a riveting adventure narrative about two primary subjects — the chimps and herself — turned her into a household name, in no small part thanks to the power of television.

Dr. Goodall’s gentle, knowledgeable demeanor and telegenic presence — set against the beautiful yet dangerous Gombe preserve and its playful and unpredictable primates — proved irresistible to the networks. In December 1965, CBS News broadcast a documentary of her work in prime time, the first in a long string of nationally and internationally televised special reports about the chimpanzees of Gombe and the courageous woman steadfastly chronicling what she called their “rich emotional life.” (...)

And in becoming one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century, Dr. Goodall opened the door for more women in her largely male field as well as across all of science. Women — including Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas, Cheryl Knott and Penny Patterson — came to dominate the field of primate behavior research.

by Keith Schneider, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jane Goodall Institute

Unreasonable

The nearness of bees, and of other things that agitate most people, calms me. My father had three daughters and he ate watermelon with slices of cheese on the porch and he said once, over watermelon, that he was very lucky to have three girls: one beautiful, one kind, and one intelligent. Classification is a laudable scientific instinct. The ways in which the labelling and sorting don’t quite work are the glory of the process, a form of inquiry through which you catch sight of your errors and then reconsider, revise, or dispose of your categories. My father’s fairy-tale pronouncement was many years ago now. I have only two daughters: an industrious, loving, and optimistic twenty-one-year-old and a funny, joyful, and resilient ten-year-old. Maybe I have a third daughter: my work. (...)

The head of the lab, Bogdan, moved here from Serbia a quarter century ago. He grows peppers in tomato tins on his office windowsill, and he has gathered us to discuss what he has termed the current macro-environment. It has been decreed, he tells us, that we must turn away three of the five Ph.D. candidates we’ve accepted. The federal funding for the Bee Diversity and Native Pollinator Surveys has been cancelled, though there is still state-level funding. The funding for the Sub-Saharan Pollinator Project is frozen, not cancelled, but it is unlikely to be unfrozen in time for us to make use of the hundred-and-seventy-seven bee boxes currently in the field, in anticipation of the late spring and summer. The project on the diversity and frequency of pathogens in wild solitary bees—which is funded mostly through the Department of Agriculture—is also on hold, even though hundreds of the bees in question have already been tagged with tiny radio trackers. Bogdan has made an emergency application to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, but—he throws up his hands. What do people think?

The discussion topics that follow include but are not limited to: petitions as efficient ways for the F.B.I. to generate target lists; the importance of keeping mum; the importance of speaking out; the weakness and careerism of Democrats; being in the Ukrainian Girl Scouts and getting dropped off in the woods with three other fourteen-year-olds for three days, without food; a nephew who is a television cameraman for a news show.

That a collaborative hive is the essence of bee-ness is a common misconception. Not all species of bees are social. But it’s true that the majesty of honeycomb architecture, the future-oriented labor of transforming nectar into honey, even the decadence of male bees doing nothing much other than lounging about like upper-class Romans at a bathhouse and occasionally interrupting this to lunge at a queen—people like that stuff. They see (with reasonable accuracy) a functioning, harmonious community, a golden reflection of human potential. O.K. But, of the twenty thousand or so species of bees, about eighteen thousand are solitary. None of the solitary bees make honey. Some live underground. Solitary bees also merit interest, study, respect, etc., and it’s not because I’m disconsolate that I mention them.

Bogdan concludes the meeting by extending to me a special thank-you for speaking with the spring intern. I have not spoken with the spring intern, I tell him. Bogdan tells me that this is an advance thank-you and that I will be telling the spring intern that there is no longer a spring internship. Why me? I ask. Bogdan says that he drew my name from a jar containing numerous names.

When I open my laptop after the meeting, a cartwheeling panda crosses the screen, followed by a smiling stick figure wearing a hat. My ten-year-old daughter’s iPad has an on-again, off-again relationship with my laptop. I click and accept and manage and agree, and this process reveals that she has been playing an online game themed around wolves, the base game of which includes eighty-four achievements. In-app purchases can unlock up to a hundred and twenty-three achievements. The goals of the players are to take over territory and raise pups, and if you can get other players to howl all together—it’s a coöperative game—then your stamina increases. There are gems, stars, sidekicks, food caches, a wolf store run by gnomes, and a player named M who does not seem to be ten years old—or am I being paranoid and projecting urban myths about the ubiquity of canny pedophiles? My daughter has achieved a forty-four-day streak, during which she played for a hundred and seventy-one hours. She has Violet Tundra Wolf status, which is eleven tiers below Spirit of Cave Wolf, a Pleistocene-era wolf species now extinct.

So that explains it.

These past five weeks, this daughter—the funny, joyful, resilient one—has been slumping around saying that she needs more time to relax. Before, if you asked her how basketball practice was, she would say it was great, or awesome. If you said it was time to leave for robotics, she would say we should hurry because she didn’t want to be late. She would ask for yarn or tracing paper, she would assemble her figurines into battle scenes, and for my birthday she gave me a drawing of “what you would look like if you were a cat.” Then this turn: spending more time in her room with the door closed, saying she is desperate for peace and quiet; telling me, after she came along to a lab potluck, that I owed her majorly. (We have potlucks on the first Friday of the month. She usually loves them, on account of the reliable presence of homemade iced sugar cookies with silver sprinkles, and also because Bogdan asks her questions about her “studies,” as he calls them.) I interpreted her behavioral shift as an indication of a rise in whatever hormone it is that rises in girls around this time. My aversion to primate biology is strong. A mind must economize. Re the wolf app, however, I am not unfamiliar with the mood- and priority-altering powers of addiction. (...)

When I pick her up from school and ask her about the wolf app, she says she will delete it. She says it right away. She doesn’t argue in favor of keeping the game. She must be relieved by this intervention. I promise, Mom, she says. O.K., I should have remembered that this girl is funny, joyful, and resilient. When she was three, and we were in the gift shop of a small zoo, I told her she could choose one stuffed animal, and she chose a plush largemouth bass. Humans have what are termed K-selected reproductive strategies, which means: our young grow slowly, there are few of them, they are heavily invested in by their parents, and they have long life spans. A queen bee, in contrast, will lay two thousand eggs, but there’s little attention given to any one of her young. We would usually term this an r-selected reproductive strategy—the opposite of a K-selected reproductive strategy—though more than half survive, as the larvae are fed by their older sisters. Compare this with a largemouth bass, who lays tens of thousands of eggs, of which only a small fraction of one per cent become adults. The K and r categories are hazy, imperfect.

Many people are bored by this kind of information, I know. But my ten-year-old, historically, loves such things.

When we get home, the twenty-one-year-old is lying on the sofa, in the same position she was in this morning—apparently, although I did not diagram it—but there are two seltzer cans on the ground near her and the room smells like coconut-mango smoothie. That’s O.K. Although some worker bees leave the nest seventeen times a day and others only once or twice, the so-called lazy bees ultimately bring in about the same amount of nectar as the others. The thinking is that it’s metabolically expensive to be intelligent, so the more intelligent bees tire quickly, but when they do venture out, they are very good at finding nectar, and after that they lie low for the remainder of the day. That’s one idea, anyhow. It doesn’t cast a flattering light on me. My work ethic is that of the dim bees.

My routine these days is to drop off the ten-year-old at home with the twenty-one-year-old and then return to the lab. You could play Boggle, I suggest, as I leave. I am already thinking about my bees.

I’m teaching a subset of them to overcome a two-step obstacle to obtaining a sugar reward. They might be able to figure out one step on their own, but a sequence of steps—someone has to teach them that, unless they’re geniuses, I suppose. What I want to see is if bees to whom I haven’t taught the two-step trick will be able to learn it by watching their trained peers—whether bees can pass on ideas among themselves, and across generations. Whether they have culture, like crows do. I mean, I myself know that bees have inner lives and personalities and culture. But I’m trying to persuade other people to see them that way. I can cite much supporting evidence, some of it old, some of it generated by our lab’s research. It’s not only that individual bees have distinct foraging habits and varying problem-solving abilities. Bees even have optimism and pessimism (I would argue). If a bee has a bad experience, like being shaken in a jar, that bee is less likely to pursue a treat in situations where there’s a fifty-fifty chance of getting what it wants. Untraumatized bees are more likely to take a chance. This remarkable work came from England, a place with, I think, a no-nonsense ethology culture. Spend enough time with bees and, if you are open-minded—if you are sufficiently possessed of true scientific spirit—you begin to see them as feeling individuals. Bogdan, who researches bee visual processing and bee intelligence, anesthetizes bees before dissection as a matter of protocol, though he is not required to by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. He respects them, as beings.

It is almost seven o’clock by the time I return home. The twenty-one-year-old is talking on the phone, and the ten-year-old is asleep on the sofa, her iPad clutched in her hands, her mouth slightly open. I see that she has played another hundred and twenty-seven minutes. I delete the app. I find a category called Games and Entertainment, and I delete every single game and entertainment, and I activate a timer lock that makes the iPad unusable for anything except reading for twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes a day. I am angry and frightened. These are drugs we’re dealing with. I download and print opinion pieces by people who have designed addictive video games and who say they would never, ever let their children use them.

The loudness of the printer gets the twenty-one-year-old off the sofa. She says she doesn’t want to hurt my feelings but she needs to be honest with me, honest about the kind of difficulties I have imposed upon her. For example, I never taught her how to cook or iron or help with dishes after supper, and it is this lack of basic grownup skills that caused her to lose the one person on the planet who understood her, the one person who was like her, who appeared normal but who on the inside was an alien. There are other aliens, but she is not compatible with them, because they look weird and act weird; their weirdness isn’t private, like hers is, and his is. She is also upset with me because when she was in the eighth grade I showed her a video of the bird-of-paradise courting ritual, and that gave her a really distorted understanding of what to expect from love, and what to expect of herself, and it just generally got her started in life on the wrong foot. But it was O.K., I was only human, and she wasn’t going to be one of those people who devote a lifetime to thinking through how their mothers failed them.

Thatta girl, I want to say. I can be clear-sighted and tough, too, even if I’m not a Serb. I would never label one daughter as beautiful and one as kind and one as intelligent, because my culture is not my dad’s. But if I were to hear such a pronouncement about my girls, I would know that my older daughter was the one being categorized as beautiful. This quality has hobbled her; in effect, it has blunted the development of compensatory strengths. In any case, I’m focussed on the ten-year-old. I wake her up.

You go to your room for half an hour, right now, until I tell you when the time is up, I say, like my dad used to. And, while you’re up there, I’d like you to read these. I give her the printouts of the articles about how video games are drugs. If she’s old enough to do drugs, she’s old enough to read about drugs. I’m not punishing you, I tell her. I’m giving you a chance to be alone. Being alone can be restorative. This, too, is something I learned from my dad. (...)

After half an hour has passed, I tell the ten-year-old she can leave her room. She does so without comment.

The next morning, she opens her purged iPad while eating a raspberry Popsicle for breakfast. She glances up at me. She sees what I’ve wrought, the virtual scorched earth, but she won’t acknowledge it. There was nothing else to eat in the house, she says of her Popsicle. When I mention that there are oranges, she tells me that I picked the wrong oranges, the ones that aren’t sweet, and that I am always buying her the wrong size shoes, too, they are never comfortable, and she hadn’t wanted to say anything before but now she needs to tell me, and also do I remember the time with her ingrown toenail that I said would heal itself and it didn’t heal itself, it got worse and worse, and do I remember when I had her come out to the field when bee swarms were happening, to learn, and it was awful, and also that time I told her to hurry across the street and there was a bus coming and she could have been killed?

It is wrong to think of bees as lacking inner lives, dreams, fears, anger. I am thinking primarily of the worker bees, which is to say the female bees, because they are the ones who set out every day. When one meets a bee out in the world, as opposed to in the hive, it’s almost always a female. For this reason, most of what we know about bees is about female bees, because they are easier to see, easier to study. Male bees likely have inner lives as well—they may also be dim or bright, optimistic or pessimistic—but we have so little observational data about them. Some researchers have held on to the idea that they are simple layabouts who exist only to fertilize a queen. Myself, I agree with those who say that’s a metabolically very expensive approach to maintaining a cache of genetic variance. After mating season, male bees’ sisters no longer provide them much nectar; they let their brothers waste away, and at a certain point escort them to the hive’s entrance and toss them out like old loaves. Something is missing in our understanding of the males. That seems clearer to me than ever. And yet the abundance of our knowledge about the females has only increased their ineffability. (...)

When the class ends, someone in a cantaloupe hoodie is waiting for me outside the seminar room. It’s my twenty-one-year-old’s former boyfriend, the alien. He shakes my hand and says he isn’t angry with me. But, at the same time, I am angry, he adds. He says he is not freaked out but also is freaked out, and that he isn’t saying I’m responsible but also, if someone is responsible, it would be me.

You’re not a quantitative thinker, are you? I want to say to him. As I walk him over to my office, I am thinking that why anyone finds anyone else attractive is more mysterious than is usually acknowledged. My beautiful daughter! The cantaloupe alien sits down on the sofa, and I sit behind my desk. He says that he ran into my daughter at the taco place, and that seemed normal, and he cares for her as a person. And then he saw her at the all-night ninepin-bowling place, and he still thought, Well, maybe that happens. And then he saw her on a bench outside his cousin’s apartment. That’s when he searched his backpack. It was like one of those Swedish thriller-horror films, he says. He reaches into his pocket and unwraps from aluminum foil a very small coppery coil attached to a plastic rectangle.

That’s curious, I say. It’s a small radio tracker. I had lunch a few years back with the man who designed this particular model. He had French onion soup and didn’t use a napkin. I have superglued thousands of his trackers onto the backs of chilled, sleepy bees before sending them back out into their world. This must be a mistake or confusion, I say. There are so many of these lying around the house, I say. The coil might have caught on his hoodie. Or his shoelace. Or was packed into his bag by accident along with a book, or a sock, or a decorative charm.

Yeah, I don’t think so, he says.

He’s chewing on the aglet of his hoodie’s drawstring like a preschooler. He closes his hand over the tracker. I’m thinking, Has my daughter tracked that he’s right here right now? She will be so angry with me if so.

The alien is saying that he was raised not to get police involved in stuff like this but rather to work things out person to person, through communication, compassion, and understanding.

Yes, I say to him, it’s very commendable that he has come to see me. And it is! Meanwhile, he is looking at the three-monkeys figurine on my desk. You like the monkeys, I remark, deliberately not calling them what they really are, which is chimpanzees. He tells me that he’s seen monkeys playing poker, but not this.

O.K., I say, getting up. Thank you so much for coming by. Let me see if I can get to the bottom of this. I take the tracker—the evidence—from him.

by Rivka Galchen, New Yorker | Read more:

Image: Stephen Doyle